Finito issue 10

Issue 10 2024

ELON MUSK THE X FACTOR

£5.99

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2732-5180

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ISSUE 10

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INTRODUCTION

Editor: Christopher Jackson

FOUNDER’S LETTER an achievement with a fast-growing circulation. The feedback we continually receive is that readers really do relish holding a physical copy. It comes in contrast to Saga, the organisation founded 72 years ago by Sidney De Haan, to meet the needs of the over 50’s. It was recently reported that Saga has stopped providing hard copies of its publication for life subscribers in favour of digital-only versions.

Editor-at-large: Claire Coe Contributing Editors: Patrick Crowder, Emily Prescott, Meredith Taylor Lord Ranger CBE, Fred Finn, Liz Brewer Advisory Board: John Griffin (Chairman), Dame Mary Richardson, Sir Anthony Seldon, Elizabeth Diaferia, Ty Goddard, Neil Carmichael Management: Ronel Lehmann (Founder & CEO), Colin Hudson, Professor Robert Campbell, Christopher Jackson, Gaynor Goodliffe, Julia Carrick OBE Mentors: Derek Walker, Andrew Inman, Chloë Garland, Alejandra Arteta, Angelina Giovani, Christopher Clark, Robin Rose, Sophia Petrides, Dana JamesEdwards, Iain Smith, Jeremy Cordrey, Martin Israel, Iandra Tchoudnowsky, Tim Levy, Peter Ibbetson, Claire Orlic, Judith Cocking, Sandra Hermitage, Claire Ashley, Dr Richard Davis, Sir David Lidington, Coco Stevenson, Talan Skeels-Piggins, Edward Short, David Hogan, Susan Hunt, Divyesh Kamdar, Julia Glenn, Neil Lancaster, Dr David Moffat, Jonathan Lander, Kirsty Bell, Simon Bell, Paul Brannigan, Kate King, Paul Aplin, Professor Andrew Eder, Derek Bell, Graham Turner, Matthew Thompson, Douglas Pryde, Pervin Shaikh, Adam Mitcheson, Ross Power, Caroline Roberts, Sue Harkness, Andy Tait, Mike Donoghue, Tony Mallin, Patrick Chapman, Amanda Brown, Tom Pauk, Daniel Barres, Patrick Chapman, Merrill Powell, Kate Glick, Lord Mott, Dr Susan Doering, Raghav Parkash, Marcus Day, Sheridan Mangal Business Development: Rara Plumptre Digital: Stephen James Creative Director: Nick Pelekanos Photography: Sam Pearce, Will Purcell, Gemma Levine Public Relations: Pedroza Communications Website Development: Eprefix Media Buying: Virtual Campaign Management Print Production: Marcus Dobbs Printed in the UK by: Micropress Printers Ltd, Reydon Business Park, Fountain Way, Reydon, Southwold IP18 6SZ Registered Address: Finito Education Limited, 14th floor, 33 Cavendish Square, London W1G 0PW, +44 (0)20 3780 7700 Finito and Finito World are trade marks of the owner.

We cannot accept responsibility for unsolicited submissions, manuscripts and photographs. All prices and details are correct at time of going to press, but subject to change. We take no responsibility for omissions or errors. Reproduction in whole or in part without the publisher’s written permission is strictly prohibited.

All rights reserved. Registered in England No. 9985173

Originally launched in January 1984, the FTSE 100 was designed to serve as a barometer for the UK's equity market and broader economy. I have reflected that I have known John Griffin, my chairman, for a similar number of years. Like the share index, he is blue chip. For, during those decades, it was second nature for him to address his many colleagues as Sir, showing them the greatest of respect.

We were overjoyed that he was Knighted in the New Year Honours. It has been the happiest celebration that I can remember in a long time, and I know that you will join us in congratulating Sir John and Lady Rita on this well-deserved recognition.

The Citation from the Cabinet Office reads: “He founded Addison Lee in 1975, building the largest business of its kind in Europe, with more than 5,000 drivers. In 2013, the American private equity firm Carlyle Group bought the business for £350 million. His interest in supporting young people into meaningful careers led him to become Chairman of the Advisory Board of Finito Education. He donated over £12 million to open The Griffin Institute at Northwick Park Hospital, the UK’s largest robotics medical centre, aiming to grow capacity to accommodate up to 1,000 surgeons a year. He also became a Co-Operation Ireland Ambassador, to work on grassroots peace-building efforts.

Co-operation Ireland has helped break down barriers between communities throughout the peace process receiving much praise on both sides of the border.”

This is our magazine’s tenth issue, and we are so proud to be celebrating such

It is our intention to host a Gala Awards event this year to celebrate the best of our student and career change mentoring candidates, and those who we have helped from disadvantaged backgrounds.

There will be a variety of opportunities to align your brand with one of our Awards and an appeal for our bursary.

Our main feature is Elon Musk, the wealthiest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of somewhere between US$222 and US244 billion depending on whether you follow the Bloomberg Billionaires Index or Forbes.

During his recent visit to Bletchley Park, Musk described “Artificial Intelligence as a threat to humanity.”

The commitment by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust which supports people who address the root causes of conflict and injustice is something to which we can aspire. We are delighted that Tom Pauk, our Senior Mentor, has been appointed to the Board.

On a lighter note, I made an appointment to visit Professor John Costello, a Consultant Respiratory Physician, to be his final appointment on his last day before he retired from decades of loyal service and to thank him for looking after me, my mother, numerous clients, colleagues and friends.

At the end of the consultation, he told me that he could perform two unique tasks before his General Medical Council registration voluntarily expired, including writing me a prescription and signing my death certificate, were that necessary.

We both roared with laughter. I hope to return for the next issue.

www.finito.org.uk

ISSUE 10

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LEADERS

IS THIS THE JOBS ELECTION YEAR? A

round election time, everybody always quotes Jimmy Carville’s dictum: “It’s the economy, stupid.”

This is fine insofar as it goes, but it still begs the question of what makes a winning economy.

The answer isn’t as clear-cut as one thinks. Both Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and US President Joe Biden face re-election in 2024 and both can point to certain improvements in their respective economies, with inflation significantly reduced from its peak: nearing four per cent in the UK, and three per cent in the US. So far so good. But voters can be forgiven for looking at these statistics and refusing to cast automatic votes for the incumbents. That’s because the price rises we experienced along the way are now embedded in the economy. Everything from your weekly shop to your Netflix subscription is more expensive – and ongoingly so.

On a day-to-day level, what the consumer wants isn’t so much lowering inflation as deflation. Only deflation makes an individual cheer as they leave the supermarket, but few economists think it’s the solution: it makes CFOs squint sceptically at their spreadsheets, mulling what to do about the niggling fact they’re now making less money.

Their only recourse is to spend less, which lowers growth.

That’s why 2024 is likely to be the year of the jobs elections. If falling inflation is actually the optimal position but doesn’t feel great for consumers, then more will depend on psychological factors in the economy related to people’s experience of the workplace.

For a start, how painful all the price 4

rises really are will depend on whether your employer was kind enough to meet your financial anxieties with a salary rise. To their credit many have, but workers usually attribute salary rises to their own brilliance and in 2023 many regarded these as a necessity: besides, a salary rise is meant to put you in a better economic position – not to be a symptom of treading water.

Secondly, your overall mood will depend on how you feel psychologically about your work and career. Ronald Reagan famously asked, during the 1980 Presidential election which he would go on to win handsomely against the then incumbent Jimmy Carter: “Are you better off ?” We tend to answer this in the affirmative if we’re fulfilled at work.

When the likely challengers Sir Keir Starmer or Donald Trump ask this question in 2024 what will the response be? In the UK, it’s unlikely that the demons of the Truss interregnum will have been laid to rest.

Between now and election day, homeowners will all the time be coming off fixed rate mortgages into a higher interest rate environment, and they are unlikely to blame their own failure to secure a better paid job for the pain they will be feeling. They’re more likely to blame Truss and her successors.

The Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has done a good job of steadying the ship, but people don’t vote in droves on that score: they might tacitly respect a degree of competence, but they’re unlikely to be in a celebratory mood.

Besides, unless you had a very large salary rise, or secured a better job than the one you had before, it’s unlikely that you’re going to have much spare change out of the rise in the cost of living (including mortgage costs), and the likelihood you will have been caught up in some sort of ‘fiscal drag’ – that’s to say, you’re probably in a higher tax bracket than you feel you should be. If you are, then you’re part of a £45 billion problem, which the government is hoping you won’t notice. What they’re hoping is that you will notice the £15 billion cut from National Insurance.

This is why Sunak and Hunt – and to a lesser extent Biden – are in such an electoral pickle. There simply isn’t enough good news in the economy to offset the bad. Most economists agree that the situation is solveable only with better growth, but both economies are lower on productivity than they should be – in the UK, it is a miserable 0.3 per cent less than what it was during 2022.

Of course, the dip in productivity has its own story to tell about the pandemic and its aftermath. With hybrid working now the norm, many workers are less productive and happy to be so if it leads to a superior worklife balance. As much as this might be very lovely, there remains the deeper question as to whether it’s a financially sustainable happiness.

To look at the slow growth figures is to suppose that it isn’t: it might be that the strain we all feel in relation to prices is intimately related to the sense of relief many feel at not having to commute so often.

There is a sense, then, that something

LEADERS

has to give. Liz Truss has shown that we can’t cut taxes in an unfunded way without the bond markets intervening.

Sir Keir Starmer and the Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves may find that with the tax burden at a historic post-War high they have less wiggleroom than they would like to raise taxes and increase spending. The bond markets are not in a good mood.

We can already see signs that Reeves understands all this: her much-touted £28 billion Green commitment has now mysteriously vanished, in acknowledgement of the fact that the cost of it injures the very people Labour needs in order to win a handsome majority, which is clearly in reach.

That has its own story to tell in terms of sustainability jobs: if even Labour has come to believe that there is no way to afford a Corbynesque injection

of money into the renewables sector, then either the green agenda is gone by consensus for the time being, or Labour is more exposed on its left flank than it realises.

what jobs UK nationals are prepared

Even when it comes to immigration – traditionally considered a separate subject to the economy – the apparent failure of Sunak’s Rwanda policy means that the conversation has moved onto jobs. Specifically, anyone who is trying to tackle the problem at all is now looking at what constitutes viable skilled labour entering the country and what doesn’t. Former prime minister Boris Johnson is already arguing that an annual salary of £40,000 is a sensible threshold at which to secure a visa, though he doesn’t say why he failed to introduce such a policy while he had the chance to do so as prime minister.

the streamlining exercise of Universal

This opens up broader questions about

with regard to our working lives.

to do and what they won’t. This in turn opens up onto the gigantic question of welfare reform, so far left largely alone

by Conservative governments since Credit.

Whether we like it or not, this election year is an opportunity to look in the mirror. It is as if the old challenge

which JFK uttered in his Inaugural

Address 60 years ago is about to be laid down all over again: “Ask not

what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”

Perhaps the world is always raising

that question, for the simple reason

that the global economy is competitive and we can’t afford not to answer it.

But in 2024, it is being raised with particular urgency – and especially

IN PRAISE OF SIR TERRY WAITE N

o matter how important financial matters are, it’s important to us that this landmark tenth issue of Finito World begins with a man of far broader outlook. The life of Sir Terry Waite is one of the most important of our time; here is a man who since his kidnapping in 1987 has really suffered, really learned and really forgiven. However difficult our lives and our careers might seem, we cannot understand that difficulty without perspective and Waite is ideally placed to provide that.

When Finito World spoke with the former hostage late last year, we met someone who has found true humility and a profound sense of meaning in life. In this issue, he reminds us of

the need to achieve equilibrium in one’s self, in relation to others and the environment. With his gentleness and hard-won wisdom, Waite reminds us in our pampered lives what adversity really is, and he asks us to imagine what it might be like to traverse it, and convert unthinkably negative experience into a genuine spirit of reconciliation.

Waite’s voice has been a powerful force for good for many years now – but it is especially relevant given what has occurred in the Middle East in the past few months since the 7th October attacks. This day, and the miserable conflict which ensued, showed what happens when there is a radical failure to create the sort of equilibrium which

Waite understands to be vital. The world can sometimes seem to be without

meaning and lacking in justice: Waite knows that the meaning has to come from us and that, if we can do that, justice will flow too.

During the preparation of this issue,

Terry like our Chairman John Griffin, was knighted. The honours system has its critics. But at its best it retains the

ability to inspire and remind us that in

a world of grim headlines, achievement is still possible – and also that it lies

within us if we know how to look. This is a magazine about mentorship. If we

choose Sir Terry Waite as our mentor, we won’t go far wrong.

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ISSUE 10

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ISSUE 10

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CONTENTS

THIS ISSUE 3 FOUNDER'S LETTER

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4 LEADERS 11 DIARY Ayesha Vardag 12 MEET THE MENTOR Our senior mentor Tom Pauk

p34 James Cleverly

COLUMNS

FEATURES

16 T HE HUMANITARIAN

40 X MARKS THE SPOT

Sir Terry Waite's debut column 18 T HE CIVIL SERVANT Sir Philip Rutnam recalls Whitehall 19 T HE SECRETARY OF STATE Gillian Keegan’s latest take 22 T HE BARONESS Frances D’Souza’s bulletin from the Lords 23 T HE INTELLECTUAL Randall Heather on the US

Will Elon Musk succeed in reinventing Twitter?

56 I NDELIBLE MARK In Memoriam Terence Cole 62 A I AND ME Will Christopher Jackson be put out of business?

76 T HE BONAPARTE AMBITION Reflections on Ridley Scott’s movie 82 T HE INDIAN CENTURY

p56 Terence Cole

90 MADE IN CHELSEA Highlights from the Design Centre 96 BURSARY UPDATE Finito candidate Nick Hennigan 98 TALES FROM THE FRONT LINE Candidate Phil Verney’s New Year 100 MAKING MONEY IN YOUR TEENS Raphael Holt gives his tips

Extract from Dinesh Dhamija's book

24 A QUESTION OF DEGREE Harvey Soning 26 R ELATIVELY SPEAKING With legendary actor Simon Callow 28 10,000 HOURS Sarah Cobden-Ramsay’s jewellery business

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Copyright Gemma Levine ,UK

30 T OMORROW’S LEADERS Carter-Ruck’s young associates 32 THOSE ARE MY PRINCIPLES With social mobility expert Lee Elliot Major 34 J AMES CLEVERLY Our event with the current Home Secretary 8

p76 Napoleon

p19 Gillian Keegan

CONTENTS

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p40

Scent of Musk: What impact has the Tesla founder had on jobs in the UK? ART, CULTURE & BOOKS 104 S TRANGE FRUIT Still life with Paul Joyce 108 K ARMA POLICE Thom Yorke on his art 114 A MY AT 40 A melancholy anniversary 118 P RISON MATCH Hilton Freund’s football charity

122 D EPARTED FRIEND Remembering Matthew Perry 124 GRAHAM’S WOES Father Ted creator Linehan 128 G REAT READS Our books round-up 132 LETTER FROM ISRAEL Memories from Israel and Palestine

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p122 Matthew Perry

p124 Graham Linehan

138 COTE-TAILS Cameron Kerr on the famous restaurant 140 CLOSING TIME Costeau’s farewell to the House of St Barnabas 144 CLASS DISMISSED Guy Ritchie

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ISSUE 10

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DIARY

AYESHA VARDAG

THE CONTROVERSIAL DOYENNE OF DIVORCE ON HIRING, FORCED MARRIAGE, AND HER NEW NOVEL

F

rom a legal point of view the major shift over the past few years has been no fault divorce, which I’d been campaigning for for a long time.

This has crystallised what was already a shift in the zeitgeist, with people being less obnoxious and pointlessly confrontational. The tone has changed somewhat: you can see the relief on individuals' faces when you tell them you don’t have to say anything nasty about your spouse: it’s just a very simple administrative exercise.

I

’ve received my share of criticism from my peers. I find gossip and bitchiness just immensely boring and it always gives me a slightly nasty taste and nasty feeling. I'm a disruptor and so I'm sure people out there in the industry dislike me just as much as they always did. I always seem to provoke all kinds of extreme reactions among people that I don't know at all.

On the other hand, being slightly on the outside of things helps me to be entrepreneurial.

T

o young female divorce lawyers I’d say you’re in a strong position of appealing to female clients who might be feeling suspicious of men but also appealing to men who want their wives to be understood and want to soften their look. The men that do go into divorce law are a minority but they tend to be very successful: that’s probably because those that do so have got a real vocation. I find men really good dedicated workers and while we have a minority of men, I would very much like to redress the balance. The reality is we hire purely on quality and so we just get whatever gender mix comes in.

Ayesha Vardag, (VARDAGS)

O

n hiring, there have been times when we have been just so busy that we have taken on people that were doing well somewhere else, assuming they would do well here – actually, that very often wasn’t the case because we have our own way of doing things. We have had some great lateral hires but mostly it hasn’t worked out. Happily, we have fantastic graduate trainees but there, I have to work hard to stop losing them; what happens is they get offered a pay bump elsewhere by headhunters. It’s a nice problem to have though as we just have to raise salaries.

T

here’s still more to do on the public policy front. I feel strongly we have this situation in which men tell women they are having an Islamic marriage. Women are married in order to have sex with them and then get divorced over texts. This is not something that England should be condoning as non-marriage: it is void marriage and clearly defective but void marriage carries financial relief much like valid marriage. That’s one thing

I think they need to deal with: at the moment men are getting away with this with impunity.

P

eople ask if I am a workaholic, but I would describe myself as

immensely lazy: in fact I think I am more of an achievement junkie. I like to do things with the minimum of effort but I am also restlessly wanting to achieve. I am much more of a morning person than a night owl. If I have got something important to do I will set my alarm early and do it in the morning which is when I do my writing. My novel is called Pont Neuf, and I’m releasing it in instalments on Substack. It’s heavily based on lots of things I have experienced including some of the challenges growing up being ethnically unplaceable in the 70s and 80s in England and experiencing different sorts of racism. People are going nuts for it. www.finito.org.uk

ISSUE 10

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LETTERS

Meet the Senior Mentor:

TOM PAUK

Tell us about your career before you joined Finito.

After studying drama, my efforts to become an actor ended with a whimper rather than a bang, and I retrained as a solicitor. The career that followed was a “game of two halves”, half-time marked by the global financial crisis of 2007-08.

In the first half, at City law firm Allen & Overy, then in-house at American bank Citigroup, I’d specialised in large cross-border lending transactions.

In the second, I helped restructure loans borrowers had taken out in more prosperous times but were now struggling to repay. After leaving the bank in 2017, I began mentoring young men in prison, returned to Allen & Overy, now in a role mentoring lawyers in the early stages of their careers, and began writing plays. My professional life, it seems, had come full circle!

Did you feel your education prepared you for the workplace?

A degree in drama could not have prepared me better for the cut and thrust of commercial law, an above-all collaborative endeavour with a diverse cast list of characters, long “rehearsals” with unfeasible deadlines we somehow always managed to meet. At the conclusion of an especially high-profile deal there was the added satisfaction of reading the “reviews” in the financial press. The practice of law is essentially an exercise in problem-solving. In my case, a love of modern languages and playing the violin had also prepared me for the intellectual rigour of law, and I was even able to use my mother tongue Hungarian in transactions 12

with Hungarian clients. So to anyone reading this wondering whether a knowledge of an obscure language might prove useful one day, the answer is a resounding Yes! Did you benefit from mentorship during your career?

When I’d started out, mentoring was still very much in its infancy. Fortunately, I was able to benefit from the law firm equivalent, the “seat” system, under which trainee solicitors move from one department (or seat) to another every few months to build up expertise in different areas of a firm’s practice.

Each seat is supervised by a senior lawyer -- part mentor, supervisor and critical friend -- overseeing a trainee’s professional development. Over the course of my training contract I was exposed to a variety of mentoring styles, which then shaped my own approach when I assumed the role. But I continue to benefit from ongoing, less formal mentoring in the shape of the extraordinary people I encounter and who inspire me with their wisdom. So in actual fact I’ve never really stopped being mentored.

What are the most common misconceptions about a career in the law?

I think there’s a general (mis) perception that law is a dry, bookish occupation, and that lawyers are aloof from the rest of society, be they pin-striped solicitors in their ivory towers or wiggedup barristers bowing obsequiously in courtrooms. In fact lawyers are widely dispersed throughout society,

Tom Pauk, Finito Senior Mentor

in the public sector (civil service, local authorities, regulatory bodies), in companies and banks, charities and NGOs. If you’re a young person considering a career in law you’ll be able to select from a wide range of specialisations that play to your unique skills and interests.

Mental health is a particular passion of yours. Can you describe how your interest in that area came about?

There were occasions, especially early on in my career, when my mental health was impacted under the pressure of work. Symptoms included poor sleep, high anxiety and irritability, and a compulsion for checking work emails 24/7. Back then, there was a stigma around discussing one’s mental health, let alone seeking help when you needed it. Worse, it was regarded as a sign of weakness, possibly even career-limiting, to self-disclose. So one’s natural instinct was simply to keep quiet and soldier on. Thankfully, we’ve evolved to a more enlightened view of wellbeing in the workplace, with a plethora of interventions designed to promote a healthy mind as well as body, including

LETTERS

mental health first aiders, mindfulness, and discouraging staff from checking work emails after hours. Eight years ago, the memory of my own experience led me to train as a volunteer at a mental health charity. At The Listening Place I’ve seen vividly for myself how poor mental health can quickly escalate into crisis, and how being truly listened to can be life-saving. Literally.

Work-life balance is something you’ve been vocal about. What are the most common pitfalls people fall into there?

Most people understand the importance of achieving a sensible work-life balance, at least intellectually, And it’s hard to argue against. But here’s the challenge: we’re not necessarily aware of the pendulum as it is swinging in the wrong direction. Whether it’s staying everlater in the office, checking, or worse, responding to emails at weekends (“because it’s already tomorrow in Tokyo”), before we know it life is work and work is life. Of course we tell ourselves that it’s only temporary, that as soon as we’ve broken the back of whatever it is we’ll take our foot off the accelerator. But it isn’t that simple, for we may unwittingly have recalibrated our benchmark of what a normal working day is. We’ve trapped ourselves into believing our own indispensability (“If I don’t do it no-one else will”). We assume that working harder improves performance, demonstrates commitment to our employer and enhances our prospects for promotion. I’d counsel anyone reading this to challenge these assumptions and to listen out closely for the whirring of your inner pendulum!

You obviously have a passion for mentoring. What are the most common challenges you’re seeing among your current crop of mentees?

I’m certainly seeing the longer-term impact of the pandemic. This is the generation whose educations, family and social lives were disrupted by successive lockdowns. And I’m in awe of just how well they’d adapted to remote ways of studying and working. Another challenge is the sheer number of highcalibre applicants vying for limited places on the graduate recruitment schemes of investment banks, accountancy firms and corporations.

Training contracts in City law firms are similarly over-subscribed, and with increasing candidates achieving top grades there’s now a far greater reliance on critical reasoning and situational judgement tests, presentations, written assignments and long assessment days.

However I’m also sensing some really positive new trends, with mentees less motivated by achieving huge salaries than they are by finding a fulfilling career. And finally, one positive legacy of the pandemic: Finito mentees are often engaged in volunteering activities, whether it’s repurposing old computers and teaching older people how to use them, mentoring disadvantaged kids, or stacking boxes in foodbanks. Something, finally, to celebrate in challenging times.

rather than clinging stubbornly to our

Do you vary your process for each mentee, or do you have a particular approach which you use with each candidate?

career from the get-go. Life has a

Mentoring is a transformative tool for supporting the development of a mentee, and because no two mentees are the same the mentoring process does inevitably vary. Having said that, there are common features in my approach.

In the first place, it’s not about the mentor. Our prime responsibility as mentors is to listen attentively at all times to our mentees. Listening actively (as distinct from merely hearing) is a skill that one develops with practice.

And it’s crucial we’re responsive to the stated needs of our mentees

own agendas. One unique aspect of

mentoring is our willingness to share our own knowledge and experience to support the development of our

mentees. A word of caution however, because this has nothing to do with

being directive. What we’re aiming to

do is empower our mentees to think and act for themselves. Finally, mentoring

is a two-way street. At its most fruitful the relationship between mentor and mentee is one in which sharing and

learning opportunities arise for both

participants. I’m forever learning from my mentees.

What do you know now in

your career which you wish you’d known at its start?

Hindsight being a wonderful thing of course, here’s three things I tell my mentees.

Firstly, it’s important to pace yourself, especially when starting out in a new

role and you’re trying to make a good

impression. Keep something of yourself in reserve for when you really need it.

Secondly, don’t plot out your entire

mischievous habit of opening new doors and leading you in new directions. And

thirdly, know where you add most value, and focus your energies accordingly.

Do you have any new

challenges on the horizon?

I’m excited to have just been

appointed to the board of the Joseph Rowntree Charitable

Trust, whose endowment supports people tackling the root causes of

conflict and injustice. Along with my

governance responsibilities, I’ll also be

involved in grant-making decisions, an area entirely new to me.

www.finito.org.uk ISSUE 8

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COLUMNS Our regular writers on employability in 2024 Alamy.com

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34 | SIMON SAYS: Simon Callow’s life on the stage

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18 MADAME SECRETARY: Gillian Keegan on 2024

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KNIGHT OF THE REALM: The wisdom of Sir Terry Waite

24 ABSOLUTE PEARL: Sarah Cobden-Ramsay’s jewellery career

COLUMNS

The Humanitarian

SIR TERRY WAITE THE RECENTLY KNIGHTED ROLE MODEL ON WHAT WE SHOULD REALLY BE AIMING FOR IN OUR WORKING LIVES

I

retain equilibrium in our busy world by having time alone.

Everybody needs some solitude and everybody needs a break from other demands of life because we live in an instant age. We notice the effects of this very clearly in all sorts of behavioural patterns most particularly, in the anger and resentment we all see online.

It is as if people today now have a very short fuse: they expect to get everywhere instantly, and this is an unconscious development arising out of our constant use of the Internet. Today we have to answer emails immediately whereas before there was a necessity to take life at a more leisurely pace, and to be able to digest things. The best antidote to all this is to take time for reflection, and ideally a period of time off each year for a retreat or something of that kind.

There are three goals to work towards in life. The first is to work for harmony in yourself and establish a healthy balance between body, mind and spirit.

The second vital goal is to work for harmony with other people - and to be compassionate and understanding in that regard. The third, which we see people more conscious of today than ever, is to be in harmony with our environment.

If you look at these three areas, the bad news is that we seem to be suffering crisis on all three fronts. The fact is that the rapid rise in mental illness particularly amongst young people is often due to this lack of inner harmony, and a failure to achieve internal coherence. On the second point, the anger and frustration with

16

our neighbours tends to be brought about by a lack of understanding and compassion. Finally, the way in which we treat the environment is already wreaking a tremendous revenge on us in all sorts of ways when we see all the effects of climate change.

“WE ARE OUT OF HARMONY WITH NATURE, AND SOMETIMES BEHAVE AS IF WE HAVE FORGOTTEN THAT WE ARE A PART OF IT.” Of course, there is such a thing as natural climate change, which we accept. However, we have confused the situation by our exploitation of the environment: we are out of harmony with nature, and sometimes behave as if we have forgotten that we are a part of it. The atoms that constitute our human body are the very same atoms that make up the stars. We are a part of a much bigger creative process: we are called upon to be creators and cocreators with God, but too often we behave as consumers and destroyers instead.

We therefore need to encourage everybody - and especially to encourage young people - to be active in cocreation. The moment you accept this understanding, then an interesting thing happens: a sort of happy responsibility is bestowed upon you, and you become a creator with God.

In my experience, this is the moment

when the possibilities of life open up,

and can be felt in your personal life as much as in your working life.

The point is, of course, that God has

created us in freedom: we are not just

here to obey his commands, important as that is. We're actually called to

something far higher: we have been given the ability to choose between creation and destruction. It hardly

needs saying that these are enormous powers given to the human species,

and that we have to take them with the utmost seriousness.

Quite naturally, if we don't realise the importance of this, then we begin to

suffer - and it is this suffering which

makes up such a visible aspect of our present predicament: the restlessness

and uncertainty which we all see when we look at the world. It is because we

are not engaged in what we should be engaged in: the co-creation with God

of a better world for ourselves and for others.

Sir Terry Waite

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C A R P E T S

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GRADUATION Collection 2024 – Cassata

Deirdre Dyson is a registered trade mark of Deirdre Dyson

www.deirdredyson.com

www.finito.org.uk

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COLUMNS

The Civil Servant

SIR PHILIP RUTNAM THE FORMER PERMANENT SECRETARY AT THE HOME OFFICE ON WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT A CAREER IN THE CIVIL SERVICE

I

worked in the civil service from 1987 until 2020; I began by working in the Treasury and my initial expectation was exceeded in terms of the interest in the work and responsibility that I was given quite early on. There’s this erroneous idea of it being a stuffy place full of hierarchy and restrictions; instead I found it was a place where you were given very clear objectives and a lot of responsibility to take them forward.

The treasury is interesting because it’s right at the centre of government but you also realise that while the Treasury has the power to say no, it doesn’t generally have the power to make things happen: it can refuse to provide the funding but it can’t actually usually change the system of education or healthcare.

Did I have mentors in the early days? I had very good people responsible from management giving me direction and mentors who gave me more informal advice. Like any career you do end up having to make your own way but what’s vital is to have exposure to a range of different people who have got advice and give advice and to try to learn the best from each of them.

The fundamental job of the top of the civil service is to help ministers – and sometimes they will have just arrived in position – to translate their political objectives into practice. It’s a question of helping ministers identify their objectives sufficiently and then work out how they are going to be turned into reality.

specialists in estate management. This

I never found it difficult to be apolitical because that’s a core part of the professional skills set. You are there to serve the democratically elected government so being impartial is a precondition for being there.

In fact, we had everything from

economists, lawyers, actuaries,

accountants, finance experts, and

is hugely under-appreciated: if we don’t think this message is important we

won’t end up with a good civil service.

There are also lots of different entry routes. There are apprenticeship

entry routes, and other degree entry

options. There is the fast stream with the exam, which is probably one of the smallest entry routes. You can

become a specialist in HR, finance,

project and programme management or commercial management.

The fast steam certainly means that your get more opportunity, subject to performance, to get promoted

earlier: but once you have got to grade seven there’s no further advantage to being on that track. It is competitive but enormous efforts are made to

identity talented people from a wide

range of backgrounds. It’s a fantastic profession.

www .n a tio n

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It’s important to understand that there is an enormous variety of different things you can do in the civil service: it has about 500,000 people employed in it. People tend to think that the civil service is all about working with ministers – somewhere between Yes, Minister and The Thick of It. There are scientific and technical jobs of huge importance. In the Department of Transport working for me, there were people responsible for investigating air accidents or rail accidents; people working in and running really large operational systems like licensing drivers and vehicles at the DVLA nearly 5000 people the single biggest employer in Swansea. We also had really large complicated computer systems: so we had IT experts, and experts in programme and project managements.

data scientists, social researchers,

es

18

policy experts through to statisticians,

ch ur

When it comes to what the optimal setup is within the civil service, I definitely think you need to have people with a combination of deep specialist expertise and enough capacity as a generalist to get things done within government. In my own career I liked staying in roles for a good few years in order to try to get to grips with what was happening. By the time I was permanent secretary at transport I feel

we got the balance right. Incidentally, I believe HS2 will get to Euston in the end – and I hope without too much delay.

Sir Philip Rutnam

COLUMNS

The Secretary of State

GILLIAN KEEGAN THE EDUCATION SECRETARY CASTS HER EYE ON A GENERAL ELECTION YEAR AND SEES A SURPRISE VICTORY AHEAD

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ow that we’re in a General Election year, I feel confident that we’re going to see Rishi Sunak’s strength and leadership come through and prove the doubters wrong. So how do we win? I think it’s very important that we provide a great focus on business education; we need to work harder on encouraging young people in setting up their own businesses.

Rishi Sunak’s Maths to 18 policy is sometimes misrepresented, but it’s of huge practical importance to understand about working capital and the administrative side of business, all of which obviously goes back to the importance of mathematics as a core subject.

There’s an entrepreneurial element to the policy which has been missed in too much of the commentary. What we need to champion is the acquisition of knowledge about the pragmatic side to life.

That’s why citing our educational achievements is going to be a big part of our strategy for the next election.

Many of our universities have now set up entrepreneurial centres, and the government is already thinking about ways in which we can help entrepreneurs: they’re the lifeblood of our economy.

But I do accept that when it comes to Maths to 18, it will be absolutely crucial how we sell that policy. Young people already know that artificial intelligence (AI) will transform their lives within their lifetime – in fact, it’s already doing so. What we have to do is to demystify that and sell it as something that’s going to help you in your life. This stuff is going to be changing how our houses

work, our jobs, and our education: we have to make sure it’s something that people don’t see as a threat. When the Maths to 18 policy was raised, everyone imagined it amounted to making it compulsory to take the subject at A-Level. That’s not what we’re talking about, and we need to make sure we bring everyone along with us according to a proper understanding of what the Prime Minister is really championing.

As I look ahead to the next General Election, I sometimes think that the current London Mayor Sadiq Khan is doing rather a good job for us. Take the free school meals policy that he’s introduced. It sounds fantastic on the face of it, but it costs a fortune and is only for the course of a year. Also, nobody in City Hall seems to be thinking about how you deliver it. This is where Labour is always weak: in the crucial realm of reality.

By stark contrast, the Conservatives have been very pragmatic: Rishi Sunak knows how to get things done. So, for instance, we have an international student strategy which we’ve developed over the past couple of years which targets international students, and seeks to recognise that our education system is one of our biggest exports.

I recall vividly one trip to Egypt where everybody was talking about how fantastic our education system is: at King’s College London, we train most of the world’s defence leaders, as well as most of the senior army figures.

Of course, we all see the immigration figures, but I’ve put the case firmly that immigration can be vital to the economy and to the health of our world-class universities. It’s a question of balance.

Another area where Rishi Sunak has been highly strategic is on creative industries, where the government has put a range of policies in place to recognise that this is our second biggest sector. We’ve tried to make sure that student loan finance is available in the short term and in smaller chunks.

On a separate front, we’re also seeing an increase in nursing and medical schools, as well as full time or part time apprenticeships: but we need to change the culture around recruitment. My local hospital for instance recently returned from a trip to the Philippines to recruit nurses over there; and I explained to them that it’s perfectly possible to recruit them here.

There’s so much more to do. I have also spoken to recruiters at big companies and corporations: what they find is that a lot of kids do well in school but then lack the social skills and understanding of social interaction suitable for the working world. But a lot of that will come back to the Maths to 18 policy: we need to create a numerate and pragmatic workforce which understands the realities of life.

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The Rt Hon Gillian Keegan MP, Secretary of State for Education www.finito.org.uk

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COLUMNS

The Baroness

FRANCES D'SOUZA THE FORMER SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE OF LORDS IS WORRIED THAT THE EXECUTIVE IS NO LONGER ANSWERABLE TO PARLIAMENT

M

y really big concern is the increasing power of the executive; this has been going on for years and years. It’s becoming extreme at the moment whereby we are getting bills which have been passed by the Commons which are essentially what we would call skeleton bills. These are really just broad outlines – and all the detail is being inserted by means of statutory instruments and secondary legislation which is unammendable.

In the Lords our options are limited if the government decides to do that.

We can either put down what’s called a fatal motion and vote on it and win.

That’s extremely rare and has happened only a handful of times since World War II. The last time we did it was in relation to Universal Credit. This motion was overwhelmingly supported by peers on all sides of the House, include Tories. But it was so frowned upon by the powers-that-be that they commissioned a special enquiry into the power of the House of Lords.

Of course this whole question goes all the way back over a hundred years to Lloyd George and to the Asquith administration, and the passage of the legislation which curbed the power of the Lords. The Parliament Act means that the Lords can create a delay of a year but it also ultimately means that the government gets its way. That’s right when you consider that the Commons is elected and the Lords isn’t.

Even so, we’re now at a point where the government is getting all sorts of things past Parliament because of unchallengeable executive orders. I find 22

this truly worrying. The person who did the most on this was Igor Judge, who sadly died in November 2023. He was a convenor in the House of Lords and an absolutely masterly speechmaker. He will be sorely missed.

The only really effective check on government action are the Select Committees. These at least have the effect of making Ministers wary about what they do because they are going to have to answer to them. That fact alone makes the Public Accounts Committee, the Constitutional Committee, the Foreign Affairs Committee and so on quite powerful. But in the end these encounters occur after the event and that of course places severe limits on their power.

You might recall also that Dominic Cummings refused once to attend the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee. I had thought up until recently that to refuse to appear before a Select Committee was a sort of hanging offence and that the Committees had the power to command Ministers to attend. That turns out not to be the case.

That particular episode makes one wonder also whether there should be parliamentary oversight of the appointment of special advisors – or SPADs as they’ve become known.

Look, for instance, at the appointment of Richard Sharp as Chairman of the BBC. Regardless of the rights and wrongs of that, the perception was always very dicey: he was somehow involved in brokering a loan for a very needy and irresponsible Prime Minister and then, hey presto, he became the chair!

This isn’t an isolated instance. The government puts in people who it knows will be safe on their terms: it shows the way in which democracy can be undermined. We cannot escape the fact that the institutions of democracy are increasingly in the gift of the government.

In a curious way, the Conservatives had the antithesis of all this in the shape of Lady May. Whatever one might think of her premiership, she is extraordinarily respected today as a backbencher: she embodies that sense of public duty which has all but left government. I had a drink with her shortly after she stepped down and I said: “I don’t know how you get out of bed in the morning when they’re treating you like that.” She replied: “You can do it if you think it is right.”

It is impossible not to respect that.

I got a different answer with another former prime minister in a similar encounter. I once asked Sir John Major why he didn’t come to the Lords and he said: “I have been so bruised by politics, I just can’t go near it.” Well, who can blame him?

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Baroness Frances D'Souza

COLUMNS

The Intellectual

RANDALL HEATHER THE INTELLECTUAL OUTLINES WHY BIDEN IS IN DANGER OF LOSING THE 2024 US ELECTION

O

ne reason why Trump’s numbers are looking good is because the Biden administration is so incredibly stupid regarding energy policy – so much so that every increase in the price of oil will be seen as a creation of the Democratic Party.

Let’s look at what Biden’s done. He got rid of the Keystone Pipeline, but that oil is still coming down from Canada on trains and barges and the likelihood of a spill is multiple times that of a pipeline. Nor will they issue any new permits for oil- or gasdrilling on federal land at a time when oil prices have been going up. This means that everyone’s underinvesting in oil because it’s not politically popular.

All of this means that not only is supply being shut down but demand is going up and it’s hitting people’s pockets every day. Really, when you come right down to it the best thing we could do is to drill like hell for gas – as there’s so much of it out there.

The world is a huge methane creating machine: if you displaced all the coal fire generation with natural gas then the impact on the environment would be substantial. But the green lobby go after natural gas as if it’s oil or coal.

But everybody knows you have to have some sort of bridge to build a solarbased energy policy.

