‘Compare us with every other party in the House of Commons today and we’re easily the most united, with the biggest smile on our face’, Ed Davey informed the Financial Times in January.

Well, Ed Davey has always been more of a clown than a contender, even if he is favoured by the provincial middle-class demographic that dominates the party’s membership. Restore UK MP Rupert Lowe spoke for those of us outside this bubble when posting his opinion of Davey on X: ‘You are a low-IQ gnome whose talents would be better suited to fishing bits of bird shit out a garden pond.’

This jibe was a response to one of Davey’s many attacks on Elon Musk – ‘He must be held to account for what he is: a purveyor of child pornography’, said Davey in January. But it could have been a response to any one of the Lib Dem leader’s desperate grabs for attention. Just this week, he was calling for the cancellation of King Charles’s trip stateside in July, to mark the 250th anniversary of the United States Declaration of Independence. He claimed the king’s presence would be a ‘diplomatic coup for President Trump… someone who repeatedly insults and damages our country’.

Like Musk, Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump has become a regular target of Davey’s posturing and tweeting, all of which is as embarrassing as the stunts he embarks on to highlight local concerns. He slid down a waterslide to promote children’s mental-health services. He drummed on an exercise ball to highlight social care. He bungee jumped to encourage voters to support his party at the 2024 General Election, and rode a roller coaster at Thorpe Park to launch its manifesto. Throughout this, Ed Davey wears what Quentin Crisp, when describing the face he settled on to face the world, called a look of ‘fatuous affability’. You could state the number of victims of largely Pakistani grooming gangs, or reveal that ABBA had reformed, and Davey’s expression would remain the same.

Actually, the second of these is the safe topic more likely to begin a discussion among the party faithful. If the Lib Dem leader dared to draw attention to the systematic rape of white working-class girls, it would doubtless be via a flume ride at Center Parcs. That’s not to imply that he is not a moral man. Davey sees himself as a saviour with a mission, fully aware of his priorities. In 2025, he said he had a ‘moral duty’ to ensure that Nigel Farage does not become British prime minister.

The largest concentration of support for the Liberal Democrats is in the West Country, where a battle royal with Reform UK is expected to commence at the next General Election. I have some skin in the game, as someone who moved from my native London to this territory a decade ago. I found decent, generous people, who fed and watered me during cocktail hour, among Lib Dem supporters. Politics was avoided like bad etiquette, until Brexit, Donald Trump, the pink ladies’ protests, and marches against grooming gangs and mass immigration arose amid the chit-chat and clinking glass. Then things got ugly. When it came to politics, these people were not the people I thought they were, but they were the people I feared they might be. As they are quick to condemn and caricature those without the luxury beliefs permitted within the echo chamber in which they exist, permeated by those of a similar class, status and pedigree (I’m the exception to the rule), I feel no hesitation in sharing my field notes on those loyal to Lib Dem land.

The provincialism of the middle-class Lib Dem loyalist is not attributable to place, but outlook. These are people convinced they are multicultural and cosmopolitan, while limiting themselves to a parochial social circle. They are conventional people who labour under the delusion they are rebellious. They embrace their status while simultaneously denying it, so as to appear empathetic, sometimes casting themselves as the privileged poor. They support the Lib Dems because the Tories are too crass, Reform is too common and Labour is too costly.

I’ve witnessed an elderly Lib Dem devotee, who lives in a house large enough to warrant a tour guide, declare that he and his wife would not be able to eat if they didn’t sell up within two years. He also owned rental homes and bought his children homes to rent to others, with inherited family money. A lady who lunches, who admitted to a crush on former party leader Nick Clegg, revealed tearfully: ‘I felt physical pain when the Brexit result came through, because my children wouldn’t be able to travel through Europe as I had.’ Her children were at the local private school, even though she disapproved of private education. ‘They would not have survived at state school.’ After attending university, and enjoying a stint in London, their children return to this territory as adults, to become parents, to become the next generation of Liberal Democrat supporters.

In recent months, the party unity that brought a smile to the Lib Dem leader’s face has begun to fragment. There are rumours of dissent in the ranks due to Davey’s failure to capitalise on the anger the electorate harbours for the Labour government. This ‘frustration’ was confirmed when Politics UK quoted one disenchanted MP: ‘Reform [is] assuming a place in the national debate, and so are the Greens. We are content to not do this. And it isn’t good enough.’ Anticipating that this unrest could fester, Davey took himself away from Thorpe Park and Alton Towers to present himself as a political player on the world stage. Yet the statements he issues to give himself gravitas, consisting in the main of anti-Trump posturing, are as empty as the stunts and pratfalls at theme parks – and, ultimately, have as little impact.

Last year, Davey announced he would be boycotting a state banquet for President Trump, as a stand against his response to the crisis in Gaza. Tapping into the student slogans then (and still) doing the rounds, Davey declared that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his government were responsible for ‘genocide’. Playing to the same raggedy crowd, he demanded the recognition of a Palestinian state.

Presently, Elon Musk is as much of a folk devil as Trump for the likes of Davey. He accused the X owner of meddling in democracy and inciting far-right violence during the Unite the Kingdom march – an event that angered Davey and his tribe as much as the Brexit vote. Playing David to Musk’s Goliath, he suggests ‘Tesla tariffs’ to hit him where it hurts, and prosecuting him under the Online Safety Act for allowing material that shows child abuse and self-harm on X. This from the leader who advised his party to abstain in a parliamentary vote on a national inquiry into the rape gangs and the efforts to cover up their crimes.

When it comes to issues such as Brexit, Davey’s reaction is extreme. He proposes building bridges with the EU that would eliminate the result. Yet his party claims to be the ‘moderate’ voice absent in British politics. Supposedly, the Lib Dems are the ‘progressive’ response to the ‘populism’ of Nigel Farage and Reform UK, which he believes adheres to Trumpian politics and an American-style ‘right wing’ fervour, compared with the ‘British values’ and ‘patriotism’ the Lib Dems represent. This is clearly a recent development, given his party previously talked of ‘patriotism’ much as Labour MPs and student activists did – that is, as synonymous with ‘racist’ and ‘fascist’. The pratfalls of Davey pale into insignificance when compared with former leader Tim Farron draping himself in the Union Jack at the party’s autumn 2025 conference in Bournemouth – an event as white as Glastonbury, so white in fact it might alarm Jon Snow. The Lib Dem supporters and MPs indulging in this tragic spectacle, like those at the Labour Party conference attempting something similar with the various flags of the United Kingdom, had everyone else cringing at the comic desperation of it.

Davey and the current crop of Lib Dem MPs are neither genuinely progressive people nor serious politicians, but they emerged from parties that included figures that were. The high watermark of the Liberal Party in the 20th century was the years in government, 1906 to 1915, during which the ‘New Liberalism’ introduced the welfare reforms that successive Labour governments built on. The Liberals’ fortunes changed with their merger with the Social Democratic Party in 1988, the party founded seven years prior by the Gang of Four. These were the veteran Labour MPs who left the party as it began to prioritise the left-wing fringe issues that would eventually define its ideology – a process that would ultimately alienate working-class supporters and transform it into the party of the middle class that it is today.

During the period the Lib Dems found themselves in government, between 2010 and 2015, in an unholy alliance with the Conservatives, they were criticised by their own side at the time for reneging on abolishing student tuition fees. In the years since, it’s the negligence of Ed Davey as minister for postal affairs during the Post Office and Horizon IT scandal that has drawn criticism from elsewhere. When the ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office returned the story to the headlines in January 2024, Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson posted on X:

‘Ed Davey was paid £833 an hour – over £220,000 in total – to advise lawyers who were acting for the Post Office. (Taking taxpayers’ money to persecute petrified, innocent people.) As postal-affairs minister, Davey refused to believe Alan Bates about Post Office bullying. But happy to jump into the trough after.’

Davey’s knack for jumping on a bandwagon just as it’s leaving town has become evident since he took the helm of the party. He replaced Jo Swinson, the first female leader of the Liberal Democrats, who defeated him in the previous leadership challenge. Swinson put a smile on all our faces when her image appeared on the promotional leaflets during the 2019 campaign, arriving through the letterbox among the pizza flyers, with the declaration that we were looking at ‘Britain’s next prime minister’.

The brash declarations Davey now peddles are as performative as the indignation his fellow MPs express when rising to their feet in the House of Commons. This is notable among the party’s female MPs. Last October, deputy leader Daisy Cooper aired her indignation, and shared her limited insight, on a subject outside the echo chamber in which Liberal Democrat MPs exist: Tommy Robinson. She demanded the current prime minister direct the security services to evaluate the threat that Elon Musk ‘poses to our democracy’ for giving Robinson legal support (he had just been charged under the Terrorism Act in 2024 for refusing to give police his phone password, and was subsequently acquitted). In April 2025, the diminutive West Country Lib Dem MP, Tessa Munt, made similar demands, shrinking behind huge dark glasses – she’s sensitive to the harsh lights in the chamber – that would have dwarfed Anna Wintour.

Munt lives in Wedmore and represents Wells. In the country at weekends, at a Saturday surgery, or at hedgehog farms that feature on Facebook posts, she sports an archaic Sloane Ranger look of cashmere crew neck, a polo shirt with the collar raised, jeans, Chelsea boots and pearls. Munt, rightfully and nobly, supports local farmers and addresses their current grievances, but doesn’t extend this to the victims of grooming gangs. This was evident in her contribution to a cross-party Commons debate, in response to a contribution from Conservative MP Katie Lam.

Opening a moving, heartfelt speech, Lam addressed the need for an inquiry into the rape gangs, highlighting the racial and religious aspects that contributed to these crimes. She said: ‘One of the victims from Dewsbury was told by her rapist: “We’re here to fuck all the white girls and fuck the government.”’ Lam spoke graphically about the violence the victims had suffered, informing the few figures present in the commons, the language was necessary because ‘We must not look away or sanitise this evil’.

She quoted the sentencing remarks of judge Peter Rook, who gave Mohammed Karrar of Oxford life in prison:

‘You prepared her [his victim, a 13-year-old girl] for gang anal rape by using a pump to expand her anal passage. You subjected her to gang rape by five or six men. At one point she had four men inside her. A red ball was placed in her mouth to keep her quiet… When she was 12, after raping her, she threatened you with your lock knife. Your reaction was to pick up a baseball bat with a silver metal handle, strike her on the head with it, and then insert the baseball bat inside her vagina.’

Lam concluded:

‘This is not about me, the minister, the home secretary or any honourable members in the chamber; it is about the little girls, up and down our country, whose brutal and repeated rapes were permitted and hidden by those in the British state whose jobs were to protect them.’

Responding to Lam, Munt made the issue about herself, and sanitised this evil in the process. ‘My blood is boiling as I listen to the stuff coming from Conservative members’, she said, playing to the gallery. ‘If they had read the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse, they would recognise that there are hundreds of thousands of people alive today – people just like me, white girls – who suffered at the hands of white men who have got clean away with it, because nothing was done for so long.’ As Madeline Grant wrote in her Telegraph column at the time: ‘Belittling the unspeakable abuse of thousands of girls as “stuff” is bad enough; even worse to do so from the comfort of places where the realities of “community tension” are scarcely felt.’

In essence, here is the sinister undertow that lies beneath the ‘moderate’ veneer of the Liberal Democrats. The contempt they harbour for those outside their bubble, with a different experience and a different outlook, who now support Reform, is no different to that expressed by hysterical protesters with blue hair and placards, putting their weight behind Your Party or the Greens. The difference being the provincial middle-class Lib Dem devotees come with hand-knitted scarves, Hunter wellies, Barbour jackets, Amnesty tote bags, and pearls. They carry their Fitzcarraldo Editions to coffee shops for effect, but read Cormoran Strike novels in book groups. They would rather defend the BBC than defund it. They listen to The Last Dinner Party.

The UK political party these people loyally support is not currently a real threat, but it could become one. And Ed Davey could still be leading the Liberal Democrats and in the running, garnering support from disgruntled Labour moderates and Tory wets. At which point the smile on that fatuous face will widen. To the rest of us, Davey will still be the joke he’s always been. But the joke won’t be funny anymore.

This essay was originally published in Spiked.

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Rex Reed is alive and well and living at the Dakota, the oldest surviving luxury apartment block in New York, and the spot where John Lennon was shot.

At 87 years old, Reed continues to contribute film reviews to the New York Observer, a regular occurrence since its launch in 1987. He remains at the 8th floor apartment he bought in 1969 for $30,000, refusing to sell to the highest bidder, even when it’s Andrew Lloyd Webber offering a hefty $8 million. The year Reed moved to the building on New York’s West 72nd Street he made his film debut as a leading man in Myra Breckinridge, an adaptation of the Gore Vidal novel, published the previous year. Reed was cast as Myron, a pre-op transexual, with Raquel Welch taking it from there as the post-op Myra (‘whom no man will ever possess’). Farrah Fawcett Majors features at the start of her career, with a bewildered Mae West, way beyond what should have been the end of hers. The author, the director and the cast disowned the film, with Rex Reed joining fellow critics in panning the project on its release. One review dismissed it as ‘an insult to intelligence, an affront to sensibility and an abomination to the eye’. Of his calamitous experience on set, Reed recalled: ‘Mae West spoke to no one but God, Raquel spoke only to the head of the studio, the head of the studio spoke only to God, who then related the message back to Mae West’.

For Reed, the acting credits that followed were few, and include a cameo as himself in Superman (1978), and a part in the Patrick Hamilton stage play Rope. He briefly returned to the stage in 2020, performing songs from the great American songbook in a cabaret show (‘Famous People I Have Known And The Songs They Sang’) that brought him across the lake to, oddly, the stage at The Pheasantry restaurant on London’s King’s Road. Prior to the making of Myra Breckinridge, Rex Reed was rightfully more familiar as a prolific, high profile writer of celebrity interviews. His byline appeared in key New York publications with the city’s name on the masthead - save for the The New Yorker. One of his few regrets.

A number of those early pieces were collected in his first book Do You Sleep In The Nude? (1968). The title is a reference to a question he asked actress Ava Gardner during the interview that established his name, his style, his skill at extracting a story from an interview, and squeezing words from a subject worthy of the dialogue for a role. ‘I knew everything all of those people had been in, every role they had ever played,’ he said, when commenting on his tactics, ‘and that impressed artists so much that they gave me a lot of information they would not have otherwise given a journalist’.

That interview introduced his name to the ‘new journalism’ canon, and landed in the 1973 anthology edited by leader of the pack, Tom Wolfe. This new genre brought the staples of fiction to non-fiction, such as scene setting, descriptive passages, and even plot. Wolfe credited Reed with raising the celebrity interview to a new level ‘through his frankness and his eye for social detail’. Yet, it’s another purveyor of the art Reed cited as a major influence - Gay Talese, whose ‘Frank Sinatra Has A Cold’ from 1966, is generally regarded as the greatest celebrity profile ever written. As with Reed’s take on Ava Gardner the following year - a former wife of Sinatra - it was published in Esquire. Talese made a point of examining his subjects outside their natural habitat. He was forensic on detail. A similar take is evident in Reed’s account of his afternoon with Ava Gardner:

She stands there, without benefit of a filter lens, against a room melting under the heat of lemony sofas and lavender walls and cream-and-peppermint-striped movie-star chairs, lost in the middle of that gilt-edge birthday-cake hotel of cupids and cupolas called The Regency. There is no script. No Minnelli to adjust the CinemaScope lens. Ice-blue rain beats against the windows and peppers Park Avenue below as Ava Gardner stalks her pink malted-milk cage like an elegant cheetah.

The actress is overbearing throughout, she overacts throughout, putting on a performance in which she dismisses her career and disregards former husbands, while using a drinking straw to alternate between a champagne glass brimming with Dom Perignon and another filled with cognac. The affectation, the lines delivered for dramatic effect, evoke the camp of a tragic Tennessee Williams heroine. Reed compares her to Alexandra Del Lago in Sweet Bird Of Youth. Gardner’s theatricality is a contrast to Reed’s technique when tackling an interview: ‘If I have any philosophy at all, it’s cancel the moon, turn off the klieg lights and tell the truth’.

Sometimes his interviewees surprised him. Barbra Streisand is one of the few he detested, after meeting her in the 1960s. David Bowie was a revelation in 1976: ‘I am amazed to discover that David Bowie is astoundingly literate, fantastically well-read, creative and professional. He has written nine screenplays, a book of poems and essays, a novel, and a collection of short stories. He’s into mysticism and numerology, and he’s very knowledgeable about everything in movies before 1933’.

