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At the end of last year, I was filmed by the Channel 4 series Britain’s Most Expensive Houses, speaking in praise of our own Chairman, John Griffin, who celebrates his 80th year. Readers will know the extremely high esteem in which I hold him and you will be able to see the programme shortly.
Leading the television production team was Chris Walley. We had a lot in common and got talking and reminiscing about our own career paths. He told me how his schoolteacher had actively discouraged him from seeking a career in television and film production. Chris told me how incensed he was and immediately penned a letter to Esther Rantzen. To his surprise, she responded immediately and invited him to join the That’s Life team for a work experience placement. He ended up working on the programme and it helped launch his career. Chris talked effusively about the day he went back into school and showed his teacher the letter; he recalls that the teacher in question was less than gracious about his success.
I shared with him my own experience of being rejected by the BBC along with thousands of others, until I too responded with my own letter, Dear BBC, you have made a mistake, Yours faithfully and found myself invited in for interview. You cannot lead an employability mentoring business without the recurring theme of finding ways to overcome adversity in search of a meaningful career.
It was the most shocking news when I heard that Chris had suddenly died. This magazine issue is dedicated to his memory. His tenacity, enthusiasm and professionalism was an inspiration to all
those who met him. We were going to do more together. He will never be forgotten. Historians often try to compare past and current events, creating a valuable commentary about current affairs, potentially allowing them to predict what events might transpire in the future. Sir Anthony Seldon, who serves on our Advisory Board, is one of Britain's leading contemporary historians, educationalists, commentators and political authors. He recently addressed the eighth annual Global Family Office Conference on our behalf and summed up best what really makes us happy. He explained that it was not having money but enjoying a purpose in life and good friends which provides the stability we crave during troubled times. None of us will forget being happy for Emma Raducanu, who when she entered the US Open in 2021 was a hardly known tennis player ranked 150th in the world. She had us all transfixed as we watched her play in Arthur Ashe Stadium, New York, and became the first qualifier to win the US Open Grand Slam title. Her win inspired the next generation, showing them that anything is possible and within their grasp, and we celebrate her incredible achievements.
The media itself doesn’t always receive favourable press. Starting a magazine that celebrates the good in others and debates the issues which can help someone get on in life has been a formidable challenge. The fact that we were shortlisted for The Professional Publishers Association Game Changer of the Year Award has been a great honour. We are also soon to be reviewed by the Audit Bureau of Circulations, which provides industryagreed standards for media brand measurement of print publications, digital channels and events.
I hope that our readers will continue to engage and participate in future editions. We have exciting plans to include more features about our students and career change mentoring candidates and their individual stories of achievement. Although we never take credit for their successes, it is what makes us all happy. Their own gratitude is immeasurable.
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It was Ernest Hemingway who said in respect of bankruptcy that it happens ‘bit by bit, then all at once’. Societal change can sometimes seem similar. The year 2022 felt like a fast forward button pressed on our lives: everything appeared to be occurring helter-skelter, and at breakneck pace.
The state of play geopolitically was accelerated by Vladimir Putin’s tragically stupid invasion of Ukraine. This, in turn, sent the economy spiralling, as inflation gripped the UK, partly due to the legacy of Covid-19, and partly due to successive administrations’ failure to produce a plausible and independent energy policy.
The economic turmoil has been exacerbated by an incompetent Bank of England interest rate response, which piled unnecessary pressure on homeowners. Add in the dicey and shortlived Truss administration, and the death of a beloved monarch, and the world looked very different at the finish of 2022 to what it looked like at its start.
So what can we expect in 2023? First we must acknowledge that these trendlines won’t vanish now the calendar has shifted. No period of history is without turbulence; no age is without its anxieties and shocks, its disasters and its queasiness.
Besides, political turbulence always has an inner meaning. To take a historical parallel: when Joseph Chamberlain and Winston Churchill were tearing apart the Conservative Party over the question of free trade, in a way which might remind us of the 2022 summer battle between Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, few could have known that this would lead to the redistributive Asquith pre-war
administration, and the beginning of the birth of the welfare state. One order was ceding to another: and that would mean, in time, opportunity for workers previously undreamed of. Similarly, as Keir Starmer’s Labour Party seeks to pivot – not always convincingly – to the right, and as sizeable swathes of the Conservative Party argue for higher taxes, and not, as used to be Thatcherite orthodoxy, a smaller state, then it can seem as if some new alignment is struggling to be born. It will have its opportunities for young people.
That’s because turbulent periods always necessitate creativity – and creativity leads to economic activity. The period in the leadup to the Asquith administration saw an enormous amount of invention from air conditioning (1902), to radar (1904), radio broadcasting (1906) and the electronic washing machine (1907). Even World War One engendered numerous inventions we still use today from daylight saving time to Kleenex, zippers and even sanitary pads.
Ingenuity and perception sharpens in times of crisis. Most economists agree that technology is inherently deflationary insofar as it saves business costs and reduces labour requirements. It was recently noted by chief executive of Ark Investment Management, Cathie Wood, that in 2022 companies are rapidly increasing innovation across a range of areas including adaptive robots, autonomous mobility, blockchain, gene editing, and neural networks. And these technologies, once they are introduced and widely adopted, will either lead to jobs, or free up human capital for further invention.
The world, especially as it is portrayed by today’s media, might be full of vicissitudes, crises and sudden shifts, but there are in reality certain positives that go less reported.
The first is human ingenuity. Consider this array of geniuses in the 20th century: the Wright Brothers, Amelia Earhart, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Charlie Chaplin, Sir Timothy Berners-Lee, TS Eliot, Igor Stravinsky, Pele, and Nelson Mandela. All were undeterred by the grim news of the day, and of course, another list might be compiled at will - and another and another – until it filled up the whole of this magazine simply with the names of high achievers – without even enlarging on the actual content of their exploits.
Now consider that they all operated in the same centuries as Nazism, Stalinism, Maoism, and numerous genocides and disasters.
That brings us to the second reason for optimism: opportunity. While opportunity isn’t evenly distributed across society at any one time – an inequality which has led us to create the Finito bursary scheme – its overall quantity is clearly on the increase as education broadens, and as the standard of living rises.
These considerations ought to buttress job seekers against despair and make us realise that however the economy or the world might look at any one time, the next development is round the corner, and it’s just as likely to be a good one as a bad.
America has seen its reputation seesaw in recent years. This was largely due to the Trump administration, and it is still possible, despite underwhelming Republican results in the 2022 mid-terms, there might soon be another Trump administration to add to the noise of the last.
But, if you look beneath all the bombastic headlines, the data shows that America continues to show considerable strength. It remains, for instance, streets ahead in all global power indices which measure cultural, economic and military clout. The dollar has never been stronger against the pound, and the Biden administration has also to a large extent rebounded from its unconvincing evacuation of Afghanistan by helping to orchestrate a strong NATO response to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
As a result of all this, it’s not surprising that many UK students are thinking of studying in the US
now – a development which has, in the opinion of some commentators, been exacerbated by the poor outcomes many experience in.
We must be careful not to do down British education, which still has much to recommend it. However, a mixture of poor financial management, absent careers services, and even wokeness is making some parents and students question the value of a typical UK degree.
In some instances, this is leading students to consider apprenticeships as a possible route, with public figures as diverse as Robert Halfon MP and Multiverse head Euan Blair espousing this route.
The merits of apprenticeship route are clear: work comes first and the enormous expenditure – and in many cases, debt – which comes with a typical degree are avoided and a paycheck obtained as soon as possible.
But it might be that something is lost
without university experience. There is the notion that learning is sometimes worth pursuing for its own sake, and that not everything in life comes down to money.
So if you want to retain the sanctity of that university experience, what are the benefits and drawbacks of heading to America to do so? That’s what Finito World set out to do in its exclusive report of the top Ivy League universities in this issue. We looked at location, campus culture, graduation rates, careers advice, and other factors in order to compile our exclusive list. Either way, the data shows that many students are looking at their options and deciding that the US isn’t so bad after all – and, in fact, this held true even during the tumultuous Trump years – with 1,095,299 students enrolling in the US in 2018-19. That number dipped below 1,000,000 in 2020-21 due to the pandemic, but it will no doubt rise again in the coming years. UK universities beware.
We are pleased to announce that the Finito bursary scheme continues to grow, thanks to a series of generous donations. But our goal isn’t just to grow the numbers who benefit from the scheme but also react to world events and think about ways in which we might help the truly needy into work.
With this in mind, we were delighted
to take on our first Ukrainian candidate, who at the outset of Putin’s invasion, fled her home in order to start a new life in the UK. By great good fortune, our own CEO was sat next to the Chair of the Business Club at Women2Win, when he was informed of a refugee’s situation. “I immediately decided to support her through the bursary scheme,” Lehmann says. “It is vital that
in extraordinary times like these we all do our best to find new and creative ways to help.”
The mandate, which will be discussed in full in the next issue of Finito World, has proved successful with a talented designer, already offered a role in an agency. We’re now looking to expand the scheme further, and are grateful to all those who have supported us so far.
3 FOUNDER’S LETTER
6 LEADERS
11 DIARY Toby Young
12 LETTERS
Caroline Roberts lays readers’ anxieties at rest
18 THE CEO
Sir Martin Sorrell on advertising revenues
21 THE HEADTEACHER
Katharine Birbalsingh on teaching
22 THE COMEDIAN
Stephen Fry and the need to relax
23 THE PARLIAMENTARIAN
Baroness Anne Jenkin on wokeness
25 THE INTELLECTUAL
Tariq Ali on Churchill’s crimes
26 A QUESTION OF DEGREE
Brooks Newmark on doing a PhD at 60
28 RELATIVELY SPEAKING
Masterchef Adam Handling
30 10,000 HOURS
Martin Gayford on the great artists
32 TOMORROW’S LEADERS
Julius Ibrahim on social entrepreneurship
33 THOSE ARE MY PRINCIPLES
Claire Cookson on learning difficulties in the workplace
36 WATERFLY
Our gossipy view of the changing waters of education
40 EMMA RADUCANU
The tennis star and her philanthropy
52 THE SHUFFLE TO THE RIGHT
Do we really get more right wing as we age?
60 MENTORING UP
Sophia Petrides says we need to learn from the next gen
62 LAST OF THE SUMMER WINE
Georgina Badine on how to make it as a sommelier
66 GET BACK
Were the Beatles a toxic workplace?
72 AT LEAST I’VE BEEN PRIME MINISTER
Is this the age of nonsense jobs?
Wikipedia.org
76 SLEEP WELL, MA’AM
Photographing Queen Elizabeth’s funeral
82 LARKIN AT 100
Lessons from the poet’s centenary
91 GLOBAL EDUCATION
The benefits of studying abroad
98 BRIGHT STAR
A talk with Umbra CEO Kate Bright
Wikipedia.org
100 BURSARY UPDATE
A tale from the front lines
104 KHAWAR QURESHI KC
The great barrister on life at the bar
106 LETTER FROM CYPRUS
Sophia Petrides reports
108 LETTER FROM THE ISLE OF MAN
Douglas Stewart’s inside track
Onetime I had to interview the film director James Ivory. I overslept and I got woken by the publicist about half an hour after it was meant to have started. The publicist said: “That’s not a good enough excuse to keep him there!” “Well what should I say?” “Car crash!” When I got there he quizzed me in great forensic detail about my car crash. He obviously knew it was a lie. I thought at the end of it he might hire me as a screenwriter so great was my imaginative capacity.
have become more and more demanding that they be kept ‘safe’ by university administrators.
Journalism is a great career for someone in their twenties and thirties, but these days journalists are unlikely to be given proper employment contracts by newspapers with pension benefits and healthcare. So once you’re in your forties and you’re married and have a family, and mortgage contributions to make, it’s a less attractive profession. Some people combine it with doing other things. Others use it as a springboard into marketing and PR.
Something I found unsatisfying about being a journalist is that there’s not much sense of progression. If you’re a reporter or a columnist, you’re doing the same thing day in day out for decades at a time. Unlike an architect where you can look back and say: “I built that” with journalism there’s sometimes a lack of a cumulative sense of achievement. If you’re on the editorial track, and you shin up the greasy pole and become editor-in-chief, that can be a different thing though.
I’vealways had an entrepreneurial streak. I set up my first magazine in primary school, so when I set up The Modern Review in 1991 when I was 27 I was able to say I’d been in the publishing business for 20 years. I eventually got involved in education and set up four schools, and then more recently The Free Speech Union. Setting up schools and institutions gives you a sense of leaving something behind. You have to think much more commercially if you start things, and if there’s a market for it, and if so, how to reach that market.
AsBritish universities have admitted more and more students and grown in size, they’ve attracted left-wing academics with a sense of social mission who want to change the world by evangelising and converting students to the cause of social justice. It’s a generational shift. The older generation of academics were radicalised in the 1960s and have hand-picked their successors. As universities have grown, more has been spent on diversitycrats. As tuition fees have gone up, students
TheFree Speech Union is often contacted by students and academics who have got into trouble for exercising their lawful right to free speech – sometimes quite bad trouble. A good example is Timothy Luckhurst, who’s the head of South College at Durham, which is the equivalent of an Oxbridge college, for inviting Rod Liddle to speak. He was placed under investigation and the Free Speech Union had to look after him. Durham is one of the worst offenders, and we’re often contacted from students there. On the other hand, we don’t get too many inquiries from Birmingham, and only a few from Exeter.
Oneof the reasons to be cautious about how quickly the spirit of liberty can be restored is that it was revealed to be in a very decrepit state during the last three years. It was surprisingly easy for the government and various public health agencies, civil servants and the BBC to persuade people to exchange their liberty for safety, much more so than it had been dyring the Asian flu pandemic in the 1950s. That was true not just of Britain but of most liberal democracies. Last year, when we looked at the lockdowns in China, and people streaming from their windows for help, we thought that’s what tyranny looks like. But three years ago we experienced similar measures. That was a sobering moment.
To contact the Free Speech Union go to freespeechunion.org.
I’m soon to be a ‘mature’ student, and I’m a bit indecisive about how I should approach university. My passion is writing so I would love to attend a creative writing course at Goldsmiths, for example, but some family and friends have told me that it is best to choose a more ‘solid’ degree, like business or economics, and pursue writing on the side. I’ve worked since I left school, and now I feel that I can finally pursue my university dream without facing the debt which kept me from attending in the first place. I just want to make sure that I’m not throwing my hard-earned money away. Do you have any advice for making this decision?
Cathy, 33, Parisyour university education to do for you. Both a creative writing and a business studies degree will give you skills which will make you very employable by others or allow you to become selfemployed. However, the right path for you all depends on your personal circumstances and how quickly you need to be earning a good salary. The reality is that a business studies degree will open up more opportunities for you in a shorter space of time, which means you’ll be earning more money faster. I would suggest you do some research into the world of creative writing, perhaps connecting with individuals on social media sites such as Linkedin who have pursued their dream in this field to find out what path they took. Whichever path you take, I am sure you will make a success of it.
First of all, congratulations on reaching a point whereby your dream of attending a university has become a reality and will not lead to any debt. That is not an easy thing to achieve, especially considering the economic turmoil we have faced following the pandemic. However, it is important to remember that university is always an investment, and you are absolutely right to want to pursue a pathway which will give you a good return on your investment. In order to achieve that, you will need to think hard about what ultimately you want
I completed my final two years of university during the pandemic, and while I finished with a 2.1, I think that I’m now stuck in a rut. I studied computer science, and I loved it at first, but after all of the lockdowns I feel that my mental health is really suffering from staring at a screen all day. I used to be really passionate about the computer world, so I’m wondering how to get that passion back, or if I should consider another career path?
Tim, 24, Birmingham
I am sorry to hear that your mental health is suffering as a result of the recent pandemic lockdowns. Firstly, you are not on your own. Many people have had the same experience as you, which is not to say that your own personal experience is not unique, but perhaps you can take some comfort in the fact that you are not alone. I would strongly suggest that at this stage you don’t try to make any major life decisions until you have received some support for your current state of mind. Speak to family, friends, or your doctor to get some support. And when you are ready to think about the future remember one thing - the world of technology is huge and growing at a rapid pace, so there are many different fields you could go into which won’t necessarily mean that you will be sat staring at a screen all day. Think about the aspects of technology which made you excited in the first place and, when you are ready,
research different careers in that field. It is always helpful to write to different employers for their views, as that will give you a better sense of what you will actually be doing than a job description. I hope you feel better soon and good luck with your research.
I’m in my final year of school, and I’m keen to go straight into an apprenticeship, but I’m not sure what to choose. The dream would be to complete a degree-level apprenticeship while getting paid to do a job that I enjoy. I’d rather not go to college as I want to jump straight in, but I will if it’s the only way. I’ve always been interested in machines and how they work, and I’m also interested in how public infrastructure is designed and built. What are my options? Are my goals realistic? I’d really appreciate your help.
Your dreams are absolutely realistic, and I applaud you for thinking outside the box. Apprenticeships are growing, so there will be no shortage of options – the important thing is choosing something which fits your skill set and interests you. For many industries apprenticeships are the quickest and best way to enter employment, not to mention the fact that you can earn whilst you learn. From where you say your interests lie, it seems that you would be suited for internships within the construction sector, such as
a role within civil construction, or in the engineering sector. Considering your interests, you might really enjoy a career in mechanical engineering. For construction, CITB have a tool called Go Construct, which you can find through any search engine. Go Construct asks a series of questions about you, your skills, your talents, and what it is that you enjoy doing. For engineering, many of the big companies such as BAE Systems and Siemens have careers information on their websites. Alternatively, Enginuity, an organisation which works with the engineering sector on skills and training, has a section on their website which will help you research suitable careers. Good luck with your research!
I’m thinking of making a career switch, but I have a few major gaps in my employment –once when my partner and I started our family, and again when I was let go from my previous job during Covid. How can I optimise my CV so that these gaps aren’t a problem? Is there a professional way to explain the issue? Thank you for your help.
Emily, 38, St. Albans
from seeing those gaps as negative things and instead think about what skills you developed during those times. Raising a family requires major organisational skills and experiencing redundancy builds resilience. These are skills which many employers really value, so why not point them out during the application process? Make a list of all those skills and add them to your CV, particularly those which are relevant to the job you are applying for. List the skills learned and experiences gathered during those periods just as you would for any other period of employment. In doing that you will present yourself as a positive, insightful and professional individual. Good luck!
Gaps in careers are normal and should not be hidden on any CV. You have perfectly legitimate reasons for the gaps in your employment, and these gaps are fairly standard. Employers will not look on these career gaps unfavourably so long as they know why those gaps exist. Also, you should shift your thinking
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KATHARINE BIRBALSINGH: SOCIALLY MOBILE
The latest from Britain’s Strictest Headteacher
STEPHEN FRY: FRY UP How the comedian relaxes
CLAIRE COOKSON Disability in the workplace
Ofcourse, it has been a terrible time.
The 2020-2022 pandemic has been a disaster for so many people, especially the disadvantaged – and it’s been disastrous across all nations. Having said that, people don’t always realise the sheer scale of the digital transformation which took place alongside it.
Consumers are buying healthcare online, and High Street retailers are struggling here in London. Habits have shifted dramatically: in the media, the streamers continue to gain market share, and freeto- air networks are under pressure, as are newspapers and traditional media enterprises.
In this context, inflation ought not to have come as a surprise. Clients will always look for price increases to cover commodity increases. The big question is whether inflation is endemic or transient. We clearly have shortages of labour supply, as well as supply chain disruption, and that means that companies will be looking to cover those problems. That’s why inflation was well above trend throughout 2022.
The priority in central bank policy to date has been on employment, and now there is more friction in the labour market. Employees have more power now: the pandemic has encouraged people to think about what they want to do and how they want to do it. That’s made inflation in wages significant. I expect wage inflation to continue but that in turn means that employers will look at their cost structures. Crucially, it will also bring automation into the picture. If labour is in short supply and increasingly expensive, that
will accelerate the technological changes around AI (artificial intelligence) and AR (augmented reality). The metaverse has been thoroughly hyped but listening to Bill Gates and others, it clearly will have a major impact.
As we look ahead, I think people who underestimated Donald Trump are going to be surprised – and I also wouldn’t personally underestimate Ivanka. Trump’s moves on the media side with Truth Social are interesting.
We are still talking to one another in our echo chambers. I spoke to a Chief Executive of a leading package company recently; he had just been holidaying in Alabama, Kentucky and Mississippi on a motorbike; there were Trump fans everywhere. Lionel Barber, the editor of the Financial Times, tells the story of the Tuesday before Brexit. He went to see Cameron and right up until the last minute Cameron’s polls told him he would win; Barber told him he was wrong. It is the same with Trump now; everybody underestimates his pull with voters, though there is now a little doubt about that given the Republicans slightly underperforming in the 2022 mid-terms. Lately I have been reading Ray Dalio’s book: The Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail, and that’s an interesting read which I highly recommend. It contains some fascinating graphs on the rise of inequality; the book explains how there are forces at work there whose power we have a tendency to underestimate. It’s a book which makes you realise the importance of China, where his intellectual focus is.
But I don’t see much reason to despair. Companies were better run during Covid; it meant that the centre was unable to interfere, and individual employees were given greater responsibility. By the end of 2022 at S4 Capital, we’d begun to see some of the downsides, having been initially very positive about it. I’d say a digital fatigue began to set in towards the end of 2021, and so we’ve had to manage that.
Sometimes, I think back on what we’ve lived through over the past few years. I think in retrospect Kate Bingham was the hero of that hour, and I see she has just released her memoir The Long Shot: The Inside Story of the Race to Vaccinate Britain. What she achieved with her procurement team ought to be a continuing source of inspiration. She was more focused on getting the product than the cost. That was crucial – that she realised she wasn’t buying sugar or commodities – but something essential. There are lessons there for business: you have to devote your energies to the essential.
am sometimes asked if there’s any danger of children being put off by reading Shakespeare. Some of our children at Michaela Community start here at 11 years old and they’ve got the reading age of a seven year old so we are just trying to get them to read at all – especially in the age of phones and and so forth.
You might have a few kids in the top set who read. When I do assemblies and take copies of Julia Donaldson and ask who’s read The Gruffalo and so on, a few children from the top sets might put their hands up, but most won’t. So they don’t really know books at all. For us, it’s not a question of should we do Ian Fleming instead of Shakespeare. It’s much more fundamental than that.
In our library we have speed reads, are books written for six and seven and eight year olds, but we don’t want them to feel they’re written for younger children. The idea of them being voracious readers isn’t accurate, apart from a few children in the top set. One thing we say when families come into Year 7 is we want children reading half an hour every day – that’s additional to their English lessons. For some of them, we say, they can do ten minutes a day.
But in their lessons, they love Shakespeare. In their lessons they really enjoy it – they understand him, they can access him, and it’s dramatic. But our families have never heard of Hamlet – not only do the kids not know, but the parents don’t know. And
the few who have certainly don’t talk to their children about it at home. We’re trying to get families to talk to their children – and it could be about anything. Many middle class people without knowing it are in on this secret club where everyone knows how to teach their children. They mention Hamlet, or they count how many peas are on the plate, or the daily news, or they teach them who the prime minister is, and ask how their day is. They know how to do it and it’s natural.
is really hard and that’s why there’s no institutional knowledge. I don’t know how you fix that – you’d have to change the way government works.
I’ve worked my whole life with parents who don’t know much about their children. The question then is how to change this. The problem is that education moves very slowly. What’s a good school today can be a bad school in three years’ time. The Education Secretary changes every couple of years and if you set up a new school it takes five years before you have results but by then you’ve had two education secretaries. It takes a while for things to change.
I know from working in the Social Mobility Commission that people change every few months – somebody new joins, and trying to find consistency
I suspect it’s a problem across government. It’s one of the things which makes the state weak. The people at Apple have been at Apple for years and years. Of course, they’ll bring in new people and lose people, but at any point time you’ll find that the core people have been there for at least eight to ten years. In government, you’ll often find that people have been there for that period, but they’ve been moving around within government doing different roles. It’s not that they leave government, or that they’re not paid enough, it’s just the way the government is set up. Those who work there like the variety. When I was at the Social Mobility Commission, I bought all my team to Michaela Community to show them what’s possible, but it takes a long time to get them on board. And then you get them on board and they go off to some other part of government.
I’VE WORKED MY WHOLE LIFE WITH PARENTS WHO DON’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT THEIR CHILDREN.
Despitehis success, one sometimes feels a little sorry for Stephen Fry: for some, he is the celebrity everybody used to love, his popularity dimmed by Twitter spats and overexposure. Yet if you take his finest achievements: the first seasons of A Bit of Fry and Laurie (1987-1995), his early books The Liar (1991), The Hippopotamus (1994) and his memoir Moab is My Washpot (1997), his brave documentary The Secret Life of The Manic Depressive (2006), as well as his lead role in Wilde (1997), it is a body of work remarkable in its brio and its breadth.
It all serves to prove that few people work harder than Stephen Fry – and not just in the entertainment industry. In fact, his ubiquity amounts almost to absurdity. It sometimes seems that what we’re witnessing is the work ethic of Margaret Thatcher relocated to an apparently more leisurely sector.
It’s as if every awards ceremony, supporting role and quiz show on earth seems to be dominated by Fry. His outspokenness on politics, religion and other things isn’t always matched by knowledge: Peter Hitchens famously referred to him as ‘the stupid person’s idea of an intelligent man’. But these gaps are offset by the perception that it’s been fun along the way – and so Finito World felt no compunction about asking him about his views on how to relax and wind down. ‘Work is so much more fun than fun,’ as Noel Coward put it. It is a line which might have been Fry’s mantra. When we caught up at the sweaty launch of Paul Feig’s Artingstall’s gin, we asked
Fry about the need to offset work with relaxation. So, does he drink these days? “Not much, but I love a good cocktail,” came the kindly reply. And what is his favourite cocktail? “When I’m hot like I am now, I find a John Collins – gin, lemon juice, soda – really refreshing.” And are there any drinks he stays away from?
“I’m not a great one for really sweet, sticky drinks. I like them to refresh you. But I do make a good negroni!”
It’s good to see him out and about. Fry, of course, hasn’t been well, having been diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2018; the disease is now thought to be in remission, and he has spoken out publicly at his good fortune at catching the disease early. Nevertheless, there has to come a time when everyone slows down and thinks about resting on their laurels. So will we ever see Fry host the BAFTAs again: “Oh, I don’t know. I think twelve is probably enough – it’s a good number and I’m very happy.”
Our conversation soon turns back to drink and what role it should play in our lives. “Whisky provokes violence more than gin,” says Fry. “Gin provokes tears. If you’ve had a lot of gin you just start crying.” Here Fry, ever the actor, performed an immense howl. “I’ve had a few friends who had a lot of whisky and it’s really unpleasant.”
Fry is also illuminating on national differences. “I think we should learn from European football. Whenever there was a match in Belgium there was violence afterwards, because in Belgium you drink beer and get pissed. Whenever they played in the Netherlands, there was no violence,
because they were smoking, because cannabis is legal in the Netherlands, so that’s what we should learn really! We’d be better off if someone were to create some exquisite hash brownies.”
Fry is a global citizen and I ask him how he feels about this part of central London. “This is a very Mayfair event, isn’t it? I feel like an out-of-towner, somehow everybody looks as though they belong here, and I feel I don’t.”
If even the famous feel perpetually out of place perhaps this gives us permission to feel nervous for that first job interview.
Even so, Fry is an emblem of what can be achieved if you set yourself to work across disciplines and refuse to heed boundaries. You get the impression that Fry knew his gifts from the start but that he has been surprised how far they have taken him. Does he have any anonymity in London? “If you walk fast enough and you look as if you’re in a hurry, people are very good, they leave you alone.”
And with that he’s gone – and probably gone back to work.
Myprime political role in life is as an advocate for getting more Conservative women in parliament, through Women2Win. We still need more women to step up, so if there is anyone you know who has got what it takes, or wants to take the first steps to knowing more about public life, I would love to hear from them.
Lately however, since researching, reading and speaking to those who are deep into the roots of gender ideology, I’ve found myself speaking out more and more about how women’s sex-based rights are under threat, as well as children’s safeguarding. I think the question of gender distress, especially for girls going through puberty, and support for women’s rights have become impossible to separate – perhaps they always were.
I have become interested, for instance, in the case of Sinead Watson, a Scottish ‘detransitioner’, who is a campaigner on this issue. She changed gender but now her argument is that she should never have been allowed to have a double mastectomy and hormone therapy, and she’s taking the Sandyford clinic in Glasgow to court. We are beginning to see an increasing number of detransitioners who realise too late that the problems they experienced going through puberty were not to do with gender distress but some other childhood trauma. Many are on the autism spectrum or young lesbians who would rather ‘trans away the gay’.
We’ll see the result of that case, but the 5,000 per cent increase in the number of girls presenting with gender dysphoria is highly disturbing. Research seems to point to the fact that it relates in some ways to the amount of time young people spend on their phones. They look to find out why they are unhappy with their
bodies, and are then driven to the social influencer sites. There is a disturbing 25 per cent year-on-year increase in profits for the companies making puberty blockers and cross sex hormones.
In addition to that we have the widespread availability of violent porn, which until 15 years ago you’d have to reach for from the top shelf of a newsagent – and pornography was in those days tame by comparison to what we see today. Today everybody has access to everything and that is not only jeopardising relationships, it’s also making young girls very fearful about sex when they see what’s expected of them. It’s always been a traumatic period, when your body is changing from childhood into womanhood – or childhood into manhood. Traditionally, girls who struggled psychologically and emotionally with that might have become anorexic at that point, to try and stop their bodies developing. But today they have this other option which is to bind their breasts, and be injected with testosterone. In a way what we’ve done is to conduct – quite by accident – a huge social experiment on children without really having any understanding of what the long term implications are.
At the centre of all this is the so-called JK Rowling cancellation. If you look at what Rowling said in her original blog, I challenge anybody to find anything remotely controversial or transphobic in it. People who repeat it and say she’s transphobic, or a hater or anything like that – I don’t think any of them could have read what she actually wrote. Most of us are very proud to be women, and though it has its challenges, it’s also a tremendous privilege.
We’re at the point now where women feel they have been understanding and
tolerant about the question of sharing female single sex spaces for too long. We feel those rights, protected by the Equality Act 2010, are threatened. So you’ve got this concern about safeguarding children on the one hand, and concern around single sex spaces on the other – and single sex spaces are single sex for a reason.
Some people try and make the comparison that the plight of the LGBTQ community resembles the fight over Section 28 in relation to gay rights. What they don’t understand is that this is a clash of rights.
Fortunately, there’s a novelist out there able to satirise this – and insodoing make sense of it a little. This is the brilliant parody The End of the World is Flat written by Simon Edge. It’s the story of a small charity which achieves everything it set out to achieve and then has to pivot into campaigning for absurd ideas – exactly as Stonewall has had to do once it achieved its goals in the field of gay rights. It is the Animal Farm of our times.
But although Edge’s novel ends happily, I don’t know where this particular story will end – I only know we need to act immediately to sort it out.
WhenI initially had the idea for Winston Churchill: His Times, His Crimes I was in two minds about it, but what convinced me it had to be done was the out-of-control Churchill cult that has just taken over. It's become completely absurd. The book is aimed at a wide audience, but I do think that it is for a younger generation who hears people speak the name Churchill in hallowed tones as if he was considered to be a saint. This certainly wasn't the case during his lifetime.
What I didn't want to do was write yet another biography, so instead I thought to have a timeline of Churchill and a timeline of history, which showed from my point of view where he was right – which was rare – and where he was wrong, which was in most parts of the world. I had taken into account the reading about Churchill which I knew I would have to do, and I did. But what I hadn’t considered were the books I had to read around him – reading books on Kenya, books on Greece, books on China and Japan. That took up a lot of time, but it was very enjoyable. Without doing that, you can't understand Churchill. Kipling famously wrote, “What do they know of England who only England know?” That applies to Churchill as well. And so it became a history of Churchill and the Empire.
The book is basically divided into two. The first period covers the years he was alive when he was constantly being criticised, with very sharp language occasionally, by some of his colleagues. Some in the Conservative government
referred to him as a semi-fascist and insane. He knew all that was being said about him and it just didn't bother him. The second period covers the cult of Churchill as we know it now, which began in 1982. Margaret Thatcher used Churchill to bully Ronald Reagan a bit over his moral compunctions towards using nuclear weapons, saying that he had constantly been in favour of nuclear deterrents. Then the post-death Churchill became a substitute for an empire that didn’t exist anymore. The use of Churchill became something they did whenever they found it necessary. The other way Churchill is used by British politicians is to say: ‘Look, we have a long-standing relationship, and regardless of the fact that the most important country in Europe is Germany, we will be better than Germany or anyone else in the EU, because we've been attached to you with an umbilical cord made of piano wire.’
Churchill is often praised for his wit, and he did have a turn of phrase, but you'll see that turn of phrase was often coloured with outright racism against non-white people. Attacking the Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans – just not funny in any way. Obviously he could be witty at times, but the wit was never neutral in that sense. I think MacMillan was genuinely witty, and Churchill’s wit was quite forced. There was a meeting on the 200th anniversary of Downing Street with six former prime ministers present, and James Callaghan said to no one in particular, “I wonder whether there is a collective word or phrase to describe all those of us who have served this great
office” – and immediately MacMillan said, “Lack of principle?” The reason MacMillan was far more effective is that he included himself in that joke too. This is something Churchill wasn’t capable of doing: his jokes were often pretty nasty. Churchill could say what he did and get away with it because behind him was the huge British Empire. That was the basis, and it was an empire supported whether we like it or not by a large bulk of the British population. Some of the most eager imperialists were the Scots, for instance, as well as the Northern Irish and some of the Welsh. It wasn't just an English enterprise, it's the empire that created the UK, so to speak. That's why, with the end of the empire, more nationalist feelings are coming out in all these territories - Scotland in particular, but also to a certain extent Wales, and even in England.
