John Walsh: Tales of the City

'The Home Secretary is revealed as a kebab-scoffing hard nut who might enjoy several pints of an evening'

Tuesday 22 January 2008 01:00 GMT
Comments

There are so many questions to be asked about Jacqui Smith and the Kebabgate scandal, it's hard to know where to start. What was a cabinet minister, holder of one of the top four jobs in the Government, doing nipping into Katies [sic] Kebabs and Burgers in Peckham at 5pm, to procure £3.90-worth of processed lamb? It was teatime. Couldn't someone have brought her cucumber sandwiches and millefeuille? Don't the perks of high office run to a selection of ad hoc savouries? Did she just not fancy them? Who the hell does fancy a doner kebab at five in the afternoon? Most fans admit the need to be on the far side of eight pints of Pride before the prospect of mechanically recovered lamb stuffed into a pitta envelope holds any appeal.

Do you see what's happened? At a stroke, our notions about Ms Smith have altered. Far from being a bureaucratic, blue-stockingy mouthpiece for Gordon Brown's law-and-order policies, she's revealed as a doner-scoffing, vulgarian hard nut, who probably enjoys several pints and, on finishing them, wipes her mouth with the back of her hand.

As for the burly policeman who accompanied her to Peckham, I wonder if his function is less bodyguard and more sidekick. ("Where shall we do lunch, Graham? Peckham again?" "Nah, 'ome secretary, I cdn't face it two days runnin'. But I 'ear there's this place in Soho called Arbutus, does pig cheeks in balsamic vinegar." "Okeydokey.") She will obviously have need of him when she embarks on a damage-limitation exercise, in which she'll walk through London streets to demonstrate that they're safe.

The row about Ms Smith's ambulatory regimen is puzzling for London-lovers. Why was the Home Secretary asked if she'd feel safe walking the streets of Hackney, as if Hackney was the lowest circle of the hell? And why did she reply, "I just don't think that's a thing people do, is it, really?" Hackney has become so gussied up in the past few years, it's as trendy as Greenwich Village. The worst you have to fear is the conversation of yakking art-lovers who've just come from the White Cube gallery in Hoxton Square. Kingsland Road is now crammed with Vietnamese restaurants. The Columbia Road flower market might once have been home to Eliza Doolittles; now it's populated by upper-middle-class painters called Lucinda. You can hardly move in nearby Shoreditch, not because of footpads or evil-smelling Lascars who'd nick you with their shiv for a ha'penny, but because of the chaps in William Hunt suits heading for the east London Soho House, with its rooftop swimming pool. Hackney and environs is about as much a "no-go area" as the King's Road, Chelsea.

Of course, there are some places in the metropolis where solitary midnight ramblers might feel nervous – a few moody estates around Stockwell and New Cross and Kilburn – but it's stretching things to claim that gangs of thugs routinely lurk in certain districts. They don't. They're usually in transit. The hoodies and rude boys and iPod-pinchers find people to mug en route from one district to another, on buses and trains.

Opposition voices trying to make capital out of her remarks merely contribute to a collective hysteria. The shadow Home Secretary, David Davis, boomed: "This [ie, the "I wouldn't feel safe walking in Hackney" line] is an astonishing admission by the Home Secretary. It is shameful that you can walk the streets of New York, Tokyo, Paris and Berlin safely at night, but not the streets of London." Mr Davis is spectacularly wrong. These capitals do harbour areas of extreme dodginess. I'd like to see him wandering through Harlem or the Bronx at midnight, or patrolling the banlieus of Paris, inhabited by the disaffected poor that M. Sarkozy charmingly called "scum" three years ago. We should be proud of the way London has developed, as its ghettos have become bourgeoisified and its poorer quarters groomed into halfway-decent communities. We shouldn't encourage Cassandra-like warnings from people who want to foment a 21st-century myth about the violence of London; people who don't know the metropolis outside the palace of Westminster, and couldn't tell a Dalston Junction from a doner kebab.

Political campaigns get dirtier as they go. In the US, we have Bill Clinton making personal comments about Barack Obama, and Mr Obama accusing Bill of lying. Here, the London mayoral contest is hotting up with allegations that Ken Livingstone drank Scotch during official meetings, in breach of the rules. Last night's Channel 4 documentary, Dispatches, showed the mayor drinking something at 10am while in session with members of the London Assembly. In October, he was seen sipping an "amber liquid" while meeting voters. Like the three witches in Macbeth, the documentary makers inspect the substance, and report that there's alcohol in it, to which Mr Livingstone replies, "It's the whisky that keeps me going, otherwise I just cough." I don't know the outcome of this inquiry into what seems a minor transgression. But how detached was Channel 4 in investigating Livingstone, so close to the vote? The whiff of scandal is such a gift to Boris Johnson and other mayoral candidates, you'd almost think they'd commissioned the programme. That couldn't be true, could it?

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