Along with Gay Talese, still with us at 93, Rex Reed is the remaining survivor of the new journalism era. He’s the last of a generation of writers to interview the last Hollywood greats from the golden age that enthralled him from when he saw his first film - Gone With The Wind - as an infant. He’s the last of the small band of critics - both feared and revered - credited with transforming film criticism into an art form.

Pauline Kael of The New Yorker was the queen bee. She sat among Reed and his cohorts in the darkened hive of Manhattan picture houses, where the silence was broken by the dialogue on screen, and the sighs or gasps from Kael in response to it. Reed moved into the limelight, as a regular on Dick Cavett’s talk show, as a panellist on The Gong Show. Time magazine reported that he fielded 20 invitations to star-studded parties in one week. In 1968, Newsweek called him ‘the hottest byline around’. He still attends meetings at New York Film Critics Circle but is scathing, on page and screen, about the state of film criticism, an ‘irrelevant’ profession. Of modern critics, he says: ‘They have no swagger, no stature, no impact. Worst of all, they aren’t any fun. They don’t have feuds, in print or in person, and their quips (if they have any) don’t sting’.

Reed delivered quips that stung, something he had in common with another figure associated with the new journalism, but prominent as a novelist and a master of the celebrity interview - Truman Capote. Like Capote, Reed was raised in the American south, and made his way to New York with similar ambitions (‘I wanted to go somewhere where people knew things and they served drinks with umbrellas in them’). He later recalled: ‘I’ve always been attracted to unusual people who have enormous talent, like Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote, two of the greatest southern writers’. Again, in common with Capote, he became a target to fellow writers because of his barbed comments, particularly in recent years, with many offended and oppressed by any criticism levelled at them.

According to Reed: ‘People attack me because they don’t like me. Not because of my work. They just attack me on general principles, and I’ve never done that. Mainly, what I’m negative about is the lack of quality. And I think we’re drowning in mediocrity. I grew up at a time when it was not mediocre, and now it is’. His assaults on films considered masterpieces in some quarters are objectionable to those that adhere to a woke agenda. Get Out (2017) was one of the worst films he has ever seen (‘I didn’t care if all the black men are turned into robots’). Reviewing Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy (2003), he asks : ‘What else can you expect from a nation weaned on kimchi, a mixture of raw garlic and cabbage buried underground until it rots, dug up from the grave and then served in earthenware pots sold at the Seoul airport as souvenirs?’ In the ancient past he was called out for comparing Nancy Sinatra to a pizza waitress. In 2013, he was pilloried for describing Melissa McCarthy as ‘a female hippo’. One of his challengers wrote: ‘He is not the worst movie reviewer on the planet, merely the worst among the prominent’. His editor at the Observer, Merin Curotto, says of Reed: ‘He’s isn’t for everyone. Great talents usually aren’t’.

‘I’m 85 fucking years old,’ Rex Reed declared in Graydon Carter’s Air Mail magazine in 2024, with the theatricality of Ava Gardner stalking her lemony, lavendery, pepperminty room at The Regency hotel more than half a century earlier. ‘I’m tired of deadlines. I look forward to days when I don’t have to be anywhere’. The deadline he dreads is the one for which he doesn’t have a date. He’d rather not be discovered dead in a screening room, or slumped at his computer while reviewing a bad film. When withdrawing from the game, Pauline Kael noted: ‘You can take a lot of bad movies when you’re younger, but when you’re older you wonder why you’re doing it to yourself’. The films Reed can no longer stomach touch on themes he detests as much as he detested Barbara Streisand: fantasy, Sci-Fi and horror. In 2024, he said: ‘There are things I haven’t done in my life that I want to do, and they’re more important than writing movie reviews. I’m just so tired of writing’. Despite these protestations, he reminds us that readers ‘still want the Rex Reed byline’.

Reed’s been engaged in producing copy throughout his adult life. It’s akin to an agreeable two-way relationship, a marriage, without the sex or the shouting: ‘I don’t have ‘relationships,’ except friends. Love is not something that I’ve been really good at’. Warming to this theme in an interview in 2018, he concludes: ‘I think it’s all over as far as that goes. How do you start looking for a wife or a boyfriend or a significant other? It’s too late’. To paraphrase Reed, he’s now ’87 fucking years old’ and no longer the lean figure with the raven hair, cheekbones and eyebrows that belonged on Elvis, circa 1968. Neither is he the dandified talk show guest accessorising houndstooth jackets and Argyle suits - ‘a little Bill Blass’ number, he confided to a Dick Cavett audience - with cravats and ascots. It’s too late. Or was it never meant to be? Maybe Rex Reed, like Myra Breckinridge, is someone who no man will ever possess. ‘It would be nice, though,’ he concedes, ‘to find somebody who’s really handy with a wheelchair, because that day is coming’. In a profile for the Observer in 2024, Curotto wrote, with poignancy and insight: ‘His reflections on film, fame and what it means to leave a lasting impact show both the vulnerability of a man contemplating his legacy and the defiance of a critic who wants to set the terms of his exit’.

Rex Reed died on September 2, 2025. AI gently broke it to me, when I turned to Google to gauge if Reed was still with us, with a view to writing about his career. It very quickly transpired this was a 93-year old namesake from Savannah. An easy mistake to make. As AI explained: ‘Confusion regarding the critic’s status often stems from his long-running Observer column where he writes annual “In Memoriam” tributes to stars who have passed away, which can sometimes appear in search results alongside his name’. Had it been true the death would have been no surprise, as Reed is 87 fucking years of age. But I would have been shocked at the absence of obituaries alerting me to the news. Nothing from those New York magazines he contributed to, including Vogue and Esquire. No sightings in British broadsheets. Surely, on these shores he’s demise warranted a mention, for all those words, those interviews, those reviews, the books, the major flop he appeared in alongside Mae West and Raquel Welch. Or simply for his closing rendition of ‘I Was Lost, I Was Drifting’ on a spitefully cold March night at The Pheasantry restaurant on London’s King’s Road, as an audience of foreign tourists, and a gaggle of gay men old enough to have walked out of Myra Breckinridge, applauded.

Reed once referred to the libraries at newspapers as ‘the morgues’, where names like his were fading on ‘the yellowing pages’ from the past - first the bylines, then the obituaries. Those compiling obituaries in the 1960s prepared them early, in a decade when prominent figures went before their time. Presidents, pastors, pop stars, pop artists were taken out by an assassin, or survived an assassin’s bullet. Others were slaughtered by hippies in a luxury Hollywood residence. At that time, when Reed appeared on the Dick Cavett show, decked out in the ‘little Bill Blass number’ the host joked: ‘Oh, you’re older than I am’. Reed responded: ‘I think I’m older than everybody’. It was 1968. He was 30 years of age.

It was the year before his move to the Dakota. Cinema goers were given a glimpse into the grim yet stately interior in Roman Polanski’s gothic horror Rosemary’s Baby (1968). In August 1969, the director was in London, when his pregnant wife Sharon Tate and her guests were mutilated in the multiple murders at the couple’s Hollywood home, by members of the Manson ‘family’. Tate had come to prominence in the film adaptation of Jacqueline Susann’s best-selling novel, The Valley Of The Dolls. The author was one of the many people - if all is to be believed - invited to dinner at the Polanski home the evening of the tragedy. Susann sent her regrets after Rex Reed declined to be her date: ‘I said, “Jackie, I want to stay home and eat lemon meringue pie in my pyjamas, in front of the TV at the Beverly Hills Hotel”.’

The Tate murder changed Hollywood. Its celebrity inhabitants reinforced their security in efforts to guard themselves and their privacy. The assassination of John Lennon in 1980 had a similar impact on famous residents at the Dakota, where the Ono Lennon couple occupied an apartment or five from 1973. Rex Reed once gave his name to a petition to prevent the former Beatle being deported because of drug use and political activism. Lennon rewarded him with a one-year subscription to TV Guide. On the night of December 8, 1980, after shots rang out, Reed’s neighbour dispatched him to investigate and report back. Outside the building he found Lennon sprawled across the pavement with a stream of blood rippling towards the road. Reed helped get him into the police car that rushed him to Roosevelt Hospital, where he was pronounced dead on arrival.

In the wake of the murder, the Dakota co-operative made fervent efforts to keep out high-profile figures making applications - such as Madonna - to avoid further notoriety. The monolithic building became less a sanctuary symbolising prestige and more a mausoleum tainted by Polanski’s film, which evoked memories of Sharon Tate’s murder, and the assassination of John Lennon. Somehow the sandstone facade, the dormers, spandrels, balustrades, gables, garrets, wood panelling, terracotta detailing and marble wainscotting is in keeping with this image, placing it at odds with other iconic buildings in the city designed by the same architect: the Plaza, the Waldorf Astoria.

The moment Rex Reed arrived there was the moment he truly arrived in New York, even though he’d moved to the city a decade earlier, existing on sandwiches from Woolworth’s, living in a one-room, roach-infested apartment - Aren’t they always in a writer’s story? - above a Chinese restaurant. At the Dakota his neighbour was Boris Karloff. Rudolph Nureyev and Lauren Bacall were residents. Reed arrived with a sleeping bag and a shopping cart stacked with books and records. In recent decades, death has diminished the celebrity quotient. Bigwigs in the banking industry have replaced them. The famous figures once found at the Dakota are within the line-up of photographs at the Rex Reed apartment. Among them, Angela Lansbury - who relocated her family to Ireland from Hollywood after the Tate murders - a long term friend of the critic.

When recalling his time as a student studying journalism in Louisiana, Reed said: ‘The first thing they taught everybody was the five W’s—who, what, why, when and where—that have to go into the opening paragraph. I hated that. I started stories about the color of the wallpaper’. This was in keeping with the ‘social details’ Tom Wolfe referred to when crediting Reed with elevating the status of the celebrity profile. You wonder if the writers turning up at the Dakota to interview Reed in his dotage are aware they owe him a debt. The profiles invariably begin with the ‘deep hunter green’ walls, before listing the abundance of antiques and the gallery of famous figures in photographs where Reed is the sole survivor in the frame. Some cast him, cruelly and predictably, as a Norma Desmond-type, whining that the pictures got small not the critics. All of which is wide of the mark. The critic became less relevant because the internet enabled everyone to become one via blogs, social media posts, and podcasts. To purists this demeaned the art of criticism, and is used as a slur when attacking veterans of the trade: ‘Rex Reed does not quite scrape the bottom of the barrel, not since the creation of the internet, at least’.

Reed is not averse to the positives of the digital age. The Observer became an online only magazine a decade ago, and certain Netflix projects have appeared favourably in his reviews. The Ripley series, based on the Patricia Highsmith novels, was ‘absolutely terrific’. From 2026, the Oscars will be broadcast on YouTube, in a move to make the ailing annual ceremony relevant in an age that’s already left it behind. ‘They have to stop thinking of new ways to improve the Oscars,’ Reed said. ‘Just show them and get them off the air.’ One year, after witnessing the ‘In Memoriam’ segment on the televised ceremony, he reacted with: ‘Those stupid dancers dancing around those tiny pictures of the people who died. You couldn’t tell who died!’

When the current Rex Reed goes the way of all flesh, and his namesake in Savannah, will he figure in this segment? Rather than wait, I set out to assemble a profile, a premature obit even. I was familiar with much of his output and some of his story, a little of which I garnered from a brief conversation we had at the end of the last century.

I was contracted as a development producer for a company based at Granada TV in Manchester. While working on an arts documentary treatment for a film on Jacqueline Susann that, ultimately, failed to come to fruition, I spoke with two prospective interviewees based in New York. The first was a rude, cranky close friend of the late author who’s name I’ve forgotten but who is forever planted in my memory as ‘the oldest, angriest, living lesbian in Manhattan’. The other was accommodating and courteous during the course of our transatlantic telephone call: Rex Reed.

He spoke to me from his Dakota apartment, looking out on West 72nd Street towards Central Park, and the Strawberry Fields memorial to John Lennon. My view, from a tiny office in a warehouse annexe at the TV studios, was of an empty Coronation Street set on a bleak Weatherfield afternoon. After thanking him for his time and before our “goodbyes” I mentioned that Myra Breckinridge was not the unmitigated failure so many had written it off as. It was part of the quirky, campy, alternative film canon from the beginning of the 1970s that included John Waters projects with Divine, and Warhol movies featuring The Factory ‘girls’ immortalised in Lou’ Reed’s ‘Walk On The Wild Side’ - Candy, Holly, Jackie. (Candy Darling pursued the Myra Breckinridge role, claiming it to be ‘her’ life story.) All of which seems quaint and archaic this century, now the LGBTQIA lobby has morphed from a minor movement into a mainstream cult, bringing unnecessary allies and an alphabet with it. ‘Oh, you really don’t have to say that!’ Rex Reed replied before signing off. But I meant it.

In the intervening years I occasionally returned to his books (Conversations In The Raw, People Are Crazy Here, among them), only once becoming aware of his adventures, when a minor headline emerged on the internet some time after the event it covered in 2000. Reed had been arrested for shoplifting, having left Tower Records on Broadway with CDs concealed about his person. What struck me was the forensic mention of the titles, as though central to the motive: Mel Torme’s California Suite, Peggy Lee Songs from Pete, and Carmen McRae’s Easy to Love (I was disappointed it wasn’t Bittersweet with her seminal rendition of ‘Ghost Of Yesterday’). Lee was so impressed that Reed was such a fan she reputedly sent him a CD box set of her back catalogue. He was charged with petty larceny and criminal possession of stolen property, while attributing the misdemeanour to a ‘senior moment’. Something his detractors have accused him of following inaccuracies and factual errors in reviews, as well as reportedly falling asleep during a screening, only to confuse his dream with the plot of the film.

The crime was not mentioned in the details provided to me by AI. The Ava Gardner interview was. There was a reference to his father being a drilling supervisor on oil rigs, which led to an itinerant childhood. In the introduction to Do You Sleep In The Nude? Reed recalls: ‘We lived in everything from a motel near a Tabasco sauce factory to a crumbling Southern mansion near Natchez — anywhere there was an oil boom’. Further AI facts appeared to be wrong, and were perhaps applicable to our man in Savannah. Thereby proving that even though AI is not human it is fallible, and too young to attribute its mistakes to a senior moment. One thing was certain. The Rex Taylor Reed born in Fort Worth, Texas, 1938, was alive and well and living at the Dakota.

‘Rex Reed would be dead today if he’d accepted the invitation to Sharon Tate’s doomed party,’ wrote the author John Lahr (son of the actor Bert Lahr, the lion in The Wizard Of Oz), in his New York Times review of Reed’s second book Valentines & Vitriol (1977). ‘Instead, he scavenges the bones thrown to him by the rich and famous.’ Here was an example of those critics that attack Reed himself, rather than critique the work. He, meanwhile, has his own take on his legacy, long after he escaped the fate of those murdered by the Manson gang at the house on Cielo Drive, while Reed was a short car ride away at The Beverly Hilton on Wilshire Boulevard. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t pursue the path of fiction,’ Reed has stated. ‘I do think I took the lowest form of journalism—which is celebrity interviews—and I did something with it. I think I elevated the genre in the pages of the New York Times and Esquire and New York magazine’. That will be his legacy, but what line will he pursue when THE END, the words that appeared at the close of the many films that preoccupied him from infancy, finally comes? It’s likely he will not go gently into that good night, and might take his cue from the ‘female’ heroine in the film in which he was cast as the male lead, Myra Breckinridge: ‘Let the dust take me when the adventure’s done and I shall make the dust glitter for all eternity with my marvellous fury’,

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A minor controversy over a major event arose at the start of Morrissey's career, and a similar experience may soon plague him in the present. Common to both are children, murder and Manchester.

What has changed throughout the intervening years is the nature of controversy. What has changed is the nature of those taking offence. It was once the reactionary and the conservative, now it's the radical and the progressive. It was once the old, now it's the young. 'Manchester, so much to answer for,' he sang in 1984, recalling the bodies on Saddleworth Moor from the 1960s of his childhood. The tragedy continued to resonate. That's how the nation grieved back then. It allowed itself to mourn; it allowed itself to be angry. While some events were too sacred to be sung about. 'Suffer Little Children' became a tabloid story, hyped up into a minor controversy; the lyric provided a list of the lost. We will be right by your side, until the day you die.

We knew the song, those of us in our twenties who, like Morrissey, are in our sixties now; aware that we're mortal when back then we believed we weren't. The loss we mulled over as odd outsiders as adolescents made headway as adulthood moved in. For some of us it came by way of pets, hair, figures, siblings and parents. In 2021, Morrissey spoke of his mother's death the year before: 'It brings something that you cannot cope with … the final stage of growing up, perhaps. When your mother dies it’s the point where the end of your own life begins.' Finally we're next. The last of the gang to die. The body will close down sooner rather than later - everything must go.

