The Sunday Times May 1, 2022 27COMMENT
The drug den next door is driving
me potty: my cue to move, perhaps
There was a moment in
the 2010s when you could
live in an Airbnb, travel by
Uber and eat Deliveroos at
what seemed an impossibly
low cost. The sharing
economy, they called it
grandly.
Alas, it was indeed too
good to be true. What we
millennial ingénues were
actually doing was feasting
off massive venture-capital
investment in tech start-
ups. With tech stocks
crashing, recession looming
and investors tiring of
propping up loss-making
behemoths, the taps are
now being turned off.
“Goodbye to the millennial
lifestyle subsidy,” is how
one recent New York Times
article phrased it.
I recently tried to book an
Airbnb for a weekend in
New York and can indeed
confirm the glory days are
indeed over. The only
decent-looking places I
could find available were
“crazy crypto penthouses”
for about four grand a night.
No, thanks.
The sharing economy
hasn’t evaporated — those
services are all still
available. But we’re back in
a world where you have to
save a little more and plan a
little better. It was fun while
it lasted.this flagrant den of iniquity to
flourish? A quick Google
search shows me that armed
cops raided the snooker club
twice before, claiming it was
making over £1 million a year
from drug dealing. And yet,
almost a decade later, trade
at the club is humming. Is
it just easier to keep it all in
one place? Is someone getting
a brown-envelope kickback?
I have called and emailed
police to inquire, but no one
seems remotely interested.
I think I’m ready for the
suburbs.We’ve all had our problems
with difficult neighbours.
Some rev up the leaf-blower
at 8am on Sunday; others
bonk too loudly or neglect to
take the bins out. I once had a
neighbour who snored so
loudly from the floor below
that I had to sleep with ear
plugs. But few of you, I would
venture, have lived next door
to a drug retailer. And, no, I
don’t mean Boots.
You buzz to enter the
“snooker and shisha club”
next door to me in north
London. Then, like in a Guy
Ritchie movie, they let you
into a caged area where they
can have a proper look at
you. After that, the cage door
opens and you can head
upstairs towards the action.
From my one neighbourly
drop-in, my sense is no one
plays a lot of snooker at the
snooker club: it’s mostly
shady-looking blokes
lounging around smoking
and staring menacingly at the
steady flow of punters who
buzz in and out at all hours of
the day.
Things got a bit tense when
I started nosing about, so I
quickly explained I was a
next-door neighbour just
politely wondering if they
might stop blasting out Sean
Paul after 2am. (Love Sean
Paul; also love sleeping.) I
didn’t quite have the guts to
ask what they sell at the
snooker club, but
acquaintances in the area tell
me they’ve bought all
manner of narcotics there.
What to do? For a while I
tried to play the hip youngurbanite and took a live-and-
let-live approach. It’s a seedy
area, after all, and who am I
to judge? Then, a few years
ago, my flat was burgled. I
don’t know if the intruder
was after drug money to
spend next door, but it’s a bit
dispiriting when someone
smashes your door down and
walks into your bedroom in
the middle of the night,
hunting for laptops. Later,
despite beefing up the locks, I
was burgled again, at which
point my patience wore thin.
Why do the police allowLiberal dose of
schadenfreudeBetween the horrors of war
in Ukraine and the lesser
horrors of overbearing
lockdowns across China,
there isn’t a huge amount of
cheer to be found in the news
cycle at present. But one
glimmer of hope is that these
are reassuringly bad times for
authoritarians.
The West had a crisis of
confidence during the
pandemic when it seemed
everyone apart from us was
capable of managing Covid.
But, as Putin’s Russia bends
reality to justify its brutality
in Ukraine, and Xi’s China
imprisons its own citizens to
crush a virus it unleashed on
the world, the messy,
unsatisfying reality of life in a
liberal democracy doesn’t
look so bad after all.NEWMAN’S
VIEWJosh Glancy
Week ending
It seems
I’ve been
exploiting
the venture
capitalists
Nothing about
our politics is now
about the voters;
it’s just politicians
slagging each
other offThe Battle of Basic Instinct was no battle at
all, just an excuse for endless showboating
Camilla Long
So, prison for the world’s
other hopeless blond Boris —
Becker — and what a
magnificent life he has
shagged away. Houses, art,
trophies — how did he do it? I
think I know the answer: by
surrounding himself with the
world’s worst, leeching
people, like Judy Garland.
I got a taste of the toxic
ecosystem that had sprung
up around him when I
interviewed him some years
ago. There was an army of
PRs keen to control
everything, stopping me
asking even innocuous
questions such as, “What
was your most embarrassing
moment?” If you are a big
celeb and know how to
handle yourself, you don’t
have swarms of junior PRs
openly snapping, “Sorry,
that’ll have to come out.”
When I finally did raise the
broom cupboard incident,
about which Becker had
written a whole book, one
woman hissed as if we were
at a witchcraft trial, and
another snapped, “That is not
a Sunday Times question.”
Becker was then summarily
dragged away like some
gullible polar bear, and the
remaining PR person said, “I
wish you hadn’t asked that
question.” He was a messy
bitch surrounded by messy
bitches. It turned something
that could have been quite
funny into an awful incident.
