Issue 19
DONALD TRUMP AMERICA AT 250
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W W W . H A R R O D S C O R P O R AT E S E R V I C E .C O M
INTRODUCTION
Editor: Christopher Jackson Editor-at-large: Claire Coe
FOUNDER’S LETTER
notable people including Ian Taylor, Jeff Katz, Terence Cole, Lord Young of Graffham and Sir Tom Stoppard.
Contributing Editors: Emily Prescott, Meredith Taylor, Lord Ranger, Liz Brewer, Dr Paul Hokemeyer Advisory Board: Sir John Griffin (Chairman), Dame Mary Richardson, Sir Anthony Seldon, Elizabeth Diaferia, Ty Goddard, Neil Carmichael, Mark Plummer Next Gen Board: Nick Hennigan Management: Ronel Lehmann (Founder & CEO), Colin Hudson, Tom Pauk, Professor Robert Campbell Christopher Jackson, Julia Carrick OBE, Gaynor Goodliffe, Nick Pelekanos, Martin May 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, Mark Thistlethwaite, Madhu Palmar, Margaret Stephens, John Cottrell, Victoria Anstey, Stephen Goldman, Patrick Timms, James Meek, Dominique Rollo, Tracey Jones, Alan Urmston, Duncan Palmer, James Slater, Charles Hamilton-Stubber, Catherine Wood, Guy Beresford, Paul Glanville, Richard Manners, Nigel Dicker Maeve Walsh, Kathie Knell, Tamsin Aston, Robert Goldsmith, Kathryn Stone OBE, Ron Boschetto, Anna Darvas, Renato Fantoni Business Development: Rara Plumptre Design and Digital: Nick Pelekanos, Phil Verney Photography: Sam Pearce, Will Purcell, Gemma Levine Public Relations: Soho Communications Website Development: Eprefix Media Buying: Virtual Campaign Management Print Production: Marcus Dobbs Printers: Micropress Printers Ltd Circulation: Templar Global 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
There has been much coverage about the million young people aged between 16- and 24-years old (NEET’s) not in employment, education or training. I have taken part in several debates about this on television and radio. The thing that strikes me is that when I was that age, I had a burning desire to start a business. The pandemic spurned many new start ups and whilst being an entrepreneur is not for everyone; we should encourage the next generation of business leaders to take the plunge. I applauded the news that universities promise work experience for all students. Work experience should really begin for pupils when they are teenagers and not delayed until after they leave school. I was encouraged aged thirteen to work during the summer holidays in street markets. I learned about customers, merchandise, money, and how to deal with complaints. Safeguarding, risk assessment, and insurance prohibit teenagers today from gaining such valuable experience and to develop the necessary communication skills which provided the best foundation for life. The cynic in me believes that universities may now be pivoting to find new ways of generating income to replace the loss of international student revenues. In my capacity as publisher, I have never interfered with the editorial policy in the magazine. However, one of the more respectful benefits of my role is to be able to remember those who have touched our lives with a feature entitled An Indelible Mark. To date, it has celebrated many
For us it has been an especially sad time. Two of our much-revered mentors have passed away. There is a special tribute in this issue for my former boss, Christopher Clark, 84. At the time of going to press, the news also reached us that Patrick Timms, 40, had his life cut short after battling a lengthy illness. Both mentors worked with our candidates over many years and will never be forgotten. There has been much debate from the new Government about its commitment to finally sort out social care. In addition to my other responsibilities, I have found myself to be a carer for my mother. I have been struck by the compassion of those in the profession and the way in which they go about their work. It is not an easy task, and I have been forced to learn fast. It is the greatest honour to be there and care for parents in their twilight years in recognition of all that they do for us over many years. My own birthday falls on 4th July, American Independence Day, which makes our America at 250 even more special. Like my mother, Donald Trump is an octogenarian, and it does not cease to amaze me how in this country we retire our former Prime Ministers and those on Boards and in the professions too early. There are many senior partners of law firms in the United States who work well into their nineties. Their experience and wise counsel are so important to inspiring the next generation. Talking of age, I was excited to read “Believe it: the young are grumpier than pensioners.” by Andrew Ellson, Consumer Affairs Correspondent, The Times. Now when I complain, I can be happy in the knowledge that I am not becoming a grumpy old man.
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ISSUE 19
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LEADERS
A LESS SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP
D
onald Trump has never been a man to understate his case, but
on one point his critics keep testing
an argument that refuses to collapse entirely under scrutiny. Since the start of his second term he has
repeated, in venue after venue, that
America is now "the hottest country
anywhere in the world." Economists have picked apart the claim. Other indices have outperformed Wall
Street. Growth has not, by every measure, been exceptional. And
yet something in the boast lands,
because it gestures at a deeper truth
about the American mood: a country that still believes, with a conviction Europe finds almost embarrassing, that it is the place where the future gets built first.
As the United States celebrates its 250th birthday, that self-belief is
worth taking seriously, whatever one
makes of the man currently narrating it. Capital continues to flow toward
American technology and American energy. The country is ahead in
the race for AI, and in quantum computing. Talent continues to
migrate toward American universities and American companies, even as
visa policy grows more erratic. The
country's instability is real, its politics coarsened, its institutions tested in
ways that would alarm any previous generation of its own diplomats.
But instability has not, so far, been mistaken by markets or migrants
for decline. America remains, for all its noise, a place that manufactures
opportunity at a rate the rest of the world struggles to match.
This is, in a sense, the oldest 6
American trick, and one worth
steadiness. Remove the steadiness and
invites the country to look back as
stand.
remembering on an anniversary that well as forward. The republic has
always narrated itself into confidence before the facts entirely justified
it, after depressions, after civil war, after the long doubt of the 1970s,
each time talking its way back into a swagger that then, often enough, became self-fulfilling. Trump's
rhetoric belongs to that lineage more than it departs from it. The claim is not really a claim about GDP
figures. It is a claim about national temperament – and temperament, unlike a stock index, has a way of shaping the future it describes.