These days he sings: I will look back in anger until the day I die. Not the finest lyric he's written, granted, yet it deserves a place in the canon because of the rage behind it. The words are from the title song on the next album - ‘Bonfire of Teenagers’, a reference to the victims of the Islamist attack on the Manchester Arena in 2017. The aftermath of the event was similar to that which followed familiar tragedies. The motive is swept aside, the lone wolf motif is introduced, with mental illness offered up as a chaser. The nation is encouraged to grieve, light candles and lay flowers, but not look back in anger. Morrissey alludes to this in the song, not simply as a comment on those on the streets keening and mourning, but the culture that confines us to this ritual; to a country that has lost so much confidence in itself it can barely refer to the act as terrorism, or to the ideology of the killer, for fear of offending a radicalised minority.

'No one writes songs about England anymore,' he announced when introducing the number on his recent tour. 'Here's one'. It was Blackpool on a sodden night. Cabs were circling; collars were raised. Those assembled were agile elders and younger fans that may have been tanked up on drink or prescription drugs. Some rushed the stage: the former were assisted off by security men; the latter were thrown back into the pit. In silhouette, gathered at the front, lit by the film that replaced the support act, the ancients could have been the age they were when the bands on screen were young or alive: The Ramones, New York Dolls, the Sex Pistols singing 'God Save The Queen'. Mobile phones raised in the air, and the night's main attraction gave the game away: it was here and it was now.

Morrissey's performance was as energised as anything that appeared on screen before the band took to the stage. A number of the older songs are classics, and the current songs are contemporary. Songs about England; songs about the enemy within on these shores. These are subjects that creators of pop songs will never touch. Notably those that sign themselves in as 'political' and labour under the delusion they are outliers, as they reprise the pet causes they believe made them radical in their youth. The world has moved on and society, like the nature of controversy, like our reaction to tragedy, has changed. These are the figures that now silence and censor; these are the figures who fear causing offence. Morrissey doesn't now, and he never did. Once they loved him for it, now they would willingly silence him. Some attempted to. You were good in your time and we thank you.

Some of us liked The Smiths but we didn't love them - largely because we loathed some of those that did. The students, the middle class graduates who believed that not eating meat and not voting Tory was short hand for being revolutionary. These armchair activists had no understanding why the Tories were in government, or why more trade unionists than ever before had voted for them in 1979. The left were warming to the marginal preoccupations that would eventually overtake them, alienate traditional working class voters, and once again relegate Labour to obscurity for more than a decade. Time passed, governments came and went. Many devotees once loyal to the cult of Morrissey lost faith and failed to change - because he did. At least he noticed that the world had changed and reflected those changes, or reacted against them. ‘I apologise. I grew up,' he sings on the new song I Live In Oblivion.

They wanted Margaret On The Guillotine decades after Mrs Thatcher resigned, and The Queen Is Dead years before she died. Bringing in Thelma Houston to take more from a song than she brought to it, and quoting James Baldwin, would not placate them. He'd long since broken with racial etiquette by commenting on immigration, Islamist terrorism, and the ineptitude of the London mayor and Labour MP Diane Abbott. Others cited earlier examples: mocking outmoded Bengali footwear, responding negatively to reggae, and wrapping himself in the union jack for a rendition of The National Front Disco. Irony and context were overlooked by offended onlookers. The reaction was a feral one; an exhausted word that bores us more than it scares us - racist.

'But then there's his racism,' wrote the author Douglas Coupland, earlier this year. 'People tend to cut him some slack and chalk it up to the same gene that makes our parents crank up the racism in their late fifties. That’s right: Morrissey is old, which means you’re old, too.' He's right. We're old. Out hearts are ancient; our minds alert. Those still cast as the odd outsiders. Yet, even when we were young we were not as ridiculous as journalists and musicians that make much of how Morrissey let them down. While his stance, at this stage of the game, has a touch of Beckett's Krapp about it: 'Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn't want them back. Not with the fire in me now.'

Some of us raised the needle from the groove before it reached songs about meat eaters and Mrs Thatcher, and lingered on the poignancy of 'Everyday Is Like Sunday’ and ‘Late Night, Maudlin Street’. These could only have been conceived by someone with a certain experience of a certain class from a certain time. Also an outsider within that class. He had to be to have written ‘I Know It's Over ‘ while in his twenties. Here he introduced a figure found in poetry in the past - often from the pen of Larkin or Housman. 'Dry as dust', as Auden described him, Housman summed up the solitary, celibate figure who sought solace in the word. In doing so, as Morrissey pointed out, he said more about love, sex and intimacy than those whose lives were defined and completed by them.

Here was a figure Morrissey feared he might become, the figure we feared we might become those of us taught that marriage, parenthood, housing lists and a long life lived locally were the options. The queer and odd outsiders among us saw this figure in the lodgers and confirmed bachelors among the neighbours in the poor postcodes of our boyhood. Did they harbour a dirty secret? Had life simply passed them by? Did some of them find salvation in the written word, from their own hand or that of others? Some of us have become a version of them: old, outward bound and on the shelf - content in the company of great books by dead homosexuals and spinster poets. In 'The World Is Full Of Crashing Bores’ Morrissey sings: 'You must be wondering how / The boy next door turned out / Have a care, but don't stare / Because he's still there.' The streets that once defined and confined The Boy Next Door have now gone, along with the neighbours.

'We live in forgotten Victorian knife-plunging Manchester where everything lies wherever it was left over one hundred years ago.' This is Morrissey describing his formative years in his autobiography. It's a place we recognise, those of us that came of age in a similar setting. For him it was Manchester, for me south east London. The poorer postcodes of the capital, and northern cities, were like none that had gone before. Urbanised England was a new nation too. It was no longer solely the England of the country and the town. Yet it was so frequently overlooked in poetry, prose and pop. England remained the pastoral, the Albion of myth and folklore. But for some of us it wasn't blue remembered hills that would haunt our memories but bomb sites, half heard songs from pubs about to close, the lights from market stalls reflected in puddles on wet December mornings. Over time we would romanticise these images and the half-forgotten pathways they returned us to. Those for whom pop music was our first language, our native tongue. We needed to escape these landscapes, and embrace the loss and longing when we did, and when they vanished, our memories of the buried past transformed into stories and folklore. This is where Morrissey came in, and where he stayed in many ways, and where part of him remains today. Peter Ackroyd has written that there is no real progress in English writing; our writers return to the location of the original sources of inspiration, whether it's the mythical Albion or the streets of Manchester.

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In a short film in 1985 Morrissey recalls the streets he was raised in, where his family lived. What the bombs didn't take out, the bulldozers did. It was the same for many of us. On my patch, in those tender years, the neighbourhood of streets, pubs, tenements, schools, barber shops, cinemas went in the late 1960s. The postcode had become a backdrop for activist auteurs arriving with an agenda and a camera crew. In 1967, the director Ken Loach turned up with Terence Stamp to film Poor Cow in the condemned tenements in our neighbourhood, known to locals for housing single mothers, solitary males and those referred to in a sombre tone as 'simple'. The neighbourhood was razed and replaced with a brutalist estate in the slate-grey early-Seventies, where clouds were forever the colour of twine, when heels were higher than hopes, and the young and modern among us welcomed every breeze block that brought change. Ballard wrote about it. Bowie too. Then came Morrissey: Amid concrete and clay and general decay, nature must still find a way.

Now we walk like ghosts on streets that were once familiar, reminded of those that are gone and a London, a Manchester, an England that is no more. This was the England Morrissey has written of when at his most English, and in the grip of the melancholy so central to the English character and the English imagination. In recalling the past in this way we are dealing in history rather than nostalgia, and if the latter, then the ‘literary nostalgia’ that the poet Fernando Pessoa described. We recall external things: the arrangement of furniture; the way a table was set. It's a nostalgia for scenes. ''Thus someone else's childhood can move me as much as my own,' Pessoa writes in the posthumous 'Book Of Disquiet', 'both are purely visual phenomena from a past I am unable to fathom, and my perception of them is literary. They move me, yes, but because I see them, not because I remember them.'

This was how we related to the Morrissey songs that dealt in these scenes, and were evident even in recent years with ‘Once I Saw The River Clean'. It was the England of our parents and grandparents that we caught a glimpse of in its final days. It was the last of an England that was fading, the very last of which came in September with the death of the Queen. Even those of us that aren’t monarchists were impressed by her longevity; the virtues she embodied when carrying out the role for seventy years, rather than the role itself. (‘Send her victorious,’ tweeted the former Johnny Rotten.) We were not nostalgic for scenes, but values embodied by our parents' generation, in a nation that despite its shortcomings - and there were many - had an identity and a confidence. ‘It is lack of confidence, more than anything else, that kills a civilisation,' the historian Kenneth Clark once said. 'We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs.' The cynics and the suicide bombers are among us, along with the grifters, race hustlers, and a posh white left eager to erase the country's past, re-write it, or define it in terms of its barbarism. Those with an alternate take are accused of celebrating a mythical, utopian, monocultural past. Yet the mythical, utopian, multicultural present they cling to is imploding before our weary eyes. As Morrissey says, no one writes songs about England anymore. The Queen is dead, boys, and it's so lonely on a limb.

Decades after singing about the death of the monarch, and dead children on the Yorkshire moors, he sings a song about England; a song about the murder of children at a Manchester concert in 2017. Perhaps Morrissey saw in those attending the concert something of himself as a child in that city; the relevance of pop music in those young lives. It reverberates through those bones; images of those responsible linger in the minds, the hearts, and remain on bedroom walls until breasts form and voices break. 'All human activity is fruitless when pitted against the girls and boys singing on pop television,' Morrissey has written of his youth, 'for they have found the answer as the rest of us search for the question. I will sing, too. If not, I will have to die. ' It's not the death of the child murdered on the moor, or taken out by a terrorist, but the poetic 'death' of the dreamer who never fulfils his dream; the writer who never finds the words; the odd outsider who never finds a way in. It's not death he's referring to here but life - the extended sentence for those who never learn to live. Not the lives of those that were extinguished before they got the chance to choose.

So he sang, too. It began with a song about a tragedy that devastated the city of his birth, a city he longed to leave. It continues with a song about a tragedy that devastated the city long after he'd left or moved on to, in his words, see ‘many shores’…..Los Angeles…..Rome. Momentarily he considered throwing his arms around Paris. But the England that made him remained throughout in mind, body and song. It's an experience many of us understand - the mortal among us, for whom the end is nearer than the beginning. We each have our own place, and it remains long after home has become a question mark. Love it or loathe it we leave it but never lose it. It's our England, our Manchester, our south east London and long after it's gone it still has us, and like us, it has so much to answer for. As hateful as it sometimes seemed, it's left us with much to be grateful for. But we wouldn't want it back. Not with the fire that's in us now.

Originally published in Arena Homme+, and Spiked on 31 December, 2022. Re-issued to coincide with a new single release in January 2026.

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Michael C Hall and I are comparing notes on all that has been done in the name of David Bowie since his death in January.

“Did you see the Lady Gaga tribute at the Grammys?” he asks, that familiar eyebrow raised. “The BBC Bowie Prom was far, far worse,” I reply. “I swear you could hear him turning in his grave when Amanda Palmer brought her baby on stage.”

Luckily, Hall missed it all — he was at home in New York. Now he’s in London for the Mercury prize, for which Bowie’s Blackstar was a contender, but not the winner. He performed the track Lazarus, the title of the off-Broadway musical in which he played the lead. It opens in London this month, which means the capital is his home until the new year.

For the moment, Hall, 45, is Bowie’s representative on earth. The part of Thomas Jerome Newton in Lazarus was his from the start. He was cast on the back of his roles in the award-winning series Six Feet Under and the groundbreaking Dexter, rather than for Hedwig and the Angry Inch, the Broadway musical about an androgynous glam rocker in which, again, he played the lead.

At his Lazarus audition, Hall began with Where Are We Now?, the song that coaxed Bowie out of exile in 2013. “Meeting him and singing his songs felt like more than a formality,” he says. “David didn’t come to see Hedwig — he was aware of my acting, but that was the first time he heard me sing. I did puddle on the floor when he left, for a second.”

Musical theatre has been central to Hall’s stage career. His résumé also lists Cabaret and Chicago. Yet Lazarus is a departure, perhaps more akin to the avant-garde theatre work of Robert Wilson and Philip Glass. “The music doesn’t operate the way it does in traditional musical theatre, in as much as it isn’t always there to move the story forward. It can be atmospheric, but also provide a counterpoint. I know David didn’t want to do a jukebox musical, and this is the furthest thing from it.” Several songs from Bowie’s last two albums feature, along with three unreleased tracks and a surprising collection of rearranged numbers from the early years.

Of all the Bowie personas, Newton seems an unlikely one for him to return to. “He maintained a fascination with the character,” Hall says. “That theme of isolation and the interest in that embroidered interior world we all create runs through all his work. So to maintain he is not quite done with Newton makes sense.”

The character was the creation of Walter Tevis, author of the book that became the film The Man Who Fell to Earth, in which Bowie made his feature debut. The story was inspired by the trauma in the writer’s childhood when he was moved from his family in San Francisco to a children’s home. Transposed to film and fiction, it became the lonely travails of an alien landlocked on Earth, in the parched landscape of New Mexico.

Filming took place slap bang in the mid-1970s, when Bowie was at his lowest point with drugs and depression, but equally, scaling the summit creatively and stylistically. Reviews from the time mention his “imperial detachment” in the role. But was it a great performance, or merely a thin white drug-addled rock star going through the motions?

“Well, I don’t know that those things are mutually exclusive,” Hall says. “His performance is fascinating. He is disarmingly beautiful and impossible not to watch. I like that he doesn’t take pains to act otherworldly. He doesn’t need to.”

Forty years on, the Newton in Lazarus drinks gin, eats junk food and watches television. Little is revealed of the backstory of the intervening years. The orange hair and alabaster skin are absent, even though he doesn’t appear to have aged. According to the script, he’s “a dying man who cannot die”, retreating into his internal world and self-imposed exile.

Death has stalked Hall’s role choices: the gay, conservative undertaker David Fisher in Six Feet Under; the cold but cool forensics expert and serial killer Dexter Morgan. With Newton, the fundamental theme is grief — the loss of family, a longing for home.

According to Hall, the parts he plays tend to be “dichotomous”, something that is perhaps true of Bowie, too, who was both “impenetrable and revealing”, as Hall puts it. He brings a darkness and a humour to the roles. There was a muscularity to his Hedwig that also has parallels with Bowie. No matter how thick the make-up or how high the heels, Bowie somehow maintained a trace of blokey straightness.

Hall was never in a band, yet there is a touch of Jagger and the New York Doll David Johansen about his features. His vocals owe a debt to a 1970s rock voice, and his look today, as he sits in his publicist’s office in Covent Garden — scuffed boots and scruffy black — is the wardrobe of a rock singer in his forties. He’s reserved rather than guarded, cerebral rather than detached — perhaps one of those figures who spring to life when inhabiting a part. Or, as he corrects me, “becomes inhabited”. The word “repressed” recurs throughout his conversation.

As Bowie appealed to the loner and queer outsider that some of us were in adolescence, I wonder if this was Hall’s experience (certainly not now, as he’s on his third marriage). “I think I behaved in ways that were pretty conformist. My dad died when I was 11. I understood implicitly that I needed to take care of my mother. The best way was not to upset her, never cause her to unnecessarily worry about me. So I kept a lot under lock and key. I’ve certainly found myself working on things that have encouraged me to explore whatever is repressed or shadowy in me, and I’m glad.”

Hall’s father died at 39 of prostate cancer. In 2009, at 38, Hall was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer of the immune system. He announced he was fully in remission in 2010. But he was aware of death very early, as his sister died in infancy before he was born. The trauma of losing his father was “a frozen moment” he regularly returned to and slowly, gradually, pulled himself out of. Trauma and death are so much part of the characters he has played that, on meeting him, Bowie asked: “What is it with you?”

The day the cast were due to record the Lazarus album was the day Bowie died. Two days later, they were back on stage. “The recording gave us a chance to actively do something productive that we knew was in sync with his wishes. It was very emotional and surreal. Doing the show was more challenging, realising just how much David’s enthusiasm for it had to do with its capacity to be a meditation on mortality and death.”

One of the featured songs in the show is The Man Who Sold the World, from the album of the same name, released in the UK in 1971, the year Hall was born. When did the boy Michael come on board as a Bowie fan, growing up in North Carolina? Turns out it was the moment when many of us jumped ship: Let’s Dance.