The truth is we don’t have an energy crisis – we have an energy storage crisis. As things stand, we can’t take solar and wind energy and save it at grid level. The technology doesn’t enable us to store it for any length of

time whatsoever – and until you solve that problem, you can’t rely on solar or wind.

helped him in doing that, to have been

Which brings me back to the Keystone Pipeline and the question of why Biden might be struggling in those states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan which he needs to win to retain the presidency, if he’s well enough to contest the election. There are lots of blue collar jobs associated with the natural gas infrastructure, and if you make an intervention like the one Biden did, then any adverse fluctuation in the gas prices can be justifiably placed at your door. Added to that, there’s not much spare capacity globally – expect in states like United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. But you can’t except to switch off supply without some effect on prices, and therefore political ramifications.

anything and it certainly showed.

Biden is discovering this all too late.

There’s the perception of a weak President – more than that there’s no real Bidenism that I can see which might amount to a core set of principles. It’s worth comparing him for instance with Bill Clinton. People forget that after Clinton came in in 1992, he immediately got cleaned out in the mid-terms, and had to work with Republicans. But he didn’t stick his head in the sand: instead he brought down the federal deficit and instituted some important welfare reforms. That led to a remarkably prosperous decade where the federal government even ran a surplus.

That’s where Obama differed with Clinton. Clinton saw how he could make lemonade out of lemons – and it

the Governor of Arkansas. Obama, by unhappy contrast, had never run

Biden suffers from the same affliction.

What we’re witnessing with Trump’s resurgence speaks to a gap in

America’s institutions: there’s no

Leader of the Opposition in America.

Trump has effectively been fulfilling that role by default – and you could say Nancy Pelosi did something

similar from 2016-2020 during the

Trump years. The system is too diffuse and lacks that gladiatorial atmosphere of parliamentary debate we see

week in week out in the House of Commons.

Politicians never debate each other except during elections and all

interaction is done through the prism

of the media. No American President is called upon to do PMQs and the Cabinet meanwhile is absolutely

invisible to the public. We’re paying the price of all that now – and who knows where it will end.

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Randall Heather www.finito.org.uk

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COLUMNS

A Question of Degree

HARVEY SONING THE LEGENDARY PROPERTY ENTREPRENEUR ON THE IMPORTANCE OF NOT GOING TO UNIVERSITY AND LEARNING ON THE JOB

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y education wasn’t what you’d expect. My grandparents on my mother’s side came from Russia and Poland – that was in 1912. Within two years my grandfather was conscripted into the First World War. He spoke very little English but learnt very quickly in the trenches – mostly swear words.

On the other hand, my father’s parents were here a generation before and were quite anglicised. My father’s father – a second generation immigrant – was an entrepreneur who built one of the first cinemas in the country in Staines.

One month he had money – the next he didn’t: in that sense, he was a typical entrepreneur. In 1945, my Dad came out of the Air Force Bomber Command with £300 and went into the retail business. He became a successful businessman with a property portfolio.

“AT THE AGE OF 14¾, I HAD THE MOST DIABOLICAL SCHOOL REPORT: I WAS DRAWING AEROPLANES AND BATTLESHIPS WHEN I WAS SUPPOSED TO BE WORKING.” At the age of 14¾, I had the most diabolical school report: I was drawing aeroplanes and battleships when I was supposed to be doing schoolwork. We lived in Willesden at the time and my father said enough was enough. The headmaster said the best thing my 24

Harvey Soning

father could do, was to send me to an aircraft factory in Cricklewood and see if they would give me a job and draw aeroplanes for the rest of my life.

Fortunately, my father phoned George Farrow, of Peachey Property, his friend in Kent, and said: “I’ve got this boy Harvey, and I don’t know what I’m going to do with him”. George said: “Send him to me and we will make a man of him.” Peachey Property was based in Petts Wood, Kent, and so it was quite a commute: Willesden Green to Charing Cross, then Charing Cross to Petts Wood. I was paid £24 a week, of which £15 went on the fares even in those days. That’s how I got into the

real estate industry.

My education was, as they say, on the job. It was January 1st, 1960, when I started. There were no bank holidays not the three-days-a-week in the office like there is now; it was full-on office work. The Corps of Commissionaires Sergeant used to clip me round the ear quite hard to make sure I had a clean desk –it’s how I was brought up and trained. You had to be the first in and last out: eight in the morning to eight o’clock at night.

You could almost say that the old work ethic has now been all but destroyed and in the same way the mobile phone

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is destroying the art of communication, but this is the world we’re living in. In the 1960’s, London was being rebuilt.

The smart money was buying the plentiful bomb sites, especially in the City and the East End.

real estate companies. At that point I thought: “Sod this business of working for other people” and I formed Andrew James as a commercial estate agency.

I certainly didn’t think it was going to last for 50 years!

Despite the long hours, I got the property bug. Shelter is fundamental to human beings, whether that be a cave or modern home. We all must buy food and clothes – so retail is inevitable – and the retail has a supply chain, so you need warehousing and factories and so on. All of which makes real estate one of the most important factors of human life on earth, after food and water.

I had £5,000 and named the company after my two eldest sons. I immediately received a desist letter to stop using the name because there was already a company with the same name in existence. I couldn’t afford new notepaper – you had to write letters to each other in those days, so I reversed the name to James Andrew. One of my first clients was Sir Gerald Ronson who is still a client after 50 years, Sir Martin Sorrell followed a few years later. We have some very loyal clients including Sir Lloyd Dorfman, a Sovereign Wealth Fund, and a major Japanese Institution, who have been with us for 35 years.

It was on my 15th birthday that I started working in real estate. I have always admired the architecture and the sheer guts of these people to put these buildings up, From the early entrepreneurs such as Thomas Cubitt (1788-1855) and John Nash (17521835) who built this country, and then latterly for Irvine Sellar and Renzo Piano who built the Shard in the midst of a recession.

Of course, you mainly read of the successes, but there have been lots of disasters as well. More people have lost fortunes than the few who have succeeded. There are tens of thousands of people in this country involved in real estate as agents, architects, builders, and developers. I go to cocktail parties at Christmas, and look around me and think: “Wow, how do all these people earn a living in the Real Estate Industry.”

I started life at Peachey Property Corporation who seconded me to estate agents for experience. I stayed there until the late 60s – a good 10 years – then I joined a company called Guardian Properties in which my father was a shareholder. Unfortunately, that went the way of many other real estate companies in 1974, which was the first crash after the Second World War. It was a secondary banking crash that brought down public-private

I don’t think setting up a business has changed all that much since we came out of the dark ages. Human beings are great at invention – whether that invention takes the form of technology, medicine, electronics, or some other commercial enterprise, and look at the tech businesses that have grown in the last 20 years. It’s the human drive. You have got to prove in a very small way that what you are trying to do actually works – and I would advise doing that with as little money as possible.

The 1980s was amazing to witness. You have to hand it to Margaret Thatcher and her advisers as well: she had a great vision. When you met Thatcher, she was always straight to the point: no pleasantries about family life or anything like that. Right away the facts came out: she had a great brain.

After what her successors have done to the economy, we’re now in a different world. We are still suffering from austerity and Covid 14 years after the last financial meltdown.

There has always been tax, the only consolation being if you are paying

tax, you are making a profit; tax runs the country. Has tax been a disaster for the real estate industry? Not really.

Corporation tax hasn’t moved too much either way with the changing of the governments. For private individual rates have not been the problem it’s the removal of allowable expenditure.

Local taxation whether it be residential or commercial property is starting to hurt more and more, especially if you have a vacant property where there is no income. I am pleased that Business Asset Disposal Relief is still available, with tax being at 10% or gains up to £1m, and most other business gains taxed at 20%.

I would prefer to see entrepreneurial relief, at even lower levels to encourage new start-up businesses, as we talked about before. I think there should be at least a 5-year period before any tax on start-up businesses is charged. The government should also be providing more money for young entrepreneurs; we certainly need to encourage young people in this country to create the growth the economy requires.

We need more bursary schemes for students and apprenticeships.

I am involved in the Worshipful Company of Chartered Surveyors Scheme. We have been very successful and have 30 youngsters going through universities that would have had no chance of being involved in higher education or know about the real estate and construction industry. It’s a great country of opportunity. We need governments to encourage people to try and progress themselves.

Harvey Soning FRICS, is the founder, Chairman and CEO of James Andrew International.

Ambassador to the Royal Air Force Museum.

Founding Member of the Natural History Museum Foundation. www.finito.org.uk

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COLUMNS

Relatively Speaking

SIMON CALLOW THE GREAT ACTOR AND WRITER ON HOW HIS UPBRINGING HAS IMPACTED ON HIS CAREER

I

am sometimes asked by young people who want to be actors whether I can help – realistically, there's not much I can do because I’m not Laurence Olivier so I can’t invite people to come and work in my theatre.

But when asked for advice, I tell young people that it’s a very, very hard life. If you are considering this route, you must first ask yourself: “Do you need to be an actor?” Unless your life depends on it – unless it’s the only thing that you can imagine yourself doing – then don’t even think about it because it’s a life of rejection and disappointment.

“I TELL YOUNG PEOPLE THAT IT’S A VERY, VERY HARD LIFE.” I lived in Streatham until I was five and then I went to live in Berkshire where my mother was the school secretary for two years, before we returned to Streatham. When I was nine, I went to Africa; we returned eventually in 1962, and I lived then in Gypsy Hill.

I didn’t think I was going to be an artist until much later. I had no idea but my grandmother had been a singer, and even been on the stage. She was a contralto - one of those deep female voices that you don’t really hear so much nowadays. But the life was not for her since she suffered quite badly from nerves so big concerts were difficult.

However, she did sing at the Albert Hall to celebrate the end of the war in 1919.

She was a very theatrical human being as was her father – who was Danish and had been a clown in the Tivoli 26

Simon Callow (Wikipedia.org)

Club, and then became a ringmaster in Copenhagen where he married my great grandmother, a bare back horse rider. He came from a long line of equestrian folk and came to London and became an impresario. So theatre was there but not close to hand.

“THIS CHILD SHOULD BE ON STAGE, HE IS VERY GIFTED.”

As a child I was rather extrovert.

When I was out with my grandmother shopping I would be doing routines and someone said to my grandmother: “This child should be on stage, he is very gifted.” My grandmother was delighted by that idea and told my mother the good news and my mother said: “Over my dead body!”

When I was in Africa, aged 9 or 12, in Lusaka, Zambia at school we did little playlets but tiny stuff. When I went to boarding school in South Africa at a school called St Aidens in what was then Grahamstown, I did actually act

COLUMNS

in plays but I have very little memory of it - except there is a photograph of me dressed up as an angry old man shaking my fist.

When I came back to England, I went to a school called the London Oratory which was in those days in Chelsea but subsequently moved to Fulham and became quite a famous school partly because Tony Blair went there. It was a pretty terrible school and we had no drama at all. I knew nothing about acting at all. But London was all around me, and from my personal experience, I was overwhelmed by the work of the National Theatre and the Old Vic. I wrote a letter to Laurence Olivier who suggested that I might apply for a job in the box office.

Since that time, I’ve been very lucky in my career, and I do get recognised, especially after Four Weddings and A Funeral. However I’m not Jennifer Lopez and I’m not Brad Pitt so the true burdens of fame aren’t something I’ve had to bear.

“I’M NOT JENNIFER LOPEZ AND I’M NOT BRAD PITT SO THE TRUE BURDENS OF FAME AREN’T SOMETHING I’VE HAD TO BEAR.” I’ve had my share of setbacks. Not all movie executives or financiers are especially responsive to my art, but then that’s normal when people cross over from theatre into film. Take Sir Tom Stoppard, as an example, who has sometimes seen his scripts go unmade: he is essentially a playwright, and he knows what he's doing. But when executives read a Tom Stoppard script they probably don’t see dollar signs.

Instead they think: “This is very clever, this is very interesting but where’s the money and the audience?”

I have sometimes had to face the fact that I’m not commercial. I directed one

Simon Callow in A Christmas Carol at Arts Theatre London in 2016. Photograph: Tristram Kenton

film called The Ballad of the Sad Café which was a sort of mildly respected flop. An art house flop is the worst sort of film you can make. You could make an art house success, and that’s very good. You can also make a commercial flop – but if you brought it in on time and under budget then you would still be a safe pair of hands. But an art house flop is an absolute no-no.

Even so, things are looking up and I have some movies in the pipeline, which are very promising. But the thing about making movies is that it’s very expensive, and people don’t like spending their money – except when they sometimes go mad and think that they are making art like Warren Beatty’s famous flop Ishtar, where everybody spent more and more money because he was Warren Beatty.

This is all partly why I am quite nervous when I am doing plays with other people: on my own I am my own master completely and even if I were to forget a lump of the text I can make it up, and I am now quite good at improvising Dickens and Shakespeare. I note that the solo play is becoming a trend. I see that Eddie Izzard has just done Great Expectations, and that Andrew Scott has done Uncle Vanya as a one man show. The only novel that I have ever done as a one man show is A Christmas Carol which works because it is this amazing magical performance where you can jump from one scene to another: the narrator of A Christmas Carol in our

version is a conjurer and that makes sense.

I am often asked about my next one man show. I’m sure Gore Vidal would make an entertaining evening but I don’t think I would be the person to do it. I am always nobbling writers to write me things and they are always a bit daunted by it. They are adapting at the moment a novel by an American novelist called John Clinch. Clinch writes two kinds of novels: straightforward narratives and prequels somehow interconnected to already existing novels. One he wrote was called Marley; I happened to review it for The New York Times and I immediately took an option out on it because I could see huge cinematic potential in it, as well as solo performance potential. I’m on a third draft of it, and getting close to something performable now.

I’ve now been writing about Orson Welles for over a quarter of a century: I have become a more nuanced viewer of the human scene than I was when I was younger but that’s not surprising. But lately I’ve been thinking about fiction too: there are about half a dozen novels swirling around in my brain and I would love to write them, but I have so many other things that I have still got to do before that. I also want to write about my family – but not in fictional form: I have just got to get it out of my system. www.finito.org.uk

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Ten Thousand Hours

SARAH COBDEN-RAMSAY THE JEWELLERY-MAKER ON THE ORIGIN OF HER FASCINATING COMPANY RHINO TEARS WHICH IS FIGHTING BACK AGAINST THE POACHING INDUSTRY

Sarah Cobden-Ramsay

I

t was during a visit to the Kariega Game Reserve in South Africa in 2016 that I encountered a remarkable rhino called Thandi. This was not just a wildlife sighting; for me it was a life-altering event.

Thandi was a living testament to survival. She had suffered a horrendous poaching attack, her face had been savagely disfigured to extract her horn. Despite the physical trauma, her indomitable spirit shone through. Not only did she survive this gruesome assault, Thandi has become a symbol of resilience, mothering five calves – Thembi, Colin, Mthetho, Siya and Zolani. The horribly scarred, yet serene Thandi, grazing quietly with her 28

first, 18 month year old calf, Thembi, was a turning point for me. I had to contribute, even if in some small way, to help fight this dark canvas of brutal poaching and support the incredible work so many do in rhino conservation.

I had several years of experience as a jeweller, a skill honed under the tutelage of Jinks McGrath in her Sussex workshop. With Thandi as my inspiration and my passion for jewellery, I embarked on the journey of creating 'Rhino Tears', firstly designing a unique piece of jewellery in Thandi’s honour and hopefully then raising awareness and those all-important anti-poaching funds.

Each piece is designed as a delicate solid gold or silver tear, and carries an engraved hallmark on the back - a triangle with a 'T', in homage to Thandi. For me, for every sale, it becomes more than just a piece of jewellery; it becomes a tangible symbol of strength, survival, and hope.

Happily, my charity Rhino Tears, has gone from strength to strength, the product has evolved to include earrings, cuffs and bracelets and particular commissions with diamond inlay in both silver and gold pendants and earrings across the range.

This has resulted over the years, in considerable donations to a few

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Thandi the Rhino, Photo by @danielhaesslich

carefully chosen charities. Importantly for me, these game reserves in South Africa and Kenya are passionate about the conservation of rhinos in their natural habitat, as well as raising awareness and enabling local communities in supporting their heritage for the future.

The monies raised have gone to help in several areas, primarily anti-poaching units, the purchasing and training of tracking dogs, tracking collars, cameras, the sad but essential de-horning of rhinos and the successful rewilding of orphans. Rhino Tears has also been able to proudly fund eight local interns through a year’s training in wildlife conservation and protection. They

are now fully-fledged rangers at the Kariega Game Reserve. Although most of my sales are done online, due to popular demand, I have been thrilled to provide Rhino Tears’ jewellery to several outlets, including the Curio Shop at Kariega, Ant’s Nest in the Waterberg and Auckland Zoo. My journey from the plains of Kariega Game Reserve and a jewellery workshop in Sussex will, I hope, inspire, and show that we can all find a small part to play in preserving our planet's rich biodiversity and ensure the rhinos roam freely and safely on the plains of Africa.

Go to rhinotears.org

“THE MONIES RAISED HAVE GONE TO HELP IN SEVERAL AREAS, PRIMARILY ANTIPOACHING UNITS, THE PURCHASING AND TRAINING OF TRACKING DOGS, TRACKING COLLARS, CAMERAS.” www.finito.org.uk

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Tomorrow’s Leaders

KATHERINE HOOLEY A SENIOR ASSOCIATE AT CARTER-RUCK DISCUSSES LIFE AS A LAWYER – AND SPECULATES ON HOW AI IS ALREADY CHANGING THE LEGAL LANDSCAPE privacy and reputation, which can be seen with the cases of NT1 & NT2 v Google LLC and a leading Supreme Court decision in PJS v News Group Newspapers Ltd, which, while perhaps not immediately recognisable to laypeople, have been pivotal in shaping privacy law including the ‘Right to be Forgotten’. Only a few weeks ago my colleagues were in the Supreme Court against the Home Office, in what is likely to be a landmark judgment on important issues of defamation law.

Katherine Hooley

S

o, what do you do? That ubiquitous and seemingly simple question intended to glean insight into one’s life, can carry unexpected weight for a lawyer.

We often find ourselves navigating preconceptions about our profession.

You might recall Shakespeare’s muchquoted line from Henry VI Part II “let’s kill all the lawyers,” a sentiment amusingly echoed during an encounter with a stranger who inquired if I belonged to the “blood sucking” variety of lawyers!

As a lawyer, we are bound by professional obligations such as client confidentiality.

This restriction can significantly limit our ability to discuss specifics of our day-to-day work and our clients’ identities, making the answer to “What do you do?” even more complex.

I am a Senior Associate at the law firm Carter-Ruck and work in the media law team, which specialises in reputation management, involving (among other areas of law) defamation, privacy, data protection, copyright and harassment law.

We are known for our 40-year history of being at the forefront of the development of law within our practice areas, particularly 30

Despite our firm’s association with claimant litigation and advisory services, our practice is multifaceted. We represent both claimants and defendants.

Our clients are global and include governments, heads of state, members of both Houses of Parliament, multinational companies, corporate and commercial entities, entrepreneurs, shareholders, directors, private family offices, celebrities, sports personalities, private individuals who find themselves temporarily in the public eye, academics and academic institutions.

The scope of work is incredibly varied and ranges from litigation to advisory work (including advising on Parliamentary investigations and complaints) across our different practice areas. We also act for global broadcast and media entities, which involves both pre-publication work and dealing with legal and regulatory complaints post publication. Our recognised international law practice spans human rights issues, international arbitration and sanctions work.

For me, one of the most fulfilling aspects of working at Carter-Ruck is that the client base and work is as broad and diverse as it is interesting and although my mainstay is media law the diversity of our practice

presents a variety of opportunities. My recent heavy involvement in a commercial law case centring on an unfair prejudice claim against our client, as well as having the opportunity to work with the international law team on a high-profile international arbitration matter, exemplifies this. Additionally, our internal team structures offer unique benefits when it comes to opportunities for juniors at all levels, even trainees and paralegals, to work closely with Partners, benefitting from their experience and guidance and gaining invaluable experience and responsibility.

“DAILY LIFE AS A MEDIA LAWYER REQUIRES GOOD TIME MANAGEMENT AND COMMUNICATION SKILLS.” Daily life as a media lawyer requires good time management and communication skills. These are key. Any one associate will be working across multiple matters, with different partners, balancing client expectations and court deadlines. In litigation, deadlines are mostly set by the court, and although extensions can be obtained in certain situations, often they are immovable. On media matters, at pre-publication stage, my schedule can be dictated to some extent by the media’s publication deadlines, which can be unpredictable. We might get an enquiry on a new matter on a Thursday or Friday to which we need to respond within a short timeframe ahead of a weekend publication deadline.

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As with all law, the media law landscape is an evolving one and so it is also important to keep up to date with case law. The media law blog Inforrm provides great insight and updates on cases and current issues in the field. Barristers’ chambers like 5RB and Matrix, with which we work closely, also publish regular case updates and host conferences and roundtable events which encourage active discussion on case law and developments within our practice areas.

These types of events are invaluable for junior lawyers to forge connections within the profession.

Defamation law cases have traditionally involved individuals challenging print media publications over allegations about them that they contend are untrue, not in the public interest, private and/or confidential and causing harm to their reputation. The legal landscape has had to expand and evolve in response to the internet and the consequential boom of publication of material online (both by traditional media and, increasingly, by the general public). It remains the case (by virtue of them being of interest to the public) that legal complaints often still involve high profile individuals, from celebrities to politicians, about whom something has been published which causes serious harm to their reputation.

When these cases go to trial they often attract significant press coverage. The recent “Wagatha Christie” case transcended the media law legal circles and became a topic of national interest and debate.

Unusually, I found I was being asked for my professional view by family, friends and even acquaintances on what had by then turned into an almost globally talked about trial. The same was true with the Depp trials.

Ordinarily when litigation is brought, this means the case and key information about it, including the parties’ names and the basis of the claim and any defence, are put on the court record which means that that information becomes publicly available. Any court hearings and the trial are usually held in public, which is consistent with the “open justice” principles

we have in this country. However, some of our cases involve private and confidential information, which can require deviation from the usual open justice principles.

This can mean that even the identities of the parties are protected (usually through anonymised ciphers), let alone details of the private information itself, as further dissemination of that information is likely to harm the parties and/or undermine the case. This can be the case even if the matters involve high profile individuals and court hearings, although it is up the court to decide what measures it considers proportionate in the circumstances, which will involve it balancing the competing rights of the parties and also what is in the interests of the public.

“AI TECHNOLOGY LOOKS LIKELY TO BE GAME CHANGING.” In recent times, social media has become a source of information and news for many of the population in competition with traditional print media. The democratisation of social media allows anyone to become a commentator or ‘citizen journalist’. However, while trained journalists might be expected to take a course in legal issues journalists face, such as defamation and privacy law and data protection, and the steps they need to take to ensure that their work is responsible and legally defensible and avoids infringing other people’s rights, no such tests apply to the populations of Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok. The recent Online Safety Act tries to grapple with some of these issues in its creation of new communications offences aimed at those sending false or threatening messages online or encouraging self-harm. In addition, case law enables the law to evolve and adapt as society changes.

AI is the latest frontier, with its impact on various industries, including law, being a topic of much debate. In some industries, the use of generative AI technology looks likely to be game changing, but while its

abilities are undoubtedly impressive, it has also already courted controversy. There has been more than one instance where generative AI has won a photography or art prize, which has caused some debate around the threat it poses to those trying to make a livelihood as a creative. As lawyers, in addition to our professional obligations of confidence, we have obligations and duties of honesty. Generative AI’s ability to have “hallucinations” (i.e. create new information that is false, which it can attribute wrongly to a source or insist is correct) makes it necessary to treat the technology with a high degree of caution.

I think this is a particular concern for lawyers, where we need to be certain of the veracity of the information we are presenting. There is also the risk that using generative AI could breach duties of confidentiality where the information provided to the platform might be accessible to the platform provider. It raises extremely interesting questions from a media law perspective as well. If hallucinations involve false and defamatory allegations against individuals, which they repeat to multiple users, this raises questions as to whether ChatGPT could be held liable for defamation. One such case has already been brought in Florida by a radio host called Mark Walters whom ChatGPT alleged, falsely, had committed financial crimes. It is very much a case of ‘watch this space’ in the world of AI Law.

“IT IS VERY MUCH A CASE OF ‘WATCH THIS SPACE’ IN THE WORLD OF AI LAW. ” Looking ahead, the fast-changing world we inhabit will require an ever-changing and evolving legal system. This shifting legal landscape offers lawyers the opportunity to shape and adapt our legal system to keep pace with societal and technological advancements, which is quite something to be a part of. Perhaps I should lead with that next time I am asked ‘What do you do?”… www.finito.org.uk

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Those Are My Principles

LEE ELLIOT MAJOR THE UK’S FIRST SOCIAL MOBILITY PROFESSOR GIVES AN UPDATE ON WHERE WE ARE ON ONE OF THE TOPICS OF OUR TIMES

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ne of the big challenges for the current generation is that we’re facing a decline of what I call absolute social mobility. Today’s landscape is the polar opposite of what happened after the Second World War, when there were more jobs created, and a notable expansion in the number of hospitals and universities. Those developments created more room at the top, and people did better than previous generations.

Sadly, we’re now entering a period where – for reasons both domestic and global – that prospect is receding. I’m the first in my family to go to university – and I’m not a unique case in Britain over the past 50 years. At the moment, those on the lower rungs of the ladder among the younger generation are struggling to improve their lives. We’re entering a difficult phase, and our present predicament challenges the traditional notions of right-left politics. We have to throw all out existing ideas out of the window.

How to solve all this? I produced a book called Social Mobility: And Its Enemies for Pelican a few years ago: this was a review of the evidence so far on the topic, which also aimed to look at what drives social mobility both historically and internationally. My goal is to influence policy.

I was a trustee for nine years at The Education Endowment foundation. This is a government-funded organisation set up with money which Michael Gove, then the Secretary of State for Education, announced to find out what works in the classroom in terms of improving learning for disadvantaged pupils. I discovered during that time how hard it is to find approaches which 32

Lee Elliot Major

both work and which – crucially – can be consistently scaled up.

“ONE-TO-ONE TUTORING REALLY WORKS.” For our book we reviewed thousands of studies, and what came up time and time again is the that one-to-one tutoring really works. I’ve always felt that it’s also scaleable. Let’s say you get a good school – unfortunately, as soon as you scale that up to a 100 schools on the same model, the impact will likely shrink somewhat.

Tutoring isn’t bedevilled by that problem: you can scale it up.

When it came to the National Tutoring

Service the idea was that wherever you live in the country, you have access to tutoring. Of course, there’s a lot of good education out there, but what we found is that charities are often able to operate predominantly on a local level. What was needed was coverage across the country – and there was no reason why this shouldn’t form part of the levelling up narrative.

The context of the pandemic was important too since that shone a light on inequalities which we saw very clearly during that time. What happened during the Covid-19 crisis was a boom in private tutoring for families who could afford it, and it seemed to be clearer than ever before that a National Tutoring Service could form a vital part of the solution.

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There was another component to all this.

I was also struck by the volunteering spirit which we see today among the young: they have a strong sense of social justice. I felt the stars could align, especially with the brilliant Rob Halfon MP as Chair of the Education Select Committee backing the idea.

“IF YOU HAVE EVIDENCE BEHIND WHAT YOU’RE PROPOSING, IT DOESN’T MATTER IF YOU’RE LEFT OR RIGHT OF THE AGENDA.” I am very careful to be apolitical with my views on social mobility as I think it’s a cross party issue. This might be a naïve belief but my view is if you have evidence behind what you’re proposing, it doesn’t matter if you’re left or right of the agenda it should be compelling for both Labour and the Conservatives, and I have to talk to both sides.

Of course there were concerns here and there – that it might devalue the teaching profession, particularly if it came a permanent fixture of the education system. In general, I thought the Labour Party would support the idea but, as things stand, it would be interesting to know where they are on it. During the Corbyn era there was talk of a National Education Service, but it was a very broad idea without a lot of detail.

I’m concerned like everybody else that public debate is becoming increasingly polarised so what I wanted to do was present incontrovertible evidence.

Perhaps my views on tuition fees will surprise people: I think you need means-tested fees and far greater support for poorer students when they go to university. I also believe that if you’ve got fixed personal resources to invest in

education you invest more in the earlier stages of education.

credits for what economists call ‘human capital’ – that is, investing in your

Everything we do must take into account the fact that we have a real issue around social mobility. In particular we’re facing a decline in absolute social mobility: it’s the opposite of what happened after the war, when more jobs were available and there was notable expansion in the number of hospitals and universities.

workforce. As things stand, there’s a lot

We need to do something about people who leave school without basic skills. I would suggest a basic school certificate in English and Maths, which everyone is expected to pass. I would also have a vocational stream for children who aren’t academically minded.

more long term.

On employment, I argue that there should be guaranteed training and employment for those threatened with long-term unemployment. The costs of doing this will be less than the costs of having generational unemployment: we need to think in terms of another New Deal. It’s only if we focus on long term and deeply embedded problems such as these that we can move the dial: but politicians of course want to have swift ideas which make a quick impact. What we’re discussing here will occur over a couple of parliaments at the very least.

“WE NEED TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT PEOPLE WHO LEAVE SCHOOL WITHOUT BASIC SKILLS.” Rob Halfon who is now the Skills

Minister has said some interesting things about guaranteed apprenticeships.

But the devil’s always in the detail. I would argue that there should be as much support for people who don’t go to university as for those who do – and equal support also for those who go down the apprenticeship route. I also believe companies should receive tax

of policy around tax credits and general infrastructure – but less in terms of

developing your employees. International comparisons are difficult because of

context, but you can’t help but see the

contrast between the UK and Germany; the latter’s approach to business is much

“THERE SHOULD BE AS MUCH SUPPORT FOR PEOPLE WHO DON’T GO TO UNIVERSITY AS FOR THOSE WHO DO.” One of the enduring frustrations with the social mobility literature is that

there aren’t many studies looking at intersectionality – that’s to say, the

combination of your social backgrounds, your income, social class, ethnicity and gender. When you do begin to look at

the evidence there, you realise that social mobility has been bad for some ethnic

minority groups – but not so much for

others. For instance, black pupils seem to fall behind in secondary and university as well – but a lot of this is driven by inequality and poverty, which affects people from all backgrounds.

All of this makes inequality an important subject. Historically, it would have fit a little better with the left agenda, but I

think the right are also interested now

in these debates. What we can’t have is

a situation where it doesn’t matter how

talented someone is, they have no chance of making it. Take America: the idea

is that anyone can make it there with

hard work and talent. With too much

inequality, you damage that prospect and that’s what I’m committed to fighting against.

www.finito.org.uk

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EVENTS

Event Report

JAMES CLEVERLY AT THE IN AND OUT CLUB FINITO WORLD REPORTS ON A BREAKFAST WITH THE THEN FOREIGN SECRETARY AND REFLECTS ON THE SWIFTLY UNFOLDING NATURE OF POLITICAL CAREERS

James Cleverly answers questions from the room.

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he latter quarter of James Cleverly’s 2023 is an object lesson in the uncertainty of politics – and especially politics at the highest level. Cleverly came to speak at a Finito event at the In and Out Club kindly sponsored by eBookers founder Dinesh Dhamija, with an impressive guest list including the historian Sir Anthony Seldon, the former Minister for Civil Societies, Brooks Newmark, and head of the Inzito Partnership, Carol Leonard.

Cleverly, then Foreign Secretary and now – following the autumn Cabinet reshuffle – Home Secretary, gave every 34

sign of enjoying the job. As he took questions from the audience, he ranged widely across every aspect of foreign policy with a deep knowledge, humour and skill which showed a man in full mastery of his brief.

The then Foreign Secretary began by observing what he called “a jarring disconnect between how the world views the UK and how many people in the UK view the UK –particularly those people on the opposition benches who seem absolutely dead set on seeing Britain at its worst, in terms of interpreting everything in the most cynical and negative way.” Here we had

a preview of some of the arguments we can expect to see in the imminent General Election.

“I DETECT A REAL CRAVING FOR THE UK’S VOICE, THE UK’S VIEW.” Cleverly continued: “I detect a real craving for the UK’s voice, the UK’s view, and the UK’s engagement in Latin America, in Africa, in South East Asia, in the Middle East and elsewhere. We are a serious player on the world stage

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James Cleverly with Dinesh Dhamija

James Cleverly with prospective Parliamentary candidate Yasmin Al-Atroshi

and that is why I get the opportunity to visit whichever countries I want to visit: I have access to people at the most senior level. I would love to pretend that that’s all to do with my charming personality and wonderful good looks but the truth is it’s because I am the Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland: that’s what gets me in the room.”

Had the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky been in the room he would have been cheered by Cleverly’s next sentiments: “I go to the US pretty regularly and there are voices there questioning our collective ongoing support for Ukraine. I will make this argument: to remove our support for Ukraine in its self defence against Russian aggression would be an error of catastrophic proportions.

Carl Hunter, OBE

From left to right: Joanne Rees, Rara Plumptre and Alison Cork, MBE

“TO REMOVE OUR SUPPORT FOR UKRAINE IN ITS SELF DEFENCE AGAINST RUSSIAN AGGRESSION WOULD BE AN ERROR OF CATASTROPHIC PROPORTIONS.” We made a promise back in February 2022 when a full-scale invasion happened that we would back Ukraine in their self-defence until they regain their country. On the basis of that

promise, they committed their sons and daughters, and their husbands and wives, to the battlefield and they have endured very significant losses. If we were ever tempted to throw them under the bus we should have done it at the start before they put their people in harm’s way.”

This was greeted with murmurs of approval across the room. Cleverly now entered into a broader thematic discussion of what he aimed to do at the Foreign Office: “One of the things I have really tried to do during my time as Foreign Secretary is for us to get back into the habit of thinking about foreign policy not just in terms of months or years, but decades. I have had a consistent approach that we build relationships not just with the countries that are powerful now but with the www.finito.org.uk

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EVENTS Steven Kay KC

countries that will become increasingly powerful in decades to come – like India, Kenya, Nigeria, Indonesia and others because foreign policy is not about fads or fashion or short term interest.”

To that end, Cleverly explained that he had visited 53 countries in the 12 months since becoming Foreign Secretary and had hosted over 100 formal guests to the UK.

“INDIA IS PROBABLY NOW THE MOST POPULOUS COUNTRY IN THE WORLD.” At that point, Cleverly took questions, the first being from Dhamija about the prospects of a trade deal between India and the UK, which would bring 300,000 jobs to this country. Cleverly was sympathetic: “I will be going back to India soon,” Cleverly told Dhamija. “India is probably now the most populous country in the world.

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There are arguments about exactly whether it’s China or it’s India – but we know the trends. The Chinese population is declining, and their economy is slowing. India’s population is still increasing and their economy is increasing disproportionately: you don’t need a crystal ball to know they’re going to be the key global player in the next 50 years. Obviously, we have a long if complicated relationship with India but it would be remiss of us not to take advantage of the links of the long tradition we have together to build a really good future relationship with India.”

After that came a question about Libya from Steven Kay KC. Kay spoke of the considerable role which the UK might have to play to advance peace in that country, explaining that Lord Salisbury had agreed to make Hatfield House available for talks. Cleverly responded in a friendly but oblique manner: “I will take that on board. I am not going to make a commitment now. You will forgive me for holding

my counsel a little bit. The frustration with Libya is that we are about to hit the third anniversary of their delayed election. They were meant to have an election on Christmas Eve a few years ago, although they got close. But what you say about the need for the UK as a sophisticated and calm voice is true.”

On Net Zero, which Sunak had recently announced his intention to dial back a little, Cleverly had this to say: “You will see some of the brouhaha about our Net Zero policy – and just to let you know, we have gone from being way out ahead of the pack to just being ahead of the pack.

We dodged a bullet in the winter of 2022-3 and had a short and mild winter meaning that energy demand was less.” He added an important geopolitical angle to the energy question: “We have also got to make sure we don’t find ourselves in hock to China: yes, this is about preserving the planet but it’s also about making sure that people who can’t afford to switch technologies or cars or boilers in the

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His Excellency Mr Manar Dabbas, Jordanian Ambassador

next couple of years have got a little bit more breathing space.”

Interestingly, Cleverly was also happy to answer questions beyond his brief.

Asked what he would say to would-be candidates for election, he said: “It’s a tricky one. A lot of this is down to luck and everyone hates hearing that because you can’t really control it. Energy and enthusiasm is the thing – but that’s easy when things are going well. What selectors look for are people who have energy and enthusiasm when it gets tough: when you get knocked down, brush yourself off, get up and go at it.”

peoples in 100 years’ time: “One of the massive advantages that we have as a country on the world stage is that we are the global default language: if you are Columbian and you find yourself doing business with someone in Indonesia and you don’t speak each other’s language, there is something like a 90 per cent chance that you will both be able to converse in English.

It is also basically the language of technology: I think the historical success of the English-speaking peoples is going to be locked in for a very long time.”

“ONE OF THE MASSIVE ADVANTAGES THAT WE HAVE AS A COUNTRY ON THE WORLD STAGE IS THAT WE ARE THE GLOBAL DEFAULT LANGUAGE.”

Cleverly was talking to us just before the appalling events in Israel on October 7th – at that time it seemed as though Israel and Saudi Arabia were heading towards an imminent peace deal. Some of Cleverly’s comments speak to an optimism about the region which has since vanished: “From the UK’s point of view, seeing Israel and the Arab world becoming closer and working together is a positive thing.” We would have been having a very different conversation a month later.

Cleverly was also asked about the future of the English-speaking

But now it is a conversation for Lord Cameron to have, and Cleverly is

James Cleverly with Ronel Lehmann

charged with handling the fallout from the Supreme Court’s adverse ruling of the government’s Rwanda policy.

A week is a long time in politics and a month can be an eternity. Nobody in that room was in any doubt that Cleverly enjoyed – and was good at – being Foreign Secretary; to look back on this important and interesting breakfast is, more than anything, to be reminded of the helter-skelter nature of politics as a career. www.finito.org.uk

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FEATURES Deep dives into the issues which matter 70 | THE EVE OF THE MACHINES What will AI really entail?

(Unsplash.com)

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52 THAT BONAPARTE THING Should we be more like Napoleon?

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62 IN MEMORIAM Remembering Terence Cole

76 HAPPY NEW YEAR Phil Verney looks ahead

COVER STORY

EXCLUSIVE: HOW ELON MUSK IS CHANGING THE GLOBAL ECONOMY CHRISTOPHER JACKSON

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COVER STORY

E

lon Musk is one of those public figures like Mark Zuckerberg who seems to have his own uniform.

It is difficult to imagine Musk not dressed in black boots, black T-Shirt and tight-fitting black jeans. And at Bletchley Park, for an AI safety summit, here he is: like a life-size Musk doll which turns out actually to be Musk. When he speaks, he rather charmingly mumbles.

I wouldn’t call his fellow tech billionaires Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, or Zuckerberg disarming. Musk is. He has a way of murmuring intelligently, even humbly. There is something mesmerising and centred about him which is separate from his wealth.

Speaking to the UK prime minister Rishi Sunak, he says: “I think actually [this summit] will go down in history as being very important. I think it’s really quite profound.”

This praise is offered somewhat in the voice of a homeless person soliloquising at a bus-stop. But it seems to do the trick. Sunak himself looks like being prime minister may have been less to do with forging some sort of change to Britain than an elaborate attempt to meet Musk, which is only on this day bearing fruition. When Musk compliments Sunak on inviting China, I briefly think Sunak might weep for joy.

“Having them here, I think is essential really. If they’re not participants, it’s pointless. I think if the United States and the UK and China are aligned on safety, that’s all going to be a good thing.”

The inescapable conclusion is that Musk is more powerful than Sunak – or he certainly seems to be at Bletchley. Musk is not only one of the people likely to shape the destiny of AI, and therefore the future of humanity; he can also get into space in a way that NASA can’t (SpaceX); give internet to places like Ukraine if he wants to (SpaceX again); control

the future of the electric car (Tesla); control the future of robotics (Tesla, Neuralink); drill vast tunnels and solve your traffic problems (The Boring Company); collect vast troves of data (Twitter); decide on the direction of free speech (Twitter); and has also had, or is about to have, a say on how the financial system works (PayPal, perhaps Twitter again). Rishi Sunak on the other hand will likely shortly retreat into private life, probably as a sort of a middling financier.

No wonder Sunak was in his own words ‘privileged and excited’ to be interviewing Musk and not the other way round.

What else did Musk say during the interview after the Bletchley Park summit at Lancaster House. From the perspective of work, Musk predicted that AI would ‘create a future of abundance where there is no scarcity of goods and services. There will come a point when no job is needed – you can have a job if you want for personal satisfaction, but the AI will be able to do everything.”

These were stirring words for an employability magazine to hear. After the talk, some listeners were taking Musk’s words with a pinch of salt.

The South African-born entrepreneur hasn’t got to where he is by thinking small about the future: it is almost a running joke that every year at his Tesla presentation he predicts that driverless cars are imminent: and every year that turns out not to be the case – so far.

But the naysayers should also beware: Musk has a habit of making things happen which onlookers had thought impossible: nobody expected SpaceX, Tesla, or Neuralink. We didn’t think reusable rockets could be a thing; they are. I never thought it possible for a robot to delicately pick up an egg and transfer it from one hand to the other; Musk thought it doable and made it happen. This is a man who has

repeatedly changed the world by sheer gumption, hard work, imagination, zeal, and brutal workplace practices.

We might not like him, but we’d be crazy at this point not to pay attention.

THE MUSK METHOD The Musk we see at Bletchley and later at Lancaster House might seem unassuming and even gentle, but it is one of many Musks – to put the matter mildly. Musk is protean; like many great men, he is complex – at constant motion. As is so often the case when it comes to well-known people, journalists get the most palatable version. But there are others Musks than the one we see at Bletchley: the goofy version who bought a sink into Twitter on his first day as a pun on the idea of ‘Let that sink in’ referring, I think, to the new working culture which he would bring to the social media company. For someone so intelligent, Musk’s sense of humour can be remarkably puerile, as followers of his X feed will know.

Then there is the dreamer, often to be found in Isaacson’s indispensable biography Elon Musk: this Musk is to be seen off to one side of a busy room, letting the future and his role in it coalesce around him. A science fiction fan when young – perhaps the biggest single influence on him is Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – it can seem as if he is more comfortable out of the present moment, inhabiting future ones. With Musk, contemplation of the future is a salve to stress: it is, I think, a kind of resting-place with him.

Then there is the Napoleonic questioner: the Musk who stalks his factories and asks questions of his staff. Could this be done more efficiently? Most importantly: could www.finito.org.uk

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This is certainly the case. But it also opens up onto another Musk, the one his colleagues fear. This is the version identified by his partner Grimes called ‘demon mode’. This Musk is full of a dark rage, and comes into being with an unsettling randomness. Demon mode Musk manifests as supreme urgency, and goes like this. A product or situation will be adduced by a hapless underling, possibly a newbie.

It will not be good enough. Musk tends not to be polite about not good enough in general – but he is especially disparaging about the subpar when in demon mode. In such instances it leads to rage and dismay. “Does this timeline seem like something I would find remotely acceptable? Obviously not. If a timeline is long, then it’s wrong,” Isaacson quotes him as saying in relation to a situation with the servers at Twitter on December 22nd 2022. This then is followed by: the imposition of an insane deadline; the overriding of any opposition to that deadline, usually by threatening job losses; a series of firings anyway; a period of manic and sapping activity; the creation of something new.

Elon Musk with his brother Kimbal. (Alamy.com)

it be done more quickly? This version of Musk is difficult to distinguish from Musk the Engineer and Musk the Mathematician – someone who both presides over his companies, and also occasionally interferes with theme, descending onto his engineers with quixotic passion or baffling rage. With his sudden lurches, and bursts of frenetic activity, he seems as far as possible from the man we see at Bletchley with his softly spoken politesse as almost to amount to a different person altogether.

James Badgett, the CEO and founder of the Angel Investment Network, has seen thousands of businesses come through his doors since the company’s 42

inception. He helps me begin to get the measure of Musk: “One thing I have noticed is that engineers make really successful entrepreneurs – the two often go hand in hand. That’s not just to do with knowing the detail of the mechanics and the workings of a project: Musk is remarkable at that, particularly in his feel for a problem. It’s also because companies at their best need to work with something like the logic of machines. They need to have their own workings, and their own mechanisms.

Musk is a prime example of this – he is a brilliant engineer but also an engineer who uses that knowledge to create efficient corporate systems.”

This isn’t always successful in its entirety. In Isaacson’s book, he recounts Musk’s decision so move all the servers on Christmas Eve. Everyone says it will take six months, but Musk gets it done in a week – although in retrospect he admits it was probably a mistake. Even so, Musk’s career with all its outsized achievements is unthinkable without demon mode. It is what gives him his edge.

Which is enough to make us all wonder whether we have enough urgency in our own working lives.

Most readers of Isaacson’s book will feel quite simply that they didn’t do enough today. And maybe they didn’t.

But there is something informative about the Musk energy. When you emerge on the other side of Isaacson’s

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book, you realise that almost every business you’ve ever interacted with is too sedate to be what Musk would regard as fit for purpose. One London lawyer I speak to, who has worked with Musk, is prepared to corroborate this, though prefers to remain anonymous. “I was on a call with him and the work energy was different to anything I’ve experienced before. It was so intense and focused. We had some recommendations to make, and Musk assimilated them so quickly that what would normally have been a two hour call was over in five minutes. He broke down our instructions and then gave orders and deadlines. That was that. It was astonishing – I’ve never experienced anything like it.”

INTRODUCING ERROL So why is he this way? One of the most striking things about Musk is the strained relationship with his father, who was extremely brutal to the young Elon, and today sways between family sage and internet conspiracy theorist.

It is also worth noting that Musk was bullied when young and growing up in South Africa. It seems to have lodged enormous defiance in him – and ambition. Some of the instances in Isaacson’s book are appalling. At one point, Musk is bullied severely at school. When his father finds out, rather than extending sympathy, he gives the young Elon a psychologically tormenting rant about his weakness.

When I talk to the revered psychologist Dr. Paul Hokemeyer, I ask if trauma of this nature can be resolved by an outsized work ethic?

Hokemeyer explains: “Trauma, and in particular relational trauma where a child feels rejected and is abused by a primary caregiver, has a profoundly negative impact on the child’s physical, emotional, and relational functioning.

This is especially true in situations

Elon with PayPal Chief Executive Officer Peter Thie (Alamy.com)

where the trauma is ongoing, chronic, and pervasive rather than being a oneoff event such as being involved in a motor accident or witnessing a horrific event. The latter is known as simple trauma whilst the latter, complex.

Abusive relationships with parents fall squarely in the category of complex trauma.”

We are therefore in a position where the most powerful man in the world is dealing with trauma on a rather considerable scale. Hokemeyer continues: “In these cases, the child’s central nervous system operates in a perennial state of crisis and produces a steady stream of toxic neurochemicals that flow through their entire body.

Because all of this happens during critically important developmental stages of a child’s life, this complex trauma causes significant damage to a person’s sense of self and self-esteem, their brain functioning, their ability to have intimate relationships and to effectively regulate their emotions.

It also instils in them a haunting message that they are not enough, unlovable, and unsafe in a hostile world.”

This rings true and can be seen at certain points in Musk’s life: especially in those moments of sudden intense focus à la demon mode. So how does this manifest in Musk? Hokemeyer is clear: “For these reasons, men and

women like Musk, people who are compulsively driven to attain extreme levels of power, fame, and financial success, typically struggle under an internalised narrative of scarcity. The lens through which they view the world and their place in it is coloured by a chronic sense of impending annihilation. At any given moment, they feel their world can be invaded by vicious predators who will shame and torture them to a slow and humiliating death.”

And how is it possible to offset these feelings of shame? “To guard against these persistent threats to their existence, these incredibly clever and talented individuals invest their life force in attaining exaggerated levels of wealth and garish levels of individual power. In our capitalistic world, such herculean investments pay exceptional dividends for the highly clever, the compulsively driven and the emotionally extinct. These men and women are not limited by considerations of intimacy, morality, equity, empathy, or compassion.

They are myopically focused on the outcomes of a zero-sum game where the winner takes all and the losers get what they deserve. And because they are idolised and handed even more power by virtue of their outsized influence they are never called to account for their actions or change www.finito.org.uk

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their way of viewing and operating in the world. The irony is that the higher up the power and wealth scale they get, the less safe and secure they feel and thus, the harder they need to work and insensitive they need to become to maintain a baseline level of protection from the hostilities they internalised as highly vulnerable youths.”

This sounds – and is – bad. It seems certain that Musk, carrying around in him these sorts of traumas, has sometimes felt very little when he has treated employees with bluntness, and often with cruelty. But Musk’s career makes us wonder whether he would have achieved much, or even anything, without them: his traumas feel so woven into his life story, that I wonder if we’d have Tesla, reusable rockets, Optimus, and many others if that man hadn’t, when just a boy, experienced such pain.

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OFF WITH THE BIRDS But not all of this trauma has been to the good: there remains the perception that Musk almost enjoys creating difficulty for himself. He distrusts peace; no sooner than he sees a clear blue sky than he thinks of brewing up a storm. For example, in the leadup to his sudden purchase of Twitter, everything was going eerily well for Musk. He was selling vast numbers of Teslas, and SpaceX was making more successful missions than ever before. In this context, the purchase of Twitter seemed unnecessary and even borderline mad.

When I ask around, I get a wide variety of views on the platform now known as X. “I think he dramatically overpaid for it,” says the philanthropist and businessman Mohamed Amersi, who has just penned his autobiography Why?.

“The danger is that he is now going to

control it to the point of extinction. And the rebranding from Twitter to X was bad – and his approach to free speech may well be deemed unconventional.”

Meanwhile, the founder of Ebookers Dinesh Dhamija, and author of The Indian Century, is prepared to wait and see: “I think that it’s too short a time since his purchase for one to make up one’s mind. By relabelling the platform X, he’s moulded it in his own image; one has to give it two or three years to see.”

It’s easy to criticise Musk’s tweets and his purchase of Twitter: for many people it is a strategic error because it has taken him away from his strong suit of engineering into the media world where he is less suited as he shows limited empathy with other people.

Yet a surprising number of people I speak to are positive about Musk’s purchase. “I think it’s a fantastic platform, and that the free speech element is so important,” says Badgett.

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SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket launch (Wikipedia.org)

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Stephen James, CEO Hermes Digital

President Barack Obama, Air Force Col. Lee Rosen, Commander and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. (Wikipedia.org)

“It will come good.” When I speak to Anushka Sharma, who has wide experience in startups, she says: “With Elon orchestrating, there’s a whole load more happening than you think. There’s always been a play with X; it was never just about publishing. It’s the payments stuff. By now none of this should surprise us, he has a bigger plan.”

“THE PLATFORM’S EVOLUTION INTO “X” UNDER MUSK’S GUIDANCE HAS BEEN AKIN TO WATCHING A MASTER CHESS PLAYER AT WORK.” One person who agrees with that is Stephen James, the CEO of Hermes Digital, who has deep experience of using all social platforms including Twitter before and after Musk’s purchase. He tells me: “I find the recent transformation of Twitter under Elon Musk’s leadership a fascinating case study in strategic adaptation and influence. The platform’s evolution into X under Musk’s guidance has been akin to watching a master chess player at work. The introduction of a premium 46

subscription model, which filters out noise and anonymous accounts while simultaneously encouraging free speech, has been a strategic move in a complex game, where controlling the narrative becomes as important as the narrative itself. This new Twitter landscape offers a more streamlined, focused environment for communication – it allows me to cut through with the messaging for my clients, particularly politicians.”

James admires the way in which Musk is beginning to create a set of structures around which free and measured speech can prosper: “Musk’s emphasis on free speech, while opening the platform to a broader spectrum of voices, also necessitates a delicate balance. In this new era of X, every tweet, every statement must be made with precision and intention, balancing the fine line between transparency and strategic communication. Why? To be verified, you need to supply contact details and payment details… which means you can be held to account for what you say! This underpins the importance of a measured, calculated communication strategy, especially for my clients where we are building personal brands and networks.”

For James, we underestimate Musk at our peril: “It strikes me as a strategic masterstroke,” he continues. “The

platform’s ability to provide real-time data and insights, particularly when integrated with AI, is invaluable. It’s akin to having an ancient oracle atop a mountain that can gauge public sentiment and trends – a crucial tool in shaping effective strategies for those in the public eye and also running businesses.”

When I ask James for applications of how Musk might ultimately be able to leverage the X business, he cites the government’s use of the 77th Brigade during the Covid crisis to monitor social media posts. “Machiavelli said it’s better for a prince to be feared than loved. Along the same theme, we could ask if you had to choose between being wealthy with money or powerful with knowledge (data), which would you choose?” It goes almost without saying that Musk has chosen both.

ELON’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY Nevertheless, the Twitter sale – whatever one thinks of the wisdom of it – is really of a piece with the way in which Musk does business. He never thinks how to make money – he thinks about a goal. We need electric cars, or we need to get to Mars, or we need to build better tunnels, or have safeguarded AI. He then works back to figure out how to make money from this. Badgett says: “I think this partly shows the level that he’s at – he has enough money where he can think: ‘Now what are

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the big problems that humanity needs to solve’?. On the other hand, he’s definitely always had these grand visions for humanity – most notably the urge to get to Mars.”

The filmmaker Guy Ritchie, who is focussed on his own grand creation of WildKitchen, an outdoors-indoors cooking unit, tells me: “I quite like him: he’s hilarious. He’s playing a big game.”

In general Ritchie respects Musk’s approach: “I love him for being so radical – that’s what I like about him, he goes against the political zeitgeist.

He seemed like he was going one way then went another way. I wonder how he’ll stand on his narrative over electric cars: it’s probably a wobbly narrative and I feel he’s transcended it.” It does seem as though Musk is paradoxically committed to what might be viewed as the left-wing narrative of climate change with Tesla, while also reserving the right to be a defender of Donald Trump’s free speech.

However, Ritchie is not so sure about Musk’s plans to get to Mars with SpaceX: “You don’t want to live on another planet: it would be like living in a gilded cage in hell.”

STARS AND MARS In many respects, the goal to get to Mars is core to Musk’s life. Is this a realistic goal? To gauge the anwer, I talk with the Astronomer-Royal Lord Rees.

Rees is well-qualified to comment since his book On the Future, now translated into 20 languages, and his more recent book The End of Astronauts, grapple either explicitly or by implication with what Musk is trying to do at SpaceX. “In my books, I argue that as robots get better and more sophisticated, the practical case for sending people into space – at least lower than Low Earth Orbit – gets weaker all the time,” he tells me. “That’s because it’s very expensive to support humans on a

Uncrewed SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft approaching the ISS. (Wikipedia.org)

journey to Mars. You have to provide a year of food, and protect them from all sorts of hazards – whereas robots can be sent more easily and with one-way tickets.”

Anyone who has seen video footage of Optimus, Tesla’s most advanced robot yet, which has human-like grace in many of its movements – though also slightly odd low-slung walk like someone in an egg-and-spoon race, will be able to imagine what Rees is describing. He continues: “For that reason, if I was an American taxpayer or European taxpayer I wouldn’t support NASA’s or ESA’s programmes for manned space flight. On the other hand, I’m prepared to cheer on the endeavours of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk in the private sector. Firstly, they’re not using taxpayers’ money, and secondly they can take higher risks than NASA or ESA can when sending civilians into space.”

Despite this, Rees is realistic – and even cautious – about what is possible for humans in the hostile environments which await us beyond the earth’s atmosphere. “It’s also important to think of space as being a dangerous environment. We should talk about space adventure and not space tourism, for instance. I’d argue that Branson makes a mistake in talking of tourism

as if travel beyond this planet would ever be normal; if you take that view the first accident is going to be traumatic.

If these private sponsors are prepared to send risk-takers up into space – the Sir Ranulph Fiennes’ of this world– I’m prepared to cheer them on.”

“MY PREDICTION IS THAT BY THE END OF THE CENTURY THERE WILL BE A FEW PIONEERS LIVING ON MARS...”

So what does he think will happen?

“My prediction is that by the end of the century there will be a few pioneers living on Mars, but they’ll be that kind of person. Elon Musk has said he wants to die in Mars but not on impact.

And he’s fifty years old; it’s just about achievable. These pioneers will have a long-term importance, and they’ll be in a very hostile environment. They’ll want to take advantage of all the techniques of genetic engineering and cyborgs and so on.”

That’s in contrast with the vast majority of us with less appetite for risk than Musk. “Here on earth we’re going to www.finito.org.uk

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ELON MUSK EDUCATION 28 June 1971

1992

Born in Pretoria, South Africa to Maye, a model and dietician and Errol, an engineer and property developer.

1995

After entering Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario he transfers to the University of Pennsylvania, earning two degrees in physics and economics from the university’s Wharton School.

Founds Zip2, an Internet city guide which ultimately sells for $307 million in February 1999. Musk receives $22 million for his seven per cent share.

2002

Having founded X.com, which subsequently merged with PayPal, Musk receives a big payday when the merged entity is sold to eBay for $1.5 billion.

Uses $100 million to found SpaceX.

1994

Holds two internships in Silicon Valley at energy storage startup Pinnacle Research Institute, and Palo Alto-based Rocket Science Games.

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1989

Graduates from Pretoria Boys High School in South Africa, a fee-paying school also attended by Oscar Pretorius.

1995

Decides not to join PhD program in materials science at Stanford University to avoid missing out on the Internet boom.

June 1989

Musk applies for a Canadian passport and lives with a second cousin in Saskatchewan working odd jobs at a farm and lumbermill.

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want to regulate and constrain things like genetic modification on both prudential and ethical grounds. These guys will be away from all the regulators anywhere and have a far greater incentive. I imagine a few centuries from now they will have become a new species – secondary intelligent design will be much faster than Darwinian natural selection.”

This is a truly astonishing notion, and it makes one’s head spin. The Mars mission has its critics. One vaguely accepts that it should be priority at some point to have a presence there, 48

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since every palaeontologist knows that asteroids do hit earth. However, it doesn’t happen regularly – and the majority of scientists argue that climate change is happening now. Bill Gates tells Isaacson: “I’m not a Mars person He [Musk] is overboard on Mars. I let him explain his Mars thinking to me, which is kind of bizarre thinking. It’s this crazy thing where maybe there’s a nuclear war on Earth and so the people on Mars are there and they’ll come back down, and you know, be alive when we all kill each other.”

You can feel Gates’ contempt for the

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idea. Meanwhile, Rees criticises Musk from another angle: “Of course, the money might be better spent on the environment – but if it’s spent by individuals who otherwise would buy a football team or a huge yacht, I’m prepared to support it.”

Even so he laces this acceptance with a warning: “Musk, like my late colleague Stephen Hawking, thinks that there should be mass emigration to Mars to escape the problems of the earth. That’s a dangerous delusion. Dealing with climate change is a big challenge, but it’s a doddle compared to terra forming Mars. There isn’t a Planet B for ordinary risk-averse people.”

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ON TIMELINE: 2004

Becomes an early investor in Tesla, and eventually assumes the role of CEO in 2008.

2018

2022

Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Buys Twitter for $44 billion.

2022

2023

Elected to the National Academy of Engineering

2015

Receives an honorary doctorate in engineering and technology from Yale University.

Founds xAI, an artificial intelligence company.

2016

Founds both Neuralink, which develops braincomputer interfaces and The Boring Company, a tunnel construction company.

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2007

SPACE JOBS ALERT On the other hand, we’re a species of dreamers, and I suspect it will be very hard to change that. Besides, in the future – which seems to have a habit of arriving quicker and quicker all the time – a career in space won’t be only for those with the ability to tolerate risk. Anushka Sharma, the founder of the London Space Network, explains to me some of her backstory: “I set up the London Space Network as a community which anybody with an interest in the

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UK space sector can join. We now have 1200 members on our list from students and astronauts, and space agency people.”

So how does she think Musk, and his competitors, will shape the future?

“When we think about humans and navigation, and the whole question of travel on earth, we’ve always used the stars to navigate – but the opportunity of building a human presence on Mars, and on icy moons, presents the possibility of the foundation of our human future. At the moment, only nation states through their agencies have

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managed to land on the surface of the moon. But SpaceX and other companies are removing these barriers meaning that state resources can be relocated to the exploration science.”

That’s an enticing prospect in itself.

But meanwhile, there are employability implications not just for governments but for all of us. “When the cost of space travel comes down it will open up huge markets of growth,” Sharma continues. “Who doesn’t want to wear a pair of trainers that have been in space or products that have orbited our planet?. Children everywhere www.finito.org.uk

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he’s moved things forwards in leaps and bounds which has disrupted the space ecosystem. I would also love to shift some of his thinking to be more open and inclusive.”

Anushka Sharma, the founder of the London Space Network

will be inspired to innovate; the opportunities for a STEM career will be unimaginable. Will there be art galleries on the moon in 100 years’ time? We would get so bored if we didn’t think beyond our planet. This is why I care about the space sector.”

And what does she think of Lord Rees’ idea that there will one day be a civilisation on Mars evolving at a different pace to the less risk-averse here on earth? “I get that – but I think that for me I need to fight for everyone and make sure space is as inclusive and open as possible. I don’t want to see a duality whereby the rich are the only ones who can access those trips. That’s why I try to be open as possible with everyone I meet across every background.

Martin Rees is an incredible force with extraordinary insight – I just hope he’s slightly wrong!”

And what does Sharma think of Musk?

“If you look at the career trajectory, he’s an incredibly intelligent man.

Elon is just incredibly good at building companies. We were told that electric cars wouldn’t be a thing – now look at the shift and disruption that he’s caused to the automotive industry generally.

Likewise, his decision to engineer rockets to be reusable. It’s impossible to think of anyone in our time who has had such an impact on technology and production.”

What about his style of leadership and the silly tweets? “I’ve not worked directly with him, but know people who have. He has this style of leadership. But 50

Inclusive in what ways specifically? “I want more of a feminine presence on the space sector: having said that, I tip my hat to Gwyneth Shotwell, who has been running the operation at SpaceX and is also a force of nature. So Musk does build teams, which together help him fulfil this vision. Even so you do hear of engineers at SpaceX paid peanuts who should be paid more. But he’s played a big part in awakening our imaginations.”

Sharma points to a specific example of the recent competition for a group of artists to go around the moon with SpaceX – the so-called Dear Moon crew. In the end all the tickets were bought up by Japanese entrepreneur Yusaku Maezawa, who then made sure they got to a broad cross section of talented and interesting people including British photographer Karim Iliya and American DJ Steve Aoki.

“These are inspirational stories, of everyday people getting access to space, and it’s all been underwritten by a billionaire. This will shift the imagination even more, and it’s a SpaceX initiative.”

TESLA AND ALL THAT Of course, Musk is spread thin – he must be owner of the finest portfolio career in the history of the world making former Chancellor George Osborne look lazy. Musk’s career shows a surprising degree of unity for someone who does so much although one can sometimes, for instance, wonder if there is tension between, say, his espousal of electric cars, and the environmental pollution causes by SpaceX. Dinesh Dhamija cherishes his Tesla:

“I’m a big fan of Tesla,” he tells me.

“When I sold ebookers.com, I had salespeople trying to interest me in all kinds of fancy cars. Some of them I couldn’t squeeze into. Others just made me feel like a polluting road-hog.

Several years later, I’m still extremely happy in my quiet, smooth, comfortable and non-polluting Tesla. And so is my wife, in hers.”

So what does Dhamija think will happen next when it comes to electric cars? “It’s exciting to see that Elon Musk is getting serious about setting up Tesla in India. He’s met Narendra Modi a couple of times already and held meetings with commerce minister Piyush Goyal about building one of his mega factories in the country. Of course, there are hurdles to overcome. Despite hundreds of millions of consumers, few Indian car buyers can afford to pay $38,000 (the current cheapest Tesla).

The government would have to lower its 70 per cent tariff on cars below $40,000 and 100 per cent on cars above $40,000, which will be resisted by domestic carmakers.”

How might these hurdles be surmounted? “An Indian government official was quoted in the Financial Times proposing a 15 per cent tariff for all EVs, in return for building a plant in the country,” explains Dhamija.

“Infrastructure for EVs is basic to non-existent in much of India. Right now, they make up just 1.5 per cent of passenger vehicles sold in the country.

And the most popular types of car are tiny, compared with the spacious Tesla saloons.”

Despite the possible hurdles, Dhamija is confident that they’ll be surmounted.

“Like so much in Elon Musk’s career, the idea of attacking the India market shows imagination and vision beyond the scope of most other people. He sets almost ridiculously high targets – the latest is to produce 20 million cars a year by 2030, more than Toyota and Volkswagen combined. For India

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Tesla Manufacturing facility (Wikipedia.org)

and specifically for Narendra Modi, a new Tesla plant would give all the right signals: it would show that he welcomes industrial investment, is further developing his green agenda, boosting high tech employment and helping to improve India’s terrible air quality.”

wins the car competition by numbers – though I’m sure he makes much more profit than they do. As long as keeps advancing the technology that’s fine.

He is ahead of everybody else.”

Dhamija explains that he doesn’t buy his Teslas, he leases them. “The reason is that the technology advances so quickly over the course of six months.

By leasing, you get a better deal. There are other competitors of Tesla and they’re fine too.”

To what does Dhamija attribute Musk’s success? “I just saw his factory from the motorway in Germany outside Berlin and it’s huge: as you drive past it, it goes on and on and on. I discovered that when he went there recently, he didn’t stay in the hotel, he stayed in the factory. Time is money. If you can get something done faster than others that’s impressive.”

Dhamija was referring to reports that in the last three months of 2023, BYD, a Shenzhen-based EV giant, sold 526,000 fully electric vehicles to Tesla’s 484,000. What does Dhamija think of this? “I’m not worried if Elon Musk

Does Dhamija see any tension between the work of, say SpaceX, and the stated goal of an electric car future? “I’m not a purist in these matters,” Dhamija says, unwilling to criticise someone who has achieved so much. Mohamed Amersi

agrees: “I agree absolutely with his mission to Mars. It is an important part of human nature to push the envelope.

We need to explore new frontiers. If we agree on that, we have to accept that the only way at the moment for space travel to happen at all is for conventional jet propulsion fuel. In 10 years there will be greener fuel, presumably a nuclear-based alternative.

But we can’t delay the conquering of new frontiers for that to happen.”

Amersi has met Musk and recounts his experiences. “Elon Musk was in attendance once at Dumfries House, and behaved somewhat arrogantly. He came to the house because he thought that King Charles III was living there, and so flew in with his girlfriend on a private jet. What I think Musk wanted to be faced with was some www.finito.org.uk

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Elon Musk and the Neuralink Future (Wikipedia.org)

transformational tech ideas. What he found instead was King Charles III's admirable commitment to improving lives and livelihoods and to reskilling local communities. He didn’t even stay for dinner, which was a shocking breach of protocol.”

This rings true – in Isaacson’s book, he refers to philanthropy as ‘mainly bullshit’.

For Musk, change is best brought about by the corporate sector. Amersi continues: “I have a photo of me with Charles and Musk, before beautiful Renaissance tapestries; me, in national garb, and Musk holding forth. There is no art to find the mind’s construction in the face. The conversation seems very civilised, and it was to some extent. But my main memory is that Charles and Musk were very far from a meeting of minds. Charles expressed his concern that driverless cars would take away people’s jobs and Musk replied that for every job lost he would invent five new jobs for them, and that all he needed was to be able to skill people to do those jobs.

They were talking at cross purposes over a great divide: the concerned Charles and the profit-minded Musk. It was an image of two different time scales when it comes to money: Charles’ family is and always will be one the richest families in the world; Musk had made his wealth recently – and it showed.”

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has clashed with Bill Gates, not least because Gates took a half billion short position against Tesla, thinking that ultimately demand for the cars would dry up. Never one to mince words, this led Musk to describe Gates as ‘categorically insane’ and ‘an asshole to the core’, but Gates has been more obliging about Musk’s achievements: “You can feel whatever you want about Elon’s behaviour, but there is no one in our time who has done more to push the bounds of science and innovation than he has.”

This is the thing with Musk – everything keeps coming back to his behaviour. This is even more the case now that he owns Twitter. Errol Musk has a tendency to tweet conspiracy theories. Musk loathes his father – but now he does the same. I become interested in these blind spots in our lives and ask Hokemeyer why we are drawn to emulation of someone we might think we despise? Is this involuntary genetics at work or might there be something more going on?

“Human beings are hardwired for emotional connections,” Hokemeyer tells me. “We come into this world completely dependent on the approval, love, and nurturance of our primary caregivers. All goes well when we get sufficient care, but when there is a breach in this care, particularly over a

long period of time, what were adaptive survival techniques to deal with these breaches often morph into significant personality disorders, mental illness, and even physical illnesses such as hypertension and stress related diseases.

And while the adaptation in the face of parental abuse and rejection calls for a conscious swearing off of interpersonal vulnerability, as a person matures, there remains an organic and biological need for neuropeptides such as oxytocin and vasopressin in men that are generated through intimacy that our bodies physically crave to feel safe and at ease in the world.” So Elon is still trying to get Errol’s love – and perhaps has subconsciously chosen Twitter as a way to do so? Hokemeyer seems to agree: “These primal urges never go away and in fact, in my clinical experience reemerge with great intensity as a person reaches late middle age and begins to become aware of their impending mortality and how they have behaved during their life. In these cases, they are called on a deep intrapsychic level to fix that which was originally broken.”

THE FUTURE IS MUSK Whether one likes it or not, the impression is that Musk is living a definitive life; it is quite clearly one of the most important of our times in terms of his ambition, the range of his activities, and the high achieving example he has set.

If you want to know the future, a study of Musk is indispensable not just because he will help define it, but because more than anyone I can imagine, he lives there within the realm of his imagination. Talking to Sunak, Musk says: “One of the challenges in the future will be how do we find meaning in life if you have a magic genie that can do everything you want.”

It’s grand statements like this which draw us to Musk, in spite of the things

COVER STORY

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, left, and Elon Musk, view the historic Dragon capsule that returned to Earth on May 31 following the first successful mission by a private company to carry supplies to the International Space Station on June 13, 2012 at the SpaceX facility in McGregor. (Wikipedia.org) Elon Musk Accelerates the Boring (Wikipedia.org)

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SpaceX Headquarters during Iridium-4 launch operations, December 2017. (Wikipedia.org)

Elon Musk, Tesla Factory, Fremont (Wikipedia.org)

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Falcon Heavy Side Boosters landing on LZ1 and LZ2 - 2018. (Wikipedia.org)

but for the real-world challenges of business and innovation. The fact

that Musk could afford any school he

wishes but still chooses to homeschool tells you how he views the education systems around the world.”

For James too the example of Musk is another reminder of

what this government, and the

next administration, needs to do in education: “Reflecting on the nearly 14 years of Conservative

governance, the synergy between

business and education has been a

focal point of interest. The challenge

lies in integrating a business-friendly approach with a robust and inclusive

education system. This balance is key

to nurturing a generation that is well-

versed academically and equipped with entrepreneurial and work-ready skills.” he has retweeted which he shouldn’t

Which is in many ways the era of

And what does Musk think will

that we could never be his friend.

best, seems to lay down the gauntlet

“It’s fun to cook food, but it’s not that

have and the nagging suspicion

To consider him is to be jolted out of a torpor you didn’t know you

were experiencing. As Sharma puts it: “He’s definitely had one of the

biggest impacts of anyone alive today, if not the biggest. When I think of Elon I realise that we only have a

finite term on our planet: his work ethic is to live quite simply, and to acknowledge that time is the only

resource none of us have enough of: that’s an acknowledgement we have to make if we want to create true

change. That’s what drives him, and it opens up onto a set of facts we’re now all awake to: your children’s future is fast-changing, and some of this

change is determined by decisions taken before they were born. At a

time when science and technology

is opening up new avenues, I feel we

have a unique window of opportunity now; I feel incredibly grateful to be born into this era.”

Musk. His example, considered at its to the education system to produce a

new generation of far-sighted people who can feel at home and propser in

happen in the future? He tells Sunak:

fun to wash the dishes. The computer’s perfectly happy to wash dishes.” That sounds fine to this reluctant washer-

the future which Musk has already to

upper. And how will we all make a

James, in addition to his role at

universal basic income. We’ll have

Conservative Friends of Education,

Musk might be ridiculous sometimes.

realm of education which he hopes

offensive and seem to deliberately

some extent brought about. Stephen

living in the future? “We won’t have

Hermes Digital, is also the founder of

universal high income.”

and sees an opportunity here in the governments will take up. “Some

might see Musk as a pseudo Bond

villain, but his entrepreneurial spirit

is a beacon, and the education system, I believe, must foster such innovative minds,” he tells me. “It’s not just

about imparting knowledge but about instilling a sense of strategic thinking and resilience. Encouraging young

entrepreneurs through initiatives that provide practical business insights

complements traditional academic routes. It’s about preparing young

minds not just for tests and exams

Sometimes his tweets are plain

bait people by espousing foolish

prejudices. He’s obviously difficult

to work with. In his own words: “To anyone I’ve offended, I just want to

say, I reinvented electric cars and I’m sending people to Mars in a rocket

ship. Did you think I was going to be a chill, normal dude?” No, we didn’t. But when you look at the scale of Musk’s

achievements, you wonder if you need to summon a little uptightness, even

a little abnormality, in yourself – even if only for a little while – in order to reach the next level.

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AN INDELIBLE MARK:

TERENCE COLE 1932-2022 FRIENDS AND FAMILY REMEMBER THE GREAT AND CHARISMATIC INVESTOR AND PARTY GURU TERENCE COLE, WHO TOUCHED MANY LIVES.

Terence Cole, (Wikipedia.org)

RONEL LEHMANN CEO, FINITO

I

often find myself in, and around, Marble Arch for meetings and

can be seen bowing my head as

a mark of respect to Terence Cole

outside his Upper Berkeley Street office. It was there, thanks to Liz

Brewer’s introduction, that we first met.

Terence founded MARCOL with Mark Steinberg in 1976 and together they created a multi-billion international investment group. Terence was a true visionary and a creative genius. He was 56

not afraid of sharing his politics and utter disdain for Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London, who he hated with a vengeance for destroying the road infrastructure and transport network. He was a man who understood the importance of retail customers and championed Chelsea Harbour, following its acquisition in 2003.

I remember our many conversations during the pandemic. He shared our passion for inspiring the next generation and adored our work helping young people to find meaningful careers. He loved this magazine and was responsible for coming up with an improved mentoring business strapline, The

Employability Experts, for which we will always be grateful.

Before he died in December 2022, he

told his staff to ensure that his mobile phone was fully charged and buried

with him just in case he could make

a call from the other side. Whenever

I meet his colleagues, we do ask each

other, “Have you heard from Terence?”

He must have known that he will be remembered by us all with a smile.

He impacted many lives through

his generosity of spirit and leaves an incredible legacy which his family

continues, as patrons and benefactors, to many of the charities that he supported.

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business up, literally from zero, working with The Portman Estate. We had no capital but we were tenacious. Soon we were working with other estates like Cadogan, Eton College and Grosvenor.

MARK STEINBERG CO-FOUNDER AND JOINT CEO, MARCOL

T

erence and I worked together as partners for 46 years from 1976 until he passed away.

There was a substantial age difference

between us – about 25 years – but that

never mattered. It just worked. Having faith in each other and having trust in each other was fundamental to a

relationship which lasted a long time,

Over 40 plus years, MARCOL grew from nothing into quite a substantial pan-European operation that wasn’t just real estate in the latter years: we went from being a small residential real estate developer to being commercial as well. In time, it grew beyond London across the UK. We went into Europe and invested in Germany, Poland, Romania, France, the Czech Republic, Hungary. Soon we were involved also in operational businesses with real estate foundations such as hotels.

“TERENCE WAS INTENSELY PRIVATE, BUT CHARISMATIC, A MAVERICK, A LATERAL THINKER.”

worked very closely.

Terence was intensely private, but charismatic, a maverick, a lateral thinker.

He had very strong views about how he saw things. He had very leftfield views that really added a lot of gravy and sauce to what might otherwise have been quite straightforward. There was nothing linear about him. You’d go into a meeting with him with other people and he would come from a complete tangent, and confuse them to begin with – but by the end of it they had bought into the idea.

In 1976, we bought a ten-year lease on a property – a stone’s throw from the offices we still have today. That was £10,000 and it was the start of MARCOL: the name was made up of part of my first name and part of his second name. We worked from his dining room table to begin with and then from a basement windowless room in South Audley Street. We had a part-time secretary coming in and working with us and we built the

Terence engendered very strong loyalty from people working with him from his staff. One of his PAs worked for him for 60 years. She also passed away last year but she worked for him way before we were together in a previous life and then left him for a few years and came back again. He created this very professional business but which had a family kind of atmosphere. Whether it was dealing with people’s health issues or personal issues he would always be the first to

longer than most people’s marriages.

When a business relationship lasts

that long, you know how to finish each other’s sentences, and you know what

your partner is thinking. In meetings, you intuit who should take the lead.

Our roles were very merged together.

I tended to deal with more of the

financial side – the fundraising and

the debt-raising. But strategically we

say: “We are going to send them away on holiday” or “We are going to pay their medical bills” or whatever it might have been.

Mentorship was very important to him. Terence was a very good judge of character: when we were interviewing people for roles or looking at businesses, he had a kind of sixth sense about people and was able to take a view on whether we should take somebody on or not.

Of course we had our ups and downs.

We have been through numerous recessions: the late 70s property crash; the 1989 property crash; Lehman Brothers; Covid. He was a real personality – a bear of a man, who loved his food and loved people, loved to entertain, and loved to investigate something new.

CLAIRE GERMAN CEO, DESIGN CENTRE CHELSEA HARBOUR

I

t was almost as if he’d been here before. It’s been strange since Terence died, not having him

involved in my life. He played such a

huge role ever since I arrived here 13

years ago – and I knew him before. He

was this fabulous mixture of incredible business brain and great vision, who seemed able to predict what could happen. For instance, during the

pandemic he said: “Darling, this is

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post-pandemic with everyone trying to

say that a party had to have the right atmosphere: a heartbeat.

bit.” He was already thinking about

It doesn’t quite seem real that he is not here. I keep expecting him to burst in at any moment asking for food. Food was always a big thing in the meetings. He would arrive; we would be in a meeting and he would always arrive after everyone else and say: “Darling, can you get me an egg sandwich?” I was learning at the feet of the master.

return to normal that will be the hard getting people back into the office

while everyone else was getting used to lockdown.

“HE HAD A TWINKLE IN HIS EYE; THIS MADE HIM QUITE MISCHIEVOUS.” Terence had these intense business meetings where he would really put you through your paces. He would not suffer fools gladly: you had to know your stuff – bring in energy and have ideas.

He had a twinkle in his eye; this made him quite mischievous. If a situation was getting out of hand, he would immediately see that and disarm it and then bring a lighter tone to it. He had great emotional intelligence.

Sometimes when Terence went off on a tangent, I would start off by thinking: ‘I’m not quite sure where this is going’.

But you always had to believe in the journey because you knew the journey was a very well-thought-through one and you had to trust in that.

Every day at the Design Centre Chelsea Harbour, I can hear him in my ear.

He would say: “We’ve got to stick to the concept”. He would drill that into me. The space would have to feel lively and create reasons for people to come.

Right down to the food, the attention to detail was incredible. The Design Centre Chelsea Harbour is the jewel in MARCOL’s crown: they are very proud of what they achieved and rightly so and they had the vision to create this centre. It’s not just a landlord-tenant relationship: it’s bricks and mortar and beyond.

He was also the party maestro. He wasn’t particularly easy-going about it because he would be very critical if he didn’t like something. He would 58

We weren’t even marketing it at the time. Cutting a very long story short we negotiated a sale of this asset over a period of no more than probably 3 or 4 weeks. I didn’t know MARCOL from a hole in the wall. It was before the internet so you couldn’t check anybody out. There then ensued a long torturous negotiation with Terence in the Churchill Hotel where he would turn up two hours later than scheduled.

“HE WAS ALWAYS A LARGER-THANLIFE CHARACTER AND VERY SELFCONFIDENT.”

NIGEL LAX DIRECTOR, MARCOL

I

first met Terence in 1994. I was in

my late 30s, and had been through a fairly institutional career. I

qualified as a chartered surveyor,

and spent 10 years in private practice post-qualification in various parts of

the UK. Then I came down to London

to work for a developer in the late 80s.

This was an inauspicious time to come to London: the developer I worked

with was going down the tubes like a lot of developers at the time. I had a

respite at the Halifax Building Society; again, a very traditional financial

institution – and then I met Terence.

He came into my office on the Strand.

He was always a larger-than-life character and very self-confident. He said: “I believe you have got an asset in Docklands that you are trying to sell for the Halifax. I would like to buy it.”

After that he made me a job offer. I realised I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life at the Halifax. Thirty years later I am effectively still working for the Cole family office and for Mark’s family office: it’s gone in a flash.

Terence took you outside your comfort zone beyond the boundaries that you were comfortable with.

That’s the best thing you can do in your career: to be tested all the time is to learn all the time. Now, in my late 60s, I am still looking for new intellectual stimulation. I have also developed other interests which I don’t think I would be doing but for Terence: he was so mindexpanding in the way he approached things.

Nobody was a better litigator than Terence: he loved a fight. If he thought somebody was trying to get one over on him he would be tenacious. I remember we were suing a firm of valuers, a matter which had gone on for probably two and a half years before Terence really got involved. We were getting to the final stretch in negotiations with the valuers’ insurers. On a Friday afternoon, we got them up to a plausible number but Terence wasn’t impressed. In meetings, he never had notes. He never wrote anything down.

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In this one, he got up and walked out and said: “When you see sense come back and talk to us but we are not accepting that offer.” He just walked out and nobody knew what to say. That was the end of the meeting. During the course of the weekend he got them to go up another 10 per cent on where they were on Friday afternoon. He rang me on the Tuesday and asked what I thought. I said: “I’d have been happy to take the number they offered us on Friday but clearly you have done a much better job than I’ve done.” He replied: “I’m only doing it for you.”

preposterous at the beginning of a meeting would seem totally doable (somehow) by the end. He had the most incredible way of talking people into doing things and making people think it was their idea in the first place. He helped me plan my wedding and took great interest in all things. He even said I must have his car and driver to take me to the church and that he would get a taxi.

VICTORIA BOXALLHUNT GROUP OPERATIONS DIRECTOR, MARCOL

He also had this extraordinary attention to detail. My wife worked with him on one of his refurbishments which was hugely frustrating for her but she learned a huge amount.

Specifically, don’t put up with second best if you know it can be done better: particularly if you are paying for something, criticise it. My wife is very like him now. We are doing a project up in Yorkshire and for the contractors it’s frustrating at first, but if they get it, people can lift their game.

I

Parties were Terence’s hobby: that was what he lived for. The Coles always used to throw a party on Boxing Day. On one occasion they took a suite in the Savoy but we turned up at the allotted time and were held on the ground floor in the lobby of the hotel because the room wasn’t ready. We then discovered that 30 minutes before the party was due to start, Terence had decided he didn’t like the layout of the room so he literally got them to take the doors off the hinges so that the space flowed better.

I would never have had. It has taught me

It was certainly never dull. MARCOL isn’t the same without him. There are youngsters in the office who will never experience that. With Terence there were no airs and graces: no aloofness.

He wanted to be looked after and respected by people but at the same time he would give that respect and care back.

shall never forget the first day I met

Terence. He made me laugh so much in my interview that I snorted! It

makes me go red at the thought even now

I have witnessed so many unbelievably kind and thoughtful gestures over the years that genuinely made a positive impact on peoples’ lives. He was driven by making a difference and an impact, which he did. I think of him often and ask myself regularly: “What would TC have done?”

NIKI COLE TERENCE’S WIFE

company and so began my journey with

I

life and given me many experiences that

limousine pull up outside the shop, and

– 18 years later. On my second interview, he sent his car and driver to collect me

and bring me to Upper Berkeley Street to

meet him and Mark. This was no ‘normal’ MARCOL, a journey that has shaped my

a huge amount, introduced me to some incredible people and has tested and

delighted in equal measure. There is also no doubt that we have laughed a lot and had a lot of fun over the years.

“HE DIDN’T DO THINGS THAT PEOPLE EXPECTED, IN FACT QUITE THE OPPOSITE.” I genuinely think they broke the mould when they made Terence Cole. He didn’t do things that people expected, in fact quite the opposite. I learned a lot from him, particularly to be patient, stay quiet, listen intently and to stand up for myself and fight my corner. He had an innate understanding of people and a way of asking questions and getting things done that astounded. What seemed utterly

was married to Terence for 48 years.

When I met him, I was a young

actress who had just done a movie

in LA. I was doing publicity and was

asked to go to a fabulous European men’s

shop to sign autographs. I saw a big giant Terence got out with two guys. He looked

around and was soon trying on clothes. At the end of that, he said: “I’m going to take all these clothes on the condition that

that lady over there delivers them to the Beverly Hills Hotel.”

“IF YOU PLAY YOUR CARDS RIGHT, I’M WILLING TO MARRY YOU.” When I was informed of this proposal, I said: “I’m not doing that.” But he had this power about him and this presence.

I went with the driver there, and said: “The clothes are here,” and I was asked in for a drink. I stayed with him a week, at which point he said: “If you play your cards right, I’m willing to marry you.”

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and Alex and his wife were standing there. Jools Holland sang; José Carreras sang; breakfast was served at five in the morning.

Perhaps it could be daunting sometimes. If I said, “I’m not doing this,” he’d reply. “We are doing this – I know what’s right.” The secret to staying married to him was to know how to challenge him back.

“MY HUSBAND DANCED TO HIS OWN TUNE IN LIFE.” When he died – in London at the Cleveland Clinic, I wanted him to be buried in America. It’s the most beautiful place. On one side you have the sea, on the other are mountains.

He is buried in his tuxedo jacket, his pink open-neck silk shirt, white trousers and green velvet carpet slippers. My husband danced to his own tune in life.

ALEX COLE TERENCE’S SON, FOUNDER OF ELEVATE ENTERTAINMENT

M

y father was a man who

created his own destiny:

it was his way or the high

way. He was a man who’d built something

Terance Cole and his wife Niki Cole. (Alamy.com)

of confidence in what to say or do in any situation. He was very relaxed and brought people down to earth, and attracted them: he brought them along.

I’ll never forget the party he threw for my son Alex and his wife after they were married. The theme was Hollywood glamour. It was at a venue outside London, with 500 guests.

Every single one of them had their own chauffeur and their own car and were taken to the country. The party finished at 5am. There were 60

different-themed rooms and all sorts

of music: the Royal Opera; the BlackEyed Peas, Shirley Bassey. My son

and his wife knew nothing about it.

There was a Doctor Zhivago-themed room where there were ice sculptures

dispensing vodka and Russian soldiers

on horseback. There was another room for period films, with ladies dressed in

from the ground up in business, and didn’t apologise for it. Why should he? He could humble any mighty person – no matter

how powerful you were, he could always

teach you something. He had this way of

speaking in a low voice, of taming people, and drawing people into his wisdom. I

knew if I went into property development and private investment, I would never get

Jane Austen-style costume. We went

close to what he was doing: I didn’t want

raining ice, and suddenly everything

life was a little to his chagrin: “There’s no

downstairs and there was a sheet of

to interfere with the master. My path in

went ‘Boom!’ and opened like a curtain

money in that,” he’d say.

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So I now produce and develop big TV shows: that’s very different to what my father did. There were things we each had to navigate in relation to each other’s choices. My father wanted me to always admire what he did, but I could never achieve what he had done in business, even though he would have liked that. For me, it would have been disrespectful to step into those shoes.

I was going to stand on my own two feet. While he was around you knew everything was going to be fine; he was going to see to that. He needed to control the family – and not in a bad way. I felt secure in my family; you knew you could always go to this wise man for help, whether it to be personal or to do with business. If you were under his watch, you were taken care of.

“YOU CAN’T DO THAT”. MY FATHER WOULD ALWAYS SAY: “WELL, I’M DOING IT ANYWAY.” When he went we all felt lost: me, my mum, Mark. Because my sister had health challenges, I had pressure to keep the legacy of the Cole name going. That created a wonderful bond, but it also created a pressure. When my dad passed away I wanted to keep that security nearby, and have him close to me: I arranged to have him buried about 15 minutes away.

He liked the sunshine of America: he liked getting out of England – he found the mentality to be: “You can’t do that”. My father would always say: “Well, I’m doing it anyway.”

As I proceeded with my career, he really became interested in films. He decided he wanted to tell me how to produce films. He would say I should host a talk show and so on.

He was proud: it was a creative job, dealing with celebrity and a bit more

Alex Cole and his wife. (Getty Images)

glamorous than property – or at least it seems that way until you’re in this world. He would say to me quietly under his breath: “You know, I’m proud of you, right?” When he gave compliments, you knew they were valuable – more so than with people who shower you with affection and praise.

When it came to the parties, I’ve been to the Oscar’s – and they’re boring compared to what my father could produce. He planned things but never wanted to be the man of the moment when they would happen – his kick was to stand in the corner as people took the journey through the party.

When it came to work, he never had to behave in a certain way: he was the meeting. Everyone had to pause while he did his things. But the theatrics encouraged people to want to do business with him; he wasn’t conventional. And he loved everyone: the team, the staff, the doorman. If you were part of his group, you were part of his group. It created company morale. He didn’t waste his life in any way. When he died he was 90 years’ old. His mind was strong, that mind could have gone on to 105 in the office. But his body gave up on him which makes the loss of my dad harder to stomach. www.finito.org.uk

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ME, MYSELF AND AI WORDS: CHRISTOPHER JACKSON ILLUSTRATIONS: ANDREW PRESCOTT

British Grime Rapper Stormzy (Alamy Stock Photo) 62

LONG READ

W

hen I consider the

question of AI as it

relates to the matter

of myself, I find I have to begin with a board game. After playing chess

occasionally in childhood, by 2021 I began playing with bots. My return to low level chess formed a crucial

plank in my plan to give up Wordle – that very 2022 fad to which I became

pointlessly addicted for a month or so.

I decided to swap one addiction for

a slightly more meaningful one and

became a regular visitor to chess.com.

I play chess to a level which may almost be deemed infantile, full of incomprehensible failures and idiotic myopia (“Oh, I didn’t realise my Queen was there”) where humiliation constantly vies with a curious sense of pleasure. One feels faintly intellectual just by trying to play chess at all: there is a sense of a brain muscle which needs attention getting a minor massage.

As many will know, on chess.com, if you want to play humans, you can set yourself up with an ID and then play against another flesh-and-blood person roughly of your level. Interestingly, when you play a fellow human, you can sense their humanity even when there is a computer screen intervening. It was John Arlott who said in relation to the cricketer Jack Hobbs that what made him great was his ‘infallible sympathy for the bowled ball’. In chess.com something similar seems to happen: when you play a human being, each move feels personal in some way – and may even have something to do with a shared humanity. Sometimes a pause will occur and you’ll think: “They’re probably making a cup of tea.” Or when the moves come rapidly, you might think: “I see you’re going out for the night and you need this game finished in the next five minutes.”

But the problem with playing people is that they’re unreliable: either they’re

busy, or else they can be petulant losers.

Quite often, you’ll begin a game on chess.com with another human and find that the time between moves can be inexplicably long, and you’re not sure if they’ve left the game and not bothered to resign. Sometimes, you begin to win and your opponent capitulates depriving you of the real pleasure of chess: the unfolding of the logic of victory. In a just chess world, you begin to sense victory long before check mate is confirmed, but it’s part of the sportsmanship of it all to let the drama unfold: the defeated are meant to fight, to let their opponent pin them to the wall. All this means that playing humans on chess.com is something of a lottery. It can be anything from fun to a mild disappointment to a notable waste of time.

Which is why, one evening, I thought I’d bypass all that nuisance by playing a bot, starting with Coach Danny – named after Danny Rensch, the chief chess officer of chess.com, who has a score of 400, which is to say he’s programmed to be a rank beginner. Victory against this bot comes relatively easily, and as I have gone on I’ve eventually been able to compete with intermediate players.

But it feels different. There is never a thought-delay between moves, and never any sense of anything shared: there is a gulf between you and your opponent, the gap between robot and human – between AI and me. One feels infinitely separate from one’s AI opponents: they never make a cup of tea while they consider the way in which you cunningly developed your rook. They never expose their queen accidentally because they’re rushing not to be late for the cinema.

The more I played bots on chess.com the more I came to feel my humanity. I felt how separate the bot was, isolated in its bottishness: a different kind of thing altogether. The division is this: I possess a self – or to use a now antiquated term, a soul – and the bots don’t.

“I POSSESS A SELF – OR TO USE A NOW ANTIQUATED TERM, A SOUL – AND THE BOTS DON’T.” By 2024, I now know that those matches of chess, pitted against a computer, were harbingers. Now it’s not just my chess ability which is to be matched against AI – but my whole self, my soul: me.

The_Looming_ Revolution I have been reading William Hague’s excellent biography of the great campaigner and statesman William Wilberforce. Since it is a faithful reflection of the great man’s life, the book largely concerns Wilberforce’s extraordinary contribution to the abolition of the slave trade. Wilberforce’s campaigning gathered pace through the 1780s – and Hague brilliantly depicts the way in which momentum was building in 1788. In fact, the reader is left with the distinct impression that in any normal year, the slave trade would have been abolished in 1789. But of course 1789 was by no measure destined to be normal: it was to be the year of the French Revolution. War would have to be prioritised. The abolition of the slave trade would be delayed until 1807.

In early 2024, we are talking about any number of things: the return of Trump, the the interest rate, migration. But are we doing so in ludicrous ignorance that we are on the cusp of a similarly sweeping force?

When I meet the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Michael Gove, I mention the French Revolution analogy to him in relation to AI. Gove agrees, and explains the enormity of the situation to me: “We’ve had two Cabinet sessions about AI and the point was made at www.finito.org.uk

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unpreparedness in all of us – because how do you prepare for something when you don’t know what it will be?

Some of this is to do with the structure of our economy and the question of where wealth, and therefore knowledge, happens to reside. It’s possible to intuit that AI’s true nature is hidden behind the veil of the gigantic and essentially impregnable tech companies where all this will unfold – and to a certain extent has already unfolded.

“I FUCKING LIKE HUMANITY, DUDE,” one of them that this was perhaps the most consequential issue with which we have to wrestle. AI has the potential to transform our world to an even greater extent than nuclear power and the hydrogen bomb.”

“AI HAS THE POTENTIAL TO TRANSFORM OUR WORLD TO AN EVEN GREATER EXTENT THAN NUCLEAR POWER AND THE HYDROGEN BOMB.” So what kind of transformation will this be? Gove isn’t sure. “It is difficult for us to envisage quite the scale of transformation that AI will generate in our societies. At different times, people predict the impact of technology – wiser minds than me will know you overestimate then underestimate what the impact will be. But AI will undoubtedly be impactful. It may further entrench and indeed exaggerate inequalities and of course it has the potential – unless you have proper alignment for catastrophic outcomes.”

This echoes what we sometimes find in the discourse. All anyone can agree on is the enormity of the oncoming shift. There is a terrible sense of 64

Unless you happen to have a management role at Google or Tesla, you are given scraps. In Walter Isaacson’s superb biography Elon Musk there is an astonishing moment when Musk is sensibly arguing with Google cofounder Larry Page that safeguards need to be built into AI. Page accuses Musk of being a ‘specist’ – someone in favour of his own species - and goes onto argue that humanity needs to be replaced and ought to accept its own demise. “I fucking like humanity, dude,” comes Musk’s reply. When Page seeks to buy DeepMind, Musk tries to put together financing to block the deal. “The future of AI should not be controlled by Larry,” Musk says, putting it rather mildly, and echoing my own thoughts.

theology isn’t their strong suit. They also, I have decided, don’t particularly mind about the economic future of journalists.

Journalism_v_the_ bots Chess turned out to be merely the opening salvo in my experiences with AI. By 2023, with the release of Chat GPT, AI seemed to want to do my job for me – or to help me do my job, depending on which way you looked at it. Writing being so much more central to my life than chess, this in turn seemed to up the stakes between me and AI. It went much nearer the heart of me.

The self and the soul. These are not necessarily wheelhouse topics for an employability magazine, but since the meaning of this turns out to be decisive for the future of work and therefore of humanity, its discussion can hardly be avoided.

This is already heady stuff and many people will wonder how, by dint of not being tech billionaires, they have accidentally outsourced their entire future to the likes of Page and Musk.

The argument may be lost on Larry Page – and to a certain extent on Musk – but it runs like this. Human beings have always had something rather unique and mysterious about them. There is a certain bestowed strangeness attached to us, on which basis we’re constructed.

This is valuable - even infinitely so. We don’t know where we come from, or where we’re going, but we’re can’t quite escape the nagging suspicion that we matter. This could be called ‘specist’.

But it is quite likely to answer to reality too – it is certainly a more respectable opinion than Page realises. I don’t think, for instance, that there is a major figure in history from Shakespeare to Bach and Michelangelo who would seriously dispute it. When one hears Page take the opposite view, one wonders if he seriously thinks the creation of Google entitles him to override the creator of Hamlet.

Whatever one thinks of the tech barons – and some of them are more likeable than others – it probably is the case that a grounding in history, philosophy and

This in turn opens up onto the notion of sanctity. To put it mildly, our sense of ourselves has never been as straightforward as we would like. One

What Musk ends up touting towards the end of Isaacson’s book is “maximum truth-seeking AI. It would care about understanding the universe, and that would probably lead it to want to preserve humanity, because we are an interesting part of the universe.”

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trouble with human beings is that we Stormzy on stage (wikipedia.org) tend to note our value when it’s absent – for instance, when there is some terrible atrocity in the context of war. When that happens we think: “Hang on, aren’t we meant to be more than that?”

By expressing our dismay at negative development, we are indicating the value we ought to be ascribing to one another. This sense of ourselves is more likely, paradoxically, to be present at the aftermath of a shooting than it is in an AI lab at Google.

In the ordinary scheme of life, it resides in us quietly. Most of us, when we seek an ideal career, are also seeking to give expression to some sense of destiny burning within us, which we might think of as being an aspect of our self, or soul. We act as though we matter.

Page would say we are delusional in this; I would say we are acting on a valid but admittedly mysterious logic which flows out of our existing at all in the first place. Sometimes, in workaholics, it might be that a large part of the self or soul manifests itself through work.

I’m sure a chess grandmaster feels that way about chess – and perhaps the chess world therefore knew early on – when the first computer beat Kasparov – what I have begun to see in 2023: namely the possibility that a computer can usurp you. Over the past 12 months, AI has begun to sneak nearer to my career – by turns like a sun about to rise, or a storm about to come.

Writing for writers usually does form a large part of the soul. It tends to manifest as an obsessive condition, and the stories are legion of writers failing to separate out work from their personal lives to the detriment of family.

The increasing popularity of ChatGPT – the acronym at the end stands with an almost laughable ugliness for Generative Pre-Trained Transformer. Its mounting popularity caused me to wonder how skilled the bot would be at writing a Finito World leader.

Illustration by Andrew Prescott

To that end, I issued the command: write me a leader for an employability magazine about the importance of skills in education. It replied:

greater than in journalism which is in some way to do with the conveying of factual information, and its organisation.

Welcome to this edition of our Employability Magazine, where we explore the dynamic intersection of education and skills that propels individuals toward success in the ever-evolving landscape of the professional world. In an era marked by rapid technological advancements and global connectivity, the traditional paradigm of education is undergoing a profound transformation.

To take poetry as an example: its creation is much more mysterious than the creation of journalism – it comes from, to use Martin Amis’ notion, the back of the brain. Writing poetry can actually feel like a complete possession of body and soul in a way in which writing journalism does not.

Faced by the ludicrous dullness of this, I experience a rise in self-confidence that the plight of the journalist may not necessarily be an entirely hopeless one at least for the next few years. I might, however, feel differently if I were a copyrighter.

The situation is the same, if not increased, for songwriting, painting or poetry where the link to the self is

It is not surprising therefore that AI and the arts have already clashed, most notably in the 2023 Writers Guild of America strike. The moment which most caught my eye occurred in Nick Cave’s indispensable Red Hand Files, in August 2023. As readers may know the singer-songwriter famously takes questions from his fans on any range of matters. ChatGPT has come up a few times.

Cave takes a very anti-AI view. He www.finito.org.uk

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views true creativity as being fraught with self-murder and challenge – its difficulty is, according to him, what renders it worthwhile. Art is hard work and meant to be so – it is a sort of voyage along suffering. Cave writes: “ChatGPT rejects any notions of creative struggle, that our endeavours animate and nurture our lives giving them depth and meaning. It rejects that there is a collective, essential and unconscious human spirit underpinning our existence, connecting us all through our mutual striving.” So what, for Cave, does Chat GPT ultimately amount to?

“ChatGPT’s intent is to eliminate the process of creation and its attendant challenges, viewing it as nothing more than a time-wasting inconvenience that stands in the way of the commodity itself. Why strive?, it contends. Why bother with the artistic process and its accompanying trials? Why shouldn’t we make it faster and easier?”

“CHATGPT’S INTENT IS TO ELIMINATE THE PROCESS OF CREATION AND ITS ATTENDANT CHALLENGES, VIEWING IT AS NOTHING MORE THAN A TIME-WASTING INCONVENIENCE...”

And so what should we do about it?

Cave’s response strikes me as very beautiful. “As humans, we so often feel helpless in our own smallness, yet still we find the resilience to do and make beautiful things, and this is where the meaning of life resides. Nature reminds us of this constantly. The world is often cast as a purely malignant place, but still the joy of creation exerts itself, and as the sun rises upon the struggle of the day, the Great Crested Grebe dances upon the water. It is our striving that becomes the very essence of meaning.

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This impulse – the creative dance – that is now being so cynically undermined, must be defended at all costs, and just as we would fight any existential evil, we should fight it tooth and nail, for we are fighting for the very soul of the world.”

Therefore, we’re in a mortal fight brought about primarily by economic circumstances. Technological advance throws to the top of the pile people like Page who can precipitate astonishing developments while knowing very little about the broader context of what they’re doing. They are immune to knock-on effects, because they are financially unassailable, and blissfully ignorant of what they’re doing, knowing no history or literature. It’s sometimes

the case that to understand the world you have to go to the artists and the philosophers as well as the scientists and the tech entrepreneurs. The worrying thing is that the tech entrepreneurs don’t need to do that. They either want to plough on because they believe in progress for its own sake, or because they want to see the money rolling in – or usually both.

There are minor silver linings. It seems likely that Musk, the most safetyconscious of the AI moguls – will succeed by dint of owning Twitter with its vast linguistic datasets and Tesla with its visual dataset of driver behaviour in competing with ChatGPT and DeepMind. More experienced with his success at SpaceX and Neuralink

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at rapidly building competitive engineering companies, there seems a good chance that he will define the AI future to some extent. It may therefore be very fortunate that the most gifted entrepreneur-engineer of our time at least doesn’t take the Larry Page view of life. But it might not be a bad thing too, if he were to listen to Nick Cave.

The_Cry_of_the_ Theologians He could also do a lot worse than listen to the great humanitarian and religious thinker Sir Terry Waite. Waite begins by explaining to me the irreversible nature of the progress the big tech companies have made. “I don’t think you can ever reverse these trends,” he tells me. “I think there is a trend towards artificial intelligence and that is now moving and it will not be stopped. What can be done is somehow to control it. It has very real dangers, of course, and I don’t fully understand the full implications of what AI is going to be.”

Waite tells me of a minor AI scrape he’s recently been in. “I have been suffering this morning from the effects of a very minor form of AI – namely, a parcel should have been delivered, it was delivered to the wrong address and every time I get close to speaking to any human being about that I get some automated response which gives me a series of answers to questions I pose which bear no relation to my problem. I need to know where it is and where it’s gone. They tell me it’s been delivered but it hasn’t been delivered here; it’s been delivered somewhere. That’s very minor and it’s not the full use of AI but it’s an indication of what is coming where we do not speak to another human being.”

In a sense Waite’s worries are rather similar to Cave’s – a world where human closeness, and even meaningful interaction, is radically curtailed. “Maybe this will be different in the future but a machine does not have the human

qualities of compassion and love which are central to human existence and central to the teaching of Christ who constantly emphasised the values of compassion and love,” Waite continues.

Waite also explains how we have tended to express these values throughout history. “You can express compassion in a number of ways but in general it’s expressed with face-to-face meeting.

There is a very good book recently written called The Matter of Things by a neuroscientist and writer called Iain McGilchrist. He speaks about the two sides of the brain: the left hemisphere and the right. The left hemisphere is the area of calculation and decisionmaking. The right area is the area of imagination and spirituality and all that goes with that. He points out that much of modern society is now concentrated on the left hemisphere, especially in the teaching of mathematics and the teaching of science. These things are important – I don’t deny that – but they’re now being pursued to the detriment of history and the arts. We are being put out of balance.”

And what are the dangers of that?

Waite is unequivocal. “Lack of holistic understanding does not make for rounded human beings.”

The way society appears to have gone is that left hemisphere-dominant people have created things which the righthemisphere dominant would never have dreamed of, and monetised these creations aggressively, essentially marooning the right-hemisphere dominant – among which I count myself – in a world they didn’t particularly want or need. Lefthemisphere people tend to make a big impact on reality, and their version of society has a momentum which can’t be realistically reversed. But they are not dreamers – and dreaming is important too.

The predicament may be more serious still. The right-hemisphere seems to me to link far more reliably to human meaning, and human meaning is probably more important than analysis

Sir Terry Waite (Wikipedia.org)

and measurement (left-hemisphere thinking). It could therefore be that we have created the entire future out of the wrong side of our brain. But a decision-maker like Larry Page, full of self-importance and unlimited money, would likely give short shrift to the notion that their worldview is false: they will not feel it to be so in their gilded boardrooms and, again, have no particular reason to listen to you.

We therefore face a precarious situation where Waite and Cave are right but that nobody in positions of decisionmaking power will listen to them. It is this which has led many to argue for government intervention.

So will AI affect everyone in the world similarly or will there be different outcomes on a country-by-country basis? The answer to that is that while individual governments will harness potential in different ways, the overall impact is likely to be pretty broad. And how is the UK placed? Michael Gove, as might be expected, is optimistic: “As nations go, we’re in a better position than most. But we may well find ourselves in less than a year’s time reframing many of the questions we’re discussing now.” Then he pauses and says, almost defiantly: “But human nature itself won’t change.”

Yes, but will it be eradicated? Here, the international landscape becomes www.finito.org.uk

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James Cleverly (Wikipedia.org)

important and cannot be realistically divorced from geopolitics. And geopolitics, if we’re honest, isn’t in a great place either.

Cleverly_does_it When one reads the coverage, it can seem as though America is way ahead and without any serious competitors.

That’s partly because we’re discussing the brands we all know and bankroll: Amazon, Facebook, Google, Tesla, Twitter, Microsoft.

“CHINA IS IN A FAR MORE ADVANTAGEOUS PLACE IN TERMS OF AI TECHNOLOGY THAN MANY REALISE.” But worryingly it has been said sometimes that China is ahead – that’s the view of the philanthropist Mohamed Amersi whose brilliant autobiography Why? has just been published. He tells me that China is in a far more advantageous place in terms of AI technology than many realise. “China is way ahead,” he tells me. “One indication of this is the number of patents filed – if you google patent filing you’ll see 68

that China is way ahead of the US, and perhaps ahead of all other countries combined. It’s worth noting also that China has put together a code for regulating AI. This law came into force in August 2023 and was internationally ground-breaking. When you put those two things together the consensus is that China is in out in front and by a long way.”

This seems sufficiently serious to be worth communicating to the then Foreign Secretary James Cleverly. When I ask Cleverly about China’s progress he puts his finger immediately on the key issue. “This is one of these classic foreign affairs quandaries,” he tells me. “China in so many areas is on a completely different page to the UK. This is partly to do with history and culture, but their attitude when it comes to the relationship between the state and the individual is completely different to the UK’s.” For Cleverly, this has clear ramifications: “Therefore, their use of AI, what they might utilise AI for, and what they are fearful about in terms of AI – all these things are likely to be different.”

But does he know how far advanced China is on its AI development compared to the West? “The truth is, in direct answer to your question, I don’t know whether they are ahead of the UK or ahead of the US or behind us, or both. They are a very closed society but the fact is they’re on the podium. They are one of the top AI countries in the world. They are a Top 10 country and therefore they are inevitably developing AI technology. It almost doesn’t matter exactly what the ordering is, they are – and will continue to be – a very serious global player with a fundamentally different set of values.”

For Cleverly this opens up onto the question of how global safety agreements should be structured going forwards. “If we try to build some kind of framework for safety and rules-for-the-road limitations, as we do for example with nuclear weapons

Sir Anthony Seldon

technology and chemical weapons technology – as we are now beginning to do with the use of space hardware cyber rules – countries are less likely to break the rules if you include them.”

Cleverly therefore reasons that China ought to be included in negotiations.

“If we don’t include China at all – if we create a western framework and consciously exclude them right at the start of the process – I believe they will feel liberated to do what they want to do and that may well not be in our best interests. We need to at least try to persuade them to sign up to some reasonable pragmatic behaviour around AI safety. There is no guarantee that they will play by the rules, but it gives us a better fighting chance.”

Seldon_Says As the AI debate continues, I realise that the effects for me are of less significance than the effects on the lives of my two young children, who are aged seven and three. It was Christopher Hitchens who said that once you have children your heart lies outside you – the self, the soul, appear to extend outwards in time and space beyond one’s own predicament into theirs. In my own case, the older already displays a passion for architecture which strikes his teachers as being outside the norm; he has already been given a prize in respect of this.

But when he says: “I’m going to be an architect, Daddy,” I find myself quietly wondering to myself what being an architect will mean, if it means anything,

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when he’s old enough to make a living doing it.

For thousands of years, being a father has meant handing on the world reasonably unspoiled to your children. We might try to improve it if we’re lucky, but we have tended to assume that it will have been broadly preserved. My father expected the world to be intact for me – and it was, at least until now. The fact that I am unsure of my ability to replicate what had seemed a fairly basic feat can sometimes cause me disquiet.

It is therefore probably true to say that I am invested in the idea that AI will actually not be the doom-laden scenario which many predict for it, but instead an unlooked-for boon, where Musk’s vision of human beings existing happily alongside robots is fulfilled – and my son gets to be an architect if he wants to be.

If I look for these apostles of positivity I find one in Sir Anthony Seldon, who has written a book called The Fourth Education Revolution which paints a rosier picture around AI’s impact on education.

Seldon was in this conversation pretty early. He tells me: “I started writing that book in 2017, seven years or so before AI was as much talked about as it is now. One of the governors at Wellington College, Tim Bunting put me onto it.

We talked about how it would change everything about education.”

“I FELT THAT AI WOULD BE THE DYNAMITE THAT WILL FINALLY BLOW IT APART.” So how does Seldon view AI in the education space? “It is the understanding that AI would come along at a time when we still have a fundamentally 19th century model of schools – and to some extent universities – where the lecturer and the teacher’s at the front, students sit passively, and everyone moves at the

same speed. That whole image of white boards and so on is hardly different from the whole model which was absurdly redundant by the late 20th century. I felt that AI would be the dynamite that will finally blow it apart.”

And why is that? “That’s because it compensates for the deficiencies and endemic failures of the third revolution, which is that everyone has to move at the same pace, in every subject, regardless. Everyone has to work at the same time of day in the same fundamental way.”

For Seldon this flat-footedness has severe ramifications. “It makes social mobility static or declining,” he tells me. “Teacher workload gets worse.

But above all the model assumes that the student should produce the right answer at the right time in the right way, and isn’t interested in what the student thinks.” Having two very individual children who don’t fit easily into boxes as I do, this is cheering to hear. The quality I have always most valued is curiosity and if AI can accelerate that, while having built-in safeguards, then I can imagine a very bright future indeed.

Furthermore, the pre-AI education system has been bad, Seldon says, for our well-being. “Homogenisation is a key contributor of mental unwellness and devotes itself to a very narrow range of human intelligence. As a system, it is very good at helping people pass exams but not at helping them learn how to live, how to lead meaningful lives, be good physicists and good historians, or how to be good MPs, or even good parents.”

So AI could help with that? Seldon replies: “If it’s harnessed early enough, it can overcome all those things.”

That sounds promising although there remains the suspicion that Larry Page, in addition to not being a historian, artist or theologian, is also not an educationalist. Again the sense is of

unchecked and rampant momentum, and worse, a momentum primarily driven by financial gain. Even so, I am also prepared to admit that Larry Page isn’t all powerful and that there is clear evidence here that good can come of AI too.

Message_in_a_ Bootle Seldon’s arguments, if taken to their conclusion in other areas of life, could form the basis of an even sunnier set of predictions. If you want this full-scale optimism then you need to go to Roger Bootle, the economist and chair of Capital Economics, who has authored the excellent study The AI Economy: Work, Wealth and Welfare in the Robot Age (2019).

I ask him how he came to write the book. “There has been this massive obsession in the media and elsewhere about AI and robots and the conclusion was fundamentally negative,” he tells me. “Most people argued that this great technological advance was going to bring some form of impoverishment because we were all going to lose our jobs. Robots and AI were going to take over and I thought this was a pretty important subject so I got stuck into reading about it. Most of it turns out to have been written by noneconomists claiming to be technical experts. I discovered that they’d got their economics upside down and I thought it was time an economist got to grips with the subject, which I did, and my take on it all was fundamentally optimistic – so my book really does stand out from most on the subject.”

So what are Bootle’s reasons for optimism about AI? “The first thing to appreciate is you have got to start with the history. Technological improvements have been going on for ages. Since the late 18th and mid-19th century, we have had a wave of technological developments and improvements which www.finito.org.uk

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something about how the human mind works which is very different from the way that a computer works – especially the capability of making jumps which a computer can’t make. But on from that comes the most central thing: human beings are social creatures. They like to relate to other human beings; they are naturally suspicious of machines and sympathetic to humans.”

Roger Bootle. (Wikipedia.org)

have knocked out various job skills – and in some cases industries – and others have sprung up to take their place and for me the question was always: ‘Why should this be any different from that?’”

And what did Bootle discover? “When you got down to the specifics, what the pessimists focused on was the idea that essentially there were going to be no areas where human beings could compete with AI and robots. Therefore, they leapt to the conclusion that this is different. I looked at that and I thought it was bunkum. For a start, the capability of AI and robots is massively exaggerated in the literature put out by the enthusiasts.”

I ask Bootle for examples. “Every time I go through an airport I am amused by the AI-enabled automatic passport machines which are fine when they work, but beyond them there are rows and rows of border force officials guiding you. Robots have been working in industry for 40-50 years but the idea of an omni-capable robot is a long way off because they don’t have sufficient manual dexterity. If you have a robot maid, for instance, to your house, they can’t plump the cushions, or tie shoelaces: there are umpteen things they just can’t do.”

But mightn’t that technology improve?

“It might, but I think the most important thing is to realise what human beings are. I quote someone in the book who says that the human brain is a computer that happens to be made of meat. I think it’s fundamentally wrong. There is 70

In this Bootle echoes Sir Terry Waite and Nick Cave – but his observation is a cause for hope not despair. According to Bootle, there are therefore a whole range of areas where humans, contrary to the horrific predictions, are in fact indispensable. When I ask him to name one, he is swift. “Let’s take medicine, for instance, where not only is there room for greater advances and recordkeeping and so on but also diagnosis.

But some people have suggested this is going to lead to the redundancy of medical professionals, with surgeons doing robotic surgery. This is complete and utter nonsense. Apart from anything else, human beings need to interact with and trust other human beings and so you are not going to go along with some sort of AI-disembodied voice telling you you’ve got to have your right leg chopped off and say: ‘Okay, fine, I’ll go ahead and do it’. We will need to have human beings intermediating between us and AI. Of course, at the moment, robotic surgery has brought some terrific advances but what it hasn’t done is make surgeons redundant. Instead it has made surgery much more accurate, reliable, quicker and potentially having it done at remote distances.”

This seems to hold out some hope for me to continue working as a journalist – and more importantly, for my son to one day practice as an architect. It also means that both my children are much less likely to do dull jobs. After naming checkout tills and passport control as jobs we need to get rid of, Bootle lands on translation services as a good example of the rate of progress. “When they first started they were completely

useless. They are now not bad. It is still the case it seems to me in the future that there will be professional linguists who are ultra-skilled in the language with its literary flushes and its ambiguities and so on – you will want to employ those for specialist cases but if you just ordinarily want to translate a letter that’s written to you in a foreign language you just plug in translate and most of the time it does a pretty reasonable job and it will be getting better.”

So it’s those middle jobs which will be under threat? Bootle agrees. “Basic accounting, basic legal services. It is suggested that the development of AI and robots is going to substantially undermine the demand for labour from people at the bottom of the heap. I don’t think that’s right. I think it will undermine the demand for labour of people a bit above the bottom of the heap. A lot of manual tasks I don’t think will be replaced at all. It’s the clerical positions or the lower reaches of the semieducated middle classes – people doing admin, clerical type jobs. I suspect a lot of those are going to be replaced.”

So overall, this will be good for productivity? “I see it as fundamentally something that is going to massively increase our productivity over time. Just like all the other things that have occurred since the industrial revolution, some people will lose their jobs,” Bootle explains.

The_Great_ Reskilling So what does this mean for people who are now in jobs which are potentially for the scrapheap. Will they need to reskill?

“I think that’s right,” Bootle continues.

“To some extent it has already been happening. There used to be banks of typists in most firms, but all that’s gone.

Your personal assistant or secretary now does other sorts of jobs to what they used to do. They use the technology but they have to develop other skills.”

So what will the impact be on the working week? Bootle explains: “Well if

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it is the case – as I argue it is – that this is going to make us a lot more productive then I think this is going to be one of the forces pushing for a shorter working week. In other words, if we are going to become a lot more productive, we can consume and produce a lot more based on an increase in productivity.”

So what does Bootle think will happen?

“I think in general there will be a society wide move towards shorter working hours particularly, I suspect, a four day week, some individuals may do this more than others but the average will be shorter working hours. If you look at the historical evidence, working hours have fallen dramatically since the industrial revolution but also of course we have become an awful lot better off. We have trod that middle way already.”

Bootle is also a fan, perhaps not surprisingly, of Seldon. “I think there is scope to use AI a lot in the education process and I personally think the old system of a lecturer standing up in front of a class of 30 or 40 or in some cases hundreds of people and he brings out his notes and they then write them down – that’s absurd.”

One can imagine that the modern day equivalent of Roosevelt’s New Deal would need to restructure the economy around the soon-to-be-unemployed clerical classes, and redirect them toward more fulfilling work.

That_Uncertain_ Feeling I am emotionally invested in the idea of AI as a positive – the life we are about to enter would be so much better if that were so. But I find that while I can accept much of what Bootle and Seldon say, I don’t trust the big tech companies, nor do I particularly trust government to regulate AI effectively.

Furthermore, I have read compelling evidence that suggests that Bootle may be underestimating the way in which AI technology works: it isn’t something which is programmed, it is something which grows. And if it grows, then we have no more control over how it develops than we do over the direction of the branches of a tree.

So how does Bootle see the education future? “The way I see education going is essentially along the lines of the tutorial system. You have more one-on-one sessions which are about discussion and interaction and seminars where you have got a small number of students discussing and interacting so that the ratio of teachers to pupils or students may not change that much – but the ratio in individual teaching sessions will change dramatically. There will be a big increase in the ratio of teachers to students but there will be fewer hours doing in-person teaching because the students will be doing their other stuff remotely.”

In short, there is something spooky about the technology. I cannot escape the notion that AI will be both good and bad – as the Internet has been.

This sentiment is echoed by the great filmmaker Guy Ritchie who tells me: “I think I’ve got a handle on it. It’s going to be brilliant – and in equal measure it’s going to be awful. I don’t think it’s any more complicated than that. In proportion to how brilliant it’s going to be, it’s going to be awful too. There seems to be a consistency to anything that’s great – it’s awful. I can’t see how the equation isn’t going to work like that because all those things do. With communication came great benefits and at the same time great deficits.”

This all sounds broadly positive, assuming those people in vulnerable jobs can be effectively reskilled, which arguably suggests a programme of a far greater reach and imagination than what governments tend to be capable of nowadays.

This feels just, and Ritchie explains how that viewpoint can help anchor us when it comes to the advances coming down the track. ‘Everything is subject to these laws – I’m yet to see anything that isn’t. It’s the only way I can reconcile it.

Otherwise it’s just a wild dog and that wild dog will end up consuming you.”

What Ritchie is saying is that AI, however major its advances, will ultimately have to conform to something like the pattern of good and evil which has been one way or another the basis of all major religions, and many philosophical systems as far back as we trace humanity. This is comforting – and it may well be true. If the universe is in fact forged somehow according to good and evil, then AI, also an aspect of the universe, may very likely be subservient to these things. That would mean that our struggle will go on. It is a titanic one, but it at least has the virtue of being somewhat familiar.

When all anyone can agree on is the enormity of it all, I find myself continually coming back to the question of what life really is. It seems to me pretty certain that it is in some sense sacred, as Cave and Waite say. The cultural conservative in me, who likes old things like cathedrals and poems written hundreds of years ago, wants to put the brakes on. But what Waite, Ritchie, Seldon and Bootle seem to agree on is this overarching need of the human. This is a good aspect of this debate: it keeps bringing me round to the fragility and generosity of the human experience.

As I have researched this article, I have been going back and forth to school to drop off and pick up the children. Each day at 9am and 3.30pm I am presented with a sea of humanity: children in their innate optimism; parents looking harassed by the pressure of the work-kids juggle; teachers most of whom emanate a bright sense of vocation. When your daily life entails writing about robots, you see more sharply than before the beauty and the kindness in your fellow people. It might be that we’re on the cusp of some tidal wave, but I have sometimes had the image that we need hold the line, here together, on the shore. www.finito.org.uk

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HEIDI MALLACE ON THE POTENTIAL IMPACT OF AI ON DEMOCRACY IN 2024

2

024 is poised to be the largest election year in history. There will be 74 elections and an estimated four billion voters globally, half the world’s population. Countries such as the USA, UK, India, Russia, South Africa, and Nigeria are among those involved. With over 25 years in the communications and reputation management industry, I’ve witnessed the crucial role of effective communication in achieving success.

Communication not only shapes opinions and reputations but also influences beliefs. This is a pathway to power for political leaders. 2024 marks a pivotal moment where AI generative communications and democracy converge.

THE RADICAL EVOLUTION OF COMMUNICATIONS IN THE 21ST CENTURY Throughout human history, communication has been a remarkable fabric of society. Prehistoric humans relied on verbal means—spoken language, storytelling, and gestures— to share information and coordinate group activities. The development of written language around 3200 BCE marked a significant leap forward in recording and sharing information.

Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in 1440 enabled the mass production of books and pamphlets, facilitating the widespread dissemination of knowledge and transforming access to information.

The invention of the telegraph, over 400 years later, introduced longdistance communication through 72

Heidi Mallace

Morse code. Alexander Graham Bell’s invention of the telephone allowed realtime voice communication over long distances. The 20th century witnessed the rise of electronic communications through radio and television. In 1989, Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s creation of the World Wide Web revolutionised global communications.

“61.4% OF THE WORLD’S POPULATION USES SOCIAL MEDIA, WITH FACEBOOK ALONE BOASTING +3 BILLION USERS.”

In the past 20 years, social media and smartphones have dominated our communication landscape. According to Kepsios, 61.4% of the world’s population uses social media, with Facebook alone boasting more than billion users. AI generative models like ChatGPT represent the latest frontier, capable of understanding and generating human-like text, enabling advanced conversational interfaces, content creation, and personalised communication. Upon its launch in November 2022, ChatGPT acquired a million users in five days. By December 2023, it had 180 million active weekly users, with 1.5 billion website visits in October 2023 alone. The scale and

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(Unsplash.com)

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(Unsplash.com)

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pace of AI development are almost unimaginable. Its impact will potentially influence democracy this year.

ALERTING ALL COMMUNICATIONS PROFESSIONALS AND VOTERS Communication strategists and campaigners are poised to integrate AI like never before. However, a recent report by Golin has analysed the impact of AI tools on crisis management and issues. The research reveals that nearly 60% of communications professionals have yet to adapt their reputation management strategies to account for AI. This poses a concern for prominent figures, businesses and politics.

Jessica Shelver, managing director at Digitalis, a firm specialising in digital risk and online reputation, expressed concern, stating, “There’s a significant risk of miscommunication or misinterpretation. Generative AI might produce responses that are inaccurate or not aligned with the intended messaging, potentially leading to misunderstandings, reputational damage, and privacy breaches.”

This holds considerable implications for elections. It will be as poignant as Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, a turning point in leveraging social media for political purposes.

James Hann, managing director and head of risk at Digitalis, whose government practice assists governments in understanding and navigating the digital landscape and managing its risks, highlighted, said: “2023 has been characterised by the widespread and accessible use of generative AI tools, especially in the online landscapes surrounding conflicts. These tools bring unique challenges, and with some social media platforms actively cutting back on moderation and safety teams, we are looking ahead to the obstacles we expect clients to face next year.”

AI TECHNOLOGY CAN BE USED TO MANIPULATE PUBLIC OPINION AND UNDERMINE DEMOCRACY. The threat posed by misinformation and disinformation to our societies is now well-acknowledged. Recent geopolitical events have underscored the growing nature of this threat with the use of AI. Hann said, “Mis and disinformation are often used interchangeably, but there’s a subtle difference. Misinformation refers to false or inaccurate information spread unintentionally, whereas disinformation involves deliberately spreading false information to deceive people.” He further expressed concern about the use of deepfakes in the Slovak elections. It illustrated how AI technology can be used to manipulate public opinion and undermine democracy. It’s a worrisome trend in today’s landscape of rapid AI and social media advancements creating fresh challenges for governments.

UNDERSTANDING AI’S PERILS, PITFALLS, AND POTENTIAL The interplay between human influence and AI technologies has reached a critical juncture. Navigating these AI-driven communications requires a prudent approach. The dynamics between humans and AI in shaping reputations and political landscapes call for careful scrutiny and vigilant oversight.

transparent AI-generated content can mitigate misinformation risks and uphold the integrity of democratic processes.

Despite the risks involved, AI harbours immense potential to enhance human capabilities and drive positive change.

Utilising AI for swift and accurate content creation can expand information accessibility. However, in this era of hyperconnectivity, discerning between genuine human-generated content and AIgenerated narratives has grown increasingly complex. As we step into this year, we should adhere to three golden rules.

Perform a digital audit: Since ChatGPT gathers information from online sources like Wikipedia, websites, and digital media, consider conducting a digital reputation audit. Companies like Digitalis use proprietary technology to trawl the internet and social media to source information about you or your organisation. This enables you to identify potential threats and inaccuracies, which you can then potentially correct or request to be taken down.

Be cautious with information: Human psychology heavily influences trust in AI-generated content. Trust builds when AI communication aligns with human expectations of authenticity and reliability.

Algorithms cater to preferences, so factcheck and don’t blindly trust all information generative AI produces.

Explore and learn: Take the time to comprehend how AI can aid effective communication for you or your organisation. Understanding your audience and crafting a compelling narrative is key to utilising AI effectively.

As we navigate this terrain, it’s crucial to acknowledge the immediate risks, concealed threats, and opportunities brought forth by AI in communication and democracy.

Knowledge is power, but remember, you control what you see, hear and read.

Human brains got us this far. Now, it’s time to use our brains to manage AI tools and our votes wisely.

Tackling these challenges demands a multifaceted approach involving policy frameworks and media literacy. Strong AI governance, ethical guidelines, and

Heidi Mallace is the Co-Founder of Curayio, a communications consultancy which advises, coaches and trains individuals, teams and businesses for success. www.finito.org.uk

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NAPOLEON IN OUR TIMES AT THE RELEASE OF RIDLEY SCOTT’S NEW FILM, ROBERT GOLDING ASKS WHAT WE CAN LEARN FROM THE GREAT GENERAL IN OUR WORKING LIVES

Illustration by Andrew Prescott

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T

here is a famous line by

the 20th century Chinese statesman Zhou Enlai.

When asked what he thought of the French revolution, he replied: “Too

soon to say.” The same might be said

about Napoleon: we’re too near him to know for sure what he means to us.

That doesn’t stop us trying to find out.

The recent release of Ridley Scott’s film Napoleon has proven beyond doubt that Napoleon remains both compelling and controversial – as lively in his importance as many a living figure. By discussing Napoleon, we somehow give an account of ourselves.

Scott’s film establishes itself as a must-watch just by virtue of its title.

It isn’t quite the film we want or need, but it is better to have it than not. All Stanley Kubrick fans lament the fact that the great director never finished his own version – and there is much hope surrounding the news that Steven Spielberg is now filming a seven-part series for HBO based on Kubrick’s script. For now, we can make do with this: Joaquin Phoenix as a gruff Napoleon, less intelligent by many magnitudes than the actual Napoleon; brilliantly shot battle scenes; and a film that feels oddly both too short and too long at the same time. What’s good about it will make us want to know more about Napoleon; what’s not so good will ensure that our appetite for stories about Bonaparte will not allay.

After Scott’s film was initially screened, and the reaction came in, one came to realise that however porous the world’s nations have become, they still mean something to most people. That’s because in France, the film has been considered anti-French, a viewpoint which has been much less notable in the English and American coverage.

It was as if the Napoleonic Wars had never been away, which in itself brings to mind another quote, this time by the American novelist William Faulkner:

Ingres, Napoleon I on his throne

“The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.”

This quote, whose truth has grown on me over the years, is undeniably the

case with Bonaparte. Napoleon, perhaps more than any other historical figure,

retains the power to affect us in the here and now, though he has now been dead for over two centuries.

What is it that makes him so powerful and even attractive? His daring, his

military competence, and his glamour

tend to spark the imagination of successive ages. Nobody is really immune from his dash, his competence, and the outsized nature of his deeds.

Readers of Andrew Roberts’ Napoleon the Great will find it striking how much Napoleon wrote, especially in his youth – stories, plays, essays, all of them very bad. But really Bonaparte is the archetypal man of action and our interest in him perhaps speaks to a deficit in us: compared to Napoleon www.finito.org.uk

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So Napoleon embodies a discredited notion, but still we find ourselves affected by him.

I think some clue can be found in the etymology of the word ‘glory’ which comes from the Old French ‘gloire’: “the splendor of God or Christ; praise offered to God, worship”, though it also has connotations with the Latin word ‘gloria’ which naturally has pre-Christian associations of ‘fame, renown, great praise, or honour”. This might make us realise that Napoleon, in so embodying glory, is a sort of ladder we might descend into the deep past – almost into another version of human achievement, full of a kind of blazing intensity and adventure.

Napoleon til Hest fra bogen Kunstnere Z: David, Jacques-Louis 2005 Fotograf:.

ACC:.

HD Afdeling. Det Kongelige Biblotek.

almost everyone else in history is too sedentary. To look on him is to marvel at a different energy altogether, one we can learn from.

But there’s a paradox at work here.

Napoleon’s very power to interest us may make us wonder a bit about the validity of the helter-skelter progress we sometimes think we are making. Why, if we’re so content to rush off into a future of general artificial intelligence and drone cars and so forth, are we so easily arrested by this man who lived not only before the Internet and air travel, but who lived most of his life without the steam engine having been invented?

One possible answer is that Napoleon, as Scott’s film shows well, remains a fascinating instance of human potential made actual. By any measure, he did amazing things – even though we might 78

not agree with much of what he did.

He stalked continents; proved himself one of the best military commanders in history; and created a legal system, the Napoleon Code, which is still in force in some 120 countries. It was the historian Kenneth Clark who said that Napoleon, for all his faults, was a difficult person entirely to discount. “We can’t quite resist the exhilaration of Napoleon’s glory,’ as he said in his landmark TV series Civilisation.

Glory, it must be said, has had a hard time of it in the past two centuries – not least because Napoleon, its principal embodiment, was defeated in the end.

The poetry of Wilfred Owen (18931918) contains the best descriptions of why glory is at the very least to be distrusted. Put simply, it leads to needless death – Owen’s among them.

There is evidence that Napoleon knew that he might serve as a powerful, almost Pharaoh-like, symbol for his contemporaries. Take, for instance, Ingres’ superb portrait which summons to mind Charlemagne: here we see the paraphernalia of immutable power.

Napoleon, too fleetingly, understood himself as a force for stability – and, of course, in relation to what had gone before in the shape of the anarchy of the revolution, that wasn’t necessarily difficult.

But he was too complex to be only that – he was also on the move, athirst, full of a certain wild rampancy. He could never be a figure of unity and a figure of conquest at the same time. In his essence he was too questioning for that. This tendency to ask quick volleys of questions was the backbone of his character. Here is Roberts describing an encounter with the prostitute to whom he probably lost his virginity in Paris when a young man: “He asked her where she was from (Nantes), how she lost her virginity (‘an officer ruined me’), whether she was sorry for it (‘Yes, very’), how she’d got to Paris, and finally, after a further barrage of questions, whether she would go back with him to her rooms…”

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And here he is towards the end of his life, as witnessed by William Warden on the Northumblerand in transit to his final ending up in St Helena: “His conversation, at all times, consisted of questions, which never fail to be put in such a way as to prohibit the return of them. To answer one question by another, which frequently happens in common discourse, was not admissible with him. I can conceive that he was habituated to this kind of colloquy…’

He certainly was habituated to it – it was a lifelong trait, which it would have been good if Scott’s film could have better conveyed. Napoleon’s curiosity was insatiable: given command when very young of the French army in Italy, he threw himself into the history of campaigns there.

But his curiosity also had its limitations.

If we ask to what end he was asking questions then the answer is conquest.

This was his raison d’être – and territorial conquest is always bound up in space and time, and so can never quite be enough. Perhaps it is never especially sane. Restlessness was the chief characteristic of his time – usually a restlessness combined with a nodding understanding of the centredness of the classical world. This paradox can be seen in figures as various as Byron, Beethoven, and Goethe. Goethe worshipped Palladio but wrote The Sorrows of Young Werther.

The boon of this romantic restlessness was that it was exciting; the problem was that nobody particularly knew what they were travelling towards, a characteristic we often seem to have inherited in our own hyperactive inattention. One of Napoleon’s greatest contemporaries, William Wilberforce, in his passion to abolish slavery, had a far clearer understanding of what life is than any of those others. This is one of the reasons why, in the end, Britain won the Napoleonic Wars: it was more securely anchored in a sense of identity than revolutionary and Napoleonic France.

Napoleon was a far better military leader than any alive – in fact, he was the best military commander of all time. But his brilliant victories were always in service to nebulous aims.

This heady Napoleon – the one who, unlike Ingres’ version, actually existed – can be seen in David’s Napoleon Crossing the Alps: it is a picture full of movement, of appetite for the next thing. It is this need of motion – the lack of a viable centre – which really came to define him, and which brought about his own destruction. Some of the more picturesque scenes in Scott’s movie show the magnitude of Napoleon’s error in marching on Russia in winter.

This then is Napoleon: a new kind of hero, but someone also redolent of the old Christian Kings, and the pre-Christian Emperors. Of course, Napoleon himself isn’t someone we would think of as Christian in any meaningful sense – the body count alone arising out of his campaigns might make us laugh at such a notion.

But in our disconnected and inchoate world, there will always be those who look to the strongman for solace, even a dead one. They are markers of what might be possible when we are feeling downtrodden and small. The spread of digitalised democracy hasn’t decreased this hunger; it has augmented it, as the existence of figures as various as Donald Trump and Viktor Orban, Vladimir Putin and Narendra Modi shows. Most of the people alive today who support these people, would have been sure to have supported Napoleon in his own day. The dynamic towards authoritarianism is a recurring one, and it is partly because it must always be fought that we can’t always be sure at any one time about the precise state of Napoleon’s legacy.

Yet our strongmen are neither so clever nor so interesting as Napoleon.

Our politics seems full of a sort of pantomime glory which is sometimes called Punch and Judy politics. It

is tempting to argue that without Napoleonic conquest the stakes simply aren’t high enough to make genuinely gigantic political figures.

Certainly the idea of glory seems to reach its apotheosis somehow with the conclusion of the Napoleonic wars. A sort of grey filter appears to descend which has to do with the nature of the victors – the dowdy Victorians – and with the absence of Napoleon himself.

The wars which occurred during the 19th century lacked the drama of Napoleon’s wars. We don’t really watch films about the Crimean War. In fact, the principal development in war in the 19th century after Napoleon’s death is probably the writing of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, in which the romantic view of Napoleon is admitted into a vast canvas which is also at pains to show the grim reality of war. Tolstoy anticipated the War Poets by around half a century.

Clearly, the Tolstoyan view of war was important and much was gained: a healthy loathing of carnage. Human beings felt able in the wake of Napoleon to think about the individual life which is sacrificed by the Bonapartist need of conquest. We began to loathe, quite rightly, what war actually is. Owen called the idea that it’s sweet to die for your country the old lie – and every Remembrance Day we come together in full agreement. One of the leitmotifs of my own life has been to visit the sites of atrocities. I have seen Hiroshima, Auschwitz, Anne Frank’s House in Amsterdam, Kilmainham Jail and Robben Island. They all tell the same story of the collateral damage which governments inflict on people when they hope nobody is watching. In one sense, Napoleon is on the side of the governments not the people.

Yet watching Scott’s film, it doesn’t feel quite so simple as that. He was also in another sense of the people, in that he was charged with bringing to some kind of order the unruly energies of the revolution. Napoleon’s Hundred www.finito.org.uk

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Days would not have occurred without his having secured some powerful connection with the people. The complexity of Napoleon is that he emerged out of a set of forces which we have to some extent accepted.

Furthermore, there was always a degree of treachery in Britain about Napoleon.

Charles James Fox – essentially the Leader of the Opposition during the lengthy administration of William Pitt the Younger – had three meetings with Napoleon, and lavished Bonaparte with praise, saying that he had “surpassed…

Alexander and Caesar, not to mention the great advantage he has over them in the cause he fights in.” We would be surprised to hear Starmer say something like this about Vladimir Putin – but perhaps it is a measure of Napoleon’s attractiveness that he had supporters even in the House of Commons.

“ALL THE PURE AND NOBLE ARTS OF PEACE ARE FOUNDED ON WAR; NO GREAT ART EVER YET ROSE ON EARTH, BUT AMONG A NATION OF SOLDIERS.” Yet it was also Kenneth Clark who approvingly quoted John Ruskin’s observation: “All the pure and noble arts of peace are founded on war; no great art ever yet rose on earth, but among a nation of soldiers.” Predominantly because of the horrors of the 20th century, and in our era of declining defence budgets, we find it hard to understand how much our forebears accepted soldiery as a pursuit. Much of the admiration towards Napoleon was therefore aimed at his military ability.

It can be possible to admire a thing done well for its show of technical and leadership ability – and few people have done anything as well as Napoleon made war. His strengths included a 80

rapport with his troops, an ability to think tactically around the terrain of a situation, and an ability to ruthlessly seize the opportune moment. It might be added that these traits would be just as useful in the boardroom as on the battlefield: everyone who aspires to leadership will therefore have something to learn from Napoleon.

This is categorically not true of Hitler, who people, possibly including Scott, sometimes want to adduce as a comparison to Napoleon.

Where I think Napoleon is deficient is in his sense of himself, and in his worldview. Heroes forget they are human at their peril. Bonaparte once said that if he were to fall off a building, he wouldn’t be scared but would take a last calm look around. This is unlikely – he would be as scared as the rest of us. In forgetting his humanity, he was unable to accept that humanity is wedded in some way to fear since we are in a universe we don’t understand. As a result he miscalculated about the wishes of others, what they would and wouldn’t do: most notably, the whole world was unlikely to want to live under his regime.

Other considerations, which he didn’t understand, were in play. This is because his worldview was essentially Voltairean, and I don’t think it occurred to him in the insane rush of his life that the Voltairean view of life might be limited, or wrong, or both. In this he was very much a man of his time, and not, as he wished to be some eternal Caesar who straddles all the ages. The Voltairean view has nowhere to go, since it refuses mystery.

Nevertheless, some of the best scenes in Scott’s movie bring the 19th century battlefield to life: we witness the sheer flurry and insanity of battle, as well as Napoleon’s ability to exist within a complex situation and calmly read it.

When asked who was the best general in history, the Duke of Wellington (conveyed here in a hammy performance

by Rupert Everett) replied: “In this age, in past ages, in any age, Napoleon.”

Ruskin’s quote about the connection between military ability and literary output is open to the objection that we wouldn’t necessarily call Napoleon’s reign a brilliant time for literature.

In fact, his biggest contribution to literature was again probably War and Peace, in which book he appears and which is impossible to imagine having been written without his extraordinary life. It took a writer of the magnitude of Tolstoy to approach Bonaparte.

But Ruskin’s idea cannot nonetheless be easily dismissed. It might be that soldiery and the skill that surrounds it are what’s missing from our society – that we have become too inward, bloated and self-regarding in a time of peace to produce work that is sufficiently vibrant and true to feel great.

In time, the example of Napoleon faded and the only clear historical example of le gloire since his life, is contained in the life of his admirer Sir Winston Churchill, who also depended on a war – albeit one he didn’t start – as the crucible in which to forge his own reputation. The peace of 1945 has broadly lasted until the present day, and it remains the case that wherever we see war we despise it, as in Ukraine or in the Holy Land.

This makes it all the harder to say that something was lost with the demise of Napoleon. But if something was indeed lost then that something was ambition.

Most of us today, as we leave university, seek to join society and joining is an inherently unglorious thing to do. To coopt oneself can be to dream small.

In his book Bullshit Jobs, the late philosopher David Graeber issued a brilliant takedown of the contemporary economy, which can sometimes seem to specialise in creating roles whose mundanity might be deemed the polar opposite of the glorious. There is something almost preternaturally un-Napoleonic after all about a middle manager.

This is not to say that the Napoleonic

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spirit is entirely absent in our world. In many ways, his example can most be found in today’s tech giants, especially in the companies of Elon Musk. Musk himself, when we see him at SpaceX or Tesla, in his constant questioning, his invention, and his desire to push frontiers, bears a remarkable resemblance to Napoleon in a battlefield situation.

Napoleon in fact never could have united Europe, especially without being able to control the seas. George III and his brilliant Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger were not about to agree to it, and he was probably temperamentally ill-suited to the creation of anything lasting. Napoleon’s bout of conquests came in the wake of the French revolution and since we to some extent inhabit the aftermath of those times, we can hardly access now the note of dismay across Europe at the idea of the old medieval order being so absolutely swept away.

Very occasionally, we glimpse what we were fighting for in opposing Napoleon.

Napoleon’s greatest contemporaries have all had a subtle but real influence – in fact their comparative gentleness is liable to make us underestimate them.

Arguably, the greatest of them was William Pitt the Younger, whose quiet conservatism and remarkable financial competence have had their own legacy.

Pitt, like most of his contemporaries, believed in the monarchy, and although the monarchy has been watered down

Illustration by Andrew Prescott

Did Napoleon’s defeat lead to the banality of the modern world? No, we created that – and in fact, there’s a good case that Napoleon’s ultimate influence is now more to be found in the realm of the imagination than in political reality.

Napoleon left remarkably little political legacy. Gore Vidal mischievously jokes in his novel Burr that Thomas Jefferson had a far bigger impact on history than Napoleon: the American revolution actually lasted and is still admired today, though it is also in peril.

to a considerable extent, we saw in the coronation of Charles III last year how it has continued – and how its symbolism is even in many respects unchanged. Conservatism has had its victories too; we live in the time of Charles III as much as in the era of Rishi Sunak.

created by Alexander Hamilton has

Similarly, we can see how the Founding Fathers of the United States, also Napoleon’s contemporaries, remain in the collective consciousness in a more meaningful way. Napoleon is a kind of a blaze, but he never, as Jefferson did, defined a philosophy. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness may in some way be a limited goal for a government to espouse – but it has been remarkably durable. Similarly, the financial system

law, he had remarkable impact. His love

endured – and there is now a musical to show for it.

This isn’t to say that Napoleon is

without concrete political achievements: in education with the creation of the

University of France, and of course in of books is an appealing thing about

him, as is his occasional generosity when in power to those who had helped him

on the way up. But Napoleon remains a

riddle – since he opens up with startling immediacy onto the riddle of ourselves.

If we ask what we really think of him, I suspect Enlai was right. It’s too soon to say.

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INDIA

THE INDIAN DIASPORA AN EXTRACT FROM DINESH DHAMIJA'S BOOK 'THE INDIAN CENTURY' cultures that they now make up large percentages of the population. In Fiji it’s 34 per cent, in Trinidad and Tobago 35 per cent and in Guyana 39 per cent.

There followed waves of emigration in the 20th century as wars displaced populations and work opportunities opened up.

Dinesh Dhamija

A

t a time when India is

breaking records for the

growth of its population

and economy – here’s another. There are more than 18 million people

of Indian origin living outside the

country, a far higher number than any

other nation. Russia and Mexico have the next highest diasporas, with 11

million each, followed by China with 10 million. But so what if millions of

Indians live elsewhere? Doesn’t it mean that conditions were so poor that they had to leave?

That may have been the cause of much migration in the past: millions of Indians settled outside the country in the 19th and early 20th century as labourers, many of them under ‘indentured’ contracts where they had to work for a set period, often five years, with little freedom. Countries like Fiji, Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago accepted hundreds of thousands of such workers, replacing slave populations following abolition in 1831. They typically worked on sugar plantations and assimilated so deeply into their host 82

The UK, Canada and the United States welcomed millions of Indians after World War II, particularly after the US relaxed its immigration laws in 1965.

At first many of these migrants worked in blue-collar jobs. In the UK the archetypical profession was bus driver or textile mill worker. But as the population grew and matured, second and thirdgeneration Indians focused on education and professional training. Today the average Indian in America, Canada or the UK is better educated, better paid and wealthier than the average white person. In the mid-20th century, mass immigration from the Indian states of Gujarat and Punjab into Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania – which were under British rule – created a situation where Indians ran successful businesses, with sometimes favourable treatment by the British.

After these countries gained independence, conditions for the Indian population worsened, to the point in Uganda where the dictator Idi Amin expelled thousands of families. Some returned to The Indian Century 19 India, but many moved on to the UK, Canada and the United States, where they continued running prosperous businesses, often in retail. In country after country, this same pattern applied: Indians are hard-working, commercially astute, determined to educate themselves and their children, and civic-minded to the point that many become political and community leaders.

There are now Indian-heritage politicians leading the UK, Scotland, Ireland and Portugal; others have led Fiji, Guyana, Malaysia, Mauritius, Suriname and Trinidad and Tobago. If you look at a list of the world’s largest and wealthiest companies, an incredible number of them in recent years have had CEOs of Indian heritage. Google, Microsoft, Pepsi, Mastercard, Diageo, Nokia, Adobe… the list goes on. It’s a 21st century phenomenon, and it’s symptomatic of a global rise in the status of Indian technocrats. In the United States, Indians’ average household income is $150,000 a year, compared with $65,000 overall and $58,000 among Chinese-born households.

According to the latest figures, there are 25 chief executives of Indian descent in the S&P 500, compared with 11 in 2013. Members of the diaspora are more often college educated, they work hard and contribute to society. Almost 80 per cent of the Indian-born population living in the US has an undergraduate degree, compared with 50 per cent of Chinese-born people and 30 per cent of the total population.

The same high ratios apply to those educated at India’s foremost colleges. Of the 100 best-performing students at the elite Indian engineering schools in the 2010s, 62 per cent migrated overseas, mostly to America. In 2022, 73 per cent of the H1-B American visas granted to skilled workers in ‘speciality occupations’ – for example computer scientists – were granted to Indian-born migrants. In the UK, 74 per cent of Indians own their own home, compared with 68 per cent of white British people and 59 per cent of the overall Asian population.

In education, 62 per cent of Indian High School students get grade 5 and above in English and Maths, compared with

INDIA

Shutterstock

42 per cent of white British pupils, and 96 percent of Indian students continue on to further education, compared with 85 percent of white British students.

Many Indian companies have also done incredibly well recently, so it’s not just those who have left the country: Reliance Industries’ market cap is close to a trillion dollars, with Tata Consultancy Services and HDFC Bank well over $500 The Indian Century 20 billion each. But despite this, for most Indians, the pot of gold remains very small in India, compared with what they can aim for elsewhere.

For decades now, Indians have spotted that the rewards were largest in the United States and headed over there.

For me, the east and west coasts of US are fine, but I’d never want to live there, especially in the mid-West, where levels of education are often low and there’s a lack of culture. Indians are by nature and by circumstances very entrepreneurial people. They have to be, since there’s virtually no welfare safety net. They have to get off their haunches and do

something if they want to make any money. And it’s a very young population – 60 per cent of the country is under 35.

If you look back 300 years, India was the wealthiest country in the world, earning 23 per cent of global GDP. Once the East India Company gained control of the country in the early 18th century, the wholesale rape of the country began and continued for 250 years until independence in 1947, when India represented 3 per cent of global GDP. The ‘master-servant’ relationship with Britain didn’t work out very well for India. What I like is being part of the Indian community in England. It’s something that I’ve become closer to in recent years. When I was a student and starting out in business, I kept the Indian community at arm’s length: I wanted to make it on my own terms, building an international enterprise rather than selling to a specific group.

After selling ebookers.com, I spent more time working with TiE, short for The Indus Entrepreneurs, which

supports and promotes (mainly) Asian entrepreneurs all around the world, including London. I was president of TiE London from 2014 to 2017 and built it up from just a handful of members to 83 by the time I stepped down. We got some great speakers to come along, like Manish Madhvani, senior partner at GP Bullhound, the leading European technology bank which spotted eight unicorns [companies with a valuation above $1 billion] and invested early. We had Luke Johnson, who built Pizza Express from 12 restaurants to 250, and the Indian yogi Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev, who has spoken at the World Economic Forum in Davos and has 25 million followers.

After that, I became a trustee of TiE’s global board in Silicon Valley for a couple of years, and then became vice chair of the organisation worldwide, putting in a few words here and there.

While Indian men focus on business in the United States, a number of Indian heritage women have risen up the political ranks and achieved prominence. www.finito.org.uk

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On the flying Republican side, Donald Trump Concord above the clouds. appointed Nikki Haley Ambassador to the United Nations in 2016 and she remains in line for the Republican nomination for president at the time of writing, while for the Democrats, Kamala Harris became a Californian senator in 2017 and then Joe Biden’s Vice President in 2022. Indians have succeeded across business and politics in the UK too: the Hindujas and the Mittals are among the wealthiest families in the country; Rishi Sunak is Prime Minister, Suella Braverman is Home Secretary, Lisa Nandy is Shadow Foreign Secretary and Sadiq Khan, whose family is from Pakistan, is Mayor of London.

Such a spread of wealth and power was unthinkable a generation ago. In 2023 there are in total 19 people of Indian heritage in the House of Commons, six in the Australian parliament and five in the US Congress. Ajay Banga, from Pune in western India, was appointed head of the World Bank in May 2023 and the deans of three of the top five business schools in the US are of Indian descent.

My roles in business and politics put me at the centre of both of these worlds, something I’m very grateful to have experienced. Although my achievements weren’t the direct result of support from fellow Indian businesspeople or politicians, the fact that Indians are now very widely accepted in positions of great trust and responsibility means that my path was made slightly easier, just as I hope to have made the path easier for future generations of Indians as they make their way through life.

Certainly, the fact that so many Indians are educated in the West, as I was, helps us to progress. In the United States, only 22 per cent of Indian immigrants admit that they struggle with the English language, compared with 57 per cent of Chinese immigrants.

This disparity is symptomatic of a wider chasm between the way Indians and 84

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Chinese have assimilated in the west.

As The Economist outlined in a report on India’s diaspora: “Understanding how and why Indians have triumphed abroad, whereas Chinese have tended to sow suspicion, illuminates geopolitical faultlines.” The report noted that, as America appears set on a new cold war with China, they are framing China as an enemy. The Covid-19 pandemic, which began in China, is a contributory factor, along with the spy-balloon saga in early 2023 and reports of a Chinese eavesdropping station in Cuba. A recent survey found that 84 per cent of Americans have an unfavourable view of China, compared with just 27 per cent for India.

By contrast, the warmth of the USIndian relationship is quite dramatic.

The flow of high skilled immigrants, the connections through digital technology, the defence cooperation all lead to new conclusions, far from the detachment of the 20th century. “This is a relationship which has support in the [Indian] street,” says Subrahmanayam Jaishankar, India’s foreign minister. “And that’s not

always the case with the United States, nowadays. It’s a popular relationship.

And I think there’s an enormous tailwind that is propelling us forward.”

If we try to distil what it is in the Indian character or historic gene pool that makes the race such successful migrants, there are a few theories.

Indian politician Shashi Tharoor, who himself was born in London and has lived in the United States, Singapore and Switzerland, believes that familiarity with the English language is one factor, a legacy of two centuries of British rule in India. But he argues that tough economic and social conditions in their home country play a more important role. “Emigrants have grown up without taking affluence for granted,” he wrote, in a paper published shortly after Rishi Sunak’s appointment as British Prime Minister in 2022, “overcoming adversities such as limited resources, heavy-handed government regulation, and bureaucratic inertia. Most have either experienced deprivation or witnessed enough of it to try and escape it. They have ‘fire in the belly’ that many

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be deeply beneficial. Recent thinking on diasporas around the world backs this up. A United Nations study from 2020 decided that “Diasporas play an important role in the development of their countries of origin by promoting foreign investment, trade, innovation, access to technology The Indian Century 24 and financial inclusion.” They bring back their experience and knowledge, create jobs and help to fund their old countries’ economic growth. This is absolutely true of India. Its diaspora of 18 million, of whom I am one, are generally very well integrated into our host countries, yet we retain a strong attachment to Mother India. In my case, I return several times a year to visit my mother, now well into her 90s, as well as my brother and other relatives and friends. Even if I didn’t have relatives, I’d be drawn to spend time in the land of my ancestors, which has played such a huge role in my life and upbringing

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in the West, raised in freer, more affluent environments, may have lost.” He adds that India’s huge diversity of cultures, languages and religions means that they are accustomed to adapting to new environments and easily able to work in multicultural, multinational businesses.

Democracy means that Indian-born workers possess initiative, critical thinking and free expression alongside respect for hierarchy. It means that Indians are seen as “Original and creative, but ‘safe’, rather than threatening or revolutionary – a combination that facilitates their acceptance in their new societies and their ascent within firms.” Tharoor picks up on Rishi Sunak’s elevation to British Prime Minister as the most profoundly important event in recent Indian diaspora history. It sparked celebrations across India, he notes, as a country that dominated India for so many years as a

colonial power puts a “brown-skinned devout Hindu” in charge. “Sunak seems to embody the aspirations and values of many Indians who celebrate him as a poster boy for the ‘New India’,” writes Tharoor, with his emphasis on education and learning (Sunak studied at Oxford University in the UK and at Stanford in the States), close-knit families (he married Akshata Murty, daughter of Infosys billionaire Narayana Murthy and the couple have two daughters) and a strong work ethic (he was a waiter in an Indian restaurant as a young man). There is a delicious irony in Rishi Sunak, as a leader of Indian heritage, negotiating with Scottish National Party Humza Yousaf, of Pakistani heritage, over the potential partition of Britain, 76 years after the British partition of India.

Contrary to India’s mass emigration being a negative for the country, as you might imagine, it has proved to

Political leaders back home in India are well aware of the potential for the country’s diaspora to work in their favour. In April 2023, Union Minister Jitendra Singh came to London to address a conference of IT businesspeople, aiming to promote Anglo-Indian collaboration. “The world is looking up to the Indian diaspora with great hope and expectation and it is high time that they also rise to the occasion and contribute to the well-being of humankind,” he said, adding they should “channelise their resources to support the important initiatives taken up by the government back home in India.”

Having this 18 million-strong army of supporters spread across the globe, from 4.5 million in the United States, 4.1 million in Saudi Arabia, 3.4 million in the UAE, down to just one person in the Federated States of Micronesia, will give India an enormous financial and political advantage over its superpower rivals in the decades to come. www.finito.org.uk

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THE DESIGN CENTRE, CHELSEA HARBOUR IN EIGHT OBJECTS

BY CLAIRE GERMAN, CEO OF DESIGN CENTRE, CHELSEA HARBOUR

D

esign Centre, Chelsea Harbour is a world-class example of placemaking, its famous glass domes synonymous with design and decoration. Its mix of luxury flagships, independent companies and some 600 international brands can be found, all at one address. The global design destination in London helps people discover great design and supports those doing it best: from big name brands to emerging makers, as well as highlights the skills they use to make pieces of lasting value. Now the next chapter of the story is being written and more global names are moving in. Change and growth are a vital part of what the Design Centre stands for – fostering talent, and continually building on its thriving community, are part of its heart and soul.

Claire German

London Design Week 2024, hosted by the Design Centre, is a must on the design calendar. As a voice of authority within the industry, professional interior designers and design enthusiasts look to the event to get one step ahead and discover what the key design directions will be for the season ahead.

All design studios work in isolation and secrecy, however, following weeks of investigation, the Design Centre’s creative director Arabella McNie and wider team have identified the most directional patterns, palettes, textures, shapes and design narratives for spring/ summer 2024.

Choosing one product for each look, read on to discover more. To see these trends in person, visit London Design Week 2024 between Monday 11 – Friday 15 March where all design enthusiasts are welcome.

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1. THE PALETTE OF THE SEASON ‘MUGHAL PAINTING’ RUG, WENDY MORRISON For spring /summer 2024 , design houses

are showcasing decorative and dream-like fabrics and wallcoverings that will appeal

to anyone who likes the sweetest palettes.

From pistachio and sage to lemon,

lavender and lilac, these colours set the tone for whimsical season ahead.

Epitomising this pastel moment is the

new ‘Mughal Painting’ rug from Wendy Morrison. The British brand is known for its maximalist rugs, textiles and wallcoverings. Its growing popularity means it will be expanding to showcase more designs in a larger Design Centre showroom in the coming months.

The wool and silk hand-knotted heritage rug celebrates Mughal art and the tradition and joy of visual storytelling.

Inspired by Mughal miniature paintings of the 16th century, Wendy Morrison was drawn to the bright, pure colours, attention to detail, links to the natural

DESIGN

Pheasant Feather Lamp

Perfectly epitomising this direction is the ‘Pheasant’ lamp from the new collaboration between Bunny Williams and Paolo Moschino which sees two design titans come together to celebrate their unparalleled expertise in design sophistication.

The Mughal Painting by Wendy Morrison

world and storytelling at the heart of this ancient art.

One of the most significant colours in the rug – lilac – is the shade associated with the crown chakra, the energy centre with a connection to spirituality and enlightenment. The hue is a dominant colour across spring/summer 2024 collections, inspiring the Design Centre team to feature it prominently in the event branding for London Design Week 2024 itself.

2. BLOOMSBURY DESIGN DIRECTION A key design direction to highlight

for S/24 is ‘Bloomsbury’ which pays homage to the Bloomsbury creatives who lived and worked during the early 20th century. The group believed in creativity, innovation and beauty, but it is their sense of fun and freedom that Design Centre showrooms are celebrating for spring/ summer 2024. Much like the interior in the Charleston farmhouse or the inspiration behind Kit Kemp’s Charlotte Street hotel, this design direction is layered, eclectic and thoroughly charming. It is all about filling your home with beautiful things, seeing furniture as art and painting every available surface!

Known for balancing refined beauty, welcoming liveable appeal and attention to detail in their interiors, the evolving collection from Paolo Moschino and Bunny Williams includes furniture, artwork and accessories geared towards outdoor living and crafted from materials like wicker, teak, metal and stone.

See Bunny Williams and Paolo Moschino in conversation with Hatta Byng, the editor of House & Garden, on the main stage as part of renowned Conversations in Design talks programme at London Design Week 2024.

3. ENCHANTED ISLE DESIGN DIRECTION

‘LODHI’ FABRIC, BYZANCE COLLECTION AT OSBORNE & LITTLE It is no surprise that a connection with nature has been a recurring theme in www.finito.org.uk

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while wallcoverings and fabrics feature an arbitrary arrangement of abstract shapes in a predominantly neutral and earthy palette, with joyous accents in warmer shades such as hot yellows, rust, alongside sage, petrol and pale blue.

exciting new showroom openings at the Design Centre in 2024. With three stacks of rugs showcasing core collections, it will also be home to a new project studio dedicated to creating bespoke designs.

The Rug Company’s ‘Ori Lake’ rug (pictured) embodies this design direction with its abstract shapes. Crafted entirely in silk, it features fan-like forms that showcase traditional hand-carving techniques.

Founded in 1997 with the belief that luxury is determined through respect for craftsmanship, community and innovative design, The Rug Company is one of several

5. PALM BEACH DESIGN DIRECTION

Lodhi fabric, Byzance collection at Osborne + Little

interior design, however, this season, there is a charming twist. The ‘Enchanted Isle’ design direction takes you on a journey to imaginary places.

The Byzance collection from Osborne & Little (the ‘Lodhi’ fabric from the collection is pictured above) feels as if it is setting the scene for a fairytale. Printed and embroidered fabrics draw inspiration from the decorative cultural arts. Each fabric tells a distinctive story, from ornate patterns reminiscent of Indian artistry to playful motifs capturing the essence of nature.

A giant in the decorating world, Osborne & Little opened its Design Centre showroom doors just a few months ago bringing their classic with a contemporary interpretation design philosophy to the Design Centre for the first time.

4. ABSTRACTION DESIGN DIRECTION ‘ORI LAKE’ BY THE RUG COMPANY

The ‘Abstraction’ design direction is all about taking the essence of something and really distilling it down to abstract forms. In many instances, with a painterly brushstroke effect.

A natural extension to the interest in Bauhaus designs in recent seasons, this design direction celebrates mixing ovals, circles and abstract lines. Much of the furniture gives a nod to angular edges, 92

Ori Lake, The Rug Company

‘GREEK CANE’ RUG, MUSTARD, BY SALVESEN GRAHAM X JENNIFER MANNERS AT JENNIFER MANNERS DESIGNS

DESIGN

Renowned US designer Mark D Sikes describes the Palm Beach aesthetic as ‘classic but with a bit of drama’ and looking ahead to spring / summer 2024 and the offering from the Design Centre showrooms, there is an abundance of this look. Perhaps best summed up as ‘old world charm with a tropical feel’, think sumptuous interiors with an airy twist the homes of Estée Lauder and Gloria Guinness spring to mind.

Playful and fresh, expect lattice, fretwork, rattan and a sense of indoor/outdoor that suits the glamorous lifestyle of Palm Beach socialites as they entertain on their lawns. This is perfectly embodied in the upcoming rug collection from interior design duo, Salvesen Graham, and Jennifer Manners who has a showroom on the first floor.

They say 'great minds think alike', and the Design Centre certainly has seen a flurry of collaborations in recent years – from fashion houses to interior design stalwarts working alongside established names to create new products. There are plenty of star-powered licensed collections making a splash, but there is also evidence of exciting micro collaborations and one-offs too. London Design Week 2024 will showcase an array of Design Centre showrooms partnering with international tastemakers

Greek Cane, Jennifer Manners x Salvesen Graham

including Arteriors with Laura Kirar, GP & J Baker with Kit Kemp and Zoffany with Giles Deacon.

6. TESSELATE DESIGN DIRECTION ‘STEP’ FABRIC, KIRKBY DESIGN AT ROMO This design direction is titled ‘Tessellate’ and, as the name suggests, it is all about repeated patterns. There is a particular abundance of diamond and triangle shapes. From micro mosaics to the grander decoration found in villas and cathedrals, this design direction plays with scale and takes inspiration from all forms of tile-inspired motifs.

Step, Kirby Design, Romo Showroom

Pictured is the ‘Step’ fabric by Kirkby Design at Romo which very much plays into geometric, repeating patterns of the direction. Situated in one of the Design Centre’s largest showrooms, Romo is a British family-run business in its fifth generation. The company has grown to www.finito.org.uk

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become an international market leader in designer fabrics, wallcoverings and accessories and now has six in-house brands – Romo, Black Edition, Kirkby Design, Mark Alexander, Villa Nova and Zinc Textile.

7. SPICE ROUTE DESIGN DIRECTION ‘CAMEL’ TABLE LAMP, PORTA ROMANA The Design Centre has named the next design direction ‘Spice Route’ as it creates the sense of journeying from east to west to some exciting vistas and far-off lands.

The palette for this direction ranges from caramel and nutmeg to olive shades.

‘Spice Route’ is for the well-travelled individual who has a home that is full of nomadic weaves and treasures they have collected along the way. The ‘Camel’ table lamp’ by Porta Romana is the perfect example of a London Design Week launch that is brimming with character.

Porta Romana recently celebrated its 35th anniversary. With a flagship showroom at the Design Centre, craftmanship is at the heart of the company working with exceptional artists and makers from across the British Isles.

8. HOT TROPICS ‘MAR’ CENTREPIECE’ ARTERIORS X LAURA KIRAR AT ARTERIORS Much like a crackling fire, the ‘Hot Tropics’ design direction is bursting with sizzling design and a warm palette. Elaborate and intricate, many of the designs within this direction are reminiscent of basket weaving techniques. This is perfectly embodied in the Laura Kirar x Arteriors collection which features a ‘Mar’ chandelier, floor lamp, tray and centrepiece (pictured).

An internationally renowned interior and product designer as well as a sculptor, Kirar joined forces with Arteriors to create 94

Enchanted Isle

a collection that reflects late summers on the mediterranean coast. The collection will be launched at London Design

Week 2024 where Kirar will be present to host a special event at Arteriors’ recently expanded and revamped showroom in Design Centre East.

Free to register, secure your place at London

Design Week 2024 and see the new collections in-person alongside a packed calendar of workshops, masterclasses and talks:

https://www.dcch.co.uk/london-designweek/register/

Arteriors x Laura Kirar, Mar Centerpiece

LONDON

Makers of English Handcrafted Luxury Leather Goods Albany 10-12 Burlington Gardens London, W1S 3EY +44 (0)20 7493 9072 mail.order@pickett.co.uk www.pickett.co.uk www.finito.org.uk

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STORIES FROM THE FRONT LINE

FINITO BURSARY UPDATE:

NICK HENNIGAN

CHRISTOPHER JACKSON MEETS A YOUNG PRIVATE BANKER, AND FINITO BURSARY MENTEE, AND EXPLAINS WHY HE’S DESTINED FOR GREAT THINGS

I

have sometimes observed

that precocity creates its own

challenges: being brilliant young

creates expectation and pressure. In

fact, it turns out that ability without the right temperament places even

greater pressure on ability itself. It’s rare for the two to go hand-in-hand

because the one can sometimes clash with the other. To be very talented is

usually to be told you’re talented: not everyone keeps a level head.

Nick Hennigan, 23, who recently took part in the Finito bursary scheme, has had by any measure a difficult few years.

His father took his own life at the start of the pandemic, leading to unthinkable grief and shock. But to talk to him you wouldn’t know it – and in fact he only mentions it towards the end of our conversation. “As much as it is a completely negative impact on anyone’s life – within my family it was a huge blow to us all – I now see myself as my dad’s legacy. I want to go out there and do him proud and do the rest of my family proud,” he will say.

“I WANT TO GO OUR THERE AND DO MY FAMILY PROUD” What was his early life like? “I was born in Aberdeen and I’m very proud of my Scottish heritage. I went to a state comprehensive and after finishing secondary school, I went to join EY on a business apprenticeship, which allows young school age children to join a Big Four firm, and train up as a chartered accountant.”

The experience was formative but in 96

ways Hennigan might not have been expecting: it showed him vividly what he didn’t want to do. “I was in the audit division, and I didn’t find it personally or professionally stimulating,” he says simply.

But from there, Hennigan went on to complete his university degree in international business management at the Aberdeen Business School, before heading off to study in Canada’s Mount Royal University . “That was a fantastic experience,” he tells me. “All of this has helped shape me into looking towards a career within a company that has international presence. I suppose it gave me a deep appreciation for multinational business. ” Hennigan has always had a broad range of interests, and was strong at school across the curriculum. “I always did quite well in maths subjects but then I also did biology and chemistry, as well as English and geography. I like to look at things intellectually and enjoy studying and working towards qualifications. I would say I am numerate but I am also good with my language and the written word.”

He says this without any air of boasting – he is stating the facts. Has this range of aptitudes made it harder for him to choose a career path? “That was the observation some of the Finito mentors would actually make once I joined the scheme,” he recalls. “They said because I excelled in different areas of business and subject areas, it was difficult to rule things out.”

But Hennigan was already standing out from the crowd and an example of this is his excellent thesis ‘Leading into the post-Covid 19 era’. This astonishingly

Nick Hennigan

mature piece of work has a foreword

by ITV’s Chief Executive Officer Carolyn McCall DBE, who writes in the paper: “Nick’s research is considered and thought-provoking and very much chimes with what I have long believed, that personal values and purpose play a pivotal role in the type of leader an individual will become.”

This wasn’t the only figure that Hennigan interviewed for the paper: “I would love to one day – hopefully – become a CEO – so that’s why I chose that topic,” Hennigan recalls. “I also interviewed EasyJet’s Johan Lundgren; as well as Simon Roberts of Sainsbury’s, and Paul MacDonald, the CEO of Avon Protection, and Mark Darkworth of Schroders Personal Wealth.”

I cannot imagine the result was ever in doubt, but Hennigan secured a first for his efforts. It is worth noting that Hennigan achieved all this despite scepticism about the ambition of his approach: “My supervisor said to me it wouldn’t be possible when I proposed it and that the CEOs wouldn’t give me the time of day. This spurred me on to go and prove her wrong: that’s part of my DNA – to overcome challenges.”

STORIES FROM THE FRONT LINE

So how did Hennigan come into contact with Finito? “It happened early in 2023,” he recalls. “I have recently joined the shadow board of UMBRA International Group. Through my work there, I got to know the CEO Kate Bright well and she very kindly introduced me to Ronel Lehmann, the CEO of Finito Education.”

Hennigan’s main point of contact under the Bursary scheme was Claire Messer.

“We got on really well, and she was great at preparing me for interviews – as was Merrill Powell who coached me in presentation, and made sure I put each point across succinctly and impactfully. Amanda Brown did my LinkedIn training and Sam Pearce did my headshots. But through all this, I had Ronel who was really my main mentor.”

So what was Lehmann’s advice? “I had breakfast with him at a time when I had just had a few rejections and close calls, where I had got down to the final stages.

Ronel told me I needed to think of three areas. So we narrowed it down to PR and recruitment – but we also spoke about private banking.”

Hennigan was initially sceptical about this third possibility: “Given my experience with EY, I was wary about going back into finance, but private banking is very different to audit, even though it’s also underpinned by numbers. It also chimed as I have always said I want to be external-facing and deal with clients.”

Once this strategy was deemed a major possibility, the stars began to align.

Hennigan recalls: “Luckily enough, Kate Bright knows the Head of Marketing at a private bank in London and Ronel knew one of the MDs. I was able to meet with both of them on the same day back-to-back. The meetings weren’t for a particular role but I was able to explain my situation and set out my stall. They followed up afterwards by saying there was a potential role with us in a different team as an assistant banker. Again, I had no experience in banking and I made

them very aware of that but they didn’t seem to think that was a problem: I got the job.”

Those are the four words we most enjoy hearing at Finito. When I speak to Hennigan, he has only been in position for two and a half weeks, but his early impressions prove to be overwhelmingly positive: “I am enjoying the set-up that I’ve got,” he tells me. “It’s very fastpaced and I have got a lot to learn. It’s going to be a steep but positive learning curve. The good thing is I am fully supported by not only the banker that I am assisting but also the team and the other assistants that we have in the bank within the team. I am in the front office and I think it’s an amazing first job. I am not going to take it for granted. I am going to work hard.”

“IT’S THROUGH ADVERSITY THAT YOU END UP GOING ON AND DOING GREAT THINGS.” Of course, it is a tragedy that Hennigan’s father isn’t around to see what a remarkable young man his son is – and is still becoming. His will always be one of those stories which, despite his remarkable nature, will contain the wish that events had been otherwise.

Never once in our conversation do I see any trace of the self-pity others might feel and which would be perfectly understandable.

Hennigan says: “I suppose it’s formed my outlook on life. It’s through adversity that you end up going on and doing great things. Finito opens doors and it encourages you – but it is down to the candidates themselves to do well. If the candidate doesn’t want to engage in the process then they are not going to get out much. I think there is maybe a misconception with Finito: people say they will just place you into a job. No, they will support you to get yourself into that job.”

That’s something that mentors observe on a daily basis – it’s not often, however, that a mentee speaks so eloquently about the experience of the mentor. What I think Hennigan has therefore – and I expect it to catapult him in time to the front ranks of British and maybe global business – is imaginative empathy. It is an ability to place himself in the shoes of others, and yet to retain his own remarkable steel and determination at the same time. It is the mark of someone already functioning at an extremely high level. It will do no harm that he is charming, and equally skilled at numerical and linguistic tasks.

Usually, in an article like this, we like to thank the Bursary supporters who have helped the candidate in question.

In this case, the donor has asked to remain anonymous, but has been happy to offer us these thoughts: “All it took was one brief telephone call from Ronel and I felt compelled to help. He was so emphatic in his enthusiasm for a newly presented applicant in whom he saw enormous potential but who had no possibility of funding. Ronel gave me the basic details and story, but was careful not to reveal too much. I did not wish for anything in return, simply the expectation of hearing some good news in due course. And indeed there has been. Nick will no doubt have a bright future and successful career, made possible by Finito’s mentoring and guidance. Maybe one serendipitous telephone call really has changed a young life.”

This generosity is an example to us all, and Hennigan expresses to me the extent of his gratitude: “This person changed my life and I hope one day I get to meet and thank this person.” The donor should also know that to have supported Hennigan is to have backed an obvious winner. I would say: “Watch this space” – but my suspicion is you won’t have to look too hard to see the impact Hennigan will go on to make. www.finito.org.uk

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STORIES FROM THE FRONT LINE

FINITO CANDIDATE PHIL VERNEY LOOKS AHEAD

U

s humans are interesting

creatures aren’t we? On the

face of it, one could argue that

the changing of a year is merely a second changing on a clock. Yet, for many

humans, it signals the opportunity for

reflection and change, especially when thinking about our careers.

On New Year’s Eve, I was lucky enough to have a guest pass to photograph London’s ever-impressive firework’s display. Standing opposite this worldrenowned landmark, listening to revellers discussing their plans for 2024 and seeing technicians rehearse the countdown, I found myself reflecting on my own achievements, lessons learned, and plans for the future.

Photo by Phil Verney

Embarking upon a career change can feel a daunting one. Technological leaps, such as AI and a post-Covid work dynamic, have resulted in a rapidly changing job landscape. Through Finito’s career change mentoring programme, I have gained vital knowledge, skills and insights. For me, their attention to detail, structure and step-by-step approach has been incredibly helpful in preparing me for the next steps. I have also noticed improvements in my personal life too which was an unexpected, but most welcome, benefit.

Now, as the festive lights, trees and echoes of Auld Lang Syne disappear and 2024 gets into full swing, my own excitement is building once again to find my next role.

Phil Verney

“I FOUND FINITO’S STEP BY STEP APPROACH INCREDIBLY BENEFICIAL.” I’ve been really fortunate to have had a number of incredible experiences throughout my career, notably during my time at Google, so I know the importance of a job not feeling like a chore. I very much subscribe to what Mark Twain said; “Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” I remember distinctly when working on an exciting role within the Google Earth team that I couldn’t really tell much difference between a Wednesday morning and a Saturday afternoon, because of how much I was enjoying the work. This notion is what I always strive for because it’s a win-win scenario for myself and a company’s progression.

I became aware of Finito through a previous role and had met with Ronel on a couple of occasions. I was really taken by the work of Finito and so

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STORIES FROM THE FRONT LINE

Photo by Phil Verney

when I decided that it was time to undertake the next steps in my career, I knew there was only one place to start.

As mentioned, I found Finito’s stepby-step approach incredibly beneficial.

Time keeps us all marching to a quick step, and having access to the team of experts that Ronel put together really supported me in organising all the pieces of the jigsaw required to begin a career change.

Our starter for 10 begins with me meeting Finito mentor, Claire Coe, to put together my credentials and design them as a powerful but succinct summary of my skills and experience.

Everybody to whom I have shown this CV has been impressed and commented how much it stands out.

The next stage was to meet up with Finito’s resident photographer, Sam Pearce, to have some headshots taken.

I had never had headshots done before, so I was a little apprehensive about this. I needn’t have been worried though as Sam did a wonderful job of putting me at ease.

“A STRONG LINKEDIN PROFILE IS AN INTEGRAL PART FOR ANYONE LOOKING TO NETWORK AND SEEK OPPORTUNITIES.” A strong LinkedIn profile is an integral part for anyone looking to network and seek opportunities, and for this part, I met a few times with Amanda Brown, whose insights and attention to detail really helped me to spruce up my LinkedIn profile, and most importantly, make it useful for others!

Working with Finito’s presentation and body language expert, Merrill Powell, was an absolutely fascinating journey for me. Whilst I had never found interviews particularly intimidating, I knew there were areas on which I wanted to improve. Merrill’s ability to offer constructive criticism was incredibly helpful and I feel as though I learned so much about myself as a whole.

Establishing a really strong connection with a primary mentor is a key aspect of Finito’s approach, which I have found incredibly useful. I meet regularly with Robin Rose to explore strategy, contacts and how best to position myself. The wealth of insights that Robin has been able to impart really has been priceless.

I met briefly with Angelina Giovani and Mike Donoghue too as Ronel felt that their insights would be beneficial.

This multi-pronged approach has also been an excellent reminder for my own self of how much I have to offer an employer. I’ve always found that combining a career path with a long held passion is key for me. I would love to find a role where there’s a strong visual component, such as the space industry, photography or lighting/art shows. My plan would be to find a role that had a business development “let’s get stuck in, there’s much to do” theme to it, where I can position myself as someone to really help an organisation achieve and further its goals, and become a leader within that company. www.finito.org.uk

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STORIES FROM THE FRONT LINE

I FOUND SIX WAYS TO MAKE MONEY IN MY TEENS

BY RAPHAEL HOLT

F

rom the age of 15, I have been focused on finding work. As a student in North London, I wanted financial freedom and to gain experiences that could benefit me in the future. From turning my passions into businesses, to finding work that builds up experience for my future, the joy these experiences have brought me and the lessons they have taught me have been a pivotal part of my upbringing.

1. CUSTOM FIDGET SPINNERS Even before I hit my teens, I started an online enterprise. At the age of 12, fidget spinners (a small toy based around three arms that spin from a central ball bearing) became a huge sensation among young people. I too became entirely consumed, so consumed I began to design and sell my own under the name Custom Fidget Spinners. I had spotted a gap in the market for innovative design and colourways. I would bulk buy 30 or so plain spinners, strip them of their ball bearing and dip the outer body into a bath of water and spray paint, a process called hydro-dipping that often resulted in a mesmerising mix of patterns and colours.

I sold to school friends, family and even 100

shipped abroad. This also solidified my position as the cool kid for a brief two months.

2. SELLING SECOND HAND CLOTHES Covid struck the world, many worked

from home, but hospitality-working teens were left with uncertain finances. I had to

find a way. Depop, Vinted and Ebay are all well-known to the vast majority of young

people. However, what I found is that the

price of an item can be seriously increased by the photography and presentation of

your online store. Combine clean aesthetic with car-boot sale prices and your profit

margins will lengthen. I would rise early

to haggle over the finest worms with the Nag’s Head sellers. Return home with a

STORIES FROM THE FRONT LINE

bumper crop to upload to the shop. This is easy and accessible for teens of all ages.

The real trick is to brand scout in the hopes that a seller is slightly removed from the fashion world and is willing to let go of some Carhartt jeans for a quid.

3. LANDSCAPE GARDENING Possibly my favourite of them all – working outside, earning well... what’s not to like?

Again, this all started from a passion as opposed to financial desperation, and for me that is key to enjoyment and success in any work. I developed an interest in landscaping and (mostly) pond-scaping.

I went into my back garden, dug a hole, lined it with plastic and I had made my first pond at 14. To my horror, two weeks after I had perfected it (with a running waterfall) one of my mates careered into it during his first experience in the world of beer, instantly disabling my precious water feature. Nonetheless, I cracked on with my landscaping and went on to help many of my neighbours, eventually working under a local landscaper. This is an excellent opportunity if you’re partial to a bit of manual labour in exchange for £150 a day.

I distinctly remember fuelling my summer travels after a three-day landscaping stint at Corum's Fields Nursery.

4. WORKING AS A PHOTOGRAPHER’S ASSISTANT FOR NEXT Year 11 work experience day. I found myself in Acton on what I assumed was

a visitors pass to a fashion shoot. I was taken aback by the grandeur of the whole operation, and slightly stumped by some of the dopey, Chelsea boot-wearing staff.

However, I tried to seem like I knew what I was on about, cracked a couple of droll jokes with the Chealsea booters – presumably about hackney and IPA. One week later they called me up and asked me to work on a two-day shoot as a photographer's assistant. I said yes without hesitation. After the two days I finally dared to ask if I was being paid at all. They said, ‘yes of course, £200 a day is a minimum for this work.’

5. BAR AND WAITING SHIFTS FOR A CATERING AGENCY Why would you want to work in a pub and be stuck on a weekend-destroying rota, when you can join a staffing agency and pick your own hours and venue?

You do not need substantial experience to join these agencies, so have a look in

your local area if you live in or around London – try Host, High Society, Rocket or Splendid. These all regularly staff large events. The pay starts at £13ph and can go up to around £15. Not only will you never have to sacrifice your social life, but you have the chance of working a rage of cool events. I did the BAFTAS as well as the Kings Coronation Concert last year, during which I had the opportunity to subtly serve Austin Butler with my best Elvis accent.

6. TUTORING ENGLISH AS PART OF THE NATIONAL TUTORING PROGRAMME Set up by the government due to the poor post-COVID literacy rates, the National Tutoring Programme sees tutors being employed across UK secondary schools, and sees my bank balance into the friendly figures. Jokes aside, this is an incredibly important role and extremely valuable experience. Not only do the students make me laugh (by asking me how many children I have) but they make me happy when I see them doing well or growing in confidence. So, if you are looking for a job, have a specialist subject you would like to teach, and extraordinarily long and slow burning fuse – this is the one for you.

IN CONCLUSION...

Aside from the individual job titles and intricacies of working within each industry, what I really believe is that every teenager should get involved with work.

In most circumstances teens will be living at home with no rent to pay and some spare time. This is the greatest opportunity, perhaps of your lifetime, to make money, and every penny you earn is yours to spend. No tax, no subscriptions, no debt.

You can work one shift a week during Sixth Form and before you know it you are booking a holiday.

To see examples of Raphael Holt’s work, Visit freelancejournalist.com Or Raphaelholtphotos on instagram www.finito.org.uk

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CULTURE The lighter side of employability 70 | AMY WINEHOUSE AT 40: Lessons from a singer’s career

Amy Winehouse (Wikipedia.org) Martin Amis (Alamy.com)

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Wiki

pe d ia. or g

52 GREAT GUY Filmmaker Ritchie on the outdoors Un s p las

h.c o

m

62 LETTER FROM ISRAEL Christopher Jackson on Israel

Wiki

pe d ia. or g

76 TRIAL BY WOKENESS Graham Linehan speaks out

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PAUL JOYCE: MY BRUSH WITH STILL LIFE

Paul Joyce

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rt has always been distinguished by separate genres within its compass, but it was as late as 1669 that these were actually categorised into distinct genres. An art- theoretician called Andre Felibien ranked them in this order of importance: 1) History Painting; (2) Portraiture; (3) Genre painting; (4) Landscapes; (5) Still Lives.

Of course, the final, casually dismissed category of Still Lives, has formed part of art’s history from the earliest depictions made by man on the walls of caves, all the way up to the doodlings of David Hockney on 104

his iPad. In the era before Christ, and indeed right up to the Middle Ages, the painting of objects such as fruit, as well as food of other kinds including dead animals, was not just an attempt to arrest the ravages of time. For example, in Egyptian art the placing of depictions of objects in a tomb was considered a practical aid in the journey of the soul towards heaven. It was thought the images would transform into actual nourishment to help the deceased on their travels.

Again, in Roman art, large murals in the villas of the rich showing the bounty of nature, along with the

inhabitants of those very productive fields, namely birds and small animals, demonstrated the superiority of an upper elite class and their ability to feast of the best. Pliny the Elder wrote of one artist who came to be called “a painter of vulgar objects” as he depicted shops, animals and food. But he made it clear that the results were extremely popular and far outsold work of artists in other genres.

The fact that Still Life painting is relatively easy to distinguish and therefore categorise meant that for centuries it was associated with academic principals of depiction,

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with styles and subject matter being handed down from generation to generation. An academy, after all, is fundamentally an organ of the Establishment, usually conservative and anti-liberal. The Adademie Francaise up until the nineteenth century still had strict guidelines distinguishing subject matter in art, with historical, biblical or religious pictures occupying the highest category and with Still Lives (again) relegated to the outer darkness.

However, the arrival of the Impressionists blew all previous assumptions out of the water. They were more concerned with the emotional impact of colour on the viewer and their choice of subject matter was as wide as any previously written hierarchy. The greatest exponent of this rapid emergence of new approaches to ways of seeing the world was undoubtably Van Gogh.

His series of Sunflower paintings took the humble Still Life to heights of greatness he himself, dead by the age of 37, could never have imagined.

All of us struggling in his footsteps owe him an immeasurable debt of gratitude.

“WELL, MINE IS TO ATTEMPT TO AMAZE BRIGHTON WITH AN AVOCADO.” So, my current attempts to come to terms with this lowest form of art is part inspired by Vincent, of course, but also very much by the “painter’s painter” Paul Cezanne as well. Cezanne famously stated that he wanted “to astonish Paris with an apple”. Well, mine is to attempt to amaze Brighton with an avocado. The images reproduced here are very much the start of a journey to investigate one of the most influential, successful and popular genres in the history of Art. Nature can provide us with so much, particularly in terms of structures,

Paul Joyce, Avocado Study

Paul Joyce, Fruit Study

Paul Joyce, Banana Study www.finito.org.uk

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Paul Joyce, Fruit Study

forms and especially colours. It is no accident that most of the best artist’s pigments come directly from actual elements culled from within our natural environment.

I have come to understand even more than before, as I embark on this voyage of discovery, that the marked differences between the application of paint both by brush and palette knife produce totally different results. Using a conventional cotton canvas, a brush will drag across the dimpled cotton texture, frequently leaving details of the individual bristles.

Whereas a knife will glide over the surface, allowing colours to mix together, sometimes in an almost magical way.

This together with an attempt to use that sensuality that paint has in its very essence, itself attempts to mirror how tactile and toothsome still lives can be.

If I can literally make some viewer’s mouths water, I will feel that I have at least in part succeeded. But this of course I shall never know, unless some concerned reader tells me so.

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Paul Joyce, Fruit Study

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Paul Joyce, Cauliflower

Paul Joyce, Strawberries

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PLENTY OF SURPRISES GEORGE ACHEBE IS IMPRESSED WITH THE ART OF THOM YORKE AND STANLEY DONWOOD AT TIN MAN ART

Let Us Raise Our Glasses To What We Dont Deserve

T

he Internet may have wrecked the opportunity for tactile nostalgia. When

Radiohead’s OK Computer came

out in 1997, I experienced it on CD

There was nothing quite like the

google – or alternatively, I can look at

beautiful – to prepare you for the

and Thom Yorke, which have been

album cover – allusive, weirdly album itself.

and part of that experience was to be

Had the Internet not been invented

itself in the shape of the artwork.

able to find the cover. Now I have to

confronted with the physical object

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I’d probably have kept my CDs and be

the new pictures of Stanley Donwood showing at a two part exhibition The Crow Flies at Tin Man Art.

These works have been done in

collaboration and are remarkably

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Thom Yorke (Wikipedia.org)

good. The first picture which catches my eye is ‘Let Us Raise our Glasses To What We Don't Deserve’ – which sounds perhaps unsurprisingly like a Radiohead song title – shows what might be a sun dominating the canvas, with tendrils coming out of it. Beneath it, a green world told in oil paint seems to be mapped in some way: patterns recur as if they have been pinned down as having special significance. The effect of the oil is to create the memory of its application: it feels as though we can see its movement into place on the canvas.

“That was what I found incredibly exciting. It just stays active for so long,” says Yorke in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition. He draws a lesson about the similarity between oil painting and music: “I became so conscious of the fact that the two processes are almost exactly the same.”

With art that you’re actually going to mind about, the first thing you’re sensing is that a lot of thought has gone into it – that there’s some been some heavy-lifting behind the scenes which you didn’t see. Donwood tells me: “Our aim is to make work that functions, that does what it is supposed to do, what we intend it to do. Which is, in essence, to convey meaning. Although what that meaning actually is must remain unclear. It’s

Unchecked

necessarily quite vague, otherwise we would just write slogans on billboards and leave it at that.”

I mention that there is a playfulness to ‘Let us Raise our Glasses…’ and Donwood agrees: “One of the influences in these works was the way that Mediaeval paintings have no sense of perspective - if something is not important, it’s small, if it’s vital and interesting, it’s huge. This idea of representation is kind of funny to us, because we’re used to perspective and photography, so to us it look playful, but it’s just another way of looking at things. All painting is play to an extent; it’s something all children can do, and some children just don’t stop doing it.”

But of course, another sign that a particular kind of art might matter is when it provokes a range of responses – and you know you’re in the presence of exciting art when it’s making you smile at the same time as it’s making you think. The large sun

in ‘Let us Raise our Glasses’ cannot help but evoke climate change – the psychological nature of a hot day has changed these past years to become a cause for foreboding. Would Donwood and Yorke shy away from having these works incorporated into that conversation? “Not for a moment. It's hard just to get up in the morning without thinking about our rapidly changing climate, and that’s putting it incredibly mildly. Everything that we rely on, not just for our amazingly comfortable way of life - clean water, electricity, somewhere to live, safety, freedom from harm - all of these things - everything, absolutely everything is at enormous risk from the breakdown of the patterns of climate that have made civilisation possible. People are still lying about it, still denying that anything is wrong, still making money from trading in petrochemicals - money for what?

What is the money actually for?

We've been having a sad excuse for a ‘conversation’ about our disastrous use www.finito.org.uk

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Membranes

of fossil fuels since at least the 1980s.

There's no way anything can happen without the menacing spectre of annihilation looming over us.”

Yorke is comfortable with these sorts of interpretations: “I'm completely incapable of creating anything without a kind of narrative.” But he adds a post-modernist twist to this, explaining how narrative is rarely linear – and more than that, that the viewer will make their own narratives independent of the artist’s intention. “I see narrative happening 110

in different kinds of ways. You make associations because you need to make associations,” he says.

Their art, then, is about freedom – it strikes me as a moment in the history of art where the initiative is seized back from the photograph and human perception is claimed to open up onto rare pathways of excitement. Yet there’s a paradox here too, because by working in collaboration each has surrendered what we have come to think of as the utter freedom of working individually.

I ask whether there is a competitiveness at work here, but in asking the question realise that I have underestimated the long history of working in bands which Yorke has had, and how genially Donwood has fitted in with that ethic. “Not really,” Donwood replied. “We used to take turns at a canvas until one of us ‘won’ it; which is to say that one of us would have the better way of continuing with whatever was emerging, but for these paintings we’ve worked together on the pictures at the same time, and we realised quite quickly that each

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Two Moons

of us had ingredients which we were more suited to using, techniques of painting or ways of depicting images, but this time these energies were complimenting rather than battling against each other. Neither one of us could have made these pictures alone.”

I say that I particularly like the picture ‘Membranes’ where the main portion of the canvas is taken up with what might be intertwining rivers – or alternatively may be, as the title suggests, a landscape plucked out of the land very small, the universe of

the cell or the subatomic particle. Bob Dylan once said that all his songs ultimately meant: “Good luck, I hope you make it.” In these pictures there is a gallant sense of mysteries being mapped. Donwood tells me about its genesis: “These paintings were made in two sessions; the first from some time in 2020 (I forget exactly when, but it was back in that strange lacuna which was entirely coloured by the coronavirus) until early in 2022, and the second from early 2023 until the summer of the same year,” he recalls.

“The first series became a sort of

collection of navigational aids, a set of maps or diagrams of somewhere that had never existed and never would.

The second were, perhaps accidentally, some kind of depiction of what you might find if you followed those maps.”

So was Membranes from that first series? “It wasn’t planned in any way - none of these paintings were - but it became a sort of deluge, a flooded landscape, a floodscape really, a rushing tumult that was in the process of swallowing everything it could. Or www.finito.org.uk

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Somewhere You'll Be There

at least, that’s one way of looking at it. At the same time it’s a huge sound, an immense outpouring of volume that drowns out everything else that might be heard.”

That reminds us that music is never far from the pair’s collaboration: it is inwoven in the context of their friendship. But Yorke and Donwood differ here too: “Obviously Thom is a musician and perhaps less obviously I am most definitely not. I can’t play music and I don’t begin to understand it, but I can listen to it, and I have 112

always listened to it. It’s always affected how and what I draw and paint.”

or heavy metal, or someone telling

Yorke’s music continues to mature – in 2023, he debuted a new band in collaboration with Johnny Greenwood and Tom Skinner called The Smile. Their debut album is A Light for Attracting Attention.

Do they listen to music while they paint? “The results of making art while listening to classical music are completely different to what they would be if you were listening to jazz,

music that was being made, the music

you a story. While we were making these pictures we listened to the

that would be on the record that

would be inside the sleeve that had

the artwork we were making printed

on it - so we heard a lot of The Smile.

But it wasn’t finished music because

it was being made at the same time as the pictures, so neither were finished but both were on that trajectory. We

also listened to quite a lot of techno.”

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“WE ALSO LISTENED TO QUITE A LOT OF TECHNO.” For Yorke, something of the process of The Smile has found its way into these paintings: “Because it is a three piece, things would happen extremely fast and you didn't really know what it was until you came back. It's very fast. It's very fluid.”

One example of this is the magnificent picture ‘Two Moons’, where I find myself particularly drawn to the sparks which fly out of the moons, suggesting some sort of charge or quickening energy. I ask whether Donwood and Yorke painted these works quickly to capture a rapid creativity or whether the process was more careful than it might appear. Donwood is enthusiastic: “This, like all of these paintings was one that revealed itself as it came into being. I didn’t know what would happen; I didn’t know there would be sparks, but right at the end of making the picture it was very obvious that it needed that explosive energy - but just enough, not too much. Any more would have ruined it. It was, counter-intuitively, a really careful and considered action, but one that had to look fast and energetic.”

I suggest to Donwood and Yorke that the hardest thing about abstract art is to know when it’s finished – when you’re in a process of complete invention, there is no natural moment to finish as there is when you’re seeking to render a literal description of the world. “This is something very difficult - or more precisely, very nearly impossible - to explain,” admits Donwood. “Mostly because I don’t understand it myself; I know for sure when a picture isn’t finished, when it needs more, or when it needs change.

But I frequently don’t know what that ‘more’ or ‘change’ is, so there’s

necessarily a lot of experiment, much trial-and-error. Mostly error. It’s very useful not to work alone because a second opinion is fantastically helpful when you’re a bit lost.”

This then is another instance where collaboration can free you of the bafflement which accompanies creativity.

“I think it’s a question of balance in the picture - I can’t define what that balance is, but it’s probably the something like the difference, when you’re out in the world, perhaps away from everything, between a view that excites your senses and a view that means nothing that doesn’t register as ‘a view’. Sorry, that’s no use at all, is it?”

kind of hauntology of everyday life…

In many pictures that we’ve made there are eyes where perhaps they shouldn’t be. It’s also startling how two simple marks can give such a sense of watchfulness and of a kind of life to almost anything.”

“IT’S ALSO STARTLING HOW TWO SIMPLE MARKS CAN GIVE SUCH A SENSE OF WATCHFULNESS “IT’S VERY USEFUL AND OF A KIND OF LIFE TO ALMOST NOT TO WORK ANYTHING.” ALONE BECAUSE This is marvellous – and speaks to A SECOND a joy in the work which we might not always feel we’re hearing on a OPINION IS Radiohead album. I ask the pair FANTASTICALLY whether they’re happy during and after painting, or should we be HELPFUL WHEN thinking more in terms of struggle and YOU’RE A BIT surmounting obstacle? “I don’t think anyone should be thinking too much LOST.” Actually, it is – and I am struck by how much thought has gone into these pictures. What it seems to me has been achieved here is very exciting: the transmutation of the seen world into something which answers to the complexity of our experience.

Take for instance ‘Somewhere You'll Be There’, where we find a sense of the earth’s upwards force and the volcanos themselves seem to undergo a metamorphosis into figures – ghosts even. The world is never the same after we paint it. Donwood explains: “The notion of inanimate objects or landscape features coming to life is something I am fascinated by.

Sleeping giants below the hills, being watched by trees, your surroundings reassembling themselves while your back is turned - I love these ideas.

The ghostliness of our surroundings, a

in terms of struggle or of surmounting obstacles! Life is hard enough as it is, no? But as to whether I feel happy, that’s kind of a little too far in the other direction. There’s definitely a form of satisfaction when a picture is finished, and there’s certainly a kind of joy when everything is going well.

This is always tempered with the frustration, misery and sometimes acute depression and what feels like depthless melancholy when things are going awry. I guess it’s the same for all work of this type. Swings and roundabouts, hey?”

Yes, but after all that fluctuation in experience, it seems that, if we’re lucky, the artists gets us to a worthwhile endpoint which is the picture itself. I hope these pictures will continue to attract viewers and critical attentions; they certainly deserve to. www.finito.org.uk

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LOSING GAME IRIS SPARK DISCUSSES THE GREAT SINGER AMY WINEHOUSE WHO WOULD HAVE BEEN 40 THIS YEAR (Alamy.com)

T

he case of Amy Winehouse is so tragic that we could be forgiven for not wishing to revisit it: the druggy freneticism of her short unhappy life is something one is as much inclined to turn away from as to look at. But as a major anniversary rolls round – Winehouse would have been 40 this year, and in her prime – there is the widespread realisation that there is still a market for our morbid fascination with her unhappy fate.

In the case of the new coffee-table book Amy: In Her Words. The proceeds are going to Amy’s Place, a rehab centre which obviously does good work, according to two testimonials by addicts who have been treated there. But 114

inevitably, given Winehouse’s short life, it is all a bit of a scraping of the barrel.

The title itself can’t help but be underwhelming. Of course, what we care about is Amy Winehouse’s life in music, and so there is an element of loss and even deflation about this project at the outset. We are reduced to her words now, when it is her voice we would love to hear.

Even so, it would be very churlish to deny that Winehouse could have a wonderful way with language. We have to remember that what we now consider the completed achievement constitutes what in another life would have been just a very promising start. Had Winehouse lived she would probably have been on her

ninth album by now, and we’d know more about what she was capable of. Instead, due to her early death, we sometimes find ourselves allotting maturity to what she did, because it’s all we’ll ever have.

She was so young – and yet this book shows that a certain wisdom and selfawareness was lodged in her all along, as if in compensation for the likelihood of her early death. “Good words to describe me: loud, bold, melodramatic,” runs one entry.

But there was always something remarkable about Winehouse, which means we’ll always want to learn more.

Winehouse was physically very slight, even before she became bulimic. But the voice itself could do anything: there was always something preternatural about its

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sheer extent and force coming out of such a vulnerable frame.

It might be that the great voices seem complete very young. Bob Dylan was a great singer by the age of 22 partly because he sounded like he had access to the wisdom of an octogenarian. The same might be said of Billie Holiday – like Winehouse, an alcoholic who died young – who sounds in a song like ‘Strange Fruit’ as though she has come into the world with an innate knowledge of how things are which would somehow not have changed had she lived to be 100.

The lyrics don’t matter all that much in Winehouse for the simple reason that the voice is so good that it obliterates all before it. However, she did have a verve with language which shows that she had been paying attention to the linguistic possibilities showcased in Britpop, especially in bands like Blur and Pulp.

The content of the lyrics can be dark and depressing since they reflect a life which we wish had been otherwise, but songs like ‘Rehab’, ‘You Know I’m No Good’ and ‘Back to Black’ all have spirited lyrics which mean we can’t dismiss out of hand the notion of a collection of her words.

Nevertheless, there is a caveat. In those three songs I have mentioned, there are two depressing factors. The first is her self-loathing, leading to an apparently logical insistence on the continuation of drug abuse. It is impossible to listen to ‘Rehab’ without thinking the singer has got the matter precisely wrong and that rehab is really the best place for her.

It’s a magnificent track, but in the line about her preferring to listen to Ray Charles than to go to rehab, one wants to be pedantic and remind her that she could just as easily listen to Ray Charles in rehab: if she’d done that she’d still be around today. “Beyoncé and pathos are strangers. Amy Winehouse and pathos are flatmates, and you should see the kitchen,” as the great Clive James put it.

The second unfortunate aspect of the words is the description of her relationship with Blake Fielder-Civil who is by any

Amy Winehouse (Wikipedia.org)

standards one of the least appealing plus ones in the history of popular music.

Phenomenally vain, there remains the sense that Fielder-Civil took Winehouse for granted, using her as a sort of bank for drug money and not minding about the effect their shared addictions had on her.

In the documentary Amy, he sometimes seems to be acting the pantomime villain, until one realises that he really is this way – assuming the complicity of the viewer out of a pure ignorance and arrogance which stood out even in that pointlessly hedonistic decade, the so-called Noughties.

This is what injures these songs from the lyrical perspective and marks out their immaturity: the subject of the song seems so plainly overvalued that we wonder about the validity of Winehouse’s overall perception of life. The scene in Jamaica

and Spain in ‘You Know I’m No Good’ for example can in no way have been a ‘sweet reunion’, since it unfortunately was a reunion with Blake. One can sense through the misguided protestations of the lyric that his interest in her carpet burn is transactional and that the singer has fatally misjudged everything about the situation.

Perhaps we simply know too much about her life. We know nothing of Shakespeare’s life, and it may be that the Dark Lady treated the playwright as badly as Fielder-Civil treated Winehouse.

But sometimes it helps not to know, and there must be few Winehouse fans who delight in the notion of Fielder-Civil. We wish she were singing about someone else, but she’s always singing about him.

Even so, this book reminds us that she could be very funny. There is a brief journal entry berating herself for her www.finito.org.uk

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eating habits: “No fucking carbs, bitch.”

There is also an amusing story in this book of Winehouse in court. When accused wrongly of assaulting a dancer, she showed a leg to the judge and said: “Could someone with feet this small be intimidating?” But every page of sweet drawings, or little notes to self, all of which tapers off by the release of her first album Frank in 2003, is full of an understandable yearning on the part of her bereaved parents who have compiled the book that she were still here.

“WHY DOES ADDICTION LEAD TO A LOSS OF INNOCENCE, WHICH IS REALLY A LOSS OF SELF?” This is a book then about the girlhood of someone who dramatically lost all sense of innocence very quickly due to excessive drug and alcohol intake. Why does addiction lead to a loss of innocence, which is really a loss of self? It’s because we cease to dream and wonder which is what children do; instead we’re caught in a loop, unable to look ahead and no longer open to enchantment about what life may yet contain.

The fact that we wish it could all have been so different for Amy Winehouse can make us forget that sometimes, in precious instances, it was. That was when she was sober in the vocal booth – and then she showed herself to be one of the great singers of any era.

In certain instances, we talk of God-given talent and sometimes what we are noticing is a huge juxtaposition between a person’s daily life and what, all of a sudden, they can be capable of. The classic example of this is Mozart, though his life has been somewhat Hollywoodised by the Peter Schaffer film Amadeus (1984). It is impossible to shake the sense that something wonderful was bestowed on Winehouse – a complete musical soul which in a remarkably short 116

space of time rushed to maturity, en route to its own destruction.

The great example of this is her rendition of ‘Valerie’, her version of the Mark Ronson song which had originally appeared on the 2006 Zutons album Tired of Hanging Around. Here, Winehouse shows us what she might have been capable of had she lived: there would have been extensive proof across a large catalogue that she had few obvious peers in the interpretation of song.

It’s worth remembering that ‘Valerie’ was initially written from the male perspective and so there’s something inherently fun and joyous about Winehouse singing it; the song acquires a certain Sapphic feel just by virtue of her doing it at all. This is important because too many cover versions lack a decent reason for their existence: one needs to know why one isn’t singing a new song, but redoing an old one. Winehouse knew that by taking on this track she would shine a new light on it.

I am especially fond of the song because, written in 2006, it can transport us back in time to an era just before the widespread adoption of the mobile phone and WhatsApp. The Internet had been invented, yes, but we were still communicating over written email. In this song, the singer – Ronson/Winehouse – goes to the US and meets a vivacious ginger-haired girl who he falls for. He returns to the UK – the song is actually based in Liverpool – and looking out over the sea which separates them, thinks back on his time with her and asks her questions about how she is, whether she’s changed the colour of her hair, and whether she’s got over her legal problems. Today, we’d be in contact, sending photographs of ourselves across the Atlantic.

The song is fixed in a moment in time when that wasn’t possible, and the heart would ache imagining what someone who we’d left for good was doing. The way Winehouse sings the word ‘hair’ – ‘did you change the colour of your hair?’

– in the first verse is sublime, doting on the physical detail she loved about the

vanished girl, but playfully too as if the primary emotion of recollecting her is joy in spite of absence. The same trick is then repeated on the word ‘lawyer’ on verse two – its light-heartedness suggests the girl’s troubles are already surmounted, if only because she’s singing this song to her on the other side of the world.

The song makes you think of a certain togetherness which the imagination could create when it sought to overcome distance; by association it makes us think of the secret distances between us in the interconnected world we now have.

It is the good nature of the song and the generosity of Winehouse’s performance which marks ‘Valerie’ out and makes us mourn her all the more. Most songs written by men who have been separated from their women take a jealous turn: the song will usually say something to the effect of: “I bet you’re with some other man and I’m jealous enough to write this song about my predicament.”

Such songs reflect how many people feel, but they’re essentially selfish. ‘Valerie’ isn’t like that at all: it roots for the girl no matter what she’s doing. It wants her wellbeing and her friendship come what may.

It’s an extremely good song, but it took Winehouse to turn into a great record.

In wishing she had lived longer, we can forget that she lived at all – and that we wouldn’t wish for more if she hadn’t hit such heights. ‘Valerie’, most of Back to Black, some of Frank, the incredible skirling vocal in the bridge to her cover of Carol King’s ‘Will You Love me Tomorrow?’ – most of us have outlived Winehouse by many years and never found such glory within ourselves.

In the end, the attempt to resurrect Winehouse in this book, and in the upcoming film Back to Black starring Marisa Abela, bump up against the fact that she resurrects herself every day the world over on iTunes and Spotify. That’s the good news about her: the music is where her life always was, and where it will always be.

MUSIC

(Alamy.com)

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THE BEAUTIFUL CHARITY TWINNING PROJECT CEO HILTON FREUND IS CHANGING THE LIVES OF UK PRISONERS BY GIVING THEM EMPLOYABILITY OPPORTUNITIES IN FOOTBALL, WRITES CHRISTOPHER JACKSON

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he great and the good of football are filing into Downing Street: representatives of the charitable foundations of the likes of Manchester United and Arsenal – clubs famous the world over. At Number 10 they’re eager to disabuse you of your mobile phone the moment you arrive but it isn’t personal. Myles Stacey OBE, the special advisor who takes us up to the meeting room, points to a cubby-hole next to the Cabinet room and says: “Ministers have to put their phone in there before a Cabinet meeting so you’re not being singled out!”

That means the discussion upstairs isn’t recorded, but it’s a remarkable occasion, convened by the likeable Hilton Freund, the Chief Executive of the Twinning Project, an organisation which uses football to help rehabilitate prisoners into jobs.

Around the table on that day, the possibility of football as a force for good in local communities is repeatedly brought home. The central fixture of your local area used to be your church – now it’s the football stadium. I note time and again in the contributions an admirable sense of responsibility towards those who have been unfortunate enough to choose a life of crime.

Afterwards, I ask Freund how is involvement in The Twinning Project began. “I have known [Twinning Project founder] David Dein a long time.

David was the former vice chairman of Arsenal and he was vice chairman of the FA: he currently still advises FIFA and UEFA on a number of initiatives. After David left Arsenal FC he began public speaking and doing motivational talks.

He started primarily in schools and then 118

Twinning CEO, Hilton Freund

moved into the prison environment: he just felt that football could do more to create employability opportunities. He reached out to me in 2018 and asked me get involved.”

knew we had a responsibility to raise funds to help them, so we set up our own charity which was incorporated in mid- 2019: at that point I became the official CEO.”

“IT DOESN’T MEAN THAT THE CHARITABLE ARMS OF THOSE CLUBS HAVE READY ACCESS TO CASH.”

Thinking back to the Downing Street event I recall how many of the clubs’ foundation heads complained about the perception that the whole of football is rolling in money. This may be the case when it comes to the eye-popping player salaries we all read about, but it doesn’t mean that the charitable arms of those clubs have ready access to cash. Was all this factored in at the inception of The Twinning Project or did it come as a surprise? “We were acutely aware of it very early on,” explains Freund. “There is a clear division between the club and the community trust or the foundation: the money that swills around the premier league doesn’t become a pot with which

Dein’s initial approach to Freund came in early 2018; by October 2018 the Twinning Project had launched. So did Freund come on board as a CEO figure? “Not at first. Once we launched, we quickly recognised that some of the non-premier league clubs would need financial support in order to do this. We

SPORT David Dein and Alex Scott

to carry out football-based provisions in the community.”

So how is the Twinning Project funded?

“We are a sports-based intervention into criminal justice. We have received little from the Ministry of Justice. We have secured some funding from local police and crime commissioners and from some local charities. But mainly we’ve sought to raise funds through some big events, such as an audience with David Dein and Arsene Wenger. We are a national charity so what we find is we prefer our events to raise unrestricted money and unrestricted funds: these are what helps cover my overheads which are significant.”

Those overheads tell you about the scale of the organisation which Dein and Freund have built in a brief period of time: “I’ve got staff all over the country who are essentially project managers.

If you can imagine, I’ve got a guy in Manchester and he looks after 20 clubs and 20 prisons. I’ve got a similar guy in London who looks after 20 clubs and 20 prisons. They all need taking care of.”

Does Freund have access to the players’ help ? “Access to the players is actually limited,” Freund says. “Access to the club

ownership is easier than access to the players.” Why is that? “The players are restricted: they have got a number of initiatives that the clubs have themselves which tend to take priority. What we don’t want to do is compromise our relationship with our football club partners because it’s putting pressure on them to make players available. To date, although our relationships are rich and very warm with football, we are very careful about how we activate our player engagement.”

“ON COMPLETION OF THE COURSE, PRISONERS CAN ACHIEVE LEVEL 1 CERTIFICATION”.

So what exactly does the Twinning Project do? “The idea of football in prison is not new. It’s been happening for years that football clubs go into prisons, but it’s been spasmodic: what we wanted to do is to offer a sustained consistent delivery. What we were seeing was football club representatives going into prison, having a kick around and then leaving and not going back

for six months or a year. That’s why we approached The Football Association to create the FA Level 1 coaching qualification which can be delivered in the prison environment.”

So where can that journey take prisoners? “On completion of the course, prisoners can achieve Level 1 certification which puts them on the ladder to further football-based education should they choose to go that route. It’s the first step to education, but the important thing is they’re beginning to upskill and engage with a football club at the same time: they are actually on a big interview as well. So when they are released from prison, the football clubs have experience of working with those prisoners, making them that much more employable by those organisations.”

What’s fascinating is the variety of roles which prisoners end up doing. Freund lists the possibilities and you can see how passionate he is about the potential range of positive outcomes: “I’ve got guys working as coaches – but I’ve also got guys working as stewards on match day, baristas in the coffee bar, as barmen in the club, or in maintenance roles.

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Freund’s programme and decide that football isn’t for them, but then go into some other form of business? Freund answers in the affirmative. “I have got a great example of a young man at Lincoln City who wasn’t into football but he was in prison when Lincoln City visited: he is now studying accountancy through the Lincoln City Foundation.

We recognise that not everybody loves playing football but everybody understands the power of football brands: we mustn’t lose sight of the fact that this is not just a football-based provision.”

without a job. It should be no surprise that 65 per cent reoffend in the first year.

But if they have got some work and the stability which comes from engagement with a big brand like Everton, Manchester City, Arsenal, Plymouth Argyle, are less likely to reoffend.”

“70 PER CENT OF PRISONERS LEAVE PRISON WITHOUT A JOB”.

For Freund then, employability is the key metric in driving down reoffending.

“Those in criminal justice will tell you there is a couple of things that prevent 120

people from reoffending. The first one is their age. For people in their late teens and early twenties, when you are in a gang, going to prison is deemed a badge of honour. The second thing that prevents people going back is a stable relationship: if you have a wife and children, or supportive parents, you’re that much less inclined to want to go back in. Sadly, a lot of people are victims of inter-generational criminal activity.

If your mother or father has been to prison there is a very good chance you are going to prison too. But lack of a job upon release is another – and that’s what we’re committed to tackling.”

Do any of the prisoners go through

This makes me wonder whether Freund would consider broadening the Twinning Project to include other sports? “My sweet spot is football,” he replies. “Nigel Wray, the owner of Saracens Rugby Club, sits on my board of trustees – we have entertained the idea of engaging with rugby.” The trouble, he says, is that football is so much more powerful: “Nothing really rivals the level of passion you get with football. When you consider the lack of money with the football club foundations which sit alongside very rich football clubs, the case becomes even harder with other sports. Take cricket as an example. Even at Lords they struggle to make money: to work with other sports codes would increase our funding exposure. It’s a real challenge.”

The Twinning Project is now impressively expanding its football offering into the US, where soccer is the fastest growing sport. This prompts some interesting reflections on the difference between UK and American prisons.

“Let me tell you something: you don’t want to go to prison in the US. Prison for me should be rehabilitative. In the UK, it is: your punishment is the loss of your liberty, and you are being prepared on day one for the day you get out. In the UK prison system, you can work, you can study, you can do sports-based activities, and you can go to the gym.”

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Ian Wright and Arsene Wenger

“YOU DON’T WANT TO GO TO PRISON IN THE US”.

And in America? “You go to prison in the US and there are 80-90 men in a dormitory three bunks high. There is no privacy. Locking prisoners in a cell for 23 hours a day is not going to rehabilitate anybody – it’s going to make them angry. We have to work with these individuals to create an environment of nurturing, learning, skilling, and improving these people for when they come out. I was on Rikers Island in New York. You don’t want to go to prison there: it’s another level.”

And what’s the reception been like in

the US? “We work with an organisation called the International Prisons & Corrections Association,” explains Freund. “We have made a presentation to them and, off the back of that, we were given the opportunity to speak to the heads of prisons commissioners and deputy commissioners across the US. There are 50 states, and we have pitched to over 20, and 14 loved the idea. But you’ve got a federal system: what’s going on in California is very different to what’s going on in New York or Texas.

US prison reform is a political hot potato around which elections are won and lost.”

And where next? Has Freund got a 5-10 year plan? “We are currently in advanced conversations with South Africa; we are in conversation with Roma

football club in Italy. We have been approached by Australia. The only thing holding us back is money: I can’t be in a million places at once but what we have managed to do is come up with a provision in the UK of which we can be very proud. There are 92 football clubs in the football league; currently 73 are engaged with the Twinning Project.”

That’s an incredible achievement and could only have been achieved by passion: “As you can tell, I am hugely passionate about this. I eat, live and breathe it.” He certainly does – and his story is a marker about what can be achieved with that passion – and a window also into the way in which our collective passion for football can be leveraged for good in our communities. www.finito.org.uk

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MATTHEW PERRY 1969-2023

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here is a scene in Matthew Perry’s memoir Friends, Lovers and The Big, Terrible Thing which it is impossible to read without sadness over the past few days.

In it, Perry recalls the period before the first episode of Friends aired. It was a heady time. The internal data from the television studio showed with certainty that the show would be the gigantic hit which it became. Some sensible producer observed that as a result all six of the main cast – Jennifer Aniston, Courtney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt Le Blanc, David Schwimmer and Perry himself – would soon become very famous indeed. It was therefore suggested that the cast go out for a night out on the tiles – a last stab at the anonymity which they were about to surrender for good.

What makes the scene interesting is Perry’s evident nostalgia for that time before his name became so known.

It was President Obama who during an appearance on Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee opined that he hadn’t considered the value of anonymity before becoming famous. Seinfeld replies: “It wasn’t that great.” Perry would agree with Obama that something almost beyond price is lost at the point of transitioning away from obscurity into its moneyed opposite.

As the reader, we have mixed feelings reading about this strange night out before gigantic celebrity is bestowed. On the one hand, if Perry’s fame was what it took for us to be able to know Chandler Bing over the 10 astonishingly successful seasons of Friends, perhaps the pain which came to him as a celebrity was in some way a necessary sacrifice at the altar of light entertainment.

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Mathhew Perry, Alamy

On the other hand, seeing his evident unhappiness down the years, and his essential inability to function in the spotlight, one wishes him out of it altogether. Perry as a failed actor would surely have been a happier man; one even wonders whether someone else could have played Chandler who might actually have enjoyed the experience and not felt the pressure of it all so acutely.

But really there never was any need for such dichotomy: there should never have been any either/or about Matthew Perry’s predicament. Was Perry always going to suffer mental health issues or

were they a biproduct of fame? It seems likely that the latter had a huge role to play.

It would be better if we were able to inhabit a society where television is just one of a thousand other professions and not elevated to such a crazy extent by the paraphernalia of stardom. We are a society of the famous and the notfamous-at-all: it quickens the pulse of most people to see a celebrity in the flesh. Fame messes with the head, as Martin Amis, also famous and also one of those to die in 2023, frankly put it in his own memoir Experience.

TRIBUTE

Similarly, Perry’s life reminds us that the discussion around mental health is still very much in its infancy, though it was accelerated hugely during the pandemic when all of us felt alarmed at the unnaturalness of the situation.

The options aren’t always sufficient even if you have the money to fight the problem: Perry spent $9 million dollars fighting his afflictions and one sometimes wonders whether even highend provision in this area is enough to really move the dial if someone has gone far enough down the path of selfdestruction.

The cast of Friends, Alamy

“PERRY SPENT $9 MILLION DOLLARS FIGHTING HIS AFFLICTIONS.” Yet despite all this, we have Perry’s work and this reminds us that there was for a while something marvellous about Friends especially in those first few seasons. We have also forgotten at this point – especially since the others went on to have more successful and stable careers than Perry – how much the show really revolved around Chandler/Perry.

This was because while Ross, played by David Schwimmer, had the funniest slapstick moments, Chandler always had the best lines. It was Seinfeld again who identified that the final stage of comedy is to have people talking like you because it’s so much fun. Perry alone of the Friends cast reached that level: “Could I be wearing any more clothes.”

“COULD I BE WEARING ANY MORE CLOTHES.” That intonation on the word ‘be’ can summon back for me the whole of the 1990s. Chandler’s wit was a way of staving off the eternal anxiety of youth – the sort of anxiety which is meant to have been dispatched by the age Perry was when he was playing the role. This

is why the show is so popular among teenagers; at that age we identify with Chandler.

Sadly in Chandler Perry had left an autobiography of sorts of a perennially nervous man who must joke in order to function. Nietzsche wrote that a joke is an epitaph on the death of a feeling, but these were feelings which could not die with Perry. A sense of inadequacy, perhaps arising out of his parents’ divorce, pursued him and was always going to be more successful in that pursuit once Perry was made vulnerable by fame.

In one famous scene, Chandler says: “I’m not great at advice. Can I interest you in a sarcastic comment?” He always could interest us in that, but it was his

fate to end up dispensing advice: don’t be like me.

“I’M NOT GREAT AT ADVICE. CAN I INTEREST YOU IN A SARCASTIC COMMENT?” Yet in our world today we all want to emulate the famous if only to have

infinite money and opportunity. His death is a moment to mourn the

loss of a kind man and magnificent comic talent, but also to consider

a fundamental recalibration in our relationship with fame.

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INTERVIEW

FATHER TED CREATOR GRAHAM LINEHAN:

“THE BUTTON HAS BEEN RESET AND I’M BACK TO BEING INCREDIBLY FRIGHTENED”

GEORGE ACHEBE INTERVIEWS THE SITCOM WRITER AND COMEDIAN ABOUT LIFE ON THE FRONTLINES OF THE CULTURE WARS

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raham Linehan is tall enough to be unmissable as he walks into Berners Tavern, a place of almost unbearable trendiness in the London Editions hotel, just off Oxford Street.

Having chosen the restaurant, I realise that I have caused him to walk in and around Soho – not necessarily a place likely to be friendly to him given that it’s a wokeness heartland and Linehan, in another lifetime the popular creator of sitcoms such as Father Ted, Black Books and Motherland, has carved out a place in our culture as a critic of wokeness in general and the transgender movement in particular. I have brought him to the lion’s den – but at least he gets to eat a meal by Jason Atherton.

Graham Lineham, Wikipedia.org

To put it mildly, Linehan is under fire.

Really, he has found himself – partly by volition but with a large measure of accident – at the front lines of the socalled culture wars. “It’s been tough,” he says, looking like he needs a hug.

How did he get here? For Linehan, it all began when JK Rowling published a blog on her website which seemed to most people relatively anodyne, but which in our current predicament as a polarised society, caused a pantomimic storm on what was then Twitter. It cannot be gone into in serious depth here, except to say that Rowling explained her position as a feminist accused of being a TERF (trans exclusionary radical feminist) at some length and with measured thought. It is probably false to say that she had chosen 124

to oppose the transgender movement; really she had reserved her right to question it.

steps that have, in some cases, altered their bodies irrevocably, and taken away their fertility.”

Among her five reasons for doing so was this: “I’m concerned about the huge explosion in young women wishing to transition and also about the increasing numbers who seem to be detransitioning (returning to their original sex), because they regret taking

Linehan – who has a daughter – sought to organise support, and circulated a letter which was signed by the likes of Sir Tom Stoppard, Lionel Shriver, and Ian McEwan. “Stoppard was great. He signed the JK Rowling letter. He has never really weighed in on the issue; he

INTERVIEW

of publication, with Linehan under fire again. “I just feel that the button has been reset and I am back to being incredibly frightened and shell-shocked by the whole thing.”

has never really spoken about the effect of removing single sex spaces.” So why has Stoppard, as an example, not been singled out? “The better informed you are about the transgender debate the more trouble you get into,” he says with a sigh. “He’s probably not that well-known among the young and he is quite cerebral. But who wouldn’t sign that letter?”

I can see that Linehan is vulnerable; his body language is passive and dejected.

He has reason to be. In a sense, he has no regrets, but he also, he says, radically underestimated what the reaction would be to a letter he viewed, and still views, as non-controversial. You can see straightaway that, unlike other anti-wokeness campaigners – Dave Chappelle, Ricky Gervais, Rowling herself – Linehan doesn’t quite have the personality for a protracted fight.

He is also, of course, much less wealthy than they are, and without the assured income streams that devolve from the Harry Potter franchise, The Office, or Chapelle’s Netflix specials.

“I AM REALLY WORRIED ABOUT MY SECURITY.” “I am really worried about my security,” says Linehan. “I am very vulnerable financially and desperately hoping the book does well enough to dig me out of a hole.”

The book he’s referring to is Tough Crowd: How I Made and Lost a Career in Comedy, recently published by Eye Books. It’s an excellent read, beautifully written and extremely affecting. It is a sort of diptych, its first half recalling with charming nostalgia his early career as a rock journalist and then as a writer of beloved sitcoms. It is a book which proclaims the importance of comedy as an art form, and will be of value to anyone considering a career as a TV writer. At one point he imagines himself being hounded by trans activists like ‘an evil Beatles’ and when I quote the line back at him approvingly, he smiles.

I can see that he’s pleased. The original intention of his career was to make people laugh, and it’s this really which still animates him. This detour into the culture wars must feel very gravid to someone who cares so much about the mechanics of laughter.

Tough Crowd is a funny book – but especially, it’s wise about being funny, which is a different thing. So how has he found publishing the book?

“I’ve found it unbelievably hard. I am finding it really upsetting. Writing it was very much a release; it was great to get all the stuff down on paper. As I was going along, I weaned myself off the anti-anxiety medication I was on because getting it all down on paper was helping.” However this positive period has ceded to the experience

The trouble Linehan faces is that while 95 per cent of the country may agree with him, or at least have some sympathy with his views, it’s the five per cent who don’t with whom he needs to work in order to secure an income.

He is especially upset that his Father Ted musical, which he regarded as his pension, has been put on hold by Hat Trick Productions, for reasons which seem to be spiteful.

Linehan explains: “That five per cent is united as casting me as either obsessive or abusive or whatever it happens to be and that five per cent is also hiding my books in bookshops. I have heard multiple reports of that since we snuck onto The Sunday Times Top 10.”

This is shocking – and obviously upsetting to him. I decide it might be my role to cheer him up and improve his mood, and seek to turn the conversation round to comedy. So how does the writing process work for Linehan? “I just sit down and start typing – but rewriting is my favourite part in sitcoms and in books too. It’s such a pleasure just going over and over something. I heard someone say a writer is a sculptor who makes his own clay – the clay being the first draft. That’s a very good way of looking at it. I used to think of first drafts as if they worked great but if they didn’t that was fine too because it was like an arrow pointing the way, and once I knew what way we should go, everything became much simpler.”

When he is thinking about these things, you can see what good company he is – how much he has to impart, and that his career has been earned as a result of an enormous amount of hard work. The trouble is the culture wars keep exerting a sort of gravitational pull on him, and we’re continually drawn back to the enormity of what’s happening. At one www.finito.org.uk

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a man and be a feminist. I think that’s a brilliant rule: it means that we can help, and offer observations – but in the end we’re men.”

point, Linehan mentions Christopher Hitchens, and I ask him what he would have thought about the wokeness movement. “It wouldn’t have got as far – I don’t think it would have got as far.”

This seems to place a lot of power at Hitchens’ elbow – but it’s plausible.

his much more limited opportunities by becoming a DJ by having access to kids charity work all that sort of stuff – but now you don’t need to be a high achiever like Savile to get access to kids. You can just change your pronouns and wander in behind someone in the toilet.”

“I REMEMBER IN THE EARLY DAYS I WAS SUCH AN EVANGELIST FOR TWITTER: EVERYTHING’S GOING TO BE GREAT,”

I ask him if the gender critical movement could be more united. How often for instance does he talk with JK Rowling? I am surprised by the response: “She has never said a single word to me.” How does he feel about that? “I didn’t do it to get thanks from her. I did it because I think it is right.

She is on her own track and is doing great work and I am on mine.”

The Internet has a particular fascination for Linehan, who tweeted happily under the @Glinner handle – but Twitter eventually came for him and he had his account banned in the pre-Musk era. “I remember in the early days I was such an evangelist for Twitter: everything’s going to be great,” he recalls. “We could connect and we could all share information and ideas. I now realise what an incredible organising tool it is for frightening people.. People have this idea that Jimmy Savile was some sort of creature that could be killed: he’s not.

He is still around. He is everywhere.

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Shouldn’t his side of the argument join up more? Linehan sighs: “The whole thing is so fractious. One of the things I remind people sometimes is that I am not a feminist. I am someone who is fighting for my career, fighting for my daughter’s rights. I am not really a feminist. I’m not part of that world and the thing about feminism is it’s incredibly territorial and there are so many wars going on at any one time.

The gender critical movement has done really well in staying as united as it has despite all these tensions but it’s tough sometimes. I try and stay out of it. I say I’m not part of these discussions.

One of the nice things about radical feminism is they say that you cannot be

Linehan detours into one particular example: “At the moment I am defending this lesbian who has been running speed dating nights and recently decided to admit no more trans-identified men: the trans activists went for her. Now when she puts on these nights, they infiltrate them. Now, she is under fire from our own side and being accused of fraud. It’s incredible this vitriol she is being subjected to and it’s based on nothing but on pure rumour. What happens every so often is this feeding frenzy that goes around aimed at people who are brave enough to stick their head above the parapet.”

When I speak to a prominent gender critical activist, who asks to go by the pseudonym Jessica Freeman, I find her broadly supportive. “I really appreciate everything Graham’s done.”

However, she also draws attention to the differences between Rowling and Linehan. “Rowling is very judicious about who she supports and what she says publicly. I hate to say it but I do understand why she’s not said anything to him or about him as some of the things he’s said on Twitter have been rather rash and extreme. But it may simply be that the opportunity has not arisen yet. She does tend to keep her head down for months on end and then makes a surprise appearance with a few carefully worded tweets. We shall see. I do hope Graham is ok though. It must be hard.”

I ask what tweets Freeman would single out as having been problematic.

“He can be overly aggressive, very defensive (understandably) and I know that calling people ‘groomers’ [this is a putdown Linehan has used on Twitter when dealing with his critics] hasn’t gone down well with some women. And there was an incident a while ago where one of his online pals - Arty Morty

INTERVIEW

- was particularly sexist and Graham defended him. I genuinely think it was an inadvertent slip but lots of women at the time were saying: ‘Oh you’re just another man defending sexist men’. He can’t win.”

He does seem alone. I ask him briefly if he’s seen Coogan’s superb performance as Savile – he hasn’t – and I then wonder aloud where the people he’s worked with – Coogan and Armando Iannucci – are when he’s being attacked. “It’s partly my fault,” replies Linehan. “I was never very good at tending relationships. I was never particularly close to these people at the best of times – and now these are the worst of times. I just figured they have got their own lives and didn’t need to hear from me. What I find kind of strange is how these extremely political people like Steve, like Iannucci, are just completely ignoring this issue.”

This is very diplomatic, but Freeman is prepared to be frank. “They’re nowhere to be seen. Did you see the abuse thrown Richard Ayoade’s way for simply endorsing Graham’s book on the front of the cover? Left-wing comedians and writers are too afraid that they will be treated like Graham so they don’t say a word. They’ll say something when it’s not dangerous anymore and everyone agrees that children are being harmed.”

When I put this viewpoint to Linehan, he says: “I just feel like it wouldn’t take too many voices saying ‘Hang on’.

They won’t be able to cancel Armando Iannucci. They won’t be able to cancel Steve Coogan.”

One star Linehan singles out is the trans comedian and actor Eddie Izzard.

“He has been incredibly arrogant and I have never seen such out-of-control ego in a star. I met him a few times, the first time while he was becoming well-known as a cross-dresser and I remember wondering why he kept bringing it up. That is part of his fetish – to put it in your face all the time.”

Given that Linehan is under considerable pressure, how does he cope? “The way I sometimes reassure myself is to remind myself that this is a historical moment. Sometimes ordinary people get chewed up in it – which is what is happening. All my friends have been cancelled, lost their livelihoods, lost their businesses. It’s just history chewing them up.”

with him coming up. She says: ‘You

Still, it probably doesn’t feel great to be chewed up – especially, for his marriage to have fallen apart. I don’t ask him about this – it feels too awful to contemplate and moreover is none of my business. Instead, I ask him about possible revenue streams to tide him over? The income from his sitcoms, he says, has reduced over time, since payments were structured around a tapering fee arrangement. A column in The Mail or The Telegraph? “I’ve been thinking about that. I would like to.”

Speaking engagements with businesses?

“I haven’t really looked into that. Part of my problem at the moment is that I am really exhausted, and I am kind of on edge at the moment because of the publicity.” Does his standup make any money? “I can’t at the moment. I could possibly do OK if I could get a venue to put me on regularly.”

asked stupid ones.”

All of which feels fairly bleak, but when we return again to a discussion of comedy, and the architecture of a laugh, then things revert. Linehan is also a great anecdotalist. “I have a great story about John Cleese during The Fish Called Wanda phase. Dawn French got a phone call saying: ‘John Cleese wants to meet you for lunch’. And everyone knew at that time that the film was casting so she is beside herself with excitement. The big day comes and she meets him probably somewhere like this and he says: “Let me tell you why I’ve got you here today. I have a problem in that I really despise younger comedians and my therapist has told me that I should meet them and tell them how I feel.” Dawn French goes back home to Lenny Henry who also has a meeting

might not want to take that meeting. He is just going to tell you how much he hates you!’”

But Linehan is at pains to point at out

that as a young journalist he interviewed Cleese and recalls: “He was lovely. I was only 19 years’ old and he answered all

my questions and was forgiving when I Another positive is Jonathan Ross, who, like Ayoade, has braved opprobrium

and endorsed the book. “Jonathan was

probably one of the only heroes involved in my story. He is the only one that

reassured me that I was right and he was the only one that tried to help when my marriage was breaking down. He let us use a place of his to stay in for a little

holiday: he’s a very kind man. But then he was an early victim of cancellation:

I think he saw it coming before anyone else did.”

All in all, Linehan’s is a fight which keeps opening up onto the absurd.

“There is no authority here unless you

count Judith Butler,” he says, referring to the academic high priest of gender studies. “Judith Butler is the Charles Darwin of things that don’t exist.”

Yet for all his anxiety and complexity,

I feel a sense of protectiveness towards Linehan. He has strong views of

course, but he has hurt nobody, and been terribly abused in return: such

people are always on the right side of history. In the end, in the part of us

that matters, we all want each other to be okay. For us to function as a society

that has to extend to those with whom

we have disagreements. Right or wrong or somewhere in between, we’re all

vulnerable. To meet Linehan is to think, is to know, that we’ve got to do better than this.

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LITERATURE

HIGHLY CLUBBABLE RICHARD OSMAN’S THURSDAY MURDER CLUB SERIES IS VERY POPULAR – DON’T UNDERESTIMATE IT, WRITES CHRISTOPHER JACKSON

I

n our age, there is an increasing suspicion that reading isn’t really that popular a pursuit at all. If we ask why this might be, we can alight on the Internet and television as explanations – but only partially. It is no coincidence that at the same time that the novel has declined, many newspapers are in thrall to the notion of ‘literary fiction’. This umbrella term, unhelpful as it is, broadly refers to writers who have no interest in story or character but are instead ‘noted for their prose’. Really they’re writing poetry without form or rhyme.

One might legitimately add that almost all these writers are of the left and therefore coming at the world with a series of preconceived ideas about things: the passivity of their prose feels allied to an inherited world view.

Independent thought cedes to long waffly passages of description, where the psychological condition of a character is told not by exposure to event but as onenoted perception.

We’ve forgotten what’s difficult – to tell a good story and to show how people really go through the world. In certain circles you can be met with gales of hatred if you say you prefer CJ Sansom to Ian McEwan as I do, or Ursula K. Le Guin to Zadie Smith; but I am prepared to take this a step further and announce to an astonished world that I prefer Richard Osman to Salman Rushdie.

Within the world of books which are actually fun to read, the hardest of all genres is crime fiction. The main reason for this is that you are writing for an audience largely made up of people who have read thousands of such novels before. They’re a tough crowd. In addition to this, you have to work within a formula – in the same way that a formal 128

poet will be caught up in metre and rhyme, the writer of murder mystery must have a victim and a murderer, a series of clues and red herrings, and at least one desirable detective. To do all this successfully is sufficiently rare for readers to want to punch the air when they encounter it.

Richard Osman’s achievement in The

Thursday Murder Club series is to create funny and joyful narratives in a genre

which you might think of as staid, but to say something definitely true about

human nature: you shouldn’t count out the old.

LITERATURE

much the ring-leader; her best friend the widow Joyce, through whose eyes we see many events in the books; Ibrahim, a gay retired psychotherapist; and Ron, a leftwing divorcee, whose boxer son Jason also features from time to time in the books.

