Around 25 minutes later, during which time a neighbour in pyjamas had trundled her bins out for collection and another had unlocked his bicycle and cycled off, the boys were back. They looked agitated. One of them hid the machete under a car and they walked off. Later, I found out a boy had been seriously wounded half a mile away and taken to hospital. Luckily it had not been fatal.

Some are not so lucky. This year has seen a flurry of street killings of teenagers — one every fortnight in London alone — most often by other teenagers.

Three days into 2021, Olly Stephens was  stabbed in a Reading park. He was 13 years old, as were the girl and one of the boys charged with his murder. The other boy was 14. A few weeks later, Keon Lincoln was stabbed to death in Birmingham, at the age of 15. Two boys, aged 14 and 15, have been charged with his murder. On February 18, Drekwon Patterson, 16, was chased and stabbed to death by a gang of youths in Wembley. On April 23, Fares Maatou, 14, was fatally stabbed in the head with a machete while in his school uniform. He was outside a pizza restaurant in East London, at 4pm. Again, two boys, aged 14 and 15, have been charged with his murder.

The list of children killing children gets longer by the day. Just last week, two teenagers were arrested after a 16-year-old was stabbed to death outside a school in Luton. On Thursday a 17-year-old was killed in Streatham, south London and on Friday, a 15-year old was stabbed to death during the school run in Hayes, west London. A 15-year-old has been charged with his murder.

Yet amid all this bloodshed, little is being done. Since street homicides involving young people started escalating in 2018 — most notably among black, working-class Londoners — politicians and media-minded crime chiefs have given us the usual spiel: it’s drug turf wars, middle-class cocaine snorters, rap music… But while these explanations may sound good, they are wafer-thin on evidence.

The Home Office now has a Serious Violence Strategy, London’s Mayor has a Violent Crime Task Force, and police in many cities have stepped up stop-and-search for weapons. But, just like the last time there was a panic and a clampdown (a decade ago), the deaths keep on coming.  This time, though, the people involved in the killings are getting younger.

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Amid this blood-soaked landscape, youth worker and writer Ciaran Thapar’s new book, Cut Short: Youth Violence, Loss and Hope in the City, stands out. Thapar is at the front line of this most recent rise in street killings, supporting young people at risk of joining gangs in Brixton, south London. He is immersed in his neighbourhood, where he builds trust and friendships over time, and his book is partly the product of this. Cut Short follows three teenagers and a community centre manager he knows and looks at the knife crime phenomenon from street level, rather than top down.

For the boys he meets and works with, the threat of serious violence looms large from the moment they walk out their front door. A wrong look, a wrong answer, and in a split second they’ll be in a life or death situation. Jhemar, whose older brother is stabbed to death during the course of the book, compares picking up a knife before going out to putting on a pair of shoes. Most kids do not carry knives with the intent to kill; they carry them with the intent to save their own lives.

Territorial feuding is partly to blame for the violence. When one of the boys, Carl, is shot at, it’s because he was “standing in the wrong street”. According to Thapar, the “hyperlocal and ever-shifting” feuds are turbocharged by social media. Shaming, beefs, abuse, rivalry — even the Zombie knives and machetes — are glorified 24/7 on Snapchat and IG. But in London in particular, these territorial wars are rarely about defending drug turf, as it was a generation ago. A former gang member tells Thapar: “It’s less about money now and it’s more about emotions. It’s more mindless now.”

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Nevertheless, a The Wire-style drug turf war narrative is pushed by everyone: from London mayor Sadiq Khan and Met Police chief Cressida Dick to successive Home Secretaries and the otherwise clued-up Labour MP David Lammy. It’s super convenient, because it allows them to deflect responsibility away from the real reasons teenagers are killing each other and onto people they say are fuelling the drug trade, in particular “middle-class cocaine snorters”.

Yet it is duplicitous to make this link. The teenagers being killed in London are far removed from the powder cocaine trade. Apart from cannabis, the drugs they are most likely to end up selling, sometimes out of London on “county lines”, are crack cocaine and heroin, mainly to semi-homeless, addicted drug users, not the middle classes. Even if everyone did stop snorting coke, teenagers locked out of mainstream jobs would still be recruited to sell crack, a far more lucrative version of the drug.

Besides, when you look at individual teenage homicide cases, it’s clear that the vast majority are not killing each other over business. It’s about insults, bullying, resentments and arguments. Once these would have ended with a black eye — now they end in the morgue.

In 2018, I interviewed Jason (not his real name), who had been relocated to a secret address by Operation Trident (the Met Police unit set up to tackle gang violence involving black offenders), after he was run clean through with a machete when he was 17. It was a surprise to his family and doctors he survived. “No-one fist-fights anymore,” he told me. “It’s hard not to get involved, most kids your age carry a knife or machete, so you have to.”

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There are many examples of petty beefs turning into deadly clashes. At the Old Bailey last month, a jury heard that Kayjon Lubin, 15, was stabbed to death last December in Beckton, east London by two 17-year-olds who believed he had taken their e-scooter. In September, a teenager who was 15 at the time was jailed for stabbing to death another 15-year-old, Baptista Adjei, on a packed bus in Stratford, over a Snapchat argument. Osman Sharif, 16, was hacked to death with a meat cleaver in a Tottenham street because of a row over some laughing emojis. Syed Jamanoor Islam was stabbed to death by a 16-year-old in Mile End in a feud that started with eggs being thrown by the victim’s brother as a joke.