“I saw this dashing, blond, tanned, moody crooner and went back from there and appreciated all the shape-shifting that had occurred. I steeped myself in the Bowie catalogue and revisited it a lot when Hedwig was happening. I was listening to Hunky Dory on a loop in my dressing room for a while. There were cutouts of him all over the mirror.”

As we prepare to leave, I say I was listening to Blackstar on the way to the interview. I had been thinking of the lyric from the song Dollar Days, in which Bowie mentions England. After many years, following his diagnosis, he made the trip here from his home in New York, and revisited settings that had been the backdrop to his formative years. Blackstar was his swan song; Lazarus the posthumous goodbye, and the fulfilment of an ambition to see his work staged as a musical. His last public appearance was at the New York opening.

“That’s so funny — I was thinking of those very same lyrics on the way here, too,” Hall says. It’s a moment of recognition in which he is suddenly alert, wide-eyed, smiling, emerging from the reserved, thoughtful figure of the past 40 minutes. “‘If I never see the English evergreens I’m running to,’” he quotes, “‘it’s nothing to me.’”

Originally published in The Sunday Times, 2016. Re-issued to coincide with the tenth anniversary of David Bowie’s death.

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In her 1932 essay, ‘Oxford Street Tide’, Virginia Woolf writes that modern London is not built to last but built to pass: ‘The mere thought of age, of solidity, of lasting forever is abhorrent to Oxford Street.’

The stretch of road that connected Newgate Prison to Tyburn gallows, currently enhanced by Christmas lights, a tradition harking back to 1959, has undergone multiple changes. Yet soon it will be subjected to a development that divorces it from its past almost completely. That’s because 1.1 kilometres of Oxford Street, from Orchard Street to Great Portland Street, and potentially up to Tottenham Court Road, is set to be pedestrianised. Having passed the consultation stage, work is expected to begin in 2026, under the management of a new Mayoral Development Corporation. Previous London mayors posited the idea, but the current incumbent, Sadiq Khan, intends to bring it to fruition ‘as soon as possible’. Khan proposed this in 2016, the first year of his tenure, only to be blocked by Westminster City Council and a lack of public enthusiasm. He now claims the support of the capital’s residents, with seven out of 10 in favour of change. ‘It’s clear that the vast majority of Londoners and major businesses back our exciting plans’, he informed us earlier this year.

Plazas are promised, lined with trees and seating areas. The word ‘boulevard’ is bandied about to elevate the leisurely shopper to a Baudelaire-like flâneur, promenading a thoroughfare worthy of Haussmann, the visionary architect of modern Paris. There will be ‘outdoor dining’ and ‘public art’ – street-food stalls and living statues, perhaps. According to the London mayor’s mission statement for the project: ‘Our plans are not only about creating a beautiful public space where people can shop, eat and connect, but transforming Oxford Street into a place Londoners and the whole of the country can be proud of, as we continue to build a better London for everyone.’ The scheme feeds Khan’s fantasy of a vibrant city in which life is a festival. It perpetuates the myth of the capital as a multicultural utopia so essential to Khan’s mantra: diversity is our strength. It chimes with events he’s mentioned elsewhere that epitomise modern London: Eid in the Square, the Ramadan Lights, Notting Hill Carnival and Pride. When a Pride march converged at the junction at Oxford Circus in 2022, Khan was centre stage rallying the oncoming crowds. Gay anthems played as Angela Rayner indulged in a self-conscious shoulder roll before Keir Starmer, cast as ‘Queer Keir’, a heterosexual sexagenarian with glitter on his cheeks, followed suit.

I’ve used these lines before, but I’ll reprise them here to drive the point home. Back in 2022, Khan was welcoming his comrades to his fiefdom, his Trumpton: ‘The great thing about London is that if you’re different, you aren’t simply tolerated, you’re respected, celebrated and embraced. That’s who we are: open-minded, outward looking.’ Such statements reveal his provincial outlook. Khan is blithely oblivious to news that those beyond the M25 are familiar with the modern world, too. Khan’s commitment to a utopian multiculturalism, coupled with his efforts to eradicate pollution with his Ultra Low Emission Zone initiative, will, he believes, shape his legacy. Yet, another issue provided the impetus for his vision of a new Oxford Street: casualties. In 2016, his office justified pedestrianising Oxford Street by referring to a fatal accident involving a person and a bus that occurred the month after Khan was first elected.

Khan flags up crime and casualty figures only when they’re expedient. He remains tone deaf to knife attacks carried out in great numbers on his watch and claimed recently to have no knowledge of the existence of grooming gangs in London. Whatever Khan believes his legacy to be, crime in London, and his disingenuous approach to it, is what he’ll be remembered for – long after the ‘holiday’ lights have dimmed on Oxford Street and the cars have disappeared. Much of the criticism levelled at the capital’s first Muslim mayor is dismissed by his defenders as ‘Islamophobia’. Ricky Gervais highlights a more pressing concern in an ad for his Dutch Barn vodka brand that has popped up at Tube stations: ‘Welcome to London. Hold on to your phone.’

Someone who directly challenged Khan’s record, as a UKIP member of the London Assembly, was Peter Whittle, who died last month aged 64. He also established the Westminster-based think-tank, the New Culture Forum, producing numerous successful YouTube documentaries, among other notable projects. His passion for his native London, his knowledge of its history, is evident in the 2023 documentary he fronts, entitled A London Lost: Death of an English City. Peter first contacted me 20 years ago when I wrote about the demonisation of working-class white people in The Likes Of Us, proudly informing me his late father had managed a gym on the Old Kent Road, a thoroughfare crucial to the backdrop of the book. In recent years, he referred to a later paragraph I’d written, as it resonated with his experience of London in middle age:

Those of us who made the voyage out and live like expats with ambivalent memories of the old country, seek out familiar relics on return trips for funerals, among other things – not in the name of nostalgia but history, to remind ourselves we once existed on streets we now walk as ghosts. We seek out those red-brick monoliths that recall the civic nature of the neighbourhood – town halls, libraries, welfare centres, the living past in the shadowed present.

For Whittle, a lament for a lost city was not anchored in nostalgia. Like Virginia Woolf, he was aware that London was a place built to pass; the city as palimpsest in which the ancient is evident beneath the modern. Referring to further pedestrianisation during a public talk, he expressed caution – he worried it would make England’s capital too static. ‘London isn’t a museum’, he told the audience. Those of us of a certain vintage have been privy to previous changes in Oxford Street and its environs, as time and the city took us from the age of innocence to the age of experience and beyond. On the classic Monopoly board, Oxford Street, for sale at £300, was the property those of us born close to Old Kent Road, the cheapest at £60, wanted to own houses and hotels on. It continues to attract roughly 500,000 pedestrians each day, and contributes an estimated £25 billion per year to the capital’s economy.

According to Woolf, Oxford Street was full of sales and bargains in 1932: ‘Moralists have been known to point the finger of scorn at those who buy there… [But] even a moralist must allow that this gaudy, bustling, vulgar street reminds us that life is a struggle; that all building is perishable…’ In Confessions of An English Opium-Eater (1821), Thomas De Quincey writes: ‘So, then, Oxford Street, stonyhearted stepmother, thou that listenest to the sighs of orphans, and drinkest the tears of children.’ By 1988, Tracey Thorn of Everything but the Girl spoke to young suburban day trippers of her generation as she sang: ‘When I was 17, London meant Oxford Street.’

It was this gaudiness that Woolf mentions that called us up west from the cheapest street on the Monopoly board, across Westminster Bridge from the wrong side of the Thames, to shop, work and sometimes steal. Oxford Street was the destination for the ‘Forty Thieves’, the infamous female gang from Elephant and Castle, who plied their trade between 1870 and the 1950s. Some of us were aware of female ‘hoisters’ carrying on the tradition throughout the 1970s. By the 1980s, they were taking orders for designer clobber for local football casuals: Tacchini, Lacoste, Pringle. Despite the proximity of the wealthy West End, it was another world, one that six stops on the Bakerloo Line from the Elephant brought us to. King’s Road was too far, Bond Street too exclusive.

High streets across the country are struggling and in need of solutions in order to survive. Online shopping, retail parks and the Covid quarantine contributed to bringing them to this juncture. Many are peppered with vape shops, along with an abundance of Turkish barbers and Vietnamese nail bars, all of which are reportedly fuelling the black economy and the illegal immigration industry. On Oxford Street, the proliferation of US candy stores brought investigations following accusations of money laundering.

Oddly, souvenir outlets have flourished. Whatever racket these conceal, if any, the shelves are filled with miniature relics from another London. Not because the artefacts, monuments and iconic images they depict are gone, but because they’ve been so defaced and brutalised they are incidental props on a trashed London set, where frequent scenes of savagery and carnage occur. I’m thinking of Ivor Roberts-Jones’s statue of Churchill in Parliament Square, with ‘is a racist’ sprayed on its plinth during the Black Lives Matter riots in 2020. I’m thinking of the letters ‘BLM’ scrawled beneath ‘The Glorious Dead’ on Sir Edwin Lutyens’s Cenotaph on Whitehall. I’m thinking of the barriers and armed sentinels clogging the thoroughfares of Westminster to prevent further attacks from Islamist extremists.

Oxford Street, which covers three postcodes, has seen its share of upheaval this century, beginning with the May Day, Monopoly-themed antiglobalisation protest in 2001. Over the past decade, we’ve seen blockades on Oxford Street carried out by Black Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion among others. Those participating in these protests are spoilt for choice when it comes to causes, and they pick them with the same ease bystanders shopping on Oxford Street choose their purchases, but with less discrimination. Yet, on Oxford Street, too, there are iconic images rooted in our collective memory that remain untarnished.

I’m thinking of Barbara Hepworth’s Winged Figure (1963) mounted on the side of the John Lewis building. The store will doubtless survive changes wrought by future plans, as surely as it survived the fire that almost destroyed it during wartime bombing in the 1940s, and the IRA bombs that exploded close to Christmas 1992. For my part, I survived a stint at John Lewis before being sacked from a Saturday job at the fag end of the 1970s. I’d progressed to Oxford Street from Regent Street, where I’d been stationed at Boots since summer 1976, when Oxford Street witnessed the birth of a movement as its 100 Club staged the Sex Pistols’ infamous Punk Rock Festival.

Then there’s Gilbert Bayes’s Queen of Time clock perched over the Art Deco entrance to Selfridges since 1931. The store will also survive, as it survived the damage from V2 rockets in December 1944. (A secure ‘hotline’ was installed in the store’s sub-basement connecting Churchill to Roosevelt.) The Sex Pistols’ former manager, Malcolm McLaren, placed the characters of Gordon Selfridge and Thomas de Quincey in his film, The Ghosts of Oxford Street, broadcast on Channel 4 on Christmas Day 1991. He claimed his mother had been a lover of the business magnate, Charlie Clore, who purchased Selfridges in 1965. As an art student in the 1960s, McLaren staged a situationist event there, arriving in Santa Claus garb and giving the store’s toys to children, as a challenge to Christmas consumerism.

I’m also thinking of the Art Deco facade of the Pantheon in sleek black granite, designed by Robert Lutyens, which opened in 1938 – 18 years earlier, his father’s Cenotaph was unveiled on Armistice Day, two years after the end of the First World War. The Pantheon housed the Marks & Spencer flagship store, which remains in the building today, even though it’s not the port of call it once was. That’s the privilege of IKEA several doors down,which opened in May this year within the 1920s building that was previously home to Topshop. In life during wartime, the basement of the Peter Robinson department store was converted into a secure studio for the BBC, where George Orwell was among those broadcasting. The living past in the shadowed present.

The Néo-Grec Orchard House, also home to Marks & Spencer, at the Marble Arch end of Oxford Street, is the next iconic building up for refurbishment. Created as a Lyon’s Corner House in 1931, and aesthetically, a sympathetic neighbour to Selfridges, the building was protected from redevelopment by successive administrations. Angela Rayner, when secretary of state for housing, removed the protection, agreeing to its demolition and its revival as a 10-storey building with offices, a gym and an arcade. This is the point where the pedestrianisation of Oxford Street will begin – it’s part of the plan from the company responsible for turning part of Tottenham Court Road into a ‘pedestrian peninsula’ in 2021, and transforming New York’s Times Square.

It’s unlikely these changes will bring about the revitalised Oxford Street, the ‘London for everyone’, Sadiq Khan envisages. Politicians’ attempts to impose their creative visions on people are always follies. Boris Johnson, London mayor between 2008 and 2016, allocated £43million for a so-called garden bridge across the Thames that was never constructed, and which Khan withdrew support for when he took office. Johnson also attempted to improve Oxford Street, introducing the current crossing system at Oxford Circus, where Queer Keir and Rayner the disco queen later danced themselves dizzy during Pride.

The spanking new Oxford Street will include a proposed 800-metre-long artwork that would cover the former road with light installations above and harlequin shapes below. We can assume this will be in keeping with exhibits Khan has previously supported, such as those that grace the fourth plinth on Trafalgar Square as Nelson looks on from his column, no doubt wishing he’d been blinded in both eyes. Currently the plinth features 726 plaster cast faces of trans and nonbinary models, mostly sex workers. This will be replaced in 2026 by Tschabalala Self’s bronze sculpture, Lady in Blue, which pays homage to ‘a contemporary, metropolitan woman of colour’. To the philistines among us, the exaggerated features of this forthcoming exhibit summon thoughts of the Aunt Jemima caricature relegated to the racism of history along with Uncle Ben, mammy maids and cakewalking minstrels.

Ultimately, Sadiq Khan’s embrace of London’s future is as crass as his efforts to erase its past – whether it’s building a new Oxford Street, banishing statues and the names of streets or train lines that fail to the match the criteria of diversity trends, or claiming promotional material featuring a white family ‘doesn’t represent real Londoners’. These trends, like Khan’s tenure as mayor, will pass. As surely as modern London was built to pass, as Virginia Woolf pointed out. We too will pass, along with the memories of the streets we lived on in the city that made us, where we took Saturday jobs as teenagers and where as adults, we wonder like ghosts, finding the living past in the shadowed present, as Noel Coward succinctly put it in ‘London Pride’. As Woolf reminds us, as Oxford Street reminded her, life is a struggle and all building is perishable.

This essay was published in Spiked

Maureen Callahan is a fervent advocate of the ten rules of writing as laid out by the novelist Elmore Leonard. She has adhered to these as a columnist, investigative journalist, author and, lately, presenter of the online podcast The Nerve.

It’s a few lines in and I’ve avoided breaking the first rule - never begin a piece of writing with a description of the weather. Now, I’m about to break the second: avoid prologues. The Nerve warrants a prologue, a fanfare even, it fulfils a crucial role at a key moment in the culture. Back in 2014, in her second book Champagne Supernovas, in which she writes on Alexander McQueen, Marc Jacobs and Kate Moss in an overview of the 1990s, Callahan mentions ‘a collective hunger for change’ following the excesses of the 1980s. This is equally true of the present. There’s a hunger for change.

I came to The Nerve shortly after its debut on YouTube in spring, and discovered that Callahan’s mission to take down those guilty of ‘befouling the culture’ was something I’d been longing to see. By way of a central monologue she forensically examines the behaviour, the words, the vanity projects of sacred cows such as Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey, while taking potshots at familiar targets that deserve the pile on. The hit list includes self-entitled celebrities, race grifters, self-help hucksters and nepo babies. Meghan Markle is a ‘malignant narcissist’ while Winfrey is ‘the master of the dark arts’, Jennifer Anniston ‘harbours anger issues’, Ryan Reynolds is a ‘psychopath’.

The Nerve addressed the Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs trial and the silence that greeted it, from those fierce independent women at the vanguard of celebrity sisterhood with ‘that feminist’ Beyoncé leading the charge. Callahan cites the First Amendment when protecting her right to offend, when insulting her subjects or indulging in gossip. As a chaser, she adds what is fast becoming a catchphrase, funnier every time she delivers it: ‘just my opinion’. Whether writing for the page or the podcast Callahan isn’t simply a contrarian, neither is she concerned by those that attack her take on the culture: ‘I don’t want to know people who aren’t critical thinkers and who can’t roll around in original, bold, provocative thought.’

The Nerve arrives at an apposite moment in America, while resonating with developments in Britain. ‘There’s a real hunger for this stuff in the culture,’ she says. A sea change is occurring in the US from the top down, following Donald Trump’s return to the White House. Here in the UK it’s from the bottom up, flourishing online, aided by podcasts and citizen journalists. It’s a refreshing alternative to the narrative peddled by the mainstream media. Here, we live under a regime that threatens our free speech by way of the Online Safety Act, proposed blasphemy laws, and lengthy jail sentences for social media posts that don’t meet with official groupthink.

