Henry Mance describes in great detail the sorry state into which the criminal courts have fallen (The Weekend Essay, Life & Arts, October 12). What is left undescribed is a parallel state of affairs in England’s civil courts.

For many years the quality of our justice system was held up by the City of London and others as one of the key attractions to draw business to the UK.

Actual exposure to the reality of the system delivers a quite different story. The detail is telling, as is the reaction of court officials to the organisation in which they attempt to work; it seems documents going missing is the norm rather than the exception.

A company with which I have an association recently attempted a small claim in the Central London County Court to recover an unpaid debt. The claim was made a year ago and a note received from the court saying the claim, sent by signed-for registered post, had been received. A year after the original claim, no substantive hearing has been held. It almost defies belief that the court had (a) lost registered post it admitted receiving, (b) could not retrieve an email it had acknowledged receipt of and (c) lost a hand-delivered bundle of papers.

The truly discouraging thing, however, is that the very polite and helpful court officials spoken to were not in the least surprised, and said that this was happening all the time, that anything sent by registered post to the post room might very well disappear and that bundles delivered often failed to make it to the judge hearing the case.

It is time to acknowledge, as Mance implies, that, however good the English court system may have been in the past, a political decision is now needed to determine whether resources can be deployed to differentiate once again our courts from those of third world countries.

David Green
David Green Consulting, London NW3, UK

AN iconic nightclub has closed its doors after 26 years with fans branding it “another nail in the hospitality coffin”.

MPs are being urged to step up their efforts to help the capital’s struggling scene after Tiger Tiger London broke the news.

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The Piccadilly Circus branch on Haymarket Street became the chain’s flagship after it opened in 1998.

The website now features a video of clubbers letting their hair down at the huge venue along with the words: “Tiger Tiger London is now closed.

“Thank you to all patrons, promoters, DJs, staff members and partners for years of incredible memories.”

Since March 2020, more than 3,000 night-time venues have shut down across London and its outskirts.

The sudden decline is believed to be a combination of the lockdowns during the Covid pandemic and the soaring cost of living.

The venue is set to be turned into an eight-storey hotel with 507 rooms.

According to a planning application to be reviewed by Westminster City Council, the hotel will have a bar and restaurant.

Planning permission for the hotel has been in the running for a while, but a new application by Centro Planning Consultancy suggests it could be close to getting the green light.

The consultancy is seeking permission to add an eighth floor and a rooftop plant screen.

Former clubbers took to social media to share their heartbreak over the closure, with one calling it “the end of an era”.

“Our first club when we went to in London in 2009,” another added.

Jeremy Joseph, the owner of G-A-Y & Heaven nightclubs in Charing Cross wrote: “Tiger Tiger closing is another nail in the hospitality coffin, it was G-A-Y & Heaven Nightclub’s nearest venue with similar capacity. I fear for [the] future.”

Tagging Rachel Reeves, Keir Starmer and Sadiq Khan he wrote: “Open your eyes, the budget needs to help small businesses and protect nightclubs. It’s not too late.”

One follower agreed: “Something needs to be done.”

The reason for the club’s closing is unknown.

The club landed in serious trouble in 2023 when boozers were served caustic soda with tequila shots rather than salt.

Owners were fined £120,000 after four women suffered burns to their mouths after licking the cleaning chemical.

According to Westminster City Council, which filed a health and safety prosecution against the club, the barman accidentally mixed up the substances in an unlit storage room.

The women started projectile vomiting and said their mouths were “burning”.

Tiger Tiger owners A3D2 Limited pleaded guilty to four health and safety breaches by “failing to ensure customers were not exposed to the risk of chemical substances.”

IF you fancy enjoying rolling hills in the Italian countryside, while being only half an hour’s train ride from Rome, Castelli Romani is just the ticket.

It comprises a collection of small towns perched around the crater of an ancient volcano, each offering spectacular views of two pristine lakes.

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Anyone wanting to experience both the hubbub of the Italian capital and a more relaxed pace of life will love it. The train fare into Rome is just €4.

The Eternal City has long been on my bucket list and I was keen to tick off sights including the Sistine Chapel, Colosseum and Spanish Steps.

But having discovered Castelli Romani, a day in the city will soon have you longing to be back in the sticks — and while a hotel in Rome does not come cheap, you get so much more for your buck at the Park Hotel Villa Grazioli in Grottaferrata.

