It is a city already divided by class, wealth and race, but yesterday another divide was opening. As The Times proclaimed London the new capital city of the world, the gap between those who agreed and who did not widened.

The thesis propounded by James Harding, The Times’s Business Editor, was that London had supplanted New York as the world's first cosmopolitan city and was on its way to becoming the centre of world capitalism.

New York might be where the money was, but London was where it was heading. Paris and New York were becoming places for business elites to take holidays, London was where they were making their home.

Yesterday Mr Harding was called onto radio stations to defend himself, while on Times Onlinea furious debate raged in the comments section. “London is a toilet!!!” wrote one correspondent. “The people are rude and unhelpful, the cost of doing anything is astronomical, it is unsafe, the transport system is a joke.”

In America, however, where financial regulators were yesterday meeting to discuss how to combat the draw of London, correspondents broadly agreed with Harding and bemoaned the decline of American cities.

Commentators from inside London were divided. “The city is a nice place to live for those that can afford to live a posh life,” wrote “Fabio C”. The poor by contrast work long hours to pay for “a badly furnished bedroom with improvised kitchen and shared toilets and shower rooms, in houses that were built during Queen Victoria’s time. If this continues much longer . . . there will be only two kinds of people living in London: the very rich, because they can afford it, and the very poor, because social services pay for them.”

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