London is the focus of the world as since no time since the Swinging Sixties. Personally, I find it rather thrilling – but it doesn’t make me want to move back. With all the kerfuffles going on at assorted hotspots around the globe, you’d think Elon Musk and JD Vance wouldn’t have much time for little old us. But there they are, setting the agenda on rape gangs (thank goodness we got rid of the police and politicians’ twee little ‘grooming gangs’ which sounded like mobile poodle parlours) and freedom of speech (interesting how Keir Starmer dismissed those calling for an inquiry into the rape gangs as right-wing bandwagon jumpers until Brother Vance and Tech Bro Musk got involved).

I think we all know where the rot set in: with ‘Sir’ Sadiq Khan strutting about his Potemkin village

I think we all know where the rot set in: with ‘Sir’ Sadiq Khan strutting about his Potemkin village, putting on lovely firework shows for the tourists, then gaslighting Londoners by telling them their city is safe when we all know it’s a hellhole of knife crime and phone theft. With his sugar daddy ‘Sir’ Keir Starmer (isn’t it curious how every socialist needs a ‘Sir’ in his name just to feel like a real man?) behind him, you could forgive this little man – who is small in every way a man can be small – for mistaking himself as big, strutting like a suburban sergeant major behind the heavily-gated walls of City Hall. But he mustn’t kid himself: Khan has wrecked London.

That doesn’t mean that some of us who have moved away don’t still feel the lure of London. Amongst my friends, the prevalence of what estate agents call ‘the Five Year Itch’ can be seen; lockdown buyers who moved to the countryside in 2020 are now craving more than space, it having finally occurred to them – d’oh! – that this was what they spent their teenage years dreaming of getting away from.

The most entertaining and insightful of these is the journalist Katie Glass, whose vain attempts to convince herself that she didn’t miss London have delighted me over the past half decade: last year she could even be found offering her country cottage to no less than her arch-enemy JD Vance, so desperate was she to unload it even for a season; MY LAST BLEAK MIDWINTER IN THE COUNTRYSIDE! she crowed this Christmas.

Me, I can smugly say that I suffer no such buyer’s remorse. I left London for Brighton, to chase a man, thirty years ago, and thence from Brighton to Hove to chase the only outdoor swimming pool in that all-important BN3 destination. (The postcode awarded the accolade of most sought-after in England and Wales for home buyers aged between 25 and 44 for the past three years in a row now.) At first I missed it and would go back every fortnight. Then I’d go back once a month. Then came the happy day when I realised a whole summer had passed and I’d made the bits of London I was interested in come to me, generally bringing a few lovely little wraps of that special capital cocaine.

On the odd occasions I was forced to visit London over the past three decades, I couldn’t get over how shabby it looks; like the worst parts of Brighton, and it smells like it too; Pepe le Pew’s not the only skunk in town, shall we say.

The soul and the style have evaporated; the 1980s were the last days of disco for both newspapers and publishing, and I found myself young, hot and courted by both. It was a time of ‘bold advances’ to quote a line from the Mel & Kim song ‘Respectable’ which, along with ‘West End Girls’, played on a loop in our sumptuously sleazy playpen of choice: the revivified Soho, which was always about chancers extracting cash in return for the promise of a thrill, now translated into realms beyond the sexual. Everywhere you went, there were people with money dangling it in front of people with none, and a lunch lasting anywhere between three and 13 hours was a good time to do it.

It’s hard for millennials who have grown up after the 2005 scrapping of limited drinking hours to get their soft little heads around, but us ancient ravers still remember living under the Defence of the Realm Act of 1914, one section of which restricted the hours of licensed premises from 12.00 to 14.40 and 18.30 to 21.30. In the late 1980s, the licensing laws were relaxed. Suddenly you could slake your thirst in a public place from 11 in the morning until 11 at night. In my somewhat theoretical capacity as ‘political columnist’ at the Mail On Sunday, I was lunched by the good (Bill Deedes), the bad (Alan Clark) and the ugly (Jeffrey Archer), often reflecting that the road to L – L’Epicure, L’Escargot and L’Equipe – was paved with good intentions.

With ‘Sir’ Sadiq presiding over the managed decline of this once-great city, you couldn’t pay me to go back

‘Those were the days when a blow job was the dessert!’ a fellow hackette recalled; the Labour politician she succumbed to was particularly persistent with journalistes over lunch, reprimanding another friend when she turned down his reptilian advances: ‘Your loss – I’m like a broom handle in the morning!’

It’s not like that now. You wouldn’t get all those young creatives from Bananarama to Boy George squatting in all those abandoned West Wonderland mansions; they’ve been sold to and shuttered up by non-doms. I couldn’t get a mortgage on a three-bedroom flat in Bloomsbury as I did in 1985.

Lockdown was the final nail in the coffin for London. As I wrote in 2024, even Soho wasn’t safe from the fun police: yes, Soho, once the life and soul of London, now a shadow of its old self. It was once a part of town that actually felt like one imagined London would feel when one was a provincial child. Now, it’s inhabited by do-gooders who think even something as pleasurable and practical as dining under the stars is problematic; as the Guardian reported: ‘In Soho, the centre of London’s nightlife, residents say alfresco dining and drinking has disrupted access and created intolerable noise. People who have lived there for decades are considering leaving, according to the Soho Society.’ Off they trot, then, preferably to a place which has not been synonymous with noisy fun across three centuries.

My friend, even as she attempts to move back, knows that the thrill is gone, and only relatively exciting compared to the dreariness of the countryside; ‘It was just past midnight and the sex shops were all shut,’ she told me. ‘I couldn’t find a lap-dancing club or a peep-show – even Sunset Strip has turned into a karaoke bar.’

London is still wild, but not in the great way it used to be (‘deviating from the intended path’ – Merriam-Webster). Rather, it fits other, more sinister definitions – ‘Uncontrolled/Disturbed: Lacking control, marked by confusion, or going beyond usual limits (e.g., wild rage). ‘Not civilised or socialised’).

So with ‘Sir’ Sadiq presiding over the managed decline of this once-great city, you couldn’t pay me to go back there – not even if you bought me back my old three-bedroomed flat in Bloomsbury and handed it to me on a plate.