Ultimately I was glad I did
ask the question: he quite
charmingly told me he was
glad it happened “because I
had a daughter”.Becker courted
calamity with
his crowd ofA sycophants
ngela Rayner, then — what a
binfire. Strung up, stripped
and perma-shamed for days
across social media, all
because one unnamed Tory
MP said she had been
deliberately crossing and
uncrossing her legs in front of
Boris Johnson while wearing a slightly
splitty skirt.
I do wonder if Labour’s deputy
leader knew it would end this way
when, in January, she merrily told a
podcaster she was aware of an internet
meme that compared her sitting on the
front bench in a sexy Karen Millen dress
to Sharon Stone at the bit in the film
Basic Instinct “when”, she giggled, “she
did the whole growler thing”.
At the time, the joke seemed light-
hearted, fun, wry, slightly inadvisable —
but it was just one of many copy-worthy
off-guard moments for which Rayner is
famous. I like her — she is funny,
different, powerfully charismatic. In
ordinary times, in an ordinary
parliament, she might easily end up
capturing our hearts as, say, a foxier,
more capable John Prescott. But these
are not ordinary times.
In fact they are vile, spitting, foul
times, times when parliament is
operating like a nasty, backstabbing
soap opera. How could she be so naive?
If you are energetic, successful and
popular, it is only a matter of time
before Johnson or one of his rah Buller
goons will be plotting to smear you out
of envy or to use you or what you have
said to distract from the shocking tide of
incompetence and filth emanating from
his own crumbling empire, like the fact
Neil Parish MP openly watched
pornography in the House of Commons
(“It was tractors I was looking at”) or
that the government essentially killed
people by sending Covid patients back
to care homes. He always brings
everyone down to his level in the end.
Nothing about our politics is now
about the voters; it’s just politicians
slagging each other off and showboating
and making grand, empty gestures.
Johnson has so far dragged one side into
it — the groping, lying, partying,
boasting Tories. What happened last
week was that he managed to drag in
the other, and Labour let it happen.The Basic Instinct story could not
have been more effective if it had been
dreamt up by a room of honking Tory
spin doctors. It started with the classic,
unforgettable image of Sharon Stone
and her kryptonite muff next to a
picture of Rayner in silky stockings. A
“Tory MP” explained that Labour’s
answer to Catherine Tramell had been
complaining on the Commons terrace
that she “can’t compete with Boris’s
Oxford Union debating training” so she
had resorted to crossing and uncrossing
her legs to “put him off his stride”.
This is straight out of the Johnson
handbook: pile class into sex into
sneering at someone else’s education
plus jokes about “Flangela”, and
everyone will go mad. It is the cheapest,
dirtiest tactic available: rile your
enemies so you can then say they are
angry simply because he is more
successful, or, in the case of women,
because they are turned on.
So why did Rayner decide to milk it?
The first sign she was engaging was
when she tweeted a huge nine-part
thread the morning the piece came out.
It had the same stigmata-pulsing
intensity and pathos as an Oscar
acceptance speech or the state of the
union address by Barack Obama. What
was she doing? It made clear she, of
course, was suffering, but she would
not let that get in the way — she was
nobly preparing to die on the hill of
being able to wear wraparound dresses
in the House of Commons. When you
read it back now, it seems ridiculous.
By Wednesday she had jumped so
fully on the bandwagon that she was
appearing on the sofa on Lorraine in a
penitential trouser suit, saying she had
put it on because she “didn’t want to be
judged”.
If you have read anything Rayner has
said or written, you will see this is
contrary to her whole life philosophy:
she is a “confident” mother of three
who never tires of telling people that no
matter what people fling at her she will
never, ever, change. To see this strident
and self-possessed fighter for women’s
rights shut away her body didn’t make
sense, even from a feminist perspective.
What was she now: some meek, cowed
extra from The Handmaid’s Tale or the
fourth wife of an Arab sheikh? SheAngela Rayner has joked about being compared to Sharon Stone in the past, so moralising about it last week was foolish
should have worn what she wanted.
Even Sir Lindsay Hoyle seemed to
undergo a Johnson-induced character
transplant. For two years the Speaker
has done a good job. But after the attack
on Rayner he somehow found himself
telling the editor of The Mail on Sunday
to come to parliament to explain his
“misogynistic and offensive” article,
much to everyone’s amusement and
mirth. Did he think the serjeant at arms
officially spanking a grown man’s botty
in full uniform would make this story
calm down? But Johnson had persuaded
poor Hoyle this was a serious issue that
needed a serious and monumental
response.
The prime minister is low-hanging
fruit. He is easy to attack on morality.
Labour loves to moralise, which is whatRayner and Keir Starmer were doing all
week, filling their stupid boots. What
they didn’t realise is that they were also
fuelling it and becoming tainted, while
Johnson and his mates, who don’t care
about doing the right thing, fell about
laughing over the fact it had not only
demeaned Rayner but made a mockery
of the serious matter of female MPs
being harassed in parliament — 225
birds with one stone.
I don’t think Rayner really cares
about the comparison to Basic Instinct,
any more than Starmer does, any more
than Johnson intends to unleash the
“terrors of the earth” on the people who
leaked it. This means the number of
people being dishonest about this
whole farrago is, as is typical now,
everyone.JESSICA TAYLOR/UK PARLIAMENT/PA