It’s A Royal Knockout
This week: some of the less likely candidates for London mayor, Europe takes the night train, and look I don’t want to talk about the royal family either but here we are.
Some things I am worrying about this week
Piers Morgan’s career. No! Just kidding, I don’t give a crap and he is, anyway, almost certainly going to be back on some televised sewage farm or another before we can so much as blink.
I wouldn’t say I’m worried about the future of the royal family either, exactly, because that suggests that I’m invested in it, and I’m not. I do find the institution sort of fascinating, but in the same way I find the Holy Roman Empire or maps of Middle Earth fascinating: it’s an arcane world of weird rules, lists and rituals, which I can take a nerdy interest in while feeling safe it’s never going to impinge on my actual life.
This stance was probably always, given Britain’s political system, something of a delusion. The fall out from Harry and Meghan’s interview with Oprah last weekend, and especially from the claims of racism, is a reminder that it was a function of privilege, too.
The other thing I was struck by, watching the interview, is how cruel the institution is, even to those inside it. The idea of having your passport and keys confiscated by a faceless bureaucracy, concerned primarily with protecting itself from the consequences of your actions, is the stuff of a psychological horror movie. The strict hierarchical nature of the whole business means that the needs and interests of those closer to the throne will always be prioritised over those further from it: without even getting into the racial politics of the whole thing, the suffering of the partner of the man sixth in line to the throne just wasn’t that important to anyone.
Oh, and the nature of that line of succession is that most of those included in it will spend their lives tumbling down it. At the time of his birth in 1964, Prince Edward was third in line to the throne. He is currently 12th. He has, quite literally, spent the last 57 years becoming ever less important. Even aside from the huge waste of public money and the maintenance of class privilege and the fact that expecting people to curtsey in 2021 is completely bloody ridiculous, the whole thing is just really, really messed up.
A brief but annoying marketing bit
This is, as threatened, the last free edition of the Newsletter of (Not Quite) Everything. Forgive the shameless money-grabbing, but a) a girl’s gotta make rent, and b) it would be unfair to the touchingly large number of people who have become paying subscribers to keep offering my goods and services for free to anyone who wants them.
But fear not! For two reasons. Firstly, there will still be occasional free missives from me, which will be in the form of marketing dressed up as an article (or, quite possibly, an article dressed up as marketing). Secondly, you can join the ranks of paying supporters, and thus continue receiving this weekly newsletter, for less than £1 a week. Come on, that’s nothing. And all you need to do is click here.
Some things I am delighted by this week
1. This amazing 1997 advert for Pizza Hut, starring Mikhail Gorbachev, the last president of the Soviet Union, who turned 90 last week. If you want to know how this slightly insane thing ever happened, last year Foreign Policy published a whole feature on the topic (“Gorbachev had suffered the same fate as many Soviet retirees, who had looked forward to generous pensions only to find themselves forced to hustle and scrape to get by as the Russian economy collapsed around them”). You can read it here.
2. The London cycle routes YouTube channel, on which journalist Jon Stone traverses the protected cycle lanes and quiet back streets of our fine city on two wheels. It’s great, honestly, and – as the weather improves, and biking about the place starts to take up more and more of my time once again – it’s going to be very useful this summer.
You can read an interview with Jon, explaining why he started making the videos, on road.cc here.
3. Lastly, courtesy of the blogger Flip Chart Rick, this lovely map showing the territorial evolution of the unchallenged champion of England’s worst county competition, Surrey.
Some people who aren’t going to be elected mayor of London
Predictions are tricky, especially about the future, but nonetheless I feel confident in saying that this year’s London mayoral race is not going to be a nail biter. Polls have rarely shown the incumbent, Labour’s Sadiq Khan, dipping below 48% of first preference votes. His main challenger, the Tories’ Shaun Bailey, has rarely made it above 30. Even the most cynical of the bookies have Khan at 1/20 to be re-elected: run this election 21 times, and Khan wins 20 of them. Bailey’s toast.
In some ways, the most interesting question is whether third place will go to the Green Sian Berry or the LibDem Luisa Porritt. This is not, you may notice, actually very interesting.
Fear not, though, because even further down the ballot you’ll find a surprisingly wide variety of candidates, who’ll be fighting it out for fifth place. So who else might Londoners vote for come election day – if anyone remembers they exist and if, come to that, they get enough signatures to make the ballot?
Candidate: Kam Balayev
Party: Renew
Renew is a centrist, pro-European party of the sort that kept popping up after late night Twitter binges back in those heady days of 2016; Azerbaijani-born Balayev works in international law and wants to talk about the digital economy a lot. It’s a measure of how well all this is going that a) I found this out from sponsored content, and b) Renew has been so electorally successful that during the 2019 European elections it stepped down in favour of Change UK.
Candidate: Count Binface
Party: none
Binface, whose real name is Jon Harvey, is the artist previously known as Lord Buckethead, but who had to give up the alias after a (no, really) copyright dispute. In Uxbridge, during the 2019 general election, the scores on the doors were Harvey/Count Binface 69, David Hughes/Lord Buckethead 125, Boris Johnson/make up your own nickname 25,351.
In the highly unlikely event the supposed alien in a giant metal mask/hat thing wins the election, his most notable policies are to change the name of London Bridge to Phoebe Waller Bridge and to tie pay rises for ministers to those of nurses. Both of which, to be fair, are great.