Which leaves an uncomfortable
question for Britain. For decades the special relationship offered a kind of shelter, an assumption of alignment
that made Britain's own uncertainties feel manageable. That assumption now looks thinner. Trade policy,
foreign policy and plain temperament divide London from Washington
more than at any point since Suez. British ministers have learned to
choose their words about the White
House with the caution once reserved for hostile powers, not old friends. Britain cannot simply borrow
American confidence by association, not when the association itself has become a source of anxiety rather than reassurance. If America is
entering its most self-assured chapter in years, Britain is entering one of its most uncertain, and the two facts are not unconnected. A junior partner's confidence has always depended partly on the senior partner's
the confidence has nowhere left to That uncertainty is showing up in
the data, not just the mood. Recent research from Arden University
found that 58 per cent of UK workers believe their industry is changing
faster than ever, yet only just over half are doing anything about it. Nearly
half point to technological disruption as the single greatest threat to their working lives. The skills gap once
discussed as a future risk has become a present condition, and the more striking finding is not the anxiety itself but the paralysis alongside
it. More than a third of those not
upskilling say they already have what they need. This is not a country
short of warnings. It is a country that has heard the warning and not yet decided to move.
Some, naturally, have decided to
move in a different sense entirely.
The rise of the British digital nomad, working a London salary from a
flat in Valencia or Lisbon, is often
framed as a lifestyle story, but it is really a verdict. It is what happens
when a skilled workforce concludes that geography no longer has to
determine opportunity, and that if Britain will not offer the terms it
wants, somewhere else might. The
countries winning this competition are not accidentally the same ones
offering good weather and pleasant
cafés. They are offering governance,
infrastructure and a functioning sense of the future, the very things a nation
needs to keep its most capable people from drifting.
LEADERS
There is a connection worth drawing
None of this is fatal, and none of it
anxiety and its own relationship
relocates to Lisbon and the worker
before, often against expectations,
to notice that the ground is shifting
out here. The worker who quietly
is new. Britain has reinvented itself
who tells a pollster they see no point
usually without American self-
the same diagnosis from opposite
financial centre out of the ruins of
Britain's institutions are not worth
cities into centres of culture.
in upskilling are, in a sense, expressing
confidence to draw on. It built a
directions. One has concluded that
empire and turned deindustrialised
staying near. The other has concluded
Reinvention has never required
that its economy is not changing
fast enough to require new skills at
all. Both are votes of no confidence,
cast without fanfare, in the country's
capacity to keep pace with the world it is competing against.
American-style certainty. It has
required an honest reckoning with
drift before that reckoning is forced from outside.
That reckoning is precisely what
a nation absorbed in its own skills
anxiety has yet to have. It is easier than to do anything about where
one is standing, and Britain, on the evidence of its own workforce, has
become rather good at the noticing
and rather poor at the doing. America turns 250 this year loudly certain of itself, certain in a way that outruns its own balance sheet. Britain does
not need to match that certainty, and could not convincingly fake it if it
tried. It needs, rather more urgently, to decide what it is certain of at all.
BURNHAM’S GAMBLE M
achiavelli, writing in The Prince, had a piece of advice for anyone who acquires new territory: go and live there. A ruler who stays away governs at a distance, through reports and deputies, and only discovers trouble once it has already taken root. A ruler who moves in sees the disorder early, and is seen seeing it. Presence, for Machiavelli, was not sentiment. It was statecraft. Andy Burnham's decision to spend part of his week working from a “No10 North” hub in Manchester deserves to be read in that spirit. It is easy to hear in it an echo of gesture politics, the kind of headline that costs relatively little and promises much. But the instinct behind it, that governing the whole country requires occasionally being physically present in the parts Westminster has spent decades governing from a distance, is sound, and marks a real departure from the last decade's regional rhetoric. Levelling up, for all its ambition, was mostly conducted by press release. Funds were announced in London for towns its ministers rarely visited outside a photo opportunity. The
country noticed. Devolved power that is never seen being exercised locally starts to feel like power that was never really devolved at all.
who the company believes it is. Where a government chooses to sit makes a similar argument about who it believes it serves.
Optics of this kind have a way of deciding political fates that policy alone does not. Nick Clegg later admitted that letting George Osborne take Dorneywood, the grace and favour country house which could have been available to him as the then deputy minister, was a mistake he came to regret. It was not the house itself that mattered but what its absence did to Clegg. Osborne had a visible seat of authority to be pictured in front of, a marker of standing that said chancellor as plainly as any title could. Clegg had no equivalent, and in a coalition supposedly built on shared power, one half of that partnership simply looked weaker for having no symbol of its own to set against the other's.
None of this guarantees success. A satellite office is not a settlement, and two days a week in Manchester will not by itself rewire a state built around Westminster's gravity. Critics are right that civil servants can be relocated up the M40 without a single decision in Whitehall actually changing.
The same logic runs through where and how people work more broadly. Google's King's Cross campus was not built by accident to look the way it does, open plan, informal, deliberately unlike a Whitehall department; it is architecture making an argument about
But the underlying wager deserves more credit than that criticism allows. A mood of national drift is partly a mood of national absence. People do not trust power they never see exercised anywhere near them, and for years the regions have watched decisions about their future made and photographed exclusively in London. Burnham has built a career on being visibly present in the place he represents, and that instinct, brought into Downing Street, is not nothing. Paradoxically, it also got him to Downing Street in the first place. Machiavelli would probably see the paradox – and warn him about that too. www.finito.org.uk
ISSUE 19
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CONTENTS
THIS ISSUE 3 FOUNDER'S LETTER 6 LEADERS 10 DIARY Sir Ronald Cohen 12 MEET THE MENTOR Mark Plummer
p20 Lord Toby Young
COLUMNS
FEATURES
16 THE MUSEUM DIRECTOR
46 TRUMP 2.0
Sir Tristram Hunt
How the Donald operates
66 AMERICAN WORK
p30 Euan Blair
86 M OTORING MONTAGU Liz Brewer on the present Lord Beaulieu 90 A N INDELIBLE MARK
18 T HE WRITER
250 years of innovation
Christopher Clark
Eva Menasse
76 H OW DO YOU SELL A
94 B URSARY UPDATE
20 T HE FREEDOM OF SPEECH ADVOCATE Lord Toby Young 22 T HE POLYMATH Sarah Tucker
SUPERYACHT? Edmiston Examined
Harvey Hounslow’s success
78 H ARRODS HERITAGE How a great business keeps its identity
82 K ATIA LUNA BENAI The Ecology of the Hexagon
26 A QUESTION OF DEGREE Jazmin Atkins 30 RELATIVELY SPEAKING Euan Blair 34 TEN THOUSAND HOURS Jon Pettman 36 TOMORROW’S LEADERS Shauna Tiffany 38 T HOSE ARE MY PRINCIPLES Rob Rinder MBE 42 LATEST EVENTS Tim Clark at Simpsons in the Strand 8
p36 Shauna Tiffany
p94 Harvey Hounslow
CONTENTS Wikipedia.org
p46
Trumpet of Fortune: Does the US President make his own luck? ART, CULTURE & BOOKS 98 G OOD IMPRESSION Monet at 100
102 M EET THE SOPRANO Katerina Mina
108 S ONDHEIM’S ANTECEDENTS Mentorship and the American theatre 114 BEYOND THE WORLD CUP Why soccer will keep growing
118 MONROE IN THE BOARDROOM What entrepreneurs can lean from Marilyn
122 HENRY MOORE AT KEW Sarah Tucker on the art of looking 126 A MERICAN HUSTLE
134 L ETTER FROM UZBEKISTAN Tamsin Aston 138 AMERICAN PORTION Costeau on excess in the US 144 C LASS DISMISSED Kedge Martin
Rap music and careers 132 L ITERARY ROUND-UP Reviews of the latest tomes
Katerina Mina, ©️Jedrek Koh
Wikipedia.org
p102 Katerina Mina
p126 Snoop Dog
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DIARY
SIR RONALD COHEN
I
The private equity legend on being a refugee, founding a business, and the future of AI was born in Egypt and left at
eleven as a refugee, my family
Sir Ronald Cohen
having lost everything. Britain took us in. From the moment we arrived I knew two things: I would have to
look after my parents, and I wanted
to make a positive contribution to the world. Oxford in the early sixties was
an idealistic place for both ambitions.
