Ludo

With this government’s vast array of taxes engineered to make employing anyone under thirty a form of fiscal self-harm, taxing entrepreneurs so they pack up and leave and AI hoovering up every graduate trainee role going, the outlook for Britain’s young is bleak. The traditional first rung of the ladder — filing, photocopying, fetching coffee, learning to dread Mondays — has been quietly automated out of existence. There is, increasingly, nowhere for the young to start.

Into this wasteland strides the Dame’s nephew Ludo, a young man whose only demonstrated talent to date is an unerring instinct for other people’s money. Ludo has had An Idea, and — as is always the case with Ludo — it is an idea entirely uncontaminated by shame.

If there is no work, Ludo reasons, then the only growth industry left in Britain is Benefits. And if there’s one thing the state does brilliantly, it’s handing out money to people who ask nicely and fill in the right forms. So why not — Ludo announces this with the pride of a man who believes he has just spliced the atom — teach young people how to do it properly?

Thus was born Public Money Transfer (working title: Benefits Exploitation), a fully accredited three-year online degree, designed by Ludo to equip an entire generation with the one employable skill left to them: extracting maximum value from a welfare system currently supporting some 50 million claimants of one kind or another.

The course prospectus, which the Dame was shown over lunch and read with mounting horror, promises modules including “Advanced Form-Filling,” “PIP Assessments: A Practical Workshop,” “Sanctions and How to Avoid Them,” and a capstone dissertation modestly titled “Maximising Household Income Without Ever Meeting an Employer.” Guest lecturers will include a rotating cast of recently retired civil servants from the DWP, several of whom, Ludo notes approvingly, “know literally where every lever is, because they built the levers.”

Ludo’s pitch to prospective students is disarmingly direct: most young people, he says, have absolutely no idea how the gravy train works, or indeed that it exists at all. They assume that they must get a job. Ludo’s degree will disabuse them of this notion entirely, replacing it with a rigorous, examinable understanding of how to become — his words, delivered without a flicker of irony — “sustainably state-dependent.”

And here is the flourish Ludo is proudest of: he is already lobbying for government grants to fund the course itself, on the grounds that a nation so committed to supporting people who don’t work really ought to extend that largesse to a degree that trains people how not to. He has, apparently, drafted a funding bid describing the venture as “upskilling the next generation for the realities of the modern economy” — a phrase the Dame found almost admirable in its shamelessness, rather in the way one admires a really committed con artist.

The Dame’s only question, posed to Ludo over the cheese course, was whether the government had considered that a country subsidising a degree in claiming its own benefits might, eventually, notice something had gone badly wrong with the incentives somewhere upstream. Ludo looked at her blankly and asked whether that meant she wasn’t investing.

The Dame, like Emma, is very grand (well, she likes to think she is). But there the resemblance ends. It would never occur to the Dame, on hearing of the brutal killing of a human being, to reach for her phone and tweet “WTF.” The Dame was raised to understand that some things are simply not done — chief among them, treating a violent death as an occasion for a four-letter aside.

There is something genuinely repellent about grand, aristo, comfortable women like Emma performing coarseness for public consumption — dropping “fuck” into a sentence about murder as though profanity were a badge of authenticity, a passport to the common touch. It isn’t edgy. It isn’t relatable. It is a woman of considerable privilege play-acting at being one of the “ignorant and debased,” presumably under the impression that this makes her sound less remote from the rest of us.

It doesn’t. It makes her sound like exactly what she is: a woman who has never had to worry about anything real enough to teach her when silence, or a plainer word, would do. The lower orders she is so keen to impersonate rarely reach for obscenity when someone has actually died — they reach for it over parking spaces and penalty shootouts. Reserving it, rightly, for something less than a corpse.

It is, in short, pathetic. And no amount of borrowed vulgarity will disguise it.