Candidate: Valerie Brown
Party: Burning Pink
Burning Pink, also known as Beyond Politics, wants to tackle the climate emergency by bringing down the government, replacing it with citizens’ assemblies and covering government buildings in pink paint. In one stunt, five activists walked out of the Camden branch of Sainsbury’s with full trolleys without paying, while others broadcast over a loudspeaker that food was now free. How Valerie Brown (“Grandmother, mother, vigilante”) would turn these policies into a platform for City Hall is not currently clear.
Candidate: Drillminster
Party: none
South London rapper in a balaclava, which he has declined to take off. Claims to have been inspired by the success of Donald Trump, and helped get the word “wasteman” into the Oxford English Dictionary. His manifesto is actually quite meaty, promising price capped peak-time rail tickets for anyone earning under £21,000 a year, new stations for transport deserts and top-up cards that allow homeless people to buy food, shelter and clothes. My former NS colleague Anoosh Chakelian interviewed him here.
Candidate: Peter Gammons
Party: UKIP
Motivational speaker, author, social activist, philanthropist, holder of a doctorate from a university not recognised by the US Department for Education, subject of contested claims about the ability to heal the sick through prayer – all of these things are as nothing compared to the inescapable fact that his name is Peter Gammons.
The official UKIP candidate is not to be confused with former UKIP London Assembly member David Kurten, who is now campaigning as head of the socially conservative Heritage Party. Which I’m sure will go down a storm in a socially conservative town like London.
There are more. Oh god, there are so many more. There’s Winston McKenzie, who’s been standing for everything for as long as anyone can remember; Nims Obunge, the pastor of the Freedom’s Ark Church; environmental campaigner Rosalind Readhead and Women’s Equality Party candidate Mandu Reid, who I’m skipping over slightly because actually those are quite sensible campaigns and thus not very funny; and a Croydon-born entrepreneur named Farah London, who has the air of an Apprentice contestant who got into the race through some kind of nominative determinism accident.
For much of the last three(!) years, Charlie Mullins, the bloke behind Pimlico Plumbers – used to donate to the Tory party, then switched to the Liberal Democrats because he didn’t like Brexit – has not shut up about running for mayor, mostly because he doesn’t like cycle lanes or the congestion charge. But although he’s never formally withdrawn, the most recent interview I can find – with Jan Moir, of all people – suggests this ambition has been “flushed away down the plughole”.
Lastly, there is an American podcaster using the race as a platform to spread yet more disinformation about covid-19, and an actor who never attained the leading man status he so clearly craves and who is still angry about his divorce. I have decided, on balance, that it would be better not to mention their names.
Map of the week
This week, it’s a two for the price of one deal. Reader William Bell (hi!) emailed in, asking me to write something about Europe’s night rail network, “where European integration, infrastructure and the climate crisis all come together”.
This is not, frankly, a situation I know much about. I have only travelled on night trains a handful of times – on one, from London to Aberdeen, I recall insisting on the top bunk, then lying awake all night terrified, utterly convinced I was going to fall off – but there is something inescapably romantic about the idea of going to sleep in one city and waking up in another. More than that, by moving passengers at a time when they probably wouldn’t be doing anything useful anyway, it could potentially lure them off quicker but more environmentally costly flights.
Image: Per Eric Rosen/Wikimedia Commons, published under a creative commons licence.
So I googled, and found two lovely maps, the first of which was created by a chap named Per Eric Rosen. It shows every night train in Europe as of January 2020, and highlights the fact that, a touch unexpectedly, night trains are most commonly found in central Europe and the Balkans.
Looking at the version in this email only gives you a tiny fraction of the picture, though: to get the rest, you should head on over to the full version on Wikipedia. There you can see that the name of each route is written beside the line, with its operator included in brackets. What’s more, the map distinguishes between nightly, less regular and seasonal services using various different types of line. It’s a lovely piece of work.
It does, however, date from January 2020, and while I don’t imagine that vast numbers of new train routes have launched over the course of the plague year, that does mean that it’s slightly out of date. Which brings me to our second map...
Image: Deutsche Bahn.
This one shows the brand new NightJet routes, now being launched by a coalition of European rail companies. The first two (Vienna–Munich–Paris and Zurich–Cologne–Amsterdam) depart this December. Two more are due in 2023 and 2024 respectively.
Could the UK join in this bonanza? Our domestic night rail network has always been held back by the fact we’re not quite big enough to make it work, and our existing overnight trains (from London to Scotland or Cornwall) tend to do a lot of running slow and otherwise mucking about to get the journey time up from a few hours to an entire night. Night trains from Britain to the continent would need a bit of extra infrastructure in places, true. But they would get around that timing problem, and could get us off planes, too.
And doesn’t the idea of a city break bookended by an overnight train sound wonderful? Especially if you avoid that top bunk.
Links and housekeeping
Some other things I have done this week:
Last Thursday, a rare opportunity to hear my opinions on some stuff, as I was the guest on The Londown, the Open City podcast, talking about house prices, air pollution, toilets and the rest of the week’s London architectural news. You can listen to that, subscribe and so on here.
Rishi Sunak’s plan to inflate house prices offers nothing for generation rent: my latest New Statesman column is another entry in my semi-regular “seriously, why do we persist with the myth that this guy is in some way good” series.
And that’s that. If you want to read next week’s newsletter and you haven’t becoming a paying supporter already… well, this is your moment. (Again: under £1 a week!)
Questions? Comments? Suggested topics? Email me.