The future of London: Less Shaun Bailey, more sausage rolls
Plus taxi grenades and crazy horses.
It’s official: Sadiq Khan would have to film himself kicking a kitten in order to lose this election
A new poll has confirmed what we pretty much already knew: Shaun Bailey has more chance of winning the next series of The Masked Singer than he does of winning next month’s mayoral election.
According to the poll, Khan leads Bailey by 47 per cent to 26 per cent. And if you take second preferences into account, those numbers go to 66 per cent versus 34 per cent.
That means Bailey is set to suffer the worst defeat of a Conservative candidate since we started doing this whole London Mayor thing about twenty years ago.
Is there any hope for Shaun? In a word: no.
Last month it was reported that the Tory party had “pulled the plug” on his campaign funding, and despite Holly Valance’s husband’s attempts to raise a million quid for him, it looks like the coffers are bare.
This week Bailey called on Londoners to stop “flagellating” themselves over statues linked to Britain’s colonial past, and suggested an alternative measure of racial “acceptance” would be “to imagine marrying me. When you get to the point where you could quite happily marry me, then you're there.”
At this point his only chance of looking remotely mayoral is to tweet out a video of himself alongside the Housing Secretary, Robert Jenrick, who can’t even put a high vis jacket on properly:
And don’t even get us started on that Daz-inspired logo.
Of course, it’s easy to point and laugh at this point (and that’s exactly what the New Statesman have done with their Seven explanations for Shaun Bailey’s comically bad London mayoral campaign article), but it’s also worth remembering that London has had no problems in the past electing Tory mayors with a habit of sticking their foot in their mouth in highly questionable ways.
But, then again, you don’t have to be a political sciences graduate to understand the enormous leg up Boris Johnson had over Shaun Bailey. Which raises the question: did the Conservatives ever really believe Bailey could win this?
Beyond pints and Primark: Other things returning to London this week
We’re sure you’ll have already seen the pictures of people queueing outside of Primark and all those ‘Soho revellers’ (does anyone actually use the verb ‘revel’ outside of headline writers?). But there are a few other elements of London life that have popped up this week that are worth noting.
Big Issue sellers are back. The Big Issue had to put a halt to selling on streets during lockdown, but as of Monday all 1,400 vendors are back, with PPE and the ability to take contactless payment helping things to get back up and running. We imagine the massive drop in commuters is going to make things a bit harder though, so if you want to support the Big Issue you can go to to their online map and find your nearest vendor.
Congestion is back. According to data from TomTom, road journeys in London at 8am on Monday “took an average of 42% longer compared with free-flow conditions.” That’s up 10% at that time on April 6.
Queues are back (in Lambeth):
Taxi grenades are back! What do you mean you don’t know what a taxi grenade is? Well, apparently a team of “cleaning specialists” has been sanitising London’s black cabs using “electronic spray guns and non-toxic 'grenades' of hospital-grade detergent”. The video over at ITV News shows the spray guns in use, but no signs of the grenades. Maybe it was just too dangerous to use them with the film crew nearby?
Public transport strikes are back. 4,000 London bus drivers have voted for strike action over a ‘remote sign-on policy’ which means drivers wouldn’t report to a depot anymore, instead they’d have to meet their bus at a bus stop. Actual strikes haven’t been confirmed yet but Unite have said that will happen very soon if TFL don’t rule out the new policy.
Stampeding horses are back! Nature is healing and wildlife is returning to the Chiselhurst area of South London. Either that or these horses keep breaking out of their field and freaking out drivers as they “stampede towards them”. Obviously, having horses running around busy roads isn’t safe for anyone, not least for the horses. MyLondon says they have contacted the owner for comment. Maybe the RSPCA should be next on the list.
And while Topshop won’t be coming back, it might be replaced by a Greggs
Bloomberg has published an article on how they see the West End evolving over the next few months as big names like Topshop and Debenhams disappear and new ones take their place.
According to Bloomberg it’s not just online retailers that will benefit as we’re all “flush with lockdown savings,” (erm… sure) and “desperate for an excuse to leave the house.”
Apparently, some names you might be seeing more of are Greggs who are “looking at about six more sites in central London” (only six?!), Pets at Home (thanks to all the “cats, dogs, rabbits and rodents” we welcomed into our homes during lockdown), and “the German no-frills supermarkets Aldi and Lidl”.
A Lidl on Oxford Street? Now that would be something.
And the rest
Yesterday evening a man was stopped and arrested while walking down The Mall carrying an axe. There were no reports of any injuries.
The inquest into the deaths of Jack Merritt and Saskia Jones in 2019’s Fishmongers’ Hall attacks has been hearing how convicted terrorist Usman Khan “told a prisoner rehabilitation conference that he was a reformed character who had turned away from the ‘wrong path’” minutes before he went on to kill Merritt and Jones with a knife.
The inquest has has also been shown pictures and video of civil servant Darryn Frost attacking Usman Khan with a narwhal tusk.
Met police officer PC Charlie Harrison has been sentenced to two years and three months in prison after breaking Carl Abraham’s knee in what the judge called “a clear case of racial profiling.”
One piece of food news we forgot to mention in our last edition: Taste London is coming back. The festival is due to return in July for two weeks, rather than the normal one week, so they can spread the crowds out over a number of days and keep things safe.
If you’re looking to treat yourself to a night in a hotel when they reopen next month it’s worth having a look at Hotel Week London’s website. The’ve brought a bunch of pretty nice hotels together to offer discounted rates and some “unique value-added packages” to boost business. And who doesn’t love a value-added package?