Winston Churchill: His Times, His Crimes is published by Verso Books (£20).
Asan MP, over 25 per cent of the people that approach me in surgeries are generally asking questions about their children and their children’s education. My mum didn’t have much education – she left school when she was 12 or 13 – so she was also a great believer in having a good education, and having me her eldest child going to Harvard Business School and Oxford was a proud thing for her. So the importance of education has been instilled in me from a young age.
While I was an MP, in my second year in Westminster around 2007, I had the opportunity to work on a social action project in Rwanda. This was post-genocide Rwanda when they were still trying to rebuild the country and Clare Short, who had been Blair’s International Development Secretary, donated a huge amount of money for Rwanda. The UK at the time was the largest donor to Rwanda.
David Cameron decided this was important, and a trip was organised with eight MPs, and we worked on five different social action projects. I was in charge of a project which involved helping to fix up a small nursery kindergarten in a poor area in Kigali. There were 83 kids. I put in around £5,000 of my own money and we fixed up the school: we got electricity, we had two big water tanks, a lot of rooves and walls had holes in and we fixed that up. Cameron then came over for two years to see the projects we were doing. And I remember one of the journalists who was with me came and visited me and he said: “You’re here for a couple of weeks and then leave it. What difference can you possibly make?” I explained that
the infrastructure was better and so on. Back in the UK, six weeks later, I received a phone call saying: “Rwanda Health and Safety want to shut it down”. I said: “What do you mean?” He said: “Well there were 83 kids and now there are 343 children there in these tiny classrooms.” So I flew back and I met with the Minister of Education and I said: “Don’t close the school down. I will rebuild it.” In my head I thought it would cost me £100,000.
I found a new site which I bought about a kilometre away, and spent two years getting planning permission, which I finally secured. We had a foundation laying and the President decided to come and I asked him why he came. He said: “Most people come to me giving advice. You came, saw a problem and put your hand in your pocket to fix it.” He added: “I would like you to do one thing: make sure there are all Rwandan teachers.”
At that time a lot of teachers came from surrounding countries like Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya and so on. So I took that on board and we finally opened the school in January 2012. I then created a charity called a Partner in Education and we went on to build a secondary school. By 2017, we were ranked in the top three in the country, with nearly 100 per cent Rwandan teachers. At that point, I built a teacher training centre too.
When I left Parliament in 2015, my old tutor came to see me and said: “Brooks what are you doing next?” He said:
“We’ll figure out what exactly you do.” In 2016, I was sitting next to a Professor in the education department and I was asked to give a talk. I was asked to sit in on his class. I suddenly realised how little I knew about education even though I had this school. After three classes I asked if I could do his Masters. I passed and got in. I was 60 years old, but I always love learning. It’s never left
me. I went back to university at the age of 60 and my dissertation focused on fine motor proficiency of seven-yearold children as a predictor of academic achievement.
They then said I should stay on and do a doctorate. I decided to look at policymaking in Rwanda. I realised there are a lot of policy ideas which are generated without real focus on outcomes. For instance, they have this thing one laptop per child. But if there isn’t broadband in schools, or the teachers aren’t trained you won’t get satisfactory outcomes. We can’t really think about these things in a linear way.
I decided to look at it through the lens of a systems approach and consider what enables and what constrains policy implementation. For instance, if teachers have only rudimentary understanding of English they can’t overnight suddenly be able to deliver lessons in English to children who themselves don’t speak English. It was understandable why the Rwandan government wanted to bring that in; but this top down approach wasn’t working.
Having been in government myself, I can say with some authority that we have a habit of coming up with great ideas which in principle sound good, but we don’t think enough about who we need to bring on board to implement
these things properly.
But things happen in life and get in the way. I started my DPhil and then in 2020 Covid hit, and I couldn’t do my field research. Then, my mum got sick in 2021 and I could see from January she would pass away, which she did in May of that year. Finally I did some research in November 2021, and then suddenly
from Kviv and Lviv to the Polish borders. As the war moved to the East, I had hubs across Ukraine, and I spent a lot of time in Kharkiv: we moved 1,000 women and children out of a Russiancontrolled area. To do that we had to move 500 metres of anti-tank mines, which was an amazing achievement. I am torn between doing what I am doing in Ukraine and not wanting to drop the ball on my DPhil. I’m trying to navigate with my supervisors between my work with Ukraine and getting to the next stage of my DPhil.
the Ukraine war starts.
It seems I will continue to find reasons not to work! I saw a friend of mine was on the Polish border moving people along refugee centres into Europe. I messaged him and asked if I could come and join him. Four days became two weeks. Soon, I began bringing buses into Ukraine from Lithuania, moving people
But the moral of the story is you’re never too old to learn. While my wife does Sudoku as a form of brain gym, I have my doctorate. Having started 40 years ago, I feel much better prepared through having had life experience in business and as an MP.
THE MORAL OF THE STORY IS YOU’RE NEVER TOO OLD TO LEARN.
Mychildhood wasn’t idyllic. It wasn’t one where food was about experience and niceties, it was about nutrition. My dad was in the army, so I didn’t really have a childhood where hospitality was a path that me or any of my brothers and sisters were going to walk down. It was an opportunity to not go to university. It was an opportunity to get out of schooling and get on with some solid work, so I fell in love with the industry after experiencing it rather than dreaming of it.
My time as an apprentice at Gleneagles, a five-star hotel in the highlands in Scotland, was where I was inspired by food and also the culture of the kitchens. I fell in love with the camaraderie, the teamwork, the passion, the fire, the adrenaline, and then my love grew for experiencing food in a different way beyond just nutrition.
About eight years ago, when I opened my first restaurant, sustainability came into the equation – I needed to be able to afford the bills to open up tomorrow. I didn’t become interested in sustainability for its own sake, it came out of a necessity to operate as economically as I could. My first restaurant was a small one. We bought fish from day boats, buying exactly what the fishermen had fished for. We bought whole animals, because butchery skills are very important for me and I wanted to make sure we used every part we could, out of respect for the animal and the farmer. All skills are important to me, to be able to know
how to do everything and teach the chefs everything I know. Operating sustainably came into practice when I couldn’t afford to bin anything. It wasn’t about saving the world or being greenfingered, it was about respect of the product and thinking about how to stay open going forward.
I would say that sustainability can be described in one word; tomorrow. The word sustainable can have multiple meanings. How to be sustainable in terms of sourcing or producing or people or buildings, or your business. And if you’re sustainable in terms of mentorship and looking out for the
future of the industry, you will create wonderful chefs. You should learn a new skill every day, and you should have a mentor; someone that inspires you rather than teaching you something. Someone that pushes you to become better is a mentor. Don’t limit your mentors to one person though, you should be open minded to everyone who can teach you something.
The way that I think about my business is, first and foremost, how do we teach the staff? You teach them about being respectful, it doesn’t need to be about saving the world. It’s about learning all the skills you can possibly learn. When I say that, I mean whole animals, whole vegetables, nothing portioned, nothing cut, nothing shaped, then cooking sustainably comes naturally. A lot of people chuck that ’sustainable’ word all around because it’s the word of the moment, but in fact, many of them misunderstand the principles.
The thing that I’m seeing nowadays is all these sustainable restaurants are utilising by-products but they have no clue how to utilise the product itself. That’s almost as wasteful as the other way around. You need to understand the foundations of that product first before you can even try and be inspirational and move boundaries. Just because it’s the word of the moment doesn’t mean that you’ve got to bin the prime and look after the waste. They’re utilising waste rather than utilising the products, and that’s stupid.
I’ve never hired a senior member to join my team since the day I opened my restaurant. I’ve always hired young people and promoted from within. So all of my restaurants are run by the same team who’ve worked with me since I opened my first restaurant. They’re the sous chefs and head chefs of all my restaurants now, and we hire based on personality, smile, and real passion for what we do. I lost restaurants in lockdown, and it was so painful because for me the staff are more important than my business, so I had to create a restaurant, not out of a love for the stress of opening restaurants, but to find a home for the staff that had dedicated so much of their lives to me. So that’s why I did it. I can’t emphasise enough, opening restaurants is one of the most stressful, horrible times of your life, and I don’t particularly like doing them. I do it for the chance to grow a team, and to give them the opportunity to learn a new skill, to progress, to move forward, and to run under the foundations of what we’ve already created. It means that the ship is not going to get rocked by a storm, instead they’re going to know how to get out of a situation. They’re going to know how I like to operate, they’re going to know the style and process, but then they have the opportunity for their personality to shine through and show their individuality. If
I don’t promote from within I’ll lose that wonderful talent.
I prefer apprenticeship paths to university. There’s nothing like learning on the job, rather than sitting in a classroom where you can joke and play around and not absorb what you’re being taught. I prefer being in a kitchen and I don’t tolerate wastefulness in terms of time. Your time is important. Don’t waste it. What’s the difference between wasting time and wasting a product? Both are dangerous to your future. You need to build up your foundations first. For aspiring young chefs, I would say this; find a chef you get really inspired by, be it the food that they cook, the lifestyle they have, or the ethos they represent - it could be one small thing that sparks you. Go into their restaurant, ideally when it’s not in service, and stay there until you get offered an interview. Pester the life out of them. Because if someone is really hungry, a chef will see that and even if they don’t have a position open, they will make one available because you’re hungry as hell. Passion is priceless.
For me, inspiration, motivation, knowledge, those are the three things that keep anyone excited, turned on, and really hungry, and can bring everything into reach. It’s when you start to lose one of them, then the three crumble. I’m a self-acknowledged workaholic. I’m going a million miles a minute, but I love it and I wouldn’t change it. For me, the work/life balance thing is irrelevant. I’ll work as many hours as I need to achieve my ambitions. Of course, I don’t expect that massive time commitment from my team. I respect that there is life outside the kitchen and looking after my staff’s mental and physical welfare is very important to me. But when I look at talented young people, I’m going to pick those who are more driven, who aren’t watching the minute hand on the clock, who are willing and hungry enough to put in the time and effort. These are the people who will get better and better, learning new skills and moving up to that next step. That’s where the knowledge, motivation and inspiration really comes into play. Adam Handling was speaking to Patrick Crowder.
you would be edged towards the door. I think that’s probably still true in a lot of media; if you don’t perform, people won’t be nice forever. They won’t publish dud columns on the basis you’re a nice person - or not for long. Possibly, if you know the owner it helps! Really the question was, could you do the work? Having a qualification in journalism would be nice, but it wouldn’t cut the mustard if you couldn’t produce 1,000 words on deadline, and with copy not needing extensive work by the subeditors. Bad copy makes editors irritable.
From my experience young people are sometimes perplexed about how to begin a career in journalism. Personally, I blundered my way in. I started writing about music and I became jazz critic of the Daily Telegraph which was a small niche. Then I was talking to the arts editor one day and she asked, quite casually over lunch, if there was anything else I wanted to write about, and I said art, and that was that.
I’m not sure if that sort of thing would happen today – and you often hear it said that it’s all much more difficult nowadays, and there are more hoops you’ve got to jump through. But then I was in the position I was as I’d carried out a campaign of self-education – I’d written many pieces and submitted them to numerous places until someone said yes. That took a degree of determination, I suppose.
Contributors were as good as their last piece – if you started to go off,
Do the big artists, the Lucians and the David Hockneys feel that they’ve got to perform like journalists do? Lucian Freud’s charm comes across in the current edition of the letters I’ve written with David Dawson. He would say one of the two worst things you could think is: “I’ve spent 80 or 100 hours on this so I can’t throw it away – it must be good.” The other is: “It’s mine, so it must be good”. Lucian was ruthless at editing work. Francis Bacon was a masochist in his private life, but also quite masochistic in terms of selfjudgement.
“I THINK ARTISTS HAVE TO BE AWARE – RATHER LIKE WRITERS – THEIR WORK IS ONLY AS GOOD AS THE LAST WORK.”Martin Gayford
David Dawson thinks maybe 2530% of Lucian’s work was destroyed, and much of what was destroyed was more than adequate by most people’s standards. Lucian could be quite sweet about that: ‘I’m always in trouble with my pictures,’ he once told me.
David Hockney is quite different: he preserves things. I think artists have to be aware – rather like writers – their work is only as good as the last work. You can’t coast on your reputation. All artists who succeed would regard that as a dangerous thing to do.
I think if you’re trying to do something new, the work carries on being difficult. The work would only be easy if you’ve established a formula – and if you have integrity as an artist, you don’t want to do that. David was saying the other day
that turning out product is a dangerous thing to do – piling up a lot of stuff of a fairly similar type.
Painters have different interests. In the mid-1950s, Lucian got more interested in texture, and Hockney is more of a painter-draughtsman. David would say that what’s absolutely fundamental to him is drawing. Lucian started out with that sort of view, but it took him some time to become the kind of artist he became.
My inherent tendency is to want to learn from artists. There are two kinds of people who call themselves critics: there are one or two who think you should close yourself off from the art world. I was at a dinner party once with a critic of that ilk, and this was aimed at David Sylvester who was also there, and this critic said: “If you make
friends with artists, that will undermine your critical distance”. David Sylvester replied that he thought all critics and art historians should talk to them if only to see how they don’t think.
My personal view is that interviewing artists isn’t like trying to interview the Chancellor of the Exchequer where you’re trying to get them to divulge information they’re keeping from the public: it’s not just not that sort of enterprise. I feel very luck to have had the career I’ve had.
Love Lucian: The Letters of Lucian Freud 1939–1954 is published by Thames & Hudson, pp. 392, £65
When I was 16, before I started university, I was part of a leadership academy which included a two-day residential course where you learned all about problem-solving techniques, local group exercises, trust exercises, and team building – it was amazing. One day I was sitting down at breakfast with a mentor, who was from Future Foundations, and he told me about the amazing things that he was doing at Enactus KCL to tackle knife crime in London. That talk left me so inspired, and it sent me on this journey.
When I joined my Enactus team it was day one of freshers so I was excited, and I was lucky enough to join immediately as a project leader of a consultancy project where we were helping a local community centre restructure to enable them to become financially resilient and continue all of the amazing things that they were doing. Thankfully, within a few months, we were able to turn them around.
Straightaway from there, I became team president. In that role I was facilitating impact, so I was advising team leaders, and doing that kind of work more than being actively involved in the day-to-day running of the projects. Sometimes I found it frustrating because I wasn’t involved in the actual day-to-day activities, and we had so many projects that I wanted to have a handle on, but I wasn’t quite able to. For me, it was always a priority for myself and my team to have an impact within homelessness. We had a
few projects that didn’t quite reach our desired impact level, so I decided to take it upon myself to see what kind of solution I could come up with.
I am of the belief that whatever solution you’re coming up with – or whatever social enterprise you want to launch – you personally have to be able to execute it. For me, I’ve always loved hospitality. I worked in restaurants from the age of 12 to 17, and I was that kid at school who would bake cookies and brownies to sell. I was also the head chef at a street food place when I was at university, so I felt comfortable that I could launch something in the hospitality space and make it successful. While going through the planning process, I realised that I could open a coffee shop which retrained and employed people affected by homelessness, and that idea became Second Shot Coffee.
There is no such thing as a homeless person, only people who are experiencing homelessness, and it can happen to so many of us at different points in our lives. Victor was 51 years old when, five days after moving to London, he found himself alone sleeping on the street. He didn’t have great English skills, and he was one of those people stuck in that unenviable position of isolation. He was homeless. But what Victor did have was an unrelenting belief that he could really improve his life, and that he deserved better than what life had given him so far. Victor was someone with an incredible work ethic, a
warm personality, determination, and perseverance. He was able to find temporary housing, and then he found Second Shot. When he started working with us, he stopped being all these negative things in other people’s eyes. He became a barista. He became a hub of his community, a person that people could look forward to seeing and sharing a conversation with every single morning.
Our concept, and the concept of our logo, is that we’re trying to help people who are on one path get to a higher, more prosperous path. But there’s always this overlap between when one journey ends and another begins. It’s up to you to decide how you want the next phase of that journey to pan out. Whether you’re working on projects now, thinking about launching a social enterprise, or working in an industry, you must know how to place your strengths, trust the process, show your resilience, and know that you can do amazing things and create impact.
Julius Ibrahim, the founder of Second Shot Coffee, was speaking to Enactus students at the ExCel Centre, London
When I first started my career in special needs, I realised that people aren’t sufficiently amnitious for people with learning disabilities when it comes to their transition into employment.
That didn’t seem right: I was struck by the skills and talents of these young adults, and I just felt really concerned that the world of employment would never know of their skills. For as long as I've been doing this, in the UK, the statistics of people with learning disabilities transitioning into paid employment are woeful. Right now, only 5.1 per cent of those with a learning disability or autism who are known to adult services are in paid employment. I was looking at this trajectory for these young children and young adults finishing their time at my school, and I became really concerned about what their adult lives would look like if they were going to live a lifetime on benefits.
When you train to be a teacher, as I did, there is very little training around supporting people with learning disabilities – it’s a real gap in our training system. So in truth I didn't learn a whole lot about how to support people with learning disabilities, or autism spectrum condition. It was actually in a role that I had in a mainstream college, as part of an internal inspection team. I was inspecting a special education department in the area, and just became overwhelmed by the fact that nobody was being hired and nobody was looking at their future, and that’s when I transitioned to work in a special education school. I think that's where
you learn everything about yourself, because suddenly you are working with these people who have faced such unbelievable challenges on a daily basis, more than I've ever had to face, yet they still come to school and give you their best day.
The word disability is so negative, and if you look at the skills and qualities of people with autism, for example, often they have really amazing attention to detail and they’re able to follow standard operating procedure to the letter. People with a disability are incredibly solutions-focused because they're constantly finding workarounds.
They're also typically in a world that's not set up for somebody with a learning disability, so they have to find workarounds to fit in. That translates so beautifully into the world of work –where we need to be resilient, and we need to be reactive, and we need to be able to make changes and work with others, and I just became consumed with how incredible they are. When I started partnering with organisations, I realised they were already employing people with different learning styles, with undiagnosed learning disabilities, and undiagnosed autism spectrum condition. It was really enlightening to be able to say to companies: ‘You are already doing thisyou are already making great adaptations’.
In terms of value for the businesses who take part, we know that productivity goes up. What we then see is that staff satisfaction goes up. In organisations that partner with us, people feel more proud to work for their organisation. What we also think is that people working within that organisation start to disclose their own hidden disabilities, because suddenly they feel like they work for an organisation which values diversity and that is inclusive, and that wants people to be open and honest and bring their whole self to work. Suddenly they feel like they're working for an organisation that demonstrates in real terms its social values.
Every single young adult who does our programme, they change. They change the way they walk, the way they talk, the way they feel about themselves, and the way they present themselves, because suddenly, and for some of them for the first time ever, they’re integrated into society, they’re adding real value, they're developing their skills, and they feel like they’re giving back to their community.
As we move towards the coronation of a new King, Wa terfly hears that Finito’s CEO Ronel Lehmann has had the opportunity to meet His Majesty on multiple occasions when the current King was the Prince of Wales. The first meeting was facilitated by Lady Nourse, who enjoyed her superior position perhaps a little too much. “The first time that I met HRH
The Prince of Wales was thanks to Lady Nourse who was chairing a charity event at a West End theatre,” Lehmann recalls. “We all had to be seated half an hour before Charles arrived. Lady Nourse took great pleasure in marching into the Royal box and immediately chastising us for not standing up quickly,” he recalls. It’s not recorded how Charles reacted to this: at least it didn’t involve a rogue pen.
But the future King’s humour comes through in Lehmann’s recollections. After a lifetime of service, charity, and championing the environment, His Majesty took particular pride in another accomplishment of his when he and Camilla visited The Jewish Museum to mark its Camden Town expansion. Among the refreshments were Duchy Original Biscuits, which the thenPrince of Wales began production of in 1990. Now they are a Waitrose product, though to their credit the royalties still go to charity. At the museum’s grand opening, His Majesty was seen to relish
picking up biscuits, placing them in his jacket pocket, and excitedly telling guests “these were mine!”
Lehmann also recalls a meeting at the Platinum Jubilee celebrations, which he attended through an invitation from Marianne Fredericks CC. Lehmann and the future King spoke of his own longstanding association with Sylvia Darley OBE, who founded The Malcolm Sargent Cancer Fund for Children. “I told His Royal Highness that I was trying to get the Royal Albert Hall to honour Sir Malcolm on one of their stars located under the canopy of the building. These are dedicated to key players in the building’s history, from its opening in 1871 to the present day,” Lehmann says. “Most young people have no idea of his impact on classical music or Sir Malcolm’s importance to the survival of The Royal Albert Hall. I felt that I was beating a Royal path for common sense to prevail!” We feel another black spider memo coming on.
Waterflyhears that the world of snooker is a place where journalists experience a variety of welcomes. According to Finito staff writer Patrick Crowder, Australian champion Neil Robertson exuded quiet confidence and kindness, asking nearly as many questions about Crowder’s life during the interview as Crowder was asking him. Eventually the expats connected over the question of homesickness – and even swapped mobiles.
But when Crowder approached Ronnie O’Sullivan after a match, the legend was initially closed off. O’Sullivan generally has little patience for the media, preferring to focus on his play. He asked which publication Crowder was writing for, and as he began to explain, O’Sullivan cut him off with, “I don’t give a f**k mate, how much time have we got?” But O’Sullivan warmed up when he picked up on Crowder’s Californian accent –an unusual nationality on the snooker circuit. Eventually the pair bonded over their shared love of scones and clotted cream from ‘Marksies’, which O’Sullivan was surprised Crowder had even heard of. From expletives to cream – the true trajectory of a Rocket.
The author Tim Robinson recalls what it was like directing and producing Reading the Eighties for BBC2. He recalls: “Sue Townsend of Adrian Mole fame was perhaps the most amiable, although she couldn’t stand Beryl Reid who played Adrian’s grandmother in the TV adaptation. ‘She was a mad pain in the neck,’ said Sue, ‘who, unable to do a Sheffield accent, did an awful Brummie caricature and then tried to force the rest of the cast to imitate her.’ I confessed to her my terrible fear of aging and losing my looks, and she, who was close to death, replied, laughingly: ‘Because of my diabetes, I’m completely blind and can’t see you at all, but I’ll tell you how lovely you look if that helps.’
Robinson , whose acclaimed new novel The Orphans of Hatham Hall has recently been published, also had other fascinating encounters: “Stephen Hawking wasn’t noticeably more agile than Sue, but still manfully plugging A Brief History of Time which had sold in huge numbers – although, it has been scandalously suggested, a smaller percentage than usual ever reached the end. I was allowed only one unprepared question and as we were featuring ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’, asked him about Douglas Adams. For 20 minutes the camera ran while he dutifully programmed his gizmo, and I crossed and uncrossed my legs. But it was well worth the wait as finally everybody’s favourite household dalek began speaking: ‘I once met Douglas Adams in Los Angeles for lunch where
he told me about working on scripts for Doctor Who.’ The silence that followed told me the anecdote was complete, so I jumped up, shouting out: ‘Wonderful, that’s simply wonderful!’ Still, it made it to the final cut.
Russell T Davies was heard to be quite rude about MP Nadine Dorries over her appearance on Radio 4. “The woman is an idiot – a big f**king idiot. She’s a plain, complete, clearly idiotic woman,” Davies tells Waterfly. Speaking of his return to writing for the nation’s favourite time-travelling doctor, the Welsh screenwriter expressed concern about going back to the BBC, which he believes is coming under fire. “I think it’s under attack all the time. Every single day,” he tells us. His proposal to save the historic broadcast service? “Vote the government out, it’s simple as that. But we won’t, it’s not going to happen, so when your children are sitting watching cartoons it’s your fault for not voting them out.” Call the Paw Patrol.
Raducanu sits in a luxury hotel, immediately more interesting that the backdrop behind her. Interior designers will have specific words for the subtle gradations of brown, beige and mauve which I see, conveying low-key opulence. The gold struts of a light disappear out of shot. Behind her, half-lost in the night, are the ghosts of other buildings, suggesting Raducanu is in some upper floor suite: this feels appropriate since she has been in the stratosphere of sporting stars for the last 14 or so months.
Raducanu is perched on the sofa, professionally lit. She is dressed in what looks like a purple ballgown and which is probably Dior – one of her sponsors. The spangly crucifix which she wears for all her matches – including her 2021 US Open final victory – disappears in the glitter of her dress. It is as if she has found herself by accident in the interviewee’s chair and decided to allot some brief time before heading out for the night.
Recalling the last helter-skelter year, she says: “I’ve had a lot of new things that have been exciting. It’s great to learn from different industries and see new things, and I can apply it into every aspect of my life really, even my tennis. So I think that's been really eyeopening.”
To recap for those who may have missed what has been without exaggeration the most astonishing fairytale in all sport, Emma Raducanu began 2020 as a little known tennis player. The armchair fan might easily have pigeon-holed her as the latest in a long run of British tennis players who ‘don’t quite make it’. It would have been easy to imagine, without any disrespect intended to any of these players, that here was another Johanna Konta, Elena Baltacha, or Heather Watson – one of those British hopes, who shine briefly then move off into commentating, coaching, management, or agenting.
It didn’t work out like that. Instead, Raducanu had a promising run at Wimbledon in 2021. At that time, she was ranked outside the Top 300, and entered the tournament as a wild card. She charmed everyone on her way to the fourth round. That match was disappointing at the time, and saw her lose to Ajla Tomlianoviç after experiencing breathing difficulties.
But in retrospect it was formative: Raducanu subsequently entered the US Open Championships and had to win three qualifying matches to be able to enter the main draw.
What happened next would be deemed unlikely if submitted as a Hollywood script. Raducanu went on to beat a
string of top players: Stefanie Vögele, Zhang Shuai, Sara Sorribes Tormo, Shelby Rogers, Belinda Bencic, Maria Sakkari and Leylah Fernandez to win the tournament. More than this she did so without dropping a set. On her victory, she received public congratulations from the late Queen Elizabeth II, who called it: “a remarkable achievement at such a young age… testament to your hard work and dedication”.
These developments have led to pressure, of course, but Raducanu herself has been philosophical about that. “I’m a Slam champion, so no one's going to take that away from me,” she has said. “If anything, the pressure is on those who haven't done that.”
In short, this sort of thing doesn’t happen; to Raducanu it did.
Raducanu’s victory was astonishing in itself: it also revealed somebody well-spoken, educated, charming and humorous. She has sometimes been deemed, as we shall see, a poster-girl for social mobility or diversity in sport. Interestingly she has a grammar school background having attended Newstead Wood School in Orpington, which though it celebrates her on its website does so in a more understated way than other schools might.
In fact, for much of her ascent to superstardom, Raducanu was multitasking her burgeoning tennis career with A Levels, but now things have shifted a bit. Raducanu continues, telling Harper’s Bazaar: “Even though I’ve finished my A Levels now, I like to keep my brain quite active. Bath time is also when I watch TV or Netflix– I find I don’t get much spare time to do that otherwise. People always ask what I’m watching but it’s usually quite obscure.”
And what is she watching and reading?
“Right now I’m really into these different Chinese shows because I’m trying to improve my Mandarin! As for books, I recently finished The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari by Robin Sharma which is about this lawyer searching for the meaning of life. I like non-fiction books best. I also like talking to my friends – not so much on the phone, but I’m a big texter.”
It’s this which sets Raducanu apart: her maturity and willingness to learn. As you consider the person on the hotel sofa, you realise how she is already an old head on young shoulders, used to being the object of attention and fascination; the impression is of somebody who has very swiftly reconciled herself to fame, as if her astonishing story was what she expected to happen long ago. She came prepared.
So what is it like when the limelight comes for you? When I speak to Chris Eaton, the former World No.317, who reached the second round of Wimbledon in 2008, he compares his own experiences as a tennis player to what Raducanu is experiencing: “I would say that my experience would be extremely different to a lot of other peoples’: it’s rare to have an experience with the press which is only positive.
“PROFESSIONALLY SPEAKING, I’M VERY PROUD OF MY RESILIENCE THIS YEAR. I'VE FACED QUITE A BIT OF ADVERSITY AND I’VE HAD TO KEEP GETTING BACK UP A LOT.”
For me, there was no expectation. Nobody got my phone number, social media wasn’t what it was. Accessibilitywise, you didn’t have Instagram where you could message somebody or post something. Emma has outrageous expectation.”
I remember once talking to a tennis coach at Reed’s tennis school, which the former British No.1 Tim Henman – and Eaton – had attended. He told me that many students had been as talented as Henman but Henman had been the only person who, if you told him to hit a ball against a wall for 10 hours, would follow the order unquestioningly.
The story, apocryphal or not, seems to open up onto the question of what success means in sport, and how much should be sacrificed in order to obtain it. Furthermore, success in sport has its relationship to success in other disciplines, and young people already wish to find out how they can emulate her achievements in their own lives.
“I think the confidence comes from just inner belief,” Raducanu has told Vogue. “My mum comes from a Chinese background, they have very good selfbelief. It’s not necessarily about telling everyone how good you are, but it’s about believing it within yourself. I really respect that about the culture.”
But Raducanu’s story is already a layered one as much to do with setback as it is to do with that astonishing victory. In 2022, she began to experience reversal as she adjusted to joining the main tour: the latest example of this was her defeat to American teenager Coco Gauff in straight sets in the second round of the 2023 Australian Open.
Raducanu has been both a meteoric success story and someone who has increasingly had to wrestle publicly with disappointment. In the merciless world of stratospheric celebrity,
disappointment will mean criticism, most of it unfair. Press intrusion is now an aspect of her life; perhaps it’s even its defining note – along with her newly found wealth which itself cannot come without its own measure of difficulty.
Raducanu admits this publicly, telling Sheer Luxe: “Professionally speaking, I’m very proud of my resilience this year. I've faced quite a bit of adversity and I’ve had to keep getting back up a lot. So much stuff is said about me that isn’t true, but I try not to let it affect me. The past year has meant getting used to that side of things – the publicity and hearing all these things I never even knew about myself! The attention on the tour is so intense.”
Behind the beauty and the smile and the Raducanu we think we know there is someone far more complex, and indeed perhaps less obviously enviable than the one we had her down for.
By their endorsements shall ye know them. Raducanu has had the most monied and famous brands beating their way to her door, and this has given her, in addition to instant financial security, a host of commitments.
Raducanu explains in that plush hotel room: “I’ve been lucky enough to work with Dior and Maria Grazia Churi who I've met a few times and she's so nice. I also like that she's all about feeling comfortable and having casual stuff in your wardrobe that you can wear day to day. Nike is probably another one because I'm always in tennis clothes and don't go out very often! That said, I think they’re the masters at making the sporty stuff just look a bit cooler. I’m also into quite masculine pieces – you’ll often find me wearing a men's polo and tennis shorts.”
Eaton explains how it goes for the likes
of Raducanu: “It all depends on what contracts she has with these brands. Is it to wear a watch at the end of everything and do one corporate day a year? If so, it shouldn’t be a problem. If it’s a question of five different sponsorships requiring ten days a year, suddenly you’re looking at 50 days a year which then means you don’t get any time off and you’re always working.”
For Raducanu, the sponsorship questions feel different; for this article, we spoke to Christopher Helliar, her agent, who was willing to cooperate on the basis that our magazine was interested in Emma’s substance. And there’s a lot of that. In general, her endorsements feel thought-through. Raducanu is able to talk articulately about the sponsors she’s signed up with. Consider this excerpt, for instance: a dropped-in reference from an interview with Harper’s Bazaar: “I wake up a lot during the night and my hydration always takes a hit overnight – I'm an athlete, so I need to keep on top of that to perform properly during the day. You’ll always find a big bottle of Evian next to my bed, so the first thing I do is normally have a big glug of water!”
Likewise, her commitment to BA chimes with the jet-setting lifestyle of an international tennis player, and her physical beauty makes her a natural fit for Tiffany’s jewellery and Dior. But the same brands would be a good fit for many other tennis player on the circuit. As one looks through the long list of her endorsements, one leaps out as somehow being more specific to Raducanu and that is her deal with HSBC to work on financial literacy, about which she has said: “To partner with HSBC is so natural for me having grown up playing in the HSBC Road to Wimbledon and having been a customer for many years. If I wasn’t a tennis player,
I would definitely want to work in finance so I’m excited to learn more about the industry in the years to come.” Raducanu’s parents are both in finance and so it is of interest to look at what the sponsorship might mean. Strangely, HSBC say they are unable to comment which makes one wonder a little about the depth of their commitment to the question itself. However, there can be no doubt that financial literacy is of importance and that the broad idea is valuable, even if HSBC’s approach to the sponsorship might be deemed unduly standoffish.
I talk to Anna Freeman, founder of Zavfit, a business committed to financial literacy. So, what does she make of the partnership between Raducanu and the bank? “From a marketing perspective it makes a lot of sense,” she tells me. “HSBC has always looked to use ambassadors who connect cultures while using sport as a tool for education around their brand and products. Emma is a great example of someone who is young and has found her passion and taken her chance with a brilliant platform to carry a message to a new generation.”
Of course, it’s not necessarily a straightforward match. Freeman continues: “While it’s hard to ignore the fact that Emma won’t be having financial struggles herself anytime soon and she’ll have obligations to support HSBC with their advertising returns, she is relatable to a younger audience while representing aspiration, so using her to help bring education to the next generation is very important. However well it does as a campaign, we’d like the big players like HSBC to continue using real people in everyday situations to tell their stories and make the conversation reach everyone.”
