The Big Smoke

Damien Hirst: 'I'm not Charles Saatchi's barrel-organ monkey'

Art Artists vs collectors, administrators and other parasites
Nothing pleases the art world like a good ruck, and the London scene seethes with antagonism. Arguably, Nicholas Serota kicked things off when he set about reinventing the Tate and the Turner Prize as red-hot arbiters of taste. Meanwhile, Serota stoked up further animosity by allegedly rejecting work offered to the Tate both by Charles Saatchi, who was the major collector of young British artists (YBAs) at the time, and by their opponents, the frankly hopeless stuckists, who hated everyone anyway. Saatchi subsequently started a side feud with Damien Hirst, based on a disagreement about who was more important. (‘I’m not Charles Saatchi’s barrel-organ monkey,’ Hirst fumed at the time.)

Over at the ICA, Ivan Massow was attacking conceptual art on another front, calling it ‘all hype and no substance’ and ‘the product of over-indulged, middle-class, bloated egos’. Tracey Emin, he said, ‘couldn’t think her way out of a paper bag’ and the ICA itself – of which he was chairman at the time – was ‘a pillar of the shock establishment’. Not surprisingly, he parted company with the ICA shortly afterwards.
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Football Arsenal vs Spurs
Most London clubs hate each other, but the oldest rivalry is between Arsenal and Spurs, originating in 1913 when south Londoners Woolwich Arsenal decamped to Highbury, a stone's throw from the existing home of Tottenham. Having made their way on to Spurs’ turf, Arsenal then unexpectedly replaced the Lilywhites in the First Division after chairman Henry Norris wangled promotion despite the Gunners finishing fifth in Division 2 (this may have involved the distribution of money in brown envelopes to his fellow Football League chairmen). Since then, Arsenal have gone from strength to strength: they clinched the double at White Hart Lane in 1971, stole Sol Campbell from their neighbours in 2001 and profited from half the Spurs team going down to the Noro virus in 2006, while Spurs have had to content themselves with the moral high ground. No other London rivalry can compete: Millwall-West Ham is more of a street fighting affair, Crystal Palace fans have to go all the way to Brighton for their feud, while Chelsea are fairly fond of little old Fulham. That said, Sutton versus Carshalton can get a bit tasty.

Literature Alexander Pope vs Edmund Curll
The eighteenth century was a lively time to be a man of letters, and warring literary factions would regularly fire off pithy odes and couplets lampooning one other. But it was the pint-sized Alexander Pope – four foot six in his socks – who made poetic insults his speciality, publishing a mock epic called ‘The Dunciad’ in 1728, which took potshots at just about everybody in the literary establishment. One of his prime targets was the publisher Edmund Curll, who appeared in the poem swimming about in excrement-filled sewers. After publication of ‘The Dunciad’, Pope no longer felt it wise to go out in public without a fierce dog and two loaded pistols.

Gordon Ramsey: 'A wonderful chef, but a really second-rate human being'

Food Big mouths vs sour grapes
Gordon Ramsay has more feuds boiling away than most, including one with his former mentor Marco Pierre White, who he claims to have framed for the theft of Aubergine restaurant’s reservations book. Meanwhile, critics ensure he gets as well as giving: Marina O’Laughlin habitually refers to Ramsay as BSG (Big Sweary Gordon), and AA Gill once slagged him off as ‘a wonderful chef, but a really second-rate human being’. (Arguably, Ramsay got off lightly: Gill started a feud with the entire Welsh nation when he denounced them as ‘loquacious dissemblers, immoral liars, stunted, bigoted, dark, ugly, pugnacious little trolls’.)

So far, so PR-friendly; but the ongoing spat between Terence Conran and Stephen Bayley has the unmistakable chill of true hatred. Since working together in the 1980s, they haven’t had a nice word to say about each other and have even disagreed publicly about the merits of soup. In his 2001 autobiography, Conran said Bayley had ‘the temperament of a hummingbird moth on LSD’. Bayley fought back. Reviewing Conran’s Floridita restaurant in Soho, he wrote: ‘Strange that Terence Conran, who made it his life’s ambition… to obliterate cynical, middle-class mediocrity, has followed tragic vectors to become that which he once despised.’

Teen tribes Mods vs rockers
1964 was the year Britain was gripped by moral panic about warring London gangs with strongly held but radically different views on fashion. Mods – urban, working-class, scooter-driving suits – sneered at the more rural, working-class, leather-clad rockers, who in turn dismissed the mods as limp-wristed nancy boys. Although the major battles tended to occur at the seaside on Bank Holidays – with coshes, flick knives, and in the mods’ case, finger-shredding fishhooks sewn underneath their lapels – the mods in particular were London lads, hanging around Soho clubs like the Scene and the Flamingo. Since then, generations of teen cults, from punks to skinheads to casuals, have attempted to achieve similar infamy in their turn, and arguably the punks, at least, succeeded.