But whatever specific incident sparks the individual killings, the truth is that these teenage deaths mark the end point of a process, a grim assembly line. On the whole, the victims and perpetrators involved, as academic reports into youth violence have always told the government, have similar backstories. These are not just any children, they are children who have usually suffered continuous trauma and have been rejected, shamed and belittled all their lives: at school, sometimes at home, by the police and even, as their neighbourhood becomes gentrified, by the well-off homeowners who fear passing them in the street.

They are known to social services from a very young age. They live in council housing in deprived areas. They have been excluded from school and have ended up at a Pupil Referral Unit. Many have experience of the care system, have been victims of abuse, and have absent fathers. In London, an overwhelming proportion are black, mixed race or from other ethnic minorities. Jason told me: “When I was younger no-one showed me respect. To get respect I turned into a monster. I’ve witnessed a lot of people die. It’s a normal thing. I’ve lived in care, I’ve lived everywhere, and most places I get looked at like something is wrong with me. So black kids have to be tough.”

As Cut Short points out, if the Government was sincere about tackling these deaths, it would be looking into the “trauma, fear and exclusion of young people”, it would drill down into “how unsafe and alone” they feel, and seek to expose the “failures of the state to care for its citizens”. But why bother, when you can solve the problem in one fell swoop by, as one MP stupidly suggested at a House of Commons briefing attended by Thapar, by “blunting the end of knives”.

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They might live in claustrophobic neighbourhoods made worse by the intrusive and violent world of Snapchat, but these kids aren’t stupid, and what is happening in the political world is not lost on them. Tony, who runs the local community centre, described by Thapar as a “tiny island amid a sea storm”, says he believes that the nationalism and xenophobia around Brexit, and scandals such as Windrush and Grenfell, make young people in areas such as Brixton “feel like they don’t belong … it sends the message: you are not wanted”.

Indeed, it’s hard not to wonder — when faced with the Government’s abdication of responsibility for them — whether black working-class children who have led highly traumatised lives really are not wanted. I have no idea whether Jason has managed to escape the clutches of gang life. Or whether he is still alive. But what he told me should be beamed onto the walls of Parliament — along with the testimonies from Cut Short: “Most teachers told me I would end up dead or in jail. I got told I was worthless. It breaks your spirit. A lot of black kids get their spirit broken. Schools give up way too early, they kick you out from an early age. No school I’ve ever been to has helped me … Youth clubs are good. Even two hours talking to people, it’s support. But they shut down youth clubs and instead they spend all the money on a week-long knife crime clampdown.”

Cut Short ends with an appeal to the Government to treat youth knife crime violence as a public health emergency — just like Covid-19. It also calls for society to help out. “Start with something small. Walk into your local community centre, youth club…drop your defences. See what happens.” Given the subject matter, the book is surprisingly hopeful. By the end, with the help of various mentors including Thapar, the three teenagers are able to jump off the conveyor belt and create new chances for themselves — getting into university or making music. People have actually spent time with them; they have given them the confidence to step away from such a dangerous life.

Every time we hear about another child being stabbed to death, it should stop us in our tracks. We should hear the sound of a tolling bell each time. It should serve as a reminder that this death, this family’s grief, and this teenager sentenced to life behind bars, are all symptoms of a society that simply does not care enough. We might comfort ourselves by thinking that these children, who lie bleeding to death on the streets they grew up on, are different, that they are not like us. But they are our collective responsibility. Until we accept that this violent epidemic is a reflection of something toxic at Britain’s heart, it will only get worse.

Whether the eccentric in question is Sir Isaac Newton, or that bloke in Port Talbot who dresses like a baked bean, they are said to represent this blessed — and peculiar — plot. American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson knew of no other country but England, he said, “where any personal eccentricity is so freely allowed.”

Eccentrics, we tell ourselves, are the oddballs on the outside who end up changing the mainstream for the better. Cracks who let the light in.

It’s a well-worn story, repeated by J.S. Mill, Edith Sitwell, and Christopher Hitchens. When Mill elaborated it in 1859, he was already warning “that so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of our time”. This, too, is part of the tradition. England’s eccentrics are felt to be an endangered species, dying out. Squashed by the forces of conformity: mass education, mass media, the ever-increasing uptake in psychiatric drug use.

This tale has something in it, but it’s probably closer to the truth to note that the eccentric was swallowed whole and digested by another type — the exhibitionist. Exhibitionists want to be loved. Their self-esteem is franchised out to other people, creating an air of desperation about them. There’s no endzone, no landing strip. It never stops. They say: “I am alive, I am alive, I am alive.” The exhibitionist courts disaster.

The eccentric, who is rarer, does not really consider himself eccentric at all. The world is eccentric, and they are normal. It’s an attitude that makes them freer than other people, because it does not depend on other people to exist. Unpretentious and unassuming, they nevertheless have a tendency towards taking one or two personal qualities to a heretical extreme. The eccentric courts embarrassment.

These types are easily confused. Count Binface, the needily satirical candidate for London Mayor, is a glittering example of this. Regularly hailed by the press, foreign and domestic, as a quintessential example of the ‘Great British eccentric’, the sad reality is that the Count would push his nan into a lake for a slice of recognition.

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He has one joke. He makes a politician’s evening worse by hovering behind them on the night of a vote count dressed as a bin. This week it will be poor, hapless Shaun Bailey’s turn. When the Conservative candidate’s defeated face is flash-photographed, adorns newsprint, and loops on the 24 hour channels, there will be a man dressed as a bin behind him.

That, as far as I can tell, is the point of Count Binface. That’s it. Is it funny? Maybe the first time around it was, when he did it to Theresa May, in 2017. Then he did it once more, to Boris Johnson, in 2019. But again?