Professional debut on the ITF women’s circuit, winning the $15,000 ITF Tiberias, her first professional title. Later that year, she would go on to win a second title at the ITF Antalya.
During the pandemic, she wins LTA British Tour Masters title while preparing for her upcoming A-level exams.
She reaches the fourth round in her Grand Slam maindraw debut, before winning the US Open without dropping a set. She tests positive for Covid-19, causing her to miss her second exhibition match at Royal Albert Hall. She completes her A-levels, earning an A* and an A in mathematics and economics, respectively.
2015
Becomes the youngest ever to win an International Tennis Federation tournament at the age of 13 when she wins the Nike Junior International in Liverpool
So why is financial literacy a problem in society? “It’s not understood because it’s not interesting. It’s not interesting because it’s not relatable,” Freeman replies. “Children and young people have learnt preconceptions about financial literacy and money from their parents which will usually have a negative connotation. We’re made to think that ‘money = problems’ and so we avoid learning about it. We’re then brought into a society where every finance operator sells the same thing ‘Saving is Good, Spending is Bad’ and the cycle continues from generation to generation.”
So what is Freeman’s solution?
“Instead of talking about all the bad things associated with finance, why don’t we talk about the good it could do?” she asks. “How to spend our money in ways that improve our health and happiness and get away from the model that finance is all about protecting a future that feels like lightyears away to the younger generation.”
This failure has real mental health effects in Freeman’s view, and it’s this insight which led to her founding
Faces after effects of Covid-19 and injury, leading to an early withdrawal from the Nottingham Open and causing her to miss Eastbourne. She competes in Wimbledon where she is defeated in the second round, and enters the US Open again where she loses her opening match.
Zavfit. “From our perspective, we see money in the same as diet and fitness - we know people want to do the right thing but they don’t know what that is. We’re all different and so we need to find what works for us. Instead of ‘how much money do I have’ we should be thinking about 'How can my money make me happy’.”
The above conversation illustrates the power of Raducanu: she can make us talk about things which we wouldn’t otherwise talk about.
But, of course, building a brand is a complicated business. Formerly of BDB Pitmans, Stuart Thomson is one of the UK’s foremost public affairs practitioners and explains: "Hitting the heights of winning the US Open at such a young age has presented Raducanu with the opportunity of building her brand the way she wants it to be. For many more established players, there isn’t the level of interest or relative blank sheet that Raducanu has. That lack of history is a real benefit to her.”
And does he foresee any difficulties there? “Well, with that, of course, comes the pressure not only to win more tournaments but also to live and breathe her newly established personal brand. Many audiences will be interested in any deviations from the brand and use that against her or to generate click-bait adverse headlines. She will need to get the right people around her in both a sporting and communications setting so that her brand is built and protected for the long-term.”
And, of course, there is a substantial team of people behind her from her financially savvy parents; her agents Helliar and Max Eisenbud; her physiotherapist Will Herbert; her nutritionist Kate Shilland; and hitting
partner Matthew James. Professional sport as it grows and expands produces an array of well-paid careers undreamed of even 20 years ago.
Despite her entourage, tennis is often considered a highly individual sport – and it is. There is a loneliness about the match situation which can only be partially offset by the creation of a large support team. This is tennis’ particular fascination: it is a game of fine margins, where the scoring system makes it possible to win more points than your opponent but still be defeated because you didn’t win the crucial points at a crucial time. There isn’t another sport like this which so advertises the need to compete well in pressure situations.
In others words, it’s an abnormally stressful career choice. It might also be said that Raducanu’s story opens up onto the whole question of positivity in sport and in our lives generally. Her uniqueness is so far encapsulated by that incredible run at Flushing Meadows in 2021. If she never wins another major championship it will always be a remarkable story: it can never be taken away from her.
So how did she manage to hit those heights, and what might we ourselves learn in our careers from her? After all, work must be said to have its element
of performance, analogous to sporting performance.
To learn more, I talk to leading psychologist Dr. Paul Hokemeyer, who tells me: “Succeeding in both competitive sports and a competitive life in times of elevated stress requires us to elevate above our emotional reactivity and utilize our prefrontal cortex. This is the part of our brain that enables us to control our emotional responses and channel them into concrete and focused action.”
What’s interesting is that Hokemeyer doesn’t just find this in his sporting patients; it’s replicated in other sectors. “Many of my highly successful patients frequently describe this ability as 'supernatural' or as an 'out of body' experience,” he continues. “They go on to explain how in this state, they are removed from what they see as their human form and come to occupy a highly mechanical state that has no feelings. In this highly automized state of being, their emotional reactivity is suspended, their physical sensations fall away and their mind becomes myopically focused on the immediate task at hand – be that task winning a tennis match or closing a real estate deal.”
When it comes to Raducanu, she has been able to reach heights few other players have ever managed, but then she has found it hard to rediscover that form. Likewise, in our own lives we have good days and bad days, a period of peak performance, and moments when we end up wondering why we couldn’t replicate our best.
So what is happening to us in our careers when things aren’t working out? Hokemeyer tells me: “When it comes to sport, not everyone is biologically wired to withstand this intense level of being. Some people, in spite of their
talents and discipline, are genetically wired and environmentally tuned to reject the pressures and stresses of elite competition. Their central nervous systems short circuit the elevated cognition needed to stay focused. For these people, failing or surrendering becomes a primitive and highly successful strategy to put them back into a place of physical and emotional safety.’
So on some level then, it’s almost as if we want to lose. Eaton, who now coaches at Wake Forest, one of the top tennis universities in the US, agrees with Hokemeyer, and tells me that the very top players – Federer, Nadal, Djokovic and Murray – all of whom he has got to know well on tour and as a coach, very rarely let this mindset enter into the picture. “These very top guys have five or six people to take care of them, which definitely helps. But take Andy Murray, who I got to know well –his attention to detail is amazing. Here at Wake I’m coaching 22-year-olds and some are very good and some will turn pro. But what’s hard is to get across how far along the best guys are in terms of desire.”
Eaton gives me an example: “Look at the Andy Murray Netflix documentary Resurfacing. It just punches you in the face how desperate he is to be great. You watch the practice drill, the warm-ups, what he’s doing between shots: everything is immaculate. It stinks of desperation to be great. Very successful people are operating on that different level of detail.”
And yet for everybody – even for Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, and certainly for Raducanu – things go wrong. “For my players here,” continues Eaton, “I see the frustration when it comes to dealing with things going wrong. It’s not this generation’s strength: they’re very used to getting
what they want and so when things don’t go well they don’t always respond well.”
For Eaton, if you look at the stories of the great players, they always met a moment similar to the one Raducanu finds herself in 2023. “It seems like everybody has to conquer a personal flaw to get to be great. Federer for a while was too angry, or maybe too relaxed in his personality. He conquered that. Nadal used to seem scared or too timid; he certainly conquered that. There was a point when Djokovic would complain too much about injury. And in that documentary, you can see Andy Murray sitting in a hotel room in Australia having just lost to Djokovic
in the semi-final, and saying, ‘This is not acceptable. What can I do to change this?’”
And Raducanu? “It will be interesting to see how she deals with it. She’s young and she’s got expectation and there’s this way out smiling at her – her marketing ability. It will be interesting to see how desperate she is to be great.”
Careers wise, there are sports psychologists out there to help the likes of Raducanu, and a good coach will also be a mentor: here, then, we meet another analogy between the world of work and sport.
One of the leading sports psychologists is Matt Shaw who works for Inner Drive. So what work does he do and
how did he discover it was what he wanted to do?
“In my role, I work in two main contexts, in sport and in education. In sport I tend to work in two key areas: all-round development and learning and performance under pressure. In the all-round development element, I help athletes to learn better, improve and to grow as a person, whereas in the performance under pressure element, I help athletes to thrive under pressure when it matters most. Both my sport and education roles require me to deliver 1:1 support to athletes and speak in front of large groups of pupils, staff, and parents.”
So how does he teach players to optimise performance? “Our athletes work with us to explore what being mentally strong really looks like in the build-up to a big event. For example, working on things like how to deal with mistakes, asking for help, and how to appraise stressful and important events. This enables athletes to better focus on what’s important in the moment and to think in helpful ways in order to perform at their best.”
Shaw wisely refrains from commenting on Raducanu’s precise plight as he says it’s not helpful to comment from the outside. I ask him instead what it is about those like Tiger Woods who do come back from injury, and what we might ourselves –and perhaps Raducanu herself - might learn from them? “What we tend to see with experts like Tiger Woods and other successful athletes is not only a physical muscle-type memory whereby they are able to complete successful movements over and over again, but also a resilience that is built by a long and often challenging path to success. For many athletes we often only hear about their success, which of course teaches them how to win and
the emotional control associated with that. However, it’s often the tough moments that the best grow in and learn from to get better next time.”
By that measure, Raducanu is entering the most important years of her life now; what she chooses to do in these years will define her as an athlete and as a person. It will be difficult, as all careers are, but that difficulty is also a gigantic opportunity for a new level of greatness.
There are many promising signs that Raducanu is grounded and self-aware. She knows she is in that rare category who have not only discovered what they might be capable of, but explored it, conquered their demons, and achieved a career as a result.
But this isn’t the case for everyone; many have an inkling that tennis might be for them, but they have no serious chance of knowing for sure one way or the other. For instance, she has shown herself admirably concerned over the question of social mobility and tennis.
The great issue in relation to tennis is that many young people from disadvantaged backgrounds don’t have the opportunity even to discover if a tennis career is possible for them: our country is full of a latent athleticism which, lacking an easy outlet, fizzles out in far too many cases.
Fortunately, there are many people, and some of them highly influential, who are making it their life’s mission to fix the problem.
One is Nino Severino, a former tennis coach, and the widower of former British No. 1 Elena Baltacha. To say Baltacha, who died of liver cancer at the horribly early age of 30
in 2014, is much missed is to riot in understatement: when she died, she left a terrible gap in many lives.
But this might be to state the case too despairingly: because of what Baltacha committed to during her life, she continues to impact lives positively: her generosity of spirit is her legacy, and, as you talk to Nino, an astonishingly active legacy at that. Raducanu donated two tennis rackets to the charity auction organised by charity Love All, with proceeds going to several charities including the Elena Baltacha Foundation.
I ask Nino how the foundation started: “It was when we were travelling. What Bally noticed whenever we were travelling was that tennis is typically for more affluent children and the kids in the deprived areas weren’t getting a chance because tennis didn’t go to the schools. She said she wanted to do something about it.”
Many would make the observation and then do little about it. Bally, by all accounts, wasn’t like that. “In between travelling the world on tour, we started to organise school trips with a view to introducing tennis to deprived areas.”
Soon others became involved: “Judy Murray loved the idea. That was back in 2010 and she loved Bally like a daughter. She came on as patron and then she was followed by Martina Navratilova. All we’ve tried to do is get as many girls as possible into tennis.”
Raducanu has sometimes been deemed a poster girl for social mobility in tennis. After the famous 2021 US Open victory, the Olympian javelinthrower Tessa Sanderson wrote in The Sun: “For years, tennis in Britain was generally regarded as a white and middle class sport but thanks to Emma Raducanu now it is not.”
Severino agrees: “Emma is as close to a tennis miracle as you can get. Qualifying was tricky enough so to go and do that. It’s funny though, in all my years of coaching, you come to realise there’s no accident. It’s their pathway to greatness, and it’s their opportunity to continue their rise.”
What Severino is now focused on is giving that same opportunity to as many people as possible. The Elena Baltacha Foundation is focused on young people who may well get on the track to a professional career. Judy Murray (“she really gets her hands dirty”, Severino says) is focused on helping kids near Dunblane. Tim Henman is active in the area too with the Tim Henman Foundation.
Another is Patrick Hollwey, who has founded TennisForFree with comedian Tony Hawks, a charity which aims to regenerate park space with a view to giving young people the opportunity to take part in tennis.
Hollwey tells me about the genesis of
TennisForFree: “It’s a bizarre story as to how it all started. My wife was always a tennis player and when I took it up I must admit that I found the cliquiness in clubs quite off-putting. It’s not the most welcoming of environments if you’re not a good player.”
This caught his attention and as his interest in the sport grew, something began to bug him: “I began to notice that the public courts were never used and were padlocked. You had to go down to a hut, pay to get on the court and it made the game a bit unwelcoming.”
And how did he pair up Hawks? “A few months later I was on a plane coming back from India with Tony, and we had both had pretty rough trips. We sat at the bar and put the world to rights; among the topics discussed was the elitism of middle class sport. A few days after the flight, Tony called me up and asked if I was serious about making a difference. I said I was. So we went down to the local tennis court and chained Tony to it. Then we sent a
cutting email to the Minister for Sport, the Head of the LTA and other tennis luminaries and we essentially said: “This is a public sporting facilitiy that is locked and excluding people. You don’t do this with basketball, or skateboard parks. Why do you do it with a tennis court?”
Fast forward to 2023 and many people have listened. For one thing, Hollwey and Hawks have an impressive list of celebrity endorsers including Pat Cash, Hugh Grant and Stephen Fry. But the government and the LTA are listening now too.
Hollwey is among those who applauds the government and the LTA in committing to delivering this changed landscape: “We talk with the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. DCMS is currently investing £22 million into public tennis courts, and the LTA top that up with £8 million, and £3o million over the next few years. That’s a lot of money going into the question of rectifying the dilapidation of public facilities.”
But there’s still a long way to go, he adds: “What we need to do is to encourage people to get out there. People need to know what is available and what the benefits are, and I don’t think enough people know of the opportunities.”
This is where Raducanu is of such importance. Hollwey says: “I can’t think of any comparisons to Emma’s story – not even Leicester City winning the premier league. To go through qualifying like that – it’s Roy of the Rovers stuff. She’s inspirational to young girls and teenage girls are the hardest to get into the sport – and then to retain.”
Tennis then keeps intersecting with other things: with politics, with business, and with our essential ideas about justice. Perhaps this is a function of its popularity; but of course not all young people who take tennis seriously can have a lengthy career in it.
We might forget what a high level the top players are at: it is quite likely that even if you are stratospherically good at tennis, you’ll eventually meet a ceiling where you can’t get any better.
But if that’s the case then there are other options; excellence at tennis has much to
teach us about how to attain excellence in the wider world. Hokemeyer tells me: “I rarely find a highly successful person who has not engaged in some sort of sport in the past or is currently engaged in a sport of some kind in the present. For this reason, I advise the parents I work with to find some sort of sport, activity or hobby their children can engage in.” So what are the precise benefits? “Sport enables our children to cultivate discipline and develop a sense of agency over their lives,” Hokemeyer explains. “In clinical speak, through sport we develop what's known as an internal locus control. We see the connection between effort and outcome and we develop healthy bodies and minds that can manage stress and conflict in productive ways. It's also important to note that people can start playing a sport, be it tennis or bridge, at any stage of their life.”
Severino sees other synergies between sport and business. “You’ve got to have a Plan B,” he explains and points to his work at SportsSkills4Business which aims to help young people beyond their sporting journey. “We want our SS4B Student Athletes to know that their time in sport is not only about learning how to become technically and tactically skilful at their sport, but also to be connected with the virtues and skills that being a competitive athlete will provide them with,” the website’s mission states.
Hollwey is also bullish about the opportunities available in sport: “There are so many opportunities for people to work in sport. A lot of coaches left the sport during the pandemic; they had no work and took up other temporary careers which have turned into full time careers. So there is a shortage of supply of coaches and particularly new young coaches with a different mentality and a different outlook.”
Eaton also points out the win-win nature of trying to make it at tennis, or other sports. “Some of my students go on to be pro, and go onto the tour; some do well and others struggle,” he says. “We have the same conversation, and I always say: 'Go on tour and play for a year.' Don’t go straight into a job. For employers, it’s quite appealing to have somebody who’s been a sportsman, and who has some real experience of having travelled the world. Sport gets you far: it shows that you’re decent under pressure, able to deal with things when they go wrong. I say to my guys: 'Do you really want to be the same person as 700 other applicants?' You can say: 'I’ve done everything they’ve done, but I’ve spent the last two years in 25 different countries, basically running my own business.'
And Raducanu? The curious thing about these tennis players is that they exercise a certain fascination because of fame, talent, and wealth. But something about the way they acquired all this is so extraordinarily simple – a case of dedication and talent at a single sport – that you find yourself looking for the next thing about them. But often there really isn’t much more to it than this and that is what feeds the media frenzy: an appetite has been created for something which isn’t there.
With Raducanu, the more I look into her I feel differently: she has hit the heights but shown rare dignity when difficulty has arisen. She’s been wise and thoughtful in her choice of sponsors, and articulate about what she wants to achieve, and philosophical when she’s had setbacks. Our world is full of sporting phenomena. Raducanu, in her talent, her single-mindedness, and in her fallibility is something rarer. The only word for it is inspiration – and you don’t need to be a budding tennis player to feel it.
“DON’T GO STRAIGHT INTO A JOB. FOR EMPLOYERS, IT’S QUITE APPEALING TO HAVE SOMEBODY WHO’S BEEN A SPORTSMAN, AND WHO HAS SOME REAL EXPERIENCE OF HAVING TRAVELLED THE WORLD.”
Once a literary spat caught my eye. It was between the novelist Julian Barnes and the polemicist Christopher Hitchens, towards the end of the latter’s life. This was initially conducted in the pages of The New Statesman, when Barnes gave the following précis of his former colleague: “He was the most brilliant talker I’ve met and the best argufier. At the Statesman he was largely gay, idly anti-Semitic and very left-wing. Then ripple-dissolve to someone who was twice married and had discovered himself to be Jewish and become a neocon. An odd progress, though he didn’t do the traditional shuffle to the right; he kept one left, liberal leg planted where it always had been and made a huge, corkscrewing leap with his right leg. I enjoyed his company but never entirely trusted him.”
Leaving aside the absurdity of the word ‘argufier’, the phrase which was discussed at the time was the ‘traditional shuffle to the right’. The description generated column inches as part of the debate over the rights and wrongs of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. But it remains interesting in that it seems to assume that right-wing attitudes are in some way incorrect and reprehensible – or, as Hitchens would later put it, ‘allied to senility’.
In his defence in his memoir Hitch-22, Hitchens went on to argue that he had discarded utopianism in favour of complexity. “It is not that there are no certainties, it is that there is an absolute certainty that there are no certainties,” he would write in his memoir.
And there the matter lay. But sometimes the phrase has returned to me – ‘the traditional shuffle to the right’. When it does, it’s never in relation to the protagonists, but in relation to the phrase itself. In short, is it true that people move to the right with age? And if so, why? And what does this all mean for our careers and for our education?
Recent data suggests that Barnes is broadly correct that people become more right wing with age. The best
“IT IS NOT THAT THERE ARE NO CERTAINTIES, IT IS THAT THERE IS AN ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY THAT THERE ARE NO CERTAINTIES.”
recent indicators are the 2019 General Election, which Boris Johnson’s Tories won with an 80-seat majority.
When one considers that Brexit, Covid-19, Russia-Ukraine and our present inflationary woes have happened since, it must be admitted that the following statistics emanate out of an ancient period, several historical epochs ago. Reality may have shifted in any number of directions since, and it’s likely that the 2019 data depicts a nation more friendly to the idea of voting Conservative than shall be the case at the next election.
Furthermore, it must be admitted that the election ended in an unusually personal mandate for the outsized figure of Boris Johnson, who though technically a Conservative, isn’t easily pigeon-holed on the political spectrum: his commitment to Net Zero and his acceptance of lockdown, however reluctant, are, for instance, arguably leftwing positions.
Even so it’s the best data we have. And what does it say? It backs up Barnes. Between the ages of 24-29, 23 per cent of voters voted Conservative, with Labour at 54 per cent. By the time voters have reached the age of 30, they’re slightly more likely to vote Conservative,
and slightly less likely to opt for Labour, though a small percentage seek refuge in the middle position of the Liberal Democrats: the figures are 30 per cent Conservative, 46 per cent Labour. Fascinatingly, the trend continues all the way through life, with on average a nine per cent rise in Conservative voters for every ten years of additional experience. By the time you reach the age bracket 60-69, the figures have flipped: 57 per cent vote Conservative, and a mere 22 per cent Labour. The trend continues into our seventies: there, you find 67 per cent vote Conservative, and a mere 14 per cent Labour. If you ever find yourself talking to a grey-haired stranger, there’s a two in three chance you’re talking to a Conservative.
So there seems little doubt that something is going on here. But what?
In the first place, there’s tax. Human nature is more often acquisitive than altruistic and the rarity of saintliness likely means that most people vote in their own self-interest. Quite simply, over time people’s own self-interest aligns more with the tax policies likely to be espoused by the Conservative Party.
In Roger’s Version (1986), John Updike describes a Democrat voter as ‘a fighting liberal, fighting to have her money taken from her.’ Most people can see the humour in this position – and the light touch of the novelist who pointed it out. Of course, there have sometimes been attempts to extrapolate a broader lesson. It was Edmund Burke, that great orator and parliamentarian, who said: “Anyone who is not a republican at 20 casts doubt on the generosity of his soul; but he who, after 30 years, perseveres, casts doubt on the soundness of his mind.” Over the course of time, variants of this have been attributed to
everyone from Georges Clemenceau, George Bernard Shaw, Victor Hugo and Winston Churchill. In other words, it feels sufficiently true and wise to have been ascribed to numerous people. For the Conservative MP Sir Bill Wiggin, tax is the core driver of the Conservative vote. As we get older, if our trajectory has been reasonably normal, then the chances are we’ll be earning more – and, of course, being taxed more as a result.
“Definitely when I was a young man, the world an ideological place,” Wiggin recalls, “and I remember when I got my first payslip. You look at your payslip and see how much tax you pay and ask yourself the question: “That seems a lot of money, is it good value?” And some people will always say ‘yes’ and some
“OVER TIME PEOPLE’S OWN SELFINTEREST ALIGNS MORE WITH THE TAX POLICIES LIKELY TO BE ESPOUSED BY THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY.”Christopher Hitchens (Wikipedia.org)
people will say ‘no’. Most people will say: ‘Actually, I think I could get more for that money if things were done slightly differently’.”
But Wiggin has another point to make: “That’s not why people vote labour. They vote for it and go, ‘That’s a lot of money. If rich people paid more I wouldn’t have to pay so much.’ That’s where the shuffle to the right begins.”
So Wiggin is sympathetic to the current government – as one would expect – for precisely these reasons: “I want a small tax, low interference government.,” he tells me. “Rishi Sunak’s pledge to reduce the income tax from 20 to 19 per cent for two years’ time was a really good thing. Although it would be better if that were happening today, the direction of travel is the right way. Boris Johnson lifted the restrictions on Covid early against some of the medical advice because he wanted us to be free to make some of our own choices and live our own lives. These are very powerful messages for me. So whether you run, hop, skip, shuffle, crawl or are dragged screaming to the right you will do that as your age suggests that that is more important. It’s not more important because you’re older, it’s because you’ve witnessed the alternative.”
For Wiggin then the question of how much tax you pay segues into broader questions of the size of the state and its
alleged tendency to meddle in personal freedom. “It’s much harder if you’re British to imagine a superstate. When I stood in Burnley in 1997, people had just stopped having outside loos – a privy in the bottom of the garden. And I thought to myself, ‘Why isn’t the council – which was eternally Labour – interested in improving their housing?’ The answer was because once you’ve got people who vote Labour, if you make their situation better they’re less likely to vote Labour, but if you keep them suppressed they’re more likely to stay with you. That authoritarianism keeps them where they are or presses down on them.”
For Wiggin, there is therefore an essential justice to the government’s levelling up agenda. “Levelling is fair but squashing people down is what we’re against. Lifting the people who have the least and the most vulnerable up is the opposite to what you see under a Labour government when everybody is pressed down, especially the highest earners. If you squash the people at the top, then everybody’s incentive to succeed is suppressed.”
This leads Wiggin to an interesting dissertation on education. “The grammar school system did that educationally. It took the cleverest kids and pushed them up through the grammar schools but it didn’t deal satisfactorily with those who weren’t able to pass their 11-plus. The biggest challenge for Britain in the 21st century is to have an education system
which is ready to supply a workforce which is able to take on and beat the rest of the world. However old you are, you want your mates and their children to be world-beaters and we can’t afford to get education wrong. Your pension is going to be paid for by the people reading this magazine. It’s across the board and in everyone’s interest to get the best out of every individual.”
So what does Wiggin think? “Young people should be in school for longer. I look at schools in my constituency: the teachers are good, the facilities are good but if you’re not there, you’re not going to get the most out of it. So why do they go home at 3.30? Of course in the younger age groups they might not be able to last. If you look at the South Koreans, they have after school until 10 o’clock at night, because they need to beat the Chinese and the Taiwanese. The world is a savage place and if you don’t believe it, look at people all over the world who live on a dollar a day. You don’t want to be one of those.”
Not everyone will agree with all this, but it is a comprehensive description of the Conservative mindset. Wiggin’s descriptions might have had their origin in tax policy, but what is noteworthy is how rapidly their logic travels outwards to other things: education, the health service, work.
Conservativism feels unified in this sense, and this is perhaps something of what people feel they are experiencing when they identify with the Tories. It was summed up best in recent times by Margaret Thatcher with her devastatingly simple maxim: ‘The facts of life are Conservative’. But its pedigree is deeper and one might trace a line back through Edmund Burke and Thomas Hobbes to find its origins in Enlightenment thought.
“IF
THE PEOPLE AT THE TOP, THEN EVERYBODY’S INCENTIVE TO SUCCEED IS SUPPRESSED.”
Hobbes, like Wiggin, viewed the world as a savage place and life, for him, was, in his famous phrase: “nasty, brutish, and short”. This notion of a world full of dangers and disasters, where human beings are hemmed in on all sides, led Hobbes into the idea that people would readily accept a king or a parliament as a remedy to their predicament.
This turns out not to be a simple idea, since the blind handing over of one’s interests to the state doesn’t always pan out very well – as numerous miserable peoples in the 21st century, from Stalin’s Russia to today’s China, would attest. This is where the formidable figure of John Locke comes along, stating that while a government is necessary it nevertheless depends on the ‘consent of the governed’. These words were of huge importance not just to the story of British democracy, but to the Founding Fathers of the United States of America – and to Thomas Jefferson in particular, so much so that they found their way into the Constitution.
It is Lockean democracy which informs much of what Wiggin is saying, and much of what Thatcher did. It goes without saying that it isn’t accepted by everyone; if it were the UK would be a one-party state. But it is certainly the case that the world presents itself to us over time, and that as we go on in our lives we are more likely to increase our experience of the state: we have children who then attend school and can assess the suitability of the state education system; health scares crop up which enable us to take the measure of the NHS; and over time, the odds go up that we shall become a victim of crime, and wonder about the efficacy of the police. None of these experiences of the state is likely to be perfect, and so they will at the very least generate a questioning mindset about the efficacy of the tax system.
Put simply, the state is a gigantic fact of our lives, and life is imperfect, and so its imperfections are likely to stack up over time. It is possible – even likely – that we can yoke the two together and say: “Things are imperfect because of the state.” For some this will always seem a false joining up – or worse, a lofty denigration, for instance, of all the good work state-paid nurses or teachers do. For others, Conservatism is more measured and might amount to
something more like this: “Yes, I know the world isn’t perfect and that a smaller role for the state won’t make all my problems vanish all at once. But it will give me greater agency in my life if I bump up against the state less regularly. And I am at my best when the prime mover of my activities comes from free inspiration – from a felt liberty within.”
However, the issues Wiggin describes all fall broadly within the question of core policy and do not touch particularly on the question of social conservatism. A non-exhaustive list of issues which would fall under this umbrella would be: immigration, gay marriage, the role of women in the workplace, and climate change.
Now, if one were to imagine what a clicheic ‘shuffle to the right’ might entail
“PUT SIMPLY, THE STATE IS A GIGANTIC FACT OF OUR LIVES, AND LIFE IS IMPERFECT, AND SO ITS IMPERFECTIONS ARE LIKELY TO STACK UP OVER TIME.”
it would be something like this. That as you age, not only do you feel a mounting sense of resentment about the reach of HMRC into your own wallet, and the incompetence of government, but you also begin to lament societal shift of every kind. You yearn for the past and yearning for the past means the restoration of a predominantly white, Christian world where women look after the children and don’t get any crazy ideas about becoming CEOs of FTSE 100 companies. To boot, you’re shortly to leave the world and so relatively cavalier about the seas rising in 20 years’ time since you won’t be around to drown in them.
Barnes’ original ‘shuffle to the right’ may not have meant precisely this as regards Hitchens, but I think something like this impatience with a perceived stupidity is housed somewhere within it, and it is present within, for instance, the discourse in the pages of The Guardian, and in parts of the BBC. It doesn’t need more than the implications of its tone to establish almost as fact an
insurmountable gap between generations where the old are stupid and prejudiced and the young wise and virtuous.
If taken to its logical conclusion the country, and every organisation within it, is undergoing a sort of surreptitious civil war between elderly idiots and young sages. This viewpoint seems inwoven especially in the climate and trans debates: the protestors who vandalise a Van Gogh, for instance, or stop traffic in rush hour in a major city, have assumed a certain behavioural licence which they feel has been bestowed on them by precisely this generational stupidity which is so rampant and obscene that it must be aggressively countermanded. The trouble with all this is that human beings turn out to be more complex than this, and that the generational divide isn’t so distinctive as one had thought on many of these questions, though it is still there to some extent.
Research published by NatCen’s British Social Attitudes at The Policy Institute on the intergenerational divide looks at
many of these questions and produces data to capture the mood of the nation. In relation to immigration, its conclusions are stark and don’t make for particularly good reading. Here is the report’s conclusion, as indicated by the graph in figure A:
"Attitudes to immigration became one of the most divisive social issues in the UK in the last decade or so – and that has a strong generational dimension. In the late 1990s, hardly anyone in any generation considered immigration one of the most important issues facing the country, but over the following 15 years, its prominence increased, and generational gaps exploded, so that the oldest cohort was twice as worried as the youngest in the years before the EU referendum."
This would seem to back up the Barnesian idea of a ‘shuffle to the right’. It can seem as though a sort of xenophobia – ‘allied to senility’ as Hitchens put it – had somehow become rife among the elderly on this important
% of UK adults saying that immigration is among the most important issues facing the country
point. This notion has generally had its Exhibit A in the career of Nigel Farage, and, for instance, his referendum poster of refugees from Syria and other places, which seemed to portray Islamic people other, and to be feared on account of their external appearance.
However, some reservations about this narrative need to be aired. In the first place, we don’t know why and on what basis this generational shift in opinion has been brought about. Douglas Murray is one of those alarmed by the way in which the rising movement of peoples during the Blair years isn’t something we’re allowed to discuss. He once told me: ““It’s easy to be ‘for’ more empathy – to stand up and say, like Jess Phillips, ‘If everyone was more like me, everything would be better.’ But decisions require something hard. We’re very good at talking the language of inclusion, but the language of inclusion necessitates the language of exclusion. Try doing exclusion language in public. You can’t.”
In other words, it might not be that elderly people are opposed to immigration in some broad sense, but that they’re particularly aware of what has been going on in recent history –the opening up of borders during the Blair years – versus what had happened
before. This is a characteristic of age: the ability to compare the present time with what had gone before. It must also be said that during the first EU referendum, it was the left of the Labour Party, as represented by Tony Benn, which took the Leave position which was then, as now, to some extent synonymous with doubts about immigration. But for him the EU was a rich man’s club, where the free movement of workers was in fact a freedom for capital to exploit labour. All this is to say that immigration isn’t a topic easily categorised as being of the left or the right. The NatCen data needs to be treated carefully.
Interestingly, this generational gap turns out to be less marked when it comes to other matters, most notably the environment.
As the NatCen survey points out, nearly half of the pre-war generation state that they are now concerned about the environment. It’s a reminder that the Clean Air Act in America was passed by the Republican Nixon administration and that the environment has traditionally been a cross-party issue. The report states:
"The gap between generations on environmental concerns is often grossly overstated. It’s true that younger generations in the US are more likely to say that climate change is very or extremely dangerous, but there is not a great deal of difference, and older groups are far from unconcerned."
So the age disparity exists in relation to certain issues more than others. This in itself opens up onto other possible theories about the age divide – and these in turn might open up onto new solutions for the workplace and for education.
I talk to Mark Morrin, a policy and research strategist at ResPublica who first digs down into the 2019 General Election. “2019 was a different sort of election,” he explains. “Brexit had been framed in such a way that those who voted Brexit were more right wing than left, and more likely to be old than young. It doesn’t really do justice to the argument.”
Then Morrin gives it to me straight: “The younger generation – the millennials – are much more socially conservative as a generation and Rishi Sunak is on the cusp of that. There’s a book called The Fourth Turning is Here by William Strauss and Neil Howe which I like a lot, even though the theory in the book can’t be empirically proven. The book states that there are four different generational archetypes
“THE YOUNGER GENERATION –THE MILLENNIALS – ARE MUCH MORE SOCIALLY CONSERVATIVE.”
and each lasts for around twenty years – and between them they constitute a cycle lasting between 80 and 90 years.”
So what point are we at in that cycle?
“What happens is we go through a high point, to a rejection of the high point, to an unravelling and then onto a crisis – and we’re at a point of crisis at the minute.” That sounds like bad news. Morrin has this sobering thought. “The last time we were in crisis was in the 1930s and according to The Fourth Turning is Here, it was that GI generation who were the heroes who resolved things last time.”
