Crossed Rails
Owen Hatherley
Around twenty years ago, public transport in London suddenly got much, much better. The tube and the buses, which had been neglected for decades by central government, improved remarkably – especially the buses. Of course, London’s transport was always (even per capita) better than that of the rest of urban England. This was helped by the fact that the Thatcher and Major governments had exempted it from the worst – they had not privatized the Underground, and while they had privatized the buses, a clause had left the capital’s buses to be publicly regulated. I moved to London in 1999, and even then, at the start of the New Labour boom, you could still feel the neglect, a dereliction that had been lethal in the Kings Cross fire of 1987, caused by uncollected rubbish under a wooden es
calator. Aside from the somewhat toy-like light railway across the redeveloped Docklands, new transport construction hadn’t kept pace with the sharp increase in the capital’s population. And then in a few years, everything changed.
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Star Quality
Alice Blackhurst
Last autumn in Paris, I spoke with a gallerist who claimed to have been friendly with the incomparable Hervé Guibert during the brief flare of his thirty-six-year lifespan. Naturally, I wanted details, and wheedled her for gossip over one too many espressos. Did Guibert really drive his long-time infatuation, Vincent – the protagonist of Crazy about Vincent (1986) – to a tragic, alcoholic existence, isolating him from all his friends? Didn’t he owe numerous photographers, benefactors, fellow writers and a clutch of hangers-on significant amounts of money, which he never intended to pay back? ‘Peut-être’, the gallerist sighed, swatting away my evidently all too Anglo-Saxon questions, ‘vraiment un beau gosse … he had – you could only understand this if y
ou met him – such star quality.’
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Fresh Disasters
Tom Hazeldine
Given how things have been going, defeat for the governing Conservatives in two Westminster byelections yesterday wasn’t unexpected. All the same, the results make another Tory push to topple Johnson more likely. Tiverton and Honiton in rural Devon (Tory majority: 24,000) fell to the Liberal Democrats on a 30% swing, the third such capsizal in little over a year. On paper it was one of the 50 safest Conservative seats in the country, so you can hear the rattle of Conservative nerves. The Telegraph’s Allison Pearson wrote ahead of the poll that were reversals of such magnitude widely seen at a general election (an unlikely contingency), the Tories would face ‘an extinction-level event’. The Party chairman resigned early this morning.
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