There’s nothing else there. A 20-minute interview between Binface and Owen Jones feels longer than a Scandinavian SlowTV epic about a train making a 50-hour journey between Brønnøysund and Stjørdalshalsen. With fewer laughs.

Binface, like Screaming Lord Sutch before him, is a garden gnome of English political history: garish, hollow, and bafflingly popular with a gormless minority. Both are exhibitionists, not eccentrics.

When Mill made his warning in the mid-nineteenth century, the high tide of the homegrown eccentric was already washing out, and the tide of the exhibitonist was washing in.

(Mill’s small contribution to eccentricity in his own time was a description, in his Autobiography, of his dreadful, narrow-minded wife Harriet, as a greater thinker than himself. He wrote that she was more poetic than Shelley too — for which he became an instant national laughingstock.)

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The world-class English eccentrics were usually men, usually aristocrats, and usually born in the eighteenth century. There was nothing cuddly about them, no chance of them ever becoming national treasures (I suspect that this is what Count Binface wants — to win Strictly and co-author children’s books with David Walliams). Insulated by money and status, their oddities and manias grew wild.

Take the politicians alone. There was an eccentric in every rotten borough: the profligates (Charles James Fox), the rakes obsessed with orgies (Francis Dashwood), the proto-populist firebrands (John Wilkes). James ‘Wicked Jimmy’ Lowther, who sat in the Commons for twenty-seven years, had two overriding preoccupations: stinginess and having affairs. These combined when his favourite mistress died. He could not bear to bury her, or pay for a funeral. So he had her embalmed, thereafter using her glass-fronted coffin as a sideboard in his dining room.

Anthony Henley was the MP for Southampton in the 1720s. Once he received a request from his constituents that he should vote against some tax changes proposed in the budget. He replied in a letter that he was “surprised at your insolence in troubling me at all…. May God’s curse light upon you, and may it make your women as open and as free to the excise officers as your wives and daughters have always been to me while I have represented your scoundrel corporation.”

Henley did not stand for the borough again.

His political career was longer than John ‘Mad Jack’ Mytton’s. A high-spirited colonel who took his seat in Parliament on a warm day in June, Mytton, who regularly surprised dinner guests by riding a bear around his dining room, found the debate boring.

He lost his patience, left and never returned. He had only been elected after a hard campaign in Shrewsbury, where he walked among his future constituents with ten-pound notes fixed to his hat. These were replaced as soon as they were taken, so Mytton ended up spending £10,000 in a few days, or £899,186.77 in today’s money.

After drinking five bottles of port every morning for most of his adult life, Mytton eventually died in the 1830s — in a debtor’s prison.

Eccentricity was vindictively competitive back then, full of spontaneous boys-club one-upmanship, and an escalating, balls-out weirdness that was both joyous and grotesque. To call it a golden age of eccentricity, which sounds gooey and nostalgic, is too far. They must have been awful up close.

But they do illustrate the difference between eccentrics and exhibitionists. Unlike Count Binface, none of them wanted to be liked. It’s impossible to imagine them being heckled at a stand-up comedy night, bothering the Edinburgh Fringe, or entering Britain’s Got Talent.

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The eccentric took his last dinosaur steps long before the forces that are usually blamed for their demise arrived. It was part of the great Victorian make-over: discipline, self-control, fig leaves. Coffee after dinner, not port. As Mill’s writing shows, the Victorians became sentimental about eccentrics. The only Regency wild man to survive fully-formed into the reign of the little Queen was Colonel Charles De Laet Waldo Sibthorp, a long-serving, long-suffering, long-fulminating MP for Lincoln.

Sibthorp set a standard for reaction unequalled in parliamentary history. He was against Catholic Emancipation, against the Reform Act, against the Maynooth Grant, against patented water closets, against sanitary inspectors, and against the Great Exhibition — because Prince Albert was a foreigner.

The only business an Englishman had going abroad, Sibthorp reckoned, was to wage war. Innovation was a “dangerous thing”; reform, he told the house, was what he “detested, as I detest the Devil.” As soon as it was invented, he began a fruitless war against the railway, complaining that they “encourage the working class to move about.”

If Sibthorp were alive now he would milkshaked every time he crossed Parliament Square. If he appeared on Question Time #SibthorpScum would trend for twelve hours. But Victorian liberals — more robustly confident than their contemporaries today — dispatched him with generous laughter, not hatred. Charles Dickens described Sibthorp as a “‘a militia man, with a brain slightly damaged and, quite unintentionally, the most amusing man in the house.” He appeared in Punch over 345 times, always at the fag end of a joke.

The roaring 18th century English eccentric was made safe, an object for sweet reminiscences, like a holiday postcard stuck on a fridge. Biographies and bestiaries of them proliferated — In the Days of the Dandies (1890), The Book of Wonderful Characters (1869), English Eccentricities and Eccentrics (1866), The Life of John Mytton (1870). There would still be eccentrics after this point, but eccentricity was also a guise, slung on the rack of panto costumes that the exhibitionist could wear. It became a choice, even a strategy. The spontaneity was gone.

You can glimpse these changes in the career of the Tory statesman Robert Cecil. He was an immensely wealthy Marquess, and Prime Minister three times. He appeared to disdain ambition. During his maiden Commons speech he paused, yawned, and sat down — he found it all too tedious to carry on with. He turned down the premiership the first two times he was offered it.

Cecil was scruffy too — once arrested on the grounds of his estate on suspicion of being a poacher, once refused entry to the casino at Monte Carlo because he looked like a tramp. The impression is of an accidental Prime Minister, a lovable eccentric somehow forced into No.10 under duress.

