“Hell is a city much like London,” advised Percy Bysshe Shelley. It’s a sentiment taken up with gusto by the city’s detractors. Impunity for petty theft, the omnipresence of violent crime, “no go zones” and the imminent imposition of sharia law.

In the legal world, collapsing courthouses, crippling delays, striking barristers and the death of the jury trial. On the personal front – penury, susceptibility to scurvy, and a ritual pummelling by the Great British Pound.

Shelley’s observation about London is unremarkable – it’s dark, dank and the legal profession is overrepresented. But, in the heart of darkness, watched over by the gargoyles of the Courts of Justice, a glimmer of warmth emerges from the rear end of Lincoln’s Inn.

The disembodied heads of two barristers, crimes unknown, guard the entrance. A black cat (in ruffles) slinks around the feet of Roxy Beaujolais, who left Adelaide in the 60s, did a stint at Ronnie Scott’s, and is now the formidable proprietress of the Seven Stars.

She sits at a corner table in the warm light, tallying up the takings by hand, the fruits of a clientele “who damn their souls/To the auction of a fee”.

Here, out of the cold, dead in the heart of London’s district, come the barristers, judges and defendants to ventilate, postulate and asseverate on all matters of justice.

The Seven Stars “has almost acquired the status of a fifth Inn,” according to the Spectator, and the privilege travels. In Curless v Shell International, the Court of Appeal ruled the contents of a conversation overheard in a pub around the corner on Fleet Street were covered by legal privilege.

Word is yet to reach the patrons here, however, whose minds are focused on matters more pressing than the professional.

Behind me, a trio of young barristers. One lays his deerstalker cap on the table. Their conversation: drunken skiing, Christmas cards from the landed gentry, a hilarious retelling of the logistical implications of forgetting one’s car keys at the Cambridge boat club dinner, and the latest from the No-Manners clan.

The duo to my right, varicose cheeks flashing red, rumpole on about the filmic representation of red wine.

Across the room, an august-looking group are so buttoned up as to be incapable of speech. In the next room, a journalist from The Times rings up the bar, badgering Beaujolais for a story about cats in pubs. “Tell them to fuck off!” is the call from the corner.

My trip to the Seven Stars yielded two pints and a guinea foul beyond my means. Bizarrely, for an English pub, the food is good – in line with the exacting standards of the legal fraternity’s lunching demographic.

Alas, the gossip which I had come here to gather is covered by the Curless rule. It was a Beaujolais which convinced Clive James that “a temporary sell-out might be advisable” to keep the radiator on, so instead I pitch my afternoon at the pub to Justinian to recover my costs and head back out into Shelley’s stygian streets.

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So what’s going on over here? Retreats and resets are the flavour of the month from Keir Starmer’s flagging government. One wonders how a man so dull can inspire such disgust.

Welfare reforms, digital IDs, and inheritance tax changes are among an ever-growing pile of policies on which the government has been beaten back. Plans to slash the number of jury trials to deal with a mountainous court backlog could be next.

Justice Minister David Lammy has argued the plans to limit jury trials for defendants likely to receive a prison sentence of less than three years will clear a backlog of 80,000 cases within a decade. Delays blew out during the pandemic after a decade of budget cuts for the Department of Justice, which forced the closure of hundreds of courthouses, while criminal barristers went on strike to protest stagnant rates and deteriorating court conditions.

Many Labour MPs have been unwilling participants in Lammy’s plan, expressing concerns about its impact on the ability of disadvantaged accused to defend themselves in court. One has threatened to resign and trigger an unwanted by-election.

The jury plan – desecration of heritage, loss of “British values” – contributes to a modish attitude of decline and self-loathing which is impressive even for the English, fed by the conservative press and the MAGA milieu across the Atlantic, and seized upon by the rising Reform Party.

Among all this, Australia has become a beacon for the dispirited Brit. Net migration to the UK, until recently a point of national crisis, is set to hit reverse. A solid proportion of this, we can presume, was led by those chasing the TikTok phenomena known currently as the “Australia effect”.

It goes like this: greasy-looking Englishman leaves his grim, wet town and moves to Coogee, whereupon he develops a tan, makes a small fortune on a construction site, grows a mullet and blossoms into an antipodean Adonis.

The Telegraph’s roving columnist, on a trip to Sydney, reports of salvation from “downfall” at home, which is “enough to make you want to emigrate”, locates “the soul of the British people” in the bulbous bellies of the Barmy Army, and finds hope in Joe Root’s batting at the SCG: “all of us in that stadium who longed for our country’s success drew strength from our fair laddie. That’s real leadership. Something that is so lacking in Britain under the abysmal Keir Starmer …”

That England suffered yet another crushing defeat appeared not to enter into the analysis.

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Shelley’s line on London and hell is obvious, but another point is more prescient: “When London shall be an habitation of bitterns … some transatlantic commentator will be weighing in the scales of some new and now unimagined system of criticism.”

For the American right, whose ideas appear increasingly popular in Britain, London is a fallen “warzone”, riddled with crime, under the thumb of censorship, and soon to be governed by “sharia law” (as Donald Trump told the UN General Assembly).

So is it really that bad? For this correspondent, it’s been pretty good so far, even if it does get dark early. Ask again in spring.

As the Financial Times editorialises: “the UK capital may not be considered right now the epitome of global cool. But it has an awful lot going for it.”