I write these words to you from the jaws of hell. Here in my favourite north London cafe, among the bare lightbulbs and the £3.80 cinnamon buns, I take shelter from the screaming terrors of Sadiq Khan’s no-go hellscape. Toddlers in pushchairs scream for salvation. A Lime bike comes dangerously close to running a red light. Like the Roman, I see the Blackstock Road foaming with much blood, albeit from this distance it may actually be a discarded pastrami sandwich.

“Welcome to London, don’t forget your stab vest,” reads a proposed tube billboard for a brand of vodka being promoted by the comedian Ricky Gervais. Gervais is furious that Transport for London has rejected his advertising slogan, and rightly so, because this is the sort of generational wit that deserves the widest possible audience. It is, of course, the most minor of inconveniences that the design was never actually submitted to TfL and only ever existed for the benefit of social media. Because when it comes to the nation’s metropole, you can say pretty much whatever you want and someone, somewhere will believe it.

I have spent close to two decades travelling up and down the country covering football, and one of the most striking insights has been how openly disparaging people from outside London can be about it. London is perhaps the only place in England where you can tell people where you’re from, and instantly they feel empowered to inform you what a terrible place it is. Occasionally, your interlocutor will deploy the pre-emptive qualifying phrase “it’s a great city, but …”, before launching into a tirade about the traffic, or the cost of West End theatre tickets, or a dog turd their........

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