The Sunday Times May 29, 2022 25
COMMENT
are moving out of petite
downtown apartments
because they’re being asked
to pay $6,000 a month for the
privilege. Life has swung
from arduous to nigh-on
impossible.
And yet. And yet. In my six
days in the city I felt more
alive than I do anywhere else,
as I always do, and my time
there was easily the most fun
I’ve had in ages, as it always
is. There’s undeniable magic
in this madness, and that’s
the eternal paradox of New
York. As the old line goes:
“It’ll be a great city one day, if
they ever finish it.”After more than two years of
lockdowns and travel bans,
I finally made it back to New
York last week for my belated
stag do. What a mess. (The
city, that is.)
The chaos unleashed by
the pandemic is still
upending a town that wasn’t
exactly high-functioning in
the first place. The
perennially grotty subway
has become savage and
unsafe, stalked by the
homeless and the mentally
unwell, and has recently been
the scene of a string of fatal
stabbings. The Lower East
Side has — predictably — gonefull Amsterdam since weed
was legalised, with puffs of
potent ganja lingering on
every corner.
My old block, once a low-
key bohemian cul-de-sac near
Canal Street, has now been
christened “Dimes Square”
and is the focal point for a
fierce culture war that has
spawned a wave of
unintelligible think pieces
about warring hipsters: edgy
libertarians on one side,
liberal scolds on the other.
Nothing is affordable: even
a diner breakfast costs $30
(£24), and rents have become
so preposterous that friendsIgnore the danger and prices and
New York is still a hell of a town
lAlso in the Big Apple, I
was pleased to discover my
old Brooklyn leftie friends
have all turned into
monarchists. This is not due
to jubilee fever, nor are they
suddenly addicted to The
Crown. It’s because the
American left today has
become appalled by its own
slaveholding founding
fathers. And so by the law
that your enemy’s enemy is
your friend, these social
justice strivers are now
weirdly enamoured with
Washington and Jefferson’s
old foes: the British
monarchy. Huzzah.
As the American left tries
to dismantle its nation’s
founding myths because of
white supremacy, suddenly
we snaggletoothed redcoats
and our overbearing, tax-
hungry royal overlords
don’t look so terrible. The
Hanoverians are back in
fashion, and the Boston Tea
Party has begun to look like
what it really was: a tragic
and unnecessary waste of
perfectly good brew.
“Without the revolution,
the British would have
abolished slavery sooner
and kept the genocide of the
Native Americans vaguely in
check,” is how one pal
explained it to me. “We’d
have been more like
Canada.” How aboot that.Wasps have lost their
sting but can party hard
At a notably Waspy country
club wedding somewhere
near Miami, America’s old
ruling elite didn’t seem very
bothered by the pasting
being doled out to their
venerable ancestors. These
are the families and social
castes that once ran America
(and so the world) at the
height of its power. They
won world wars, launched
New Deals and creamed off
the top of an economic
miracle that reshaped the
planet.
Yet you won’t find many
of them in the Biden
administration today: the
show is being run by peoplewho are Catholic, black,
Jewish and Hispanic. There
isn’t a single Wasp on the
Supreme Court now and
hardly any in the cabinet.
No one wants the lantern-
jawed preppies in charge
any more: the Democrats
are too woke and the
Republicans too fruit-loopy.
And so the Brooks
Brothers brigade has
sensibly retreated from the
front line. As far as I can tell,
they now seem to spend all
their time on golf, fly-fishing
and managing one another’s
trust funds. My God,
though, they still know how
to throw a party.The sad truth
about books
I ended my whistlestop tour
of the east coast at
Washington’s best bookshop,
Capitol Hill Books. Second-
hand bookshops have long
been among my favourite
places: musty, esoteric and
full of intriguing possibilities.
And yet as I plod towards
the first foothills of middle
age, I’ve started to feel rather
differently about them. No
longer just exhilarated by the
thought of all the books I
could read, I now feel a little
saddened by all the books I
will never start. Nonetheless,
I bought a perky-looking
travelogue about following in
the footsteps of Captain
Cook, because you really
never know when the mood
will take you.NEWMAN’S
VIEW
Josh Glancy
Week ending
comically sloppy and silly and having a
mad private life, however, is that your
team will begin to think that is the way to
behave, and eventually they will take it
too far, which is how we end up with
members of Downing Street staff,
despicably, being rude to cleaners.
Johnson may have sacked
everyone in Downing Street —
apart, obviously, from himself —
but who has the careering
shopping trolley replaced them
with? It’s not going to be better
people, is it? Just the first person
who says yes.In a too-Gray report, No 10’s sloppiness and
entitlement blaze in hideous Technicolor
Camilla Long
Have you thought about
what to wear for your next
court appearance? Will you
go for the full lemon French
Fancy, à la Rebekah Vardy, or
Kate Moss’s “subversive”
pussybow blouse?
I have been reading, with
astonishment, the acres of
superficial fashion faffle
written about the sleek jacket
and blouse Moss chose last
week for her three-minute
appearance as a witness in
Johnny Depp’s libel case
against Amber Heard.