But who becomes Prime Minister three times by accident? Cecil undermined all his privileges with a look of ragged incompetence. It made them stronger. His tramp act, and his understatement, made the vanity of his rivals look ridiculous.

Though Cecil is never compared with Boris Johnson, they are very much alike — pretend luxury slobs, and sly exhibitionists, who squeezed this old Regency idea of eccentricity out of a bottle and smeared it on their faces. The difference between them and Count Binface comes down to having a much better education, and a much better act.

For a long time, we have preferred exhibitionists to eccentrics. We talk a good game about fairness and decency, and let foreign despots buy up our football clubs, and look away when Philip Green is garlanded with every prize. We say we celebrate kooks, and the last one we produced was Chris Eubank over 30 years ago.

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Boris Johnson’s thumping victory over Jeremy Corbyn was a clear case in point. Exhibitionists beat eccentrics in England, often by pretending to be them. Zoologists call this aggressive mimicry, and your grandmother called it a wolf in sheep’s clothing. In England how often is faked eccentricity a disguise for predators?

At a much lower level, the sympathetic, chummy, punch-in-the-arm coverage Count Binface receives from the press, compared with the staggering nastiness directed from all sides at the utterly eccentric — if not quite harmless — Piers Corbyn, also running for Mayor, demonstrates this. The Victorians would have laughed at Piers, we will end up chucking him in prison.

Compare us with our nearest neighbours. The French gave the world the Marquis du Sade, À rebours and Surrealism. We have the Marquess of Bath, David Copperfield and Russell Brand. Perhaps, ultimately, we are not as strange as we like to think we are.

In 1998, voters in the capital were given a referendum on whether or not we wanted to have a Mayor of London. It was the first time I voted — and I was delighted to be in the distinct minority of people who said “no”.

But we lost, and we lost bad. We made up just 28% of the vote, among a measly total turnout of just 34%. And yet, given the opportunity again, I would vote the same again.

Back then, the likely candidates to lead the nation’s capital ranged from Jeffrey Archer to Ken Livingstone. It did not require a clairvoyant to know where this was heading. In the end Jeffrey Archer went to prison and Ken Livingstone did not. So Ken Livingstone became Mayor.

Two embarrassing terms later, it soon became clear that the trouble with City Hall lay in the same problem that distinguishes all superfluous offices in government. People always equate expanding layers of government with increasing accountability; but the truth is that the more there are, the harder it is to hold people to account.

During Livingstone’s reign, for example, whenever the underground service ground to a halt there was always a fight over whether he was responsible or not. It was the same with every budgetary issue.

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And yet, somehow, the most memorable feature of Livingstone’s time in office was the way he managed to impose his own outlandish foreign policies on his fiefdom. For example, while Westminster looked somewhat askance at Hugo Chavez’s regime as it set about crashing Venezuela, Livingstone made special alliances with it. Similarly, while the Government was distinctly pro-Washington, the Mayor of London, by contrast, was not; when President Bush visited the capital in 2003, Livingstone declined to meet him and denounced his arrival by calling him “the greatest threat to life on this planet that we’ve probably ever seen”.

Now the reason I believe it’s worth returning to Livingston isn’t to justify my vote in 1998, but merely to point out that the problems at the heart of London’s mayoralty are endemic. The powers that come with the position are too unclear — or have, at the very least, the potential to be made unclear. And then there is a more obvious pitfall: that the position attracts  — possibly requires — figures who believe that London is merely a stage to stand on; a means to project themselves on to the wider world.

To that extent, the problems of Sadiq Khan’s mayoralty are no different from those of his predecessors. Just like those before him, Khan has been able to jump from one photo op to another, looking the other way as his city burns.

For instance, take crime in the capital. Under Khan, knife crime in London has remained at near-record levels, while rape prosecutions have slumped. But whenever the mayor is challenged on these issues, he avoids taking responsibility for them, preferring instead to prevaricate over “institutional racism” or talk about how London’s crime wave is caused by cuts ordered by Whitehall. The message is clear: it’s not my problem.

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Like Livingstone before him, Khan has also decided that he can make up for what he lacks in actual power with narcissistic grandstanding. His time in City Hall has coincided with a number of major events on the national and international stage, into all of which he has tried to interject himself.

When, for example, the UK voted to leave the European Union in 2016, Khan didn’t seem to care that it was a national plebiscite — or that 40% of Londoners voted for Brexit. Instead, he sought to weaponise the result, using it as an opportunity to present London as distinct from the rest of the backward country. He continued to parade the EU flag at every opportunity, up to and including turning the city’s 2018/19 New Year’s Eve celebrations into a tribute to Brussels.

Emulating Livingstone, Mayor Khan has even tried to make political capital by opposing an American President. In fact, he arguably took things one step further during President Trump’s visit to the UK in 2019; before the President had even touched down at Heathrow, Khan fired off a newspaper article comparing him to the “fascists of the 20^th century”.

Yet there are, of course, no prizes for guessing which of Khan or Trump went on to establish a totalitarian-sounding “Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm”. Put to one side the fact that one of the activists hired by Khan to review London’s landmarks was sacked within a fortnight for being anti-Semitic; far more striking was the decision of the Mayor’s office to announce the findings of the Commission in advance — a move seemingly taken straight from the Stalinist playbook.

