by Henry VIII takes the microphone to explain why the London housing market is the first opponent he has ever respected
Good evening, London. Yes, it is me. No, you may not touch the doublet.
A King Reviews The Rental Market
When I last held power in this city, I owned more than sixty palaces. Sixty. Hampton Court alone had a kitchen that fed eight hundred people twice a day. Last Tuesday a letting agent named Josh showed me a studio flat in Leyton where the oven was also the wardrobe, and he said, with a straight face, that it was priced competitively at nineteen hundred pounds a month. Josh, I have signed death warrants with more warmth than that tenancy agreement.
I asked Josh what the deposit was. He said five weeks of rent, held in a protection scheme. Protection scheme. I invented protection schemes. Mine involved the Tower and a man named Cromwell, and I can tell you the interest rate was brutal, but at least you knew where you stood. Usually on a scaffold, but you knew.
The Viewing
The viewing lasted four minutes. There were eleven other applicants in the stairwell, each clutching a folder of payslips like peasants presenting grain to the crown. One woman had a cover letter. A cover letter. For a flat with mould shaped like the Holy Roman Empire. I dissolved the monasteries for less than what that landlord is charging for a boiler that sounds like a jousting accident.
Josh told me the landlord wanted a professional couple with no pets and no personality. I told him I have had six wives and dissolved two of the marriages personally, which makes me extremely professional, and he wrote something in his little book. I later learned the something was no.
Guarantors And Other Modern Heresies
They asked me for a guarantor earning thirty times the monthly rent. Thirty times. In my day the only man in England earning thirty times anything was me, and I achieved it by owning England. I offered them France as collateral. Josh said France was not an accepted form of reference. This is why the country has declined. In 1544 I mortgaged half of Norfolk before breakfast and nobody asked for three months of bank statements.
The audience at my show in Peckham last week understood this. A man in the front row told me he has lived in a houseshare for nine years with a landlord who enters unannounced. Sir, I said, I also had a problem with people entering unannounced, and I resolved it with an Act of Parliament and several arrests. He bought me a pint. That is the London I remember.
The Closing Bit
People ask why I came back as a stand-up comedian rather than a king. Simple economics. Kings need castles, and there is currently a one bedroom castle in Croydon listed at two point three million with no parking. Comedians only need a microphone and unresolved anger, and I returned from the grave with a surplus of both.
So no, I will not be buying property in this city. I will do what every other Londoner does. I will rent a room the size of a confession booth, complain magnificently, and refuse to leave. Some men take back their kingdom. I am taking back my deposit. Cleaning fees, Josh? The mould was there when I arrived. It has been there since the Reformation. I would know. I started it.
This is, incidentally, the exact conclusion I keep reaching every week over on the main page, where the whole business of being back is examined in considerably more depth. Further reading on the wider chaos of modern Britain: the Northern line marriage that quietly relocated to zone six, London’s ongoing talent for charging you simply for looking, the full eyewitness account of how I came back in the first place.