Dear Resident Association Chair,

I am writing to you regarding a new tax proposed by the Government which we estimate could affect over 50% of homes in the borough.This is not something a Council Leader would usually do, but I am breaking convention because the Government has chosen to call this a “Council Tax Surcharge.” This is not an accurate description. While the Government proposes that the tax is collected by councils, we will not retain any of it to fund local services. It is a tax to fund wider welfare spending and the growth of the state, money that will be spent on programmes and priorities decided elsewhere.

I believe residents deserve to hear that directly from us, not learn it after the fact. Under the Government’s High Value Council Tax Surcharge, properties over £2 million in value would pay a yearly tax, levied on the value of their property. This tax would be on a sliding scale rising to a maximum of £7,500 a year. More details of the proposals can be found here https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/high-value-council-tax-surcharge/high-value-council-tax-surcharge#supporting-those-with-limited-ability-to-pay

I wanted to be clear that this Council opposes the Government’s proposal for this new tax in the strongest possible terms. A home is the centre of family life, not an untapped tax stream. I have written to the Government asking them to reconsider their proposal.

We estimate that over 50% of properties in the borough could be in scope for this additional tax and under current proposals almost every impacted household would have to pay the tax in full every year.

Only those earning less than £35,000 or with less than £16,000 in savings would be able to defer payments. Indeed, so low is the deferral limit that someone on £35,000 a year with £16,000 in savings would qualify for social housing under our allocations scheme. I am genuinely concerned that residents of this borough will be forced to sell their home, just to meet this new tax bill.

This new tax would impact tens of thousands of households in the borough, and I would encourage you and your members to look at the Government’s proposals and if you are concerned make your views clear either by writing to the Government ([email protected].) or your local Member of Parliament.

The Dame says….

This Labour government isn’t just incompetent — it’s dishonest, and Cllr Campbell is right to call it out.

House price inflation has wreaked havoc with people’s finances — not by destroying their wealth, but by taxing a gain they never asked for and can’t spend. Governments are responsible for that inflation, just as they’re responsible for the reckless spending now spiralling out of control: £408 billion in benefits by 2030 — 12% of GDP. Strip out the State Pension and the number is still obscene.

So what’s Labour’s answer? Raid the homes of residents whose only “crime” is that their house rose in value on paper while their bank balance stayed exactly the same. Call it a “Council Tax Surcharge” to make it sound local, sound fair, sound like it’s going back into your street. It isn’t. Not one penny reaches the councils. This is a Treasury smash-and-grab wearing a council disguise — and calling it anything else is a lie, plain and simple.

And Joe Powell? The constituency MP whose job is to stand between his residents and exactly this kind of raid? Nowhere to be seen. Not a statement. Not a tweet. Not a whisper. Either he doesn’t understand what’s being done to the people who elected him, or he understands perfectly well and has decided their pockets are an acceptable price for staying on-message with his party. Neither is good enough. Residents deserve an MP who fights for them — not one who goes quiet the moment his own government is the problem.

This country is broken beyond repair…why would any sane person live in a lawless country governed by corrupt and greedy fools.

If you’ve ever spent forty minutes redialling your surgery only to be offered an appointment in late September, The Dame may have found your answer. Her neighbours are, by and large, splendidly well-heeled foreign nationals whose entire relationship with this country consists of an intermittently occupied flat and a standing order to the Council Tax department. No income tax. No National Insurance. No skin in the game whatsoever — yet a full NHS registration awaits them, no questions asked, no proof of entitlement required.

Somewhere in NHS management, someone has decided that the optimal use of a taxpayer-funded health service is to advertise it enthusiastically to people who have never paid for it. One can only assume the same department is responsible for the booking system, since both appear designed with the same guiding principle: maximum availability for everyone except the people actually paying for it.

The Dame salutes the ingenuity. She merely wonders, gently, whether anyone in NHS management has considered checking IDs as enthusiastically as they check council tax bands.

Join us this Saturday, 27th June, for an evening that promises pure enchantment.

The superb Lowe Ensemble will transport us to the courts of 17th-century Spain with a glorious programme of Spanish Baroque music — full of passion, colour and flair. As the final notes fade, the evening continues with a reception in the Church’s beautiful Rose Garden, where the Spanish theme lingers on amid good company and fine surroundings.