Key figures in America claim they are exasperated at watching Britain destroying itself from within. Vice President J.D.Vance addressed his fears for the eradication of free speech in this country earlier this year. Many online pundits in the UK welcome the intervention of Elon Musk on X, as he highlights concerns overlooked by regime journalists. The week before his assassination, it was bizarre but heartwarming to have Charlie Kirk post an image of a protest against illegal immigrants in the Lincolnshire town of Skegness, from his Turning Point USA HQ in Arizona, with the words: ‘Rise up, England!’

The Nerve ushers in the new order and shows the celebrities, causes, themes that represent the old one the door. As the host points out, the show doesn’t deal in politics but it does deal in facts. It delves into territory familiar to all of us, which is why the correspondence she shares on the show is dispatched from faithful ‘troublemakers’ across the globe. Those tuning in spring from various countries and are of various ages, including men of a similar vintage to myself, such as one Armando J. Cortés: ‘I am a 64-year old fully hetero man, fully into man’s stuff, but I can’t get enough of your show’.

For me, a 64-year old single man with a shoulder bag and a sibilant ‘S’ that arrived with the dentures in March, The Nerve taps into an emerging trend within ye olde World Wide Web. Online content has been dominated by partisan opinion, by argument, by the need for the short, sharp take. To fully erase the ailing legacy media it’s now expanding beyond politics and polemic to embrace all that culture covers; the function of mainstream media before it became bogged down by the dying trends of DEI and identity politics. In the absence of our own equivalent of The Nerve this US model will suffice when ridding the culture of rot. A hand reaches across the ocean. I’m gripped.

Again, in keeping with Elmo’s ethos I’ll avoid a description of the weather or even a portrait of a place, but I’m impelled to introduce a setting, a backdrop, that suggests a unique mood: New York. It’s where the three hour-long episodes of The Nerve are recorded each week. It’s where Maureen Callahan was born. ( Her Brooklyn-based parents soon relocated the family to the Long Island suburb of Long Beach.) It’s where she found the pop culture that formed her……where the New York titles she later contributed to informed her aspiration to become a writer. It’s the birthplace of Lady Gaga, the subject of her first book in 2010. Callahan’s reasons for writing Poker Face were twofold: firstly, to crack the task of writing a book, secondly, to buy a home with the proceeds, in New York City

A decade on Callahan has two high profile books under her belt on subjects far removed from those earlier titles. The award-winning American Predator (2020) is her forensic pursuit of the crimes of Israel Keyes (‘the first sui generis serial killer of the twenty-first century’). Last year’s New York Times bestseller, Ask Not, is an account of the women used and abused during their association with the Kennedy clan. She speaks to me from her house at the opulent end of Long Island, a serious drive from the middle class suburb of her formative years, and closer to the exclusive resort where Manhattan-based celebrities - the breed she targets on The Nerve - have holiday homes: The Hamptons.

Michael: The Nerve is the first outing for former NBC anchor Megyn Kelly, in expanding her burgeoning online media empire beyond The Megyn Kelly Show. Your appearance as a guest on Kelly’s podcast - including the two of you spoofing With love, Meghan and the space mission of Katy Perry and the celebrity female ‘astronauts’ - provided an enticing introduction to the monologues you now deliver on your show. This must have brought an audience to The Nerve early on.

Maureen: The reaction to the show from the beginning was so strong. Whenever you start something like this, they come at you with metrics and they say this is how we can predict what kind of audience you’re going to capture maybe in year one. After the first episode they were like The Nerve just blew past the year long predictions. So we knew we had, quote, unquote, struck a nerve. The name of the show is multilayered. And what’s extremely gratifying is that we are doing what we set out to do, which is be a singular voice. Nobody’s doing what we’re doing. Nobody is coming at pop. And I come at pop culture as a fan. But, we’re the really dark side of the moon. We’re the entertainment show that would be broadcast in Satan’s waiting room. At The Nerve we serve as a corrective in some ways, a fun, funny but brutal and honest corrective. We’re telling true stories.

Michael: You’ve walked a long way and covered a lot of ground on the way to this point. Did all roads lead here?

Maureen: I feel like everything I’ve done in my career before has prepared me for this. I think it’s kind of why the show has taken off in a way, because we know exactly what we’re doing. When I criticise a subject who is otherwise getting glad handed in the American media, I go back and look at everything they’ve written. I look at interviews. I like to use their own words, their own statements, their own actions, their own contradictions to build my argument as to why I may think the way I do, because I do present so much of it as my opinion. I’m protected. I have a backlog of factual data that I am presenting and saying.

Michael: Your skills as an investigative journalist come into play on The Nerve, and you have more freedom in America to go on the attack, which is increasingly impossible in Britain. Stating your views as your own opinion allows you the freedom to call Ryan Reynolds a ‘psychopath’.

Maureen: I think he is a psychopath. I think he is a dead eyed psychopath whose smile never reaches his eyes, who has a lot of dark stuff in his past. The thing that’s remarkable about so many of these celebrities who are elevated to untouchable status is it’s like a cultural caste system over here. They often tell us who they are in plain sight. They may do it behind a laugh and a wink and a nod, but they often tell us the truth about who they are. Right now, here in America, we’re watching Priscilla Presley (ex-wife of Elvis) do a media tour. Now the number one question is, Priscilla, you’re being sued because your former business partners allege that you pulled the plug on your daughter prematurely so you could wrest control of Graceland from her. What’s the story? She doesn’t get asked that question. She gets a little bit of tiptoeing around it and it’s really unpleasant. So let’s not touch it. You’re a nice old lady. I don’t think she’s a nice old lady. I think she’s a dark, malevolent force.

Same thing with Amy Griffin, the wife of this billionaire here in America who has been peddling a memoir - The Tell - that was swallowed whole by the media industrial complex, by the likes of Oprah Winfrey and Gwyneth Paltrow. In this book, she alleges that a teacher who she keeps pseudonymous, but who is a real man and everyone in her city of Amarillo knows exactly who this guy is, raped her repeatedly as a child, multiple times in public places, and nobody saw a thing. And we at The Nerve were the first to do a segment. And I was very, very careful about this because you never want to take a claim of sexual violence lightly, and I don’t. But Griffin’s book read way off to me. I didn’t believe it. So we did a little bit of digging, we went to Amy Griffin’s people, we emailed a list of questions. One of those questions was - If there is a violent child sexual predator on the loose, do you not feel any responsibility to make sure this person can never harm another child? Because child sexual predators never stop at one. And we heard crickets. So the New York Times picked up this thread and just ran an exposé. Her lawyers got back to the Times. They didn’t even come back to us. Now maybe they didn’t come back to us because they thought, oh, this cute little podcast, who’s gonna listen? But that’s great for us. Underestimate us at your peril.

Michael: I like the way you highlight the hypocrisy of celebrities when they fall silent on certain subjects, while questioning why we should listen to their opinions anyway.

Maureen: Yes, the notion that they have to opine about everything no matter what it is, whether it’s geopolitical, whether it’s a once in a century plague, whatever it is. We just covered Violet Affleck, the 19-year old daughter of Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner. She goes over to the United Nations behind a mask and demands that the world mask up again because she needs to feel safe. Somehow, the culture did it to her. She’s a sick girl and as I’ve said, not for the reasons she thinks. She needs a lot of help. Just my opinion. But you know this girl is there by dint of her parents fame. This is a borrowed list of accomplishments that she is using to stand before the United Nations and make a nonsensical argument and demand. This is the outgrowth of everything the culture has allowed thus far.

Michael: I believe the couple also have a transgender child, a trend that’s almost as evident as nepotism among the Hollywood elite.

Maureen: We covered this earlier on The Nerve, and yes, it’s disproportionate. Because if you were to do a one to one with the segment of the population that is truly trans, it’s a very tiny, infinitesimal percentage. If you were to do a one to one of the Hollywood community or the celebrity community, and the number of those people who have one child, if not all of their children are trans or on the spectrum or on some sort of sexuality or gender spectrum, mathematically it’s statistically impossible. I interpret it two ways. One is, these children are often born to malignant narcissists, and they’ve got to do something to get attention in that house. And if that’s what it takes, that’s what it takes. Or secondly, it’s encouraged by parents who are social justice warriors and virtue signallers. It redounds to their own cultural halo of importance and righteousness.

Michael: A cast of characters have become targets on The Nerve. One of these ‘repeat offenders’ as you refer to them, is Sarah Jessica Parker. You have this knack of moving in on figures that I’ve felt are deserving of criticism. Parker is one such target, as the character of Carrie Bradshaw which she exhausted in the Sex And The City brand and finally buried with the lamentable And Just Like That. An event which you rightly celebrated by way of a funeral on The Nerve. For me, Sex And The City took some risks and brought fashion and a modernity to comedy and drama in the 1990s, but the Parker character was the weakest link. She’s now the Methuselah of Manhattan. The older she got the more infantilised her wardrobe became, along with her behaviour, as though this was short-hand for being ageless and sexy: the elongated knitted sleeves covering the knuckles, wearing the boyfriend’s oversized shirt the morning after sex. The injection of woke and desperate shock tactics into And Just Like That made it a prime target for The Nerve. I take it that even though you were walking similar streets in the 1990s, experiencing similar events, the New York of Carrie Bradshaw was not for you, then or now.

Maureen: I hate watched Sex in the City. I could appreciate the aspirational qualities of it. But I knew way too many young women who moved to Manhattan thinking that was the life that they were going to have and identified as, everybody’s a Carrie Bradshaw. It’s like how everyone who believes in reincarnation believes they used to be a queen, you know, I’m a Carrie. They’re never a slave or a foot soldier or a janitor. New York for me was downtown. As a teenager, I worked as an intern at MTV. That’s when it was small enough and nimble enough you could soak up everything about television production and how that worked. That was such a great time to be a young person in New York in the 90s and the early noughties. You still had an underground here. The internet has really erased that. I’m sure you relate to this. You sort of had to earn your bona fides if you were interested in subcultures. You really had to listen and think and absorb and chase these things down. They weren’t just a Google search away. It was the way that people really identified. Everybody had tribes. So the girls with the nameplates and the $14 mimosas, that was not my scene. That was not for me. I was into young Cool Britannia. Kate Moss, Trainspotting, Blur versus Pulp. All of it.

Michael: Yes, I can relate to so much of that. But I was a very late baby boomer, while you arrived by way of Gen X. I left infancy as glam rock (Bowie, Roxy Music) was colonising the British music charts, hit adolescence in time for punk, and became a fully-fledged adult with ‘new romanticism’ before the Eighties went full pelt. I was working in television at the same time as you, in the 1990s. I began as a researcher on Tonight With Jonathan Ross at Channel 4, his attempt to bring the David Letterman show to these parts. What was happening in television at that time was akin to what’s happening with the internet now in terms of a challenge to orthodox broadcasting. MTV was coming up on the outside, while in Britain you had a nascent Channel Four commissioning independent production companies to create ‘yoof’ TV, redefine breakfast television and the talk show. Ross was unique in that he introduced mainstream television to trends and content we previously had to seek out in the margins; searching for clues, putting in the legwork, when it came to music, clubs, film and fashion.

Maureen: That all speaks to me, all of that stuff you’re talking about.

Michael: In the 1970s it was a private code, rather like the ‘camp’ Susan Sontag defined a decade earlier. I was a Londoner, on the poor side of town, but a few tube stops from the action. Everything was done on the cheap, but that somehow made the experience more unique. If aspects of the wealthy west end felt like another country, despite its proximity, New York was another world, but one we looked to with awe, particularly the world of Warhol. I remember skipping school one Monday afternoon in February 1977 to head for King’s Road where I forked out for Andy Warhol’s Interview, the last issue with his name on the masthead. Even though you were part of the rising generation, the reference points you often allude to on The Nerve suggest the era before you came of age was your playground. You mention John Waters films, the New York of Warhol, The Factory, Studio 54.

Maureen: Oh, my God, I wish. When I was a kid, like a very young kid, I would go to the library and read New York magazine. From the time I was able to read, I was like reading the New York Post. So it’s like, oh, Andy Warhol’s Diaries are out. Go to the library, get Andy Warhol’s Diaries. The same with Studio 54. Watch the documentaries, talk to people who were there. The people in the margins are always the most interesting to me. Also because they’ve been through the most as young people to get to where they are and they see the world differently.

Michael: I agree that the arrival of the internet meant you didn’t have to put in the legwork to discover fellow travellers with a similar sensibility. All that was once in the margins has found its way to the heart of the mainstream, and with it has come the worst of everything. From the vantage point of the present there is something quaint about David Bowie playing gay for a day, and Lou Reed dating a transsexual. Even the Warhol Factory fodder cast as ‘superstars’ by the artist, appear endearing in their efforts to pay homage to old Hollywood starlets. And they did so despite the hard drugs and harsh drag that determined their lives, and the heroin addiction and hormone treatment that hurried their deaths along. In place of the anomalous transsexuals and transvestites that made us odd outsiders avert our eyes and prick up our ears, there is now a militant trans lobby which is treated as a protected species.

The prominence of drag in mainstream culture is part of a trend that embraces Susan Sontag’s take on Camp. But it also breaks with it. According to Sontag it was never political; it made the serious frivolous. Contemporary Camp makes the frivolous serious. It has lost its outsider status despite fervently clinging to it; it is no longer a subversive subculture. In 2013, filmmaker Bruce LaBruce wrote an essay in which he revised and updated Sontag’s original. He took her to task for arguing that Camp was apolitical, claiming that’s exactly what it was — until now, an age in which he sees “bad straight camp” and “conservative camp”. Several years on, bad Camp and fakery sum up what is dominant in the culture, particularly when it comes to political activism. The serious has become frivolous. The exaggeration, theatre and artifice of Camp coloured the antics of Black Lives Matter, #MeToo and the supporting cast of agitators that take to the streets, whether it’s women dressing as extras from The Handmaid’s Tale or Black Lives Matter foot soldiers reprising Black Panther costumes.

In the aftermath of his death, George Floyd was inducted into the contemporary canon of bad Camp. Even before his canonisation his 14-karat gold-plated casket was displayed for the curious crowds as though he were Mandela or Evita. Drag and Camp are interchangeable because each derives from themes central to Sontag’s thesis: a love of the unnatural by way of artifice and exaggeration. Things being what they are not.

I recall a podcast interview following the launch of The Nerve, in which you said: ‘People have had it with the falsity and the bad art that would be camp, if it wasn’t so bad.’

Maureen: They are so fake now, the ones doing it. They fool you. Talking to you about this and listening to you talk, I so relate. I was in Catholic school, but I was that kid who on the weekends was on the train into the city and going to all of the independent record stores and all of the vintage shops, soaking up everything that was either counterculture or that came before me that was informing that decade. My humble hope would be that The Nerve is the place where everyone who thinks differently, feels differently, absorbs things on the margins, is questioning what the mainstream is telling us is true and real. I would like The Nerve to be the destination for everyone like that, because that’s definitely informing where I come from, I think. That’s why I get those children are the ones who grow up to be the most interesting and the biggest contributors to the culture because they see the world differently and they don’t care if you like it. They don’t care if the other kids like it. They’re not going to push themselves like a square peg into a round hole.

Michael: Speaking of mainstream media, there is a speech by Camille Paglia in the early days of this century in which she riffs on the decline of the ‘Manhattan media’, beginning with the Village Voice. Since then Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, The New York Times, New York magazine have followed suit, having been consumed by Trump Derangement Syndrome since 2016. It’s a long way from Dorothy Parker and her witty cohorts at The Algonquin Round Table writing for The New Yorker in the 1920s. Or the new journalism commissioned by Clay Felker, when he edited New York magazine in the 1960s, with Tom Wolfe heading the pack. All of which you are familiar with and fond of. These writers were iconoclasts unafraid of attacking and insulting the saintly and the sacred figures of the age. I believe The Nerve, with you at the helm, has a boldness and a spirit similar to this that’s absent in a climate reeling from censorship and cancel culture.

Maureen: I think there are so many factors. Trump is definitely one. We try to stay pretty apolitical at The Nerve because things are fractious on both sides. But in terms of the decline of media and magazines, and I grew up loving magazines and even now, like, there are still a few. I’ll go into a good New York magazine shop and I’ll buy smaller titles, anything that feels like it’s got a finger on a pulse of anything. But Vanity Fair is dead. It died the minute Graydon Carter left and Vanity Fair went woke. A lot of these publications went woke. They took the teeth out. You cannot criticise anybody anymore. And I feel like it is an outgrowth of wokeism to an extent, you know, because what if you’re insulting somebody who later says, hey, I’m marginalised over here - you, Michael, were talking about being marginalised to be a point of pride. Now everybody’s cloaked in victimhood. It’s so boring.

Michael: It astounds me that much of the fashion press can be so brilliantly attuned to contemporary cultural trends, and yet be stuck in another age when it comes to politics; flagging up tired student causes relating to battles that have largely been won, so as to expand the victimhood of ‘beleaguered’ minorities. Just my opinion. I like the way you straddle high end and low when it comes to your reading and research. You’ve fond memories of both Mad and true crime stories, you’re an ardent consumer of gossip and fashion magazines, but you appreciate the ‘shoe leather reporting’ of the National Enquirer. It all comes together on The Nerve, but equally in the columns you’ve contributed to the Daily Mail and the New York Post.

Maureen: It’s kind of why Andy Warhol was something of a spiritual godfather. That love of the high and the low and realising how fine that line can often be. Just one step in the other direction. I think that’s where this, the magic is and the secret sauce is. I’m sure you’ve encountered this too in your life where you meet people who you would think have far better things to occupy their minds than gossip. Everybody loves gossip. Everybody wants to know what this person over here is doing, or this vaunted idol over here, this celebrity. What’s the real story? What’s going on? You know, everybody loves it.

Michael: As a non-fiction author you’ve examined the psychology of a serial killer who famously had ‘no digital footprint, no paper trail’ in American Predator, you are therefore perfectly placed to tackle modern celebrity and unearth what lies beneath.

Maureen: I’m fascinated by psychology, by human psychology, by people who have the need such as a Meghan Markle to become that famous. You know, she’s got a black hole, she’s never going to fill. The fun of The Nerve is that selfishly I get to explore all of these topics and, and there’s a Venn diagram. I mean they all overlap. You know, there’s a lot of personality disorder when you look at people who thrust themselves that high on a platform, whether it’s an Oprah, whether it’s a Michelle Obama, you know, it’s politics, it’s pop culture, it’s everywhere. We do these deep dives into certain kinds of personality disorders, people to look out for, breaking apart all the different kinds of narcissism, breaking apart body language. Our tagline is ‘real talk about fake people’. We are always looking for the real story underneath. When I talk about Oprah Winfrey and I say I think she’s a dark force in the culture, people laugh sometimes. But I’m also being dead serious and I always lay out, as you said, as the author of a true crime book, the case for the audience. In my mind, I’m a cultural criminal prosecutor.

Michael: The Nerve also highlights figures that have elevated the culture rather than ‘befouled’ it, those from the past and present famous for kicking against the pricks. Some of them are sorely missed - Joan Rivers, Christopher Hitchens. Others remain with us, Ricky Gervais for one. Being a lover of language you also call out those committing the sin of befouling it, including Kamala Harris with her nonsensical word salads, and the platitudes that fall from the lips of Michelle Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Meghan Markle. But what dominates as a recurring theme when delving into the psyche of these celebrities is what you refer to as a ‘darkness’. A touch of Hollywood Babylon perhaps?

Maureen: There is a darkness there on so many levels. Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs trial is one of the darker events of the year. He was ultimately convicted on what were the lesser charges. I think the jury got that wrong. I think it’s very, very possible that someone from his camp got to at least one juror. We know he was trying to intimidate witnesses from behind bars. That’s why he was locked up before trial in the first place. All of these virtue signallers in Hollywood, women especially, who, in the wake of Harvey Weinstein, #MeToo, who went to the Oscars that year wearing black. We’re all mourning. We’re all in. You know, nobody stood up to him. Everybody enabled it, and they’re not even looking at themselves. Oprah gets up there at The Golden Globes and says she’s gonna make sure another woman in Hollywood never goes through this again. If I go to my grave having abolished Oprah Winfrey as the self-help guru of the age, I will die a happy woman.

Michael: There is a connection here with all that came into play with the establishment protecting the image of the Kennedys and more recently, the Bidens.

Maureen: Everybody went silent. We have seen the photos from the parties of all of the celebrities who were at the parties. The Ashton Kutchers, J-Lo, who was arrested with Combs back in the 90s, during a nightclub shooting, a woman was shot in the face. Jennifer Lopez gets to the police precinct and says, ‘go get me some cuticle cream’. These are the people that the culture still elevates, you know, and it’s remarkable to me. I couldn’t believe that everybody was getting away with not being asked. What do you think about the Diddy trial? Hey, you know him? What did you see? What do you know? The entire celebrity industrial complex, from the major magazines to the entertainment shows, to the famous podcasters like Oprah - we don’t touch that stuff. It was remarkable to me that Sean Combs has been the only person who has gone down for this stuff, because you cannot tell me that there are not major players who were at those parties participating in this abuse of women.

Michael: Let’s talk about womanhood, another suitable subject for you, someone who grew up reading books on female saints and First Ladies. In calling out the ‘repeat offenders’ in the culture on The Nerve you arrive at certain types such as ‘the malignant narcissist’, ‘the misogynistic gay man’, but equally there is a type of modern female celebrity unique to the age that comes under fire. She’s tanked up on empathy, hysterical on protests and marches, and yet surprisingly coldly casual when it comes to issues such as late-stage abortion. The woefully woke Cynthia Nixon, whose career will hopefully go the way of Just like That, is a pensionable example of this type. She parades her trans children, wears a Palestine flag blouse, sports a MAGA-style red baseball cap emblazoned with the words ‘Make Abortion Great Again’. The Nerve did a beautiful and brilliant take down of Nixon and her ilk in the segment ‘Celebrity Abortions’.

Maureen: I think even the most ardent pro choice among us can agree that abortion is a tragedy. You know that Lily Allen clip of her talking about her multiple abortions and how fun they were and how she can’t even remember how many she had? These are a kind of female celebrity that strike me as profoundly dumb and uneducated and who somehow think that it is the height of modern day feminism to celebrate multiple abortions as a win. Especially women who are wealthy and privileged, a Lily Allen or a Cynthia Nixon, who should know how to prevent an unwanted pregnancy in the first place. I feel as though we are at a particularly ghoulish time right now. I don’t know what forces are coalescing here, but again, The Nerve exists to expose these people and purge them.

Michael: Are there other examples of this ghoulish trend?

Maureen: We have another author here, a very famous one named Elizabeth Gilbert, a product of the Oprah industrial complex, propped up by her decades ago with the book Eat Pray Love, who is now hawking another book, a memoir. Her girlfriend is dying of cancer. They’ve gotten themselves on a great drug and alcohol binge. Liz has tired of taking care of this girlfriend who she otherwise has said is the love of her life. And so she, in the pages of this book, talks about plotting to murder her girlfriend, actively plotting to murder this woman and how she was going to swap out her chemo pills for medication, whether it was fentanyl or something else, I forget, and knock her unconscious. And then once she was unconscious, smother her to death with a pillow over her face. This is treated like a really cute anecdote. Oprah, in interviewing her was like - ‘Wow, things got really dark for you, right, Liz?’ Dark for you? Dark for this poor woman who’s already dying of cancer, who has a potential murderer pretending to be the person who loves her the most in this world. Liz sails through a lot of these interviews like she’s a genius. She positions herself as a self help guru. She throws retreats where she charges women thousands of dollars to spend weekends in her company.

Michael: Perhaps the most tragic recent event that epitomises the darkness within the culture, and the mindset that contributes to it, was the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Following on from the attempt on Donald Trump’s life, this brought back memories of the US in the 1960s - the assassination of two Kennedys, one King, and the bid by Valerie Solanas to take out Andy Warhol with a bullet. This must have resonated with you in particular, having re-visited the lives of the Kennedys when writing Ask Not.

Maureen: I feel like we’ve crossed a Rubicon. I thought a lot that day about what it must have been like to be an American in the 60s, where three leading lights were gunned down. JFK, MLK, RFK. I guess the closest parallel to Charlie would have been in MLK. He was a leader. He was a religious leader. He wasn’t a politician. I found that the symbolism of Charlie being shot in the throat is terrifying. And we now know that the gunman was waiting for Charlie to answer a question about the trans issue. And that’s when he chose to pull the trigger. He was waiting for it. I think this loops into what we were talking about earlier. I am gobsmacked by this culture of death that we are living through right now, This celebration of death and true mortification when Luigi Mangione is celebrated by the culture for assassinating a husband and father and is the subject of a musical in San Francisco. He has groupies. Going back to Diddy. They’re housed in the same facility in Brooklyn. Diddy’s very upset. You want to know why? Because Luigi gets more fan mail. I’m not making this up. You say, well, why? I think it’s because we’ve slowly and silently built to this. To this level of darkness in the culture, that’s the cost of whistling past the graveyard culturally. That’s the cost of letting a lot of these people off the hook or explaining away their misdeeds or their malfeasance. I think people have had enough of it.

Michael: I was watching The Megyn Kelly Show on YouTube when I received news, via email, that Charlie Kirk had been shot. The show was a recording from the day before. I quickly scanned X, then clicked on YouTube and Kelly’s live podcast. She was discussing the shooting with her guests, all of whom were naturally emotional as they knew Kirk personally, or knew of him and respected him. When she read out confirmation that he’d died it was the most intimate, personal experience to be privy to via this platform, watching her shattered by the news, and her stoicism in making it through the rest of the show as she reacted to the tragedy. At one point she said she didn’t know what she was waiting for, she was a figure behind a desk talking into a void, holding it together. To a viewer, it was so raw, so real, but equally an experience unique to the age, and the new media that now dominates.

Maureen: You know I said this to Megyn on her show the other day. When that news broke I was out. I got home, I turned on my TV. By which I mean I put YouTube on my TV and put her show on, because I knew out of anybody broadcasting she would be telling the story factually and truthfully and giving it every bit of investment that it deserved.

Michael: It struck me that this event also marked another nail in the coffin of legacy media, for whom Charlie Kirk’s death, at first, was a footnote, even an inconvenience.

Maureen: I agree with you, this new medium, there is an intimacy to it and you know, what’s missing from it really, as you just said, is artifice. It’s not the sets and the lights and the music and the producer. It’s not that. It’s a one to one discussion. We’re all experiencing this thing together. There’s no ‘I’m going to tell you how to feel about it’, which so much of legacy media is about. Right? It’s like, ‘Oh no, you don’t understand how to think and feel about this. We’re going to tell you’. Or we’re going to lie by omission. We’re going to leave things out. You know, first of all, number one, the New York Times the next day in their physical paper, not a single op ed about this. So two weeks later, front page, above the fold: ‘If only we knew what motivated Charlie Kirk’s killer. If only he had left some clues behind’. So if this is the only media that you are consuming because of bias, and wanting to have your views reinforced, then that’s really what you think is the truth.

Michael: The famous line about everyone knowing where they were when President Kennedy died feeds into this. Years from now, some of us will remember where we were when we heard Charlie Kirk had been shot. We were online, watching a live podcast, and reading the shocked reaction of those responding to the assassination on social media posts.

Maureen: You know that stuff is going to be replayed. What is replayed every anniversary of the JFK assassination is Walter Cronkite removing his glasses and tearing up, saying the President has been pronounced dead. That’s because that was a one on one with the viewer, with the fellow citizen. Even though it’s behind a screen, it felt unmediated. It felt authentic.

‘I like it when you get hysterical on The Nerve,’ I told Maureen Callahan before we finished a two hour conversation. ‘You look great on screen,’ I added, meaning both on The Nerve and during our Zoom hook up. Shoulder length platinum blonde hair, the occasional old school secretary spectacles that make you want to ask her to ‘take a letter’. Often a black sweater and pearls that bring to mind Audrey Hepburn (we discussed her, she’s a fan). Days after our conversation Maureen fronted The Nerve wearing a vintage Roxy Music t-shirt (we discussed them, we are fans) accessorised with two rows of pearls - a nod to the era when Roxy were in the charts and Warhol was on the town (we discussed this).

Other guests sometimes appear on screen, and The Nerve hosted a panel when it covered the Emmy Awards, but the host alone addressing the camera via a monologue is when it’s at its best - smart, wise, witty, articulate, turning up the heat, reaching fever pitch and heading towards hysterical. There’s a touch Camille Paglia about Maureen Callahan’s presentation…. a touch of Sandra Bernhard…..a touch of that spirit we discussed that once made the like-minded outliers among us seek each other out and assemble in the margins. This is not just an age thing. The rising generation on TikTok are railing against the outmoded culture of woke, identity politics, censorship and the ailing legacy media. They’re done with safe spaces and trigger warnings.

In September this year, Maureen Callahan wrote: ‘The bulk of Americans are tuning out of linear television and an infotainment complex that, under the banner of free speech, insisted, for years, that these baldfaced lies were true: The Hunter Biden laptop wasn’t real. Covid lockdowns were necessary. Donald Trump is Hitler. Joe Biden was in top mental and physical condition to run for a second term. That last whopper was the death knell for liberal corporate media…’ The celebrated American cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead, now long gone, believed the invention of television meant that for the first time ‘the young are seeing history made before it is censored by their elders’. Television no longer performs that role. The mainstream media has become the adult censoring history and treating viewers like children. The baton, the mantle, has been taken up by online podcasters, citizen journalists, and individual pundits of all ages stepping into the breach. The culture is at a turning point. If there’s a revolution going on, in the culture, in broadcasting, it’s a revolution that will not be televised.

The Nerve on Substack

This essay is published in Arena Homme+ Winter/Spring 2026

The veteran broadcaster Andrew Marr quit the BBC in 2021 after twenty years, claiming he needed to get his voice back. ‘I’m free to speak my mind now,’ he declared, following his departure.

According to Marr, the ‘insane’ impartiality rules imposed on BBC journalists were impacting on his private life: ‘I was self-censoring on air, and then self-censoring in front of family and friends, and even not saying what I really thought in the pub with friends.’

It sounds ironic in retrospect, given the extent of the BBC’s partiality, as revealed in Michael Prescott’s leaked internal memo. This showed that Panorama had ‘doctored’ a speech by President Trump; that BBC Arabic had given hundreds of on-air appearances to anti-Semites, including a man who once suggested Jews should be burned ‘as Hitler did’; and that BBC News’s ‘specialist LGBTQ desk’ ensured that stories that shed a critical light on the trans agenda were not covered. The revelations contained wit…

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The historic ‘special relationship’ took on a new form, one that is less an official solidarity between the nations and more a natural allegiance between the natives. Currently, a large contingent of Britons are continuing to take to the streets to bring about not so much a ‘revolution’ but what David Starkey recently referred to as a ‘restoration’. To paraphrase Alexander Pope: Hope springs internal. Of course if Britons have to fight this war alone they will, but assistance from America is welcome. Particularly if it comes sooner rather tha…

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At 68, Stephen Fry is finally the age he was meant to be. Even though he subscribes to the argument Cyril Connolly advances in Enemies of Promise, that privately educated schoolboys remain locked in a permanent adolescence, he has always been old.

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This year, Fry received a knighthood. It was inevitable but perhaps later than he, and the rest of us, expected, given he has been acquainted with the…

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In recent weeks, two types of women in revolt have been sighted on the streets of Britain, defined by opposing outlooks and experiences. One group rails against Israel, the other objects to illegal immigration.

What they have in common is their sex. They are mothers, wives, grandmothers, but there the similarities end. What divides them is class.

Provincial middle-class protesters have become a spectacle in a market town in Somerset, a county colonised by the Lib Dem vote perhaps more than any other. In the market square of Wells, the smallest city in England, they gather on Saturday mornings banging pots and pans, accompanied by a sandwich board calling for sanctions on Israel, much to the annoyance of the stall holders attempting to earn a living. That’s not an issue for this handful of women, as they’ve passed pensionable age. Two of them, former teachers, returned to Wells as conquering heroes following their arrest at a rally in support of Palestine Action in Cardiff, with their adventurous day out becoming a major story in a minor local newspaper.

These are the same ancient activists who block roads for Just Stop Oil, or cling to ‘Refugees Welcome’ signs between bread-making classes. A type as I say. They shop at Waitrose (while boycotting the Israeli goods), they buy shapeless tops from Seasalt and sport hairstyles that belong on Colette or Mary Beard. The women of Wells on pan duty for Palestine wear a shade of burgundy reminiscent of that required by devotees of the bygone religious cult of free love, Rajneeshpuram.

‘Who radicalised Nan?’, began Tom Slater, when examining this breed of silver-haired female activists in the Telegraph recently. It’s a type, a trend, a cult. Rumour has it that there have been sightings of similar women, of a similar age, armed with similar pots and pans, in similar settings. But larger crowds of females from another class with their own pressing concerns are evident in other towns and cities, swelling in numbers with each passing week.

In London’s East End, working-class women taking to the streets don’t have the luxury of returning to rural middle-class homes after a day of demonstrating. What needles them, what has propelled them to protest, doubtless for the first time, is an immediate threat that’s on their doorstep: illegal immigrants housed in hotels and buildings on the streets in which they have spent their lives.