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Naturally, it is easy to scoff at such a fatuous approach to politics. But dismissing Khan in this way forgets that while he has busied himself with his “progressive” agenda, it has all been at the expense of addressing the genuine political issues that concern his constituents. Public transport in London has never been more expensive or inadequate — a reality made all the worse by the introduction of a new Green “ultra low emissions zone” that has made car-travel eye-wateringly expensive. Meanwhile house-building, which is so badly needed to address the shortage of affordable property, has actually gone down since he assumed office.

So what has Mayor Khan done? Well, one part of the Mayor’s budget has rocketed enormously: his PR budget, which has risen by a third since he took office. And perhaps Khan’s lead in the polls justifies the spend; it certainly seems to confirm the fact that, even if you do nothing very well, you can still succeed by spending on self-promotion. Either way, it’s a grim sign for the future of democracy in the capital, and a late — if pointless — vindication of the 28% who saw this coming over 20 years ago.

Instead, the man gazing out is Brian Rose.

Rose, 49, would certainly make an unusual boss at City Hall. He is, after all, a former Wall Street stockbroker who has spent the past year hosting Covid-19 conspiracy grifters on his YouTube channel and website. He is also Britain’s first post-truth political candidate.

In Rose’s self-created fantasy world, his campaign is proving a roaring success: he is running in second place to be Mayor, he has the “largest outdoor campaign in British political history” and his raft of glossy films calling out Mayor Khan have racked up millions of views.

Yet in the consensus-based reality occupied by the rest of us, this version of Brian Rose doesn’t really exist. Why? Because all his metrics of success have been systematically distorted — and in the one that really matters, the polling for London mayor, he doesn’t even register, not even breaking 1%.

So how has Rose managed to craft such a fabricated narrative of success? The answer, I suspect, can be traced back to the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, when San Diego-born Rose first made a name for himself after hosting the conspiracy theorist David Icke — most famous for claiming that world is controlled by a secret lizard Illuminati — on his show “London Real”.

In the frantic early days of the pandemic, the interview hit a nerve and went viral. Unchallenged by Rose, Icke spun a grand narrative, that the “Covid pandemic” was fake, was really caused by 5G and  was a cover for a murderous global cult who were determined to create a fascist state. He said that 5G was designed to cause a mass cull, and that if humanity didn’t “get off its knees” then “human life as we know it is over”.

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In an environment where 5G masts were already being destroyed, and engineers threatened, YouTube took the video down. All of which allowed Rose, never one to miss an opportunity, to turn himself into a free speech martyr; a victim of Big Tech censorship. Whether or not he knew it at the time, his Mayoral campaign had just begun.

In the following days, Rose went into overdrive, claiming that he had been censored by Big Tech and that he was determined to fight back. He launched a crowdfunder for what he called a “Digital Freedom Platform” to host another interview with Icke. It would, he said, be “of the people, by the people and for the people”. More importantly, it would be fully independent of London Real.

What he didn’t say, however, was that it would also be fully owned by Longstem Ltd, the company that owns London Real and has one shareholder: a Mr Brian Rose.

Still, in the early days of the pandemic the crowdfunder hit a nerve among those frustrated with Big Tech’s heavy-handed attempts at censorship. Rose hit the initial $100,000 target in less than a day — so, over the course of a few days, he added new features to the crowdfunding campaign to justify increasing the target, including unspecified “blockchain technology” for $200,000, and a promise to take YouTube and other tech companies to court for another $200,000. In the end, the crowdfunder maxed out at over a million dollars.

But it was unclear from the start what the point of the platform was, or even whether it was necessary. Several tech commentators have noted that he could have used any number of free video services, such as Bitchute, to host the videos, if YouTube took them down. Needless to say there have been no court cases brought against the big tech platforms — though Mr Rose’s spokesman assures us that they “plan to proceed” — or any introduction of “blockchain technology”. Instead, he seems to have dedicated all his energies to his Digital Freedom Platform, and hosted a slew of interviews with other controversial conspiracy figures, from Infowars‘s Alex Jones to anti-vaccine activists Judy Mikovits and Robert Kennedy Jr.

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In fact, at the time, the only tangible development was the sacking of nearly all of London Real’s video production staff, and the hiring of political advisors for his mayoral bid. Today, the homepage for the “Digital Freedom Platform” takes you through to a campaign site of “Brian For Mayor”. When I pointed this out to Rose’s campaign, his spokesman said that the Digital Freedom Platform “is in the process of being set up as an entirely separate commercial entity”. He also emphasised that none of the money raised through the “Digital Freedom Platform” fundraiser has been used to fund this mayoral bid.

After raising $1m, Rose was flying high, but then he managed to push his luck just a little too far. Shortly after the crowdfunder was completed, he announced that he needed to raise running costs for the platform to $250,000 per month. Within hours, the penny dropped for his supporters; the comment threads under his video turned into a bear-pit. Overnight, he became an online pariah, and finally got the media attention he craved — but not the headline he wanted: “The YouTuber Accused of Using Coronavirus to Scam His Followers”.

And yet in many ways, Rose’s fall from grace was a long time coming. Before he set up his Digital Freedom Platform, the main source of income for London Real was their expensive online courses. Indeed, at one point these courses were the business’s main source of income; eight-week courses titled “Business Accelerator” or “Podcast Yourself” were, for example, on offer for $3,000, while those who wanted to join his exclusive “Inner Circle” – for personal mentoring – could do so by coughing up $15,000.

Predictably, many of Rose’s “customers” felt they had been scammed: the website Scamguard has 28 scathing reviews of the courses, and a Google search for reviews shows up multiple unhappy customers. A Facebook group set up to advise unhappy customers on how to get their money back has nearly 300 members. In fact, many of those who signed up for London Real’s courses managed to get their money back from credit card companies, after they were able to prove that the courses were such poor quality that they were covered under the credit card company’s guarantee against mis-selling.

