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........

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