This strikes me a far more complex theory of generational mentality than the typical ‘shuffle to the right’ dichotomy. Morrin continues: “The equivalent of the GI generation today would be the millennials, who have similar traits to the GI generation: they’re less likely to commit crime, less likely to take drugs and more inherently optimistic in their character even though they also can’t get on the property ladder.”
Morrin explains how this affects their approach to policy. “When you poll, they’re happy to pay tax on the Scandinavian model if they’re getting decent services as a consequence. I don’t see a huge popular movement on the streets wanting to lower tax.”
So does Morrin think people make the traditional ‘shuffle to the right’ at all? His response is nuanced. “There are people who start on the left and then end up Conservative but I don’t know how archetypal those people are. Philip Blond, the CEO of ResPublica, tends to argue that the Conservatives on the right are economically Labour, and that Labour on the left are socially liberal. You need a quadrant to explain it really.”
This means that those politicians who make it to the top of British politics are all
to some extent hybrids on the ‘right-left’ spectrum. Morrin gives an example: “Look at Boris. He’s economically and socially liberal. He has no regard for family, and he wants to be free Europe. Uniquely, he tried to play at being a One Nation Conservative while really being a liberal.” Which would mean that that 2019 Boris mandate doesn’t describe a straightforward move to the right at all.
Morrin agrees, and then gives another example: “Blair was economically liberal and socially liberal. There was perhaps a communitarian nod at the beginning, and his Catholicism of course. But it all just goes to show that the main parties are a hodgepodge and can’t really represent values. Within Labour you’ve got two parties: the far left and the moderate right, and within the Conservatives you’ve got the moderate wing and the far right – so that’s at least four parties between them.”
So what bearing does this all have on education? Morrin says: “There’s this pervasive idea when you look at the university attendance figures that the younger people who didn’t vote are more educated than the older people who did. We’re not yet at that 50%
point in relation to higher education. But soon we’ll get to a stage where 50% of those people aged 30 will have had some experience or exposure to higher education.”
Morrin pauses then says: “You could argue that if that continues, then the population becomes more educated they’re likely to become more left.” And then the shuffle to the right would become a thing of the past.
Such a development would go hand in hand with an economy which had become larger and more statedependent. So what can the workplace do now to adapt? Finito mentor Sophia Petrides writes overleaf about the importance of ‘mentoring up’ as a way of making sure that young people are taken properly into account in the workplace setting.
So the question of our broad political leanings turns out to be both more and less important than we might have expected. We bring these tropes with us into the settings which define us: into work and into our education. But they’re not fit for purpose, and the moment we start looking past them, a more meaningful dialogue becomes possible – and we have the chance to grow together in a way in which our previous simplistic notions about one another had tended to prohibit.
“YOU COULD ARGUE THAT IF THAT CONTINUES, THEN THE POPULATION BECOMES MORE EDUCATED THEY’RE LIKELY TO BECOME MORE LEFT.”
We live in an age of rapid change. It feels like many of the workplace conventions we accepted without question for the last 30 years are turning on their heads on a daily basis. I am not talking about digitalisation; I am talking about the human experience of working. Today, we are encouraged to bring our whole selves to work, to express our sense of personal identity without fear of discrimination or disapproval. We expect equality and inclusivity, and we expect our mental health to be prioritised as much as our physical health and safety. This is a good thing.
However, there is still a long way to go in so many areas. The human experience of the workplace is changing, but are workplace relationships changing with them? After all, don’t we still have seniority, hierarchy and decision-making structures that look rather oldfashioned?
Let’s use mentoring as an example of traditional workplace relationships. What image does mentoring create in your imagination? When you visualise the mentor-mentee relationship, which one is older? Conventional wisdom – and every Kung Fu movie, Star Wars style epic and Hollywood action
blockbuster – says the mentor is older. There is an unconscious bias at work here, the age-old association between older and wiser. But wait, what exactly does wiser refer to? Knowledge and experience. Those two attributes don’t necessarily track with age. In fact, in the modern workplace – especially given its reliance on new technologies – knowledge and experience are rapidly transferring to a much younger demographic. Could we consider mentoring from a different perspective? Yes. Who is better suited to mentor on using social media channels and selfie videos to communicate in the workplace?
Well, clearly the person with the most experience would be who? A 50-year-old executive in a C-suite role or a new graduate with a thriving Instagram account? Emerging professionals – digital natives – have grown up in a world of mobile digital communications and social media. Obviously, the new graduate is the best mentor candidate in this context. That concept of getting new hires to mentor the C-suite is a truly progressive approach to improving company performance on a range of different levels. It sets-up a skills transfer that is two-way, because by teaching the older members of the
company to engage with new ideas, the emerging talent gets to work with experienced senior leaders, and their knowledge will rub off in both directions.
larger organisation – to look over the cubicle wall towards the top. It also improves talent retention, which saves bottom-line HR dollars, and increases the knowledge within the workforce, which in turn improves results and productivity. It also promotes inclusion. It’s a win-win.
This brings us to the elephant in the room. If you believe the hype, the leadership of every organisation has a door that is always open and an open mind for any and all ideas. In reality, there’s a stubbornness about age and seniority. The stubbornness comes from workplace status, and status is the enemy of inclusion and effective change. Is that cynical? Well, how many new recruits are mentoring their C-suites? How many graduates are helping their CEOs to create podcasts or advising their CTOs on company smartphone contracts? Not nearly enough.
What is really at stake for organisations when tackling this kind of change is bottom line, buck-stopshere, profit and loss common sense. Mentoring-up (or reverse mentoring) is a really good example of innovation within the field of employee experience. It increases engagement for emerging professionals with the
About 12 years ago I remember talking to an HR professional at a major New York bank, who had problems with hiring emerging professionals. The best candidates would turn down job offers once they discovered company policy was to use an office Blackberry with official work apps, and couldn’t use their personal smartphones, personal emails or personal chat apps to communicate with colleagues. My HR friend couldn’t work out what the problem was, saying “it’s just a phone”. I explained that personal smartphones weren’t just phones, they represented a new way of living and working – and new expectations of the workplace. That wasn’t something the leadership of that organisation could learn from their own experiences, they needed to listen to emerging professionals in a way they hadn’t before.
hit a snag. Emerging professionals didn’t like the term ninja. Ninjas are generally associated with Japan and traditionally male, it’s a cliché, loaded with rather old-fashioned notions of technology and loaded with unconscious gender and racial issues. The people who were named ninjas wanted to be referred to as skilled professionals – something validating, not something out of a Kung-Fu movie.
Similarly, one of my coaching clients told me about a project at a major telecoms company, where each senior leader was assigned a “digital ninja” –a young person who helped a C-suite mentee to make the most of their new internal Yammer platform. This is a step in the right direction, but it
We live in times where terms like ‘woke’ and ‘culture wars’ fill our news feeds, and there seems to be increasing polarisation in politics and society. This is ultimately bad for business because workplaces rely on social co-operation and teamwork. Diversity and inclusion aren’t just about personal identity, they refer to smarter working practices and decision making. The workplaces that embrace the power of inclusion across traditional hierarchies will ultimately win out, with reduced recruitment costs, lower staff turnover and better productivity. It’s about recognising how concepts like inclusion relate to improving business performance. Mentoring-up is just one example of a practical approach to turning the good intentions of diversity and inclusion into better, hands-on company processes. As for the next great idea, perhaps the emerging talent should be suggesting that to their C-suites, rather than waiting for the older generation to take the initiative? Now that is a very exciting idea.
Sophia Petrides is a Finito mentor
LIKE ‘WOKE’ AND ‘CULTURE WARS’ FILL OUR NEWS FEEDS.”
COMPANY POLICY WAS TO USE AN OFFICE BLACKBERRY WITH OFFICIAL WORK APPS.”
Either way, I’m delighted because he remembers me and every guest feels special when that happens. The chef patron wows me by knowing who I am before I have even uttered the words wine o’clock, highlighting what a tightknit industry this is.
Remembering a guest goes further than just knowing his or her name. It involves knowing his or her favourite wines, any allergies and dietary requirements – as well as those of his or her guests – and knowing what occasion, if any, is being celebrated.
It’s a cold rainy day in November in London and I keep asking myself how I managed to forget my brolly today: it’s London after all. In my own defense, the forecast said cloudy with only a 20 per cent chance of rain. The winter has just begun to make an entrance and I know exactly what will cheer me up: a lovely glass of Bordeaux.
I enter a London restaurant for the second time in my life and the receptionist greets me with a warm smile and remembers my name, adding that she will gift me an umbrella when I leave. I am already smiling before being shown to my table. Equally impressive is the Manager who had only met me once before and who remembers not only my name but also when I last came and where I was sat. Physiognomist or lucky shot?
As wine is my passion, I am often asked what makes a great sommelier. Some may think great knowledge and exams. But for me, before all of that, a great sommelier is one who listens. “Would you like a rosé or a light white wine?” are words that are often uttered to me by sommeliers and it has become a bit of a joke within my circle of friends to see how many sommeliers will ask me this. Is it because I’m a young woman? Don’t assume every young woman likes only rosé. In fact, I love red Bordeaux with power and body and white Burgundy with oak and creaminess. The best sommelier will remember this while challenging me by taking me on a journey and making me discover other wines in that range that he or she thinks I will really enjoy.
As a wine-lover I have other foibles. Vintage is key and there have been
occasions where a different vintage has been brought to me by accident. I was once brought a 2007 Château Talbot instead of the 2005 listed on the wine list. Luckily, it didn’t take long for the sommelier to see I really wanted 2005 so he rectified this and surprised me with a Rauzlan Ségla 2005 that had just arrived. Stock shortages can happen, although I think it’s always important to notify the guest of this to enable them to make an informed decision.
But what are things like on the sommelier side? I recently caught up with Angelo Altobelli, the Beverage Director and Head Sommelier of Dinings SW3. I know I am always in great hands when Angelo is there. With his Italian flair and charisma, Angelo knows what it takes to make his guests feel welcome and happy. He knows my love of Bordeaux as opposed to Malbec, and for Burgundy as opposed to Riesling, and won’t even dream of recommending orange wine as he knows it makes the vein on my forehead pop. He also understands my obsession for decanting all my wines as well as my love of perfectly chilled champagne.
I started by asking Angelo why it is so difficult to find sommeliers in the UK? Angelo explains to me: “After Brexit, many people decided to leave the UK. This was reinforced after the many lockdowns. Wine is not as present in this country as in Spain, France
If you are looking for a worldclass Japanese culinary experience in the heart of London, it is in your best interest to take a stroll down Walton Street, nestled between Chelsea and Knightsbridge. Since 2017, Dinings SW3 has produced an authentic Izakaya-style experience under the leadership of head chef Masaki Sugisaki.
An Izakaya is, in a way, the Japanese take on the pub; an informal restaurant and bar with good food where many people go for afterwork drinks. While the restaurant would not be considered informal by most, it is certainly a place where you can go with no fear or expectation of pretension. The main restaurant formerly served as an artist’s studio, and remnants of the past can be seen in the form of neon lips on the wall and an intricate historical fireplace dating back to the 1500s.
The restaurant also features an even more private section upstairs called
the Kurabu. It is carefully furnished with comfortable and elegantly upholstered seats and perfectly set up to accommodate your needs, whether that be a company event or an intimate outing. It is known that celebrities choose the place not only for the exceptional quality of food and service, but also because they are unlikely to be recognised and bothered in such a hidden away space.
The food and drink here are of the highest quality, and the nature of the dishes shows that they are not afraid to place their locally sourced ingredients front and centre. Fitting their style of mixing traditional Japanese cuisine with European dishes, our first dish was truffle-topped sea bass carpaccio. The delicate fish mixed with the earthy truffle created a wonderful combination, especially when paired with Dinings SW3’s own 78 Kin Daiginjo sake. For those who are more accustomed to European wines than sake, Dining’s offering is a great place to start due to the
sake’s mild yet familiarly floral taste. Even something as simple as a tuna roll is done to the nines here. This dish is a tuna tour de force, incorporating all cuts of the fish including the belly of the tuna highly sought after for its buttery, mild flavour. For those who do not share my love of fish, the restaurant offers a number of vegetarian options including miso aubergine. This baked aubergine, marinated in and then topped with both light and dark miso sauce, quickly won the favour of our table and was a true highlight of the meal. If wagyu beef is more your speed, Dinings has you covered with a truly unique take on slider burgers. No matter your palate, this establishment will have an option for you. This place is something special, and once you’ve experienced the exemplary cuisine and service of Dinings SW3 you’ll find it extremely difficult to stay away for long.
Bookings can be made at: www.diningssw3.co.uk
and Italy as a profession. Most of the sommeliers in the UK are not British.”
Angelo adds that in Italy, there is even a school where budding students can study hospitality and wine whereas in the UK this is not so common, the exception being Le Cordon Bleu.
I’m curious to know what Angelo thinks makes a great sommelier. He replies: “A great sommelier needs to adapt to the guest’s needs, whilst still making it fun based on their palette. Some sommeliers make it a bit too academic.” I couldn’t agree more: what I like best about Angelo is that he listens to the guest. He knows my love for full-bodied wine so he avoids recommending me any Pinot Noir.
Angelo continues: “A great sommelier needs to have a good understanding of business so they know what sales and profit margins they need to achieve. While we may be quick to complain about high wine prices, a lot of research goes into what wine I put on my list. We look at the producer and the vintage in depth: it has taken me nine months to get the Dinings SW3 wine list to where it is now and I’m not even halfway there yet.”
The industry is clearly struggling and we are likely to see many restaurants shutting their doors, which is heartbreaking. Angelo admits that he is a little bit scared about the situation: “Demand for sommeliers is high at a time when there is a real shortage,” he explains, ”and this may lead restaurants to have to recruit people who are either not sommeliers or not passionate about the trade.” So does the government need to be doing more for the sector? Angelo strongly argues that it should: “A key priority is easier access for people to come and work in the UK. Four years ago, it would not be uncommon to see a starting sommelier position advertised at under £25k. Today, you will struggle to advertise for that position under £30k, with some restaurants offering even more.”
Angelo has plenty of funny wine stories: “I once had a guest who said to me: ‘Can you recommend a good white wine?” When I asked the guest what wine she usually preferred, she replied that she would try everything except Chardonnay. I then went on to recommend a Riesling, yet she insisted on having a Chablis.” My eyebrows are raised, and I ask him if he told her that Chablis is a Chardonnay grape variety. Angelo smiles: “Well, I opted for diplomacy.”
Readers might not know how much time sommeliers dedicate to their exams known as the Court of Master Sommeliers. The first of these exams took place in London in 1969. The aim is to encourage quality standards for beverage service in the hospitality industry. The first of these exams is called Introductory, then comes Certified, followed by Advanced and ending with the most prestigious and highly coveted
A GREAT SOMMELIER NEEDS TO HAVE A GOOD UNDERSTANDING OF BUSINESS SO THEY KNOW WHAT SALES AND PROFIT MARGINS THEY NEED TO ACHIEVE.Angelo Altobell, Head Sommelier at Dinings SW3
of all, the Master Sommelier exam. On average, the pass rate for the Master Sommelier is about 5 per cent and there are only 273 worldwide, which shows how difficult it is to achieve. More than a decade can pass between the first exam and the Master Sommelier exam which involves a blind tasting of three red wines and three white wines, as well as an evaluation on service and a theory-based exam. So why put yourself through such intense studying? Well, on one level it’s the pride of the achievement but as well as this, it does demonstrate to a potential employer that the candidate is among the most qualified in the industry and can also lead to better progression and a higher salary within the industry.
Historically, one could argue that sommeliers were not paid very well, given all their hard work and the long hours they spend in the restaurant.
Before the pandemic, it was not uncommon to see a starting sommelier salary between £24k-£25k. Now this is closer to £30k although it will depend on the restaurant of course. This is something positive though as the lack of supply has also highlighted the need to reward talented and passionate people. A Head Sommelier will typically start at around £40-£45k in London although it could be more depending on the person’s experience. As for Master Sommeliers, it is not unusual to expect them to be on £80k-£90k in London. The title is one
of the most prestigious ones in the wine world so it is understandable that restaurants are proud to be able to say they have a Master Sommelier in their team.
Investment in wine has become an interest of many wine lovers as it is an alternative way to make some money from something people are passionate about. It can get quite complex so having an advisor for this in the industry is very helpful.
The key is buying the wine En Primeur, which means you are buying the wine before it has been bottled straight from the producer. This ensures you will make good revenue on your investments. You could expect to buy a bottle of Guiberteau two years ago for between £20-£25 that would now sell for between £35 and £40 per bottle. Both Burgundy and Bordeaux wines are great investments and two that I always turn to. Burgundy gets mature quicker so the return will come sooner, usually in about five to six years whilst Bordeaux can take up to 10 years. It is all dependent on the producer and the vintage also plays a part. The top two wines I would recommend for investment are Domaine Romanée Conti (known as DRC), although getting an allocation is a challenge in itself. A case of three bottles about five years ago was £900, whilst today it is up to £4,000. DRC is so attractive as it can generate returns of more than 200%. For Bordeaux, I would turn to Château Lafite. As an example, a bottle of 2018 Château Lafite was £2,300 en Primeur whereas now it is selling for £3,500. The key with wine investment is patience and a careful selection by someone who understands the market.
When it comes to hospitality, consistency is key and being made to feel welcome will have me coming back for more. My dad used to say: “This restaurant is my home away from home”. Nothing beats sharing a bottle of wine in good company. Warm treatment of your guests will make them a walking advertisement and they will not only become regulars but also spread the word to their network. True hospitality is achieved when people leave feeling better not about you but about themselves. Psychology plays a huge part in hospitality so understanding your guests is really key and the sooner this is achieved, the better, so keep the orange wine away from me and get your decanter out because it’s wine o’clock!
GEORGE ACHEBE ENJOYS A BEATLES DOCUMENTARY, AND DELVES INTO WHAT IT HAS TO TELL US ABOUT THE WORKPLACE.
The data is mixed as to whether The Beatles have broken through to the younger generation. The band which used to make a habit of being number 1, is currently listed as the 93rd most streamed artist on Spotify, with 20 million followers. This pales somewhat predictably when set against the sort of numbers totted up by Taylor Swift (83.23 million), who recently made headlines by greedily having the whole of the top 10 to herself; The Weeknd (79.04 million) and Ed Sheeran (76.60 million).
Of bands people over the age of 35 will likely remember from their youth, the best performing are Coldplay, who are 12th on the list with 58.54 million, and Elton John who is 21st with just over 50 million listeners.
While the available statistics on the Beatles, testify to the fact that Beatlemania itself happened over half a century ago, they do show that the band’s popularity endures among the young, with over 30 per cent of downloads coming from 18-24 year olds.
These statistics seem to assure the Beatles continuation in the culture well into the 21st century. This will include not just the music but movies, and therefore Peter Jackson’s epic three-part series Get Back.
The film follows the Fab Four as they record an album which would become Let It Be , the last album the band would release, and a few songs from Abbey Road, which was the last album the group recorded. As the pair meet in Twickenham it seems possible that they will shoot a new film of some kind, but as the hours go by, it becomes clear that nobody has a clear idea of what the film might entail and so it is abandoned in favour of the famous concert on the roof at 3 Savile Row. This would turn out to be the band’s last live performance.
That’s because in this film, all isn’t quite well with the Beatles. We, the viewers, know that the band is in fact close to its terminus: the break-up which coincided with the end of the 1960s and brought that colourful epoch to its conclusion.
In fact, in places the film turns out to be a study in workplace toxicity. Though there are passages where the magic of music-making makes you feel, though you know differently, that the band could continue, the air of tension is at other times unmistakeable.
The dynamic of the four feels dictated throughout by Paul McCartney, sometimes to a surprising extent. We often think of John Lennon as the leader of The Beatles but there appear to have been a few factors which worked against Lennon being in charge by this point in their careers.
The first is that Lennon at times seems disengaged. Whereas Linda McCartney accompanies Paul to the studio only occasionally, and always seems a straightforward and optimistic presence when she does, Yoko Ono accompanies John throughout, sometimes maintaining what must have been an unnerving silence and at others screaming into a microphone in an alarming way.
One might add that it might have been especially alarming on the ears of the man who wrote ‘Yesterday.’ Even so, despite the difficulty, one notes throughout a certain tenderness, which feels heartbreakingly residual, about the way in which Lennon and McCartney look at each other, and converse. It
suggests, even as that friendship is unravelling, a profound connection based on having journeyed through strange seas of song together for so long. But something else is clear. McCartney, certainly at this stage, and perhaps throughout, is in a leadership position because his talent feels of another kind. Lennon’s was always the stronger personality, but McCartney is the one with the preternatural gift, the writer of the melodies which we still sing around the piano today. It is notable that McCartney wrote without much input from Lennon: Hey Jude, Yesterday, Yellow Submarine, When I’m Sixty Four, and in this film he is seen writing Let it Be. These songs are standards in a way which Lennon’s songs aren’t: they have their origins sometimes in music hall or in jazz. They have a capacity to endure in any setting which you cannot say of songs like Strawberry Fields Forever’ or I am the Walrus, so tethered to the unusualness of Lennon’s personality, really have.
Genius of McCartney’s kind creates imbalance. In this film it is shown in the way in which McCartney seems to be working on a huge number of songs. By my count he is writing more or less simultaneously: Let it Be, I’ve Got a Feelin’, Oh Darling, Let it Be, Maxwell’s Silver Hammer, Her Majesty, The Long and Winding Road, Get Back, She Came in Through the Bathroom
Window, Carry That Weight, around half of which are songs now of lasting fame, and the other half of which are musically interesting. Lennon, by contrast, is working on Across the Universe, Don’t Let me Down, Dig a Pony, Polythene Pam, an early version of what would become Jealous Guy, and has the riff for what would become I Want You (She’s So Heavy). These songs are slight by comparison with what McCartney is working on, as well as fewer in number.
Meanwhile, George Harrison is working on I Me Mine and Old Brown Shoe and has the bones of a song which would in time become a standard, Something. One sees here the ludicrousness of Harrison’s position: Harrison is writing a song which will reverberate forever yet there is a clear assumption that his songs are unlikely to be included in any significant number. McCartney is not only ahead as a composer but as a player of instruments. It was Lennon who was once asked if Ringo Starr was the best drummer. When he replied, “He’s not even the best drummer in the Beatles” he was referencing McCartney. Likewise you sense that McCartney can also play guitar better than Harrison. This knowledge leads him to micromanage and makes you realise that the band can’t function really as a team anymore.
But there’s a paradox here because McCartney’s talent, as we know from the comparative decline of the postBeatles years, also feels oddly dependent on the Beatles, and so you feel there is more at stake for him in wanting the band to remain together. At one point he plaintively tells everyone: “We can sing together when we’re older.”
Ringo Starr meanwhile is worth watching closely throughout the film as he remains unobtrusive and popular. He is in fact an exemplary study in how to handle workplace toxicity.
At times the juxtaposition between McCartney’s gifts and the others can be almost ludicrous. While the others are talking at one point, we see McCartney in the background writing Let It Be. Nobody looks up to tell him how good it is. Either they are inoculated to his genius by long exposure to it, or they do notice and suppress some feeling of envy.
ON 30 JANUARY 1969, THE BEATLES PERFORMED AN IMPROMPTU CONCERT FROM THE ROOFTOP OF THEIR APPLE CORPS HEADQUARTERS AT 3 SAVILE ROW
Sometimes, you feel that the horsing around is irksome to McCartney as it takes him away from the heavier workload caused by his own prolific nature. Yet he takes part anyway, as he senses that whatever else he will go on to do with his abilities, The Beatles will be the end of something important: you can taste his fear throughout. Then beautifully all this disappears in the final episode which deals with the rooftop concert. Here we see the Beatles perform Get Back, Don’t Let Me Down, I’ve Got a Feeling, One After 909 and Dig A Pony. We get a glimpse of the typical pedestrians on the streets of Mayfair towards the end of the 1960s: most are positive about the concert but enough people in the area have issued complaints to mean that a pair of bobbies, who seem young enough to be alive today, are sent over to ask them to turn the sound down. At one point he mutters: ‘They’re disrupting all the local business.”
The scene is a fascinating snapshot of the police in the 1960s. On the one hand one can see the powerlessness of law enforcement in the face of global celebrity; it is all told beautifully in the delighted smile McCartney gives at the beginning of Don’t Let Me Down when he turns around to see the police have joined him on the roof: this is what he wanted.
During the concert one feels drawn particularly to Lennon; in fact, power somehow seems to devolve to him during the live performance. Public charisma and private force of character seem to be very different things.
What is it that enables someone to have sufficient confidence to insist on their idea of music before allcomers?
Wikipedia.org
As we watch Lennon, we see two things. First he is proclaiming the idiocy of the homogeneity of anything establishment. Much of the film shows us how absolutely victorious he had been in pushing back against the dullness of the post -War settlement. Many of the pedestrians are dressed in styles which emanated out of the Swinging Sixties which they themselves had to a large extent brought about. Meanwhile, everybody else has to accept their presence.
But I don’t think Lennon would have got so far with all this if he hadn’t also had positives to offer. Throughout the songbook, love is always being proclaimed. It is the sadness of this film that that ideal couldn’t prevent the break up of a band whose music still matters today.
Pyschologically speaking, how do toxic work situations arise and why is it that we find them so difficult to deal with?
Toxic work situations mirror toxic family of origin situations. In them, we and our colleagues consciously and unconsciously play out unresolved patterns from our primary developmental relationships. I've seen this is particularly true in creative industries where there are fewer organizational boundaries to keep people operating with a modicum of decorum. Toxic work relationships arise because people feel threatened. They feel they are not getting what they need to feel safe and secure in the organization. The best way to look at this is through the lens of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. In this lens, people can only be their highest and best self and produce their best work when their physical and emotional needs are satiated and they operate in a culture of psychological safety.
We struggle to productively deal with toxic work relationships because they affect us on the most primal level of our being. In them, we are constantly feeling the whole of our being is under attack. In this state of being, our limbic system goes on overdrive. It keeps us in a state of hypervigilance and stress. Our central nervous system floods us with stress hormones such as Cortisol and causes our prefrontal cortex, the part of our brain that rules our rational behaviours and enables us to make smart strategic decisions, to go offline.
In Get Back, Paul McCartney emerges as a boss figure. He seems in some way a micromanager, particularly of George Harrison. How should we deal with micromanagers and ensure we retain our equilibrium in these situations?
One of the defining features of anxiety disorders is a compulsive need to control what feels out of control. Micromanagers are operating from a place of heightened anxiety. Once we understand the etiology of their behaviours we can create a plan to address them. The best way to do this is to focus first on self and second on the other. Become conscious of what your manager fears most. Look for her triggers. Everyone has hot buttons that send them into states of emotional reactivity. Once you've identified these patterns in your manager, consciously strive to go above and beyond in your efforts in these areas. Also, address these issues directly with your manager. Ask her straight out what you can do to improve your service to her and the organization in these areas. The mere fact that you evidence awareness of her triggers and are diligently and intentionally striving to improve in these areas will go far in reducing her anxiety and enable her to put her focus on someone or something else.
To be fair to McCartney he is partly in a position of authority due to a greater talent – his ability to play more instruments than the others for instance means that he invades their space more. How should CEOs and managers deal with extremely gifted individuals to ensure that they don’t alter the balance of a workplace setting?
The construct of psychological safety is every bit as relevant in creative families as it is in traditional organizations. Through it, people feel safe to fail and have a voice that's outside the norm. Studies show that a culture rich in psychological safety produces exceptionally innovative work and is made up of happy, healthy employees. Managers who are working
with extremely gifted employees will be well served to look at the foundations of the construct. At its core, a culture of psychological safety ensures that people will not be humiliated or punished for challenging the cultural norm or speaking up against authority.
Contrastingly, Ringo Starr in the film seems to carry himself extremely well, and maintain excellent relationships with all people, even in an increasingly toxic situation. How is he able to do this and what might we learn from him?
As in most challenging situations, successful resolution comes not from investing your principal energy in changing the system but rather on focusing on how you can change your reaction to the toxicity that exists in the system in which you are operating. In short, this means coming up with healthy ways to manage the toxicity that surrounds you. The first step in this process is to accept the reality of the situation. Toxic work environments exist. Yes, you might be able to change them but the probability of changing major systems can be quite low and the return on your risk in trying to change them low. Instead focus, like Ringo Starr focused, on that in which there is a high probability of success and a high return on investment. As we see in the film, Ringo had the most balanced life. He had a rich and rewarding personal life and invested his human and relational capital through a diverse intrapersonal and interpersonal portfolio. He manifested resilience, which is the capacity to make meaning from setbacks and grit which is the capacity to tolerate short term discomfort for a long term gain.
It is one of the most astonishing remarks ever attributed to a UK prime minister. The story, as told, by Harry Cole and James Heale in the recent book Out of the Blue: The inside story of the unexpected rise and rapid fall of Liz Truss, is that as Truss’ mayfly premiership wound to its helter skelter conclusion, Downing Street aides were crying as the then PM prepared her resignation statement. But Truss was in philosophical mode and not about to cry over spilt milk. “Don’t worry I’m relieved it’s over,” Truss said. “At least I’ve been prime minister.”
With all due allowance given for the possible casualness of the remark, this is nevertheless revealing. It seems to mark the apotheosis of political ambition whereby holding a position is good in and of itself, regardless of one’s suitability for the role, and what one was able to accomplish in it. One might read the remarks aloud and place particular emphasis on the words ‘I’m’ and ‘I’ve’ and thereby better arrive at the truth of the matter.
Peace, pointed out that anytime you hear the words ‘These days’ prepare to hear a lie. There have always been people ambitious for position; in fact, it’s a safe bet that every prime minister of the past had precisely that same kind of ambition which animated Truss. As Gore Vidal once noted: “Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically by definition be disqualified from ever doing so.” Sometimes when one sees a politician assume the highest office, one notices a range of emotions, but often a certain relief is there: a remorseless itch has finally been scratched.
It’s not just presidents who have ambition, but those who surround them. Reading Carl Sandburg’s magnificent biography of Abraham Lincoln, we find the president issue the poetry of his first great inaugural speech and then settle into the prose of governing. In that spring of 1861, job-seekers descend on the president to the extent that Lincoln invented the humorous salutation: “Good morning, I’m very pleased to see you’ve not come here asking for a position.’
States Government are demoralized and overthrown, it will come from the voracious desire for office, this wriggle to live without toil, work, and labor, from which I am not free myself.”
In these words, it might be said, is squirrelled away a far-sighted prediction of the Truss administration, where the PM knows only one thing: that they want to be PM.
Truss aside, do the remarks tell us something broader about who we are, and what we’ve become? Of course, it is important to proceed with trepidation. It was Leo Tolstoy who, in War and
Sandburg picks up the narrative: “Of a visit of several days in Washington Herndon wrote that Lincoln could scarcely cease from referring to the persistence of office seekers. They slipped in, he said, through half-opened doors; they edged their way through crowds and thrust papers in his hands when he rode.” On another occasion, Herndon quoted Lincoln directly: “if our American society and the United
Lincoln was too wise not to include himself within his own criticism, but also too humble to differentiate himself from all those office-seekers who hemmed him in during those first months of his presidency. History has shown abundantly that Lincoln did have a reason for being there: he is one of those people, like Churchill, with a historical mission to fulfil. In Churchill’s case, he was always the preserver the British Empire and the foe of Hitler before he was prime minister. Lincoln,
“DON’T WORRY I’M RELIEVED IT’S OVER,” TRUSS SAID. “AT LEAST I’VE BEEN PRIME MINISTER.”
meanwhile, was always the defender of the Union and the enemy of slavery before he was president.
It’s possible that an advocate for Liz Truss might argue that she was the evangelist of lower taxes before she was the occupant of Downing Street, but it seems likely that this won’t quite wash. In a sense Truss also represented the real life embodiment of the comedy of Armando Iannucci, the leading satirist of our times. Iannucci is the creator of not only The Day Today but Alan Partridge, The Thick of It, Veep, In The Loop and latterly a satirical prose poem Pandemonium. The common thread of Iannucci’s comedy is that people in his world occupy roles which seem to lack real meaning: Alan Partridge wants to be TV star while having no talent to entertain or inform; the civil servants and spads in The Thick of It, are rushing around Westminster bereft of real political beliefs; in Veep, an entire position – the vicepresidency of the United States – has no discernible function.
It is as if the world has itself turned into satire – making it increasingly difficult for satirists to mock. This sense of futility regarding the roles we need to carry out is far worse beyond Westminster than in Westminster itself. In his 2018 work of sociology Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, the late writer David Graeber identified the way
in which numerous jobs have cropped up in contemporary society whose fundamental value is highly questionable. Graeber’s point is not just that many contemporary roles are pointless, but that their pointlessness is known even to those who carry them out. Furthermore, this lack of meaning is made to rub along with the contemporary tendency to tie work to status. He writes of ‘a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.’
This, Graeber says, in what amounts to a searing indictment of contemporary life, is ‘profound psychological violence’. So what kind of jobs is he talking about? Firstly he refers to ‘flunkies’ whose purpose is to make important people feel more important: he is discussing the whole raft of receptionists, assistants and assistants’ assistants who populate the typical corporate setting. Graeber’s second category is ‘goons’, those who set out to deceive or do harm on behalf of their employers: he is thinking of lobbyists, some lawyers, telemarketers, and the like.
