‘I’ve seen no evidence of Andy being anti-London,” the capital’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, told the Evening Standard last week, which is quaint and adorable: evidence is so 2009. This is all about feels. Some feel that the prime minister disfavours the capital because he frequently mentions that neoliberalism hasn’t delivered a fair deal for the north of England; tacitly, then, someone’s deal has been unfair in the other direction, and that would be the south, which must be London. Where else would Burnham mean – Hastings? The institution of No 10 North gestures audibly towards there being some problem with the OG Downing Street, and the use of the words “Whitehall” and “Westminster” as anything but geographical denominations – connoting “faceless” or “out of touch” or “rigid” or “having contempt for the ordinary person” – gives strong anti-London vibes, since Whitehall and Westminster are, indisputably, in London.
You could group all that as leftwing shorthand. For those moments when you want to describe a shallow, mammon-worshipping society, lurching blindly from one shiny, meaningless prize to the next, empty of proper feeling for others or for nature, “London” pretty well covers it.
That vibe – which only ever described a sliver of the capital, basically the bit of Notting Hill where Boris Johnson might once have lived and Canary Wharf – was repurposed by the (British) right wing a decade ago to become the “metropolitan elite”. In 2016, this version of the typical Londoner had all the same characteristics as before – they’re in a bubble, they’re rolling in gold, they neither understand nor care about the conditions of the common man – but with the appended trait of liberalism, or wokeratiness (if you prefer).
By a process so transparently syllogistic and stupid that for a while it was hard to even discuss it without howling like a wolf, the expression of any attitude that might distinguish you from Enoch Powell placed you squarely in the “metropolitan liberal elite” and therefore rendered you dispensable, inauthentic. There were a ton of other markers of privilege – coffee shops, public transport infrastructure, tofu, the Guardian! – so you were checkmated everywhere you went. This wasn’t really about living in London, or even any big city: you could get your passport to the metropole from drinking matcha, believing in universal human rights or knowing how to board public transport, rather than dithering near the door like an idiot. But obviously all of this was so much more rife in the capital.
This is quite distinct from what the global right wing hates about Londoners, which is, briefly, that we’re savages who won’t stop killing each other. The former Guardian staffer Gary Younge came back from the US in 2016, where he had been embedded with the Maga right, with a fascinating account of a dinner with some Republicans who had asked him how he could possibly feel safe living in London, now that the Muslims had elected “their” mayor and the rest of us weren’t even allowed guns.
It seemed so extraordinary then, and now is an absolute commonplace, to hear the capital described as a “stabby wasteland” where grinding poverty interlaces with intractable race wars to create a brutal place, the global nidus of civilisational decay. There’s some overlap with the British right, insofar as London is where multiculturalism is supposed to have failed, and taken society down with it. But there are no liberal elitists in the global right’s concept of “Londonistan”; it would be way too rough and dangerous for our luxury-softened paws. No data or firsthand testimonials can dispel this myth of the capital. It works better if it isn’t true; it makes insisting on reality that little bit more exhausting.
None of this answers, definitively, the question of whether the prime minister hates London, since there are signals in the other direction. His plan to give regional mayors a slice of their tax take would work better for Khan than almost anyone, what with London’s feverish mammon-love.
I will meet some of these detractors halfway and accept that Londoners definitely lack something in the areas of gentleness and humility. To everyone else, I’d channel Millwall: no one likes us, we don’t care. Multiculturalism in action, in a single London heart.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
