There was a time – not so long ago, though it already feels sepia-tinted – when London was the sort of place that tourists arrived in with stars in their eyes and left with shopping bags cutting off circulation at the fingers.
Harrods bags, Selfridges bags, Mulberry bags, the bright yellow of Fortnum’s peeking out of a suitcase being sat on in a hotel lobby. Europe’s favourite grown-up playground; Manhattan’s chic transatlantic sibling; Tokyo’s idea of European swagger with better tailoring and more chaotic restaurants.
And somehow, somewhere between the end of the pandemic and the beginning of whatever this new national habit of self-sabotage is, we decided that this was all terribly inconvenient.
Because now, instead of rolling out the red carpet to high-spending visitors who fund vast swathes of our hospitality and retail industries, we appear determined to trip them up with a series of policy banana skins. A kind of bureaucratic Mario Kart, except instead of cartoon plumbers skidding off Rainbow Road, it’s Andrea Baldo at Mulberry watching millions evaporate from his London tills.
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