It is worth sampling Joyce’s voice to get an idea of the comedy of Osman’s world:

Richard Osman (Wikipedia.org)

The Thursday Murder Club is set in a Kent retirement village and now into its fourth book. In order of publication, these are: The Thursday Murder Club (2020), The Man Who Died Twice (2021), The Bullet that Missed (2022), and the new book The Last Devil to Die (2023).

The inspiration behind the books was delightfully simple. Osman, best known for being the presenter of TV’s Pointless, was visiting his mother at a one such place, having lunch with her and her intelligent friends, and he looked around and thought: “This is a perfect place for a murder.” Then came the ensuing thought: “And I bet these old folk would be the ones to solve it.”

What is good about the conception is that it reminds us that we tend to look through the old when we really shouldn’t.

Almost by definition they know more than we do – even if, as one character does in the series, they’re beginning to lose their marbles. Osman knows that dementia is a terrible thing, but it is also a kind of experience and therefore a kind of wisdom.

In a world where judges retire at 70, and accountants somewhat earlier, these books can be read as a quiet broadside to the way we treat the elderly: in forgetting what they did for us, we also forget what they’re now capable of.

The Thursday Murder Club itself consists of Elizabeth, a retired spook, who is very

“We’ve had the most wonderful New Year’s bash. We drank, we counted down to midnight and watched the fireworks on TV. We sang ‘Auld Lang Syne’, Ron fell over a coffee table, and we all went home.”

The humour is almost always dropped in like this, incidental to the plot – or perhaps bundled in with it. We can see the comedy of Ron falling over, but it rushes past us and doesn’t hold us up: this is what distinguishes the books from those of, say, PG Wodehouse, where we are always building towards set pieces like the Gussy Fink-Nottle prizegiving scene in Right Ho, Jeeves.

Wodehouse is pure knockabout comedy; Osman’s laughs are part of the fabric of a world where crime occurs.

The crimes themselves lead onto another set of characters – specifically Chris and Donna, the loveable detectives whose love lives the Thursday Murder Club quartet also mind about. Chris has been given Osman’s own eating addiction, which the writer has been open about in interview.

The image of the police which the books gives is broadly favourable – but then this is to be expected of a writer whose overall view of humanity is generous. In fact, if it comes to that he’s generous also to the criminals. Here is a representative passage about Mitch Maxwell in The Last Devil to Die who is probably Osman’s funniest creation to date: “Here’s the thing. It’s a great deal easier being interviewed by the police than another criminal. Mitch Maxwell has been interviewed by the police many times, and their resources and opportunities are limited. Everything is on tape, your overpaid solicitor gets to

sit next to you shaking her head at the questions, and, by law, they have to make you a cup of tea.”

Sometimes this sort of writing has led critics, who should be enjoying the books, to tut and say that Osman doesn’t in the end take crime very seriously at all. Personally, I think he is just a better writer than the people writing about him. Who’s to say that it’s not slightly annoying to be a book reviewer dealing in prose – and perhaps with an unpublished novel or two sitting in the desk drawer – to find that a mere TV man can write so well?

The other magnificent thing about these books is that because we’re dealing with a group of elderly detectives, we get a sense of how much time matters. The action across all four books probably takes place across just over a calendar year. This means that a new set of murders is usually kicking off a matter of weeks after the previous. This creates a sense that the characters are packing lots into their lives, and we feel we might emulate this in ours, even if we’re not solving murders ourselves.

But this is not to say that Osman turns his attention away from the aging process: without wishing to give spoiler alerts, in The Last Devil to Die, he confronts it head on with great wisdom and tenderness. About the plot itself I shall say little for fear of giving it away.

But in this book Elizabeth, the leader of the gang, is undergoing some personal difficulties which mean that Joyce now takes centre stage in solving the murders: the Thursday Murder Club is evolving over time. I was pleased to see we also get to know Ibrahim better in this book too.

Naturally, we mustn’t go too far. Osman isn’t Shakespeare; the real poetic pleasures aren’t to be found in these books as they might be in those rare literary novels which tell exciting stories. But the joy they give is far better than what we’re all too often faced with in literary fiction today: no joy at all. www.finito.org.uk

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BOOK REVIEWS

BOOK REVIEWS

UPLIFTING BOOKS FOR CHALLENGING TIMES but if every one of those letters could have been a poem, this book measures out a sort of loss – the replacement of the actual work by the business of being, to use Yeats’ phrase, ‘the smiling public man’.

Heaney had a terrific set of cards: supportive parents; warm friends; and above all, an ideal wife in the academic Marie Heaney, who bore him three adored children. Marie was the centre of his existence, but no letters to her are included here, though they certainly exist. She is still alive, and it seems likely that there will be a subsequent volume after she passes to round out the picture.

THE LETTERS OF SEAMUS HEANEY EDITED BY CHRISTOPHER REID I don’t think any writer would in their right mind refuse the Nobel Prize for Literature, but there is a lot in this book to make one wonder whether it might be the right course of action should Stockholm call.

However busy Seamus Heaney (19392013) – ‘famous Seamus’ as Clive James dubbed him – might have been before he was awarded the prize in 1996, life was a constant deluge of correspondence from that point on. ‘In the last two days I have written 32 letters,’ Heaney writes to the artist Barrie Cooke in 1985, ‘all of them a weight that was lying on my mind even as the accursed envelopes lay week by week on my desk. The trouble is I have 32 more to write…’ Of course, he’s too generous to point out that Cooke is by definition in the second tranche of 32.

All poets must carry out administration, 130

This is therefore a tale of considerable success which was ordained, one feels, from the first. In poetry, the premier publishing house is probably still Faber and Faber, as it was in Heaney’s lifetime – a legacy of the role TS Eliot played in building up the original poetry list. It has probably gone down a bit since then since independent publishing is on the rise generally, and the books don’t quite have the caché they once did.

In Heaney’s day to be asked to submit to Faber – not to come cap in hand – was rare. This book begins in 1964 with Heaney in his early twenties doing just that. We start then at the crest of a lifelong wave of success: Death of a Naturalist was published in 1966, and has never been off the syllabus since.

Famous friendships accrued: Ted Hughes, Czeslaw Milosz, Tom Paulin, Michael Longley and so forth.

It is also a tale of mentorship: Heaney could never resist lending a supportive voice to young poets, perhaps knowing his luck in having been elevated above his peers even from a young age. It was a network of support in relation to the endeavour of an art form which is at once charmed and economically hopeless.

Even well-known poets need shoring

up. ‘Poetry is small beer,’ as W.H. Auden observed. The readership is always small, and predominantly confined to fellow poets. Even Heaney, who achieved a Tiger Woods level of success, died with an estate matched by many middling solicitors. Tiger Woods himself has a yacht big enough to play golf on.

It was always kind of him to write back to poets who needed it; this book shows us that he made so many peoples’ days.

To get a letter from him would, for many poets, have constituted an instant trip to the framers. That he did this is wholly admirable.

“THERE IS A KIND OF GLOW TO HEANEY’S POEMS WHICH IS TO DO WITH A GOOD HEART MINING THE WORLD FOR CONSOLATION.” And I don’t think his doing it can easily be separated out from the quality of the poems, which emanate out of that same generosity of spirit. There is a kind of glow to Heaney’s poems which is to do with a good heart mining the world for consolation. These letters are like that too – and they show him to be a willing citizen in the republic of letters.

Poetry, and increasingly, literature itself, isn’t a career. What is a career is to teach in a university, and publish books on the side which sell to an audience of 200 if you’re lucky. Heaney knew that the ship of his success had created dinghy-loads of unread poets in its wake. Perhaps there was guilt to that – but if so, he converted that guilt into this special book.

BOOK REVIEWS

teens. He was a man whose life had already attained filmic proportions by the time he was representing the lovely constituency of Penrith and the Border.

Brad Pitt had taken an option on one of his books.

POLITICS ON THE EDGE RORY STEWART This is a fabulous book written by a man who thought he might be prime minister but who has instead become Britain’s premier political podcaster.

It always used to be said during the Cameron years that Stewart was the easiest man to get an interview with – perhaps he has always been a creature of the media.

But this book tells us what it’s like to be a person of real interest and imagination caught up in Westminster and ministerial life. “Stop being so interesting,” as Liz Truss, then environment secretary, had said to her junior minister. Skilled at taking her own advice, it was never to be expected that Stewart would be able to follow suit. By the time he arrived in Parliament he had already walked Afghanistan on foot.

Anybody who can do that might not particularly enjoy being reined in by parliamentary whips. Stewart was always an unlikely MP – and an especially unlikely Conservative MP, not least because he had voted Labour in his

SILENCE, ARMISTICE DAY

This book, an important work of historical documentation, won’t cause a deluge of applications from would-be candidates to Conservative HQ. Here we meet the lordly and embedded civil servant who thinks he knows better than the prisons minister. We see Theresa May – to whom Stewart would be admirably loyal over the ill-fated Chequers agreement – ‘with some of the monarch’s stiff authority’ – offering him a Cabinet position. Overall he would hold six ministerial roles during that turbulent time.

Stewart is still by turns baffled and angry at Boris Johnson’s premiership and is especially good at pointing out the absurdity of Johnson as a Foreign Secretary: “A man who enjoyed the improbable, the incongruous and the comically over-stated had been trapped in a department whose religion was tact and caution,” he writes.

Now I hear a wild universe

The final verdict is a grim one: “Nine years in politics had been a shocking education in lack of seriousness. I had begun by noticing how grotesquely unqualified so many of us were for the offices we were given,” Stewart writes. This book will also not do the impossible and rehabilitate Britain’s shortest-serving PM: “I had found, working for Liz Truss, a culture that prized campaigning over careful governing, opinion polls over detailed policy debates, announcements over implementation. I felt that we had collectively failed to respond adequately to every major challenge of the past 15 years: the financial crisis, the collapse of the liberal ‘global order’, public despair and the polarisation of Brexit.” So back to the media then – where politicians increasingly seem happier in any case.

There’s still time to try again: to push the frontier of pain

with something of the old effort.

Silence can be overwrought, and difficult to conduct – they gave their lives. We refract their sacrifice: bending the shape of their lost ending in fields of France to our pause.

of unforeseen mutations.

The victory of this nation never meant what they thought, if, in war, they ever sought the exclusion of the defeated.

The nationalist is thwarted wherever human movement is.

My silence has to contain this: a Gatwick flight along the sky; Internet humming like a fly.

The dead in their mud never know what their soaking blood will grow: a tree and a wood so strange – and all included in the change.

Lucy Carlyle

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Letter From

ISRAEL CHRISTOPHER JACKSON

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T

his letter is 10 years late. I went to Israel for the first and so far only time in 2013, and for obvious reasons have been thinking about the country a lot since the attacks on 7th October 2023, and the events which followed. This is really a letter to Israel – a delayed epistle I’d been waiting for an excuse to write.

I was unlucky in the lead-up to that trip: I dislocated my knee playing tennis a week before flying. I was thus forced to cut a comic figure in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, hobbling with my grandfather’s old silver cane around the Old Town, which, as visitors will know, contains numerous steep pathways, including the famous Via Dolorosa up which Jesus is meant to have shouldered his cross. At one point, I remember an eight-year-old girl trying to steal my cane off me, leading to a scene reminiscent of the sort of thing which might happen to Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm, where I sought to wrest it back and found myself only just equal to the task.

But I found I loved the country: loved its noise and its contention, and the passion for theology, philosophy and history that lay behind its disagreements.

Jerusalem is a microcosm of the human story. To step into it – even casually, and unwittingly – is akin to presenting yourself to humanity for inspection. It all amounts to the strangest of looks in the mirror.

In Jerusalem, it’s not unusual to find people coming up to you in a bar and asking some variant of the question: “Who are you?” “Where are you from?”

To ask this question in any other city 132

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in the world is to issue a pleasantry; in Jerusalem it feels deeper than that, an invitation to consider your personal identity. Most people who go to Israel end up feeling that they somehow needed the experience. At times, it feels like undergoing therapy.

It’s no coincidence that in the Gospels Jesus’ opening remarks to his disciples constitute both a salutation and a challenge: “What seek ye?” Quite a lot of the time in Jerusalem one closely neighbours the related question: “What am I seeking?”

The answer, if we’re honest, almost always involves some sort of large noun: truth, beauty, happiness, love, God – peace. Jerusalem is a place to consider all

these things, although periodically, as on 7th October 2023, it particularly evokes the question of peace. That’s because that question: “What am I seeking?” hasn’t always summoned up the same answers in the hearts of human beings.

The large nouns mean different things to different people: for some happiness is a rave – for others it’s a church service.

Peace in turn can be the means by which we gently seek to bring others into our sense of the world, or open ourselves to new avenues of being. Alternatively, as with Hamas, peace might almost slide into its opposite: it might masquerade as the means by which we seek to still a murderous resentment which all too readily rises up in human minds.

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The founding of the state of Israel was widely deemed necessary in the aftermath of the Holocaust, but soon ran into a difficulty which now feels somewhat inevitable due to the geography of the situation. And yet if we believe at all in human freedom then we can’t quite throw up our hands and shrug that it had to be that way. We must admit that the whole question of the state of Israel foundered on human frailty.

As a general rule, wars are what incompetent governments inflict on unsuspecting peoples. We cannot call the period from 1948 a period of model governance. On the other hand, there have been periods of statesmanship: the Oslo Accords, begun in 1995, and the Unilateral Disengagement Plan in 2005 both amounted to attempts to move towards the solution of the problem.

As I travelled through Israel, I found myself asking how the situation has deteriorated so seriously so rapidly.

The first clue is in the history itself.

Everywhere else on earth, history feels asleep by comparison. Here, you feel its urgency – its pulse. To be surrounded by so much holiness is to exist in a highly alert moral condition, and this is the case if you’re only visiting. To live here must be another step up.

Secondly, I often think of an observation once made by Daniel Barenboim the co-founder, with Edward W. Said, of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra.

This orchestra brings together Israeli and Palestinian musicians. Barenboim was at a rehearsal and stepped out for a moment, returning to find his orchestra at loggerheads over politics.

He watched them argue and reflected that both sides of the argument are of a similar temperament. It isn’t, Barenboim reflected, like a conflict between the Swedes and the Italians. This fact alone, Barenboim says, accounts for much.

It all amounts to a charged atmosphere.

There is a lovely museum Ticho House in Jerusalem which all visitors should see. It was founded by Dr Abraham

Ticho House (Wikipedia.org)

Ticho, the husband of the landscape artist Anna Ticho. When Abraham, an ophthalmologist, was injured in the 1927 Palestinian Riots everybody – Jews, Christians and Palestinians – prayed for his recovery since he was the go-to man for the treatment of the common ailment trachoma.

These riots, in which 133 Jews were killed by Arabs and 116 Arabs killed predominantly by Mandate police, were sparked by questions of access to the Western wall. It all reads like a terrible promo of the conflict we now have. The Shaw Commission, charged with looking into the matter, would find that the riots were caused by “the Arab feeling of animosity and hostility towards the Jews consequent upon the disappointment of their political and national aspirations and fear for their economic future”. Of course, one might have feelings of disappointment and anxiety without resorting to murder, and Ticho’s story reminds us that many didn’t have these feelings. It is worth visiting the Ticho museum to remember not just Ticho, but the people of every denomination who prayed for him because his medical skill ensured he was part of their shared interest. In Ticho’s story, we receive a tantalising glimpse of another set of possibilities for the region which sadly has never yet been taken up.

And there is something unique about his wife Anna’s landscapes too. In these pictures, it is as if the land of Israel, like Jerusalem itself, carries a particular charge. This isn’t solely to do with politics: for Christians (and for many Muslims), these are the hills which Jesus retreated to in between sermon and miracle; for Jews, each bush can be aflame, as it was for Moses, with the suddenness of God; for Muslims, the very sky is open – filled with the idea of ascending to the Heavens. That means that Ticho can never be painting landscape in quite the same way that, say, Constable is painting landscape: she’s painting spirit.

Injured though I was, I decided it would be worth taking a taxi out onto the West Bank. In Bethlehem, you can visit the Church of the Nativity – the supposed original of the manger which we used to recreate in our youth in rural Surrey.

As we drove out, I saw the grape sellers – all Palestinians – reduced to selling grapes on the side of a dusty road, where little traffic comes. All drivers know that non-dusty grapes are available in the supermarkets of the built-up settlements nearby. It is a hopeless situation and even those broadly supportive of Israel will wonder at a lack of humanity which is so evident but whose causes are so difficult to trace. www.finito.org.uk

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Church of the Nativity (Wikipedia.org)

In Hebron, the look and feel is of a warzone without the bombs falling.

Children kick bedraggled footballs against the walls of shuttered shops; Israeli tanks move through the streets, like sharks through a fish tank. Here the guidebooks point you to the Cave of the Patriarchs, considered to be the burial place of Abraham and Sarah – figures whose importance the major religions agree on. Here one feels one is entering something like the crux of the matter. As a Westerner, I was only able to go in through the Israeli side. There is an entrance for Muslims I didn’t see, and the interior itself is partitioned. I hobbled up towards some Israeli soldiers who seemed to be mocking my injury in Hebrew, which didn’t strike me as the most welcoming start.

Inside, there is a seminary where Jewish students recite passages from the Torah, and everywhere there was a hushed seriousness and, to me at least, a palpable sense of things being about to kick off. This is the hard fact about Israel: from Woody Allen to Larry 134

Herodium (Wikipedia.org)

David, Jerry Seinfeld and Mel Brooks, nobody has made the world laugh harder than Jewish people. But to come to this land is to feel that everything keeps coming back to a flammable seriousness.

was the Palestinian sense that Jewish

In that Shaw Report the writers added that the cause of those 1927 riots

Palestinians this is what did happen.

settlers were ‘not only a menace to their livelihood but a possible overlord of

the future.’ In 1927, some two decades

before the founding of the state of Israel, this was remarkably prescient: for many As you climb the hill to see Herodium,

INTERNATIONAL

Herod the Great’s palace, I had a panoramic view of the homogeneous settlements somewhat resembling the worst kind of British council housing.

As I hobbled skywards, the Adhan – the Islamic call to prayer – reached me easily from the skies. Sometimes it sounded like an assertion of some kind; at others a cry for help. Looking down on those towns from the archaeological site, everything felt so terribly boxed off.

A commitment to freedom of movement is what we still have here in Britain and in the UK: this in turn is built on trust and the notion that everyone potentially has something to contribute through hard work to the betterment of all our condition. Interestingly, if you had to pick a country in the Middle East which has some of this spirit, you’d also pick Israel, especially Tel Aviv with its superb food and Miami-like energy of expansive bustle.

We have all seen music festivals like the one which was taking place near Re’im on Black Saturday; most of us have been to them. These festivals, very far from my cup of tea, are part of our national life, and so we might recognise ourselves in the victims of the massacres. Alarmingly, I don’t think if Hamas were exported to the UK, that they would have much hesitation in massacring Glastonbury as appalling as such an idea might be to contemplate. This, in turn, cannot help but generate some questions regarding the pro-Palestinian – and all-too-often pro-Hamas –marches on the streets of London. Firstly, how many have been to Israel? Secondly how many of them have been to Glastonbury? One suspects here a far higher percentage in answer to the second question than to the first.

But if this is the case, then many are marching in favour of the very people who would murder them if they had half a chance.

None of this means that Israel has behaved in a flawless manner. Too often, violence has met with ratcheting language, and counterproductive

Tel Aviv (Unsplash.com)

violence. The failure is predominantly one of political leadership: no one would accuse Benjamin Netanyahu of too much resembling Nelson Mandela. But to consider this an isolated failure on the part of Israel’s leadership, as so many do, is a dangerous fantasy. To land on a fairly obvious point: any organisation whose central text is the Protocols of the Elder Zion, as is the case with Hamas, has a fair amount to learn about peacemaking. Some people need to be fought; there is such a thing as the legitimate causus belli. In addition, the Mandelas of this world have a far greater dose of realpolitik in their make-up than we realise when we later lionise their achievements in peace. We forget that they often pivot to resolution only after having defeated the harshness of their

enemies. Hamas has never been as cuddly as the left-wing intelligentsia has liked to imagine it.

The reality is that history – any nation’s history – is peppered with injustices of every kind. The past is in some fundamental sense unthinkable – and yet it all happened.

The usual way in which we move beyond atrocity is by acknowledging that many evils were perpetrated by the dead. This is the basis on which we forgive and forget. In England, we no longer identify with a particular side of the War of the Roses; I am as welcome in Lancaster as I am in York. Except when a rugby match rolls round, we have also rather forgiven the Norman conquest – and anticipate, as we walk through Paris, a degree of forgetfulness www.finito.org.uk

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The Temple Mount - the golden Dome of the Rock mosque in the old city of Jerusalem, Israel, (Unsplash.com)

regarding Agincourt. The past has to recede because it was conducted by imperfect people.

The same is true of the founding of Israel, and in relation to recent history in the region. There are two differences.

Firstly, these events are closer in time.

But secondly, the fear is that they shall in some way always remain so, because they revolve around both temporal and eternal questions. For so many people, Christianity, Judaism and Islam still matter, forming part of our essential hopes beyond the life of the body. It is not just that these affections won’t go away – it’s that anyone of religious inclination would be bereft if they did.

If you want to know what that would look like then you have Soviet Russia, and maybe the hard-left wokeness in the UK to sample: identikit moralities where power goes not to the meek, the thoughtful or even the hard-working

but to the noisy and the cunning. That’s the real reason one suspects that a large chunk of the left marches against Israel: they don’t believe in any eternal dimension whatsoever and would like to delete that from their lives. Like Christopher Hitchens, they loathe religion full stop, and can’t distinguish easily between the book of Genesis and Hamas: to them, it can all be grouped under the ‘God is not great’ banner.

This is the intractability of the crisis: it goes deep into all of us and keeps refusing to recede. Israel is a remarkably complex undertaking with a paradox at its centre. It is, in one sense, a representative of the Western way of life in the Middle East. There are few cities so Bohemian as Tel Aviv. But, at the same time, when you get right down to it, it isn’t a particularly secular country.

Too much of the Bible and the Koran takes place there for that to be possible.

“IT’S OUR COLLECTIVE STORY AND THAT’S WHY IT WILL ALWAYS MATTER.” These two aspects have both created enemies. The hard fundamentalist right dislikes its licence; the left dislikes the obligation it places on us to consider religion. Israel is a land of miracles and from one perspective the bar of not killing one another over a set of misunderstandings feels sufficiently low that it ought to have been achievable by now. But we have to admit that it hasn’t been and that if you ever go to Israel you’ll be visiting the saddest, but also the most necessary, place in the world. It’s not a foreign country – it’s our collective story and that’s why it will always matter.

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www.finito.org.uk

ISSUE 10

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30/08/2023 17:38

FOOD & DRINK

CÔTE: THE RESTAURANT CHAIN THAT BEAT THE COVID CRISIS

W

BY CAMERON KERR

hen the world economy ground to a halt in 2020, the hospitality sector was amongst those by far the worst hit.

Restaurants, pubs and bars can’t operate through Zoom meetings, and unlike a supermarket we don’t go there to take our food home with us. So in March 2020, the only option for the hospitality sector was to go into hibernation.

Workers were furloughed, premises closed up and lights turned off, waiting for vaccines that at the time were estimated to be 18 months away… which experts thought was actually a worryingly fast rollout. So when French dining chain Côte went into administration during 2020, the news may have seemed predictable.

What may have been more surprising to some, is that its’ financial savior, Partners Group, was able to save 94 out of 98 of the chain's restaurants.

In 2023 that number had reduced to 82 restaurants, but for comparison, Byron Burgers, a restaurant chain founded in 2007 - the same year as Côte - had 70 restaurants across the UK at its peak.Once considered ‘the darling of the better burger scene’ according to Restaurant Online, a series of setbacks including three insolvency procedures has left its total number of remaining restaurants in single figures.

So why has Côte - a chain focused on steak frites and beef bourguignon stood the test of time, and not a brand specialising in crowd pleasing burgers?

138

“WE’RE QUITE GENEROUS IN OUR INTERPRETATION OF DINING.” “We’re quite generous in our interpretation of dining. We’ve got a big menu and intentionally so,” former Côte CEO Alex Scrimgeour told The Telegraph in 2015.

“We’re not setting the world on fire and trying to do anything too crazy in a culinary sense.”

“We’re trying to deliver very simple, high quality food that you would

expect to pay quite a lot more for if eating in an independent restaurant.”

Browsing the menu for my local Côte branch, I find a steak tartare starter priced at just £10.25, confit duck à l’orange for £18.50, and even that beef bourguignon comes in at under £20.

This is 2023, when a London pub can charge you £20 for fish and chips - a dish once considered a cheap and nourishing Friday night takeaway. So to see dishes with the kinds of names you’d expect to hear when watching Masterchef: The Professionals, followed by the number £18.50, is a surprising sight. Perhaps this best

FOOD & DRINK

menu is a reflection of everything I

love about French food in the Spring.

Our main focus is and always will be

the taste of our food at Cote. Simple, yet complex and delicious.”

More than three years on from the pandemic and lockdowns when

Partners Group rescued Côte, the

French restaurant chain has a new head chef and has carried out a

refurbishment of its restaurants.

The refurb aimed to create

‘contemporary and elegant Frenchinspired’ interiors, accompanying a new in-house butchery and demonstrates the gap in the market that Côte has been able to fill.

Byron Burgers has plenty of competition that springs to mind: Honest Burgers, Gourmet Burger Kitchen, Shake Shack, every major chain pub that offers a food menu (and a lot of pubs these days operate more as restaurants). That’s before we get to the usually cheaper, fast-food alternatives. Burger King, McDonald’s, Five Guys, your local kebab shop. If you want burgers, you are spoilt for choice - but French food?

Café Rouge, another French food competitor, had to publicly deny that it was in receivership earlier this year, after a columnist for the Sunday Times wrote that the chain was “struggling” and “the last few outlets are on the verge of closing forever”.

and worked on Gordon Ramsay books including ‘Secrets’ and ‘World Kitchen’.

“OUR MAIN FOCUS IS AND ALWAYS WILL BE ABOUT THE TASTE OF OUR FOOD AT COTE. SIMPLE, YET COMPLEX AND DELICIOUS.” When Allen introduced a new spring menu for Côte this year, he told reporters: “I have been cooking French cuisine since the age of 13 and this

development kitchen.

The company reported a turnover of

£144.9 million for the 2022 financial

year, a flat turnover compared to 2019 - but money that was made amid the

backdrop of the Omicron variant and the cost of living crisis.

Commenting on the figures, executive chair, Jane Holbrook, seemed

optimistic about the future:“We’ve

built our foundations for growth and are very well supported by Partners Group. We are excited about our

recent progress and have embarked

on a brand renaissance supported by a brilliant team.”

Gordon Ramsay’s French restaurant ‘Petrus’ in London offers an A La Carte menu at £120 per person. But Ramsay’s expertise has found its way to Côte for a far cheaper price.

Last year as part of a brand refresh Steve Allen, the former head chef of Gordon Ramsay’s at Claridges, took over the role of head chef at Côte.

Allen rose from Junior Sous Chef, to Head Chef and then Executive Chef during his time at Claridge’s, www.finito.org.uk

ISSUE 10

139

FOOD & DRINK

Costeau

BACK TO CLUBLAND COSTEAU REPORTS ON HOW THE COST OF LIVING IS AFFECTING ONE OF MAYFAIR’S OLDEST INSTITUTIONS: THE PRIVATE MEMBERS’ CLUB

5 Hertford Street (Wikipedia.org)

A

s Costeau walks into 5 Hertford Street, he receives that jolt of self-importance which he has learned to distrust: there is a sense, which surely must be foolish, that one has somehow arrived. Isn’t that Robin Birley sitting over there?

Didn’t that tall chap used to chair the Conservative Party? And I seem to remember that woman has a title which she only uses when she comes in here.

Of course, 5 Hertford Street has an immaculate aesthetic, the bloodline of which one might trace back past Robin Birley, through his father Mark Birley – also the founder of Annabel’s and a myriad others – back to his father Sir Oswald Birley, the middling portraitpainter. Part of its pleasure is the sense 140

of a very plush warren, where some of the most important meetings are taking place in some attic or anteroom whose existence you certainly wouldn’t intuit in the foyer.

the Dover sole is especially to be recommended. “This is my kitchen,” he says, with a gesture at the whole of Mayfair, not referring to one of these clubs, but to all of them.

Even so, as nice as it all is, the suspicion remains that people join Private Members’ Clubs not just because they’re convenient, but also to say they’ve joined them. There is perhaps a certain commercial power to saying to a prospective client: “Let’s meet at my club.” This sentence alone suggests the existence of disposable income, and therefore success.

“CANDIDATES WOULDN’T STAND A CHANCE OF SUCCESS WITHOUT DISCRETION, PRESENTABILITY AND PERHAPS A QUIET ENJOYMENT OF THE FINER THINGS IN LIFE”

When I speak to an ultra-high-networth individual who seems to be a member of almost all the clubs of London, including Alfred’s where

The job opportunities in these places mirror those in the broader hospitality

FOOD & DRINK

industry, marrying up the possibilities of working in a Michelin Star dining setting with working in a luxury hotel.

One manager tells me candidates wouldn’t stand a chance of success without “discretion, presentability and perhaps a quiet enjoyment of the finer things in life” – even if you are serving people who are experiencing those finer things and not experiencing them yourself.

was because news has now reached me that the club has sadly closed, but I think there is much other clubs can learn from the attempt. In the House, the coffee possessed the unmistakeable tang of Nescafé Instant, the pizza – one of the few things on the menu – tended to almost laughably inedible, and even the nibbles could reliably bring on any number of gastric illnesses.

The expansion in these clubs these past years has meant that it is possible, if you have the income, to be never far from a possible exclusive spot. If you’re somewhat exhausted after a meeting with your banker in the City, then for five years or so it’s been possible to swing by Ten Trinity Square. Here you enter a world of wood-panelled comfort: an experience which ought to rub away at the fact of having spent the morning in a financial institution discussing the interest rate.

But there was method in this madness, since the place doubled up as a homeless charity. The club’s website tells visitors that the House is on a mission to change the conversation around homelessness, broadening the definition away from rough sleeping to encompass the 104,510 households currently in unsuitable accommodation.

While Ten Trinity Square is still relatively new, one of the features of the world of private members’ clubs is to feel a connection with the city’s past – and especially with its aristocratic past. In Home House, there is the magnificent staircase by Robert Adam, spiralling up towards a skylight. The dining room offers expansive views of Portman Square as you eat what may be the best cuisine in the city.

But perhaps there is an increasing sense of disconnect in today’s cost of living crisis. Pampered luxury isn’t always the best look when, a few streets away, others are struggling to make ends meet. If joining one of these clubs is tantamount to admitting to a spare £5,000 a year, one may sometimes wonder if that money might not have been better spent. Many of the members of these clubs publicly remind the outside world that they’re engaged on extensive charitable works after all.

Perhaps this is why I was rather fond of the House of St Barnabas just off Soho Square where the food was so reliably bad as to salve one’s conscience. I say

Chief Executive Rosie Ferguson explained in the club’s 2023 Impact Report: “Private member’s clubs have existed for centuries. They have often acted as exclusive spaces for the elite, an environment created in order to give wealthy people their own networks and careers, and their exclusivity has been at odds with diversity, inclusion and social progress.” This is an important document – one searches in vain for evidence of 5 Hertford Street’s social impact report. That’s not to say Robin Birley doesn’t do any good – most people do – but The Guardian has reported that staff were lobbying in 2019 for a living wage, with porters paid £8.50 an hour.

But it does make one wonder a bit about the ultimate purpose of these places, even as one always enjoys dining at them. One also can’t help but feel that their original historical intention has been slowly mutated by a failing politics.

These clubs originally emanated out of the coffee shops, and were places of political debate: one has an image of William Pitt the Younger holding court at White’s or Charles James Fox issuing his latest opinions at Brooks’s just down the road. This was not an undebauched

time, especially not for Fox who, being the Boris Johnson of his day, was as dedicated a philanderer as he was an orator. But

nobody doubts they had concrete matters to discuss.

William Wilberforce, who was in the Pitt set, extricated himself from the club scene after his conversion and the result, after

a long period of attrition in Parliament,

was the expedition of the abolition of the slave trade. One wonders whether the

House of St Barnabas, with its impressive Employment Participation Programme, where 95 per cent of participants have

completed the course, might have marked

a new seriousness of purpose more suitable for these times. The club had worked

with 42 employers, partnering with Bafta 195 and Nimax Theatres. Let’s hope that

despite its failure it has some sort of legacy.

Similarly, there has been a marked rise in the women’s only private members’ club,

with the Allbright leading the way. This is named after the first female US Secretary of State Madeleine Allbright who once

remarked: “There’s a special place in Hell for women who don’t help each other.”

Notable members include actress Olivia

Wilde, filmmaker Gurinder Chadha, and the business woman Martha Lane-Fox. All of this shows that the sector is

shifting, and that the opportunities for a meaningful career are broadening. This is now an area where you can work in a thoughtful environment as much in

the service to ideals, as in the service to

ultra-high-net-worth individuals whose opinions you might not agree with.

Obviously, if the coffee had been better at

the House of St Barnabas that might have helped with the membership numbers;

but equally, it might not be an idea for 5 Hertford Street to do a bit of visible giving back to the community. www.finito.org.uk

ISSUE 10

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PREVIEW OF COMING ATTRACTIONS

NEXT ISSUE Wikipedia.org

1 LEADERS 4 FOUNDER'S LETTER 7 DIARY Anushka Sharma 8 MEET THE MENTOR Merrill Powell answers our questions

p13 Dr Susan Doering

COLUMNS 12 T HE SECRETARY OF STATE Michael Gove on housing 13 T HE MENTOR Dr Susan Doering’s advice to women 14 T HE HUMANITARIAN Sir Terry Waite on careers in peacemaking 15 T HE ACTOR Simon Callow on Shakespeare and Dickens 17 T HE MP Lisa Nandy on Sir Keir Starmer 19 A QUESTION OF DEGREE Mohamed Amersi’s astonishing time at Oxford 20 R ELATIVELY SPEAKING

p12 Michael Gove

FEATURES 30 F RY UP

The incredibly varied career of Stephen Fry

40 S TORMING THE CAPITOL

Christopher Jackson on the return of Trump

51 M AGIC BEANS

Tales from the Coffee Industry

57 PHOTO ESSAY

A school in Namibia

64 RECHARGING BATTERIES

85 ENGINEERING FUTURES

David Lakin on the state of the curriculum

94 BURSARY UPDATE Our new Manchester cohort 96 ELIZABETH GAGE An interview with Joanne Rees 98 LETTER FROM BRAZIL

An update from a troubled land

102 L ETTER FROM SAUDI ARABIA Dr Najah Al-Otaibi

Is Lithium in the UK a non-starter?

72 P ORFOLIO CAREERS

How to up your income streams

75 S USTAINABILITY INDEX

Which companies are really green?

Wikipedia.org

Wikipedia.org

p23 Martha Lane Fox

p57 Namibia

Sir Rocco Forte on the family business 21 1 0,000 HOURS Paul Joyce’s portfolio career 23 T HOSE ARE MY PRINCIPLES Martha Lane Fox on fighting poverty 25 T OMORROW’S LEADERS

Lucy Epps on work and nutrition

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PREVIEW OF COMING ATTRACTIONS Wikipedia.org

p30

A Bit of Fry and Hurry: What Drives the Great Public Intellectual?

ART, CULTURE & BOOKS 114 THE LOOK OF EDUCATION Architecture and Schools 118 BEFORE THE MERCY SEAT The importance of Nick Cave

128 WRONG-SHAPED BALL The joy of a career in rugby 132 BOOK REVIEWS Our literary roundup

121 L A SERENISSIMA

136 IN CHURCHILL’S FOOTSTEPS A European in Morocco

126 AT THE FEET OF THE

142 COSTEAU Whiskey Jobs

Martin Gayford on Venice

MAESTRO Review of the latest films

Next Issue

144 CLASS DISMISSED Jamie Dornan

Issue 11

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STEPHEN FRY THE RENAISSANCE MAN

p121 Venice

p144 Jamie Dornan

£5.99

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ISSN

060778

2732-5180

770005

www.finito.org.uk

ISSUE 10

143

CLASS DISMISSED

GUY RITCHIE

THE LEGENDARY FILMMAKER WAS INTERVIEWED AT HIS ASHCOMBE ESTATE ABOUT HIS WORK ETHIC, FILMMAKING, AND HIS PASSION PROJECT WILDKITCHEN. WILDKITCHEN IS AN OUTDOOR INDOORS COOKING APPARATUS. SO YOU’VE SOLVED THE PROBLEM OF THE ENGLISH WEATHER? It doesn’t rain as much in England as everyone thinks it does: people confuse a cloudy day with a rainy day. I put sun as more of a nuisance than rain but even then wind is your biggest issue: the idea with WildKitchen is that you really can control the cooking environment. It is very rare that the entire tent is retracted because there is always something niggling at you which gives you an idea of why it is so hard to cook outside.

TELL US ABOUT INSPIRATION. HOW DO YOUR IDEAS EVOLVE? I became obsessed with this idea eight years ago and I would say I spent 30 hours a week on it. There are ideas that you come up with and they just don’t work. I reckon I use this 300 days of the year – I am constantly tweaking and refining. It’s unpredictable enough to keep you guessing and to keep refining but not so unpredictable that it is a bore and it doesn’t work.

HAVE YOU ALWAYS BEEN AN ENTHUSIASTIC COOK? A while back, I became obsessed with pizza ovens. I never cook pizza in a pizza oven – or I seldom do – but they are just brilliant once they are fired up. You chuck a log in every three hours and in the morning it is still warm and you can fry eggs in it. I became obsessed with that and that allowed me to develop a love of wood and then, out of that, came my interest in BBQs. 144

WHAT’S YOUR FAVOURITE TYPE OF MEAT?

Guy Ritchie (Wikipedia.org)

Good question. I ate two fillets recently and they were shot by a professional stalker who had killed two beasts within the same minute. One was looking at him – it just raised its head from grazing – and the other one he shot while its head was still munching in the grass. The difference was insane: it makes you think adrenalin and the correlation with meat is really big.

IT SEEMS YOU’RE INVOLVING A NEW SYSTEM OF LIFE HERE ON THE ESTATE? I want to immerse myself into a natural environment as elegantly as possible and enjoy that while also having access to the human comforts – I want to fuse those two different worlds which are very hard to fuse, but I’m getting there.

ARE YOU FINDING YOURSELF MORE AND MORE IN THE COUNTRY AND LESS IN THE CITY? I love the city. I just use the city for work. So to me – if you can – just leave it there. Holidays and weekends are spent here. It’s really the only part of England that’s not been played with for thousands of years because you can’t get a plough up here.

IS THE SAME PART OF THE BRAIN WHICH INVENTS STORIES ALSO CREATING THESE PROJECTS ON YOUR ESTATE? It’s the same part of the brain – all creativity is unified for me.

DOES FILM MAKING GET EASIER AS YOU GO ALONG OR IS IT STILL AS DIFFICULT AS IT ALWAYS WAS? It’s not difficult as much as it is hard work. As with any work, if I enjoy doing it, then it’s not really work. It’s just endlessly pleasurable.

WHAT’S NEXT FOR YOU? We are doing a TV series of The Gentlemen and you will see the WildKitchen pop up there as well: there are more cameos coming! I’ve directed two episodes. There is a certain football star [Ritchie is referring to his friend David Beckham] and he uses it about as much as I use it!

Go to ccwildkitchens.com

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