A
t business school in America I heard a professor describe
how he had invested $70,000 in a minicomputer company that was
business model. He was one of the
I
the more money we throw at poverty,
I
six when I started Apax. You build
force whose conclusion was simple
purpose. The convergence of artificial
relied on government spending and
is where the largest companies of the
investment to bear. We had invented
anticipate the PC, the mobile phone, or
going to be worth $100 million. I thought: this is a very interesting
n 2000, Gordon Brown's Treasury rang me. The message was blunt:
f I were advising a twenty-year-old
today I would say: go to a firm that is
conversant with AI and has the ambition to use it, preferably for an impact
first venture capitalists. I was twenty-
the less we seem to achieve. I led a task
the field in order to lead it.
and revolutionary: we had only ever
intelligence and impact investment
philanthropy. We had never brought
next generation will be built. We didn’t
A
s Apax grew, I realised that the gap I had set out to narrow –
between rich and poor – was actually widening. The CEO-to-employee
pay ratio in America 40 years ago was forty to one. Today it is 249 to one. Trillionaires are appearing. Venture
capital and entrepreneurship do allow
venture capital to fund those who
wanted to make money. We had found no equivalent for those who wanted to
improve the world. That phone call put me on the path to impact investment.
create an ever-growing gulf between without. At fifty-three, I told my
difference is not incremental – it is
to become successful, but they also those with education and those
partners I would leave at sixty to deal
with two things: social issues, and the Middle East – where my wife's father was the commander of the Exodus
and my own roots lay in the Egyptian camp. 10
in the seventies. We are at an equivalent threshold now, and this time the stakes are considerably higher.
B
ritain missed the foundational AI
P
people from modest backgrounds
the internet when the microchip arrived
hilanthropy amounts to perhaps
two to three trillion dollars a year
globally. Investment markets run to fifty to three hundred trillion. The
civilisational. Impact investment – the idea that you can make profit and
deliver measurable improvement in
lives or the planet simultaneously – is now a movement that has become an industry.
race. DeepMind was acquired by
Google. We find ourselves behind in a
competition where large language models confer enormous strategic advantage –
not merely to the firms that build them but to the entire national ecosystem of companies that cluster around them. However, the quantum race is not
yet won. If Britain were to make that
commitment now, we would have real
chips to play with America and China. It is not too late. But it will be, soon.
DIARY
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MENTORING
Meet the Mentor:
MARK PLUMMER Mark Plummer is a member of the Finito Education advisory board – here he explains how AI will transform financial services
H
aving spent much of my career in private banking and
Mark Plummer
wealth management, one thing has remained remarkably consistent: our industry is built on trust.
Products evolve, markets rise and fall, regulations change, and technology advances, but clients continue to place their confidence in people. In my experience, the strongest relationships are rarely built on technical expertise alone. They are built on understanding, judgement, empathy and the ability to provide clarity when circumstances are complex. That is why I find the current debate around artificial intelligence so interesting. There is no question that AI will transform financial services. In fact, it already is. From analysing data and producing reports to streamlining administration and improving operational efficiency, the opportunities are enormous. Every private bank, wealth manager and family office will either be using AI or actively exploring how to do so in the near future.
Every private bank, wealth manager and family off ice will either be using AI or actively exploring how to do so in the near future. 12
As with every major technological shift, those who fail to adapt will struggle to remain competitive. Yet I suspect we are asking the wrong question. Much of the discussion focuses on what AI will replace. A more interesting question is what it will make more valuable. The reality is that access to AI will not, in itself, become a differentiator. The technology is advancing rapidly and becoming increasingly accessible. Over time, most firms will have access to broadly similar tools and capabilities, but I already see some organisations making the mistake of viewing AI as the destination rather than the tool. In my view, what will distinguish the best firms is how effectively they combine technology with human expertise. Family offices and wealth managers do
not simply provide information. They help clients make sense of it. They listen, interpret, challenge, guide and occasionally reassure. They understand the nuances behind a balance sheet, an investment portfolio or a succession plan.
“The more sophisticated technology becomes, the more clients are likely to appreciate the qualities that technology cannot replicate.” A family considering how to transfer wealth across generations is not looking solely for an answer generated
MENTORING
by a machine. AI cannot fully understand the complexities of family relationships, and no two families are ever quite the same. Clients need someone who understands not only the financial implications of a decision, but also the personal dynamics that often determine whether a strategy will succeed. Technology can support that process, but it cannot replace it. In many respects, I believe AI will increase the value of relationship skills rather than diminish them. As routine tasks become increasingly automated, however, advisers will have more time to spend with clients. Their value will shift further away from gathering information and towards interpreting it. The ability to explain complex issues clearly, navigate uncertainty and build genuine trust will become even more important.
“What will distinguish the best f irms is how effectively they combine technology with human expertise.” Those skills have always mattered but they are now becoming critical, and that has significant implications for how we develop talent within our industry. One of my greatest professional satisfactions has been mentoring and helping people grow. Throughout my career, I have worked with many talented individuals, and one lesson stands out above all others: technical knowledge can be taught relatively quickly, but judgment takes years to develop.