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Whose weird world are we living in?

By Mary Harrington

The $15,000 “Inner Circle” fared even worse. A few months ago, a letter signed by nearly every single person from the “Inner Circle” was sent to Rose, asking for their money back and complaining about the lack of value from the course. One of the signatories told me: “We had no mentorship whatsoever, it was a joke, we would have three minutes with him every 15 days and he would just talk about himself. The whole course rebelled against him.” When they eventually complained, the member said, Rose lectured them about how lucky they were to speak to him, as “people queue just to shake my hand”.

“Like many businesses, we receive occasional complaints,” Rose’s spokesman admitted. But, he said, “the reality is that this is from a handful of people amongst the thousands of satisfied graduates of our academy”.

It’s a bold claim in the face of such criticism, yet such self-confidence informs much of Rose’s myth-making today. From the start of Rose’s mayoral bid, he has claimed to be the “second ranked candidate” in the mayoral race, because he was second favourite at the bookmakers. At one point, before any polling data was collected to burst Rose’s bubble, he was rated at only 3-1 to beat Sadiq Khan.

How did he achieve this? Well, a number of political pundits have questioned whether Rose may have bet heavily on himself to distort the odds. In a flattering interview with the Times last month, he confirmed that he has bet on himself. His spokesman told me: “Mr Rose has staked a small amount on himself in the mayoral race, which wouldn’t be enough to influence even a single bookmaker’s odd”. As it stands, he is still around 20-1 at many bookmakers, ahead of the Conservative Candidate Shaun Bailey.

One suspects, however, that those odds remain extremely generous. On the face of it, if you visit the London Real YouTube page, it looks like Rose’s recent films, including one criticising Sadiq Khan, are receiving hundreds of thousands of views. Yet many of these videos show the tell tale signs of being paid posts, and the vast majority of his films released in the last few weeks are getting around two or three thousand views, a massive drop off from the heights of his conspiracy content during the pandemic.

As for his claim that he has the “largest outdoor campaign in British political history”, this also doesn’t appear to tally with reality. The non-profit group “Reform Political Advertising” identified this as one of multiple “false statements of fact, or blatant misrepresentations” in his advertising, in a letter they sent to his campaign.

Typically undeterred, Rose has since tried to repeat the trick of the Digital Freedom Platform, and generate controversy by claiming to be victimised by powerful forces. For months, he has been one of the only candidates to be campaigning heavily in person under lockdown, releasing stylised videos of him without a mask and shaking hands and mingling with assorted Londoners.

When the inevitable happened and he was stopped and fined by police while campaigning in February, he attempted once again to turn himself into a martyr, releasing a video claiming that he was being targeted for political reasons. He was given an on-the-spot fine, and tried hard to spin up some notoriety firstly claiming falsely to have been arrested, and then also falsely that he now had a criminal record as a result of the fine.

When I asked Rose’s campaign about this, his spokesman said: “Mr Rose was referring to the fact that he would ultimately be arrested if he refused to comply with the terms of the FPN he received. As he has chosen not to comply with these terms, he anticipates that the next phase of the legal process will commence in due course.”

That, of course, remains to be seen. And in the meantime, faced with the increased scrutiny that comes with any political campaign, his fantasy world could soon be about to come crumbling down. Only a couple of days ago, for example. Dorian Yates, a regular London Real guest, pulled out of an interview and released a statement claiming that Rose had refused to allow him to question on-air what had happened to the money donated to the Digital Freedom Platform.

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Who are you calling gullible?

By Timandra Harkness

Rose is yet to respond to Yates’s claim, instead preferring to release films of him shadow-boxing the camera. But in truth, it is hard to see where he goes from here. The pivot from his glossy interviews via his Digital Freedom Platform to his mayoral bid has alienated his online fanbase, while more and more of his course “customers” are starting to speak out. He now has Facebook groups and Reddit threads dedicated to calling him out and picking apart his claims.

Indeed, once London’s voters deliver their verdict, it is hard to see where Brian goes next. After all, the actual votes counted come May 6th are a somewhat purer metric of popularity. And so far London seems immune to Brian’s reality distortion field.

Live on an average Londoner’s wage
James Bloodworth, author of Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain

He announced his intention to run as an independent candidate only a few days ago, but Conservative MP Rory Stewart has already been dismissed by some commentators as not being enough of a Londoner to win the contest.

In this age of identity politics, out-of-towner is not an appellation that Mr Stewart is going to wish to find attached to his name during a mayoral contest. Indeed, Sadiq Khan appeared to win the last contest merely by repeating to Londoners that he was the local son of a bus driver.

So Rory needs some kind of policy gimmick to draw media attention away from any focus on his origins beyond the M25. Fortunately, I have just the plan. Following in the footsteps of former Labour MP Dave Nellist, Rory should pledge if elected to live on the average London worker’s wage.

It’s a gimmick — but it might be just enough of a gimmick to set Stewart’s campaign alight.

As well as being paid an average worker’s wage, Stewart would also have to dispose of his comfy house in South Kensington and live among London’s army of penurious renters. However, his descent into England’s proletariat would be softened by the knowledge that it would only be temporary while he served out his term.

We live in anti-establishment times, and such sacrifice and ascetism would surely be rewarded by the electorate, in whose eyes Rory would be transformed from an effete liberal raconteur to a stolid man of the people. This is a winning formula in today’s political climate.

