Missing London, and why I intend to do more of it

“You must miss this,” my driver said as we sat in a huge traffic jam on the edge of the City of London on Monday.

To our left a bus inched past, leaving just about enough clearance to accommodate a sheet of graphene. To our right assorted Lycra-clad loons on bikes wove gaily in and out of the traffic, scattering pedestrians like confetti.

“Are you trying to be funny?” I asked, thinking fondly of the beauty and tranquillity of the corner of Northumberland where I had just spent the weekend.

I lived in London for nearly 30 years, and have never regretted handing back the keys of my rented flat in 2006. Though I do bitterly regret selling my small stake in the capital’s property market 20 years earlier.

I felt sure things must have peaked, having more than doubled my money on my fourth floor walk-up flat in Earl’s Court in less than five years. I pocketed a magnificent £73,000. Not so long ago I thoroughly depressed myself by checking a property website and finding that it last changed hands for not much short of a million.

Which is, by any standards, utter lunacy. If I were starting my career again, even in an overpaid trade like financial public relations, I could surely never aspire to buy my own home.

The Bank of England faces the uncomfortable challenge of setting interest rates that will dampen the undeniably overheating South East property market without visiting ruin on the rest of us.

It’s quite enough of a challenge maintaining a single currency in a country united by centuries of shared history, language and values, when its regional economies diverge so markedly.

How anyone ever imagined it was going to work satisfactorily across an entity as diverse as the European Union is completely staggering. But then, of course, they never did. The Euro was merely a lever to help achieve the grand objective of building a United States of Europe. Whether for the noble purpose of ensuring peace and prosperity or to allow a small elite to strut the world stage with added swagger I leave to you to judge.

A big fan of the Euro, you may recall, was one Tony Blair: a man still fond of global swaggering. We would be lumbered with the Euro now but for the sterling (in every sense) efforts of Gordon Brown, who deserves to have a statue erected in Kirkcaldy just for this. Even if he was perhaps motivated less by an appreciation of the Euro’s economic insanity than by a determination to deny Tony his desired place in history as the man who abolished the pound.

But, of course, Mr Blair has no need to worry about his place in history. That is assured thanks to Afghanistan and Iraq – and hasn’t that gone well?

Invading Iraq to eliminate non-existent weapons of mass destruction and clamp down on non-existent terrorists, we have managed to put great swathes of the country in the hands of real terrorists of particular savagery. The same brutes we support, oddly enough, when they are fighting the evil dictator Assad in Syria.

When the terror campaign spreads beyond the Middle East, as it surely will, I imagine that it will make rather more impact on life in London and our other great non-UKIP-voting, cosmopolitan cities than it will in the rural backwoods of the north.

Another great reason for all of us to count our blessings and ask just one question whenever we are asked to attend a business meeting in London: why?

If God had intended all our decision-making to be concentrated in one square mile, why would he have allowed us to invent videoconferencing and superfast broadband?

If the latter ever comes to my little hamlet, I’ll hardly ever need to leave the house again. And the cost of extending it would be a tiny fraction of the money we propose to lavish on HS2, to get people to their unnecessary meetings in London a fraction quicker.

Or, for that matter, on unnecessary wars that have achieved the exact opposite of what they were billed as being for, at a human cost that is almost unbearable to contemplate.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Let's build a new Royal yacht - and bring the old one here

One thing is for sure: Tony Blair is really going to struggle with delivering Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” when it comes up on the karaoke machine at party nights in his twilight home.

So far he has publicly regretted the (admittedly nominal) abolition of foxhunting and the Freedom of Information Act. Under pressure at the Chilcot enquiry, he also said he was sorry for the loss of life in Iraq.

However, he is on record as having no regrets about removing Saddam, befriending Gadaffi or indeed remaining silent about baby Leo’s MMR jab.

What else, in the fullness of time, might he come to see as a mistake? The most recent example of the benefit of hindsight came in the debate about a possible new Royal yacht, when it was revealed that Mr Blair now regretted getting rid of Britannia. An unsurprising revelation to all of us who pointed out at the time that it was an egregious error.

The value of Britannia for projecting British prestige and promoting trade around the world was incalculable, though arguably it could have been worked harder for this purpose. I can vividly recall the surge of pride I experienced each time I saw her, even when being rudely awoken by a destroyer’s 21-gun salute as the yacht appeared through the mist at the start of Cowes week.

Since this column was recently maligned as Tory propaganda, let me concede that her demise was not Mr Blair’s fault. The decision to decommission the ship was taken by the Major government, which then decided in 1997 that it would spend £60 million on a new yacht, scheduled to enter service in time for the Queen’s Golden Jubilee in 2002.