The best advisers are not simply knowledgeable. They are personable. They are curious. They listen carefully. They understand context. They know when to challenge and when to support. Most importantly, they recognise that every client is different.
families navigate complex financial,
learned through conversations, client meetings, difficult decisions and exposure to experienced professionals willing to share their knowledge and experience.
AI will undoubtedly help
business and personal decisions over many years. That level of trust is
earned through human connection, not technology.
“In an increasingly These qualities are developed through digital world, I experience, observation and guidance strongly believe that from others. people will remain That is why mentoring remains so important. Much of what makes the most valuable someone successful in private banking or wealth management is asset of all.” not found in a training manual. It is
As leaders, we have a responsibility to create those opportunities. The firms that succeed in the years ahead will not necessarily be those with the largest technology budgets. They will be those who invest in people with the same commitment they invest in technology. They will develop future leaders who are comfortable using AI while also possessing the emotional intelligence, commercial judgement and relationship skills that clients value. The irony is that the more sophisticated technology becomes, the more clients are likely to appreciate the qualities that technology cannot replicate.
organisations operate more efficiently, analyse information more effectively and improve client service. Those benefits should be embraced.
But while clients may value faster
reporting, deeper analysis and greater
efficiency, what they tend to remember is the adviser who understood their
concerns, helped them make difficult decisions and provided confidence when it mattered most.
That has always been the essence
of exceptional private banking and
wealth management, and I suspect it always will be.
As our industry enters the next phase of technological change,
the organisations that stand apart will not simply be those with the
Discretion. Integrity. Empathy. Trust. These are not new concepts, but they remain central to every successful client relationship.
smartest systems. They will be those
Family offices perhaps understand this better than most. Their role extends far beyond managing assets. They often become trusted advisers across multiple generations, helping
relationships into lasting value.
who continue to develop exceptional
people who can turn information into insight, technology into advice, and In an increasingly digital world, I strongly believe that people will
remain the most valuable asset of all. www.finito.org.uk ISSUE 19
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COLUMNS Our regular writers on employability in 2026 30 | NO 10 CHILDHOOD Euan Blair on apprenticeships
Euan Blair (multiverse.io) 14
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di pe
iki
a.o
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BERLIN BLUES Eva Manesse on founding PEN Berlin
36 HONOURED BY THE KING’S TRUST Changemaker Shauna Tiffany
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REMEMBERING ANNE FRANK Rob Rinder MBE
COLUMNS
The Museum Director
SIR TRISTRAM HUNT
I
The director of the V&A and former Labour MP on Manchester, the curriculum, and the limits of state power
f you want to see a working model of how culture and
political leadership reinforce one another, you don’t need to look
to Whitehall. You need to look at
Manchester. I think Andy Burnham has done a good job telling a story about the city, but the people who
actually delivered Manchester were Howard Bernstein and Richard Lee, the council’s former chief executive and leader.
What distinguished their approach
was that they put culture at the heart of it from the start: the Manchester International Festival, which they
partnered; the support for the city’s nightlife; the cultural support for
institutions; and yes, sport as well, which is kind of handy. Liverpool,
by contrast, didn’t manage that same integration for years, and is only beginning to get there now. The
deeper lesson is that Manchester’s success was both local and global at once; they always wanted
Manchester to be this place on the world stage, not just a city with
strong local identity. You don’t have
to choose between the parochial and
the global. Done well, culture can be both.
That same instinct for institutional independence runs through how I think about restitution and
repatriation, where I don’t think
the answer is as simple as people
Sir Tristram Hunt
no. Incidentally, that’s literally what
in place – the media, donors, civil
right now, asking institutions, most
things back. I don’t think you’d want
through all their labels to hunt out
government rewrites a label the
they’re doing at the White House notably the Smithsonian, to go particular content.
sometimes want it to be. On the
But the fact is that institutions are
intervene in labelling, my answer is
If you go too far, there are systems
question of whether the state should
16
largely capable of self-correcting.
society, government – that pull
to end up in a situation where one
wrong way, then there’s an election, and the next government rewrites
it back. That’s not a stable basis for
anything. For the most part, curators and museum professionals have a
COLUMNS
very strong professional ethic about
years – the so-called Gove reforms
There’s little sense of design spirit
On restitution specifically, my view
in literacy and numeracy. But we
authorities are better than others
be accountable and have real
creativity from the curriculum in
At the moment, because of various
to go; some of it was a mistake. My
Museum, the V&A and the Science
about any one curriculum’s content;
objects at all. We have a wonderful
five years with each government
Spain, which was stolen in 1910;
consensus, the way they have it in
in 1905, and a photograph showing
where it embeds itself over 15 or
stolen in 1910, and we know it came
conversation at the moment.
to us. The source is stolen. We can’t
It’s fun to bash the BBC – it is
how they approach these questions.
– made some real improvements
is that museum trustees should
also stripped away a great deal of
responsibility over their collections.
the process. Some of that needed
pieces of legislation, the British
bigger concern, though, isn’t really
Museum are unable to repatriate
it’s that changing a curriculum every
monstrance from a cathedral in
is a disaster. You need cross-party
we have a photograph of it in place
Finland, Singapore and Lithuania,
it gone by 1950. We know it was
20 years. We are nowhere near that
onto the market and made its way
We also need to look at the BBC.
return it. We’ve sent it back on loan, but legally we cannot restitute it,
and to my mind that’s not right. I would want a situation where the
trustees of a museum could express an intention to do something, and
it then goes to an advisory panel, as already happens with Nazi-looted
material, which says yes or no, object
unbelievably annoying at times – but over time, institutions tend to selfcorrect. Safeguarding and securing it is a really important part of any cultural framework for the future,
making sure that access to culture
through television, which has been
such a hallmark of the BBC for half
in it at the moment. Some local
and have a feel for this, but they’re under real pressure to deliver
housing numbers. It doesn’t help that the professionals who once had the confidence to say no to
certain developments until sensible conditions were met are now in
short supply. So my advice, if you
care about this, is: stand for office.