Politics New Labour vs the BBC
The current government has a deep-rooted and not-particularly-well-hidden dislike for the British Broadcasting Corporation. ‘I asked somebody why they all take an instant dislike to Peter Mandelson,’ John Humphrys once commented. ‘He said, “It saves time.” ’ Later, this animosity between government and public broadcaster was to bear bitter fruit, with BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan’s investigation into the ‘dodgy’ Iraq dossier, Alistair Campbell’s fury and the ensuing death of weapons expert Dr David Kelly.

Ken Livingstone: feuding with... everyone

London Ken Livingstone vs the world
Our Mayor appears to like nothing more than a good scrap. He started with Margaret Thatcher (who hated local government almost as much as she did socialists), but he really upped his game for the twenty-first century. In 2000, he riled Tony Blair with his negative stance on part-privatisation of the tube, and was ejected from the Labour Party – only to trump Frank Dobson in the Mayoral elections as an independent.

In 2005 his ill-advised comments to Jewish journalist Oliver Finegold ignited an ongoing feud with the Evening Standard (currently spearheaded by Andrew Gilligan), and in September of that year Westminster Council refused him planning permission for a proposed statue of Nelson Mandela on the north side of Trafalgar Square (it eventually went up in Parliament Square). In March 2006 Ken called Robert Tuttle, the US’s London ambassador, a ‘chiselling little crook’ after he discovered that US Embassy officials were refusing to pay the Congestion Charge. In the same month, he is alleged to have said of David and Simon Reuben – two Indian-born British businessmen – that ‘if they’re not happy they can always go back to Iran and see if they can do better under the Ayatollahs’. Labelled a ‘fool’ by The Times, Livingstone responded ‘I would offer a complete apology to the people of Iran to the suggestion that they may be linked in any way to the Reuben brothers.’ In September 2006 Ken accused Trevor Phillips, head of the Commission for Equalities and Human Rights, of moving so far to the right he ‘would soon join the BNP’. And finally Ken took on the population of west London with his controversial extension to the Congestion Charge. A spokesman for the National Alliance Against Tolls said ‘This extension of the charge zone is a lose-lose situation for Londoners.’ Like Ken cares.

Royalty Charles I vs Parliament
Charles Stuart, by the grace of God King of England, did not consider himself responsible to any being more human and less graceful for his actions. His belief in the Divine Right of Kings led first to a civil war and then eventually, after an army coup to get rid of those MPs reluctant to kill their king, to his trial and conviction by the remaining (Rump) Parliament in 1649 – 59. Signatories stood up, literally, to signal their willingness to turn regicide, while Charles remained disdainful of the oiks against him until the end, refusing to plead because he didn’t consider the renegade parliament an appropriate opponent. England became a Commonwealth, then a Protectorate, and remained kingless until Charles’s son Charles II snatched back his throne in 1660.

Theatre Steven Berkoff vs Nicholas de Jongh
Relations between actors and critics have never been cordial, but Nicholas de Jongh has made more enemies than most. Stephen Berkoff – a man who once told Radio 4 that he is constantly angry from the minute he wakes up, and that his first act is to focus his anger on his toaster – issued a death threat after de Jongh slated his Hamlet in print. He had to make hasty assurances that he he was joking after the critic called in police protection. Still, this scare didn’t stop de Jongh describing Tony Slattery as ‘a beached whale’ after he appeared on stage naked for a role. Slattery got his revenge when warming up the audience at the Olivier Awards. ‘I’m the fourth choice of host for this part of the evening,’ he told a packed audience. ‘The first choice was Nicholas de Jongh, but he was withdrawn at the last moment following the shock revelation that he’s a cunt.’

EastEnders Den vs Angie
Christmas 1986: a high watermark for British TV as a barely imaginable 30.1 million tune in to see Den Watts serve wife Angie with divorce papers. This one had the lot: a philandering husband who fathers a child with his daughter’s best friend, and an alcoholic wife who faked an incurable illness to stop him leaving her. Brilliant performances, too: Leslie Grantham and Anita Dobson broke new ground for a soap with a two-hander episode earlier in 1986 directed by Antonia Bird, in which Angie broke the news of her ‘cancer’. Its success saw the format become an ‘EastEnders’ trademark. So who won? While you might think that Den’s notorious return from the grave represented his ultimate victory, Angie enjoys eternal life through alter-ego Dobson: ‘Anyone Can Fall In Love’ is believed to play on a loop in the bowels of hell.