Let Londoners drink on public transport
Claire Fox, Brexit Party MEP and founder of the Battle of Ideas festival

Rory could do with a bit of an image makeover after that Pret a Manger joke, which makes him look like a healthy-eating stick-in-the-mud. One way he could do it would be to reverse the ban on drinking on public transport.

Firstly, it would be a liberal thing to do, in the classical sense, trusting that the vast majority of people can enjoy a tipple without harassing others.

Secondly, it would be a nice vote of confidence in London’s night-time economy, which has faced many pressures in recent years, yet is vital for anywhere with ambitions to be a “world city”. Let partygoers and clubbers enjoy a drink on their big night out and mark out London as a place that likes to let its hair down.

Last, but by no means least, it would be a poke in the eye to Boris Johnson, who likes to claim he’s a libertarian, but whose first move as mayor was to introduce the drinking ban in the first place.

Make the capital a hedgehog haven
Tom Holland, author of Dominion

Just because Rory is moving from Cumbria to London doesn’t mean that he has to leave behind Mrs Tiggywinkle. Despite all its concrete and tarmac, London can be a surprisingly hospitable place for wildlife, and alongside the foxes nosing around our rubbish bins and the migratory birds who flock to nature reserves like the London Wetland Centre, hedgehogs too provide the capital with a touch of the countryside. Even in the very heart of the city, in Regent’s Park, a tiny population of the animals consistently voted Britain’s best loved wild mammal clings on.

Londoners who want our hedgehogs to be saved from extinction cannot leave the task to conservationists beyond the M25. There is a job to be done in the capital as well. The sheer scale of London means that hedgehogs are unlikely to flourish here without a co-ordinated attempt to link their habitats together.

Councils need to be encouraged to allow herbaceous vegetation and shrubs to grow along the edges of parks; public utilities to sink tunnels under roads; householders to open gaps in their garden fences. As a candidate to be mayor, Rory should back the provision across the capital of what the London Wildlife Trust has called “hedgehog superhighways”. The ambition must be to ensure that no hedgehog habitat in the city is an island entire of itself.

A capital that neglects to save its last remaining populations of these enchanting, iconic and authentically wild creatures, at very little cost and inconvenience, will be a capital that has lost something of its soul. I would love to see Rory put this in his manifesto.

Rethink the green belt
Jonn Elledge, editor of CityMetric

The case for rethinking London’s Green Belt will, by now, be familiar to anyone who’s given a thought to the capital’s housing crisis. Short version: we need more homes; we’re not willing to demolish existing streets so we can squeeze them in there; large chunks of the Green Belt are ugly and next to stations, so let’s have at it.

What is sometimes missing from this debate, though, is that a Green Belt with more houses on it might actually be more green. The farmland which fringes the suburbs, after all, tends to be drenched in chemicals which do untold damage to nature. It’s also far less accessible to the public than, say, Victoria Park.

As perverse as it sounds, redeveloping some of that green belt as homes with carefully planned parkland in between might actually increase both biodiversity and suburban Londoners’ access to green space. By reducing the need to commute from far-flung towns like Luton or Southend, it might be more environmentally friendly, too.

This is a hard case to make, of course, but if there’s any higher purpose to an insurgent campaign like Rory Stewart’s, surely it’s to make the case for important but unpopular measures. And if he wants to play on the easy setting — well, he could always restrict himself to promising to build homes on golf courses.

Get Londoners walking and talking
Polly Mackenzie, Director of Demos think tank

Rory Stewart’s main problem is that his brand — walking about and talking to strangers — is about as un-London as you can get. What works on the fells of Cumbria starts to feel weird when hemmed into a Tube carriage with 120 other sweaty souls.

But he has no choice. A brand is a brand, and his policy platform should be to remake London in his image: the best place in the world to walk, and the best place in the world to make a new friend.

#LondonWalks is the easier proposition. Pedestrianise our high streets. Convert our disused railway lines into strip parks, like New York’s high line. Reward families who walk the kids to school. Ban lorries from the roads between 6am and midnight. Allow people to close off any residential streets on Sundays for children to play outside. We’d be calmer, and healthier, if we all got our 10,000 steps a day.

#LondonTalks will challenge us sceptical city dwellers. But we’d be a stronger city if we made more effort to speak, and listen, to each other. Let’s start with a single day, when every Londoner can pledge to say hello to a stranger. Then a day when everyone who doesn’t know their neighbour pops round to say hello. From there, who knows?

The Mayor doesn’t have to just be a technocrat, pulling policy levers. They can also be a leader of social change. London, Rory-style, might prove a refreshing change.

Introduce an annual London census
Jon Cruddas, Member of Parliament for Dagenham and Rainham

The speed at which people migrate into and within the capital is extraordinary, yet it is barely recognised by the state. This is a critical issue for those living in the poorest parts of the city — those with the cheapest rents and house values. It places extraordinary pressures on public services in these areas of greatest need.

The state is totally ill-equipped to track in real time such movement, remaining captive to a ten-year census cycle. The data is outdated before it is even published, given the velocity of change in a city such as London. The best tracker is the school roll — which is inadequate for effective public policy making.

A new baseline for distributing public resources is desperately required, not least because the poorest communities are disproportionately taking the strain in terms of the escalating city headcount. Such a resource would also be invaluable in lobbying central government over all aspects of public policy from health to education, council allocations and policing.

The Mayor should urgently engage the Leverhulme Centre on Demographic Science at Nuffield College to build a new census model for the capital as an innovative, transparent metric to underscore public policymaking for London.

Take on the absentee landlords
Peter Franklin, Associate Editor of UnHerd

Rory Stewart won’t win on the strength of his awesome Roriness alone — it just gets him a hearing for his ideas. Luckily, as an independent, he can propose whatever policies he likes — so they’d better be bold and brilliant.

