London
THE EXPECTATION HERE IS that is that Keir “Keith” Starmer will win in the UK and Donald Trump will win in the US, and if that one figures out, it could be well awkward when Trump asks Keith why he once described him as a “neo-nazi sympathising sociopath. “Because of Charlottesville,” I presume Keith will stammer, and because nobody has ever told him that this didn’t happen - Trump did not, contrary to prestige media’s disinformation specialists, declare “very fine people” in reference to the participants of that demonstration - Keith will have to accept that he’s another victim of crooked, shitty reporting putting ideas in impressionable people’s heads.
Keith has done everything to become Prime Minister. He has prevaricated, obfuscated, reverse-ferreted, kneeled and manipulated. If the era of luxury beliefs is drawing to a close, soon it won’t be fashionable for men to claim they are feminists (as Keith does), or call in sick to work having self-diagnosed with “climate anxiety”. So who knows what he’s capable of doing to stay in office? Blacking-up? Becoming an “islamaphobe”?
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LONDON’S BEST YEAR was 2011. Jobs and careers had steadied from the preceding global turbulence and fates were not yet determined by simulations designed by companies headquartered in Ireland.
During that remarkable June / July I extended work trips from Johannesburg to include weekends. A friend of mine rented an apartment in Upper Brook Street in Mayfair, and threw parties at the height of summer on his balcony overlooking Grosvenor Square and the former American Embassy. Concerts in neighbouring Hyde Park were safe and revellers left The Kings of Leon or Bruce Springsteen without the urge to turn the joint into a dump. The bar at Claridges played Django Reinhardt, SoHo House hadn’t been infested with neurodivergent non-binary soy devs and middle-class white GEN Z was yet to appear with its non-drinking ways and “I CAN’T BREATHE” t-shirts.
Then it declined. Whether or not it had to do with the exiting of European hospitality professionals, or the emergence of tacky shit like “Salt Bae”, or the city’s radical dwarf Mayor (elected in 2016), or the political consequences to a supposed pandemic, or the obsession with left-wing architecture, is now irrelevant. It declined, and today the restaurants and bars are still around, but they’re average and worse, much more expensive. At least with some of the 80’s bistros, you reconciled paying shit for shit, but when Cecconi’s hits you £33 for a small, pinkish-gray bowl of ravioli, we appear to be lost inside some overly-sanitised algorithm.
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THE DWARF MAYOR is running again - and he’s projected to cream it (those elections are scheduled for 2nd May). He is polling at 44% probability (Survation) and his nearest rival, Susan Hall, is way behind at 26%, revealing again just how shameless the conservatives’ surrender of the city has been. Over 2000 venues, bars and restaurants in London have shuttered in the last three years - this despite the Mayor’s appointment of a “night czar”. This non-job belongs to a flamboyant lesbian called Amy Lamé, and she gets paid £115k a year. The actress Sarah Jessica Parker, currently starring in Neil Simon’s Plaza Suite at the Savoy Theatre, bemoans London’s failing nightlife. In an interview she complains that “places close too early” and that she “has to follow restaurant workers after they’ve knocked off to find the best places to eat”.
Were it up to me to save London’s nightlife, I would appoint two people with skin the game: firstly, a successful nightclub owner who charged through the 80s at the sharp end of too many flat surfaces in the old baños, and secondly, a stylish, gay PR dude who gets on with everyone. The older dude would frighten the life out of the councils imposing these stupid new rules (“carbon emissions”) and chase away zero-proof GEN Z’s fiddling on their TikToks, whilst the stylish one would coax the venue owners out of the risk aversion Ms. Lamé has enhanced.
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BRITAIN’S SECOND LARGEST city is far worse. Birmingham was declared bankrupt last year, which would surprise you if you believed these types of things only happened to Cederberg hamlets where the Mayor is too busy taking photographs of his private parts then sending them to his secretary. “Under-performance, poor leadership, weak governance, woeful mismanagement of employee relations and ineffective service delivery” is how Michael Gove (“levelling up” Minister) described the crisis.
Now herein lies the power balance complex: the conservatives volunteer defeat - they just quit, and the people who are serious about power get stuck in. Then they bugger things up properly, which prompts the conservatives to return - only to use colorful language. Then they leave again.
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THESE DAYS you’re a bit spoiled for choice insofar as decline here is concerned. Thames Water now wants to make you drink poo, the postal service is not fit for purpose, farmers are being told to net zero themselves in fits akin to autoerotic asphyxiation, the trains are delayed, the buses smell of injera and strawberry vape, residents of Battersea are now filling in potholes themselves - and the only consistency of life in modern Britain is that everything is always racist.
We never really know the forces that determine electoral choices, but there’s a sense of something deeper is accompanying the route to the elections. Britain is a little bit heartbroken.
The story of Alan Bates vs the Post Office will take you a few hours to get through. It is the greatest miscarriage of justice in British history, where the worst of the country tormented the best of it and more: seen beyond the bowl haircuts and the vertical misalignments of the teeth of the girl-bosses who administered the miscarriage, it exposes the professional class illusion. This country was told by the likes of Tony Blair that only people with degrees would be considered, so it degreed up - the police, the council, the sewage managers and the train marshals. Two decades in and the results reveal that, funnily enough, degrees are not particularly useful in the face of swinging machetes, they don’t work when a spade needs to be lifted or for a country village that needs a nerve centre - as many of the persecuted sub postmasters were to where they lived. We picked up a scent of failure when “trust the science” became untrustworthy in 2020, but there’s a new realm of dreaded awakening now manifesting like the wilting flowers belonging to the well-meaning middle-Englander waiting at Heathrow airport for the Nigerian bride he met online and has been sending money to for the last year.
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THERE’S BEEN ANOTHER GAY TORY SEX STORY - which is nice for them because like voluntary surrender, its the only thing they’ve excelled at in the last few years. This time William Wragg, vice chair of the 1922 committee, claims “he may have sent a man on Grindr compromising photos…and he may have encouraged his colleagues to do the same” - which means that by the end of the week we could be looking at over 100 of these randy idiots caught in one honeytrap. But this story is about numbers, not substance, and by far the most substantial gay-ish Tory sex story of the past two years or so is that of the transgender Tory MP, Jamie Wallis.
Jamie crashed his - or theirs - car in the early hours of a Thursday morning in the winter of 2021. It wasn’t a particularly devastating accident - but it did wipe out a small Welsh village’s entire WiFi. The theory is that Jamie was traveling to meet a date he’d arranged - also on Grindr - and between the high heels he was wearing and his attention to Grindr, his foot slipped. Then Jamie, who reportedly wearing crotchless suspenders, left the scene and hid in the woods for a bit before walking home.
And you ask why people in Kommetjie just want to surf and watch Blue Bulls?
Coming Friday: