‘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 …

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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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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 within the memo led to the resignations of director-general Tim Davie and BBC News chief Deborah Turness.

Indeed, the partisan outlook of the BBC was already the stuff of legend, long before Marr finally felt the need to liberate himself from its alleged impartiality rules – something he himself noted as far back as 2006: ‘The BBC is not impartial or neutral. It has a liberal bias not so much a party-political bias.’

Representing a type of media man and a particular worldview, Marr is worth looking at in a bit of detail. He captures the fate of an archetype – that of an ageing left-ish journalist, clinging to a media establishment and an elite worldview that are both now crumbling.

Marr spent 16 years of his BBC tenure fronting BBC One’s Sunday morning politics show, The Andrew Marr Show. His take on journalism is covered in his 2004 book, My Trade, shortlisted for the Orwell Prize the following year. (I finished first with The Likes Of Us – if memory serves, Marr attributed my win to the meritocracy of Blair’s Britain in his Telegraph column the following day.) He believes that journalism is ‘nine-tenths being in the right places at the right time’. At the BBC it was helped by moving in the right circles while holding the right views. Coming from an upper-middle-class background, complete with a private-school education, a degree from Cambridge and the obligatory leftist politics, Marr was ideal BBC fodder. Although he describes himself as ‘slightly to the left’, he was nicknamed ‘Red Andy’ during his student years. In this he was not alone.

The ailing mainstream media is littered with similar middle-class men in late middle age, who were once left-wing students of a similar standing and background, but who softened in their politics or suppressed their voices, because their ambition to be columnists or anchormen was greater. As they drift towards their dotage, they appear to have been boosted by a renewed verve that’s ignited the revolutionary zeal of their agitprop years. Much of this is relayed in their social-media accounts: I’m free to speak my mind. These days they continue to sign in as radicals, railing against the ‘nationalists’ and ‘Brexiteers’ who challenge their views and status. Despite their radical posturing, the relic from the past they cling to, the institution that summons the reactionary within them, is the BBC.

Alongside Marr in this camp, there’s journalist and sometime BBC broadcaster David Aaronovitch, and former BBC Newsnight economics editor Paul Mason, who according to some has regressed to the role of a student revolutionary. They have minor differences on political points, but they are united when outsiders criticise Auntie Beeb. They’re backed up by fellow travellers in the same trade, such as Will Hutton, John Simpson and Adam Boulton. The latter believes that the right-leaning GB News should be shut down as it affects the ‘delicate ecology’ of British broadcasting.

They are all, in their different ways, opposed to the populist revolt that has gripped Britain since Brexit in 2016. Mason implied recently that the Union flag-flying ‘Unite the Kingdom’ march in September recalled the rise of Nazism during the 1930s. ‘Paul Mason is running out of insults for the ordinary working man and woman who refuse to pander to his obsequious endorsement of the criminal uselessness of the Labour Party’, wrote Austin Williams, co-editor of The Future of Community, in response. David Aaronovitch re-posted Williams’s tweet on X, commenting: ‘an architecture critic writes’. The implication being Williams was not a journalist with the calibre and BBC pedigree of Mason. Or of Aaronovitch himself, a former president of the National Union of Students, who once appeared on University Challenge, where his team made the radical move of answering every question wrongly with the name of a revolutionary: Trotsky… Lenin… Che…

Aaronovitch is the Hampstead-born, middle-class child of well-connected communists, while Mason stems from humble northern origins, although he’s now arguably more vocal in expressing his contempt for the white working class – a demographic he previously dismissed as a conceit. ‘To me, “white working class” is like the word “coolie” – created by imperialists to impose an identity on the people they wanted to rule’, Mason informed the Idler magazine in 2019. ‘Michael Collins started using the term in the early 2000s with The Likes of Us’, he said, referencing myself, ‘and what he describes is real: the antipathy towards modernity and the white flight from the inner city to places like Essex. But it is driven by a disappointment and nostalgia for the many good parts of that world that have gone.’

If the term was created by anyone, it was created by a left-leaning cultural elite that controls the narrative on race, faith and class. Created, that is, by those who paradoxically claim that the white working class doesn’t exist while casting it as the fall guy. Marr at least reflected on this constituency’s concerns in his book, A History of Modern Britain (2007), be it grudgingly: ‘The majority of British people did not want the arrival of large numbers of blacks and Asians, just as they did not want an end to capital punishment, or deep British involvement in the European Union, or many of the other things the political elite has opted for.’ David Aaronovitch at least concedes that self-righteousness is a shortcoming of the middle-class left, as he notes in a 2017 piece about Corbynistas: ‘When you add the sense of entitlement that is characteristic of so many of the younger middle-class people in Britain, you can end up with an impatience with compromise coupled to a belief that anything that is strongly felt must somehow be enacted.’

Writers such as Marr, Mason and Aaronovitch were once left-wing student activists, highlighting the plight of the proletariat. That was before the working classes failed to fit the image they and the rest of the middle-class left had imposed on them. Now these pundits harbour a contempt for those within this demographic, whatever their ethnicity, who express the wrong views on mass immigration, asylum hotels, the EU and the BBC. Reflecting on the Unite the Kingdom march in September, Marr wrote:

‘The much-photographed crowds waving St George’s and Union flags are statistically tiny compared with the wider electorate who are quietly watching. And yet a single misstep, a death, a fire, could change the mood. The same “small crowd” point is true of the periodic public displays by Islamists.’

Diminishing the numbers of disaffected Britons, along with the crimes committed by Islamist extremists is at least an improvement on castigating the former as racists, and the latter as victims. Even middle-class, left-wing broadsheet journalists and BBC loyalists are starting to acknowledge that members of the ‘correct’ identity groups sometimes do bad things.

Still, a contempt persists for the current breed of working-class protester, accompanied by an abhorrence for citizen journalists, online news media and podcasters addressing the issues that have forced them on to the streets.

‘The business of funding digging journalists is important to encourage’, Andrew Marr informed the Independent in 2008. ‘It cannot be replaced by bloggers who don’t have access to politicians, who don’t have easy access to official documents, who aren’t able to buttonhole people in power.’ At the Cheltenham Literary Festival two years later, he was dismissing these online upstarts as ‘socially inadequate, pimpled, single, slightly seedy, bald, cauliflower-nosed young men sitting in their mother’s basements and ranting. They are very angry people.’ And there’s more: ‘So-called citizen journalism is the spewings and rantings of very drunk people late at night.’

But the media world is changing. In the US, major networks are looking to online media for a lead as ratings for legacy media decline. CBS has enlisted Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News, a few short years after she was bullied out of the New York Times before she slowly built up a multi-million dollar online empire with the Free Press.

Some BBC stalwarts have, like Marr, perhaps seen where things are heading, and jumped ship to be free to express their old ideas on new media. Emily Maitlis and John Sopel created the News Agents podcast for this purpose. Oxbridge-educated Maitlis now doubles down on the smug but deluded sense of class-based superiority that has become her stock-in-trade. Never has she seemed more out of place as when she deigned to take her podcast to Clacton on the eve of the General Election last year. Nigel Farage is now Clacton’s MP.

Andrew Marr, meanwhile, prides himself on being able to take on people from all walks of life. An editor-at-large of the New Statesman, he’s now at LBC, stablemate of another fellow traveller and former BBC panjandrum, James O’Brien. ‘Verbally, I’m quite fast on my feet’, Marr informed us in 2017. ‘I could embarrass or anger most people if I wanted to.’ He attempted this on his LBC show Tonight with Andrew Marr in March last year, while interviewing John Lydon, the former Sex Pistol, whose championing of anarchy in the UK would have appealed to ‘Red Andy’ throughout his agitprop years in the age of punk. The former Johnny Rotten railed against mass immigration, illegal or otherwise, and the impact on the urban working-class stock that made him. Marr was thinking on his feet, ready to embarrass and anger this former Sex Pistol, by reminding Lydon his parents were Irish immigrants. His interviewee subsequently schooled Marr on the difference between being Irish in England, sharing the same culture and values, and being a migrant opposed to integrating with the citizens of the country that takes you in.

A further example of Marr thinking on his feet was evident on his return to the BBC as a panellist on Question Time, following the election of the Labour government in 2024. He was free from the self-censorship he imposed on himself when working for the BBC, and indeed in the company of friends, and even in the company of family at the Primrose Hill home he shares with his wife, former Guardian journalist Jackie Ashley. ‘For the first time in many of our lives’, he sighed, as the select BBC audience nodded sympathetically, ‘Britain looks like a little haven of peace and stability’.

One year later, the serenity Marr detected is less apparent. Yet it’s not the failures of the current administration that concern him, but those who dare to highlight these failures beyond the confines of mainstream media and regime journalism. Marr accuses social media of ‘selling ringside seats for a carnival of hatred, designed to tear us all apart’, while acknowledging that migration is changing the country at ‘a scale and velocity we’ve never seen before’. This implies he believes the ‘Pink Ladies’ protesters outside asylum hotels might have a point. ‘There are many decent people among the protesters, just as there are inside the migrant hotels’, he wrote recently in the New Statesman. ‘Though [the protests] are spectacles, and fuel for social-media polemic.’

There it is again, the predictable, safe response that’s almost an attempt at impartiality. Marr, like many other ageing upper-middle-class media types, overlooks the ordinary women and men who dominate these protests, who don’t have the luxury of assuming that illegal male immigrants arriving on their streets are all decent people. What concerns them are the knife attacks that don’t have an impact on media pundits holed up in Primrose Hill, and the sexual assaults that don’t affect their Guardian wives. These protesters have never before been forced to take to the streets to have their voices heard. They don’t have that middle-class sense of entitlement that David Aaronovitch alluded to when writing that ‘anything that is strongly felt must somehow be enacted’.

Following last week’s proposals from home secretary Shabana Mahmood to tackle the immigration crisis, Marr delivered a rant on his LBC show, that concluded:

‘Let’s be real. This today, is a massive victory for all of those who waved English, Scottish and British flags outside asylum hotels. And for the politicians and broadcasters, who cheered them on. And all of those around the country who said to pollsters they were going to vote Reform. The so-called Overton window, if you like, of the acceptable, has well and truly shifted.’

This is not the view of a journalist who thinks on his feet, but the rhetoric of a middle-class man who’s dragged the political posturing of his student years into late middle age, like other former Red Andys of his era who campaigned for the world to change. Well, it did change, but they didn’t. They offer no new solutions to these problems, preferring instead to shower tired slurs and insults on those that need solutions, because they live with the problems.

It’s not the protesters outside asylum hotels who are clinging to the past, it’s the likes of Marr, Aaronovitch and those fellow travellers in the same trade, loyal to the memory of a BBC that is no more, and a wider legacy media that is crumbling around them.

Originally published in Spiked

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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.

At least that’s how it strikes those of us now in our sixties, who have aged with him. As dispassionate observers, we have watched him achieve ‘national treasure’ status, an honour bestowed on such disparate figures as Joanna Lumley and the Windrush generation, by those who decide such things. To them, Fry is as much an institution as the literary giants and characters that formed him: Oscar Wilde, Evelyn Waugh, Agatha Christie, Sherlock Holmes and PG Wodehouse. Of the latter, Fry wrote, ‘in my teenage years, his writings awoke me to the possibilities of language’.

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 current monarch longer than his tenure as a national treasure. In the 1990s, a joke did the rounds at the BBC: Stephen Fry’s head is so far up Prince Charles’s arse he can see Jonathan Dimbleby’s shoes.

The king and Fry are similar: learned, erudite men to some, yet superior, even arrogant, to others. ‘You have to have arrogance as a comedian in the same way you do as a writer’, Fry said earlier this year. ‘One of the primary arrogances of any writer is to assume that their experience is general and worth sharing.’ In the decades since he came to prominence as Wodehouse’s Jeeves with Hugh Laurie, his comedy partner from Cambridge Footlights days, as Bertie Wooster, there have been many experiences he deemed worthy of sharing on page and screen.

So we know him, and we know so much about him: his teenage kleptomania that led to a stint in prison, his manic depression, his erudition, his celibacy, his homosexuality, his marriage to a spouse 30 years younger who, to us dispassionate observers, could have been his son from a previous marriage. Oscar Wilde, who he portrayed on film in 1997, alerted him to his sexuality during his formative years – ‘his nature was the same as mine’, Fry later reflected. It’s Wilde with whom he’s been compared by those who decide on our national treasures and knighthoods. A comparison Fry rightly dismissed in an interview with the New York Times: ‘To combine Wilde’s insight, acuity, kindness, breadth of reading, wisdom, human folly and divine talent is asking too much of anyone in our culture.’

We know him. Even those of us with no desire to read Stephen Fry’s six novels, 10 works of non-fiction and three autobiographies, or tune in to the abundant BBC projects that helped him amass his millions. This is more from disinterest than dislike. There were other performers that struck us as funnier than Fry and those of a similar pedigree, who came to prominence with the generation of ‘alternative’ comedians who rode a wave in the 1980s.

Speaking of those with a similar pedigree, French and Saunders were provincial middle-class trainee teachers in the right place at the right time, who built a career on camp parody that tickled gay execs in the BBC’s comedy department. Despite the mockney inflection, Ben Elton was the well-connected nephew of historian Sir Geoffrey Elton. As a stand-up comedian he was locked in his own state of arrested development – the hectoring student clinging to the causes and the catchphrases that saw him through his twenties, even though he too is now in his sixties, and old.

It was class that separated this new breed of comedy act and the purveyors of the outmoded humour they replaced. Those of us reared on ITV in the 1970s remember Benny Hill in the background as our mothers flicked through Avon brochures and our fathers licked Green Shield stamps. On weekends, from Granada’s fictional Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club, Bernard Manning’s blue jokes sent us off to bed on a Saturday night. As a puerile, passive viewer, I felt little affection for the northern comics and the saucy slapstick then popular, but none at all for the student politics and RAG-week-style routines that were seeing the old guard off.

The working-class comedians who commandeered light entertainment at the time had honed their craft at northern social and working men’s clubs. The emerging generation of comics were graduates who rose rapidly from London’s Comedy Store or Cambridge Footlights to front series for the BBC and a nascent Channel 4, where their peers at university had taken up roles as producers and commissioning editors. Despite the ‘alternative’ tag, they were very much a product of the establishment. This was particularly true of Stephen Fry and Emma Thompson – the latter undoubtedly being the most entitled of this new order, with her mother an actress, her father a BBC veteran (he adapted and narrated The Magic Roundabout), and the obligatory high-end Hampstead upbringing before Cambridge called.

Fry and Thompson are inextricably linked by elite schools, Hampstead (Fry’s place of birth, too), Cambridge, the BBC and an affiliation with the man who would be king. Now Fry is a Sir, Thompson is a Dame and the views they proffer on issues of the day have become more noteworthy than the work they produce.

This is true of their fellow travellers from that distant age who, in any other industry, would be retired and receiving their pension. Dawn French can be found giving her take on Hamas and Israel on Instagram. Jennifer Saunders will be airing her views on Nigel Farage and Reform UK on Channel 4’s Gogglebox.

In a slow week for Armageddon earlier this summer, Dame Emma Thompson took a break from climate-change activism to suggest that sex should be available on the NHS. She even adopted that fretful Lady Bountiful look that’s as evident in her roles as Forster’s Margaret Schlegel, Austen’s Elinor Dashwood, as it was when acting in a Marks & Spencer ad alongside Doreen Lawrence. At roughly the same time, Stephen Fry accused JK Rowling of being radicalised by ‘TERFs’ for challenging the motives of the transgender lobby.

His use of the ugly ‘TERF’ was an odd choice for one so enthralled by the beauty of the English language (he examined etymology in the BBC series, Fry’s Planet Word in 2011). I guess it’s in keeping with the fluffy phrases he falls back on during chat-show interviews, when referring to sex or genitalia.

Like the BBC, Rowling helped Sir Stephen top up his millions. He narrates the Harry Potter audiobooks and previously commended her on her Potter fable, as it taps into the stories and ancient myths that captivated him as a child. Fry has written about these in Mythos (2017) and in several books since, the most recent being Odyssey (2024). He maintains that by understanding ancient myths, we appreciate the eternal truths central to human behaviour. ‘Morals are not eternal verities’, he says. ‘They are what we think of as right now.’ This could explain his reaction to critics of transgenderism, hinting that they are simply following contemporary conventions and morals. But surely biological sex is an eternal verity and gender identity isn’t?

The ancient past and near future are each an obsession for Fry. He was early to the World Wide Web, and first among his friends to embrace email. He jettisoned Twitter after Elon Musk took the helm and transformed it into X. While Fry is a vocal champion of free speech, it’s a courtesy he doesn’t extend to everyone. As he put it in an interview last year, social media are responsible for ‘all kinds of beastly and horrific things that coloured this utopian dream of an internet connecting people and gave it nothing but horror and despair’.

But beyond the trolls and the conspiracy theorists, it provides a platform for the voices of a marginalised majority who interpret major events differently from the establishment Fry is loyal to: the BBC, the monarchy, the Labour Party. For the latter’s leaders, from Neil Kinnock to Gordon Brown, he wrote speeches. These institutions belittle or ignore the issues central to the lives of a disgruntled public heading towards the Howard Beale moment in Network: ‘I’m mad as hell, and I’m not taking it any more.’ And who knows, something like a revolution will not be televised, but it might be forged on social media and on the streets of London and Essex.

The English language Stephen Fry loves is being doctored. The illegal immigration that is proving catastrophic is now ‘irregular immigration’. Those murdered by Islamists have ‘lost their lives’. The ideology behind the murders is secondary to the need for our multi-faith community to heal, and not be divided by hate. Seldom has this been more offensive and overt than with the feeble commemorative notices marking the 20th anniversary of the London bombings in 2005 this July, from the prime minister, the king and the London mayor. The language we use, and which Fry gestured towards with his attack on Rowling, is also under threat with Labour’s planned ‘banter ban’, intended for pubs and offices, as well as its proposed Islamophobia definition, which aims to silence criticism of Islam.

‘I am a lover of truth’, Fry tells us, ‘a worshipper of freedom, a celebrant at the altar of language and purity and tolerance’. Yet, we have heard little of his reaction to these developments, despite his willingness to speak out on other issues of the day.

He did provide Jordan Peterson with some brilliant back up at Toronto’s Munk Debate in 2018, when they argued against ‘political correctness’ – a term that doesn’t sufficiently sum up the moronic mindset it addresses, and the lethal moment it has led us to. When Fry takes time away from the past and the future to comment on the present, is it an attempt at relevance or simply part of the performance, part of the public persona that will persist even if the projects dry up? ‘I am always for an audience’, Fry said not so long ago. ‘Every time I write a phrase – even when I’m speaking now, I’m thinking of people at home listening… I’m so aware of it.’

To his audience he, like the current king, remains a quaint character from another age – the crusty don, the confirmed bachelor, or the eccentric uncle, funny to some, unfunny to others. Fry maintains, modestly, that he has never had the capacity to be an intellectual or an academic. When The Times described him as an ‘avuncular public intellectual’ in 2021, he responded with: ‘Oh my lordy lord. Avuncular gives me great pleasure. But I disavow “intellectual”, just as I disavow “artist”. I am, I think, an entertainer, impure and simple.’

This has enabled him to write, act, and front series and documentaries on travel (Stephen Fry In America), depression (Stephen Fry: The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive), homosexuality (Stephen Fry: Out There) and maybe one day Stephen Fry on ‘hats’, a project that has been a work-in-progress for a while, and an ambition for longer. Whatever the whim, a prominent publisher or our public broadcaster will be willing to finance it as a book, radio series or television programme. He has, in marketing speak, ‘reach’. Before Fry made his excuses and left Twitter, he had 13million followers.

He had flounced off Twitter on several occasions because he was frequently criticised and challenged by the public. But it was that pesky democracy that irked him over Brexit. In 2023, he referred to it as ‘a clown car crash and you can’t help being amused by it’. Prior to the EU referendum, Emma Thompson said we should be opening borders rather than closing them, an issue that concerned her as much as the prospect of Tesco Metro opening in her Hampstead village, which, naturally, she campaigned against. Thompson informed us that Britain was ‘a cake-filled, misery-laden, grey old island’, as she bought a home in Venice. Yet like Fry, she is a product and a champion of a certain type of England, one in which the BBC, Oxbridge and – despite her paternalistic, leftish leanings – the monarchy holds sway. Such an England appealed to the young Stephen Fry when he was a proud old school, one nation Tory, attending Conservative fêtes and whist drives. This was before the wind changed – ‘The wind’s name was Margaret Thatcher’, he says. After Thatcher, supporting the Labour Party became obligatory, expedient and a career move for the comic performers of Fry’s generation.

Class is therefore central to the England that appeals to Sir Stephen and Dame Emma. One far more immersed in nostalgia than the Britain of Brexit supporters, who are responding to very contemporary challenges. For many Leave voters, England has become ‘misery-laden’ because of the migration crisis, among other things. For many natives it remains the only home they have known, and the only home they may ever know. Which is why they are angry at those intent on destroying it, and their relation to it.

A home in Albion’s pastoral idyll features in the fantasy that Fry has often allowed himself, when musing on the life he might have led in a house, a very big house in the country – ‘not necessarily a grand house, certainly not Downton Abbey or anything, but enough to have hens who laid eggs and that every year I would make pickles and jams and that my only career would be a writer’. It’s the society he longed to join when he first encountered the worlds Evelyn Waugh and PG Wodehouse were writing about. Fry never became the lord of the manor, but having arrived at the age he was always meant to be, two years away from 70, consolation has come by way of a knighthood. An honour that wasn’t conferred on Wodehouse until the month before his death, aged 93, and one that Waugh expected but never received.

In that, at least, Fry has surpassed his heroes.

Originally published in Spiked.

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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 inhabitants from the past - Lord Byron among them - could stir the Albany. Aristocrats, historians, writers, actors and several prime ministers have occupied its ‘sets’, as the apartments are known. The day the Beatles played Edward Heath - he became the British premier the following year - was a resident. In his novel 'The Bachelor of the Albany’ (1848), Marmion Wilard Savage reveals that it’s' the retreat of superannuated fops, the hospital for incurable oddities’. In recent years the designer Christopher Gibbs, a long-standing resident, gave the New York Times a thumbnail sketch of life on the inside. He cast it as a monastery in which the customary Trinity has been replaced by 'secular devotions of exacting taste, the pleasures of life and a romantic nostalgia for England’s past’.

The current cost of a ‘set’ begins in the early millions; weekly rental in the early thousands. The interiors lack the opulent staples of new residences nearby, and the ‘penthouse perfection’ former resident Bryan Ferry sang about on ‘In Every Dream Home a Heartache’. The forthcoming The Clarges development, along with The Mellier on Albemarle Street have increased the desirability of 'southern Mayfair’, as Piccadilly is now referred to. But the exclusivity of the Albany is synonymous with class, pedigree, and old money in a rarefied world. One in which insiders never mention money, or discuss the Albany, because it would be bad form. And believe me, I’ve asked.

It begins with the definite article. Purists omit the definite article as the early settlers did at Albany. Was this where I went wrong? Tucking it in the emails and letters to past and present residents in an effort to gain access. 'Albany, and virtually all its residents, place great weight on shying away from any form of publicity', was the prompt response from the committee secretary Commander Wellesley-Harding, 'and whilst the odd snippet emerges from time to time from a resident who doesn't quite see things that way, I cannot as a 'hired hand' breach the policy’.

I’d written and presented documentaries on housing for BBC 4. One on the history of council housing (The Great Estate) and the other on the suburbs (Everyday Eden). I’d covered the working class and rising, the final piece of the triptych was the upper classes and the Albany, well - perfect. Its story has stayed with me for an age, as the building came to represent both that Masonic-like world of an establishment elite defined by public schools, Oxbridge and the aristocracy, and the refuge of the donnish bachelor that devotes himself to the life of the mind. If there was once glamour in the Albany I suspected it had now succumbed to a jaded elegance. I think it was Peter York who told me the Albany was a kind of ‘Westenders’. A toff Trumpton. The view chimes with the idyllic tableaux offered by Christoper Gibbs: ‘old-timers sitting in the little ivy-lined garden, sunning themselves by the little bronze statue of Antinous'. I mailed Gibbs at his antique emporium in Pimlico. He wasn’t talking. He’d said enough. Maybe too much: 'Residents who are deemed indiscreet risk a ritual scourging by the trustees. So ingrained is the sense of decorum that even to utter a friendly hello to a neighbour as we pass on the stone stairs or the covered outdoor canopy, might be violating a taboo'.

I spotted the Albany as a teenager in the 1970s, passing through Savile Row, pausing to decipher the graffiti coating the door to The Beatles HQ. Then later traipsing this stretch while training to be a tailor. The Albany often came up. The gold letters of its name fading in the sun on Vigo Street: the password to England’s romantic past, and to an elitist English present that the rest of us would never gain entry. It was a similar experience for the actor Terence Stamp, before Billy Budd propelled him into the national consciousness in 1962. In his autobiography Double Feature, he recalls telling the interior designer Christopher Bennison: ‘I saw this place when I was a messenger boy. Had a feeling about it….don’t actually know what it is, often comes to mind though. It’s called the Albany…For years I had fantasies about entering the place’. Bennison was friends with the art historian John Richardson who had a set on the Rope Walk. Stamp went for tea (Dundee cake from Fortnum & Mason, which Richardson referred to as the local ‘tuck shop’). Within weeks a neighbour headed to New York to work at Sotheby’s and the actor took over the apartment. When Richardson moved to New York, Bryan Ferry moved into his chambers. The humble origins of Stamp and Ferry make them rarities in the history of the Albany. Something that may soon change.

One afternoon last Autumn I was at the tailor Huntsman on Savile Row, researching an essay. Established in 1849 it remains upper echelon English. The heads of pursed-lipped stags punctuate the walls in its showroom. Suspended from the rafters the patterns cut for esteemed figures from antiquity. Yet it’s owned by a Belgian hedge fund manager. While Hardy Amies, Kilgour, Gieves & Hawkes have been colonised by the empire building of Chinese billionaires. Was the Albany about to surrender to the ch-ching, ch-ching of new money from super rich foreigners? ( Swiss bankers and new york art dealers are rumoured to have entered the premises in the last decade). They will have a battle on their hands. More than half of the Sets are owned by Peterhouse college at Cambridge university. These were bequeathed by one of the Albany’s longest serving residents, William Stone (he died in 1958 at 101).

'We have a list of purchasers specifically looking to purchase in Albany’, says Jenna Buck at Mayfair estate agent Knight Frank. ‘They understand that Sets are so rare that it might take a good number of years until a new Set presents itself. Most residents have been in Albany for many years’. A rental apartment appeared last year. Bereft of furniture. Stripped walls. All cracks and shadows. Momentarily, when looking at the images of the interior, the Albany of the nineteenth century name checked by Dickens and Oscar Wilde materialised. Even more so the tenure of the historian Thomas Macaulay, who left in 1865 after fifteen years: ‘The books are gone, and the shelves look like a skeleton….. It is the corpse of what it was on Sunday….To-day, even while I climbed the endless steps, panting and weary, I thought it was for the last time, and the tears would come into my eyes.’ It was here that the former Whig politician applied himself to his mammoth legacy 'The History of England' (1848). Macaulay was writing of a period in England that ended a century before the Albany came into being. The 18th century three-storey mansion of Viscount Melbourne was converted into bachelor apartments in 1802, by the architect Henry Holland. Two rows of buildings were added, and between them the covered Rope Walk that connects the main entrance on Piccadilly with the north gate on Vigo Street. The covenant that was in place from the beginning resonates in the present, and explains the absence of infants, pets, whistling and anyone without the required credentials.

The American author and academic Philip Bobbitt lives here. He’s almost American aristocracy; the nephew of former US president ‘LBJ’ with Princeton, Yale and Havard on his resumé. He’s in Texas for half of the year and returns to the Albany in summer; he finds it easier to write here. A mutual friend attempts to put us in touch. Still no word. John Richardson was worth a try. He exemplifies a particular moment in the history of the building with his upper-crust English accent and a Britishness that has become more pronounced the longer he’s lived in the US. Still no word. Anyway, I can fill in the blanks. He moved here in 1960, returning from Provence following the break-up of his lengthy relationship with the art collector Douglas Cooper. The multi-volumed A Life Of Picasso (1991) is the work with which Richardson has become synonymous. Picassos were hung in his apartment on the Rope Walk, along with the bleached shell of a giant turtle. The playwright Terence Rattigan lived here between 1945-1951, and for a short time shared his chambers with a young actor. It was from this building The Albany Trust took its name. Founded in 1958 to campaign for the decriminilisation of homosexuality its first meetings occurred in the rooms of J.B Priestley. The writer and broadcaster was representative of that new post-war mood, with the arrival of a Labour government. A fellow traveller, Patrick Hamilton, author of Hangover Square wrote of the working classes that inhabited the pubs that he frequented and then crossed London to his Albany home in those years. Priestley, Hamilton, and later Graham Greene were men of the left. They championed socialism, communism even, yet clung to the cornerstones of the old order: the public school, Oxbridge, the Albany. Priestley was a snob about the suburbs. Hamilton loathed the working class for choosing consumerism over revolution. Greene evacuated the Albany and England in 1966, partly because of the ‘braying of the English middle classes'. During his residency he often walked to Belgravia for ‘shepherd’s pie evenings’ with friends, sending round two bottles of 1950 Cheval Blanc the day before so the sediment could settle.

If these figures championed the demise of the class system other, ‘Albanians’ generated towards the aristocracy. The US-born socialite Fleur Cowls editor of Flair magazine ( 'the best things, the first things, uniting its readers in an aristocracy of taste’), occupied fives sets with her third husband from the 1960s. The interior designer Ashley Hicks currently lives here, long after his parents arrived in 1969. He has said of his father David Hicks: ‘He was the greatest snob who ever lived’, who once bragged that his 'one great achievement’ was marrying the daughter of Lord Mountbatten. David Hicks, perhaps the most fêted interior designer of the 1960s and 1970s, broke with traditional notions of good taste with clashing colours, patterned carpets, abstract painting, in his commissions for English country houses and the White House. In his last refurbishment of the Albany apartment, three years before his death in 1998, Hicks opted for the silky chocolate brown walls that become his signature, when cherry-red sofas and purple carpets were deemed passé. His wife, Lady Pamela Hicks, who finally left the Albany in 2013, claimed this was inspired by her throwing glasses of Coke at her husband during domestics. ‘Wish I could help’, Ashley Hicks says in of a series of courteous emails, when I ask about the Albany. ‘I’d love it to be better known and documented, personally, but I am rather in the position of being back at school and having to obey (most of) the rules’. One who broke them was the artist Keith Coventry.

In 2009 at the Haunch of Venision gallery in the eyeline of the Albany on Piccadilly, Coventry exhibited his ‘Echoes of the Albany’ pictures, inspired by his brief spell there in the 2000s. The 40 figurative paintings featured some of the characters from Albany’s past, in reds, whites and pinks. A superficial rose-tinted world - literally - with seedy undertones. The writer Michael Bracewell mentioned ‘the dirt beneath the finger nails of status and super wealth’, when writing about the works. The images of crack-smoking seemed a stretch, but scandalous rumours about the Albany's inner sanctum have bubbled to the surface over time. Tales of call girls and rent boys clattering along the Rope Walk in the early hours. Condoms floating in the Albany pond. These, along with the shenanigans of Tory grandee Alan Clarke, were overlooked by the discreet porters. Another Tory MP, Jacob Rees Mogg was here in the early 1990s. He tells me he lived in D6, but little else: ‘This had been Isaiah Berlin’s set’. Perhaps the greatest scandal, or rather tragedy, came in 2000. The style writer John Morgan, author of Debrett’s Guide To Etiquette & Modern Manners fell to his death at 41. His origins, like those of Coventry, Ferry, Stamp were at odds with the backgrounds of most Albany residents. He’d jettisoned the provinces for the capital, stuffing another accent in his mouth and taking on the mantle of the archetypal Albany bachelor in Saville Row suits and handmade shoes. But he soon lacked the funds to maintain his lifestyle, rather like Byron centuries before. He was thought to have committed suicide, leaping from the bathroom window of his fourth floor set. But the coroner ruled on accidental death. Pointing out that if it was suicide there would have been a note - and on Smythson’s notepaper.

Is this where he fell? I wonder, crossing the courtyard ahead of the palladian entrance. Did windows open? Did curtains twitch? Spotting me, the porter steps from his lodge and attempts to fill the main doorway. The top hat has gone but the uniform remains. I think of Terence Stamp when he first visited: ‘ I had actual butterflies in my gut, as bad as first night’; of the porter putting Keith Coventry to bed when he came back drunk. There is a ’set' up for sale on the open market, in the main house of the former mansion. Who will buy at £6.95 million? Are Russian oligarchs, Chinese billionaires, Americans and Europeans circling the wagons, keen to invest in history and heritage? The set belongs to Peterhouse College, and so whoever puts in a bid is likely to be vetted by both the college and the Albany committee. They don’t want wide boys and Ferraris. While many a rich foreigner is likely to opt for the modern Mayfair apartments where everything is operated by the touch of an ipad. This set has no central heating and is in need of a makeover at the hands of a contemporary Hicks or Bennison. There are scars left from floor to ceiling bookcases. The remaining furniture brings to mind the day bed at Christopher Gibbs place, once owned by Tennyson. This was the home of the academic philosopher Lord Quinton for the last ten years of his life, and that of his widow for the last five. The small kitchen upstairs is a hangover from the days when staff occupied the box room next to it. Today, the rooms house the remnants of the lives lived here, ready for the removal van: sculptures on plinths and gilt-framed paintings, alongside a puzzle, a beer mat, and among the books, Plato’s Symposium - a clue to the career of the former tenant. I’m not sure the Eton-educated estate agent is convinced I can afford this. I’m probably poorer than the porters, and no where near as posh. I’ve been told that discretion is key; shoes and watches are the clues to the wealth of the residents. I’m wearing brogues by Loake, no watch, and my vowels are getting flatter by the minute. I use the bathroom, like a dog spraying its scent. I’ve finally entered the Albany. The small bathroom is a nod to the Sixties, or earlier, and themes that I’ve seen emulated in homes in Kent, Essex and elsewhere, in the pursuit of high-end class, style and glamour. Except here the marble tops and chandeliers are real. But why a small square mirror on the ceiling, directly above the toilet? Oh, what stories the rooms at the Albany could tell.

Earlier this year at Sotheby’s in New York, furniture and objets d'art belonging to Terence Stamp was auctioned off. Much of it from his Albany days. He left in January 1969 via the rear entrance, looking skyward and stepping into a cab as The Beatles were playing ‘Don’t Let Me Down’. Regretting that he never asked his former girlfriend, the model Jean Shrimpton, to share his Albany rooms. 'When I moved into the Albany, Piccadilly’, he told Sotheby’s, ‘one of Britain’s great interior decorators, Geoffrey Bennison, advised me to furnish the chambers in the Georgian and corresponding French period styles in which they were built. John Richardson, the Picasso expert, steered me initially to Picasso ceramics…. There was an Empire day bed that Geoffrey had widened in order to accommodate two people comfortably. A large polar bear skin, complete with gaping jaw, lay across bare floorboards’.

I share the same agent as Stamp. I hope this might swing it. I want him to tell me all that the Albany symbolises to him. In 1967, he appeared in the Ken Loach film Poor Cow. Filming took place at The Palatinate, a condemned building in south east London, around the corner from where I lived. The name suggested the grandeur of the Albany, but here were two tenement blocks built a century before. Each five storeys high with a courtyard to the rear; a cracked concrete margin blotted with potholes, across which rope lines were suspended and from which washing was hung as though noosed, in all seasons. It was demolished as part of the regeneration of the neighbourhood. The Palatinate represented the working class world that Stamp left; the Albany the one he arrived at. He was one of those rare creatures that made the leap from east end boy to west end boy in the mythical social revolution of the 1960s. 'That first afternoon’, he writes in his autobiography, ‘I rolled around in front of the fireplace, hugging myself in reassurance it was true’. His story mattered more than anyone's. I wanted him to talk more than anyone. But he too is muted by the ancient oath of omertà.

Much has been made of the sepulchral tranquility between these walls. Standing here, staring into the the Rope Walk and the tiny patios with statues of griffins (those mythical creatures that guard wealth and treasure), I’m reminded of the silence that the dissidents refer to. The sounds that pierce that silence are the sounds that always have: birdsong, the chimes of St James church, the hourly tinkle of the Eton Boating Song from the Fortnum & Mason clock. Christopher Gibbs has written of a drunken baronet who drowned in his bath, and whose spirit was lodged in a dumb waiter here. But there must be other ghosts from its history accounting for the odd click and creak. Macaulay mounting the attic stairs at night. The swish of Lady Caroline Lamb’s cape when dressed a pageboy, she sneaked into Byron’s rooms and scratched two words on his desk: Remember me. The upper class, cut glass laugh at a Fleur Cowles dinner party. The thud of a falling man. Outside the Albany, a London that belongs entirely to the present. A city dominated by the rich and poor immigrant, from the oligarch to the asylum seeker and the refugee. But in here another city, another country. The last of England - all be it an England most of us never knew. Where the outsider is omitted along with the definite article. Albion. Arcady. Albany. An England that will one day be, like the London we natives once knew, like ‘Greeneland' itself, ‘a region of the mind’.

Terence Stamp (22 July 1938 – 17 August 2025)

Originally published in Esquire’s Big Black Book 2016, as ‘Corridors of Power’.

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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 magazines — described him as “one of the first novelists to deal with Britain’s community of blacks”. His contemporaries covered similar territory. The Trinidadian writer Sam Selvon arrived in Britain in 1950 and published his novel The Lonely Londoners six years later. In To Sir With Love (1959), Guyanese-born E.R. Braithwaite fictionalised his experience as a teacher in an East End school.

Whilst these black authors were writing as interlopers in their adopted country, Colin MacInnes was a white, well-bred Englishman describing the experience of the black outsider in the trilogy of novels that assured him his legacy: City Of Spades (1957), Absolute Beginners (1959), Mr Love and Justice (1960). The themes common to these books are race, crime, youth and a changing London (a decade before it officially began to “swing”) — topics that still resonate there almost half a century after Colin MacInnes’ death from lung cancer, and 75 years on from the publication of his debut novel, To The Victors The Spoils (1950).

As well as being one of the first authors to write about the black experience in Britain, MacInnes, who was openly bisexual, was one of the first to write rationally on the taboo subject of homosexuality — describing it as “English Queerdom” — before legalisation in 1967. Above all else, he is remembered as the first writer to celebrate the new phenomenon of the “teenager” in the 1950s (even though he was in his forties at the time).

If age made him an odd chronicler of the young, his pedigree made him an unusual candidate to tackle race. He was related to Rudyard Kipling and Stanley Baldwin. His great-grandfather was the artist Edward Burne-Jones. His mother was the novelist Angela Thirkell. Born in England, he spent his childhood in Australia, with a spell in Europe as a teenager before serving in the Intelligence Corps during the Second World War, which provided the inspiration for that first novel.

His social pedigree may have been his entrée to a broadcasting role at the BBC, where he was initially commissioned to write radio scripts whilst embarking on the career as a freelance journalist that kept him afloat in later years, when his novels failed to match the success of the earlier trilogy. The film critic Philip French, a former BBC colleague, described MacInnes as “one of the rudest people I’ve ever met, always needling away to try and expose some bourgeois trait he might, as a good bourgeois, disapprove of”.

The London of MacInnes was notably that of Notting Hill, Fitzrovia and Soho, where he drank to excess with fellow writers and artists at the Colony Room Club. Photographs taken in the 1950s capture him casually attired in grubby bedsits, where he wrote most mornings, before a daily constitutional through Hyde Park.

Notting Hill was infamous for the slum housing that made landlord Peter Rachman notorious and which the narrator in Absolute Beginners (in which the neighbourhood is re-named “Little Napoli”) reflects on, highlighting the “diarrhoea-coloured street lighting”, the “mulligatawny fog” and “broken milk bottles everywhere scattering the cracked asphalt roads like snow”.

The locale was a novelty for “good bourgeois” bohemians like Colin MacInnes but a necessity for the black immigrants that gravitated to the area. By reporting on their experiences, he wasn’t merely documenting the spirit of the times but attempting to expose its injustices. The race riots in Notting Hill in 1958 had a major impact on him and to the close of Absolute Beginners.

MacInnes wrote numerous essays on race, beyond his guide for white natives on black immigrants. In “Britain’s Mixed Half-Million” (1961), he sought to further enlighten the Jumble. According to MacInnes, West Indians arrived to escape overpopulated islands in pursuit of prosperity, whilst West African men were seamen, traders or students propelled by wanderlust. He writes: “It is only exceptionally that one may find Africans in England who decided to emigrate because of extreme economic hardship in their homeland.”

Whilst northern working-class writers were producing accounts of their native experience in novels, films and the cinéma-vérité drama that was dominant at the BBC by the 1960s, the London working-class experience was cornered by upper-class interlopers. In 1965, Nell Dunn’s novel Up The Junction became the BBC “Wednesday Play”. Her husband, Jeremy Sandford, wrote the infamous BBC screenplay Cathy Come Home the following year.

MacInnes had been attempting something similar the previous decade, but, despite the gritty subject matter and social issues central to his output, the novels were in the realm of fantasy. In these stories the characters, with names such as “Johnny Fortune”, “Frankie Love” and “Crepe Suzette”, are shorthand for the youth gangs or ethnic and social group they are part of, complete with exaggerated slang dialogue, rather than realised naturalistic figures.

MacInnes writes about black figures in a manner that would be impossible for a white author in the current climate of territorial identity politics, even though his approach is positive and his intention honourable, whilst the topicality of the issues he addressed — immigration, sexuality, racism, post-colonialism, vice — blinds those readers persuaded by his leftish viewpoint to the fancifulness of the style.

Even MacInnes was quick to dismiss any suggestion that his novels were the result of forensic and exhaustive research, referring to them as “poetic evocations of a human situation”.

The white adults he wrote about sometimes fitted the petit bourgeois stereotype he abhorred. This is evident in his essay “The Express Families” about the characters that appeared in the Giles cartoons in the Daily Express. Like George Orwell’s take on “Boys’ Weeklies” from 1940, this suited the cultural studies territory MacInnes was treading, along with academics Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall, whilst contributing to high end literary magazines such as Encounter.

His biographer Tony Gould, who commissioned him when he was literary editor at the New Statesman, has suggested that, like Orwell, MacInnes is a better essayist than novelist. His journalism took him beyond the West End postcodes with which he was familiar, in essays entitled “Hamlet and the Ghetto” or “The Pied Piper of Bermondsey”, a profile of the local boy made good, Tommy Steele.

But as with the readers of the Daily Express, the teenagers embracing the new consumerism were also subjected to his criticism because of their indifference to politics: “in their kind of happy mindfulness — the raw material for crypto-fascism of the worst kind”.

Although MacInnes occasionally concedes that the good, the bad and the ugly are to be found in all races, his tendency is to deify the black foreigner and demonise the white native. In this, he’s emblematic of white writers from his class and with his politics and pedigree that have continued to mine the same territory and re-enact battles already won, in a world that has moved on since those days of the diminishing British Empire.

In part, his portrayal of black characters was based on his objectification of them, and particularly African men, to whom he was especially sexually attracted. He pursued them, often conquered them, usually by offering cash, before discarding them.

In his 55-page pamphlet “Loving Them Both” (1973), a study on bisexuality, he outlines how same-sex attraction plays out amongst black men in foreign climes, highlighting where it is most prevalent: “the virtue of anyone who, in Barbados, bends to retrieve a coin, is in dire danger”.

Here again in attempting to expose the assumptions of others, he reveals his own. The black man is cast as carefree and exotic, a sexual radical with a natural sense of rhythm (“blacks regard a bed as a place of joy and not a confessional”). He is invariably a musician, a pimp, a hustler who, of course, avoids putting his life in savings banks because every day is there to be enjoyed.

Just as MacInnes had little interest in a white working class that might aspire to the status of those Express families, let alone the class of which he was a beneficiary, the educated black man did not hold his interest — unless, of course, he was a revolutionary.

Colin MacInnes became the token white figure to the fore of short-lived black liberation groups that limped into the London of the 1970s and landed on the agitprop pages of listings magazines. He was a propagandist for black “revolutionary” and convicted murderer Michael X, who was executed in his native Trinidad in 1975. In his final years, MacInnes’ focus on race was surpassed by sexuality, which he wrote about under a pseudonym in a column for Gay News: “Captain Jockstrap’s Diary”.

He died on the Kent coast and was buried at sea, far from his beloved London. Half a century on, the capital is a city he would barely recognise — not because of the regeneration and gentrification but the mass immigration that has followed in his wake.

For certain Londoners that remain, London is a foreign city; for those that have left, it’s an alien one. The diarrhoea-coloured street lighting and mulligatawny fogs that were the backdrop to the lives of MacInnes and his characters, that once made it a dark and dismal city, have gone. But so have many of the attributes that made it a safe, sane and dignified one.

Originally published in The Critic.

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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.

In Dunne’s documentary, she recalls a visit to the Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood in San Francisco, where she watched a five-year-old child, daubed in white lipstick, read a comic book while on acid. In response to the director asking her reaction, Didion replied: ‘It was gold.’ It’s a cold, dispassionate answer, but one in keeping with how Didion regarded her craft. Everything was there to be used, and as she once acknowledged, ‘writers are always selling somebody out’.

Does that also mean that writing should ultimately sell the writer out, when everything they committed to paper, that remained unpublished in their lifetime, is available posthumously? In 1998, Didion wrote of Ernest Hemingway that his wish was to be survived by only the words that he determined fit for publication. If this was also Didion’s wish, it’s not being adhered to.

In March this year, 336 boxes of her private papers, including menus and guest lists for those celebrated 1960s dinners she and her husband hosted, were made available at the New York Public Library. The release of these papers follows the publication in April of Notes to John, the unedited writings she committed to a notebook following her sessions with a psychiatrist from 1999. These were intended for her husband, who died four years later from a heart attack.

Back in Los Angeles, in the early days of their writing careers, Didion and Dunne were mining for gold while writing a column together along with Hollywood screenplays (including the 1976 adaptation of A Star Is Born). Mostly, Didion was writing alone, producing fiction and non-fiction essays in the elegant, chiselled style she honed at Vogue. The work was absorbed into the ‘new journalism’ canon, which included the dispatches of Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese. But Joan Didion was writing more personally, even when reporting on newsworthy events that were redefining American culture.

In the introduction to her 1968 essay collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Didion recalls: ‘Whatever I do write reflects, sometimes gratuitously, how I feel.’ A decade later, taking her cue from the George Orwell essay ‘Why I Write’, for a lecture she delivered, she said: ‘In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying, “Listen to me, see it my way, change your mind”.’ Whether she was writing about John Wayne, the Black Panthers or the Manson family, Didion always returned to ‘the act of saying I’. This was evident from an early essay for Vogue entitled ‘On Self Respect’, in which she alludes to keeping a notebook, a habit that began in infancy and continued until her death.

Didion begins another book (The White Album from 1979) by informing us that we tell ourselves stories in order to live. She wrote to understand and articulate her own thoughts, and believed that, as a reporter, she was able to be an invisible witness. ‘I am so physically small’, she wrote, ‘so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests’. This is certainly true when you compare her with Tom Wolfe, dressed like a southern American dandy from another era, and Gay Talese in immaculately tailored suits and pristine hats and spats. Yet the look that began to define her, the bobbed hair and oversized sunglasses, became her signature style. This is why fashion house Céline included her as a model in its ad campaign for spring 2015, six years before she died, aged 87.

Although many have been quick to canonise her, the odd dissident has emerged in the four years since her death, suggesting the Joan Didion persona was a conceit. This was reinforced last year, when a joint biography of Didion and fellow author Eve Babitz was published. The former was responsible for getting the latter a writing assignment at Rolling Stone. They were California girls. Didion was a descendant of prairie folk; Babitz a well-connected, wild-child party girl (infamous for being photographed naked while playing chess with Marcel Duchamp). Whereas Didion interviewed The Doors, Eve Babitz slept with them. According to the biography, the diminutive Didion used her evident brittleness to good effect, as it disguised the shrewd predator beneath: ‘It’s the tininess, it’s the sunglasses, it’s the shyness. But she’s a killer.’ Perhaps this was part of her appeal. Didion once wrote that our favourite people, like our favourite stories, become so because they illustrate ‘something deep in the grain, something unadmitted’.

Didion’s status as a national treasure was confirmed when Barack Obama presented her with the prestigious National Humanities Medal in 2012. Now, she had the venerable stature of those veteran writers revered as wise, sage-like elders of a tribe, with white New York liberals at their feet hanging on every syllable, as though each sentence is worthy of an award. Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison only needed to inform us that a bird in the hand was worth two in the bush to be in the running for the Pulitzer Prize. Didion belonged to this community of saints.

Despite her Californian origins, which she wrote about often, and was perhaps at her best and most brilliant when doing so, hers was very much a New York state of mind. In 1988, she returned to NYC and remained there until the end of her life. One of her most celebrated essays on her return was written for the New York Review of Books in 1991, in which Didion deftly addresses in detail the case of a 28-year-old female who was gang raped while jogging through Central Park in 1989. It was an unusual subject for the magazine’s readership and the demographic Didion was addressing. A gang rape in which the victim was white and the five perpetrators black and Hispanic was of little concern to the New York literati. But an essay that put history and the media on the stand over the case was gold. It was vindicated, too, when in 2002, the so-called Central Park Five were exonerated.

Here again, as with that child on LSD decades before, hers could be the dispassionate voice of the reporter. But that shifted when Didion made the subject herself, particularly when writing about loss. This was the underlying ache expressed in her 2003 memoir, Where I Was From:

‘I know what the fear is. The fear is not for what is lost. What is lost is already in the wall. What is lost is already behind the locked door. The fear is for what is still to be lost. There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.’

She deepened her reflections on grief with two further books that reached out to a wider readership. Firstly, The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), where she writes of her reaction to her husband’s death, while her daughter was in an induced coma. Secondly, Blue Nights published in 2011, six years after the death of her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, at 39. To Didion, as a wife and mother, these losses were devastating and tragic. To a writer like Didion, they too were gold.

In The Year of Magical Thinking, she notes:

‘We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all. ’

As raw as these experiences were, in writing about them Didion remained in command of her subject, and the manner in which she approached it. But this was not so with the entries in her notebooks, which ‘could only mean something to the maker’, or indeed the husband to whom Notes to John is dedicated. This is apparent from the opening entry: ‘Re not taking (the antidepressant) Zoloft, I said it made me feel for about an hour after taking it that I’d lost my organising principle, rather like having a Planter’s Punch before lunch in the tropics.’

This, the last new book to carry Joan Didion’s name, is without the precision and style that defined the writing she put her name to. But it is perhaps more gratuitously about herself than all that went before.

Originally published in Spiked.

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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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Pedro Almodóvar once informed an interviewer that the word ‘camp’ does not exist in his native Spain.

It’s a term that international critics used to describe his early films, while lauding the director and applauding the nerve of his risky vision. In some quarters the plaudits were so elaborate they too carried a touch of camp: ‘In terms of dramatic creativity there are three Spanish icons Cervantes, Lorca and Almodóvar.’ Following the breakthrough success of the Oscar-nominated ‘Women On The Verge of A Nervous Breakdown’ in 1988, the word ‘Almodóvarian’ was coined to summarise the signature style of his films: sardonic comedy, melodrama, shock tactics and garish sets. The heightened style was inspired by the golden age of technicolour that captivated him as a child, with a touch of the Memphis group’s design output when it came to those sets. Homosexuality was obligatory; transexuals a staple from his early short ‘Sex Goes, Sex Comes’ (1980). ‘I…

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