London Diary: A rich banker’s wife in lockdown & #BlackLivesMatter 

Diversity bandwagon

The #Black Lives Matter campaign has prompted a chorus of mea culpas from white British businesses and cultural institutions. Some of Britain’s most high-profile corporate leaders have attacked their own companies for failing to increase racial diversity among the workforce, and promised to make up for it by setting targets to raise ethnic minorities’ representation at all levels.

In an open letter, top honchos of Tesco, John Lewis and broadcaster ITV— said that the “cycle of disengagement and inaction must end”.

“The sad truth is that organisations have not been ready to have a challenging and frank conversation about systemic racism within the four walls of their own offices,” they warned amid a barrage of complaints of racial discrimination.

The BBC, meanwhile, has announced that henceforth it will commission outside TV programmes where at least a fifth of the production team come from racially and economically diverse backgrounds. It has also decided to spend some £100 million on making “diverse and inclusive” programmes over the next three years.

If my memory serves right, I’ve heard similar pledges before—only for them to be forgotten once the fuss is over. Will it be any different this time?

Luxury lockdown

There are lockdown stories— and then there’s Shruti Advani’s account of her lockdown travails which has drawn widespread ridicule and outrage in equal measure.

Ms Advani is an affluent banker’s wife with considerable personal wealth of her own—a fully-paid member of the so-called “top 1 per cent” club that rules the world. So, she recoiled with horror when her daily fix of luxuries—food from Harrods, flowers from the appointments-only “Freddie’s Flowers”, grocery from upscale Ocado—was disrupted by the lockdown.

She was so upset that she wanted the world to know how her life had been ruined by a mere virus. So, she wrote a piece unburdening herself on the pages of The Financial Times, the bankers’ pink bible. Bemoaning the closure of the “food halls at Harrods, which had served customers (even) throughout the second world war” she wrote this meant that “We had to find our sustenance elsewhere.”

And then because she couldn’t do without a nanny she had to “give up” a spare room in her lavish apartment; and because she couldn’t do without expensive flowers, she “tripled” her usual order of Freddie’s bouquets. That was, she wrote, the “obvious place to start” as the lockdown loomed.

The backlash was brutal. She was called “tone deaf” and “out of touch”. Some wondered if it was real or a spoof. She has since claimed that she had indeed been trying to write a “posh parody” of her life.

“It was meant to take the piss out of people like me. Maybe I’m a shitty satirist. What can I say?” she told a newspaper.

You just said it, Ms.

Men, too, cry

While on the subject of lockdown, enter Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London.

Never known to miss a chance to leap on a passing bandwagon, he has given a tearful interview claiming how the suffering caused by Coronavirus has affected him personally.

“The past 10, 11 weeks have been the hardest of my professional life....I’ve struggled,” he told The Sunday Times adding for good measure that he has often cried and was particularly affected by the death of a bus driver because his own father was once a bus driver.

And the reason why he had decided to open up was because he didn’t want to pretend that big boys didn’t cry. Or as he put it: he didn’t pretend to be “an alpha male who demonstrates his virility by being superhuman”.

“Upside down” normality

Next time, you enter a British bookshop and find books displayed with their back, rather than, front covers facing them don’t try and turn them around. That’s the new post-lockdown normal.

Or as one bookstore owner put it: “Upside down is the new right way up.” The idea is that readers get to read the blurb without touching the book. Waterstones’ flagship store in Piccadilly, London, is among the leading booksellers trying out this new normal. And the feedback, we’re told, has been positive.

Conservative London

London’s image is portrayed as Britain’s most liberal and progressive city teeming with Left-wing intellectuals and multicultural identities. But it now turns out that it is, in fact, the country’s most socially and religiously conservative place driven by its large Catholic and Muslim population.

Londoners are much more likely to attend religious services and pray regularly than people in the rest of the country. They are also socially more conservative. More people in the Capital are opposed to same sex-marriage than their counterparts in other parts of the country, according to research by think tank Theos.

Its director, Elizabeth Oldfield, is not surprised by the findings. A global and diverse city is by its very nature “complicated”.

“In such a diverse city, no single story is the whole story.

And, lastly, Tony Blair says he hasn’t done any housework, except once making an omelette, for 23 years—the day he became PM.