These women are all ages. The younger are accompanied by their children, with the elders supported by walking sticks, frames, wheelchairs and mobility scooters. They are captured on camera doing the conga, breaking into a rendition of ‘Maybe it’s Because I’m a Londoner’, holding a sit-in outside the Britannia Hotel in Canary Wharf on the Isle of Dogs. These happenings followed in the wake of protesters congregating outside the Bell Hotel in Epping, a postcode familiar to those who were part of the diaspora when East Enders made the voyage out to Essex, to become home owners.

Events in Epping have pressurised the district council to apply for an injunction to close down the asylum hotel, but this is yet to be acted upon. In Westminster, government ministers have been silent on the impact of these protests, and those in Waterlooville, Diss, Bournemouth and elsewhere. This is also true of the mainstream media, leaving a clearing for citizen journalists, activists and GB News reporters to cover the story.

Beyond the Labour government’s silence exists a sinister attempt to censor these protesters and prevent similar events – largely using the Online Safety Act, which introduced age restrictions on content in July, having been passed into law by the Conservative government in 2023. The police at these protests threaten those gathered with arrest for public-order offences that could result in lengthy sentences. This further confirms the two-tier policing operation that takes a far softer approach to counter-protesting interlopers – from other postcodes, other classes – masked by balaclavas and keffiyehs.

The face coverings conceal the identity of ‘Antifa’ activists who are as interchangeable as the marches and counter-demonstrations they join to bring about disruption and confrontation. They lack the impetus that has roused the women assembling with local men outside asylum hotels throughout the country. They are motivated by the detrimental impact an influx of strangers will have on their neighbourhoods and on local services. As one of the organisers of the Canary Wharf demonstration is quoted as saying, they are well aware that not all these migrants are paedophiles or rapists, but they are unwilling to ‘play roulette’ with their children’s lives.

The women returning to protest at Canary Wharf have earned the title ‘pink ladies’, because they turn up wearing assorted pink garments, which bring a softer, amenable look compared with the cult of the ancient sisterhood in a certain market town. Yet they are referred to as ‘far right’ by left-wingers who have never lived in the streets native to these women, and never will. In response to the predictable name-calling, they march behind a banner bearing the words: ‘We are not far right but we’re not far wrong. Stop the boats.’ Yet still the slurs occur. At the prospect of a protest in Bristol, Carla Denyer, MP for Bristol Central and co-leader of the Green Party, declared:

‘Today a far-right protest is expected to take place outside a hotel housing asylum seekers in Bristol. Let me be clear: the far right are not welcome in Bristol. They don’t represent us, or what we stand for.’

Arguably, the politics and pedigree of a middle-class woman like Denyer, daughter of a scientist mother, with a father who worked for the Ministry of Defence, do not represent the majority of Britons – particularly the working-class women taking to the streets of the East End.

The attacks on these women, and the men they march alongside, are reminiscent of the verbal assaults on Leave voters who triumphed in the EU referendum from middle-class Remainers, hinting that the background and social status of the victors should have prevented them from having a say. It’s an attitude that goes back even further, to the age when Matthew Arnold popularised the term ‘populace’ in the 19th century, and later when the poorer classes from the London docks took to West End streets, flags raised, to celebrate the relief of Mafeking in South Africa, following a seven-month siege during the Boer War. One observer compared them to ‘rats emerging from a sewer’.

Centuries pass, times change and still the bleat goes on. Figures from the left post their reactions on X to the recent protests, referring to these characters as the worst of Britain, as jobless scroungers and benefit cheats. Leading trade unionists not only support those antagonising these working-class men and women, but also reputedly fund them. At an Epping protest, Ed Harlow, vice-president of the National Education Union, addressed the ‘Stand Up To Racism’ demonstrators with a comical, tone-deaf speech that knowingly overlooked the class and concerns of the locals protesting nearby: ‘The enemies of working people in this country are not staying in hotels in Epping. The enemies of people in this country are floating around the Med on super yachts.’

Among those relevant to the new trade unionism of the late 19th century were the unskilled ‘matchgirls’ from the Bryant & May factory, who famously went on strike for better working conditions in 1888. Then as now, East End local working-class women are taking on a contemporary challenge. One that they are generally fighting alone, with an absence of support from women from other parts, other classes. Many, but not all, feminist writers and pundits from the middle class and upwards, rightfully forthright on misogyny and male violence, are silent on the hotels issue.

To their detractors, the women protesting are as much a type as the provincial middle-class women wearing Crocs and banging pots in the West Country. If so, it’s a type many of us salute. Their voices, accents and histories are familiar to us, as are the streets they walk and the city that formed them. The elders among these women are from the last generation of men and women who witnessed or were privy to harsh times, deep struggles and a conflict that saw the East End ablaze during the London Blitz. They have buried parents, husbands and maybe children long before their time. This might be their last battle, but it’s one they won’t retreat from.

For the younger ones it could be the first fight of many, in a city in which they have been discarded, and their history erased, by officials who hold them in contempt, and a London mayor who continues to cart around the washed-up corpse of multiculturalism, while ignoring key issues that are destroying the nation’s capital.

These women, these men, are part of a silent majority seeking a voice, just as their distant relatives and ancestors were, for other reasons. They have been stirred into action. Something has been awakened in them and their number elsewhere. It may be the beginning of a new dawn. As Edward Carpenter wrote in his famous ‘Socialist Marching Song’ from 1886: ‘England, arise! the long, long night is over.’ Or it may be the last gasp of a diminishing people in a dying nation. But if they’re going down, they’re taking this ship with them.

Originally published in Spiked.

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Almost no one talks about the Albany. Those that do always mention the silence.

On hearing this I thought of the silence 'like a thin rain’ that Graham Greene, a former resident, described during his sojourns into the fictional landscape of ‘Greeneland’. It has seeped into the very being of those that live here and those that have left. And so, for centuries this Grade 1 Georgian apartment block on Piccadilly has kept its mystique. Bombs, scandal and the 1960s left few scars and brought little change. In 1969 The Beatles gave their last public performance, on the roof of the Apple Corps building at No 3 Saville Row. At the 69 apartments of the Albany, concealed behind its shuttered rear entrance on Vigo Street, at the foot of Savile Row, windows didn’t open and curtains didn’t twitch. Not even‘Don’t Let Me Down’ echoing through its cloistered Rope Walk, through its hallowed corridors punctuated by marble busts of revered …

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Regardless of whether white Britons cared how black immigrants from British colonies referred to them in 1956, Colin MacInnes was keen to tell them.

Eight years after the Empire Windrush brought that first wave of Caribbean migrants to Tilbury Docks, his essay, “A Short Guide For Jumbles (to the Life of their Coloured Brethren in England)”, revealed that the “Jumble” of the title was a corruption of “John Bull”, used by West Africans to describe Englishmen “in a spirit of tolerant disdain”.

In his eagerness to enlighten the Jumble, the author seemed to be inadvertently confirming certain fallacies, as well as stereotyping both blacks and whites to a risible degree. He wrote: “What most differentiates the African from the Englishman is that our chief ambition is to put our lives into a savings bank, whilst he firmly believes that every day is there to be enjoyed.”

When MacInnes died, aged 61, in 1976, the obituary in the New York Times — a newspaper he contributed to along with British ma…

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In the 2017 documentary, Joan Didion: The Centre Will Not Hold, Didion, the subject of the film, gives a telling response to a question from director Griffin Dunne, her nephew.

She recounts scenes she and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, witnessed after they returned to her native California in 1964 from New York, where Didion had spent eight years writing for Vogue. The couple settled in a California vastly different from the Sacramento of Didion’s childhood. They were at the epicentre of a mutinous counterculture and, according to Didion, ‘participated in the paranoia of the time’. Housed in a ropey corner of Hollywood, they hosted parties that attracted the beautiful people, but remained too disciplined themselves to indulge in the excesses that took out many of the celebrities they entertained. Each morning Didion slipped on her sunglasses, sipped an ice cold Coke for breakfast, and started writing.

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In 2023, Pulp reformed, almost a quarter of a century after they released their last album and subsequently disbanded. Now the new music is coming.

In April this year, they released ‘Spike Island’, a single which has the anthemic feel of their most famous song, ‘Common People’, from their fifth album, the Mercury Music Prize winner Different Class (1995). This week, their new album, More, arrived.

Both single and album are a return to the original Pulp sound – minus bassist Steve Mackey, who died in 2023. They are exactly what a band with an impressive back catalogue and a 61-year-old vocalist might produce in order to remain dignified, while unmistakably ancient. Cocker sings: ‘I was born to perform / It’s a calling / I еxist to do this / Shouting and pointing.’

This is the reason for the return – to entertain. To do what Cocker envisaged doing as a 15-year-old Sheffield schoolboy in 1978, when he mapped out the Pulp masterplan in a beige exercise book during an economics lesson. The vision came to fruition with the formation of Pulp. Success arrived later, after a series of false dawns, and peaked with the renowned ‘Common People’. The song was inspired by Cocker’s stint as a student at Saint Martin’s School of Art, during a sabbatical from the group at the end of the 1980s.

With this career being his calling, it was unlikely that Jarvis Cocker would disappear when Pulp disbanded, despite his ambivalent response to fame when it finally came in the mid-1990s. He has hosted radio shows, authored the memoir and Sunday Times bestseller, Good Pop, Bad Pop (2022), and released solo albums. His hair is now greying, he’s close to pensionable age. The signature spectacles remain, as does the lanky gait that contributed to his image as a gangly, quirky frontman rather than a controversial one.

The drug references in the 1995 single ‘Sorted for E’s and Wizz’, and on the accompanying sleeve, may have led to a Daily Mirror campaign to ban the single. But Cocker was no provocateur. The following year, when he jumped on stage at the Brit Awards and disrupted Michael Jackson’s performance, he garnered support from the very same Daily Mirror. The newspaper organised a ‘Justice for Jarvis’ campaign following his arrest by the police. The stunt was a prank, rather than a protest or a political statement. The attention the event attracted led to him disappearing from the public realm into the recording studio to compose the darker songs on This Is Hardcore (1998).

Ahead of the release of More, Pulp did make a stab at contemporary relevance. The band added its name to the petition defending the ‘freedom of expression’ of rappers Kneecap, after counter-terrorism officers began investigating the Irish trio when footage emerged of them shouting ‘up Hamas, up Hezbollah’ at a gig, and urging fans to kill their local MPs. The petition signing was the type of performative activism more associated with some of Cocker’s fellow musicians, a few of whom make strange bedfellows in their support for Kneecap (Paul Weller, Massive Attack, Thin Lizzy).

The politics of some of Cocker’s pop peers are as predictable as they are inevitable. Signing a petition to prevent a pro-Palestine rap group from being censored is a safe move, compared with, say, speaking up for people who have been cancelled or arrested for speaking out against Islamism or the transgender lobby. The signatories seem to imagine that Kneecap are akin to the Sex Pistols, when they are probably closer to Chumbawamba. For elder statesmen of the music industry, Kneecap’s existence reignites the ‘activism’ of their youth before the world changed but they didn’t.

Although there have been two reunion tours in the intervening years, along with the single ‘After You’ in 2013, this is the first new album from Pulp since the Scott Walker-produced We Love Life in 2001. Cocker and his bandmates are now in the twilight stage of their career, heading towards the demographic he sings about in ‘Help The Aged’ (1998): ‘One time they were just like you / Drinking, smoking cigs and sniffing glue.’

Pop music is now in its dotage and has seen it all, and seen it repeatedly. So what do the practitioners of this elderly art sing about when composing pop songs in their golden years? ‘Are there unique qualities of perception and form that artists acquire as a result of age in the late phase of their career?’, asks Edward Said in On Late Style (2006). Published after the academic and critic died aged 67, the work asks if artists acquire a new idiom in later years. ‘But what of artistic lateness not as harmony and resolution, but as intransigence, difficulty and contradiction? What if age and ill health don’t produce serenity at all?’ Said brings in Beethoven and Wagner to back up his contention. But is this equally true of pop musicians that came to prominence in their twenties? Do they develop an idiomatic late style while keeping the music going in their sixties (Paul Weller, Jarvis Cocker, Morrissey) and even their seventies (David Byrne, Neil Tennant)?

Not in the case of Pulp. Just as their sound feels like the hits of the past served up in the present, the lyrics on the forthcoming album are a return to similar territory. The titles ‘My Sex’, ‘Grown Ups’, ‘The Hymn Of The North’ could have appeared on the 1994 breakthrough album, His ’n’ Hers. Back then Cocker sang about joyriders and leisure centres, with a crude and juvenile approach to sex throughout this and the albums that followed. On ‘Acrylic Afternoons’ he sings: ‘On a pink quilted eiderdown I want to pull your knickers down / Net curtains blowing slightly in the breeze / Lemonade light filtering through the trees.’ Four years later on the single, ‘This Is Hardcore’, sex keeps its furtive, youthful allure: ‘It seems I saw you in some teenage wet dream.’ It’s all in keeping with the experience of a boy who came of age in England’s former ‘Steel City’ in the 1970s, and fits with a peculiarly British mood and sensibility.

Pulp’s return comes as those collectively classified as ‘Britpop’ back in the 1990s have also re-emerged. This pop-musical trend was part of the ‘Cool Britannia’ moment that coincided with Labour reacquainting itself with power after 18 years in the wilderness. Then prime minister Tony Blair, erstwhile guitarist and vocalist in rock band Ugly Rumours, courted the Britpoppers at Downing Street soirées.

The unholy alliance of musicians with New Labour was even less likely than that which occurred in the final decade of old Labour, following Michael Foot losing an election with a manifesto described as ‘the longest suicide note in history’. In 1985, musicians calling themselves Red Wedge, including the likes of Paul Weller, united in an attempt to take on a Tory government in its second term. The campaign galvanised student activists who discovered the punk phenomenon years after the event, and who were no doubt radicalised by a Billy Bragg B-side. With a ‘Rock Against Racism’ badge pinned to their t-shirt-coated hearts, they took to the Red Wedge tour like Bolsheviks storming the Winter Palace. In doing so, they played a small part in keeping the Conservatives in power following the 1987 election. It took another 10 years for a rebranded Labour Party to finally make it back to No10, just as Britpop was heading up the charts to No1.

In December 1996, Cocker received a telephone call from a Labour apparatchik, close to the Islington set that circled the leader. Would he publicly endorse New Labour? Not only did he agree, he also delayed the release of the song, ‘Cocaine Socialism’, because he felt it might deter voters from voting Labour and bringing it to power, such was his deluded belief in his pull and influence at that point. It was released in 1998, a year after Blair was safely home and dry in Downing Street.

Now the Labour Party has returned to power after a shorter stay in the wilderness (a mere 14 years). And the original reluctant heroes of Britpop have resurfaced. Blur emerged with a new album in 2023. Suede have been in and out of pop’s consciousness throughout this century. The announcement that Oasis were to get back together and tour this summer was hardly unexpected. Since the band split, the singalong songs from their high season have remained on the lips of fans in pubs, on stag nights and in football stands. Many a male Oasis devotee has matured into a husband and father, rather like the heavy-drinking, hard-living brothers they idolised at the time of (What’s The Story) Morning Glory?.

The bands with Brett (Suede), Damon (Blur) and Jarvis to the fore were perhaps of a different ilk, with a more alternative following. The Christian names of the men were a clue to the artiness associated with parents who were perhaps less culturally working class than those of the Gallagher brothers. Jarvis Cocker’s father deserted the family to become a DJ in Australia; his mother sent her son to school in lederhosen, and raised him on a diet of BBC programming, refusing to let her children watch ITV.

Despite coming of age in a home in which adverts and the Rovers Return were absent, Cocker’s lyrics were nonetheless inspired by the lives of those who watched commercials and Coronation Street. He invested provincial places and events, along with artefacts and disposable consumer durables, with a potency and even a poignancy. History, culture and England were here. But it was a more comical and Carry On take compared with the melancholy ache evident in the songs of, say, the Smiths; that longing for a lost England we wanted to escape at the time but embraced when it was gone. The author Olivia Laing has written that in composing songs about bus depots and corner shops, sexual fantasy and sexual failure, Cocker ‘imbued the Sheffield suburbs of Catcliffe, Ecclesall and the Wicker with the same seedy glamour as Serge Gainsbourg’s Montmartre’.

