Londoner’s Diary
Bellies are rumbling in Parliament after the place’s top food spot, the terrace restaurant by the Thames, had to close yesterday. Usually well-fed legislators, staffers and journalists will have to find their taxpayer-subsidised grub elsewhere on the estate until the problem is fixed.
The signage claimed it was a problem with the water that had shut the canteen. But the straight-talking kitchen staff told us a different story, of a Biblical fly infestation.
Hot food is off the menu, though today the restaurant has started handing out tea, coffee and “grab-and-go” items. Full service is due to resume tomorrow, if all goes well.
“The Commons catering team serves thousands of customers annually from a range of outlets across the estate, with robust food safety and hygiene processes in place. Our venues remain safe to visit — where issues are identified, we act quickly to address them,” a spokesperson told us.
For a supposedly prestigious public building, the Palace of Westminster has a serious problem with creepy crawlies and vermin. In 2023, there were 549 reported pest control incidents on the parliamentary estate — 348 involved mice, 61 moths and another 33 flies. The parliamentary authorities have spent a whopping £460,000 on pest control since 2020, according to the latest disclosures. Despite repeated efforts to get on top of the problem, the little nasties seem to have burrowed in.
These problems are, perhaps, to be expected in a set of buildings that are largely Victorian. There have been grander plans for a full renovation of the site, but that would require transplanting the entire Westminster village to another part of town for years on end, and the projected costs of such an undertaking are enormous.
From Bolan to Bowie
The godfather of modern music PR, Alan Edwards, reveals he has written a memoir of his extraordinary career. I Was There: Dispatches From a Life in Rock and Roll will tell of Edwards’s rise to the top, where he represented stars including David Bowie with French journalist Jérôme Soligny, and the Rolling Stones. “I came into this very young and my further education was courtesy of Marc Bolan and the Who. Now I’ve been doing it for nearly half a century and it’s been crazy at times,” Edwards told us. I Was There, out on June 6, promises some great anecdotes. “There’s a good chunk of Bowie in there,” says Edwards, “but it’s not just war stories. I write about serious stuff too, racism in the media for example.”
He recalls how he got a job with the Stones, after being flown out to New York in the early Eighties to meet Mick Jagger. “I had to sit there while he fired questions at me about everything to do with the media.” The second interview, where he got the job, involved waiting all night in a recording studio for Keith Richards, who proceeded to quiz him on the history of the blues.
Boles follows the polls
Not another one! Quite a few avowed Tories, observing the direction in which the polls are pointing, have pledged their fealty to Sir Keir Starmer in recent weeks (see Iceland boss Richard Walker).
Now former Conservative minister Nick Boles, who was once a close ally of Tory PM-turned-peer David Cameron, is helping Starmer in the run-up to the general election. The Labour party is mining Boles’s expertise as a former minister to help its preparations for government, reports PoliticsHome.
In the late 2000s, when the Tories were in opposition, Boles took a lead role in getting his old party ready for office by participating in “access talks” with the civil service. Now he’s doing a similar job for the other team.
