Evan Davis: 'The talent all comes to London. It’s extraordinary how sucking London is'

Fast-paced, crammed and luring in the cleverest folk, London is like a brilliant party, says Evan Davis. Who would have it any other way, he asks Lucy Tobin
In the chair: Evan Davis was announced as Jeremy Paxman's replacement on Newsnight
28 February 2014

Move over, Goldman Sachs. There’s a new blood-sucking vampire squid in town. And its name is London.

“London sucks,” declares Evan Davis, the avuncular pierced one on the Today programme, whose new two-part series, Mind the Gap: London vs the Rest, tackles the capital’s dominance in Britain. “It’s a force sucking the talent out of the rest of the country. It flourishes on the back of the talent it sucks in.”

To be clear, the 51-year-old economist turned Dragons’ Den presenter doesn’t think London sucks according to the teen’s definition: he loves the place, from the Brompton Cemetery where he walks his new whippet puppy, Mr Whippy, to the South Bank, his favourite place to take tourists. But Davis isn’t sure whether the rest of the UK can cope with London’s dominance. “Britain is changing — becoming one country with two economies. There’s London. And then there’s the rest.

“Of my 15 closest friends from Oxford University, one is in Brighton, one in Berlin, one I don’t know and the other 12 are all in London,” he says. “There isn’t a single one in Scotland, or Wales, or in Manchester or Birmingham. The talent all comes to London. It’s extraordinary how sucking London is.”

Davis himself is one of the “sucked” — after he was born in Malvern, Worcestershire, to South African parents, the family moved to Surrey (“My parents were sucked in first”), his first job after Oxford was in London, “and there was never really any doubt about my staying here”.

That story, times a few million other London immigrants, is Davis’s explanation for the capital’s success. “It’s like nightclubs,” explains probably the only one of Today’s rumbustious presenters to use clubbing as an economic analogy.

“What appeals to a punter about a club is not the décor, or the bar prices, but who else is inside. You walk past a string of empty nightclubs — everyone wants to go to the happening one, even when you have to queue for an hour for the cloakroom. That’s London — topsy-turvy economics where the more people who come, the more want to come. And the bigger it is, the more people want to be in it, and so it carries on. You’ve got this unstoppable force of growth and density.”

Britain now faces a dilemma, says Davis. Sitting in a small orange booth near the Today studio, he ponders: “Do we feed the London beast to accommodate its growth? We can’t let London get broken because it’s the engine of the UK. But if we keep feeding in the money to maintain it, you’re never going to have other engines working elsewhere.” So far, so fence-sitting. Davis waves his arms, today clad in a glittery grey and black sweater, like a conductor’s baton to stress his points. But he started working at the Beeb 21 years ago and struggles to give opinions. Occasionally he conflates himself with the broadcaster, with phrases such as “Obviously, the BBC doesn’t have views” when asked for his own ones.

But asked how to solve the “London vs ‘the rest’” issue, Davis comes to a compromise. “I’m a construction nut so I’d overspend on infrastructure, everywhere. I wouldn’t economise on London but I don’t want the North to be abandoned. I think a proper second city, in Manchester or Birmingham or somewhere else, would help spread the power. But building one up while maintaining London — that comes with a cost.”

That bill for new infrastructure is increasingly picked up by foreign credit cards. On his new programme, Davis visits London Gateway, the £1.5 billion super-port in Essex built with cash from Dubai, and Battersea power station’s £8 billion redevelopment scheme, backed by Malaysian money. Davis supports the investment — “It’s not like the ports and other foreign-owned infrastructure can be lifted up and taken to Dubai or wherever” — but he thinks the capital’s foreign billionaires should pay more tax.

“London is giving quite a lot to people who settle here — a ticket to security, stability, cultural opportunity. I think we need to ask ourselves, are we charging the right price for that? If you make it too cheap to come to London, you’re not serving the interests of the domestic population. How much should an oligarch pay to have two houses in London? But I worry that we’re underpricing.”

Charging more isn’t the same as chasing foreigners away, though. “It ill behoves people who’ve gravitated to London from elsewhere to be indignant about others who have gravitated to London from elsewhere,” Davis solemnly states. He loves London’s multi-culturalism, and the fact that here he can be “a presenter who is gay rather than a gay presenter”.

As we walk from New Broadcasting House towards Oxford Circus, Davis admits he also likes the fact that Londoners are “over the whole ‘Ooh gay, oooh piercing thing’”. Alas, those are the two facts everyone I tell I’m interviewing Davis brings up (he’s rumoured to have a “Prince Albert”).

Still, there are higher-minded things occupying Davis’s brain. He’s concerned London’s housing crisis is turning the capital into Los Angeles, where he lived for a few months in the late Eighties. “LA has a lot of very rich people and quite a lot of Hispanic people working for them, but you struggle to find any ordinary people.” Londoners, Davis frets, “are being pushed out of their own city”.

His own home, an Earl’s Court flat shared with his French long-term partner, architect Guillaume Baltz, fuels concerns about the housing market. “I paid £100,000 for it in 1996, it’s in a small block of six flats, and two just sold for utterly silly prices. Stupid, stupid, stupid. I do worry that there’s a property bubble.”

What would he do about it? “You could imagine using the planning system to say there are houses for occupation and houses for investment, and when this house is sold, it has to be occupied. But we don’t generally use our planning system that way.”

It's not just for struggling young Londoners that Davis is worried about property prices. In Mind the Gap: London vs the Rest, he strolls around a £40 million Mayfair pad and waves around plans for the £750,000 redeveloped flats of the old Heygate Estate in Elephant & Castle. “By far the biggest worry I have about the programme is that we’ll get a property crash, and someone will go back and look at the programme and use it as archive footage to say, ‘Look how deluded and hubristic they were back then’.”

Still, housing and infrastructure problems aside, Davis says he’s now a Londoner for life. “Where we live, it’s dense and noisy and, being near Chelsea & Westminster Hospital, full of sirens, but I can go out and buy a pint of milk in the middle of the night by walking 50 metres from my home. I love urban living.”

He enjoys the odd escape, too. “I’m not going to lie,” says Davis in a rare drift from Radio 4 diction, “we do have, er, a bolthole, a place in northern France we can escape to. But I couldn’t move away permanently.” He’s not planning on switching jobs either, despite the 3.15am wake-up call for Today. “I can’t think of anything else I’m capable of doing now, and maybe I’m not even capable of doing that,” he grins. “It’s a nice job. And it leaves lots of room for other things, like making a programme about London.”

So should the capital shake free of the rest of the country? London provides a fifth of Britain’s income, with productivity here greater than that of Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and the West Midlands put together. Why not spin off London, not Scotland, into independence?

“But London is so intertwined with the rest of the country,” says Davis, before quickly adding “as is Scotland.”

“British people are better off with this dynamic hub called London, a hosting, networking place that’s better than anywhere else on the planet at doing so. If you dispersed London and smashed it up, Britain wouldn’t be as rich a country.”

Mind the Gap: London vs the Rest is on BBC2 on Monday at 9pm

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