Daylight saving time: Don’t let the Scots steal this hour because they want a lie-in
No, no, that can't be right. They can't trifle with our hopes like that. It is now more than two years since the Greater London Authority renewed its campaigning for lighter winter evenings – and last week we thought we had a stunning breakthrough.
The Government said it was "minded to support" a Bill put forward by a heroic Tory MP called Rebecca Harris, calling for British Summer Time to be in force all year. We all had the strong impression that the Cabinet had abandoned the inertia and spinelessness of the last 40 years, and was going to support Mrs Harris in her bid to save lives, expand the economy and cheer everyone up. Then I pick up my paper yesterday and I find that there has apparently been a U-turn.
It now turns out that the support of the Government entirely depends on the Scots. Unless Alex Salmond and his team agree that there should be another look at daylight saving, the whole thing is once again going to be slammed back into the bulging filing cabinet of projects that are commonsensical (like repatriating some powers from the EU) but just too politically difficult to pull off. According to a Downing Street source, the whole thing is now "dead in the water". Come on, folks. This isn't good enough.
This requires a bit more guts and determination. We can't let the Scottish tail wag the British bulldog – and especially not when the change would be in the interests of the Scots themselves. The arguments are overwhelming, and especially in London, the motor of Britain's economy. Lighter winter evenings would enable all kinds of places to stay open an hour longer – sporting venues, monuments – with huge benefits for the tourist and service industries. The income boost was calculated last year at up to £720 million – a lot of money and a lot of jobs in tough times. Then there is the point that crime is far more likely to be committed at dusk than in the morning. A switch to lighter evenings would not only cut crime by three per cent – according to Home Office figures – but it would lead to a fall in fear of crime as well.
If we all had an extra hour of daylight in the evening, there would be significant savings in electricity bills – and a cut in CO₂ emissions of 80,000 tonnes in London alone. There would be less seasonally adjusted depression, say psychiatrists. You would no longer have that terrible Lapland sense that the day was over by 3pm and you might as well go and get drunk.
Mellitus, the saint who retook London from barbarians
“Mellitus?” said the guide with an air of surprise. I felt as if I had gone into Waitrose and asked for something quaint —like a hogs-head of mead.
After all, it’s tricky finding a Londoner who has heard of Mellitus. But Vivien Kermath is one of the accredited red-sashed guides of St Paul’s Cathedral. She knows her stuff.
“Of course,” she said. “Mellitus. AD 604. He built the first of several churches that have been on this site. Come this way, we have an icon.” “An icon?” I boggled.
We walked through the great church of Christopher Wren, past memorials of Nelson and Wellington. We passed where Lady Diana Spencer consecrated her ill-fated union to the Prince of Wales, and the list of former deans, including John Donne and his illustrious predecessor, Alexander Nowell, who discovered how to bottle beer – “probably his greatest contribution to humanity”, said Vivien.
At the far end of the church we came to the American memorial chapel, and there – perched above an illuminated book recording the names of the 28,000 Americans who gave their lives in the Second World War — is Mellitus.
Boris Johnson’s ‘Life of London’: exclusive extract
People go to art galleries for all sorts of reasons: to edify their souls, to make assignations, to get out of the rain. But it is not often they are rewarded with a thermonuclear bust-up between two of the world’s greatest artists.
The scene was the Royal Academy, then in its former home of Somerset House, in the final preparations for the summer show of 1831. From floor to ceiling, the walls were crammed with the offerings of the Academicians, each painting shouting to be noticed above its neighbours. To hold the centre space of a wall – that was clearly an accolade. To be excluded was an insult.
Into the principal room of the exhibition stomped a 56-year-old man with a battered stovepipe hat and a shiny black coat. In one hand he held an umbrella-cum-swordstick that he used on his continental travels. He had a powerful conk, a protruding chin and with an inside leg of only 19in long, he was stumpy even by the standards of the day. He might have been some Dickensian coachman or innkeeper, except for the pigment lodged beneath his fingernails.