All this for just £20 — an evening of music, beauty and conviviality you won’t want to miss.

The Dame will be there, and she very much hopes her many supporters and followers will join her for what promises to be a truly memorable night. Ticket available below

https://parish.rcdow.org.uk/chelseastmary/event/st-marys-cadogan-2026-eventss/#tribe-tickets__tickets-form

Residents — particularly in Conservation Areas — are fed up to the back teeth with rental bikes littering the streets and blocking pavements. The Council’s chosen enforcer, Kingdom, has already made national headlines for the threatening behaviour of its staff. Officers, it seems, are putty in the hands of these companies.

Now residents fear the same officers are being leaned on by Falco UK Ltd to install racks of these eyesores across Conservation Areas and zones of architectural significance. Falco UK Ltd is owned by a Dutch entity, FRIESA B.V. The Dame is checking it out….

No resident asked for any of this. These things scar the streetscape and serve no purpose that anyone wanted. Brace yourselves: the Council will doubtless run one of its sham “consultations,” massaged to manufacture demand that doesn’t exist.

Every residents’ association needs to be on guard. Take a leaf out of MISARA’s book — the Milner Street Area Residents’ Association fought off this blight and kept Lennox Gardens clean. The rest of us should be doing the same.

The Dame has been receiving a quantity of mail from readers reminding her of her finest hour — the ruthless and ultimately successful decapitation of Sir Merrick Cockell, or Pooter as he was more affectionately known to those who had to endure him.

The Dame drove him from the leadership of the Royal Borough and, for good measure, persuaded the national press to examine his remarkable expenses and his enthusiasm for international travel at the poor bloody taxpayer’s expense. Those close to this pompous little man — and there were fewer of them by the end — maintain that the resulting publicity scuppered his ambition to plant his considerable bottom on the red benches of the Upper House. He had to make do with a miserable K instead. Why even that was warranted remains something of a mystery.

At certain points, he was pocketing upwards of £120,000 a year….not too bad for what is supposed to be public service. The Dame was desperate for her feckless nephew, Ludo, to aspire to ‘public service’.

Which brings the Dame to a recurring theme: why do leaders of this Council so consistently refuse to be put out to grass? Is it the money? The conceited conviction that no one could possibly do it better? Or simply that outstaying one’s welcome has become a local tradition?

The Dame will acknowledge, for once, that the current leadership team contains some genuinely capable people. Thalassites, Kemahli, Wills and Rendall are encouraging signs. The Dame misses Sof McVeigh and trusts her return will be swift.

And then there is Elizabeth Campbell……

After Grenfell, no sensible person wanted the poisoned chalice. Cllr Campbell was prepared to take it on — and credit, of a sort, is due for that. In less catastrophic circumstances, it is doubtful she would have been considered at all.

The Dame has never had time for Cllr Campbell. She is, to put it plainly, limited. The Council needs fresh leadership, not a caretaker who has forgotten she was ever temporary. Companies with bed-blocking CEOs tend to flounder. Councils are no different.

One detects, perhaps uncharitably, that Cllr Campbell is enjoying herself rather too much — or that she harbours hopes of one day becoming Baroness Campbell. The Dame has been informed, with some emphasis, that this prospect is remote. It would be a grotesque insult to every family that lost someone in Grenfell Tower.

Cllr Campbell, the Dame addresses you directly: your time is up. Sail away gracefully while the option remains. The young team is ready. Step aside and let them get on with it.

The Dame was having blood taken by a newly qualified doctor from Imperial — one of the world’s great universities, home to some of the sharpest minds on the planet.

Two things she said stopped the Dame cold.

First: brilliant Imperial graduates — engineers, scientists, people with serious degrees in hard subjects — cannot find jobs. Second, and worse: after surviving three brutal rounds of interviews, they are being dismissed without a word of encouragement or a scrap of useful feedback. Blunt rejection. Nothing more.

Name them. Shame them. These companies are telling you everything you need to know about their culture.