Thirdly, there are ‘duct tapers’ – those
who fix temporarily something which ought to be fixed permanently, like software engineers, or those working in computer science. Fourthly, there are ‘box tickers’ who create the appearance of utility without actually doing anything, such as compliance officers, or survey administrators.
Finally, Graeber refers to ‘taskmasters’, those whose primary function is to create unnecessary tasks for others: Graeber is thinking of the whole realm of middle management which is often blamed, with a degree of justice, on the Blair years. None of these calls to mind the prime ministership. Is it then that during the Truss administration we temporarily saw the Graeberisation of 10 Downing Street – a strange, fleeting glimpse of what happens when the highest office of state somehow cannot be injected with any particular meaning? This probably cannot be complete because the affairs of state will always have inherent meaning and so it is hard to see how the role of prime minister could ever become as numbing as Graeber’s other listed roles. Nevertheless the fact remains that, insofar as is possible, the spectacle of Truss holding the position of prime minister, predominantly for the pleasure of holding it, represented a nadir in the office, and makes one realise
that a position isn’t a static thing, but a space which one fills – above all, an opportunity, around which one needs to deploy initiative.
In general, it should be said Graeber’s target isn’t the public sector, where one imagines a fair number of ‘taskmasters’ not to mention ‘flunkies’ and ‘box tickers’ reside, but the private sector. And I think his reticence on that question is probably related to his solution for all these problems: universal basic income. This, in one (expensive) swoop, would get rid of the need to work for those who don’t want to, and in theory free people up for more meaningful activity.
The jury is out on how sensible this is. We had a glimpse of how it might look like during Covid-19 when something almost resembling Universal Basic Income had a morbid parody of a trial run. The results for productivity are already there to see with the economy in recession, and some businesses struggling to find momentum amid the pervasive malaise. It would also likely lead to inflation, since earnings would increase while productivity would remain the same, or even decline.
Therefore there has probably never been a time less propitious for UBI than the present one. It would appear we need an alternative.
Happily, a recent film suggests it might all be rather simpler than we think. This is Living, starring Bill Nighy and written by Kazuo Ishiguro. This is remake, deriving from Kurosawa’s ‘Ikiru,’ and tells the story of a middling civil servant, Mr Williams, played by Nighy, who discovers he hasn’t long to live. He is one of Graeber’s taskmasters. In the opening scenes, some women turn up lobbying to change a dilapidated part of East London, by building a playground in a disused slum. There follows a tragicomic scene where the women are
– as they had been on the previous day – taken from department to department all of whom absolve themselves of responsibility. The playground won’t be built, not because it’s not a genuine possibility but because nobody is using initiative in their roles.
But as Mr Williams begins to accept his diagnosis, it becomes clear that he hasn’t been granted so much a death sentence, as a heightened sense of life. In fact, he seems strangled in possession of a kind of superpower, all the more vivid because it is contrasted with what he had been before. He comes to realise that with the right mindset and creativity his role can be put to use. He begins to lobby for the playground with a mixture of persistence and smarts until, without giving anything away, his sense of himself and his role’s potential is transformed.
It seems to me that many of us enter our roles in life with too much passivity, and that if we are significantly vigilant we can actually make a difference to those
around us no matter what our title, or even our function, might be. What if the right answer isn’t to unpick the whole world of work with a vast social safety net which might then be expensive and difficult to administer, but to find it within ourselves to do the jobs we do have with the right spirit and creativity? Living suggests that such a thing is possible. It’s also, of course, free. It can’t be a complete solution. Some people do jobs which beat them down, and the answer to that will be a mixture of technological advance and education. But the Truss administration, mercifully brief for both the country and, one senses, for Truss herself, has perhaps as much to teach us as a more successful administration. It asks us to look inside ourselves and ask what we’re fit for, and then to wonder what we’re capable of. It’s a reminder not to attempt what we cannot do; by getting that decision right, and with the right measure of modesty, we just might nudge the world a little in the right direction.
At 10:42AM on the 19th of September 2022, the coffin of Queen Elizabeth II left Westminster Abbey. It was the start of a procession which would be seen by over one million people who lined the routes to say a final farewell, and it was the end of an intriguing era in history.
Finito World’s own Sam Pearce was there at the Abbey to document the momentous occasion, and she has furnished us with the beautiful photographs you see here. I caught up
with the experienced photographer after the ceremony in an attempt to vicariously experience the landmark event as it happened on that day.
“No one knew the protocol. I mean, I didn’t know either, but people did a mix of staying quiet or clapping or cheering. People didn’t know, but it was done respectfully irrespective of how they did it. It was all done with the greatest amount of respect,” Pearce says, “I think people really did feel that it was a story of a lifetime. People were a bit apprehensive and nervous and intrigued, and they were
“I THINK PEOPLE REALLY DID FEEL THAT IT WAS A STORY OF A LIFETIME.”
also watching as the events unfolded because no one quite knew what was going to happen. But I know everyone was thinking about the last time there was a state funeral and pictures from that, and how this was going to compare. And, you know, it was just a really interesting atmosphere. The police call it a ‘sterile area’ when they have really high security, and it was a bit sterile because there was no public around. But it was completely fascinating, because the whole procession passed straight by you. With the royal family, the Queen’s coffin, the soldiers, and all of the pageantry, everyone was sort of just watching and waiting quite calmly,” she says.
Pearce captured the above photograph of a soldier who had to be tended to by paramedics during the ceremony, and when I asked her about that picture, she recalled another soldier who fell ill.
“There was a young naval officer, a young girl, and she didn’t collapse but she obviously didn’t feel very well. She was supposed to be part of the team of naval officers that pull the coffin up to Wellington arch, but she had to be taken to the paramedics. It often happens in these processions,” Pearce says, “To me it wasn’t a very hot day, but I suppose when you’re dressed in those uniforms, they’re quite heavy, and you’d have to be standing for hours and it can’t be that comfortable. I felt really sorry for her actually, because that was supposed to be a big moment.”
A lot has changed in the 70 years since Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation, especially surrounding the world of work. It is known that the Queen
did not understand or approve of the frequency with which people change jobs today – and that is understandable considering the landscape of work when she was in her twenties. Pearce, too, has seen the way things have changed from when she got her start at Mirror Group Newspapers.
“I got into photography because I worked as a PA to the Managing Editor at Mirror Group Newspapers. I mentioned that I wanted to learn how to use a camera, and my boss at the time organised me to go out and train with the photographers on the Sunday Mirror. So I would go out with the photographers on Saturday. It was all on film, and we all used to have to go to the
“IT WAS COMPLETELY FASCINATING, BECAUSE THE WHOLE PROCESSION PASSED STRAIGHT BY YOU.”
office at that time. I don’t think anyone goes into an office anymore, but we had to turn up at eight in the morning, and then we’d be assigned jobs, and I would be sent out with another photographer. It was an apprenticeship really, and I would just go out and ask lots of questions. I’m sure they wanted me to go away at points, but the photographers were really nice and quite patient with me,” Pearce says.
“I think with like any job, including photography, you have to really want to do it, and therefore you’ll go around and take pictures all the time and hope to find where you want to be. There is a lot of competition. Years ago it would be a six-week period before you could actually go in and speak to a picture editor at a newspaper, so I think you just have to keep pushing,” Pearce says.
“I’M SURE THEY WANTED ME TO GO AWAY AT POINTS, BUT THE PHOTOGRAPHERS WERE REALLY NICE AND QUITE PATIENT WITH ME.”
BY CHRISTOPHER JACKSON
Philip Larkin, who celebrated his centenary recently, is the modern poet people actually read. His words have entered the language in a way which few other poets’ have. If you’ve ever consoled yourself with the thought that ‘What will survive of us is love’ then you’re quoting Larkin’s poem ‘An Arundel Tomb’. If you’ve ever said, either with a note of bitterness or selfawareness: “They fuck you up your mum and dad/they may not mean to but they do’ then you’re also quoting Larkin.
But Larkin is also a work poet and this is the case to an extent very rare today. A few issues ago Finito World began a series intended to feature poets writing about their jobs. The idea had to be curtailed in short order since so few poets today do interesting work: it’s true that Alison Brackenbury has worked in the family metal company, and that Philip Hancock served a City & Guilds craft apprenticeship, which informs much of his work. But these are exceptions: many poets now end up teachers, or academics. Direct experience of commercial enterprise, administration and the working world turns out fo be rare.
This can throw up problems in contemporary poetry: it can lead either to bloodless verse, which feels comfortable and therefore abstract. Nine-to-fivers don’t just get to know about the job they happen to do; they get to know about the broader condition of people, the struggle of life.
Of course, this is true for teachers and academics too, and some very fine poets, needless to say, have worked in those professions. But Larkin would also point sometimes to the cosiness of these roles as a hindrance to the realisation of true art. “Every century has its cushy profession,’ he once said. ‘It used to be
the clergy but now it’s academia.’ For Larkin, it would be a false move to accept such a position since it would be injurious to the creation of poetry with a knowledge of adversity within it.
If this is what Larkin means then why might that be the case? I think what Larkin is questioning is the idea of structuring your life around the desire to be a poet. The implication is that poems ought to be hard-won. This was partly a question of temperament. ‘Deprivation is to me what daffodils were to Wordsworth,’ he once said, and this at least opens up onto the possibility that not every poet need make themselves miserable with drudgery. But it certainly implies that a creative person shouldn’t place their heads in the clouds and consider themselves somehow a separate case. To do would irreparably harm the lines of communication to the general reader. And Larkin’s advice now has particular force because unlike almost every other poet, he has readers.
The other sense in which Larkin is out of step with modern poetry is in his awareness of money. It’s true that being a librarian at the University of Hull –as Larkin was for the majority of his life – wasn’t quite tantamount to managing a hedge fund but in conducting the administration and organisation of the library, he was not only immersing himself in the flavour of worklife, but also denying himself the successful writer’s chateau existence.
It was all to a purpose then, and it means that Larkin is able to see life from a distinctive perspective. It turned out all to the good: his great friend Kingsley Amis, who did spend time in universities, and who also celebrated his centenary (to far less fanfare than Larkin), doesn’t fill anything like the
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same place in the national consciousness as Larkin. At a certain point, decisions he made led to him losing the opportunity to become universal. Larkin protected his universality at all costs.
The result is that Amis became famous, didn’t have to do boring jobs, and has a campus novel Lucky Jim to his name. But he’s read less and less. With every year the suspicion mounts that he won’t be read particularly into the future. Larkin meanwhile looked in envy at Amis’ life (or as he put it in Letter to A Friend
About Girls ‘your staggering skirmishes/ in train, tutorial and telephone booth,); but he’s one of the English poets. It’s a position he won’t now lose.
Both Clive James and Martin Amis have observed that Larkin’s quotability is what makes the difference. Quotability is about compression and voice, but it’s also to do with a certain earned quality about the writing. What is it about this which makes it endlessly readable?
‘Dockery was junior to you, Wasn’t he?’ said the Dean. ‘His son’s here now.’
Death-suited, visitant, I nod. ‘And do
You keep in touch with—’ Or remember how
Black-gowned, unbreakfasted, and still half-tight
We used to stand before that desk, to give
‘Our version’ of ‘these incidents last night’?
I try the door of where I used to live:
Locked. The lawn spreads dazzlingly wide.
A known bell chimes. I catch my train, ignored.
It is to do with a thousand decisions
which we don’t need to notice to enjoy the verse. Few poets would have come up with a better name rhythmically than Dockery and so have spoiled the poem from the outset. They might, paradoxically, have had more time in their job, but created less room for the poem. Larkin is always denying himself leisure to write, then denying himself easy poems when he does. It is typical of him to set himself a difficulty and then double it.
A tremendous mixture of obstinacy and patience celebrates quietly in the wings of great poems. Larkin’s poetry also has more places to go than other poets: note how the colloquialism of the conversation (‘His son’s here now’) cedes so beautifully to lyrical expansiveness in that dazzlingly wide lawn. Furthermore, the lyricism also has room for a double time scheme: we see not only the lawn, but are also told that the bell is as an aspect of the past.
This sense of superior dedication is something we might all learn from: it opens up onto the idea that, for Larkin, poetry is sacred and matters to such an extent that it is worth denying himself other things in life for the sake of getting it right. One suspects that all his best poems share this common backstory: the build-up of energy into necessity, so that the act of creation is anything but rushed or arbitrary.
This in turn has a lesson for all of us: that we each have a duty to find some activity in our own lives which has that level of importance, to verify our suitability for that activity, and then to commit.
For Larkin, work had its boons which he might not have entirely anticipated. His work as a librarian made him mindful of money and commerce and so he was able
to write poems which no one else could write. Every poet writes love poems; in fact, most people write love poems. But only Larkin ever wrote anything like ‘Money’:
Quarterly, is it, money reproaches me:
I am all you never had of goods and sex.
You could get them still by writing a few cheques.’
So I look at others, what they do with theirs:
They certainly don’t keep it upstairs. By now they’ve a second house and car and wife:
Clearly money has something to do with life
One of Larkin’s perennial themes is the undesirability of marriage; for him that scale of commitment was impossible. It is another aspect of his contrarian nature, and his absolute determination for self-realisation at all costs. He looks on marriage, as he looks on religion in ‘Money’ as a pervasive insanity.
I listen to money singing. It’s like looking down
From long french windows at a provincial town,
The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad
In the evening sun. It is intensely sad.
This intense sadness is the core fact of Larkin’s universe. Sometimes it makes him grumble a bit, as in This Be the Verse but more often than not it incites a certain tenderness. It also makes him seek work as a means of filling up the time and distracting himself from the terror of death.
Work then for Larkin fills numerous purposes. It stops him thinking about death, and gets him out of the house; as a useful adjunct, it helps his poems by an obscure mixture of self-denial and also giving him somewhere else to report from.
The whole question of work is addressed definitively in two poems: ‘Toads’ and ‘Toads Revisited’. In the first he is in a contrary mood, questioning his life choices:
Why should I let the toad work Squat on my life?
Can’t I used my wit as a pitchfork And drive the brute off?
Six days of the week it soils
With its sickening poison –Just for a paying a few bills! That’s out of proportion.
We have all felt this, the sense of time ebbing away due to the necessity of working to meet our basic needs. And we all possess envy about those who are, in contemporary parlance, living their ‘best lives’ – the Instagrammers and the You Tube sensations, Taylor Swift and people granted some sort of celebrity who seem to have squared the circle, and found a way to the
philosopher’s stone of unending happiness. Larkin envies such types, but he is also suspicious of them. Besides, he suspects it simply isn’t his destiny: Ah, were I courageous enough To shout Stuff your pension! But I know, all too well, that’s the stuff
That dreams are made on: For something sufficiently toadlike
Squats in me, too; Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck, And cold as snow…
All of us then have to come into some sort of acceptance of our lot: limits are prescribed, and perhaps, the poem says, we sort of prefer it that way, or perhaps don’t have the energy to rail too long against it. Even Taylor Swift, who recently had the whole Top 10 to herself, may never wake to having the whole Top 20 to herself: work will never complete us entirely.
Something else will, and that’s death – Larkin’s great topic, the one which is always at his shoulder – or like the Raven in Edgar Allen Poe’s poem tapping at his door. This was likely the impulse behind ‘Toads Revisited’ which is like a second panel in a diptych:
Walking around in the park Should feel better than work: The lake, the sunshine, The grass to lie on, Blurred playground noises
Beyond black-stockinged nurses –Not a bad place to be. Yet it doesn’t suit me.
sense to him. And these feelings were all intimately bound up with work: the dignity of it, and conversely, the undesirability of not working.
So who does Larkin meet in the park, freed up momentarily from the toad work? It’s not a very encouraging cast of characters, to put it mildly:
Palsied old step-takers, Hare-eyed clerks with the jitters, Waxed-fleshed out-patients
Still vague from accidents, And characters in long coats
Deep in the litter-basketsAll dodging the toad work
By being stupid or weak.
For many this will open up onto arguments about the right’s caricature of those on benefits as being, to quote the poem, ‘stupid or weak’. As sometimes happens when you read Larkin today, you think: ‘you can’t say that’. But on the flipside of the un-PCness of some of what Larkin has to say is the presence of truth we might benefit from revisiting. Larkin came from that generation which saw work as duty; he would have been very uncomfortable with today’s gig economy. It was Boris Johnson who said his position on cake was pro-having it and pro-eating it: Larkin would almost have certainly wondered if he was better off without cake.
Season 11 of Curb Your Enthusiasm devided critics
It is worth remembering here Larkin’s Conservatism – in his case both big and small ‘c’. When Margaret Thatcher came on the scene, it was both a revelation and a relief to Larkin, a moment when politics finally made
This curmudgeonly work ethic was a remarkably stable arrangement which led to some of the most important poems in English in the 20th century. It was still present in his last great poem ‘Aubade’. It was his last significant utterance: much to his own bafflement and frustration, poetry left Larkin for his last five or six years.
In this terrifying poem, Larkin references work at the outset: ‘
I work all day, and get halfdrunk at night’. He then wakes with a more than usual dose of morbidity, as he encounters again ‘unresting death, a whole day nearer now’ in the middle of the night.
It is a poem which you gave to be in a certain frame of mind to confront since it is an extended – but extraordinarily measured – look into the heart of darkness. But critics sometimes miss that it is work which lightens things just a little at the end, and in a sense comes to his rescue.
Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know, Have always known, know that we can’t escape, Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done. Postmen like doctors go from house to house.
Work then bookends the poem: its necessity is what keeps him going; it enables him at some basic psychological level to function at all. The final line in the poem shows postmen carrying out their tasks. I have sometimes wondered if the poem would be stronger if it didn’t reference ‘doctors’, and whether it ladles on the despair a little too thickly. Larkin never quite accepts that
the postmen might be delivering good news as well as bad.
This is a reminder that work happens throughout Larkin; it weaves in and out of everything he writes. The poems are either moments stolen from work or which acknowledge the endeavours of others. The most notable of these is ‘Livings’, a sort of triptych, which looks at three people carrying out their work:
In the first poem, which was written in King’s Lynn, we meet a salesman of sorts:
I deal with farmers, things like dips and feed.
Every third month I book myself in at
The --- Hotel in ---ton for three days. The boots carries my lean old leather case
Up to a single, where I hang my hat. One beer, and then 'the dinner', at which I read The ---shire Times from soup to stewed pears.
Births, deaths. For sale. Police court. Motor spares.
The hotel, the town and the county are all edited out to show perhaps that this scene might have taken place anywhere in England. It shows the comfortable homogeneity of many people’s lives – the sort of quiet dignified and unexciting anonymity which Larkin sought to create in his own. The stanza shows work happening: not only the boots carrying his bags, but the small businesses advertising in the local paper, and the goings-on of the police court.
But all this is preparatory to one of Larkin’s wonderful zoomings out where a new perspective enters, distinct from the humdrum world of toil, but also impossible to have been arrived at
without it:
Later, the square is empty: a big sky Drains down the estuary like the bed
Of a gold river, and the Customs House
Still has its office lit. I drowse Between ex-Army sheets, wondering why I think it's worthwhile coming.
Father's dead:
He used to, but the business now is mine.
It's time for change, in nineteen twenty-nine.
In the magazine you’re reading, we have a regular column called Relatively Speaking, which looks at the way in which we're defined by the work that our parents do for a living. Here is a man carrying on his father’s work. The second part of the trilogy consists of a poem about a lighthouse owner. Here Larkin describes what for him may have been a sort of fantasy career where work is conducted apart from the world and where there is nevertheless the opportunity for revelation:
Lit shelved liners
Grope like mad worlds westwards.
It is just about thinkable for Larkin to have enacted for himself the life described here. Although he'd be watching the waves with a poet’s attention to detail, he’d still be fulfilling some form of duty: he’d still be working.
We can read and learn from Larkin while resolving not to be too much like him. Ultimately he was a fearful person, and a fearful poet. It is as if, given the dimensions of the problems which beset human life, we need to make sure that we don’t add to them unnecessarily, either by an excessive progressivism, or simply by making life too exciting or complicated. In the final part of the Livings triptych, we encounter the medieval economy of a university where the port goes round, and the conversation murmurs, and nothing much is happening.
The implication is that Larkin prefers that slow unobtrusive society to the world he sees around him in the present. There’s a marvellous poem ‘Poetry of Departures’ which shows you what Larkin thinks of unthought-through career changes:
Sometimes you hear, fifth-hand, As epitaph:
He chucked up everything
And just cleared off, And always the voice will sound
Certain you approve
This audacious, purifying, Elemental move.
But Larkin, of course, does not approve. Instead he knows that the person who chucks it all in and rushes off into something new ‘crouched in the fo’c’sle stubbly with goodness’ will not get very far: they’re just trying to create further down the line the same set of ‘reprehensibly perfect’ circumstances.
All of this means that Larkin is out of step with who we are now: he would
disagree with the gig economy, and would probably be alarmed by the Internet, Islamic extremism, big government, our fascination with American politics, and much else that comes with modern life. But perhaps it’s his instinctive Conservatism which means he is a valid poet of the issue which most defines our times: the environment.
In ‘Going, Going’ he writes:
I thought it would last my time— The sense that, beyond the town, There would always be fields and farms, Where the village louts could climb Such trees as were not cut down; I knew there’d be false alarms
In the papers about old streets And split level shopping, but some Have always been left so far; And when the old part retreats
As the bleak high-risers come We can always escape in the car.
None of this suggests that Larkin would have chained himself to a wall of the National Gallery and vandalised a Van Gogh, but he might have more in common with such people than one might expect.
On the Business Page, a score Of spectacled grins approve Some takeover bid that entails Five per cent profit (and ten Per cent more in the estuaries): move
Your works to the unspoilt dales (Grey area grants)! And when
You try to get near the sea In summer . . .
Larkin prioritised self-reliance above all else. He wanted to work and thought others should too. In some ways, he was a man out of his proper time. He felt that his ethos was best encapsulated in that last
Livings poem where everyone if fulfilling their roles within the context of a sluggish economy: he would approve the pace of that.
But when he sought to apply these ideas to the contemporary world his poetry came up against contradictions which it couldn’t solve. Thatcherism was moving rapidly in an individualistic direction which Larkin the man could endorse, but which I think was problematic to his work as a poet, and may go some way toward explaining the silence which came upon him in the 1980s. Rapid movement of any kind always held the negative connotation that it was bringing death forwards in some way.
And it’s this fear which places a selfish imperative at the centre of his poetry. He
once compared himself to Kingsley Amis:
Oh no one can deny
Arnold is less selfish than I
He married a woman to stop her getting away
Now she’s there all day.
And the money he gets for wasting his life on work
She takes as her perk…
Larkin goes onto argue that Arnold is in fact as selfish as him, he has just expressed his selfishness differently. But the poem never really doubts that selfishness is the inevitable driver in most people.
He espoused Conservative individualism for the selfish reason that he believed in work, and that work distracted him from
fear of death. But this causes a duplicity in his poetry whereby Larkin knows deep down that the policies he's espousing will lead to the desecration of the countryside and a soulless world of business takeovers which will make everything uglier. But the position suits him for now, and anyway he knows he’s not going to be round long enough for it really to matter to him.
Ultimately, this slightly soulless view of the universe needs to be rejected since if it’s followed logically it leads to an atomised and unhappy society without sufficient ties between people. But even once you jettison that, there’s a lot to treasure in Larkin: he’s that good a poet that you can push aside his entire view of life and still want to quote him 20 times a day.
“LARKIN PRIORITISED SELF-RELIANCE ABOVE ALL ELSE. HE WANTED TO WORK AND THOUGHT OTHERS SHOULD TOO. ”
BY FINITO WORLD
Ave. Undergraduate Tuition: $55,587
Acceptance Rate: 5%
Top Majors: Law, Economics, Medicine, Engineering
Notable former alumni: Former Presidents JFK, Barack Obama, actor Matt Damon and novelist Margaret Atwood
With a history dating back to 1636, Harvard University is the oldest university in the US, predating the founding of the country by 140 years. Harvard is perhaps most famous for its stellar reputation in the fields of law and medicine, but it is also worth noting that the Harvard School of Divinity is widely considered to be the world’s most respected theological programme. Harvard students are known to be extremely driven and hardworking, and that’s no surprise considering the school’s extremely low acceptance rate, but Harvard also offers ample opportunity for students to explore the City of Cambridge and Boston as a whole. A historical city which feels more like an oversized town than a sprawling metropolis, Boston is a place to explore the history of the nation and enjoy the rich culture embodied by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Museum of Fine Arts, and Fenway Park.
Ave. Undergraduate Tuition: $59,950
Acceptance Rate: 6.5%
Top Majors: Economics, History, Political Science
Notable former alumni: Former Presidents George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and actresses Jennifer Connelly and Jodie Foster
Yale is often seen as the Ivy League school with the heaviest focus on the arts, and for good reason – Yale’s art, film, dance, and music courses are among the best in the world. Since 1701, Yale University has provided the highest level of instruction to History, Social Science, Engineering, and Mathematics students, but their offering doesn’t stop there. If a student’s interests cannot be contained by a single traditional programme, Yale also offers multidisciplinary programmes. The city of New Haven is not as large or bustling as Boston or Manhattan, but there is a good amount of culture and nightlife to be found near Yale. Crime in the city can be a problem, but the vast majority of Yale students have no issue and rapidly adjust to life in New Haven. Yale is also home to the world famous Whiffenpoofs, so if a cappella singing appeals to you, it’s worth checking out the longest-running a cappella group in the US.
Ave. Undergraduate Tuition: $61,710
Acceptance Rate: 9%
Top Majors: Finance, Registered Nursing, Philosophy
Notable former alumni: Former President Donald Trump & his daughter Ivanka, and billionaire Elon Musk
The University of Pennsylvania is known for its work hard/play hard attitude, but active social lives distract from their tireless work to maintain the institution’s reputation as a top research university. Founded in 1740 by Ben Franklin (who was also no stranger to the party life) the University of Pennsylvania is best known for the Wharton Business School, which is one of the best in the country. Wharton often overshadows the university’s other offerings, though the School of Engineering and Applied Science and the School of Nursing are also highly respected. The university’s location in Philadelphia will give students the chance to feel the weight of the history surrounding them each time they walk down the street. Bars, museums, and music halls offer great places for a night out, and PennU’s sprawling campus can often feel like a city of its own. While UPenn is still highly selective, it does sport a higher acceptance rate than other Ivy League schools, and extracurricular activities are considered more heavily when making admission decisions.
Ave. Undergraduate Tuition: $56,010
Acceptance Rate: 5.6%
Top Majors: Social Sciences, Engineering, Economics
Notable former alumni: Former
First Lady of the United States Michelle Obama and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos
One of the finest of the Ivy League schools, with a world-renowned reputation for International Relations and Public Affairs, and the humanities in general. Princeton’s alumni, among other prominent figures, include the US Presidents Woodrow Wilson, James Madison, and John F. Kennedy. Founded in 1746, making it one of the oldest universities in the country, Princeton offers students the unique opportunity to become accustomed to thesis-writing through the Junior Project, which is completed under the supervision of a faculty member. The application process and requirements are notoriously difficult, placing much more emphasis on pure academics than extracurricular activities. While the university campus spans more than 600 acres, the town of Princeton, New Jersey is much more suited to nature lovers than city-dwellers. While the town is not large, with a population of around 30,000, there are good restaurants to be found, and downtown Princeton offers opportunities to see a bit of history while visiting the shops. It is recommended to drive, as while there is public transport, having a personal vehicle is far more convenient if you plan to leave town.
Ave. Undergraduate Tuition: $61,015
Acceptance Rate: 10.7
Top Majors: Computer Science, Biology, Labor and Industrial Relations Notable former alumni: Former Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, actress Gillian Anderson and novelist Kurt Vonnegut
Cornell University may have the highest acceptance rate of the Ivy Leagues, but that does not mean that the quality of instruction is second class. Since its foundation in 1865, Cornell students have had the opportunity to study under Nobel laureates, Pulitzer Prize winners, and other major leaders in fields ranging from Agriculture to Industrial and Labour Relations. Greek life is a large part of life at Cornell, but if joining a fraternity or sorority doesn’t appeal to you, there are many other extracurricular activities including the Glee Club, Kung Fu, and Archery. The city of Ithaca is fairly small, and though it does contain some solid restaurants and nightlife, you will almost certainly want to be comfortable driving a car as the small town can be isolating to those accustomed to the big city. The novelist Vladimir Nabokov taught here and some of his novels, especially (1962), allude to life on campus.
The Provost of Imperial University talks to Patrick Crowder about the way in which the US model is coming to the UK
Many students make their way through university without coming into contact with any of the people in charge, and the roles in university management can be difficult to understand. We spoke with Ian Walmsley, who serves as Provost of Imperial University, to help explain the duties of top university officers.
After a long career in physics, Walmsley is now in charge of Imperial’s academic vision and the delivery of that vision. His experience also helped him face the unknowns of maintaining academic excellence during the pandemic.
So what does his role actually entail?
“My job as Provost is to make sure the academic mission is delivered to high quality. To that end, I oversee all of the faculties and have to interpolate between
them. I work with all of the Student Support and the Student Educational Services, I work very closely with the Student Union, and I work with HR and Finance to make sure the resources are allocated in order to deliver that mission. So it's partly setting the vision for what the academic trajectory is going to look like, and then it’s working with the deans, the Vice Provost, and all of the heads of service to make sure that's properly delivered,” Walmsley says. Though the President and Provost model is becoming increasingly popular in the UK, some readers may be more familiar with Chancellors and Vice Chancellors. While quite similar, the role of Vice Chancellor is more of an all-rounder compared to that of Provost, who focuses mainly on academic delivery. Walmsley explains how this comparatively new system is taking hold, and the advantages that it brings.
“The President and Provost model is, in fact, very much an American model. In its sort of full-blown American form, one might roughly say that the President is responsible for the outward facing things; selling the university, raising the brand, fundraising, alumni, etc. while the provost is responsible for the academic mission. That includes all the education, research, innovation, activities, setting the budgets to enable that, and allocating resources. The UK has sort of adopted that model, but the Vice Chancellor model is much more prevalent. The Vice Chancellor model, I think, grew more from a provost-like activity, but recently they’ve had to do a lot more outward-facing activities because there's a lot more work with government, there's a lot more work with alumni, and there's a lot more work with donors,” Walmsley explains.
So while many students are looking towards the US today, the UK is moving towards something like the American
model anyway? “The UK has evolved a little more that way,” Walmsley admits, “and I think at Imperial we have a system that looks perhaps most like the American one as any in the UK. That’s partly because the first president who worked under that model was from the US, so she understood what that was model was about.”
As Provost, Walmsley was tasked with what at the time seemed impossible: how to deliver an excellent academic product during the pandemic. All universities faced this same challenge, some more gracefully than others, but it took a keen sense of vision to make it work.
“The pandemic was a hugely stressful time for everybody, especially for students, who have had to be really resilient in coming through that,” Walmsley recalls. “But with that in mind, everybody pulled together in a very positive way to make sure that our education was still being delivered to the students, students were still being supported, and the calibre of what we were providing was absolutely top notch. And I think that got recognised - we ended up getting a number of awards, Times University of the year, University of the Year for Student Experience, our NSS scores went up dramatically, and we got the Queen's anniversary prize, partly
for research that helped inform how the pandemic was managed at a national and indeed international level, and partly how we delivered our educational mission as well. The Imperial name synonymous with high calibre research and world leading education, I think, improved dramatically,” Walmsley says.
It is evident that university administrators at the top levels, while often overlooked, do play a vital role in the continuing success of a university – and, when hard times come, it’s up to them to rally the team and come up with quick, effective solutions.
“There were various ways in which we supported students at home. Part of that might have been providing IT equipment if they needed it, in certain cases, and a more general one was that some of our laboratory technicians were very creative,” Walmsley explains. “They came up with ways in which they could construct laboratory experiments, pack them in a box, send them off to students and students could do that work at home. And that lab in a box concept was a highly original one that came from our community members who were really thinking about how to support students in those circumstances.”
So it might be that before you consider applying to US universities – or sending your children overseas – worth looking at the likes of Imperial, where the US model is already active and beginning to pay dividends for its students.
Ave. Undergraduate Tuition: $63,530
Acceptance Rate: 6.7%
Top Majors: Political Science, Computer Science, Engineering
Notable former alumni: Singer Art Garfunkel and Alicia Keyes, and actress Julia Stiles
Originally founded by King George II in 1754, Columbia University can now be best defined by the cutting-edge research taking place there. Home of the Pulitzer Prize, Columbia’s humanities courses are well-respected, however the long-standing engineering programme is the most famous and prized course. Columbia’s application process is heavily academic, however they value a wellrounded student over one who excels in only a few areas. The core curriculum at Columbia also seeks to expose students to diverse ideas far beyond the confines of their chosen field of study. Columbia’s location in Manhattan comes with all of the advantages and drawbacks of living in New York. For those who crave the big city life and the wealth of opportunity which comes with living in such a major financial and cultural hub, Columbia is an ideal choice, however factors such as cost of living and fast-paced lifestyle should be carefully considered. Students at Columbia will not need a car, as public transport is well established in Manhattan.
Ave. Undergraduate Tuition: $60,870
Acceptance Rate: 9.2%
Top Majors: Biological Sciences, Engineering, Social Sciences
Notable former alumni: Television legend Fred Rogers, and children’s author Dr Seuss
Founded in 1769, Dartmouth College has the history one would expect from an Ivy League institution while maintaining the new ideas present at more modern schools. A great example of this is their flexible “D Plan”, which is a schedule consisting of four 10week terms per year. This means that students have time to take advantage of internships which run during normal university times, and Dartmouth’s many study abroad opportunities. The Thayer School of Engineering is one of the oldest schools of its kind in the country, and it offers a dual-degree programme allowing students from other universities to attend. Greek life is a huge part of Dartmouth’s tradition, and students from the many fraternities and sororities flock to the great outdoors available in Hanover. Hanover is a small town, but what it lacks in bright lights and vibrant nightlife it makes up for with its beautiful hiking trails, rivers, and opportunities for outdoor sports. If living near nature interests you, Dartmouth is the place to be; the College even owns its own ski hill!