Become a councillor. Hold the line. Underlying a lot of this is something about institutional trust. Indices of trust show that people working in
cultural institutions and education are still very highly rated, more
highly, in a sense, than some of what people in tech or elsewhere think or expect. So we should utilise them
appropriately. Politicians need to be careful here: democracy is fragile, and institutions and civil society
are a really important part of that ecology.
a century, is somehow preserved,
That same concern about fragility
In truth, there’s some material in
Disneys and your Netflixes don’t
between London and the rest of the
that I would give back, and there’s
service in them.
by object.
because your Paramounts, your
shows up when I think about the gap country. The disparity now between
the V&A which was looted or stolen
care. There’s no sense of public
some material that I wouldn’t,
Across the landscape we see a need
instance, is really shocking. That’s
Again, on the built environment,
because of how political investment
towards the end of his time as
something older: since the Tudors,
the housing and building-rate
the city and the politicians all in
aesthetic vision. But governments
city does, and it keeps all of it.
without any real sense of what the
of wealth concentration that comes
with an absolute monstrosity at
Which is why work like Andy’s,
because it has built up a relationship with the collection that makes
sense, relative to its position, given
that there’s often no longer really a
source community in the form it was taken from. But the key thing is that
I would then be open to criticism for that decision, and held accountable for it. At the moment, all I can
do is point to the law, and I don’t
think that’s a mature position for an institution to be in.
That’s why across our society, we
need to be thinking longer term. On
education, the reforms of the last ten
London and a place like Barrow, for
for deeper and long-term thinking.
a particular UK problem, partly
Michael Gove was getting there
is structured, and partly because of
Housing Secretary on some of
London has combined the court,
questions, and at least he had an
one place in a way no other British
more broadly have built, built, built
Globalisation, and the acceleration
aesthetics are. They’re going ahead
with it, has only made that worse.
Euston station, destroying a great deal of civic fabric and Victorian heritage.
work that’s rooted in a particular
place rather than just London, really matters.
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The Writer
EVA MENASSE
I
The award-winning novelist on what it took to build PEN Berlin
feel qualified to discuss the question of rebuilding
Eva Menasse (Wikipedia.org)
communities from a practical
angle, because I am someone who has actually tried to do it. A few years ago, a small group of us
founded a new organisation in
Germany alongside the existing
PEN Germany. We called it PEN Berlin. Around two or three
hundred colleagues joined at the
time, which was a striking number, and there was real enthusiasm
and real hope attached to it. In
hindsight, that wave of enthusiasm should probably have made me suspicious from the start.
I became spokesperson of the
new association together with the
German journalist of Turkish origin Deniz Yücel, who had himself once appeared on PEN's own list of
imprisoned writers, having spent time in solitary confinement in
one of Erdogan's prisons in Turkey. Together with a board of nine
people, we set out with two goals: to carry on the human rights work that PEN organisations exist to do, and
to build a genuine platform for open debate in Germany, which I felt was missing.
The human rights work found us
before we had even opened a bank account. The acclaimed TurkishKurdish novelist and poet Meral
Şimşek needed to leave her country
all before PEN Berlin technically
remarkably well. We had a presence
Today the organisation supports
fairs, curated a full programme of
had the means to pay for any of it. at least five writers in exile, from Morocco, Afghanistan, Turkey
and Iran, still without any stable funding to speak of.
at both of Germany's major book
panels and discussions, and opened our first PEN Berlin congress with a keynote from Ayad Akhtar. Then came the seventh of October, and
immediately or face prison, so we
The second goal, the one that
everything turned over.
school place for one of her sons,
seemed for a while to be going
weeks immediately afterward,
flew her to Berlin and found a
18
mattered most to me personally,
I say with some pride that in the
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PEN Berlin was one of the
only organisations still willing
to put discussions of Israel and
antisemitism on a public stage. We were also the first association to
protest the cancellation of Adania
Shibli's appearance at the Frankfurt Book Fair, where she had been due to speak about her novel Minor
Detail. When she was disinvited, we took her allotted slot and filled it
with a group of well known German writers reading passages from the book aloud, so that the work, at
least, had the space she had been denied.
“ There is an enormous appetite among writers to organise and to build something together, and that appetite does not always come with the discipline to live up to what free expression actually demands.” That was not the end of it. Not
long after, we invited A. L. Kennedy to give the keynote at our second congress, and she was abruptly
recast in German public opinion as a supporter of the BDS movement. I was told we should withdraw the invitation. I said that if we did, I
would resign instead. We did not withdraw it.
Through all of this I watched the
particular toxicity that social media
adds to institutional life. People
who had been proud, only months
before, to say they belonged to this new and hopeful project began
publicly announcing their departure from it on Facebook and on X, and
could reasonably bear. Was it worth it? Also yes. The organisation still exists. It still cares for its exiled writers. What I take from the experience, in the end, is that
once a few began leaving, others felt
there is an enormous appetite
if only so they would not have to
build something together, and that
they had no choice but to follow,
among writers to organise and to
explain to themselves why they had
this same appetite does not always
stayed. It is a kind of mass hysteria that moves at the speed of a feed
rather than the speed of thought. We survived it.
The most recent crisis, not so long ago, nearly ended PEN Berlin
altogether, when we attempted to
pass a resolution condemning the
killing of journalists and writers in
Gaza. Fifty members resigned over it in the end, twenty five because they felt the resolution was too
sympathetic to Israel, and twenty five because they felt it was too
sympathetic to Palestine. I have
come with the discipline to live up to what free expression actually demands of a person when it is inconvenient.
“It is a kind of mass hysteria that moves at the speed of a feed rather than the speed of thought.” I said it so often it began to feel like
come to think that if neither side
a broken record: PEN Berlin should
probably arrived at something close
said, and where nothing is cancelled
can agree on why they left, we
to a fair compromise, though I still
argue about this with close friends, and I am not entirely sure they are wrong.
“PEN Berlin should be a place where everything can be said, and where nothing is cancelled before it has even been spoken aloud.”
be a place where everything can be before it has even been spoken aloud. I worked at this for more than two years, largely without pay, and at real cost to my own writing. Deniz set aside his journalism to do the same. And for most of that time, the major German press treated us as something faintly suspect, as though we were a political faction to be watched rather than a cultural project trying, imperfectly, to hold a room open for disagreement. I still do not entirely understand why.
So did I fail? Yes, I think in some
But that, in the end, is what I have
more hope in this project than it
among writers.
ways I did, and I probably invested
learned about building communities
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The Freedom of Speech Advocate
LORD YOUNG
The journalist and founder of the Free Speech Union reports from the frontlines persuade young people, and people on
Lord Yound
the left in particular, why they should care about this.
I think the ground has shifted a little over the past twelve months, partly
because of the pro-Palestinian protests
and the trouble people have got into over
things they’ve chanted or worn, including arrests for expressing support for
Palestine Action. It was telling, I think, that a Labour activist was ejected from
the party’s own conference this year. And in America, the Trump administration
has been quite supportive of free speech
internationally, especially when it comes to Europe, even if it’s been far less
reliable in upholding it domestically.
That’s made free speech a bigger issue
for the anti-Trump left too. We’re always looking for people on the left who get into trouble so we can defend them,
precisely to undermine the idea that this is a right-wing cause.
The argument I find most useful with left-of-centre students is to point out
that free speech has never simply been a tool for defending the status quo.
There’s a common idea that free speech
W
e've always styled the Free Speech Union as a nonpartisan
organisation, and I think that matters, because free speech shouldn’t just be
a concern for people on the right. We go to universities trying to explain to
students why free speech should matter to them, and we set up something we call the Academy programme, which gives money to free speech societies
and debating societies that want to host 20
good-faith discussions about politically contentious issues. If a university says it can’t afford the security costs for an event like that, we weigh in and pay
them ourselves, and if a society gets
into trouble for hosting it, we defend
them. We’ve been doing exactly that for institutions like the Durham Union,
which has run a whole series of debates
with our backing, and it’s been working quite well. But it remains a battle to
marginalises historically disadvantaged people, that an open marketplace of
ideas ignores real power differentials. But historically, free speech has been a weapon of the dispossessed. We wouldn’t have had the suffragette
movement and the vote for women
without it. We wouldn’t have had the
gay rights movement. We wouldn’t have had the civil rights movement in the
United States, certainly not without the
American Civil Liberties Union winning
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a string of landmark First Amendment
of that test, it deserves protection.
to organise, protest and march. Free
which is why I’ve been asked to lead
cases that allowed civil rights leaders
speech has historically sat on the side of the dispossessed, not the powerful.
That argument usually lands, even if it’s a challenge to make.
We fall a long way short of that here, a commission for the Leader of the Opposition to review the rules that
currently restrict free speech in this
country and recommend which should
grain of human nature even in places that consider themselves free. I think we could easily slide in the same direction. Digital ID is part of that worry. We’re not there yet, and I’m sure it’s not the government’s intention, but
The deeper difficulty with defending
be repealed, amended, or introduced.
a system like that could in principle
natural human impulse. If someone
to something like a First Amendment,
Chinese-style social credit mechanism,
sacred, say you’re a Muslim confronted
constitutional machinery, since no
Quran, the instinct is to lash out, not
But the Equality Act has, in practice,
people why they should put up with
clearly possible to entrench protections
rely on institutions, our universities,
Parliament with the right kind of
that tradition, and I think they’ve fallen
hard for a future Parliament to repeal.
free speech is that it goes against a
My aim is to get us as close as we can
be turned into something like a
tramples on something you hold
even though we don’t have the same
where someone could be locked out of
with someone burning a copy of the
Parliament can bind its successor.
to tolerate it. It’s hard to persuade
managed to bind its successors, so it’s
speech they find deeply offensive. We
politically, by sprinkling an act of
our newspapers, the BBC, to uphold
political fairy dust that makes it very
down on the job. Partly that’s the long march through the institutions: those institutions are now largely run by
the radically progressive left, and free speech used to be a value they prized when they were on the outside. Now
that they’re in charge, culturally if not always politically, it matters far less to them, and they’re not shy about
silencing critics who dissent from their own sacred values. So we have to keep restoring belief in the importance of
free speech in those very institutions,
because you are always fighting against human nature.
I’d slightly hesitate to call myself a
free speech absolutist. I don’t think the right to free speech extends to child pornography, official secrets,
libel or fraud. There are reasonable,
narrow categories where speech has
to be restricted. But beyond those, I
think the Americans have got it right with the First Amendment. The test should be the Brandenburg test: is
what’s being said both intended to
and likely to incite imminent lawless
action. Unless speech fails both parts
“ You can pass as many laws as you like protecting free speech, but in practice it depends heavily on judges interpreting them correctly.” It’s worth remembering that America wasn’t always the bulwark for free
speech it is today. It took the right
justices, at the start of the twentieth century, to interpret it that way. You
payments or public transport for saying something that displeases the regime. It’s a weapon that a future, more authoritarian government could misuse, even if nobody intends that today. Then there’s the question of how the police actually behave in practice. Take what happened to Graham Linehan, the comedy writer, who was arrested by five armed officers when he landed at Heathrow. I told him that next time, if the police stop him over something he’s said on social media, he should just say he’s a Chinese spy and claim automatic immunity. When he was arrested, he was held for almost twelve hours and only released when his blood pressure rose so high he had to be taken to hospital. We pushed hard and eventually got the police to drop the charges. It turned out a trans rights activist had reported him over
can pass as many laws as you like
three things he’d posted on X. When
depends heavily on judges interpreting
no further action against Graham, we
I worry about the politics of judicial
of hours later, came the announcement
protecting free speech, but in practice it
the police announced they were taking
them correctly, which is exactly why
started celebrating, and then, a couple
appointments here. The lesson
from countries that call themselves
democracies but are gradually eroding free speech, whether that’s Thailand,
that they would no longer be investigating so-called non-crime hate incidents either. That felt like an
India or Hong Kong, is that free speech
entirely unexpected second round of
because defending it runs against the
significant.
is always in a kind of perpetual peril,
champagne, and I think it was hugely
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The Polymath
SARAH TUCKER The Edward de Bono biographer on the great British institution of PMQs – and why it needs to change © House of Commons
B
Sarah Tucker
ritain’s political parties have become rather like divorced
Edward de Bono would have
where nobody notices. The Greens
technically committed to the welfare
In I Am Right, You Are Wrong, he argued that Western thinking is
people who never expect to govern.
parents at a school sports day:
of the children, but mainly occupied with ensuring the other side looks
faintly ridiculous beside the orange squash table. One watches Prime Minister’s Questions with the
peculiar sensation that nobody
present has the slightest intention of solving anything at all. They
are there to win a mood, dominate a clip, survive a headline, or in
moments of real ambition, trend on X for six and a half minutes
before being replaced by a video of a Labrador opening a fridge.. 22
recognised the pathology instantly.
fundamentally adversarial. Our
systems reward attack rather than
construction. Intelligence becomes
the ability to demolish the opponent’s case, not improve reality. Politics, especially British politics, has
possess the curious confidence of
Reform UK has mastered the politics
of permanent dissatisfaction, which is perhaps the easiest politics of all. And yet the great problems
confronting Britain are precisely the sort that cannot be solved within
become a cathedral to this error.
tribal silos. Housing, productivity,
Labour must fail for Britain to
security, educational decline,
the Conservatives are not merely
demographic ageing. These are
The Liberal Democrats specialise in
do not respond well to party slogans
The Conservative Party believes
immigration, social care, energy
succeed. Labour increasingly believes
regional inequality, NHS reform,
mistaken but morally radioactive.
systems problems. Systems problems
sounding sensible in constituencies
produced by exhausted 27 year olds in
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Westminster offices eating Pret salads at 10pm.
The difficulty is that modern politics incentivises fluency of style over
integrity of thought. Politicians are trained almost entirely in reactive cognition. They learn debating,
rebuttal, positioning, framing, and tactical ambiguity. Very few are trained in generative thinking.
Almost nobody in Parliament is
rewarded for saying: “My opponent has identified 40 per cent of the
answer, and perhaps we should build from there.” That sentence would
currently be treated as evidence of a neurological event.
The deeper problem is cultural.
Britain has confused cleverness with effectiveness for so long that the
distinction barely registers anymore. We admire devastating one liners
more than functioning systems. We reward rhetorical destruction over practical construction. A minister dismantling an opponent at the
despatch box receives infinitely more
features of British politics is that all
outcomes. De Bono constantly argued
useful truth while behaving as though
discovering new ideas because both
major parties possess fragments of
partial truth were indistinguishable
from total revelation. Conservatives are broadly correct that incentives matter, that markets can generate dynamism, and that excessive
bureaucracy slowly suffocates national energy. Labour is broadly correct
that social cohesion collapses when inequality becomes too grotesque
and when public services decay into humiliating theatre. The Liberal
Democrats are often correct about
constitutional reform and localism,
though they communicate this with
the subdued charisma of a particularly conscientious parish newsletter.
The Greens are correct that endless growth without environmental
accounting is fantasy economics.
Reform UK is correct that large parts of Britain feel culturally ignored,
economically stagnant, and managed by people who regard national
identity as faintly embarrassing.
“ The tragedy is reforming procurement systems that these insights or modernising infrastructure. are treated not as The country that invented the parliamentary heckle now struggles to components of a build reservoirs. national operating This is not simply a Westminster system but as problem. It runs through British life. Oxbridge debating culture, political proprietary assets in journalism, social media performance, panel shows, even middle class dinner a perpetual electoral parties where somebody eventually licensing dispute.” admiration than a minister quietly
says “well actually” in the tone of
a minor legal intervention. Britain
The tragedy is that these insights
construction. We have become a
a national operating system but as
romanticises opposition more than nation unusually skilled at identifying failure and strangely hesitant about designing success.
One of the more extraordinary
are treated not as components of proprietary assets in a perpetual electoral licensing dispute.
A lateral thinking approach would begin not with ideology but with
that argument is a poor method for
sides become emotionally invested in defending existing positions. British
politics exemplifies this magnificently. We do not ask: “What housing
system would produce affordable
homes, stable communities, and rising family formation?” We ask: “What
housing position prevents the Daily
Mail or The Guardian from becoming cross for 48 hours?”
The result is paralysis disguised as activity.
Take housing. Conservatives
instinctively favour developers but fear existing homeowners. Labour fears alienating environmental
and local activist groups. Greens
oppose development on ecological
grounds. Reform opposes migration pressure while often supporting
suburban expansion. Each position contains some validity and some absurdity. A collaborative model
would acknowledge simultaneously
that Britain needs dramatically more housing, that communities resent
ugly speculative development, that infrastructure must accompany
expansion, and that environmental protections matter. This sounds
blindingly obvious. Which is perhaps
why Westminster has no interest in it. Instead of asking how Britain might solve housing, politicians should ask
how they could make it permanently worse. The answers appear almost
immediately. Build homes without GP surgeries or transport. Make
planning systems so labyrinthine
that a small extension requires the administrative endurance of the
Napoleonic Wars. Ensure all new
developments resemble a business
park outside Düsseldorf. Encourage older homeowners to oppose all www.finito.org.uk
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lower exploitation, serious border
Edward De Bono (Wikipedia.org)
competence, and an honest discussion about scale. Instead we oscillate
between slogans and euphemisms
like a nation attempting to assemble IKEA furniture while refusing to
acknowledge the existence of screws. Here de Bono’s “PO” device becomes useful. A provocative operation
is not intended as policy but as a
mental crowbar. PO: Britain permits
completely open immigration for five years. Westminster would collapse into immediate cardiac distress, but eventually useful questions
might emerge about labour markets, housing, integration, infrastructure,
and what actually causes social strain. Equally: PO: Britain allows virtually no immigration at all. Suddenly half the political class would discover
by Wednesday afternoon that there is apparently nobody available to
staff hospitals, care homes, logistics networks, or install boilers west of Reading. local building while asking younger
Liberal Democrats could push local
grandchildren with sufficient urgency.
attention on infrastructure strain and
people why they are not producing Hidden inside the satire sits the diagnosis.
Imagine a cross party Housing
Settlement Commission insulated from daily electoral combat, with representation from all major
parties, economists, planners, environmentalists, and local
authorities. Not a performative committee producing a 400
page PDF nobody reads, but an
institution empowered to set 20year targets. Conservatives could
contribute market efficiency. Labour could insist upon social housing
obligations. Greens could enforce
sustainability and beauty standards. 24
accountability. Reform could focus
The point is not the provocation
itself. The point is to escape stale binary thinking.
demographic realism. Britain might
Parliament itself is structurally hostile
alarming prospect.
The chamber rewards interruption,
accidentally build something. An
The same applies to immigration,
to collaborative problem solving. theatrical indignation, and tribal
where British politics has descended
choreography. It is essentially a
hysteria. Conservatives promise
with television cameras. One
historically high numbers. Labour
proposed abolishing Prime Minister’s
avoiding candour about economic
it with something resembling
anger. Business leaders quietly panic
Admittedly this would reduce
treat overseas students as financial
The British public enjoys political
into a theatre of mutually profitable
medieval debating society updated
control while presiding over
suspects de Bono would have
criticises incompetence while
Questions altogether and replacing
dependency. Reform monetises public
Six Thinking Hats sessions.
at labour shortages. Universities
national entertainment considerably.
oxygen. Nobody says plainly that
Britain simultaneously needs skilled migration, stronger integration,
humiliation in the same way Romans enjoyed lions. Still, it might produce fewer catastrophes.
