These days the word metropolitan is spat out as a term of abuse

These days the word "metropolitan" is spat out as a term of abuse. The nation feels that the blood has been sucked out of local government and all power poured into the vampire Westminster - and they blame London, unjustly. For we who live under the shadow of Big Ben suffer greater powerlessness than most of them. Who runs London now? The Environment Secretary, who has devolved power to his junior minister. A Cabinet Sub-Committee on London, A Whitehall Government Office for London, a London Planning Advisory Committee, a London Boroughs Grants Committee, a Transport Committee, a Waste Disposal Committee, a Parking Committee - all crushed under Whitehall's dead hand.Yet how London is hated and resented among the rest of the country, as if we had it all.

Try to find out where power lies and it leads down Whitehall labyrinths, caverns measureless to any mere citizen. They are like the jetsetters of Beirut who drank daiquiris on catamarans along the Corniche while bombs fell in the suburbs. Rudderless London has no government, no voice and no one to complain to, just a hotchpotch of boroughs. They do not travel on the Tube or use the hospitals; the only estates they see are in Country Life. Newsweek, Vanity Fair and Women's Wear Daily may say it's cool Fine, but that is a delightful accident.

Foreign Ab Fab editors tripping in for London Fashion Week and a quick zip around Harvey Nichols, the Oxo Tower and Groucho's see only a sliver of London. The short 10 days since the election have shown us how political symbolism matters as much as substance. So the cities will rise again, as in the great days of Joseph Chamberlain Wait and see. London is one of the most benighted zones in the country.