He was Joseph Mallord William Turner, a painter so confident of his genius that he had already proclaimed, “I am the great lion of the day.” Now the great lion was seeking whom he might devour.
Once again his eye roamed over the Academy walls. There was no getting around it. His vast pink-and-gold fantasy of imperial Roman decay – Caligula’s Palace and Bridge – had vanished, to be replaced by some chocolate-boxy view of a large grey church. Then Turner’s blazing eyes alighted on the culprit – a man who had not only had the gall to remove Caligula’s Palace, but who had painted the very landscape that now hung in its place.
The lesson for Europe from the beach at Arromanches
If you want to see the original purpose of the European Union, then you should join me for a little pousse-café here on the beach. It is a beautiful scene. People are strolling in the autumn sunshine. Dogs and sail-surfers roam the sweeping, biscuit-coloured strand, and out in the bright blue bay you can still see the vast concrete lumps, left like the haphazard stepping-stones of some forgotten race of giants.
Yes, folks, I am looking at the hulking remnants of the Allied invasion’s Mulberry Harbours, and this beach is Arromanches. We have snuck over on an early-morning ferry from Portsmouth, to show the children where their grandfather came ashore in June 1944.
I had forgotten how this whole sector of Normandy is a monument to carnage. Among the apple orchards and the hedgerows and the dairy cows turning grass into camembert, you can see the white crosses. You can see the graveyards and memorials of the thousands upon thousands of Americans, British, Canadians and, yes, Germans, who died on the beaches and in the battles around Caen. You can imagine the blood in the water at Omaha and the puffs in the sand from the machine-gun bullets as the terrified marines prepared to leap from their landing craft.
Here at Arromanches you can see why the founding fathers of the EU decided that they were going to create a system that would lock Germany into Europe, and to make sure that nothing like D-Day ever had to happen again.
In many ways, I would say that the Common Market was a success. We now have a single market, where British people are allowed to come and live here, to trade, to make their lives wherever they like in a vast community of European nations. You can set yourself up as an aromatherapist in Alicante or a dentist in Lodz. You have a perfect right, as a Briton, to ply your trade as a ski instructor in Courchevel — and if some French union of ski instructors tries to block you, then you have single-market legislation to protect you.
London mayor Dick Whittington is a tough act to follow, discovers Boris Johnson
You think you know the story of Dick Whittington? Think again. That pantomime you see at Christmas at the Horsham Salvation Army Hall, starring TV’s Jason Donovan, with Ann Widdecombe as his furry feline friend, is in one sense an egregious piece of tabloid misreporting. But it is also a powerful lesson in how a top financier can sanitise his reputation and win the undying affection of the public.
The real Dick Whittington was not born poor. There is no evidence that he tied his possessions in a handkerchief suspended from a stick. He did not “turn again” at Highgate Hill, at the sound of Bow Bells. He was not a Mayor of London thrice, but four times. He did not have a cat.
He was born between 1354 and 1358 in Gloucestershire, and his parents were not peasants, but the lord and lady of the manor of Pauntley, with their own coat of arms. Richard Whittington’s only problem was that he was the youngest of three brothers. With no chance of inheriting, his options were (a) hang around Gloucestershire, hoping to meet a nice, rich girl; (b) study for the law at the Inns of Court; (c) enter the Church; (d) enrol for military service with a baron; or (e) become an apprentice.
He went for option (e). We don’t know exactly why he decided to become an apprentice mercer, but we do know that he made the four- or five-day hike to London, entering at Newgate in about 1371.
To be an apprentice was a serious business. You were required to attend Mass and absorb the sermon, and you had to turn out for archery practice at Smithfield. You might be of good family, but your existence was Spartan; a junior apprentice might sleep in the loft, and a senior apprentice would have to make do with a bale of hay in the house. You wore a flat, round cap and a very short haircut, with a coarse long coat, and you walked in front of your master or mistress at night with a lantern or with a long club about your neck.