Flying into Rome Fiumicino Airport, it’s just a short transfer to the hotel, which sits in stunning hillside gardens with a majestic view of Rome.

 The grand, 16th century villa, built for a cardinal, is rich in historic detail and its 62 rooms start from around £100 per night in November.

It also provides a free shuttle service to Frascati train station for easy access to Rome.

The nearby medieval village of Rocca di Papa, its colourful houses tumbling down a steep cliffside in a maze of narrow streets, is a great starting point for those who want to explore the winding hillside trails.

The fit and fearless can hike to the top of Monte Cavo and be rewarded with not just more views of Rome but of the sparkling Mediterranean

These pass through forests of chestnut trees and afford stunning views of Lakes Albano and Nemi, where volcanic soil renders the water an intense azure blue.

The fit and fearless can hike to the top of Monte Cavo and be rewarded with not just more views of Rome, but of the sparkling Mediterranean.

In the town of Ariccia, we dine in one of the region’s traditional fraschetta restaurants. These casual, rustic affairs are often found in converted wine cellars.

At Osteria N.1, we feast on local speciality porchetta — a juicy, slow-roasted pork roast — apple slices, olives and ricotta drizzled with honey.

Pasta-making class

Also worth a wander is the town of Nemi, overlooking the same-named lake.

Cafes and restaurants line cobbled streets where you can eat and drink while taking in, yes, more fabulous views.

Heading farther south, to the Tenimenti Leone vineyard, we got to sample some of the region’s wonderful wines.

The beauty of the 178-acre site is matched only by the quality of the bottles of red and white it produces.

Rome is beautiful — about that there is no doubt — but it is wonderful to be able to dip in and out and appreciate it from afar as well as up close

Meanwhile, in Rome, we enjoyed a pasta making class at a cookery school in the city’s beautiful Trastevere neighbourhood.

For €59, you can make traditional Italian fettuccine and ravioli from scratch, while enjoying a glass or two of prosecco and aperitivo snacks.

We then joined a City Experiences tour of the Sistine Chapel and Vatican Museums.

These sites are crowded at all times of year, but the tour offered a very welcome, skip-the-line, small-group experience with expert guide.

However, you are still going to have to deal with the inevitable hordes of tourists, and it was a little difficult to appreciate the sheer mastery of  Michelangelo’s ceiling in the Sistine Chapel while constantly rubbing shoulders with fellow visitors.

Rome is beautiful — of that there is no doubt — but it is wonderful to be able to dip in and out and appreciate it from afar as well as up close.

If you want to experience the real Italy, Castelli Romani is the best of all worlds.

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B&M’s nifty tool for getting rid of condensation and mould has been slashed from £22 to £15 – making it cheaper than Asda and Argos.

It’s the perfect tool to prepare your windows for the winter and cut any muck that’s accumulated over the past months.

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The Beldray Cordless Window Vacuum Cleaner was previously £22 but the bargain retailer has got prices down by as much as 31%.

Now you can pick up the gadget for £15 to help get rid of condensation in the colder months, which often leads to mould.

The gadget has a motorised suction-squeegee and works by sucking the window dry of moisture.

The window cleaner will leave mirrors and smooth surfaces gleaming within minutes too thanks to its wide rubber lip with an integrated suction nozzle. 

B&M says the product, which is coloured teal and white gold, has a 30 minute run time per charge.

The store added that it is cordless and rechargeable, multipurpose and describes it as lightweight and compact.

The Beldray vacuum also features a 60ml water tank and takes between two and three hours to charge.

The website warns shoppers to “hurry” as there’s low stock but urges customers to visit their nearest store if they want to nab the gadget.

It is subject to availability and B&M say some products are available in selected stores.

Retailers Argos and Asda are flogging the exact same item for £40 and £27 respectively so it’s worth racing to B&M while stocks last.

Just last month, Aldi was selling their mould-tackling tool for the same exact price.

The Electric Window Cleaner Specialbuy was £19.99 when last stocked at the bargain supermarket in February.

The description read: “Cleaning your windows doesn’t need to be a daunting task.

“This Ambiano Window Vacuum Cleaner, is an essential for any home.

“Keep tiles, mirrors and glass all clean with ease using this handy device.

