As I write, it looks as though Angela Rayner is going to be spending a fair amount of time at her new flat in Hove. As she is a newcomer to the area, I thought I’d give her a quick run through.
The first and most boring thing about Hove is that residents are meant to say they live in “Hove, actually”, to distinguish the town from its contiguous neighbour, Brighton, as if there were any difference between the two places (the phrase is said to have been coined by Laurence Olivier). The tiresome thing is that there is a difference. If Brighton is a town which always gives the impression – as Keith Waterhouse once put it – of somewhere which is helping the police with their inquiries, Hove is the curtain-twitching neighbour who shopped them in the first place. Brighton is actually three towns in one: Kemptown, to the east, is sleazy and rakish; Brighton, in the middle, is funky and genial; and Hove, well, Hove is genteel and respectable. As one wag (me, actually) once put it: one is conceived in Kemptown; one lives in Brighton; and one grows old, and dies, in Hove.
There may be no physical border between Brighton and Hove, save for a twitten (the local name for a narrow alleyway) called Boundary Passage, which runs northwards not far from the Co-op on the Western Road, but the differences between the two places are as stark as those between North and South Korea, or East and West Berlin in the days of the Cold War. It is said that there are 365 pubs in Brighton, one for every day of the year (probably fewer now, after Covid); but there is only one in Hove, The Wick, which I am very fond of, but that’s your lot. There are several thousand tattoo parlours in Brighton and Kemptown; I have yet to spot one in Hove. (I exaggerate for comic effect. But not by much.) You don’t actually need to show your papers, or evade the border patrols by getting on a small boat, when going from one place to the other, but the difference in atmosphere is palpable. I live only 300-odd paces from the border, but the only time I ever go to Hove is to watch the cricket, which tells you all you need to know. (The walk takes me past the forbiddingly brutalist Magistrates’ Court, which always gives me a chill, as if I had walked past my own grave.)
As Ms Rayner gives the impression of someone who likes to have a good time (and gets lambasted by certain sections of the British press when she does, to their immense discredit), she would probably enjoy Brighton a lot more; but, alas, the exigencies of living in the public eye mean that she has to reside in Hove.
Not that this insures her against unwelcome attention. Her home has already been vandalised with the words “tax evader” written in red aerosol. I can picture the artist easily: a male aerosol in his late middle years, whose own tax returns themselves might not stand up to full and rigorous scrutiny. Pure conjecture, I know, but if my guess is way out of the ballpark, or cricket ground, I would be a little surprised.
Well, I, for one, welcome Ms Rayner to the area with open arms. Her hounding by people who go to great lengths to avoid paying taxes as much as possible is deplorable, and shameful, all part of the treatment accorded by the privileged to intelligent women from a working class background. Ignore the poltroon who spray-painted the outside of her flat. If she ever wants to pop into The Wick for a pint, I would be happy and proud to buy her one.
[See more: The paranoid politics of Nigel Farage]
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