The Guardian dedicated a
whole article to telling us the
pussybow was an item worn
by women “starting to invade
male spaces [such as] the
golf course”. (I’ve never seen
anyone wear a pussybow to
play golf.) We also learnt the
blouse was “directly
feminine” but could be
“hypermasculinsed” if worn
with trousers. Balenciaga
itself, the paper noted,
opened a show with a black
satin version paired with “a
latex gimp mask”.
I know column inches
must be filled, but Moss
wasn’t appearing in a case
about a lost hat. She was
telling us Depp didn’t throw
her down a flight of stairs but
helped her after a slip and
called for help. Does anyone
wonder why we struggle to
take women seriously, when
even nasty, brutal cases
such as this are reduced to
people screaming, “OMG
amazing manicure” or “look
at her shirt”?
Could this case be
trivialised any further?Fashionista
idiocy has its
place but it’s
I not in court
f ever I need to torture a Russian
agent, or horribly neutralise some
dinner party bore, I will read out
pages 16 and 17 of the Sue Gray
report. It is here that the world’s
driest civil servant reaches her
zenith. Of course it’s possible that
Boris Johnson’s birthday was, for at
least some part of its sagging 20
minutes, really jolly good fun. But the
one Gray seems to be reporting sounds
as dull as a conference for photocopier
salesmen in Hull. No crowds of people,
no songs, no Colin the caterpillar cake,
no pics of Carrie, no Lulu Lyttle, who
actually said she’d attended. He must
have been thrilled.
Every single word of the aptly named
Gray report reads, unsurprisingly, like
ditchwater. The press has done a much
better job of revealing the licentious
mess at the centre of Downing Street,
presided over by the indecisive, chaotic
“shopping trolley”, as Dominic
Cummings calls Johnson: the endless,
numerous parties, including three in
one night, while they sniggeringly wrote
the rules for the little people.
Gray, by contrast, has bent over
backwards to soften blows and conceal
identities and offer up lame “official
photographs” as if anything officially
released by Johnson would convey the
truth, adding, weakly, that nearly all of
the No 10 press office came in over the
pandemic. Doesn’t she get it? Everyone
worked full-time over the pandemic. In
fact, the only people who weren’t
working were people in Downing Street,
who were dancing, singing and vomiting
while sneering at the cleaners who
actually tried to help them, by washing
down the walls where they’d spilt their
cheap red wine.
I know it’s not cool to go on about the
parties — as Johnson himself put it, as if
addressing one of his cheated-on wives:
“Move on” — but I don’t want to move on
when I read the details. Just as some
people are triggered by jokes about trans
women, I find disorganisation,
sloppiness and incompetence triggering.
Who, for example, invites 200 people to
a party during the most severe lockdown
of the whole pandemic? How is it that 83
whole people were fined? And who has a
physical fight — or, as Gray limply puts it,
“an altercation” — at a drinks party infront of colleagues? How are these
people in power?
Johnson claims he has changed the
entire senior management, but I don’t
think anything has changed at all. The
country is still being run by 22-year-old
drunk comms lightweights in red
trousers who didn’t quite make it to
Google. One of these creatures stayed at
one of the parties until 4.20am, alone
for the last hour. If that isn’t a one-act
play, I don’t know what is. What were
they doing? Trying to locate the
corporate slide out of the building?
Read any of the reporting and a
picture emerges of extreme Gen Z
entitlement and people just doing
what they want. There is no one, for
example, to tell them the working day
does not finish at 4.30pm. No one
questions why there is still an “internal
events team” when internal events
should not, by law, be happening. No
one thinks to ask whether it’s really
appropriate to do karaoke in Downing
Street. Of course it is, if your cultural
idols are Ed Sheeran and Kylie Jenner.
People also seem unsure of the
chain of command — even senior
figures: Lee Cain, the prime minister’s
former head of communications, tells
Johnson’s private secretary, Martin
Reynolds — Party Marty — that one of
the bigger parties is “somewhat of a
comms risk”, but still lets it happen, and
even goes.
Reynolds himself, who uses more
exclamation marks than a Love Island
influencer, is now being lined up as
ambassador to Saudi Arabia. I know
politicians are useless, but what kind of a
system allows a man like this to fail
upwards? Is it a system mired in laziness,
corruption and mediocrity, like the one
run by Boris Johnson? They must have
looked at him messing up every single
policy launch and just thought: “I know
what he’ll want — a party.”
I often wish he’d simply been made
mayor of Britain, an entirely novelty/
ceremonial role, rather than prime
minister, so he could do all the
narcissistic self-validating comms stuff
with his tech muppets — the videos, the
silly projects, the parachuting into
Ukraine — without being responsible for
anything, especially not the gnarly
important stuff, like inflation and theDowning Street have seen Boris Johnson, with Rishi Sunak, messing up everything, and thought: “He needs a party”cost of living. Next year, when people
are ill because they can’t afford food,
we’ll be so glad we wasted six months
debating the booze suitcase.
Johnson comes from a background
where it is regarded as beneath one
to make an effort: men like him are
loath to stick to the rules because that
would involve admitting the rules apply
to them.
He exists in a terminal fantasy where
he is the son of some swashbuckling
lord, a man who believes “personal
responsibility” is for train drivers and
secretaries. The problem with actingPAThe country is
run by 22-year-old
lightweights
in red trousers