But the real crisis runs deeper. If the cream of the graduate cohort is being left on the shelf, what hope is there for the millions of ordinary young people trying to get started? The first rungs of the career ladder used to mean grunt work — unglamorous, underpaid, but it got you in. AI has kicked those rungs away.

We are all going to make money from AI. But we are making it on the backs of a generation whose prospects we are quietly destroying.

The Dame always listens to property men with a finger on the rental pulse. Patrick Bullick of Stanley Property London is one such. His latest bulletin details how damaging the Renters Act is for both landlord and prospective tenants. Lordly Gove came up with this nonsensical legislation, and it was gleefully taken up by Labour. Lordly G is now so diminished that he has to front up ads for the Spectator on You Tube…

Over to you, PB…..

Tenancy Chains and Voids

The Renters ‘Wrongs’ Act (RWA) is having a material effect on the letting market. Both landlords and tenants are suffering from this ill-conceived legislation.

Many of the consequences were pretty obvious, except perhaps to those naïve left-wing lobbying groups and the dullards in Government who drove it through.

Some pitfalls are more nuanced and, only now, raising their ugly heads.

The RWA has moved us into a world of tenancy chains, directly equivalent to a sales transaction chain and just as vulnerable to being broken, allowing no-one to proceed.

It is definitely happening in London. Feedback from readers in the Shires is welcome.

There are many contributory factors causing these tenancy chains.

The devil is in the detail.

A tenant now has to give at least two months’ notice to end a tenancy, where it was commonly one month until the Act. The fear of duplication of rent means it is a leap of faith to give notice when they have not yet found a new place.

Landlords exiting the rental market because of the RWA has caused shortages and rent rises which makes it harder for tenants to find a good new home.

If the tenant does find a property, the landlord cannot sign up to that new agreement until the old tenant has actually left.

If a landlord were to suffer a ‘duplication of tenant’, that landlord would be responsible for the cost of housing the new tenant until the old one had vacated or another place had been found.

Expensive stuff, especially in London.

We have already experienced tenants giving notice to leave and then not actually going because their onward move has fallen through as something collapsed down the chain.

So, another consequence of the Renter’s ‘Wrongs’ Act is both landlord and tenant are bound into a messy and expensive process, with no certainty for either.

The lack of fluidity for a tenant, restricts their ability to move when their needs change.

Terrible for the tenants and the economy.

Whilst we wait years for the Government to recognise and respond to the debacle they have created, the market must find solutions.

Landlords releasing a tenant from their obligation to give two long months’ notice could mean they have a void period between tenancies.

However, as it is not possible to sign a new agreement until they are gone anyway, it may be the most pragmatic way to deal with an uncomfortable situation.

Voids do cost money but the ability to ask, and probably get, a higher rent is an upside.

The key will be to find good new tenants quickly.

Or sell!

Finally, for goodness’ sakes use an experienced agent who knows what they are doing.

The Chelsea Citizen has done an excellent job of lifting up the hood and looking into the latest saga involving the Moffat’s. https://thechelseacitizen.com/exclusive-andrew-moffat-makes-audacious-bid-to-re-float-houseboat-empire-despite-102m-debt-sinking/

They even got a pic of the duo…

The leafy streets of Fulham and Hammersmith enjoy a rather comfortable secret: a ring of draconian fines that keep the riff-raff — and their cars — firmly out. The coffers of H&F swell nicely, thank you very much, while unwitting out-of-borough drivers receive an expensive education in postcode politics.

But here’s the delicious irony. Residents of Kensington and Chelsea are being stung by those very same fines for daring to drive in Fulham, while simultaneously enduring a free-for-all of speeding metal thundering through the elegant backstreets around Harrods. The noise. The pollution. The danger. The sheer, grinding indignity of it.

Borough Residents Only

Enter Josh Rendall, newly installed as the man responsible for transport strategy. Josh, here’s your moment. The residents around Harrods didn’t move to one of the most expensive postcodes in the world to be used as a rat run.

