The Friend of Prime Ministers

Envy can sometimes seem so rife in our society that we fail to root it out. The chair of the Vitol group Ian Taylor (see page 38), who died on 8th June 2020 after a battle with cancer, was admired by many. But it is fair to say that Taylor didn’t always receive a fair press, either in life when he was forced to withdraw his name from consideration for a knighthood – or sadly in the obituaries published after his death.

In our exclusive tribute, we have sought to correct that imbalance. The oil industry is intricate and intellectually demanding: it requires knowledge of geopolitical trends, fierce energy and a rare hard-headedness.

Taylor had all these things. But partly because of the understandable need to rethink our energy mix, the industry has acquired a bad reputation. With regard to Taylor, the mainstream media sometimes turned a blind eye to his legendary philanthropy and kind personality, and sought to show instead a cliché: the friend of dictators.

Why this rush to judgement? It was Gore Vidal who said: ‘Every time someone else succeeds a little part of me dies.’ It’s a cathartic joke, because we feel this in ourselves. It’s a rare person who looks on another’s achievement without any trace of grudge.

But in Taylor’s case it might also be to do with a desire to simplify. We know that the world needs to turn greener, so aren’t all oil executives therefore evil? In making these judgements, we often fail to learn from those who have achieved great things. In our tribute, readers will learn, above all, the value of creating friendship as we go through our careers.

It’s easy to forget that the rich and the powerful are, to use Nietzsche’s phrase, ‘human, all too human’. During his premiership, Sir John Major took every jibe thrown at him by Alastair Campbell personally, likewise, when Lyndon Baines Johnson resigned over the Vietnam protests, Norman Mailer remarked: ‘Who would have thought that LBJ couldn’t take it?’ He couldn’t – because no one can. This doesn’t mean that we should overdo it and overpraise the successful, or forget those who helped them on their way. But there is growing evidence that we too easily mock success without thinking how it came about. Think of how Theresa May, who contributes to our tribute, was mocked throughout her premiership. Few who read our Ian Taylor tribute will finish it unmoved by the range of his interests, or the scope of his benevolence. We aim to draw a wider lesson. To be successful one must first dispense with envy regarding those who have already succeeded – and take the time to ask oneself what personal qualities led to that success, and whether they might be fostered in oneself. Now, more than ever, is the time to cheer success. Perhaps the part of us that dies when we do is the part we’d be better off without.