Ave. Undergraduate Tuition: $62,304
Acceptance Rate: 7.7%
Top Majors: Applied Mathematics, Economics, Computer Science
Notable former alumni: Current Secretary of State for the Treasury
Janet Yellen and actress Laura Linney
Brown University takes a different approach to other Ivy League schools, in that students are not locked in to one field of study, and the school has no strict majors. The “Open Curriculum” programme at Brown allows students to combine classes from different fields to tailor their experience to their own specialisation, though they must complete at least one “concentration” to graduate. Brown was founded in 1764 on the novel idea that students of all religions were welcome to attend, and that open attitude is still present in the university’s philosophy today. Brown’s eight-year Program in Liberal Medical Education is highly regarded and is an excellent way to work towards an MD, and extracurriculars including sailing, journalism, and martial arts provide an effective way for students to take a break from their studies while also bettering themselves. Located in Rhode Island’s capital Providence, students at Brown have ample opportunity to explore a lesser-known city which nonetheless features excellent restaurants, an active nightlife, and the historical architecture of College Hill.
Finito World’s own Director of Admissions has studied in Geneva, Paris, and London. Here, she fills us in on the myriad options available to prospective university students.
The hard thing for young people is the sheer range of options, and the fact that you often won’t have sufficient information about the institutions on offer in order to make the right decision for you.
For instance, if I compare Paris –where I studied at the Sorbonne – to Imperial College, the experiences were extraordinarily different. The Sorbonne was very structured, and challenging the lecturers wasn't really welcome. Whilst it was very competitive, it was a lot more formal than in the English system. In the English system we worked a lot more in groups, and while you had the lectures you also had the seminars, whereas in Paris, it tended to be just more lectures. It was a less open forum than in the British system.
On top of that, in the French system you might study economics or finance, for example, and then go on to work for a bank. The English system is much more flexible in that you could study history, or politics, or literature, and then you could go on and work in finance or another field. In terms of the way you study, there's a lot more group work and flexible thinking in the UK. In the US it's another completely different system, even when you're applying. The essay is a lot longer, and that surprises a lot of UK students. Here it tends to be a very concise personal statement, and then it could depend on A Levels or to whichever level you've studied, and then you get a contextual offer. In the US, people tend to do advanced placement and the application process is much more rigorous.
The class sizes in the US are much larger as well: depending on the college there could be 600 people in a lecture. However, you do have much more campus life in the US. In the UK it really depends on where you are studying, but if you study in London, you don't really have much of a campus. You're kind of right in the middle of the city, whereas if you were to go to Scotland or something like that you might have more of a campus life. And then there’s Switzerland, which again is completely different. There you have the elimination process, in which they'll tend to eliminate about 30 per cent of the intake during the first year. In contrast, the entry requirements are quite easy, but then they start to eliminate people. Unfortunately that drives a lot of bad behaviour because some people then get so competitive that they will give you the wrong information on purpose, which is really horrible. That’s the main reason why I chose not to go to university in Switzerland.
When attempting to navigate all of the different systems with all of their distinct traits, as well as complex application processes, it helps to have someone helping you who’s been through it. That can be someone like an older sibling or someone like a Finito mentor. That's why I get a lot of people coming to me and saying, “Can you help my son or daughter? They want to apply to uni, but they don't know what they're doing.”
It helps to have an older sibling who's gone through it, but if you don't have that, it's all about being well-connected and knowing someone somewhere in your network. Currently there's not much guidance available, except at Finito. Schools need to prepare their students better for that. The process goes like this: What would you want to study? Why are you choosing that particular course? And what system do you think will fit you best as a student? The answers to these questions will vary from person to person, but anyone who can answer all three honestly and confidently is on the right track.
To contact Finito’s Director of Admissions Georgina Badine about your education or work journey write to georgina@finito.org.uk
BY ALICE WRIGHT
Kate Bright, CEO and founder of UMBRA International, spent the first 15 years of her career working in the private office sphere. During this time she worked for three international families, with varying degrees of needs for security. After rising through the ranks she became Chief of Staff in charge of the families’ operational, lifestyle and security functions, from the supply network through to the recruitment of all members of the household and security staff.
Bright decided to do her Close Protection bodyguard training in order to understand the role’s function better. Bright found that she stood out, not just as a woman but also because she did not come from a military background. “I then started to look around, network, and connected with other women in the industry, and the seedling of the idea for the business started,” she tells me.
Bright launched the business in 2015 with the goal of “focusing on doing security differently, making it more accessible, more lifestyle-oriented, hence our phrase ‘Secure Lifestyle’ was born.” When I ask about the different roles for women in security, she counters with “everyone can do all aspects of security, man or woman. It’s also not the preserve of rich and famous people. We’re trying to make it accessible to all, to create clear pathways to not just protective services, but corporate security and all the different angles, particularly cybersecurity.
I advise young women and people from non-military backgrounds that want to get into security to get onto a pathway like the government’s new initiative, The National Cyber Force (NCF) was launched in 2020 for example. It would make me very proud for one of my young nieces and their friends to consider this as a legitimate career path in the future.”
There is currently more demand for women in security than there is supply. “I’m always trying to encourage particularly my former Personal Assistant community to do the training because I think it’s really useful and very important for us all to have a sense of safety and security.” It was from directly experiencing individuals from former professional sporting backgrounds such as rugby in her private office career that UMBRA now has partnerships with Rugby Clubs in the Premiership and Championship leagues as well as several Players Associations as well as the Switch The Play Foundation to encourage ex-elite sports men and women to move into the security industry. “It’s a great transition coming from a teamwork disciplined structure into a similar environment,” Bright explains. “We’ve had a lot of success in particular with women’s rugby, even despite the pandemic.”
Bright’s clients come from various parts of the world, are different ages and from different cultures. “What I noticed when I was working operationally was that ‘invisible security’ is supremely useful, and I was asked to do a TEDx talk about it in 2018.” Invisible security is the idea that protection can be discreet and able to maintain a low profile for clients. Some clients may be the super wealthy, but have no public-facing profile and others are instantly recognisable but do not wish to draw attention to themselves. “As my mother used to say: every lid has a pot. Lady Gaga would need a completely different set up, protocol and team composition to go unnoticed compared to somebody who may feature on a Sunday Times Rich List, but who may not be a household name.”
Invisible security also encapsulates digital and cyber safety as well. “The invisible threats that you can encounter online are just as important to counter in a very discreet way,” Bright explains. “UMBRA doesn’t just help clients with their physical safety – we’re also taking into
“THERE IS CURRENTLY MORE DEMAND FOR WOMEN IN SECURITY THAN THERE IS SUPPLY.”
consideration the whole lifestyle online and offline, because one risk will affect the other. This can include everything from broader household and private office recruitment (alongside security personnel) , staff background checking and home security upgrades through to protective or intelligence-based projects.”
UMBRA works in partnership with trusts, law firms and fiduciary advisories, to help families to achieve what Bright describes as a ‘secure lifestyle’. “Clients and their advisors come to us either proactively or reactively with problems, increasingly before they happen, or problems as they’re evolving.” This can include everything from home security upgrades through to protective or intelligence-based projects. “There’s a lot of psychology involved. It’s a lot about the feeling of safety. Insecurities, as well as securities, things that are going on in someone’s life, big litigations or disputes. Family disruptions can cause a lot of security considerations by causing a rupture in the norm.”
Indeed, UMBRA also helps clients while they navigate difficult situations such as a private or company court hearing that is in the public interest. This can involve working with reputation lawyers and dealing with press intrusion. “The sudden shining of a light on someone is not something that I would wish on my worst enemy, it has implications that are far reaching.” Another area is divorce: “When a family separates, the two different structures that are created as a result is a big area of work,” Bright explains.
Another consideration in Bright’s “blended approach” to creating a secure lifestyle is the idea of hyper-personalised security. As clients return to travel again despite the difficulties of the Covid-19 landscape, UMBRA has received a lot of requests for people to be travelling with either someone that’s security-trained, or just someone to provide an extra pair of
hands and set of eyes, such as chaperones, particularly for younger family members. This trend has not gone away. Yet Bright emphasises that she wants to avoid “the ‘gilded cage’ where there is too much protection which she believes “ultimately takes away and disempowers the understanding of what it is to be safe.”
I’m interested in the technology angle, particularly the role of social media, having read about sensational heists that have taken place after a traceable social media post. Bright answers that she always keeps abreast of crime trends including burglary tourism, where people post where they’re going on holiday then organised crimes gangs easily locate them.
non-executive committee roles, such as in the charitable sector as a Trustee of the Worshipful Company of Security Professional Charitable Trust. She is a keen military charity supporter, as an Ambassador of both Supporting Wounded Veterans and Veterans Aid. Last year she was invited to join the Gender Advisory Council for the British Army. “It’s actually really parallel, the security industry and the British Army,” Bright explains. “There is 10 per cent female representation across both the security industry and army. In both cases, I’m committed to supporting ways to create opportunities for women and support within their roles around the unique issues they face. I want to encourage the next generation and build a pipeline for the future, to give young women role models and a career path to aspire to. You have to see it to be it!”
“Particularly in the last five years it’s been a very experimental time, a very interesting time for digital and online risk to be emerging. Certainly clients are more interested and more willing to understand how to protect themselves online.” UMBRA’s approach is to always be proactive. “It’s less stressful, it’s less expensive, much more process-driven, and incorporates protocol. It’s a very good approach, particularly for those that are coming to security for the first time, whether they’ve come into a large amount of money suddenly, eg through the sale of a company, or a valuation such as a Unicorn founder, and therefore come into some sort of fame or profile in a relatively short space of time.”
Bright also holds a number of prestigious
Bright adds that she’s always looking at“how to create safe spaces, particularly for women, who so often are victims of gender-based violence and crime worldwide, so they can feel safe – for example at night or, travelling around.” This has never been so at the forefront, after the tragic high profile cases of Sarah Everard, Sabina Nessa, and others in the last few years. “Women have this duality of at once our invisibility being our strength, but also, we need to speak more about where we need to be counted, and that we are not just small men.”
“Both myself personally and the UMBRA business are trying to have positive conversations, and realise I’ve got ‘first’ syndrome, in being the first to do, or vocalise, new ways of working and approaching big problems. It can sometimes feel like we’re having conversations that we just shouldn’t be having in 2023. But I’m more than happy to keep having them. If I leave behind a slightly more empowered and safer world, that will be a good job done.”
“UMBRA DOESN’T JUST HELP CLIENTS WITH THEIR PHYSICAL SAFETY – WE’RE ALSO TAKING INTO CONSIDERATION THE WHOLE LIFESTYLE ONLINE AND OFFLINE.”
CHRISTOPHER JACKSON UPDATES READERS ABOUT PROGRESS ON FINITO’S WORK WITH A PARTICULAR STUDENT FROM THE LANDAU FORTE ACADEMY
At Finito, we are sometimes asked why it is that oneto-one mentoring works: one possible answer is that people are complex. During our lives – and especially our early lives – experience can often feel bewildering. Things come at us fast, and contradictory impressions are arrived at. Soon the world can seem insoluble.
There is no better way of tackling all this than the concerned help of a mentor.
At Finito we take it a step further and make sure that our candidates have the benefit of numerous mentors: the reality is that it takes time and a degree of luck to establish the right kind of mentor-mentee relationship. This means that students often need to try several mentors before discovering the right one.
At Finito, not all we do is aimed at those punch-the-air moments: the place secured at a top university, the new job, the promotion. These are rewarding,
of course, but they’re very far from the whole story.
More typically, mentoring is full of small wins – it can open up onto a world of quiet reward, and subtle attainments. Sometimes when you look back at the road travelled, you can be surprised by how far you came by small steps. But it usually happens that in these more mundane things might be contained the seeds of some important revelation.
All these factors are present in the
fascinating story of Joseph McDonald, a Bursary candidate of whom we at Finito World are proud.
McDonald is one of our mentees on the outstandingly successful Bursary Scheme, which we continue to conduct in partnership with the Landau Forte Academy. Finito mentor Andy Inman, who was instrumental in setting up this arm of the bursary, remembers his first impressions of Joseph when he was introduced to us.
“Joseph is, by his own admission, not particularly social. He doesn’t like groups and crowds, and has very little home support to speak of. The important thing to realise when you have a candidate like that, is that small tasks become big things.”
When Joseph joined our programme, he was about to leave to take a computer science degree at Lancaster University; he was already in a state of anxiety about what life would be like for him. “I was nervous about making friends and finding the right friendship group when I first came to university,” he tells us. “This is something that I struggled with in the past at school. It was definitely my number one priority upon arrival.”
Inman decided that Joseph required a caring, nurturing mentor and he couldn’t have made a better selection in this than Coco Stevenson. “I knew that Coco would look after him,” Inman recalls. “What was required might sound insignificant but they were not to Joseph: we’re talking about things like packing lists, and so forth – all the preuniversity tasks which you have to do before the leap to university. ”
Inman’s remarks are a reminder that as we go on in life, we typically come to know the world and forget what it was like not to be sure about things we later come to regard as obvious. Inman recalls: “It was mentoring at its most
granular, in a way – all about the detail. How would Joseph get to university? How would he make applications for student loans? Where would he shop for a duvet and for cutlery?”
But what Joseph most feared was Fresher’s week. “Most people would love that, but for Joseph it’s really the antithesis of what he enjoys – so he had to be talked through that.”
Stevenson stepped up and in time developed a profound relationship with Joseph. She tells us she was mindful of the magnitude of Joseph’s achievement in getting to university at all: “Joseph is the first in his family to go to university and we should remember that Lancaster University has one of the best Computer Science courses in the UK,” she tells us. But Stevenson also never lost sight of the difficulty for Joseph: “Going to university is a major transition in a young person’s life and is all the more difficult coming out of a pandemicespecially when you are a neuro-diverse person, as the world is not always set up for people who are not neurotypical,” she continues.
Stevenson gives us her first impressions of Joseph: “My mentee was not especially confident in the months leading up to moving to university and there were a number of worries and concerns.”
Difficulties of this kind must be tackled head-on, and together, Coco and Joseph began to explore the issues: “Working regularly together, we were able to ‘workshop’ issues, come up with strategies and plan for eventualities,” she recalls. “Planning and strategizing helped enormously in accomplishing tasks and not being derailed by unforeseen things.”
Stevenson used her experience of university life to begin to create a plan for Joseph. Joseph now recalls this
fondly: “We discussed the kind of activities I could get up to, including the structure of academic events and the social events I could engage with outside of my studies. Coco encouraged me to convert my ideas of involvement into a more solid plan that helped me find my grounding as I began living away from home for the first time.”
Soon the pair of them had alighted on a strategy: “Coco explained that societies are fundamental to finding people with similar interests and a great place to make friends. She advised me on how many societies to attend, and how to approach the problem of deciding which societies I would continue attending. This was how I became part of the Sober Society, and I am so grateful to Coco for this.”
“INMAN DECIDED THAT JOSEPH REQUIRED A CARING, NURTURING MENTOR AND HE COULDN’T HAVE MADE A BETTER SELECTION IN THIS THAN COCO STEVENSON.”Coco Stevenson
Gradually, Joseph began to feel confident, oriented in his new location, and in time able to feel at home. Stevenson looks back with satisfaction at the way in which Joseph’s sense of self developed in those early months at Lancaster University: “Each small step led to successes which in turn led to increased confidence and satisfaction. My mentee went from unsure and nervous to confident, assured and assuming various leadership roles, as well as achieving academic and social success.”
One of the core principles of Finito’s mentoring is that we want to be there for the long haul for our candidates. Coco and Joseph remained in touch as Joseph settled in, and Joseph still talks today of how the checklists and preparation that they made together helped him focus on his lecture content. The opportunity to join the Sober Society came up by chance, Joseph remembers: “The Sober Society isn’t a recovery program and does not require you to never drink alcohol but provides a safe space for non-drinkers to have fun and an alternative for those taking a break from alcohol. I was enjoying participating in the events the Society
had put on such as game and film nights.”
By regular attendance, Joseph soon discovered another opportunity: “It was announced at one of the events that the Society would soon be holding its annual hustings for the executive positions in the society,” he recalls. “As a new society formed only in that October of 2021, there were only two full-time members of the executive, so they were looking for more to fulfil other roles. It was suggested by a friend of mine that I should apply for treasurer. I was uncertain of this since I was concerned it would create more work than I would be able to handle at this early stage of my university life.”
By this point the mentor-mentee relationship was far advanced. “Upon a call to Coco, I was reminded of the advantages of holding such a position. Such positions are seen positively by future employers as leadership, commitment, and initiative. As one of the two candidates up for the position, I won the vote.”
Joseph’s tenure as treasurer of the Sober Society was a huge success. He presided over a period of expansion: “By the end of the first term, we had over 150 members. This meant we were already one of the larger societies on campus. Issues surrounding alcohol are close to our hearts within the executive, so we were ecstatic at our success.”
And this success in turn began to be noticed: “After the end of the 20212022 academic year, our president was contacted via our Instagram account by student blog Student Beans. They were interested in the values of our society and studying Sober Societies across the country. This was representative of our success.”
Joseph began to create plans for the future of the Sober Society and
for his own future, even planning a collaboration with other sober societies at Manchester Metropolitan University, with trips scheduled to destinations such as Edinburgh. In addition to this he also got a girlfriend.
But this is where the story shifts: unfortunately towards the end of his first year Joseph got into an incident at the university, an altercation in which a door handle was accidentally snapped, when Joseph reacted to something a fellow student had said about his girlfriend. Joseph wasn’t at fault – indeed had shown admirable judgement – but the situation sadly rattled him and he decided to intercalcate.
It was at this point that Finito deepened its involvement still further, as Coco voiced concerns with the Finito management about Joseph’s mental health. Mental health has been a core aspect of Finito World and we sought immediately to have him assessed by Paul Flynn, the brilliant CEO of leading mental health organisation AddCounsel.
Flynn explains: “When I spoke with Joseph he was on antidepressants, and my sense was that he had better support from Lancaster University than people usually get in these situations.”
Flynn then relayed his advice to us: “One of the challenges Joseph has is around resiliency: whether that links back to the way he’s wired up or not, it’s something that needs to be looked at. If it isn’t taken care of, then it will resurface. A very good CBT-based therapist should be able to support but so could a coach with expert knowledge of resilience skills.”
Before setting this up, we asked about Joseph’s desire. “When you get a coach you’ve got to be sure there’s that level of desire, and a wish to sort out a situation. I think that’s there or he wouldn’t have gone on the phone with me. But his
plan is to go back home, and there’s no real work plan. He needs structure.”
Enter Finito mentor Talan SkeelsPiggins, who is ideally placed to help students in this kind of situation. SkeelsPiggins’ story is unique and makes him an ideal fit for Joseph. Having been a PE teacher Skeels-Piggins suffered a terrible setback when he lost the use of his legs in a car accident. This, however, was the prelude to an astonishing display of fortitude, and he has gone on to be a Paralympian Olympic gold medalist in both motorcycling and skiing. He recently published a book The Little Person Inside which describes his extraordinary life.
Skeels-Piggins has been able to find meaning in a situation which would have defeated many others, and he seemed an ideal mentor for someone like Joseph struggling with mental health issues.
This means that Joseph has now embarked on a second mentor-mentee relationship, following on from his continuing association with Coco. Skeels-Piggins has begun to deepen his understanding of what Joseph actually wants, and been able to uncover too that some of the origins of his difficulties came during the pandemic when he spent less time in school than he would have liked.
In terms of the future Skeels-Piggins’ sense of Joseph’s outlook has crystallised during their sessions: “He needs to realise that he is enough by being Joseph, and not having to prove himself to be loved. This leads him onto the issue of not knowing what he needs to do for his future as he is only doing the current course because he felt pressure to go to Uni in order to please parents.”
After a later session, this began to deepen: “Joseph is not interested in the corporate world but wants to do
something; tangible, real, that you can see, be proud of, helps others and makes a difference in the world. He admits he is not interested in computers and would not want to get a job related to computers once out of Uni. When we were talking about litter-picking, pond cleaning projects and other ecologybased activities he had done in the past he began to show interest and smiled whilst reflecting about the events.”
Joseph therefore has a momentous decision ahead of him: whether to return to university or whether to choose another path altogether and look for a future related to the environment or sustainability.
When such things are at stake, it’s our experience at Finito that people will struggle to make a choice when they don’t have enough information at their fingertips. At such crucial moments, it can never be a bad thing – and will almost always be a good thing – to look for more information about what might work best.
Joseph’s stated interest in the environment and climate change caused us to think about people in our network who might be of use to Joseph and we approached the former Green Party leader Natalie Bennett to ask if she would be prepared to take a call with Joseph to take him through the options. She very generously assented and though the call will take place after this magazine has gone to press it is a measure of how far Joseph has come that the boy who was worried about fresher’s week is soon to talk to the former leader of a major political party. Joseph should be proud of that.
Joseph’s story is evolving all the time, but the support so far provided him would have been impossible without the commitment of two Bursary donors in particular, whose generosity has been
matched to Joseph’s needs.
In the first place, we would like to thank, Simon Blagden, CBE, Chair of Building Digital UK and former Chair of Fujitsu UK. Blagden says: “I served the Government’s advisory panel reviewing the future of technical education. During the two year process we met with hundreds of young people all over the country. I am delighted to support the work of Finito. The valuable work which you do strongly resonates with both students and their parents.”
Secondly we would like thank Dinesh Dhamija, who says: “I have been helping entrepreneurs through coaching and mentoring over the past 17 years. Finito’s focus on young people is admirable and I am proud to join their group in support. My own expertise is in the fast growing online Business to Consumer sector, and the green energy solar and hydrogen fields.” We hope to use this expertise in future when it comes to Joseph’s story.
Joseph has already come a long way. The way ahead isn’t clear, but is becoming clearer all the time. What’s certain is that we stand shoulder to shoulder with him as a business, and as a bursary, and are committed to his success.
Of all the things that can happen to you career-wise, to be born with the suspicion that you’d like to be a lawyer is one of the more benign developments imaginable. Salary expectations are good – and if you’re interested in legal problemsolving the work has the potential to be reliably interesting and intellectually rewarding.
There are other boons: for instance, there are reliable entry routes thanks to a highly regulated profession; later on there will be clear career progression – whether it be through to KC if you select the barrister route, or through to partner if you opt to be a solicitor.
But a legal career isn’t always plainsailing. Many students suspect the legal profession might be for them, but can’t initially decide whether they would prefer the essentially theatrical life of a barrister in court, or the weaving behind the scenes which tends to be the lot of the solicitor. Then once you decide that, there’s the further question of which areas to specialise in.
Khawar Qureshi KC is, without doubt, one of the world’s leading advocates, and therefore well-placed to answer questions Finito World readers will have about this area. In person he has a powerful quality – a sense of intellectual strength hits you rightaway – and there is also a sort of physical robustness, a leonine nimbleness, suggestive of someone who has been on their feet for much of their career. In this respect, barristers resemble orchestra conductors: physical and mental labour seem to go hand in hand.
The advocate has had a busy year, and recently opened the London office of
McNair International in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The launch of this was a fine event with a definite buzz about it, including a lecture by the revered Judge Abdulqawi Yusuf, a judge of the International Court of Justice and its former President until 2021 on ‘Why International Law Matters’. Finito World readers will not be surprised to know that in the era of the Russia-Ukraine conflict it still does.
So what does Qureshi most think is required to be a success in court? Qureshi doesn’t miss a beat: “In all walks of life where we assume responsibility for others, there must always be clarity and conviction to do the very best.” And what does this mean when it comes to the reality of being an advocate?
“As an advocate this means being able to assimilate information rapidly and assessing how best to convey the same to the specific audience - whether it be the International Court of Justice, millions of people watching a live broadcast of a politically charged case, an arbitral tribunal determining a multibillion dollar claim by a commercial entity against a State, or a domestic court dealing with sensitive intelligence
information. It has been an honour and privilege for me over the course of my career to undertake hundreds of case for parties all over the world- including these types of matters.”
So what does Qureshi have to say to young people on the perennial question of whether to be a solicitor or a barrister?
“In essence, the barrister who wishes to excel as an advocate must be highly selfreliant, be prepared to work exceptionally hard, enjoy and be stimulated by the prospect of unravelling complex factual and legal issues, so as to convey a case clearly and persuasively,” explains Qureshi. He adds: “No barrister can work effectively without an effective team and trust-based approach with solicitors who they work with. Solicitors work in firms and receive salaries, equity partners receiving profits from the firm. Barristers work from case to case.”
And no one has a case load quit like Qureshi’s case load: to talk with him is to be given numerous asides about matters which have just left his desk, or which are currently being dealt with. These matters all have in common, you sense, their enviability if one were a barrister, and
their bewildering complexity if you’re not.
To be in Qureshi’s company is to get a glimpse into an expertise whose enormity you can’t fathom: it’s like being in the company of a grandmaster chess player.
So what has he learned from dealing with governments worldwide? “I have acted for the UK Government on hundreds of complex and sensitive matters as an "A" Panel Treasury Counsel from 1999-2006 before taking Silk. I have also represented the USA, the Russian Federation, India as well as states such as Kazakhstan and Zambia, and been involved in matters for or against around 70 states in total. Advising and representing any Government is a great honour but comes with considerably more responsibility, as there is always a significant political element and the practical litigation insight available to sophisticated commercial parties may not always be present.”
For someone as gifted as Qureshi one might have assumed that he would consider a judicial career, but in fact he
isn’t presently considering it. “I enjoy advocacy in complex and challenging cases first and foremost. I enjoy the diversity of work that I am able to undertake for states and clients from all over the world embracing international law, arbitration, commercial litigation and fraud/regulatory matters. Just recently, I have undertaken a case before the High Court of Kenya for the DPP of Kenya against the Deputy Chief Justice of Kenya - the first time an English Silk was instructed to appear before the Courts of Kenya since independence in 1963. I had previously acted for a foreign investor against Kenya.”
So what in his opinion makes a good judge? Qureshi says: “A good judge is open-minded, fair and possessed of sound judgment, expertise, integrity and intellect as required to determine difficult issues - all to ensure that justice is done and the rule of law is always upheld.”
So what is it ultimately which drives him in his career? Qureshi, who is plainly possessed of an unusually omnivorous
intellect, talks about the way in which the flow of information has changed during the course of his career. “Whereas when I started, hard copy books were the norm, it is a rare treat (unfortunately) to visit a law library. There is now so much more information available through high-speed internet. The challenge is to be able to filter what is credible and relevant.”
In which direction does he think the law is currently headed? “Unfortunately, as legal practice has become more "business-like" due to influences that have seeped in, it is sadly increasingly rare to see "justice" and "the rule of law" as the touchstones for legal work (save, some might say, when lip service is being paid to them for "optics"). This is a very unfortunate trend which universities, the legal profession, judges and politicians have a responsibility to address. Legal practice is not a business in the conventional sense which it seems to be increasingly conforming to. Legal practice should always serve to promote human existence and interaction in a manner which protects the weak and vulnerable, not rewarding or being blind to the transgressions of the strong and powerful. Society at large will be much the worse if this trend is not arrested.”
It’s impossible not to be inspired by Qureshi’s new venture. So what’s the story behind it? “I strongly believe that international commercial lawyers who are like minded and share a passion for law and justice and enjoy undertaking challenging as well as stimulating work derive greater strength when they come together. McNair International exists to serve that purpose - for individuals from all over the world. I am delighted to have been given the responsibility to continue to take McNair International forward.” And meeting him, you’re left no doubt that he will – and that more success is around the corner.
Relocating can be a breath of fresh air, literally and figuratively. After decades of battling through the commute into the City of London, elbowing my way through the crowds of financiers and brokers, I find myself savouring the relaxed mood that blows in with the warm sea breeze here in Cyprus. However, don’t mistake Cyprus for a quiet business destination because nothing could be further from the truth. We just do things differently here. Or at least, we used to. As a coach this is something I love to pass on to my clients - that you don’t have to be stressed and work 24/7 to produce great results. As the economy here booms, we all need to remember that. It could be the key to ongoing success. There is a joke you might know about a big shot from Silicon Valley who complains about an Italian restaurant in Rome for opening five minutes late. The angry millionaire tells the owner, “The USA dominates the world because we always open on time!” and the restaurant owner replies “So what? We Romans used to dominate the world, but then we discovered if you make tomato sauce like mama, the world will come to you… and wait for you to open.” The moral of the story is quality and high performance don’t mean re-creating someone else’s recipe for success. It’s about finding your own path. So, what is the right path for booming Cyprus?
Finding the right path for Cyprus is more complex than it sounds. The Migration Department reports circa 9,000 relocations from international companies. This is reflected in our
economic growth. GDP is forecast to grow by around 3.3 per cent this year. Property prices have risen faster than GDP on average over the last five years and students and young executives are finding it hard to afford rent or affordable houses, particularly in the booming area of Limassol. We are resilient people, but now is the time for leadership to reduce the problems other boom countries within the EU have experienced before us.
Despite a slowdown in property investment since the abolition of the so-called Golden Passport route to citizenship last year, in 2022 the government introduced more favourable tax benefits for foreign companies to set up their headquarters in Cyprus and also introduced, "The Digital Nomad Scheme" enabling people to enjoy our beautiful weather and quality of life, while working for companies operating outside the country. The scheme aims to transform our business ecosystem by attracting talented individuals and entrepreneurs. This is hugely positive but begs the question of Cyprusthe last nation in the EU to set a minimum wage - how do we make sure homegrown talent benefits from the boom? Most young Cypriots report they can’t afford the rising rents or a night out with friends in downtown Limassol. If we learn from EU countries that experienced similar recent booms - in Central and Eastern Europe - two things become clear.
Firstly, company leaders need to focus on talent retention, because there is already a shortage of young local talent in our cities, and that will only get worse as more companies arrive. Holding onto
CYPRUS INTRODUCED "THE DIGITAL NOMAD SCHEME", ENABLING PEOPLE TO ENJOY OUR BEAUTIFUL WEATHER AND QUALITY OF LIFE, WHILE WORKING FOR COMPANIES OPERATING OUTSIDE THE COUNTRY.
the best new local hires and managing local talent will offer cost benefits over recruiting from outside Cyprus. Training and coaching reduces staff turnover dramatically (studies show 30-50%), so coaching for emerging Cypriot professionals should help to encourage them to build careers here, not leave for destinations where rents are cheaper to make their wages go further.
Secondly, if we want our young people to benefit from these opportunities, we need to invest in mental fitness and resilience. Young workers aged 18 to 30 are perceived to be under almost twice as much pressure as their more senior peers, being more likely to suffer from stress and worries about debt or struggling to pay their bills. If we
want to avoid a brain drain of young talent moving to cheaper parts of the EU, leaders need to offer coaching programmes that prioritise well-being, resilience, and mental health at work, in addition to talent retention programmes and rewarding loyalty with competitive salaries.
There has never been a more exciting time to live and work in Cyprus, but leading effectively through rapid growth - and change - means learning from previous EU regional booms to avoid storing up problems for ourselves in the future. That’s how we do things in the more relaxed, older and wiser cultures of the Mediterranean, isn’t it?
Sophia Petrides is a Finito mentor who recently relocated to Cyprus
THERE HAS NEVER BEEN A MORE EXCITING TIME TO LIVE AND WORK IN CYPRUSLimassol Marina (www.limassolmarina.com) Limassol Promenade (chooseyourcyprus.com)
After many years loving life in London followed by working for seven years in glitzy, noisy and brash Las Vegas, moving to this small island in the Irish Sea was quite an adjustment. That was back in 2009. I may now have acquired “stop-over” status rather than being seen as a mere “come-over.” There are thousands of both categories - many linked to financial services or eGaming. However, like the UK, the island needs more new arrivals to fill vacancies, especially in the health service. Helping people like me to relocate was Mary Linehan of BLocal, who you can find more about at b-localiom.com.
The Isle of Man is an independent nation and not part of the UK. In Tynwald, it has the world’s longest continuous running Parliament, dating back over 1000 years. The Government issues Manx passports but remains a Crown Dependency, having strong ties with the UK. However, when referring to the UK, islanders will say “I’ve been across” or “I’ve been to England but will never say: “I’ve been to the mainland.”
The M-word is a big no-no!
Our island is much larger than Malta, Jersey or Guernsey and is dominated by rolling hills, forests and wonderful sea views. With a population of around 85,000, the island is similar in size to Singapore which has approaching six million people. Beautiful green space we have in abundance.
In June 2022, a report by KPMG, confirmed that we have a larger economy by GDP than either Jersey or Guernsey. In 2021, the Government’s report “Our Island, Our Future” targeted a population of 100,000 by 2037. New arrivals are
needed to boost and diversify the economy. The population is ageing and with unemployment in handful figures, the need is for newcomers, especially families, to start a new life in a safe, welcoming and environmentally aware community. While the island welcomes retirees, the main need is for a larger and younger working population. Covid-19 brought a stream of new residents, snapping up properties off-plan.
The island has a reputation as a respected and well-regulated financial centre and is especially strong in insurance with many corporate service providers. A bespoke fund, corporate and private wealth provider such as Suntera Global https:// www.suntera.com/ has its substantial international engine-room in our capital city Douglas. Such a business provides a wide array of international advice and support, perhaps involving e-Gaming, property, trusts, jets and super-yachts. As one of the world’s few blue-chip eGaming centres, this sector has been a major boost during the past 14 years. Global giants like Pokerstars and Microgaming are headquartered here along with the likes of Celton Manx.
There is some light engineering and manufacturing industry, such as Strix, a world leader in kettle safety controls. Regulated cultivation of medicinal cannabis commenced in 2021. Crypto has also been embraced though, currently, what the future holds is less clear than once it was.
In Ballasalla, an easy commute into Douglas, Dandara (you can find more at www.dandara.com) is offering new-builds of 3-4 bedrooms for just over £400,000. Castletown, the ancient capital is close by.
Rural properties generally range from around £300,000 to multi-millions, the latter providing country estates for international HNWs who take advantage of the highly attractive tax regime. The rental market is buoyant with demand being high from financial institutions and the eGaming sector. There are two hospitals – one on the outskirts of Douglas and the other at the northern part of the island in Ramsey. Just like the UK, the hospitals currently struggle to attract consultants and nurses. Under a deal with the UK, residents needing specialist care, such as for heart operations, are flown at public expense to Manchester or Liverpool, just 40 minutes away.
In a changing society, the demands on and for teachers present all the problems similar to the UK. Children from here gravitate to the universities across the water and may be eligible for some financial support. University College Isle of Man (UCM) has offerings for 14–16-year-olds through to Advanced
Education.
There are two ferries linking the island to Liverpool, Heysham, Dublin and Belfast. A new vessel, the Manxman, is being completed now in South Korea and will soon be improving travel facilities. The airport caters for private jets as well as commercial airlines. There are flights including to Heathrow, Gatwick, London City, Manchester, Liverpool, Bristol, Birmingham and Scotland. Direct charter flights offer travel into Europe at peak seasons. Cheap flights were plentiful before Covid-19. Now, with soaring energy costs and staff shortages, prices have risen whether by air or when taking a car by ferry to Liverpool.
I was told before my arrival that there was no crime and although that is not strictly accurate, most residents do not feel threatened by real risks of burglary, rapes or murder - such as cause increasing concern in the UK’s major conurbations and even smaller urban communities. Even here, there will always be a criminal element but parents have far less cause to worry about their children’s welfare than in the UK’s major cities. Sadly, the Isle of Man is not drug-free. Pushers and dealers from the UK have seen to that but if caught, sentences can be severe.
Commuting is a doddle for anyone more used to long tailbacks around the big cities or standstills on the M6 motorway. For eating out, the number and quality of restaurants has also improved since 2009. Now with Greek, Chinese, Turkish, Japanese, Italian and French offerings, the choice is considerably wider.
There are two cinemas, a casino and two main entertainment centres where every taste of live music or theatre is catered for.
Well-known sporting and entertainment celebrities are regulars appearing at the venues or charity events. Entering the Villa Gaiety is like being back in London’s
West End. The magnificent building was designed by the celebrated architect Frank Matcham, whose legacy lives on around London’s theatreland.
The renowned TT motorbike races attract over 35,000 visitors to watch these fearless competitors race through town and country on our winding roads at mindboggling speeds. They cover the 37 miles in about 17 minutes – averaging over 135mph. It takes me over an hour longer. There is an excellent sports centre and football, rugby, hockey and cricket all thrive, along with the other indoor sports. Cycling on our roads was also the starting point for Olympic Gold medalliststhe legendary Mark Cavendish and Peter Kennaugh. There are several good golf courses including the challenging Castletown Golf Links, now rated number 261 in the world. Walking paths abound. While strolling round the bays, whether on beaches or clifftops, seals, dolphins, whales and sharks and seabirds can sometimes add to the pleasure.
It is typically never as cold nor as hot as most of England. Sadly, there are too few gloriously sunny days. When they do come, the blue sea and swaying palm trees mean there are few better sights anywhere. If it is wet, cloudy and blustery, then perhaps its time to sort out the annual Tax Return – a far less demanding task than in the UK.
Except for VAT, the Manx Government fixes its own tax rates and policies. Starting at 10 per cent and only rising to 20 per cent, income tax is far less than the UK’s 45 per cent top rate. Even better, for the world’s HNWs, the maximum tax payable by a single person on global income is only £200,000 – a bargain that attracts many to live in grand homes, hidden away amidst the hills and glens. The island operates in lockstep with the UK on VAT, something that can be advantageous or sometimes a negative for international business.
For most companies, the rate of corporation tax is 0 per cent, tax only being taken via dividends on withdrawals. There is no stamp duty land tax, no capital gains tax and no inheritance tax – benefits that attract many to take up residence. The income in Manx Trusts can roll up tax-free.
Strand Street, the main shopping centre in Douglas, is scarcely the Trafford Centre, Bluewater or London’s Bond Street. However, most needs are catered for onisland through stores such as Marks & Spencer, Tesco, Next, Currys and B&Q. Otherwise, many shoppers get their fix on away-days in Liverpool or Manchester, sometimes combined with supporting the great football teams in those cities. There’s plenty to love about life on this island.
IN
If genius is to do with fluidity and effortlessness then Paul Cézanne wasn’t a genius at all. This isn’t meant to be derogatory to Cézanne. Sometimes in great achievement we can still see the graft that went into it – a sense that things were never straightforward, and that nothing was ever arrived at in a flash.
That kind of achievement deserves a respect distinct from the awe we feel at genius when it has less hindrance attached to it. We can see in Van Gogh and Picasso that mark-making came unusually easily to them: mistakes were simply not in their nature and that there was an unusually easy relationship between world, eye and hand which almost always added up to something worthwhile.
It wasn’t like that for Cézanne. A new show at the Tate shows how long it took for Cézanne to become Cézanne. If you’ve ever thought in your career that you have something to offer, but that it might be a long time coming to fruition, then visit this exhibition and make the artist your patron saint.
The exhibition should be viewed in tandem with reading Alex Danchev’s marvellous Cézanne: A Life (2012), now experiencing a muted 10th anniversary. This book gives vital biographical detail which the placards in the exhibition don’t have time to cover.
So who was Cézanne? Cézanne grew up in Aix-en-Provence where he would eventually die: he is one of those who doesn’t need to travel much because
he suspects the substance of what he has to do lies not in travel but in stasis. To broaden the terms of reference of life would be to create an insoluble complexity; but to stay still and really pay attention might just lead you to a coup. That was the Cézanne wager. But early on in Danchev’s biography you learn that Cézanne was defined by a coincidence: he went to school with the novelist Emile Zola. This relationship – which isn’t paramount in the Tate
Modern’s exhibition – is nevertheless the chief biographical fact about him. Many people who are creative or successful are influenced to an extent they might not wish to admit by chance. For the future painter, given to a certain sluggishness, one gets the sense it was important to have the rocket fuel of a close friendship with Zola right at the beginning.
Cézanne had his influences among the dead too: Rubens, Leonardo, Puget, Delacroix. But a great friendship can be an accelerator of development and it appears to have been so in this case. It also reminds us that Cézanne’s talent wasn’t necessarily pictorial in the first instance. In fact, Zola appears to have always harboured a secret sense that Cézanne would have
been a better writer than he was. Here is Danchev:
On Zola’s side there was a certain sense of inferiority, perhaps early acknowledged and then long submerged. After leaving school he dreamed of writing a kind of prequel to Jules Michet’s L’Amour (1858): “if I consider it worthy of publication, I’ll dedicate it to you,” he wrote to Cézanne, “who would perhaps do it better, if you were to write it, you whose heart is younger and more affectionate than mine.” This is a fascinating letter, especially in light of the subsequent difficulties which would later beset their friendship. Danchev makes it clear that on Zola’s side, these feelings of insecurity were a sort of time bomb which would detonate far later with the publication of Zola’s L’Oeuvre But it is also interesting in that it opens up onto the possibility that Cézanne’s first gift wasn’t painterly at all – instead, in the opinion of his friend, it lay elsewhere. Zola seems to suggest he was made of the sort of stuff that can turn itself to any task.
Was this true? There seems to be something in Zola’s assessment. In Danchev’s biography, we read a fascinating description of Cézanne’s attainments at school. We glimpse a general talent which would find in the end a singular outlet, and not a unique aptitude for the thing for he would eventually become known.
Danchev writes:
He [Cézanne] was a prize-winning pupil. At the ceremony at the end of the first year (when he was 14), he won first prize for arithmetic, and gained a first honourable mention for Latin translation and a second honourable mention for history and geography, and for calligraphy. The years rolled by in like fashion. In the fifth grade he won second prize for overall excellence (after Baille), first prize for Latin translation, second prize for Greek translation, a first honorable mention for painting…
The 15 year old who has a first prize in Latin can be a Latinist as much as a painter later in life, and there’s always the sense in Cézanne’s life that there was something arbitrary and quixotic about his decision to be a painter at all.
But this arbitrariness itself goes into the mix and forms part of his achievement. The sense is that only someone with a certain amount of ground to make up would consider to focus with the kind of ardour which Cézanne did on just a few subjects: his bowls of apples belie a determination to really look at the world which is different somehow from Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’, wrestled with by an artist of genius and then not subsequently returned to.
Paul Joyce, the brilliant photographer and painter, agrees with this assessment, telling me: “I think art came with difficulty to Cézanne and I have the impression he struggled a great deal with perfecting his vision. My guess is that he destroyed more work than he actually exhibited or finished.”
This is certainly the impression one gets in the Tate exhibition. The first rooms see Cézanne groping for an identity as an artist, and while this is always the case with anybody’s early work, it
could be argued that the greater the artist’s eventual achievement, the more unlikely it seems at the beginning. An image like The Murder, where Caravaggio-esque lighting and the ghoulishness of El Greco’s figures combines to make an image which teaches us in one fell swoop why Cézanne would never make a drama painter. The murder in this picture doesn’t matter to the painter as an apple or a mountain would later do. Ruction and disaster didn’t appeal to Cézanne as subjects. This isn’t to call him heartless; probably quite the opposite. It might be that he felt the calamity of murder too keenly to produce a valid picture depicting it; certainly he couldn’t look at it in the same way as he would find he could look at a bather. But then, aside from a murderer, who can?
But if The Murder was a failure of sorts, it was a promising one. Crucially, it must have been sufficiently promising to Cézanne, since he kept going. This fact alone is a reminder that perseverance is rarely rational: without it, nothing would ever be achieved. Persistence needs to be innate: if we weren’t wired to dream, few would rationally continue with their first efforts, since in the ordinary scheme of things these tend to be extraordinarily unpromising.
Success, then, is often against the grain. At the Tate Modern, a selfportrait of Cézanne against a pink background dating to 1875 seems to contain this knowledge. The colours of the face are applied with a delicate care which reminds you of the fragility of any human face, composed of little strokes which happen to be together, and which might just as easily rush apart. The eyes, tired as if with too much looking, also seem vulnerable: ambivalent about the tasks ahead, doubtful about the likelihood of self-
“I THINK ART CAME WITH DIFFICULTY TO CÉZANNE AND I HAVE THE IMPRESSION HE STRUGGLED A GREAT DEAL WITH PERFECTING HIS VISION.”
fulfilment. It’s an arresting intimate image, bringing a fragile ego near. This portrait might give us permission to make inroads in our own lives, since we can see that one of the great names in history didn’t always seem confident of his value.
John Updike once wrote a review of a Jackson Pollock show which began very unpromisingly and then transformed itself in about Room Three, with the advent of the famous drip paintings. “Beauty, how strange to find it here!” Updike exclaimed in that article. One wants to exclaim the same in the Tate exhibition as the exhibition ripens in its last rooms.
By this point, Cézanne has found his subjects: bathers, Mont Saint-Victoire and of course his famous apples. When I ask Paul Joyce what he has learned from these masterworks he replies: “There are really too many lessons to learn from Cézanne to simply list, and as you return to him and his work as your own career as a painter progresses, you realise that what you may barely grasp from him is that the closer you look, the more you see. Colour, balance, fluidity of brush stroke, command of the subject, ability to build “atmosphere” and movement into a still, flat canvas amongst many more things.” That’s a good summary of what these last rooms offer. One might add that Cézanne, though he looked hard at the world, always looked with a consciousness of the limitations imposed on looking. A humility pervades his work, which is a possible reason for his popularity today. It is the genius as everyman, which makes us wonder if mightn’t we be great too.
His popularity may be set to grow again. Cézanne lived without too much pizzazz, and may therefore be an attractive figure in our own cost of
living crisis. Danchev cites some evidence that the painter came to feel that his friend Zola, showered with plaudits in Paris, had come to live too grandly. Cézanne never did that; his was a quiet existence dedicated to work.
Nevertheless, though Zola is less admired today than Cézanne, this work ethic was an example which he had had all along from Zola himself. The novelist wrote to Cézanne when he was 21 that ‘in the artist, there are two men, the poet and the worker. One is born a poet, one becomes a worker.’
To some extent, Zola heeded his own advice: his complete works comprise a formidable number of volumes, most of them fat. He might be one of those writers who makes shelves groan more than he makes readers dream. The friendship between them reminds us that work for its own sake can lead to an inferior achievement: sometimes it can really be volubility. It was once said in relation to Proust that a bore is someone who tells you everything, and perhaps Zola was a bit like that.
“IT IS THE GENIUS AS EVERYMAN, WHICH MAKES US WONDER IF MIGHTN’T WE BE GREAT TOO.”
In relation to Cézanne, one senses a greater focus – a more coherent and patient mindset about the task which needs to be accomplished. This had also, to an extent, been pre-empted by Zola who wrote to his friend in 1877 regarding his work: “Such strong and true canvases can make the bourgeois smile, nonetheless they show the makings of a very great painter. Come the day when M. Paul Cézanne achieves complete self-mastery, he will produce works of indisputable superiority.’ Though this might have been to damn him with faint praise, something like this prediction did in fact come true.
What was that legacy? Cézanne realised his own way of looking. Too often we tend to think of him as a staging-post in the history of art, but I don’t think this is quite right. All artists worth their salt do something unrepeatably unique. Too often, we compare them to those who came before and after, meaning we don’t properly take the measure of what’s in
front of us. Maybe this is especially a problem with Cézanne, not only because he really does have antecedents and a legacy, but because something about his pictures feels hard to rise to. There are those whose opinion one respects, who would say: “Oh God, not another Mont Saint-Victoire”. We feel we cannot match his intensity and so we turn away.
What is his art ultimately about? The great landscapes flaunt the strokes by which they were compiled and yet each individual stroke, which seems so apparently simple, adds to the alchemy of the whole. This art then comprises more than just a series of fragmented strategies: they’re shot through instead with honesty about our predicament as creatures dwarfed by the scale and complexity of things. That means that his landscapes and his apples are really unusual kinds of self-portraits because they are as much about the insecure position of the painter – and his integrity to admit that insecurity – as they are about the
“THE GREAT LANDSCAPES FLAUNT THE STROKES BY WHICH THEY WERE COMPILED AND YET EACH INDIVIDUAL STROKE SEEMS SO APPARENTLY SIMPLE.”
mountain or fruit which he is ostensibly depicting.
Van Gogh’s condition as a genius likely suffering from bipolar disorder was always impinging on his work. Cézanne was saying something else: that we’re all standing on shifting ground. It’s the kind of thing which, once said, has to be admitted by everyone. This accounts for his influence, and this has carried into the present day. There is some anxiety attached to high achievers: we think we might not be able to outdo them, and feel our own efforts likely to be paltry when set next to theirs. One can easily guess what Cézanne himself would have made of such a defeatist attitude. He would have liked the mantra of Sir Kingsley Amis: KBO (Keep Buggering On).
Paul Joyce tells me: “Artists are always anxious whatever their reputation or state of maturity may be. Each generation is influenced by the previous one and the History of Art is simultaneously one of constant homage and theft. My answer would be “be anxious, be influenced, then set out on your own path, like Cezanne!”
It’s sound advice – and you don’t need to be a budding artist to heed it.
Like many, I started playing chess during the lockdowns to break the monotony of endless media consumption and to give my brain something to do other than worry and slowly rot away. Here at Finito World, we believe that important lessons can often come from unlikely sources.
Chess isn’t only something to learn, it is something to learn from. Chess teaches us how to deal with and learn from failure, to teach compassionately. It also trains concentration. These are all possible reasons why it’s such a rapidly expanding industry brimming with possibilities and career opportunities.
Lately of course, chess has gone out of the chess pages into the entertainment and even the front pages. First there was the Netflix series The Queen’s Gambit (2020), starring Ana Taylor-Joy as a chess prodigy, which brought the sport – if in fact it could be called a sport – onto people’s radar. Now in 2022, we have witnessed the cheating scandal, which led to the lawsuit between the current world champion Magnus Carlsen and Hans Niemann, about which more later.
So let’s say you become interested in the game. Can chess be a career? At the grandmaster level, there is a lot of the money to be made from tournaments
alone; Carlsen’s current net worth is estimated at $50 million. But the prize money is still good lower down the chess food chain. Chess.com awards $20,000 in prizes every weekend, $1M in the global championship, and every Tuesday sees $5,000 in total prizes as part of the Titled Tuesdays event. In-person events such as the Sinquefield Cup also have prizes in the high six-digit range. There are possibilities also in the media. The renowned player Hikaru Nakamura makes a very good living not only by playing in tournaments but also by streaming chess-related content on Twitch. Chess is often seen as one of
those routes in life which you find yourself in because the game came unusually naturally from a young age. However, there are now more jobs out there than you might think, and you don’t need to be a grandmaster to get in on the action.
Other than a few games with friends I had never played over the board, so I was eager to see what attending an actual chess club was all about. I am not a very good player (about 900 ELO for those familiar with the chess ranking system). I feared that the environment may be unwelcoming, but after a Tuesday evening at Battersea Chess Club, I realised my anxieties had been misplaced.
Leon Watson is fully immersed in both the online and in person – or in chess parlance over-the-board (OTB) – chess worlds. He serves both as Secretary of the Battersea Chess Club and as Head of PR for world champion Magnus Carlsen’s online chess teaching venture Play Magnus Group.
“We are one of the biggest chess clubs in London, and one of the oldest chess clubs in London,” he tells me.
“We formed in 1885, and we've been a fixture in the community for all that time. We've survived two World Wars, and we continue going to this day. We cater to everyone from casual players to very serious players, from beginners to grandmasters. We’ve got members ranging from age seven to 92, and these people are all from different backgrounds. Some members are really struggling in life, and others are high-flying city bankers. That’s what’s great about chess; It doesn’t matter what age you are, your background or your gender, it’s a game where you can come in, sit down, have a pint or an orange juice, and just have some fun or take it seriously. It’s up to you,” Watson says.
required to walk in cold to a chess club surely exercises the same parts of the brain as a job interview, and the carefully considered strategy required to play the game itself represents a meditative disconnection from the outside world that is becoming ever harder to find in our busy lives. Watson too has seen the benefits that chess can bring, both to himself and his family.
“There are lots of benefits to chess,” he continues. ”Of course there is the social aspect, but there are also claims that chess is very good for educational reasons. I’m not an education specialist, but I personally find it very helpful for learning to focus and concentrate on things, and that helps me in life. I also have a seven-year-old son who’s learning chess, and I feel like it is helping him focus… hopefully on his schoolwork! A grandmaster has lost more games of chess than I’ll ever play in my life, but the thing about chess is that you can take a game that you’ve lost, analyse it, look at your mistakes and make sure you don’t make them again. I think that’s a great lesson for life, and as a dad I hope that I can impress that upon my kids.”
Both myself and my opponents that evening took the “just have some fun” approach, and there was never a hint of pretension or ego. The confidence
Helping people make the transition from playing online to over-the-board is something that the kind folks at Battersea Chess Club excel at. Though new OTB players must learn how a chess clock works and remember not to touch a piece unless they plan to move it, the game itself is of course unchanged. The experience, however, changes greatly. You can play slow, contemplative chess online, but it is much easier to do so if your opponent is in front of you and your environment is free from distraction. Online games are excellent for practicing faster time controls, and online game analysis is an indispensable tool for improvement, but the social and mental benefits of OTB chess are far more applicable to daily life.
“THAT’S WHAT’S GREAT ABOUT CHESS; IT DOESN’T MATTER WHAT AGE YOU ARE, YOUR BACKGROUND OR YOUR GENDER.”
Since the dawn of the internet, people have wanted to play chess online. There have been many interesting offerings which provide this service, including caissa.com, chess24, the fully free site Lichess, and play-by-email options dating back to the 1970s. Now, Chess. com is the most popular chess website in the world.
The website, which was launched in 2005, has been instrumental in the growth of chess, and is now the largest chess website with around 93 million users. International Master Danny Rensch helped found Chess.com. As someone with experience both playing and teaching chess, he realised the potential for a website which combined chess training, casual play, and tournaments which would attract the strongest players from around the world.
“I learned to play when I was 10 and I was quickly made aware that I had a knack for the game, and I got good
very quickly,” Rensch recalls. “Knowing what I know now about the levels of chess, it's not necessarily fair to say I was some sort of child prodigy, but I was definitely one of the best players in the US at one point.” So what path did his career take? “At around the age of 19 I had some health problems and was kind of forced to stop playing and travelling, which turned out to be a really important, pivotal crossroads in my life. I jumped allin to running a chess teaching business in Arizona where I’m from, which was an after school scholastic enrichment programme. It was sort of the traditional professional chess player’s gambit at the time.”
Teaching chess is an extremely common way for professional chess players to monetise their talents, and now online teaching has become the norm. With the Queen’s Gambit came millions of people new to the game who were eager to improve. Rensch has found that the best teachers seek to understand how their
students think rather than focusing solely on accuracy and rote memorisation.
Rensch tells me what he has learned as a teacher, and what he says can apply to many of us: “Honesty without tact can at times be cruel or disingenuous. But at the same time, explanation without understanding of whether someone can digest the information is also not useful. You have to have an appreciation for what the next steps are for someone's learning process rather than just saying the answer, because anyone can understand the answer to an algebraic or calculus equation in the back of the book, but your ability to solve it is a muscle that you build along the way. You don't expect someone to read before they understand how to sound out letters and syllables and vowels and put them together, right?”
So what skills do you ultimately need to succeed at chess? Rensch explains: “People always approach chess as a thing for people with brilliant IQs as if it’s an unsolvable problem – which
it is, in many ways – but the core of being a good chess player is pattern recognition. You can't expect people to see patterns that are complex before they see basic patterns. I think a good teacher appreciates the need to reach someone at their level of understanding and cares more about them taking the next step in their learning process than they do about whether they're ultimately right.”
This understanding of what it takes to teach effectively can be translated to life outside of chess, of course. Compassion and understanding are hallmark traits of a good educator in any field, and Rensch realised in the relatively early days of the internet that this teaching style could be delivered to a far wider audience online than in person. Rensch’s vision led him to look into online options, and through a chance encounter, to Chess.com.
He recalls: “I was running this chess teaching business and putting most of my energy into that rather than travelling due to my health problems, but then the internet happened. The world was changing rapidly before our eyes, and I think I quickly saw the internet in terms of what it could be for chess in a non-traditional sense. I was immediately looking to build an online chess business, so having learned about SEO and keyword optimisation I went to get the domain name ‘Chess. com’. And there, like ships in the night, I found that my eventual business partners and co-founders Erik and Jay had just acquired the domain name out of bankruptcy in the Bay Area.”
And at what stage were Erik and Jay at with Chess.com when Rensch came along? “Their vision for chess.com was to be the MySpace of chess, and my vision was for it to be a place for professionals to coach and to teach, as well as a place for tournaments. When
I came on board, within about a year after launching, I was always pushing things in this direction, and that’s why when Erik, Jay and I talk about it I’m considered an honorary co-founder.”
Now, Chess.com is a platform which allows people to play, teach, communicate, and entertain. Before platforms like it existed, the only way to enter the chess world was to attend a chess club or read chess publications to improve your game.
Chess, of course, used to have its strong geopolitical overtones. Without a large emphasis on chess in the US, Bobby Fischer’s rise to fame and his eventual crowning as World Champion seemed a perfect illustration of American exceptionalism during the Cold War. It also came at a time when chess was highly politicised. The 1972 World Chess Championship wasn’t merely a game between two men, Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky, it was a battle
“THE CORE OF BEING A GOOD CHESS PLAYER IS ABOUT PATTERN RECOGNITION.”
between the US and the Soviet Union. Fischer’s success was attributed to the mind of a prodigy, a rare chess genius who was born in America.
But, of course, intelligence and prodigy are spread across all nations. Now, the accessibility of the chess world is beginning to allow these prodigies who would otherwise be unknown to reach their full potential.
Rensch explains: “Traditionally, before online chess existed, if you didn't have a very rich chess culture in your backyard, you had no chance of developing into a top player. Even Bobby Fischer was in New York - Greenwich Village and the Marshall Chess Club were a block away from where he lived - and so he grew up around the best of chess in the US at the time. There's a reason that all of history has seen dominance by Soviet chess players. And I say Soviet because it's not just Russia, it's all former Soviet states. At the peak of the regime, chess
was a state-sponsored sport throughout all of these countries, which is why until Bobby Fischer you saw only Soviet world champions. After Bobby Fischer, we had Kasparov and Karpov, and they were great players, but since then we’ve had Viswanathan Anand from India, we've had Magnus Carlsen from Norway, and I would say that we are on the verge of potentially having a Chinese World Champion in Ding Liren. But regardless of the label of world champion, what we have are prodigies rising from all over the world because of their access to the best chess players. What’s happening online is actually changing the game”.
Chess coaching was, and still is, a major way for players to earn enough money to compete, but now online tournaments also offer that chance. As we will explore later, this has led to some significant challenges in terms of ensuring fairness. Rensch is confident in Chess.com’s
robust anti-cheat methods and explains how the good that these tournaments bring outweighs the risk of misconduct.
“Just to talk directly about the elephant in the room in terms of anti-cheating and the scandals that currently face the chess world, people don't know that we've been dealing with scandals effectively and appropriately,” Rensch says. “It has allowed us to continue to invest and increase the money that's in the game, and therefore the opportunities for professionals and therefore the livelihood of coaches, and who knows what trickle effect that's having downstream on the next generation.”
The sudden increase of interest in chess following The Queen’s Gambit formed an unlikely link between the worlds of chess and e-sports, and the pandemic ensured
a captive audience. Now, chess streaming is a multi-million-pound industry which is only growing. Grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura, who is one of the best players in the world, streams on Twitch, interacting with fans and providing funny, insightful commentary. International Master Levy Rozman, who goes by GothamChess online, has provided countless free lessons on YouTube and frequently streams games, and reviews the games of his followers. The Botez sisters, IM Eric Rosen, and many more have become stars of the chess world, both for their skill on the chessboard and through their engaging personalities. Not only is online streaming a way for people to interact with top chess players like never before, it is also yet another way to make money in a field where it was once so difficult. Danny Rensch believes chess streaming’s influence goes beyond mere entertainment.
“I think chess players are approaching the game in a much more social way, not just online but because the community has grown,” he explains. “I would say that's another reason why technology has been
so good for chess, because it's brought these communities together. Chess has merged communities that existed locally in pockets all around the world. You had the Detroit chess community and the Moscow chess community. Well, guess what? Now you can actually see them online together at the same time, sometimes on camera with a grandmaster from Michigan playing against a grandmaster from Russia. And there's something really cool and unique and challenging about that, and it’s pushing people's stereotypes of chess players.”
At first glance, there is something slightly surreal about seeing the Twitch stream format applied to chess. Watching streamers yell into their microphones, fully hyped up about what many consider to be a quiet, dignified game has an element of the absurd to it, but on closer examination, it’s really not that strange. Twitch streaming is one of the main forms of next generation content taking hold today, and many young people are interested in chess,
“I THINK CHESS PLAYERS ARE APPROACHING THE GAME IN A MUCH MORE SOCIAL WAY, NOT JUST ONLINE.”
so the marriage of the two is simply a natural progression.
What is unique about streaming chess is that you don’t have to be a master at the game. It certainly helps, but there are plenty of streamers who have a relatively low rating – it's their personality and ability to entertain which keeps people watching, not their skill. For the first time ever, there is a way to make money and gain popularity from chess without teaching lessons or playing major tournaments, and it is a new industry begging for further exploration.
If you’ve seen chess in the headlines recently, that’s probably the doing of Grandmaster Hans Niemann. In what has become the biggest story to hit the chess world in many years, the major cheating scandal involving a $100m lawsuit against top players and Chess. com has taken many turns and is at the time of writing unresolved.
Hans Niemann is a 19-year-old chess player who has shown remarkable skill and progression. He achieved the title of Grandmaster at only 17, and he has since gone on to perform well in top-level competitions against other extremely highly rated players. The scandal began when Niemann beat current World Champion Magnus Carlsen in the prestigious Sinquefield Cup tournament, breaking Carlsen’s 53-game winning streak. Even more remarkably, Niemann beat Carlsen while playing with the black pieces, putting him at a disadvantage as the player with the white pieces makes the first move. During Niemann and Carlsen’s matchup the next day, Carlsen made one move against Niemann then resigned and withdrew from the tournament. This led to wild
speculation online and prompted Carlsen to author a cryptic tweet which implied he was in “big trouble” if he spoke out.
The plot would soon thicken. Niemann admitted to cheating in his chess career while playing online, once when he was 12 and multiple times when he was 16 to grow his online streaming career, but he insists that he has never cheated in an OTB game, and that he does not cheat now. This was already known at the time of the NiemannMagnus scandal, but it prompted a further review by Chess.com, analysing Niemann’s games on the website for signs of irregularity. Niemann’s Chess.com account was closed, and he was banned from competing in the upcoming Chess.com Global Championship before the release of a damning report which asserted that he had cheated over 100 times on the website. The alleged online cheating occurred in games against other top players, while Niemann was streaming his games, and in events with large prizes attached to them. The report was careful to point out that Chess.com had no concrete evidence of any cheating OTB at the Sinquefield Cup, and stressed that Carlsen’s team had not pressured them to take action against Niemann. On October 20th, 2022, Niemann filed a $100m defamation lawsuit against Chess.com and Magnus Carlsen. Describing “devastating damages that Defendants have inflicted upon his reputation, career, and life by egregiously defaming him and unlawfully colluding to blacklist him from the profession to which he has dedicated his life,” Niemann seeks damages and vindication for what he sees as a massive attack on his livelihood. It is unclear what will be proven should the case go to court, but top players have predicted that finding
evidence of cheating will be extremely difficult. However it’s another sign that as the chess industry grows, it will encompass more and more jobs: chess PRs, and chess litigators were unthinkable in the Fischer era, but now here we are.
Many media outlets have reported that cheating represents an existential threat to chess, but chess experts insist that cheating is not as prevalent as reported. Large-scale cheating would threaten the sport, however online cheating is already fairly easy to detect, so it is far more likely that we will see higher security measures and new methods of cheat detection at OTB tournaments. These could include a time-delay between live play and broadcast, which would make it difficult to run chess positions through an engine in real time, and it is also possible that players could compete in a Faraday cage which eliminates cellular and radio frequencies.
Despite the drama, it is clear that chess is here to stay. The game which has fascinated mankind for over 1500 years continues to do so today, and there is clearly a reason why people keep playing. The mental and social benefits of chess cannot be ignored, and as an industry it clearly has room for growth. The new horizons of online streaming, teaching, and playing allows the game to be accessible to anyone with an internet connection, and chess entertainment has proved to be an excellent way to monetise a love of chess and the talent of charismatic presentation.
The world of chess is very much worth diving into, and the breadth of opportunities available is surprising, so if you think chess could be for you or you think you might want to return to the game after many years away, there’s only one thing to say: your move.
We sometimes talk as a society as though being successful were the beall and end-all – as if it were all that mattered in and of itself. Around the middle of the 20th century, the cry went up that fame was the thing. In the world of music, everybody sought that Holy Grail: the hit, the platinum disc.
The history of rock and roll makes it clear in the boldest font imaginable that fame is often far from desirable. Success as a musician, for instance, though it has always bestowed wealth, can lead to an early death. From Keith Moon and Jimi Hendrix all the way to Michael Hutchence and Amy Winehouse, death seemed to be the quid pro quo of success.
But by the 2020s, the whole enterprise seems a little less dangerous. We now have a spate of octogenarians, including Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Paul McCartney, and Brian Wilson, all of whom somehow managed to survive the ordeal of fame. If you can somehow manage not to die, then a hedonistic lifestyle can shade by gradations of mellowing into a pampered one, until a kind of creased longevity is achieved.
But today’s pop stars also feel cleaner living: it is slightly harder to imagine Harry Styles or Taylor Swift checking
Wikipedia.org
out early, and not unimaginable that we shall one day be asked to celebrate their hundredth birthdays.
It’s these developments which makes Baz Luhrmann’s biopic Elvis feel like a genuine period piece. Elvis – who of course did die young or youngish – was a kind of guinea pig. He had to shoulder a new kind of fame, and unlike the Beatles, who at least had each other, he had to do so more or less alone. In fact, his death lacks the Chatterton-esque Romanticism of some of his peers, since he declined physically to such an extent before his eventual demise. He didn’t flame out, but instead grew fat.
But the Elvis legend persists because of the enormity of his impact, and Baz Luhrmann’s excellent film is especially good at evoking the cauldron of forces by which he emerged, and then the sheer oddity of his eventual fate.