To deal with the charge that he’s too privileged to be Mayor, Rory should take aim at London’s most privileged interest group: the city’s private landlords, in particular its absentee landlords. Our capital is a magnet for the world’s money, but if it’s just used to buy into a restricted land supply, it does nothing for Londoners apart from putting up the rent.

Our capital should be a welcoming and dynamic destination for the world’s most talented people, not a series of empty apartments for idle speculators to put their cash into. If they want to use London bricks-and-mortar as a safety deposit box while making no other contribution, then it’s a service that should be charged for.

So here’s the policy: levy a hefty annual fee on every dwelling above a given value. This would be reduced in proportion to UK taxes paid by the owner — or money invested into a qualifying enterprise. Genuine entrepreneurs would pay nothing, absentee landlords and tax avoiders would pay full whack.

Oh and the proceeds would go to the regeneration of London’s rundown housing estates.

Reform political lobbying
Tanya Gold, journalist

I am bored with personality politics, saviours-of-the-day and people who claim to be different but go on to be the same. Ennui and the willingness to close your eyes on television is not enough; nor is obvious cleverness, nor unusual sensitivity. I suggest this, if Stewart wants to be taken seriously as a political reformer: reform political funding and political lobbying.

People beyond the bubble, which is growing larger each day, think Westminster is a closed shop, and, even if it were only a belief — I’d say it’s only moderately corrupt for now — it would be dangerous enough. You should not be able to buy privileged political access in Britain, but you can; and if it isn’t useful why would you do it?

At an event at Tory Conference — run by a PR firm posing as a think tank — I sat next to a monied man who heckled the very idea of taxing capital. In his hand was an itinerary including a private dinner with a senior Secretary of State. He didn’t pay for it, you say? Don’t be stupid.

Stewart should start with this – it would be worth it.

Build some decent social housing
Jenny McCartney, journalist

The most obvious policy that Rory Stewart should vigorously espouse in his London mayoralty bid is the one that so many politicians before him have fudged or failed at: a highly ambitious campaign of building good-quality social housing.

Stewart sounds receptive to the idea, having said earlier this month in a letter to Londoners that “It is obvious that we need to build far more houses and flats — not just gimcrack boxes, but homes we can be proud of.” But others have said similar things before, only for their promises to get tied up in complicated contracts with developers and elastic definitions; during Boris Johnson’s term as mayor, “affordable” was redefined to mean up to 80% of market rents, terminology that has not exactly proved accurate.

The current gross disparity between social housing supply and demand has helped create an expanding category of “working poor” in London — a throwback to the Victorian era — comprising people who are squeezed economically by high private rents but unable to access social housing. The implied contract between the individual and the state — that of work for basic security — has been eroded.

Potential pledges could be to end “right to buy” on London council properties; create a consumer regulator to enforce standards for social housing tenants; campaign for more central government money to reach new annual targets for building social housing; restrict the purchase of London investment properties by foreign buyers and encourage high-quality, imaginative constructions.

Aneurin Bevan — who, post-war, steered the UK’s biggest ever building programme for social housing — would have wept to see the housing difficulties of many families today. Some very radical, or very old-fashioned, thinking is required. Come on, Rory.

Good schools, not gangs
Ralph Leonard, Nigerian-British writer

London is one of Britain’s “hotspots” for the knife crime “epidemic” that regularly crops up in the news. At the moment politicians are frantically searching for quick, short-term solutions, such as increasing police numbers, cracking down on drill music and expanding stop and search. Arrest and convict may be the cheaper strategy, but it isn’t effective and doesn’t even begin to address the long-term social causes of knife crime.

No single policy will instantly “solve” London’t knife crisis totally, but a radical overhaul of the education system will help significantly and begin the long process of addressing this problem. Making education more attractive would be central to all this.

Education needs to be better and be seen to lead to better things; instead many of London’s schools are overcrowded, increasingly dilapidated and deprived of resources. The best chances are only for the rich.

Rory should pledge to raise the quality and standards of both middling and struggling schools, and demonstrate how being in school and learning makes a difference — and leads to greater material and psychological wellbeing than getting involved with gangs and knife crime. In doing so, Rory must recognise the damaging effects of the austerity cuts brought about by his spurned party, and commit to reversing them, through an ambitious long-term plan to providing the capital’s schools with adequate resources, teachers and renovated facilities.

Don’t just preach feminism — practise it
Julie Bindel, journalist and campaigner

During the Tory Party leadership contest most of the candidates, including Rory Stewart, declared that they were feminists (after Dominic Raab said he was “probably not” one). Quite frankly, I doubt very much that is the case, but if Rory Stewart wishes to truly set himself apart from the Tories, including former leader Theresa May, he could put his heart and soul into developing and maintaining services for women and girls who have experienced male violence in London.

The housing crisis in the capital means that if a woman escapes domestic violence with her children, then unless she is seriously rich, she is going to end up either sofa-surfing or in grotty bed-and-breakfast temporary accommodation. It’s no wonder so many women return to violent men, risking their own lives, when that is the alternative.

Similarly, sexual violence and rape in London is at an all-time high; the conviction rate at an all-time low. And yet at the same time, rape crisis services are being squeezed into nonexistence.

And then there is the issue of women being trafficked into London to be abused in the sex trade. There are barely any services available to these women if they do manage to escape, which means they face deportation. Surely we can do better than that? If Rory Stewart wants to make his mark, he could stand proud as the first ever Tory that took the pandemic of violence against women seriously.