Eventually Cocker embraced the city of Gainsbourg, after marrying the French fashion stylist, Camille Bidault-Waddington. A far cry from the suburb of Intake, South Yorkshire, where he spent his formative years in Bavarian shorts. He remained in Paris after separating from Bidault-Waddington in 2009, and later raised his head above the parapet and aired his views on politics and current affairs. What stirred him was not developments that put Paris in the headlines, such as the Islamist terrorist attacks on Charlie Hebdo and the Bataclan theatre in 2015, but the result of a referendum on EU membership in Britain in 2016. ‘I was very vocally against that and still think it’s one of the most pathetic things ever, especially now’, he said in 2020. ‘There’s freedom of movement in Europe and it’s so sad that we’ve chucked that away. I’m a little bit bothered about people knowing that I’m English because it’s a bit embarrassing at the moment because of this psychotic thing we’re doing.’ The previous year he compared Brexit to having a record that failed to reach No1:

‘I’m mentioning the pop charts because I actually think they do shed some light on Brexit. And particularly on the validity of a second referendum. Because that referendum result is the equivalent to a single entering the UK Top 40 at 19.’

In these and similar interviews he failed to elaborate further on the rationale behind his stance on Brexit. Just as he failed to explain his support for pulling down statues and attending a Black Lives Matter march.

Although politics has not hitherto been dominant within Pulp’s output, class certainly has, ever since ‘Common People’ took them to the top end of the charts. The song was a response to the middle-class students Cocker met at art college, who wanted to ‘live like common people’. Much later, during an alfresco interview in Holland Park, when Cocker had left France, the reporter notes that his interviewee ‘doesn’t like the middle classes, so the Kensington mums are anathema to him’. Yet Cocker seemed to have little problem with the middle-class legions that jumped up and down on Black Lives Matter marches, pulling down statues, and dismissed those who voted to leave the European Union as ill-educated proles who didn’t have a university degree or attend an arts college.

During a speech at the NME awards in 2015, Cocker informed those assembled: ‘A long time ago, last century, we made a record and it was called Different Class. It wasn’t called working class, and it wasn’t called upper class and it wasn’t called middle class. It was called Different Class because, let’s get over that and move on to something else.’ But the middle and upper classes he once sang about have not got over it or moved on. Nor have the Labour Party people who once courted him in the 1990s or, indeed, those he recently aligned himself with in opposition to Brexit, and marched alongside on BLM protests. But they have certainly changed. They no longer want to live like common people, or sing along with the common people, because there is so much they now loathe about them. Notably, the very Brexity things.

Originally published in Spiked

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David Lynch believed that you could live in one place and have everything. This is how he remembered his early childhood in a cul-de-sac in the neighbourhood of Spokane, Washington.

The clues to the conflict that raged elsewhere, on foreign soil from the 1940s, was evident in the frequent murmur in the sky above. ‘These B52s would fly in a squadron,’ the director recalled. ‘They have a drone, and with all of them together the drones are kind of in harmony. It’s the most beautiful sound. And they’re not travelling so fast, so it takes a long time for them to travel across the sky: it’d be a summer day with drones of these giant B52s, and it’s just a beautiful, almost cosmic, dreamy mood.’ A variation on that non-musical din emerged as a motif in the soundscape of the films he wrote and directed, from Eraserhead in 1979 to his final feature, Inland Empire from 2006. A similar motif appears in the music he produced independent of his films. The…

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Gilbert and George object to the term ‘gentrification’ to describe the ongoing overhaul to the east London neighbourhood that has been their home for almost 60 years.

‘We think it’s classist and sexist, because you’d never say ladyfication. Or Jewification. Or blackification. Or Bangladeshification’, they once informed the Guardian, with their signature prankishness. ‘They’ve only got it in for white people. It’s punishing the honkies.’

The artists moved to Spitalfields, Tower Hamlets in 1968 and quickly occupied dilapidated basement rooms in a former Huguenot house on Fournier Street. More than half a century later, they remain at the same address, having bought the entire house in the 1970s. From here they adhere to the routine of work, walking and eating out, established early on, even though they are now in their 80s.

At one end of the road, ‘gentrification’ brings a Gotham City skyline to Liverpool Street; at the other, what survives from an earlier overhaul of the neighbourhood that began when Gilbert and George arrived in these parts, when ‘Bangladeshification’ succeeded the ‘Jewification’ that altered the neighbourhood from the end of the 19th century. The Brick Lane Jamme Masjid at one corner of Fournier Street was a synagogue from 1897, and originally a Huguenot chapel. Nearby Christ Church, the imposing 18th-century Anglican church designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor, is a relic from an altogether different age. A recent development in the neighbourhood that brings the past, the present and the future together in one building is the Gilbert and George Centre, which opened in 2023 and occupies a former brewery. ‘All the museums now are woke’, they stated in 2021, which is one of the reasons they are funding a venture that will survive when they’ve gone – as a testament to their history on these streets and the works the locale inspired.

The art world continues to suffer from the condition of ‘woke’. As a consequence, the institutions also suffer from low attendance figures and diminishing revenue. Despite being elderly white men, Gilbert and George have not been sidelined, censored or silenced. From October this year until June 2026, London’s Hayward Gallery will exhibit a large selection of their 21st-century pictures.

The scale of the exhibition is a testament to their persistence and relevance (although it’s dwarfed by their major retrospective at Tate Modern in 2007). A recent Times Literary Supplement review of James Birch’s Gilbert and George and the Communists (2025), in which the author relays his experience of accompanying the artists to Russia and China in the 1990s, suggests Gilbert and George have been contemporary ‘for longer than almost anyone else’. It was at the Hayward Gallery in 1972 that they came to prominence, as part of The New Art show. They were as at odds with those who exhibited alongside them as they were with their fellow students at St Martin’s School of Art, where they met in 1967. They were opposed to the conceptualism that was in vogue. They wore suits. They insisted on good manners. ‘Two clean boys’, according to Gilbert, ‘with funny ideas behind the scenes’. They were, and remain, patriots, royalists and conservatives, while being pro-sexual-freedom and anti-religion. They often dismiss other artists as meaningless, and accuse them of not asking questions. ‘We are quite disillusioned with that kind of art ourselves. We want an art that is in your face’, Gilbert said in 2017. ‘We are confrontational.’ As other artists classified themselves as radicals railing against the establishment (which, incidentally, often funded them), Gilbert and George produced work that disturbed those on both the left and the right. ‘We want our art to bring out the bigot from inside the liberal and conversely bring out the liberal from inside the bigot’, they said in 2023.

The poster for the 1972 Hayward Gallery show features them in their staple tweedy suits, emerging from or disappearing into bushy foliage. It could almost be a double LP cover for the time. The work exhibited (‘The Shrubberies’) was a development on The General Jungle pictures that preceded it: floor-to-ceiling charcoal drawings in which the two men are solitary figures in nature’s wilderness. They described themselves as country boys, with George (Passmore) hailing from Devon, England and Gilbert (Proesch) a native of the mountainous Dolomites in northern Italy. It wasn’t until they embraced photography that they became urban artists, simultaneously creating the grid format to frame their montages that they use today. Their photographic works from the early 1970s capture them drunk at a Bethnal Green wine bar, or within the sterility of their home with its panelled walls and bare floorboards. The most enduring pictures focus on the everyday subjects that other artists discarded, whether it was the working-class locals, graffiti, headlines on newspaper stands and sex cards in phone boxes.

Collectively, their work provides a unique social document covering the changing nature of the East End – and London – that’s been described as subversive, shocking, tragic and comic. A common thread running through the work is those ancient East End streets the two young men navigated as odd interlopers, and now wander like disembodied figures or ghosts, forever indifferent to the changes they’ve been privy to for more than half a century.

When they moved there in 1968, swinging London was a rumour rather than a reality on these streets, but change was imminent. That other infamous local double act, the Kray twins, were sentenced to lengthy prison terms that year. A budding entrepreneur established the short-lived retail unit, ‘Cockneyland’, to transform the remnants of the urban, white working-class caricature associated with the area into a tourist attraction, with merchandise to match. The BBC returned East End natives, actress Georgia Brown and composer Lionel Bart, to their Jewish East End roots, in the midst of a modern diaspora, to address the question: ‘Who Are the Cockneys Now?’ It was also the year of Enoch Powell’s infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech.

The past was being demolished, but the future appeared to have failed before it got off the ground. The new east London tower block, Ronan Point, a glimpse of the housing of tomorrow, was blown apart by a gas explosion, which killed four residents. Still, the slum tenements survived from the Victorian era, which journalists and social anthropologists had reported on a century earlier, as authors Arthur Morrison and Jack London transposed their East End experience into novels that were heavy on Grand Guignol-style horror and gore, and light on the humanity of the inhabitants. These transient missionaries exposed the horrors; the local press overlooked them. As London wrote in The People of the Abyss(1903): ‘Late last night I walked along Commercial Street from Spitalfields to Whitechapel… And as I walked I smiled at the East End papers, which, filled with civic pride, boastfully proclaim that there is nothing the matter with the East End as a living place for men and women.’ A similar approach is relevant now, when the mainstream media report on the East End, and London generally, by rolling out the official mantra on multiculturalism. Purposely ignoring divisions that debunk the myth and worsen the reality, the more this defunct fantasy is perpetuated.

Shortly after their arrival in the East End in 1968, Gilbert and George embarked on their ‘Art For All’ vision. Perched on a table beneath a nearby railway viaduct surrounded by bomb sites, they performed ‘Underneath the Arches’, the song associated with local boy-made-good Bud Flanagan, who died that year. Bemused locals gathered like the small congregational groups that once surrounded preachers, salvationists and socialist orators on those streets, rather than two men in suits with painted silver faces. ‘The Singing Sculpture’ (1969), as the piece was entitled, propelled them into galleries in Europe and New York, making them the exhibit, a move that is central to their art. Recalling those early years, Gilbert has said: ‘This whole idea of making ourselves the centre of our art and trying to leave something behind, that was totally unusual.’

Despite the localised detail, the work has been shown in galleries throughout the globe, throughout the years, with Gilbert and George maintaining they are not indigenously London artists. The London natives among us, familiar with similar streets, along with many of those the couple have walked along, tend to disagree. The territory they document is unique because no other working-class area in east London, or south-east London, had been subjected to the successive waves of immigration, until now. The streets and buildings the artists photographed convey a mood and evoke memories for those whose history and ancestry is in these streets.

Arguably, Gilbert and George are in keeping with that tradition of writers and sociologists from the 19th century who delved into these netherworlds, except they only moved to the East End because they were ‘poor’ and remained because it was ‘romantic’. The duo observed, but rarely commented on, all they were witness to. This annoyed some critics, who accused them of exploitation and voyeurism – and, all too predictably, ‘racism’ and ‘fascism’.

If it’s true that they’ve been contemporary longer than anyone else, it’s perhaps because they held their nerve, and were always ahead of the curve. The culture has caught up with them, and as a consequence they are now attributed national-treasure status. A position that diminishes the impact of the work in the context of the time it was produced.

Some of us arrived at Gilbert and George through pop and fashion, rather than art. We were aware of these men in suits when, back in 1977, they were figures sometimes found at London punk clubs, gay clubs and the Blitz in Holborn, which soon attracted the theatrical new romantic crowd. The couple’s sartorial style pulled us towards art galleries; their work, which moved from monochrome to the vivid palette associated with Mondrian, Disney and stained glass, kept us returning. According to George: ‘When most people see our pictures they think the images are talking about themselves rather than us. They see their own lives in relation to the pictures.’ It was The Dirty Words Pictures (1977) that drew some of us in, with content and titles taken from local graffiti (‘Paki’, ‘Queer’, ‘Cunt’, ‘Scum’). Some of these insults were levelled at Gilbert and George by local natives when they first became Spitalfields residents (‘faggots’, ‘poofs’). Those of us who experienced similar during our formative years remember the culprits as boys we didn’t want to be. Boys we sometimes wanted, but never wanted to become.

Similar figures featured in works of Gilbert and George, who were criticised for essentially elevating these working-class subjects above their social class. Using a line-up of local young men in ‘Patriots’ (1980) led to charges of ‘racism’ from critics who failed to notice a Bangladeshi boy among them. The young white men in ‘Four Knights’ (1980) caused consternation. One particular gallery, exhibiting the picture years later, stated: ‘Its meaning is ambiguous, perhaps contrasting the alienation of modern youth with the heroes of medieval chivalry, but the reason for Gilbert and George’s interest is unclear, should these young men be admired or feared?’

Before national-treasure status beckoned and blurred the controversies of earlier years, those who embrace a cosmetic radicalism and controversy in the arts found Gilbert and George impossible to categorise. They were an antidote to the leftist outlook artists conformed to; they resisted being courted by the gay lobby. It was only when they targeted religion, and particularly Christianity, that liberal critics could truly let out a sigh of relief and comfortably shower them with praise. But perhaps Gilbert and George’s take on Christianity isn’t as simplistic as the views of the critics who welcomed it. Between the back yard of their house on Fournier Street and the studio it connects to, where they produce their pictures, there is an ancient stone fountain inscribed with a quote attributed to Jesus in the book of John: ‘If any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink.’

In 2006, The Sonofagod Pictures were accompanied by the question, ‘Is Jesus heterosexual?’. No such statement was issued about the Prophet Muhammad in the series, but Gilbert and George have perhaps gone further than most successful artists when using imagery associated with Islam, which has become so prevalent in the East End and beyond. ‘Islam’ from London Pictures (2011) features the disembodied faces of Gilbert and George beneath authentic newspaper headlines (‘London “Islam” school teaches hate’; ‘Islam “insult” Briton faces lash’).

‘Maybe 10 years ago, all non-Muslim houses in the street were kicked in’, George revealed in a 2017 interview. ‘They used to say, “Fuck off out of this, this is a holy place”.’ This is part of a wider local trend that picked up momentum in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, and according to Gilbert and George, when the imams moved into the East End. There were, and remain, attempts to make the neighbourhood a ‘no gay’ zone, with even a ‘Muslim patrol’ confronting gay men, anyone with alcohol, and women in vest tops and short skirts. In 2011, a 21-year-old artist friend of theirs, and another St Martin’s alumni, was set upon by a gang in a ‘homophobic’ attack that left him paralysed and confined to a wheelchair. The LGBT activist, Peter Tatchell, organised a march to address this issue. He wrote: ‘Earlier this year, stickers were plastered around East London declaring it a “Gay Free Zone”, warning that Allah’s punishment for homosexuality is severe.’

Art critic Jonathan Jones, who has written at length on Gilbert and George throughout the latter part of their career, maintains that their most truthful works are made when they are drawn to darker subjects. The Dirty Words Pictures were offensive and controversial to those on the left, while The Fundamental Pictures (1996), with titles such as ‘Spunk’ and ‘Piss’, were obscene to the more conservative art aficionado. The Naked Shit Pictures (1995) were comic to some, because two middle-aged male artists, famously forever in tweed suits, were suddenly naked with flaccid penises, parted arses, testicles heading towards the knees, and white y-fronts at ankle level.

But it’s perhaps the later works, particularly London Pictures (2011) and similar, that provide the most truthful account of what London has become – the modern Grand Guignol that has echoes as dark as that discovered by social anthropologists in the Victorian past. It is these that will be remembered as prescient, troubling and tragic.

Originally published in Spiked.

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It’s more than two years since the death of Queen Elizabeth II at her beloved Balmoral Castle, and, in May, it will be two years on from the coronation of her first son, Charles.

The period of mourning that engulfed the House of Windsor has passed. The honeymoon period for the new monarch has come to an end. So, what kind of king is Charles at this juncture? It has been neither an easy run nor an easy reign for him thus far. There were the cancer diagnoses that threatened to take him out along with the Princess of Wales, and the domestic dramas that threatened the stature of the monarchy. Prince Andrew has become akin to a tumour the royals are keen to remove, or relegate to a frugal exile at Frogmore Cottage, in the grounds of Windsor Castle. (His links to sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein continue to haunt him.) Meanwhile, the manoeuvres of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have become less malignant, and may soon be in remission.

For some of us, the mona…

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‘I ain’t no regular singer’, declares Beyoncé on Cowboy Carter, her critically acclaimed country-and-western album, released earlier this year. ‘Now come get everythin’ you came for.’

On Christmas Day, she will perform tracks from the album during halftime of the National Football League game between her hometown team, Houston Texans, and the Baltimore Ravens. It will be broadcast live on Netflix and available to the streaming service’s 280 million subscribers.

Those tuning in for Beyoncé’s half-time show will get a better deal than those fans who showed up to the Democrats’ rally in her native Texas in October, to watch her endorse Kamala Harris for the presidency. They got nothin’ of what they came for. They were short-changed by a brief speech in which Beyoncé (largely) mouthed the platitudes found on the lips of Oprah Winfrey and Michelle Obama throughout Harris’s campaign.

Beyoncé was far from the only superstar to throw her weight behi…

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