Even Denmark can run to a functioning Royal yacht - and it is 20 years older than Britannia

Cue outrage from Labour in general, and Gordon Brown in particular, who had not been consulted prior to the announcement by then defence secretary Michael Portillo. It is good to note that he has since moved on to a career evidently more suited to his talents, spotting trains on TV.

Look out! No, on second thoughts ...

How could a country in Britain’s dire economic state waste that sort of money? That was the question being asked as we poured £800 million down the useless black hole of the Millennium Dome.

Now the cost of a new yacht has apparently risen to an eye-watering £80 million. Precisely what we are about to squander on opening and closing ceremonies for the London Olympics that will be over in a flash and doubtless occupy little space in our collective memories.

The London Olympic mascots apparently hanged. Not at all a bad idea.

For comparative purposes, it might also be interesting to tot up the countless billions of taxpayers’ money wasted over recent years on endless reorganisations of the health service and education, grotesquely overpriced private finance initiatives and defence procurement projects that have delivered nothing but scrap metal.

You could buy five new Royal yachts for the price of one Nimrod, scrapped before entering service

But who needs taxpayers’ money? I for one would be happy to contribute to the cost of a new national flagship, if someone opened a bank account for that purpose. Come to think of it, I am surprised that those industrious gentlemen in West Africa, who are forever e-mailing me about my lottery wins and deceased relatives, have not already got in on the act.

It would be a nice gesture if a certain lightly taxed, globetrotting, multi-millionaire retired PM with an uneasy conscience could chuck in a few quid, too.

Personally I would simply confiscate Britannia from those ungrateful Scots in Leith, bung in some new engines and set her back to work. But if a new vessel that also provides sail training opportunities for young people has more appeal to the popular imagination, then that’s fine with me, too.

Though I would still tow Britannia somewhere a bit more attached to the concept she is named after. Like the Tyne, for example. Perhaps with a grand re-opening featuring ex-Prime Ministers performing karaoke. That should make Her Majesty smile.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

A world much in need of an agony aunt

Dear Auntie

I was driving past my favourite chip shop the other evening when I spotted the two brothers who run it having the most tremendous fight.

Naturally I did what anyone would have done in the circumstances. I pulled up, charged in and killed the elder brother who, in my opinion, had been throwing his weight around for far too long and seemed to be about to gain the upper hand.

Naturally I expected the younger brother to welcome my intervention and show a bit of gratitude, ideally in the form of free chips for life. But in fact he now seems distinctly sullen and resentful, claiming that he quite liked his brother, really, and certainly preferred him to me.

He also seems suspicious of my motives, and has emptied the deep fat fryer because he imagines for some reason that I was “just trying to get my hands on his oil”.

To make matters even worse, it now turns out that they were arguing because the younger brother has turned into a bit of a religious fanatic and wants to run things on a strict scriptural basis. He has now cancelled the shop’s orders for potatoes and everything else apart from five loaves and fishes, which he seems to think will last indefinitely. He just keeps looking at me in shining-eyed sort of way and asserting that “God will provide”.

Finally, he has thrown out all the shop’s materials for cleaning and pest control, making a bit of a nonsense of my attempts to smarten it up by instituting a “no fly” zone.

In short, the whole situation seems to be a complete mess and I am now wishing that I had just driven by instead of getting involved. What should I do?

Dear Keith

I am sorry to say that I receive letters like this all the time, usually from politicians and military chiefs after they have got themselves embroiled in troublesome conflicts in places like Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. Sooner or later it usually becomes clear that the one thing the people concerned have in common is their dislike of foreign intervention. Even though British politicians piled in, like you, simply to be helpful, they find that people are ungrateful and suspicious that the real motive is to get hold of their assets on the cheap.

It also often turns out that the people we hoped to assist are even less malleable than the evil dictators they ejected. Say what you like about Saddam Hussein, for example, but at least he kept a lid on militant Islam.

It’s going to be a frightful mess whatever any of you decide to do. Walk away and the odds are that everything will descend into total chaos, the price of oil will shoot through the roof, the world economy will collapse, and you will run distinctly short of chips. Stay on, and we will rack up huge bills at a time when we keep being told there is no money, servicemen will continue to die and there will be not one shred of gratitude in return.

Personally, I’d shout something like “Look at that, a cat playing the piano!” and run away as fast as you can while the surviving brother is distracted. Sadly this trick will be harder to pull off when it comes to extricating thousands of troops from Afghanistan.

But then it’s like the choice between accepting nuclear power, shivering in a cave or drowning as a result of the icecaps melting. There is no good solution. In simple terms, we’re all up the proverbial gum tree whatever we do.

But next time it is probably going to be best, on the whole, to remember the law of unintended consequences, put your foot down and keep on going.

Love, Auntie.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.