Listening to Elvis today can be a perplexing, even tame experience. Though we still to some extent inhabit the world of Elvis, we don’t always realise it: for one thing recording technology has come a long way since that time, robbing his sound of its original shock and immediacy. This state
of affairs is to some extent exacerbated by the way in which the typical Elvis mix on Spotify or iTunes is a bewildering mix of his early stuff, which really was revolutionary, with the later Vegas work, which seems schmaltzy today, and probably felt bombastic even then.
What lessons does the film have for a music career? In the first place, we see in the early scenes that great achievement is very often to do with being open to influence and to new information. Elvis’ real legacy was to listen to the great black music of the 1950s, and to open himself up to it – to make it his.
There is a tremendous scene where the boy Elvis is peeping through a window of a hut. He sees a black rock and roll band, and experiences the thrill and pulse of that music as a thing which he must have in his life – and the only way to do that will be to emulate it. It is often said that when Elvis first came on the radio, people assumed he was a black singer.
In all our careers, there is knowledge which may have a forbidden quality; Elvis is a reminder of the potential benefits of running roughshod over that kind of prohibition, and of claiming influence wherever it can be found. Our teachers turn out to be all around us; and anyone who can teach us should be welcome regardless of any other considerations. There was a hunger about Elvis, a need to forge forwards.
In the film, this idea that Elvis sounded black on the radio is conveyed to us through Tom Hanks’ Colonel Tom Parker. The question of Tom Hanks in this movie is worth a small essay in itself, since he turns out to be its only drawback. Some critics have pointed
“ELVIS – WHO OF COURSE DID DIE YOUNG OR YOUNGISH – WAS A KIND OF GUINEA PIG. HE HAD TO SHOULDER A NEW KIND OF FAME.”
to his disastrous accent as the principal issue with Hanks’ performance and it is indeed a strange mishmash, which never once feels believable or comfortable for anyone involved.
But the problem with the performance runs deeper than that. Hanks is someone with an innate relationship with goodness; he is excellent at depicting it, I suspect because he is himself a good man. In this, he is similar to Paul McCartney, who can never keep optimism out of his songs, just as Hanks can’t keep it from his performances: Hanks’ inherent tendency is towards consolation. If you look at his performance in A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood (2019) you can see him exploring a terrain – in that case, saintliness – which he feels a natural kinship with.
Here, in Elvis, he is fatally severed from the subject matter of human evil, meaning that he is at an odd distance from the essential topic of the performance. It is like a singer choosing to sing out of range, or a writer with no ability for dialogue switching from novel to drama.
The resulting performance doesn’t quite derail the movie, though it comes close. Elvis himself seems to have been born with something opposite to what Hanks displays here: an innate capacity to know what could and couldn’t be done with a song on stage. Luhrmann’s movie shows that this ability was something that he first had to learn to wield: nervousness is something everybody must overcome at some point, and it is interesting to see Austin Butler convey Elvis’ tentative first steps so believably. It is inspiring to consider Elvis’ early trepidation, since none of us is without anxiety, especially when we begin to work at something we really care about.
The greatest question for anyone with a creative bent is how to make money from it. It’s quite rare that an ability with the arts comes hand in hand with a talent for administration; the two aptitudes occupy different parts of the brain, and where the one is accentuated the other is likely to be deficient. So it was with Elvis; an outsized performative gift opened him up to exploitation, and he met, in the shape of Parker, a master exploiter.
The film consistently shows Elvis seeking his authentic self while working closely alongside the man committed to falsifying that self –and to commercialising the image he has created. A TV show, which looks like it will be an embarrassment of Christmas cliché perpetrated by the Colonel, is pushed back at by Elvis. Later, we see him inaugurating his big sound in Las Vegas, while Parker does a deal in the audience.
The trouble with the movie is that Hanks continually fails to radiate anything like the villainy which Parker is meant to be exhibiting so that at the moral level the story keeps giving off mixed signals.
Even so, Butler’s performance is faultless and this does more than rescue the movie: it makes it memorable. Elvis appears as a great artist – a man with an unfailing sense of what audiences want, but able to visualise some farther point which will not just accommodate their desires, but take them further, into the unknown where new experience is.
In one sense, Elvis is still with us. We still have our popstars identifiable by one name – Beyoncé, Drake, Kanye, Jay-Z, and so on. They are his inheritors, at least to the extent that they live
“IN RETROSPECT, IT COULD NEVER HAVE BEEN A TIME FOR STRICTURE OR TRADITIONAL VIRTUE. IT WAS TIME TO LIVE AGAIN.”
the gilded cocooned lives which are so damaging to sanity, and eventually to art.
In another sense, the world has moved past Elvis, or begun to wise up to the danger of self-indulgence. Some of the 1960s susceptibility to alcohol and drugs was probably an inheritance of the Second World War: when the joys of life had been rationed for so long, who could resist the bright party when it was on again? In retrospect, it could never have been a time for stricture or traditional virtue. It was time to live again.
This is a film which does more than listening to Elvis’ records can to describe his greatness. It shows how the compulsion of the performer can rise to
art, and how if that performance can be captured in sound, a memory lingers on.
What Luhrmann ultimately does is regenerate Elvis. Elvis’ contribution was to drag the past with him into the future, and though he died along the way, he is as much an aspect of our lives today as the atomic bomb, or Winston Churchill, or Martin Luther King, or any of the other seismic facts of the 21st century.
The film ends with archive footage of a magnificent performance by Presley himself of the song ‘Unchained Melody’. Desperately overweight, and sweating under lights, he nevertheless finds the notes as only the great entertainers do – the more so when the chips are down, and the world is difficult. They find the right notes because they have to, because it’s what they do – and because of decades of practice at doing so. This is a film which makes you realise that though the music industry isn’t perfect today, it is better in many respects to what we had before.
Lord Ashcroft’s latest book rightly focuses on “the extraordinary men and women of the Intelligence Corps' whose skills and knowledge help inform commanders where the enemy is, what they are doing, and what they are capable of. Now, at this point, I’d like to declare an interest - I served in the Intelligence Corps throughout the 2000s (deploying on operations to Afghanistan twice). As with any member of the Corps, I’m fiercely proud of my Corps and its history.
The Intelligence Corps is one of the youngest units in the British Army; it was formally constituted with the consent of King George V on 15 July 1940, with the formation being notified on 19 July 1940 in Army Order 112. The Intelligence Corps played a vital role in World War II with its members working for the Special Operations Executive (SOE), the founding of the Special Air Service (SAS), and contributing to deciphering the enigma code. Today, the Corps is one of the smallest Corps in the British Army with approximately 1850 serving officers and soldiers. However, what the Corps lacks in size, it more than makes
up for in impact and influence. Unlike other parts of the military which are known for their aggression (Parachute Regiment), equipment (Royal Tank Regiment / Army Air Corps) or drill on parade (Guards) - the Intelligence Corps does not fit into any particular category. The ‘textbook answer’ is it analyses large amounts of data, to produce accurate and timely intelligence that has an impact on the theatre of operations. Lord Ashcroft’s book goes further and gives us a fascinating insight into the history of intelligence leading to the establishment of the Intelligence Corps and, most importantly, brings the exploits of individual Intelligence Corps soldiers to life.
“THE CORPS ITSELF BRINGS TOGETHER A WIDE RANGE OF PEOPLE; SOME UNCONVENTIONAL BUT ALL HIGHLY SKILLED INTELLIGENCE OPERATIVES WHO WERE ABLE TO USE THEIR ENERGIES IN VARIOUS TRADES AND SPECIALISMS THAT CAN BE BROUGHT TO BEAR ON THE ENEMY.”
During my time in the Corps, I worked alongside the Security Service (MI5), Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and Government Communications
Headquarters (GCHQ), as well as foreign intelligence services - and the ability to be flexible and resilient to unpredictable situations was a key trait amongst Corps soldiers and officers. Some of the stories shared by Lord Ashcroft are not ones I had heard before… not because of my own ignorance of Corps history but because we take its role seriously ‘to protect the Military and its secrets’ - after all, loose lips sink ships! The only times I've heard of some of these stories of ‘daring do’ are over hushed tones in the quietness of night over a pint in the mess.
That is not to say that we are not deeply proud of our heroic soldiers who have helped tackle matters of security, terrorism and war, in every conflict since the Second World War but we take seriously our dedication to service and secrecy. Sadly (or not), it will always be the case that many of
the most valiant and brave members of the Intelligence Corps will never have their stories told due to the clandestine nature of their work. That said, this book is packed full of heroic deeds which fill me with pride, and wanting more.
For instance, there’s the story of Paddy Leigh Fermor who was a natural recruit to our ranks. This was one of particular excitement that was also made into a movie starring Dirk Boregare. Paddy was a rebellious, free-spirited sort and found himself gathering intelligence in Nazi-occupied Crete, disguised as a shepherd, as well as training and organising the local resistance fighters. As if that wasn't dangerous enough, Paddy engineered an ambitious plan: to kidnap a German general and dispatch him to British Army headquarters in Cairo. For his 'courage and audacity’ in planning and executing the high-stakes mission, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order.
The Corps is very good at shaping itself to the current threat. The Cold War and The Troubles in Northern Ireland placed huge demands on the Intelligence Corps; and as I joined it was starting to pivot towards Afghanistan. Although NI was a thousand miles away, the lessons we learnt during The Troubles enabled us to draw on the experience of senior soldiers who were used to asymmetric warfare.
My one critique is not the author's fault, but more a consequence of writing about such a secretive organisation - because it is inevitable that some extraordinary men and women are missing from this account. Lord Ashcroft could have included them but not without being locked up in the Tower of London for sharing state secrets. For example, The ‘Special Reconnaissance Unit’, also known as the "The Det" was a part of the Corps. It involved plainclothes operations in Northern Ireland from the 1970s onwards where numerous members of the Corps lost their lives. I know several stories about individuals, who, in my opinion, would deserve to be included in this book.
explanation of how the Intelligence Corps recruits the best and the brightest. It is not only for those with linguistic and intelligence skills but also for rogues, rascals and raconteurs - those with the ability to think outside the box. During my intake, we had such a broad range of people who brought different skills to the Corpsand whatever you think an Operator of Military Intelligence is – well, it isn’t, because there is no type.
Overall, this book will give you an
But in my view there are similar employability traits such as attention to detail, a passion for problem solving, excellent communication skills and adaptability to constantly evolving situations. In a world where transferable skills provide you with the best opportunities for success, I am thankful to the Intelligence Corps jobs have shaped my skill set. Short of joining yourself, if you want to get an idea of what the extraordinary men and women of the Intelligence Corps really do, this is an enjoyable read that will leave you wanting more.
“OVERALL, THIS BOOK WILL GIVE YOU AN EXPLANATION OF HOW THE INTELLIGENCE CORPS RECRUITS THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST.”
“BUT IN MY VIEW THERE ARE SIMILAR EMPLOYABILITY TRAITS SUCH AS ATTENTION TO DETAIL, A PASSION FOR PROBLEM SOLVING, EXCELLENT COMMUNICATION SKILLS AND ADAPTABILITY TO CONSTANTLY EVOLVING SITUATIONS.”
Stephen JamesMichael Ashcroft (Wikipedia.org)
BY BOB DYLAN
SIMON AND SCHUSTER, £35
Curioser and curioser,’ said Alice.” The lines come from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland but might easily have been describing the career of Bob Dylan. In Dylan’s world nothing is ever what we might expect, and it’s this quality of oddity which has created the obsessiveness of so-called Dylanologists. And now, just as his recording career has settled down into the possible endpoint of 2020’s Rough and Rowdy Ways, and his art career seems also established in a comfortable retrospective – called Retrospectrum – at the Frost Art Museum, we get something altogether different again. Indefatigability is an underrated character of high achievers: Dylan is stubborn and remorseless, able to find an audience while remaining tied to deliberate mystery.
His literary career is brief, and occasional – a fact which alone makes it peculiar to consider that he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature
in 2016. But his output in books shows in microcosm his essential strangeness. First comes an incomprehensible novel Tarantula, released during the height of 1960s mayhem. Dylan then releases in 2003, a magnificent memoir Chronicles Vol., only to eschew publication of a second. Now we have something altogether different to what we were expecting – except if we had recalibrated our expectations to anticipate the improbable.
Strangeness will not always amount to genius, but it is impossible when reading this latest offering The Philosophy of Modern Song not to remember Schopenhauer’s remark that talent hits a target no other can hit, and genius a target none can see.
spooked, it’s a constant concern. The landlord’s at your door and he’s ringing the bell. Lots of space between the rings, and you’re hoping he’ll go away, like there’s nobody home."
Dylan recently sold his back catalogue to Universal for around $300 million, but there is somehow an authentic note to this – a wisdom which has come his way through songs. It was Eddie Izzard who joked that fame tended to injure comedy as you can’t begin a joke with ‘My butler went to the supermarket.’ Dylan doesn’t always get it right; after this book was published, it emerged that copies of this book masquerading as possessing his unique signature had in fact been signed electronically. It was unacceptable, but in this book, the writer gives the impression of being able to get to the core of things, even when looking at the world through the tinted glass of a limousine.
Sometimes, as in the extended riff on ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ – Dylan writes about the Carl Perkins and not the Presley version – the predominant note is comic:
There’s never been a book like this. The book consists of 65 essays on songs which have influenced Dylan, mainly by men – as numerous reviewers have pointed out – and predominantly emanating out of the 1950s of his youth. Most of them have essays in the second person. Many feel oddly pertinent. This riff, for instance, on Elvis Presley’s ‘Money Honey’ feels relevant to the inflationary status quo:
"This money thing is driving you up the wall, it’s got you dragged out and
"You get on with most people, and you put up with a lot, and you hardly get caught off guard, but your shoes are something else. Minor things may annoy you but you rise above them. Having your teeth kicked in, being pounded senseless, being dumped on and discredited, but you don’t put any weight on that, none of it’s as real to you as your shoes. They’re priceless and beyond monetary worth."
The chapter only grows more absurd until Dylan writes of these shoes: “They neither move nor speak, yet they vibrate with life, and contain the infinite power
“THERE’S NEVER BEEN A BOOK LIKE THIS. THE BOOK CONSISTS OF 65 ESSAYS ON SONGS WHICH HAVE INFLUENCED DYLAN.”
of the sun.” It’s writing which is a joy in itself but also transforms your listening. Spotify already has several playlists featuring the songs in this book: it is a transformative listen as well as a transformative read.
Another aspect to this book is the curation of its splendid photographs which makes the book a luxury object and also ups the price to £35 at the same time. The collection is prefaced by a fascinating portrait of a young Elvis
browsing in a record store; ‘London Calling’ by the Clash is illustrated by a picture of bobbies breaking up a riot; ‘Cheaper to Keep Her’ by Johnnie Taylor, includes an ad for a divorce law firm.
That chapter also contains an intriguing invective against the divorce law profession which, having been through several marriages, is a topic close to Dylan’s heart. It’s not the only passage which feels autobiographical. Dylan’s love of London is brought out when
discussing The Clash:
"London calling – send food, clothing, airplanes, whatever you could do. But then, calling is immediate, especially to Americans. It wouldn’t be the same as Rome calling or Paris calling or Copenhagen calling or Buenos Aires, or Sydney, or even Moscow. You can pass off all these calls with somebody saying, “Take a message, we’ll call you back.” But not with London calling."
Likewise a dissertation on the little
known singer Johnny Paycheck delivers this thought from the man who began life as Robert Zimmerman: “And then there are those who change their own names, either on the run from some unseen demon of heading toward something else.”
It all amounts to a new kind of colloquialised, aestheticised and poeticised music criticism. It’s a homage to all that Dylan has known and loved, and perhaps in that sense has a valedictory feel: but then once you’re 81 everything feels like a goodbye. Yet you’re also reminded that the book is at the same time a hello, and a gift. It reminds you of Dylan’s explanation of his songwriting: “Every song I’ve ever written is saying: ‘Good luck, I hope you make it’.”
Despite a bit of padding here and there, taken in the round the book has the feeling of necessity: Dylan’s long career appears to have taught him to wait on the vital inspiration. His latest records, now spread further and further apart to the extent that one wonders whether to expect another, have the same quality this book has of things which had to be done, since they could only be done by Dylan – and only done by him at the moment when they were carried out. All great artists are opportunists in that then they end up claiming all the prizes going.
Greed is an aspect of Dylan’s life – or
perhaps hunger. Because alongside this selectiveness of projects is also the other side to him: profusion, growth, energy, and restlessness. These qualities are all encapsulated by the Neverending Tour which has just swung through the UK during the publication of this book. There are limits to this book: you can sense that by the last 10 songs or so, the exercise has been largely spent and that some of the tropes have become repetitive. But this sense is more than offset by the enormous impact which the first half has: it feels regenerative, and makes you want to listen again not just to these songs, but to all music. A great career has its basis ultimately in enthusiasm. What we glimpse here is the power of that early passion for music which the young Dylan had: it was this which propelled him forwards, changing popular culture along the way, and eventually entering the annals of the true greats. The value of this book is that it needn’t necessarily apply to budding musicians: its lessons are transferable across sectors.
We also sense that it is just a tiny corner of a voluminous mind. Artists who Dylan knew well – most notably Leonard Cohen and The Beatles – don’t feature at all. So this books suggests other books which will likely remain unwritten – at least unwritten by Dylan. This is a book which doesn’t mind who you are or where you are. It only wants to grip you and never let you go until you succeed. In another sense it doesn’t mind what you do, provided you listen to the music.
Christopher JacksonI cannot do what you can do said the icicle to the match; I cannot grow bigger with heat; watch - in cold is my renewal; yes said the little stick, but fuel like mine depends on others to be truly great - I am an agent
more than actor, critic not painter; you gain your point by slow degrees of thaw and freeze to come to a deadly conclusion, a dagger point of glinting sun; in which I end, as if in your thrall: yes he flared, but we coalesce first at a dancing ball then lie together on silver film, in a pool.
Todd Swift
ANTHONY SELDON
This is the story of Seldon’s 35-day pilgrimage along what is now known as the Western Front Way, a 1,000 kilometre journey from the FrenchSwiss border to the English Channel. Seldon became inspired to make the trek after discovering letters from Alexander Douglas Gillespie, who was killed during the First World War. In his letters, Gillespie expressed his desire to create a “Via Sacra”, a route which First World War veterans could walk to remember their fallen comrades. Seldon mapped that route, which took him through such locations as Argonne, Arras, the Somme, and Ypres. He then set off on the harrowing journey, tracing history and wrestling with grief, loss, and a sense of purpose. Seldon has long been a friend of Finito, sitting on our advisory board. This is one of his finest achievements and can be added to the 45 or so books, including biographies of Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron, and Theresa May, which he has now written.
Patrick Crowder
In the age of social media, reputation is everything. Thomson has extensive experience in public affairs, having served as the Head of Public Affairs at BDB Pitmans from 2005 to 2022. He is also a prolific author whose previous works include New Activism and the Corporate Response, Public Affairs in Practice, The Dictionary of Labour Quotations, and Public Affairs: A Global Perspective. In this new book, he combines reputation management for the company as a whole, down to the employees, and employs lessons from experts who know the importance of reputation and its impact on corporate value.
The book also uniquely examines the public sector, government, charities, and NGOs broadening the scope of the work beyond the private business world. Through case studies, hypotheticals, and cautionary tales, Thomson effectively examines what must be done to address reputational issues before they become much bigger problems.
Patrick CrowderFollowing their bestselling book How Learning Happens by Kirschner and Hendrick, Heal joined the team to bring significant research to light in the field of teaching. Drawing from education psychology research and studies about effective teaching, How Teaching Happens presents 30 pieces of research in a clear, effective way, describing how the research fits in the context of the classroom. The book, which has been called required reading for educators, covers teaching techniques, curriculum development, teacher effectiveness, development, and growth. It also challenges commonly seen techniques like “teaching to the test” and encourages educators to avoid asking questions of their students which do not require understanding to answer. Beyond the research, the book also asserts that teaching is something which must be learned, and outlines the ways teacher education can be improved. All three authors hold Doctorates in the education field, and Kirschner has experience at the Open University of the Netherlands where he served as Professor of Educational Psychology.
Patrick CrowderThe Balmoral hotel in Edinburgh is unique among the properties in the Rocco Forte Group in that it is itself a landmark of that beautiful city. RF fans will know the lounge at Brown’s, or the sweeping gardens of The Hotel de Russie, or even the ornate exterior of the Hotel Astoria in St Petersburg. But none of these can be said to dominate the skyline as the Balmoral does as you emerge from Waverley station to be granted one of the most beautiful views in the world.
In fact, it is a reliable marker wherever you happen to be in Edinburgh: a sort of navigation point. And if you happen to be staying at The Balmoral, and sightseeing in the sometimes adverse weather conditions, it is a promise of warmth
and luxury awaiting you at the end of your rendezvous with the castle, one of Edinburgh’s many museums, or the shops of Princes Street.
The Balmoral building itself, originally constructed in 1895 by William Hamilton Beattie, is a marvellous example of neo-Gothic sandstone. The hotel was originally known as The North British Railway Hotel. Over the years it has hosted Laurel and Hardy, and footage still exists – dating to 1932 – of the pair of them mobbed by crowds in an Edinburgh not all that different to what it looks like today.
It was also here that JK Rowling finished writing Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows. In a move which no amount of expenditure on PR teams
could have been able to buy, she left a note attesting to this fact, which is now preserved under glass casing in the hotel. A suite is now named after her, and its fame in the history of YA fiction as secure as it gets.
We went to the hotel in winter, and the place has a log-fire cosiness which made it a delightful place to return to at the end of a day’s sight-seeing. Like all good hotels, its entrance is pure theatre,
“IT WAS ALSO HERE THAT JK ROWLING FINISHED WRITING HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS.”
spreading as a series of possibilities you want to explore – and perhaps like every good hotel, you don’t quite have time to experience it all and so leave with the wish to come back.
Rocco Forte Hotel Savoy Duomo, Presidential Suite
particularly because of his benevolent approach to business. Forte topped up the wages of all his staff after furlough, and there remains the impression that staff are valued by the company.
In fact, I would add that all good hotels create in their clientele departure anxiety upon arrival. You feel immediately at home to such an extent that you enter a period of denial that this isn’t your home. Meanwhile, a brutal juxtaposition is taking place: your actual home, the place to which you must eventually be consigned, has become a demonstrably inferior place which definitely doesn’t have marble bathrooms.
The Rocco Forte Group is best understood as a chain of family hotels. The properties today house the legacy of the late Lord Charles Forte, as much as they showcase the approach to hospitality of his son, the outspoken and charitable Sir Rocco Forte. Whenever I speak to staff, Sir Rocco retains popularity at his hotels on account of his obvious competence and dynamism, but
Forte has also made sure that all the talents of his progeny are fully utilised: this includes his daughter Irene Forte’s spa expertise, and his sister Olga Polizzi’s wise eye for interior design. In the anteroom behind the lobby, which leads into the breakfast rooms, you find pictures of the late Lord Forte: another reminder that however grand and sumptuous these interiors might be they relate back always to a family story.
But perhaps a hotel is only as good as
its city and Edinburgh has its claim to be one of the most beautiful in Europe. Presided over by the beautiful castle and with its sky prodded at by the Scott monument, it has managed to retain architectural unity in ways which London, large enough to accommodate every kind of ugliness and still retain grandeur, has been unable and unwilling to do.
It was the 1700s which catapulted Edinburgh into the vanguard of Western civilisation, as the poetry and tragic legend of Burns took hold, and then as the great names came along: David Hume, questioning miracles; Robert Louis Stevenson, with his brilliant grasp of narrative; and Sir Walter Scott himself whose cycle of novels ventured back in time to give birth to Scottish identity in a way analogous to Pushkin in Russia, or Dante in Italy.
Today, it’s the very glory of that history which keeps causing problems. Despite the Supreme Court’s verdict in late 2022 that a referendum unilaterally held by
“ITS ENTRANCE IS PURE THEATRE, SPREADING AS A SERIES OF POSSIBILITIES YOU WANT TO EXPLORE.”Courtesy The Balmoral, A Rocco Forte Hotel
the devolved administration would be illegal, talk will likely continue about a second independence referendum, certainly so long as Nicola Sturgeon is in position as First Minister.
The economic impact of the break-up of the union remains unclear. From the perspective of Edinburgh the status quo works: it is the second highest paid city in the UK after London and also a fine place to start a business, with typical start-up spaces twice the size of their counterparts in London. It combines a rich history of manufacturing everything from whiskey and shortbread to textiles and microelectronics. In addition, Scotland – and especially Edinburgh –has a thriving investment and financial services sector: it’s possible here to live surrounded by beauty and history, and to live in style.
Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the Scottish independence movement is
that it has developed such a persistently left-wing character. One would have thought that there was a strong Conservative case for independence, but with Sturgeon dominating the political landscape for nearly a decade now, this isn’t likely to resurface any time soon.
But a visit to the Castle, and especially to Holyrood Palace, makes you feel that to be a pity. The Castle, though expensive, is worth the visit to feel the layers of history which have accrued over time to create the complexity of a great city. But time goes into the air, and it might be that the centuries often have only a few structures to commemorate them. At the lip of the hill under the wing of the castle, there’s a chapel, one of the oldest in Scotland, which seems an oddly private and windswept place for powerful people to worship in. But power often feels much unlike itself; it’s the chimera which keeps people wanting to be prime minister, even
“IT’S A PLACE WHICH MAKES YOU AMBITIOUS, BECAUSE YOU WILL HAVE FORGED THE DESIRE TO RETURN.”
though objectively it’s an almost entirely unenviable life.
Where you do actually feel powerful is at The Balmoral – and probably more powerful there than if you happen to be living at the other Balmoral we see on The Crown. Certainly you feel freer, as you wake to comfortable beds surrounded by examples of the Forte luxury: the fine library which accompanies the suites; the neoclassical statutory; and the towelled bathrobes. A real sense of authority may well in the end be tied to privacy, and not the public life some end up chasing after.
More often than not real luxury also has something to do with a view. And that’s how you remember The Balmoral: the spires and the stone, the sky and the vague sense of nature and sea beyond. It’s a place which makes you ambitious, because you will have forged the desire to return.
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During the short-lived Truss administration, Costeau found himself scouting the terrain for revealing nicknames of the then new PM, before landing on the intriguing nickname: ‘Fizzy Lizzie’. This moniker was relatively unimaginative and more than a little patronising. But in the event of it, Truss survived for such a brief time that the media had no opportunity to think of a better one.
But the ‘Fizzy Lizzie’ nickname had the merit of referring back to an actual event at 5 Hertford Street when Truss, then trade secretary, hosted ‘Fizz with Liz’ drinks when hosting US trade representatives. On that occasion, according to The Sunday Times, Truss apparently resisted claims by senior civil servants that somewhere less expensive – and with fewer ties to Conservative donors – be chosen. Alcohol is usually a symbolic aspect of a new administration. Boris Johnson, of course, will forever be associated with the red wine he appeared to be drinking on lockdown in the Rose Garden – the same drink he allegedly spilt on his sofa in Camberwell to Carrie’s annoyance shortly before he assumed office.
Drinking in Downing Street helps with the stress: Tony Blair admits in his memoir A Journey to the following
regime: ‘Stiff whisky or G&T before dinner, couple of glasses of wine or even half a bottle with it. So not excessively excessive. I had a limit. But I was aware that it had become a prop.’ Of course, we’re used to it in Britain. Our greatest prime minister, Winston Churchill, is impossible to imagine without his cigars, his Pol Roger and his whisky.
His delight in alcohol was really an aspect of his living life to the full on every possible front. When this country was fighting for its survival and undergoing deprivations we can hardly imagine today, perhaps it helped to know the man at the helm had a passion for the finer things.
Before him, Herbert Asquith’s drinking was a source of concern even to Churchill, which suggests quite considerable intake.
Over in America – once the country of Prohibition, let’s not forget – it can be a different story. What do Joe Biden, Donald J. Trump, George W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, Theodore Roosevelt and Benjamin Harrison all have in common? Answer: all teetotallers. Even those who technically drank never did so to excess. Costeau remembers being surprised to hear from someone who used to work at Kensington Palace that President Barack Obama enjoyed his cocktails while he was visiting the then Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. He never
drank to excess; that would have been unAmerican.
Our attitude to alcohol is another thing which divides the UK and America – besides the absence of that trade deal which Truss spent £3,000 in 5 Hertford Street seeking to secure. It used to be that work in Mayfair and the City was almost entirely lubricated. Nowadays that’s less the case. As an emblem of this shift, look at the new prime minister Rishi Sunak. Sunak isn’t a drinker – except of Coca-Cola, which he apparently gets from Mexico. In footage dating from 2019, he described himself to a pair of pupils at a Richmond school as a ‘total Coke addict’ before making it clear at some length that he wasn’t referring to a drug habit. So the cost of living prime minister drinks the same everyman drink the rest of us do, but as a multimillionaire he likes to source it from an unexpected place.
The world has sobered up, and not just because of the pandemic. It has become more serious, and as over a decade of free money comes to an end, people will be inspecting the cost of their wine as much as the cost of everything else. The name Fizzy Lizzie suggested Truss was out of touch. Perhaps getting your Coca-Cola from Mexico is too. After all, who will drink to that?
1 LEADERS
4 FOUNDER'S LETTER
7 DIARY Baroness Amos
8 LETTERS
Talan Skeels-Piggins answers your questions
12 THE CEO
Sir Martin Sorrell on advertising revenues
13 THE HEADTEACHER
Katharine Birbalsingh on teaching
14 THE ECONOMIST
Roger Bootle surveys the AI terrain
15 THE PARLIAMENTARIAN
Siobhan Baillie MP on her new APPG
17 THE ARCHBISHOP
Stephen Cottrell on what the pandemic taught
19 A QUESTION OF DEGREE
Dame Helena Morrissey on her philosophy degree
20 RELATIVELY SPEAKING
Lawrence Dallaglio on the inspiration of his sister
21 10,000 HOURS
Elizabeth Gage on perfectionism
23 TOMORROW’S LEADERS ARE BUSY TONIGHT
Rebekah Caudwell-Dupart on interior design and Lyme
25 THOSE ARE MY PRINCIPLES
Sally Phillips on comedy
26 WATERFLY
Our gossipy view of the changing waters of education
30 HIS MAJESTY THE KING
Which firms are used by the monarch?
40 THE BOOK OF THE LAW
The friction between literature and the legal profession
51 RECHARGING BATTERIES
Bulletin from the Lithium Industry
57 PHOTO ESSAY
Gemma Levine on her remarkable career
64 SMELL THE COFFEE Tales from the coffee industry
72 GOLD RUSH
What careers can gold give you?
75 ROCKEFELLER TODAY
Lessons from the great philanthropist
THE NATIONAL GALLERY DIRECTOR TALKS TO ROBERT GOLDING ABOUT A CAREER ON ART, NFTS AND WINSLOW HOMER
WHAT’S YOUR FAVOURITE PICTURE IN THE NATIONAL GALLERY?
I think my favourite picture changes all the time, and when you mentioned favourite pictures, suddenly, what came to my mind was that very beautiful Zurbarán still life of the cup of water on a plate with a rose, which was a picture that was acquired when I was a curator here in the mid 90s. It's a picture that you feel you're growing with. It's a picture that artists have always been very, very interested in actually since it came into the public domain having come into the gallery, and it's so interesting to see many artists responding to the quietness and the intensity of that painting.
HOW DID YOU FIND YOUR PASSION FOR ART?
I took on a fourth A-level when I went to school, which was art history, and I didn’t know anything about it. I was very fortunate to go to school in Dulwich, where you have the Dulwich Picture Gallery. Our first art history class took place in the gallery in front of the Rembrandt gallery window, and I thought, “this is wonderful!”
AT THAT POINT, HOW MUCH DID YOU KNOW ABOUT THE OPPORTUNITIES IN THE ART WORLD?
I had no idea that there were jobs in museums or that there were jobs in teaching, or even what art history really was, but that first art history class really opened up a whole new horizon. And then I was able to go to university and study art history. I was very committed and very focused, and I've been very fortunate to be able to carry on working in the museum profession ever since.
www.nationalmuseums.org.uk
DO YOU NEED AN MA AS WELL AS A BA, OR TO EARN A PHD TO FIND A PLACE AT THE NATIONAL GALLERY?
Not necessarily. I mean, more people are doing art history at a higher level, so there are many more PhDs in art history than there were when I was a 20-year-old. But I think there are still lots of other areas within museums, whether it's press or design, or even people who have an interest in art but have a specialisation in human resources, for example. There’s always work to be done in museums and in the cultural sector.
HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT NFTS?
I’m not so sure about the NFT phenomenon, and I don't really think there’s one that's for us. I do think the National Gallery has become more and more interested in the intersection between historic art and the kind of vision that contemporary artists have, and I certainly wanted to extend and enrich that relationship.
WHAT ROLE DOES THE NATIONAL GALLERY PLAY IN INSPIRING NEW ARTISTS?
There are a lot of contemporary artists coming to the National Gallery talking about pictures and actually responding to works in the National Gallery in their own work, and I think it's very exciting that this is a living collection. It's one that's throwing up questions about art, about life, about society. In a sense, the whole of life is in the National Gallery, and it's only natural that contemporary artists should be taking an interest in what's shown here.
WHO DO YOU SEE AS THE GREAT ARTIST OF WORK?
I take occasion of the fact that we're here in the Winslow Homer exhibition, he's an artist who highlighted work, particularly in the pictures of the fisherfolk women who stay at home while the fishermen go out in their boats to face danger and the risk of not returning. It just gives you a sense of the impressive human qualities of people in the past. There’s this dignity of labour, the dignity of work, and I think that comes across very strongly.
