These Columns Write Themselves

Nick in the Standard. It's sad that I have to do this, but you may need some background: Times: Deutsche Bank crackdown on expenses of elite financiers; Crunch spells end of the City expense account (from the ES so probably the story Nick was referring to.

What seems like toughness to Deutsche Bank still looks like extravagance to those outside high finance. The mismatch in perceptions explains why this credit crunch will be different from previous economic crises.

Seriously, why is the 'mismatch in perceptions' different from 'previous economic crises'? It doesn't look any different from previous booms to me. Bankers pay a lot for lunch with clients. Who knew?

We are at the end of an unprecedented boom which has brought immigrants from all over Britain and the world and so transformed London's social geography that our old stereotypical certainties no longer make sense.

People never moved to London in the past. No, not at all.

Comedians and pundits scoff about "Hampstead intellectuals" and "Islington Lefties". Every time I hear them, I mutter, "get real".

Do they? He means buffoons like this.

Islington? Surely its bruschetta-eating middle classes are still in a fury with Blair about the Iraq war

Or this one (emphasis mine).

Sex, preferably gay and maybe incestuous, is a very good thing we are told. I looked across the playhouse and realised the intellectual crisis in London’s theatre I mentioned last week was deeper than I thought. Even the Islington audience seemed bored and embarrassed.

Good news for regular commenter Matthew: Nick identifies what he means by 'middle-class'.

A friend on The Economist worked out that a family setting out in London needed an income of £250,000-plus to count themselves wealthy - not rich, just upper-middle class.

Nick returns to his old socialist self and drops the self-pity for the final para which is less Marx or Keynes than Dr Pangloss.

The boom has shifted Londoners up and down the social hierarchy and turned us into Europe's most cosmopolitan city. If the cash machine breaks down, the gulf between the bankers and the rest will narrow - and London will change again into a poorer but more equal city.

We wish to become more equal and therefore we have economic depressions. (I'm sure this doesn't work.)

It's not as if the novels of Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell, and Anthony Powell aren't all about characters, usually in London, shifting up and down the social hierarchy. I don't know how one reckons cosmopolitanism, but London's been near the top since Roman times.

Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.

Which reminded me about 'immigrants from all over Britain':

The noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees is the high road which takes him to England!