The business case, should you need one, is embarrassingly simple. If punishing outsiders is good enough for H&F, it is good enough for K&C. And at a time when cries of financial hardship echo mournfully down the corridors of Hornton Street, the thought of speed cameras and penalty notices generating a handsome revenue stream from every lead-footed interloper should have Josh practically salivating.

What are you waiting for, Josh? The cars aren’t stopping. The fines won’t collect themselves.

Cllr Sof McVeigh took on one of the hardest jobs in local government leadership — thankless, relentless, and permanently under fire. Yet even many of the Conservatives’ fiercest critics would concede one thing: Sof cared deeply about doing the job well…and she did the job brilliantly.

As councillor for Brompton and Hans Town, she built a reputation for tireless commitment. Residents knew that if there was a problem to solve, Sof would already be halfway to fixing it. She embodied the old maxim: if you want something done, ask a busy person.

Let’s all hope she returns to a leadership role soon. With her superb knowledge of housing, Sof will be missed at a local level, but hopefully her talents will be deployed at a national level.

The Dame’s ear remains firmly to the ground — and the mood across the Borough is unmistakable. There is anger, bewilderment by residents who miss a devoted councillor.

The man in the middle of these two is a human rights lawyer. He managed to persuade the jury that human rights were involved when his two thuggish clients attacked police officers. The really distressing part is that the young police officer was left traumatised, bloody and bleeding with a broken nose.

This sends out a clear message to the lawless element of the public: the police are fair game if you feel like attacking them.

In the US, these two would have been shot dead…… Poor England!

The Police Federation needs to fund the officer’s civil action for assault and battery.

The Council spends a small fortune on consultations. The resident below echoes the commonly held view that the results are ignored.

As the invisible Cllr Mary Weale(of the huge allowance) is said to say, “we hear, but we don’t listen.

Residents are getting fed up with bike hire companies abusing public space for huge private profit.

Here is an example of the council asking for opinions and then ignoring the results. Why bother?

“I am getting a bit fed-up with the residents’ car hating council, taking our local residents’ parking space away, recently for “tree pits” and now they want more for “e-scooter and e-bike” parking, when the effect of the bays created so far has been for their operators to dump yet more of these nuisances in the Borough, where they continue to be left blocking pavements, with no effective action taken.

My RA has responded to previous such “consultations” and our views are simply ignored. 

Perhaps the Dame might like to express her disapproval of those responsible in the hope of embarassing them into being slightly more considerate of residents’ views.

Off on another hike to where I was able to park my car.”

The Dame knows this wonderful oasis of peaceful greenery. Many of her friends use it. It is an asset under threat from a hotel encroaching on the space. Even if you don’t use the garden, it is important to support the fightback. Please click here

https://stopthegardengrab.org/

The Times found Polanski, now the Green Party leader, had described himself as a “spokesperson” for the British Red Cross on his personal website in 2020. He did so again on two crowdfunding pages in 2022, when he was raising £400 to support his campaign for Green Party deputy leader. The British Red Cross told The Times that Polanski “has not been a spokesperson” and said it had raised the matter with his team.

Polanski set himself up as leader of integrity with no clay feet. He lies as well as the next politician, as the Times found out. Not the first time, Zack has been caught lying.

We can never forget his sordid and unscrupulous claim to be able to enhance breast size by hypnosis. He really is a mountebank and a piece of work.

The Dame had a ‘orrid nightmare. She woke to remember what it was…it was this bunch of Green Party losers running local councils.

Cllr Jedut has replied here to those of you posting adverse comments about here.

She is not happy…..will she now join the Lib Dems?

Ex-Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (looking exhausted) with young Aberdeen clubbers….

Back in the day, our lordly friend dreamed up the Renters (Reform) Bill — his big idea to kill off Section 21. It never got off the ground under the Tories, but Labour gleefully picked it up.

May 1st. Section 21 is dead. And the result? Exactly what anyone with half a brain predicted — thousands of spooked landlords serving Section 21 notices ahead of the deadline, a mass exodus from the market, tightening supply and rents going through the roof.