“This window vacuum cleaner is lightweight and tackles everything from condensation marks to small spills.”

The window cleaner also comes with two microfibre cloths and a spray bottle so you’ll have everything you need.

It has up to 45 minutes of run time on its rechargeable battery and uses an LED light to indicate when your cleaner needs charging.

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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Emerging market investors can finally see light at the end of the tunnel. But they are checking carefully to make sure it is not a train coming towards them.

The asset class is having something of a moment as the macroeconomic environment turns hugely in its favour. Interest rates in the US are finally falling. At least in theory, this should pull down US government bond yields and bolster the allure of debt offering higher interest rates from outside the usual rich-country club. 

Crucially, this long-awaited decline in US rates has kicked off even while the American economy itself remains in decent shape — a good combination for the animal spirits that tend to support riskier asset classes like emerging-market debt and stocks.

Last but not least, Beijing has unleashed a wide-ranging set of stimulus measures, sending previously deeply unloved Chinese stocks soaring and potentially helping to support the nation’s demand for the resources that lots of emerging-market countries can supply.

Each element of these forces has at least one huge “but” attached to it. Nonetheless, emerging markets are back on the menu for a lot of investors who have ignored the asset class for years.

The decline in US interest rates will “set emerging market debt free”, said M&G Investments in a recent blog post. Particularly since the outbreak of the Covid pandemic, investment flows into emerging markets have been “terrible”, said Charles de Quinsonas, a fund manager at M&G Investments in London at a recent event. “It has not been a good time to be an EM manager.”

For many investors, the asset class has just not been worth the faff. Simply tracking the S&P 500 index of US stocks over the past five years — hardly rocket science and very cheap to execute — has doubled your money. Over the same period, the MSCI emerging markets index has left you up by about 10 per cent. US exceptionalism has sucked in funds from all over the world — in bonds and stocks — and left emerging markets out in the dark.

This now played in their favour, said de Quinsonas at M&G. “It would take just small flows to support the asset class,” he said. “It’s not a crowded asset class at all.”

Funds tracker EPFR said nearly $40bn flowed in to China equity funds in the first week of October. “That influx of fresh money, which more than doubled the previous weekly record, also lifted the headline number for all EPFR-tracked emerging markets equity funds to a new record high,” it said, adding that emerging-market debt funds were extending their longest streak of inflows in more than a year. 

This sugar rush will not be enough to foster long-term interest in emerging markets on its own. The jury is very much out on whether all the stimulus announced this month makes China investable. On the plus side it is a statement of intent, but the property sector remains a festering sore.

That is not the only source of caution. Benjamin Melman, chief investment officer at Edmond de Rothschild Asset Management, told me this week he had been overweight emerging markets — a higher allocation than benchmarks would suggest — for a little while. China’s pro-growth pivot and the US’s monetary pivot both help him out there. He was sticking to that stance, he said, but the chance that the US had cut rates too hard, too soon was bugging him. “The visibility on the Fed is less clear than it was just two weeks ago,” he said — a nod to the inflation expectations creeping back into US markets.

Swiss bank UBS said in a note this week that if the US economy did not soften, it was plausible to imagine the Fed raising interest rates back up to where it started and beyond by early 2026 — a reversal that would bring a “net negative impact to EM assets”, it rather drily observed.

Meanwhile, rating agency S&P Global this week also warned that higher debt burdens and higher borrowing costs meant that emerging market governments would “default more frequently on foreign currency debt over the next 10 years than they did in the past”.

Lastly among the main risks, anyone who tells you they have a precise understanding of what trade tariffs might land in the event that Donald Trump gets back into the White House, and what they might mean for developing countries, is fibbing. But the consensus is that this could of course sting. UBS estimated that a Republican sweep of the presidency and Congress in November would point to a 4 per cent drop in the MSCI emerging markets stocks index to the end of 2025. If tariffs ratcheted dramatically higher, the decline could be as much as 11 per cent, it said.

The key, then, is expectations management. The lower US rates environment is helpful to emerging markets, and “every little helps for an under-positioned asset class”, the Swiss bank said. Returns were likely to be “respectable”. That is a big win in comparison with the past few years. But emerging markets are unlikely to regain the sparkle they enjoyed in the zero interest rate world of the past any time soon.

katie.martin@ft.com