Londoner's Diary: New European is given new life, thanks to Brexit

Ben Pruchnie / Staff / Getty Images
3 August 2016

The New Day, which hoped to turn good news into high sales, has already woken up to the cold reality of closure — the newspaper folded after just nine weeks. But there is good news for this year’s other upstart title The New European: success has been snatched from the jaws of the Remain campaign’s defeat.

It was originally set up as a temporary newspaper, with the plan to print four issues while consumers sought post-Brexit assurance. But today sees its unexpected fifth issue, and the paper will continue as long as the readers keep coming. Selling more than 40,000 copies of its first edition, it enlisted high- profile pundits such as Peter Mandelson, Alastair Campbell, philosopher A.C. Grayling and novelist Howard Jacobson. This week’s edition features an essay from Pete Paphides on the importance of European pop, and a piece from the deputy first minister of Northern Ireland Martin McGuinness.

Aimed at the 48 per cent of the country that voted Remain, the paper aims to address the concerns of those who find our departure from Brussels alarming. “It was the day after the Brexit vote,” The New European’s editor Matt Kelly tells us. “I was walking around Shoreditch and there was this weird sense of bereavement in the air. It struck me that if ever there was a passionate and angry audience, this is it.”

The instinct paid off. “We don’t release numbers publicly,” he adds, “but what I can say is that it outperformed expectations, which is incredible as the first issue didn’t even have any advertising and we barely had a budget for editorial and marketing. Just because the vote is cast, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t consider the consequences.”

The New Day is dead. Long live The New European.

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The queen has made her move and the pawns have fallen: it’s a good time to be a chess expert in Westminster. So good luck to trade and investment minister Mark Price, who publishes The Foolish King in September.

A new children’s book about chess, it introduces the strategies behind the game. Perhaps a copy could be the final tool Labour MP and chess enthusiast Rachel Reeves needs to topple a certain persistent king.

Johnsons should mind their language

Boris Johnson may have led the charge to preserve the nation’s Britishness but his sister is more concerned with saving our words.

Rachel Johnson, journalist and author, is sick of the “bastardisation of the English language” and fed-up with her “expensively educated” sons’ lack of formality. “My moan here is … about how everyday speech has become so ugly and annoying in so many ways,” she writes in this month’s Tatler. “During the Olympics, commentators would endlessly spout that an athlete was about to ‘podium’ and when my father Stanley climbed Kilimanjaro twice in two years he would tell people he’d ‘summitted’.”

Now that we know Foreign Secretary Boris won’t be heading to Rio, at least he’ll be able to avoid the former.

Funny Girl is in the fanzone

Bad news this week for lovers of Guys and Dolls, which will close in the West End four months early. But the crowds are still coming out for Funny Girl, the Broadway musical currently at the Savoy Theatre with Sheridan Smith in the lead role.

The actress was at the stage door meeting her fans last night, looking cheerful after taking a break from the show earlier this year to recover from exhaustion. Following her return, producers released a statement explaining that Smith would no longer make a habit of sticking around to meet her public, “particularly during the heatwave,” but evidently Smith is taking her lyrics to heart: “people, people who need people...”

Tough baptism with T S Eliot

She’s been the editor of the London Review of Books for nearly 25 years but Mary-Kay Wilmers didn’t have the backing of literary great T S Eliot. Wilmers started her career as a secretary at Eliot’s Faber publishing house in the Sixties, and remembers her time with the great poet in the next issue of the LRB.

“After I’d graduated to blurb-writing, [Eliot] showed all the directors a blurb I’d written, saying ‘surely we can’t publish this’,” Wilmers recalls. “It was for Ann Jellicoe’s play The Knack and I’d said that the knack in question was the knack of getting girls into bed.” This was too rude for staid Eliot.

It was a tough place to work, as the author of The Waste Land favoured a strict regime. Wilmers remembers day-dreaming out of the window and wishing aloud that she too was outside doing “bugger all”. Behind her, the boss was not happy: “Eliot had come into the room and was glowering at me,” she writes. “I might as well have been tearing at the grapes with murderous paws.”

Wilmers and her home were the inspiration for literary hit Love, Nina, the diary of a nanny who observes the life of her employer and visitors, including Alan Bennett. As Eliot said: “immature poets imitate, mature poets steal”.

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Commiserations to Royal Opera House chair Ian Taylor, who ruled himself out of the resignation honours over Tory party donations. Taylor, a noted philanthropist, had been doing all the right things. His predecessor at the ROH, Simon Robey, was knighted in June with no fuss. Like Taylor, Robey is a noted City player as well as opera enthusiast. Don’t count on honours until the fat lady sings.

Jack’s on the Bond track

Huston, Tom Hiddleston has a problem. While speculation rages over who will step into Daniel Craig’s Crockett & Jones shoes in the next Bond film, every career move counts. Hiddleston was certainly adding Bond credentials to his CV, in particular with his performance in The Night Manager, but might he now be overtaken by a new dark horse?

The Londoner hears that dashing actor Jack Huston, is now the frontrunner to be the new 007. He is, after all, already known to Bond producer Barbara Broccoli — she co-produced his West End debut Strangers on a Train — and while his status as the grandson of the sixth Marquess of Cholmondeley provides English pedigree, he also has Hollywood in his blood: his aunt is Oscar winner Anjelica Huston. Will the next script be for his eyes only?

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Surprise shot of the day: swanky hotel The Savoy is now giving out branded selfie sticks to guests. Escape is futile.

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