We are always leaving London. It’s a cosmopolitan and restless place. It sucks us in - from the English shires, from the other nations of the UK, from countries overseas - and, when it has turned us into Londoners, releases us to spread Londonism - a loose creed of heart and mind - into the furthest reaches of the globe. We may later return, we may not; but we will have been stamped with the seal of this vast, busy metropolis, that stretches on either bank of the Thames beyond where the unaided eye can see, and London will have changed us.
I first left London five years after coming here. I was 31 and full of the knowledge and experience I had gained. In those five years, I had learned about labour-market economics, aspects of British social security, departmental budgeting, and how social and employment policy was done across the European Union. I felt quite the expert. And I had worked hard on my French and my Greek. Perhaps even more formatively, I had learned how to co-operate with others in a complex administrative system. I had been a junior Minister’s private secretary, finessing his speeches, checking the work coming to him from the department, communicating back what the Minister wanted, sitting late hours in the civil servants’ box in the Commons at adjournment debates, carrying his bags on overseas visits. I had listened, absorbed and learned. I had discovered how to work ferociously hard and to move things on, while also enjoying what London had to offer culturally and socially. And in 1997, I witnessed the change of Government, from Conservative to Labour, from the privileged vantage of the Minister’s private office. In the first week of the Blair Administration, I came out at work, confident that London’s liberal cosmopolitanism was now politically endorsed, at one with the mood of the whole country, and that the lives of gay people really would now change. In London - a city where one can be both anonymous and gregarious - I had finally become me.
Four years as a negotiator for the UK in Brussels followed. This was the happiest time in my professional career. I loved negotiations and, if I may boast a little, was pretty good at them. I met my husband. I had a religious experience and started to regain my Christian faith. When I returned to London at the end of my posting, I understood that my Londonism was now thoroughly Europeanised. This did not set me at odds with London but was perfectly complementary to it - indeed, was, as I now realised, an essential aspect of Londonism. London, on behalf of the UK as a whole, was playing a global game, open to ideas and peoples from across the world, not least those in its hugely important European hinterland.
I spent the next few years angling for and doing European jobs in the home and diplomatic services in London, while broadening my policy knowledge into global peacekeeping, environmental, agricultural and regulatory matters. I served as the Principal Private Secretary for a Cabinet Minister, and in 2010 watched, from a vantage even more privileged than in 1997, a reversal of the political change that had happened thirteen years earlier. In London in these years, I plugged away at my French, learned some Russian and undertook serious study in modern Greek literature. I didn’t feel like a ‘rootless’ cosmopolitan, a person of nowhere: I felt like a cosmopolitan Londoner, an Englishman, a Brit, a European, proud of where I had come from (my roots in the north of England have never withered), who I was and had become, and what I was contributing, however modestly, to national life. After a while, I wondered where I might head next.
So I left London again. This time, January 2013, I headed to Greece. I had had a long love affair with Greece, since my teenage years, and had long wanted to live there. Of course, my posting was not primarily (or even secondarily) an opportunity to deepen my own love of Greece, though it did present that opportunity, but was a demanding, public, representational job, leading a large, dispersed embassy in an era of austere budgetary restraint. It would be a challenge to identify, protect and advance the interests of my own country at a time of political and financial crisis in Greece. After what was nearly twenty years in London, I felt I knew my country very well and was confident in my own patriotism and in my ability to project Britain constructively in Athens and across Greece. I wanted Greek and British relations to flourish, hoping to bring Greeks and Britons into closer friendship and mutual understanding. I set to it with enthusiasm.
Nothing prepared me for the shock of what happened in June 2016. When I returned to London five months later, at the end of my posting, I realised that London was in convulsion. London itself had not understood, until June 2016, that it had significantly parted company from much of the rest of the country. Londonism was a creed with an apparently more enthusiastic constituency in Berlin or Paris or Athens than in Yorkshire or Cornwall or Wales. I found myself doing a job I didn’t much like (at the fag-end of empire) in a political environment that had become profoundly hostile, and which now - in the mean spirit of the times - allowed me no viable concession for the overdue completion of my academic studies. It was a vortex of misery. So I left government service and broke the first of the links that had so attached me to London. The successful end of my studies broke another. Finding a position in a Greek shipping business yet another still. The pandemic which confined us all to our homes in March 2020 was the final severing of a sense of real connexion with London. I fell ill (not from Covid) and had to concentrate on regaining my health. In lockdown and subsequently, the city seemed to recede out of sight and mind. As we start (if we are now starting) to emerge from this two-year crisis, London seems to have shrunk, to have lost its way, to have been robbed of its creed, its sources of dynamism and to have found, as yet, no new role.
All this said, I am not deeply pessimistic about London or about the country. We clearly need time to work out again who we are as a people and where we want to head. That seems to me to be likely the work of the next generation. All the signs are that this Government and this governing party are not up to the job. The disrupters turn out to be mere wreckers. This task of rebuilding will require new people, new ideas, new ideals. But I bet that it will really happen, really take hold, in London, when the right people find themselves drawn to this place and create a convincing new dynamic between them.
In the meantime, I am leaving London once more. This time, I’m returning home: to Yorkshire. I need to find myself again. And my country. In my roots. And I need to think hard about Londonism, its right and wrongs, its past mistakes and future trajectory. One thing is clear. I will not lose sight of all that nearly thirty years in London have meant to me. The friendships I have found here, the lessons London has taught me, the shining opportunities it has given me. In this restless, if now diminished, city the tides of the Thames ever rise and fall, shifting direction, now heading inland, now heading out to sea. I hope I leave one or two small footprints behind me, above the waterline.
John
13 January 2022
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