Windsor Castle at 9pm last night
Yesterday I came down to my boat rather than spend last night in the City of London. At some point last night I got an email from Conservative Headquarters giving me security clearance and an instruction to go to a rally given by the Prime Minister this lunchtime.
I am writing from Eton – staring at Windsor Castle -where the Queen is in residence.
I will not be going back to listen to Theresa May. The email seems to have been withdrawn. Conservative campaigning today called is off and London Bridge (on my route to the event) closed down.
I may have difficulty going back to London today, but I will – I live 600 yards from London Bridge.
This terror is business as usual
Like Manchester, London was hit by IRA bombing, only a lot worse. I was in the City (working) when the first and biggest Bishopsgate bomb was detonated. I remember getting off the floor and watching the Nat West Tower shed its glass frame in a waterfall of crystal shards. A shard of glass pierced the hood of my car, parked a few blocks from the bomb in Finsbury Circus.
Londoners are not only used to “terror”, they are inured to it. This is a City that was destroyed by fire once in 1666 and again in the 1940s. At each entry to the City is a Perspex pillbox used by police to intercept suspect vehicles.
The abject behaviour of those who drove across London Bridge last night (from the City) is part of a process played out over the past 80 years. It is nothing new, it doesn’t scare us, it is a residential and occupational hazard of those who live and work in the City.
London is the City – the City of London.
London is the City , Westminster is Westminster. The City of London is the greatest City on earth, it has 3000 residents , I and my partner are two of them. We are joined each week- day by hundreds of thousands of brilliant people who drive the world’s markets, pay our country’s taxes and make our Britain great.
I am pleased not to be going to May’s rally. I am not pleased to hear six more innocent lives are lost and 48 lives put in hospital. I am not pleased but I am not surprised.
The City of London will continue to draw low-life scum to it precisely because it has led the world for a millennium. It has mosques as well as churches, it has workers of all religions and creeds and it treats all people with respect.
These idiots may have driven into Southwark from London, but they have no part in London, they are dead, and no Londoner mourns their passing.
At the heart of the City of London
Since writing this , I have heard that Geoff Ho – a great pension journalist is among those critically injured. He is reported confronting the terrorists and got a knife through the neck for his trouble. http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/missing-journalist-filmed-staggering-ambulance-10556879#ICID=sharebar_twitter