The cruel irony? Good tenants paying the price for bad ones and good landlords paying the price for bad ones.

Nervous landlords — many of them decent, small operators already hammered by the economics of providing housing — are heading for the exit. One told the Dame bluntly: “I won’t rent to students anymore. The Act lets them just bugger off on two months’ notice.”

And here’s the delicious twist. Gove’s old parliamentary chum James Cleverley has become a high-profile casualty of his friend’s brainwave. Cleverley has been served a Section 21 by his own Braintree constituency landlord — who he describes as excellent, but simply terrified of what comes next.

Gove’s Glum ex Chum

Inept drafting. Catastrophic unintended consequences. Baby meet bathwater.

We all despise rogue landlords. They prey on the vulnerable and should be driven out. But why punish the good ones and leave decent tenants homeless in the process and others unable to afford rents?

You have to feel sorry for Joe. His other job is babysitting the buffoon David Lammy.

In an attempt to raise us all from pre-election torpor Joe, without much enthusiasm, tried to persuade us of the effectiveness of the Labour Group on RBK&C.

Don’t waste your time, Joe. The Labour Group used to have talented people. Now, led by the member for Somalia, Cllr Ali, it has become a laughing stock.

Joe says the following…

The Labour candidates have been clear they would improve value for money, while also retaining twice-weekly bin collection and borough-wide parking permits.

the idea of this bunch of no-hopers knowing about value for money is risible.

FRANKLY AWFUL, FRANCO

Most CEO’s of good companies will generally reply to complaints.

Not, Franco: he ignores them!

This Reform’s candidate for Queen’s Gate Ward. Her name is Kezia Noble. She is one of the world’s leading experts on dating. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xry-f-JSPrU.

She is hoping to unseat Sam Mackover, the sitting Conservative councillor. Now, Sam would admit himself that in the looks department, he is no match for Miss Noble. But, are looks really what we want when it comes to running a complex council? The Dame thinks the answer is self-evident.

Mackover is possibly one of the best councillors the Borough has. For Reform to put up Miss Noble is an absolute slap in the face to taxpayers.

The Dame was brought up with Victorian values (she even covers the legs of her Queen Anne furniture to avoid being shocked).

Imagine her horror when she researched Miss Noble’s very saucy background….she advises ‘only fans’ of a certain type of special entertainment to google Miss Noble

Notting Hill Genesis is a mess and this above is its CEO, messy looking Patrick Franco, Franco’s previous job was at Foxtons, the estate agent-an estate agency which attracted much controversy

Chaos seems to reign at NHG. Interventions by regulators and floods of complaints from angry tenants and owners. It is time the government stepped in.

Here is just a brief synopsis of that chaos

Notting Hill Genesis (NHG), a major London housing association, has faced significant controversy regarding, severe, chronic repair delays, widespread errors in service charges (including charging tenants for non-existent services), and, as detailed in the Social Housing Action Campaign report, a failing grade from the Regulator of Social Housing regarding tenant safety and service quality. 

Key controversies and issues surrounding Notting Hill Genesis include:

• Service Charge Failures: Residents reported significant errors in service charge notices, including instances where residents were charged for services not provided, such as a lift in a building that only had stairs. NHG apologized for “incorrectly apportioned” costs after residents faced potential, unjustified, thousands-of-pounds increases.
• Housing Ombudsman Findings: The Housing Ombudsman has documented cases of maladministration, including serious failures to handle complaints, address damp/mould, and manage repairs after sewage floods.
• Poor Conditions and Management: Tenants have raised concerns over long-term disrepair, such as mold and pest infestations, alongside accusations of implementing “poor doors” to separate tenants.
• Failed Regulatory Rating: The Regulator of Social Housing downgraded NHG to a ‘G3’ grade, indicating a failure to meet governance requirements and a need for major improvements in risk management.
• Misleading Advertising: The Advertising Standards Authority previously ruled against NHG for overstating the benefits of their shared ownership schemes.