The Londoner: It's OK to separate, insists Ai Weiwei

Ai Weiwei preaches calm and gets out the wine for Brexit | Simon Mayo pours vinegar on Lineker's licence fee idea | How will Labour respond to the Budget with no staff? | Jim Carrey admires an odd part of London | Brexit day pre-party trouble for Remainers
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31 January 2020

Many Londoners are sad about Brexit day but Chinese art superstar Ai Weiwei is staying positive. “I’m in this mood, I’m celebrating, you know: ‘Where’s the wine?’” he said at an event last night.

“I don’t know British politics that much, but I think it’s OK to separate. Husbands and wives separate, a son and father can separate... I always believe independence is very important,” the artist said. “Crying over it doesn’t really work. I keep asking... ‘What will happen after this?’ Nobody seems to know. So why worry over something that’s not too clear?”

Beijing-born Weiwei has become famous for large works that are often critical of the Chinese regime, and for five years from 2010 was prevented from leaving China by the government. Last year, he moved from his adopted home of Berlin to Cambridge with his family, saying that German society has become intolerant of refugees.

Weiwei talked last night about the power of China, saying they would become “the number one economic force in the next few years, if something doesn’t happen like the coronavirus”. Flirting with controversy as usual, Weiwei deadpanned of the disease: “It’s probably the most interesting brand to ever come from China.”

Just as he was baffled by Brexit, the artist seemed bemused by his own success, attributing it to the growth of exhibition space around the world. “In the past 50 or 100 years, they’ve built too many museums.” he said at the Guardian Live event. “They build them bigger and bigger, with very high ceilings, quite scary, and they need someone to fill up the space... I can do it, it’s easy!”

He said art curators trusted him with big projects, and he was modest about his high-concept pieces. “They’ve never met somebody like me, so they look at me for a few seconds and they think they believe in me... so it’s not necessarily art but it’s been accepted by many art institutions. It surprises me.”

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Mayo dresses down Gary over fee idea

BBC man Simon Mayo has slapped down old pal Gary Lineker for suggesting a voluntary licence fee. “It’s crazy, Gary, come on, Gary,” he told The Londoner this week. “It’s like going for a nice meal and saying, ‘Who wants to pay?’ “A few will pay and most will go, ‘I can have it for free.’” Mayo, who pays his children’s licence fees while they are at university, mounted a defence of the funding model. “If someone can come up with a better idea then fine, but in the meantime, it’s got to make sense to continue it.”

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Sometimes metaphors are crashingly unsubtle. At the For Our Future’s Sake farewell party last night, the lights fell in. “How am I meant to do a speech like this?” co-founder Richard Brooks asked as a staff member tried (unsuccessfully) to stick the light fitting back onto the ceiling with Sellotape. And still they partied on. Full marks.

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NEW MP Danny Kruger shares his mother Prue Leith’s flair. In his maiden Commons speech yesterday, he boasted about Silbury Hill in his Devizes constituency, “the largest prehistoric structure in Europe— a great mound of earth the size of a small Egyptian pyramid — built, for reasons we will never know, on a bend of the A4 just outside Marlborough”.

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Blankety blank for Holliday Grainger

Holliday Grainger survived an actor’s worst nightmare with a bit of transference. At the launch of Emma Jane Unsworth’s new novel, Adults, at Blacks Club in Soho last night, the Strike star told us about the time she forgot her lines in a play. “I once totally dried on stage at the Donmar, but I didn’t realise I’d dried until after the event... I thought it was the other person on stage. “So at the time I was just like, ‘Oh come on dude.’”

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Jim Carrey and love for London

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Jim Carrey was on good form at last night’s Sonic the Hedgehog premiere in west London. When The Londoner collared him and demanded he tell us what he liked most about Britain, the Truman Show star replied: “I like this ancient and historic strip mall.” He was standing outside Westfield.​

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It's Va va voom at Critics' Circle

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American star Elle Fanning and legendary costume designer Sandy Powell were among the guests at last night’s London Film Critics’ Circle Awards in Mayfair. Oscar-nominated Jessie Buckley and Smack the Pony star Sally Phillips made the bash too and the latter said the party was “all the va va voom, none of the awards season guff”.

Powell, who was nominated for her work on The Irishman, recently explained she tried to differentiate between decades in the film, telling W Magazine “the Fifties are grey and blue, the Sixties have more yellows and greens, and the Seventies are burgundy and brown”. In the same interview it was also revealed she carries a small personal whisk, which she uses to stir matcha herself — because she can’t trust restaurants not to put too much sugar in. Better safe than sorry.

Across town, Harry Hill and Grayson Perry pulled startled expressions at the Magda Archer x Marc Jacobs collaboration at Harvey Nichols, though Perry later called the collaboration “very covetable”.

SW1A​

Labourites fear they lack policy wonks ahead of March’s Budget. With reason: since the election, Labour has lost its heads of economic and, domestic policy, its chief economic adviser to the shadow chancellor John McDonnell, plus advisers to the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury. Labour told us it doesn’t comment on staffing matters. An insider said: “After years of telling people they could be trusted to run the economy, they’ve only taken a few weeks to create a huge deficit in staff.”​

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Liam Fox spent over an hour in No 10 yesterday — and The Londoner hears he’s tipped to run the new Business and Trade mega department. One to watch.

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New Tory MP for Redcar Jacob Young sports construction wear in the photobook of MPs handed out to Parliamentary staff. “So I’m ‘hard hat man’ according to some,” he tells Beyond the Bubble, before adding, “others call me Bob the Builder.”

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QUOTE OF THE DAY

'The night will end as it usually does... a vodka on the rocks and a chat with the dog'

Emily Maitlis won't be doing anything differently for Brexit day after presenting Newsnight

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