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Imagine it briefly. The white hat
interviewers increasingly resemble
infrastructure projects could not
or migration. The red hat
that nobody has thrown a wine glass
different rosette entered Downing
asks for facts about productivity acknowledges public emotions
without embarrassment. The black hat examines risks. The yellow hat
identifies opportunity. The green hat generates alternatives. The blue hat manages the process itself. Instead Westminster attempts all hats
simultaneously while screaming. The country also suffers from an
elite monoculture masquerading as diversity. Politicians increasingly
emerge from identical educational
and professional pipelines. They may differ ideologically, but cognitively they are remarkably similar. They are trained to communicate, not
necessarily to build. Britain needs
more polymathic thinkers in politics, people who understand business,
science, systems theory, engineering, psychology, technology, and history simultaneously. One suspects the average minister could explain a
messaging grid more confidently than the electricity grid.
This matters because modern
disappointed theatre critics furious yet. A politician calmly exploring nuance is treated with visible
irritation, like a guest at a dinner party insisting upon discussing municipal bond markets.
like a corporation in which every
reflection occasionally still survive.
Perhaps the real task is not
Of course, one objection immediately
persuading parties to agree on
partially true. Humans enjoy tribal
impossible and faintly sinister.
complexity into emotionally
aim instead is to redesign political
they are dreadful” is psychologically
becomes strategically rational rather
requires calories. Yet voters are also
At present, Britain has a politics
hunger for seriousness, competence,
that no longer exist. The twentieth
appears: voters want conflict. This is
everything. That would be both
competition because it simplifies
Democracy requires tension. The
manageable narratives. “We are good,
incentives so that cooperation
soothing. Nuance, unfortunately,
than reputationally suicidal.
exhausted. There is a detectable
designed for victory conditions
and adulthood. The popularity of
technocratic language during crises reflects a public desire, however
inconsistently expressed, for politics to resemble problem solving rather than amateur dramatics.
journalism rewards fury because
for shared ownership of success.
terrible click through rates. Political
At present, Westminster behaves
sabotaging adjacent teams.
A genuinely lateral political
trend. Constructive ambiguity has
outcomes rather than partisan purity.
where complete sentences and actual
heavily complicit in worsening the
Collaborative thinking does not
rewarded electorally for national
department receives bonuses for
“ The aim instead NHS is not simply a healthcare issue. It is a productivity issue, demographic is to redesign issue, housing issue, education issue, political incentives immigration issue, and technological so that cooperation issue. Yet departments remain siloed because Whitehall still functions like becomes strategically a Victorian filing cabinet. Parties rational rather mirror this fragmentation. Everyone protects their territory. Nobody than reputationally redesigns the machine. suicidal.” The media, meanwhile, remains fury performs magnificently online.
Street. Imagine if politicians were
Except, naturally, for Finito World,
problems are interdisciplinary. The
entire situation. Modern political
be abandoned merely because a
century rewarded ideological clarity and mass party loyalty. The twenty first century requires adaptive
systems thinking. We still operate Westminster as though Clement
Attlee and Margaret Thatcher are due back from lunch at any moment. Meanwhile the country waits
patiently in the corridor, clutching a broken boiler and a council tax bill,
while five political tribes argue over whose press release sounds most morally hydrated.
culture would create incentives
Imagine if major reforms required co signature across parties for implementation beyond one
parliamentary cycle. Imagine if
Sarah Tucker www.finito.org.uk
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A Question of Degree
JAZMIN ATKINS
Is university still worth it when a degree doesn’t lead directly to a career? Jazmin Atkins reflects on her own journey from philosophy to property, and the value of education beyond employment.
M
y parents deeply questioned my decision to read
Jazmin Atkins
philosophy at university. They
were refugees who believed firmly in building a new life by entering a profession or a business that
would enable security and safety.
They understood that a degree in philosophy was interesting but
it was vocationally a non-starter. Looking back, I sympathise with
them and wonder if my degree did
help or hinder my career in building a successful property search and acquisition business.
Higher education is simply not just a degree, it’s sowing the seed of
enduring curiosity. My enjoyment of history started with stories of
Kings and Queens and evolved into
an interest in the history of thought and society; the great western
civilisations versus eastern ones.
How neighbouring countries became
democracies and others dictatorships, all this fascinated me. All very well..
but Philosophy is not going to get me
a job and where, my parents asked, am I going with this?
A non-vocational degree in history or English would have had my parents
seal of approval. They understood my interest but also knew that abstract
books and long analytical essays would test me. So to answer my parents’
question, I had no firm idea where my degree would lead me.
In the early 90’s there wasn’t the
intense competition to get university 26
places. Further education was
Philosophy didn’t pave the way to a
government grant. Student debt wasn’t
wage. The long nights reading and
funded and some students received a
an issue then, quite the opposite. After three years, I left with a degree, which
I had enjoyed, little debt, and my head filled with idealism and enthusiasm. I wish I knew how lucky I was.
My parents were, of course, right.
profession or a job, let alone a decent writing about Machiavelli and Hobbs, analysing utilitarianism, ethics,
liberalism or the social contract was
fantastic, but left me without a career focus.
Why the interest in political
COLUMNS Scuola di Atene The School of Athens, Raphael
philosophy? I was born in Iran to
heightened tensions. Friday night
and quotes I had studied would pop
revolution in 1979, my parents sold
debate. I learned early on, how to
governance would facilitate my thought
a Jewish family. After the Islamic
everything and left. We eventually
settled, via a brief stop in Israel, in London. We were alone.
“Higher education is simply not just a degree, it’s sowing the seed of enduring curiosity.” London in the 80’s was an exciting time politically. Strong western
capitalist democracy propounded by Thatcher and Reagan and the
crumbling of communism dominated the headlines. For me, politics was not abstract, it was real. It wasn’t
something I watched on TV from the comfort of an armchair, it entirely changed our lives. It caused fierce
arguments, created family fissures and
dinner was a platform for serious hold my own.
up in conversation at work. Theories of process whilst chairing the education
My interest in political thinking had
committee. Plato’s exploration of the
my degree and if possible, monetise
negotiations with international and
at 16, and at 22, I was the youngest
Marx’s dialectic would ring in my ears
to represent the Garden Suburb ward
during council debates. Machiavelli’s
to find an outlet, I needed to justify
art of ‘rhetoric’ would influence my
it. I joined the Conservative Party
increasingly wealthy buyers and sellers.
councillor to get elected. I continued
whilst dealing with the opposition
in the Borough of Barnet for 12 years.
notes on the ‘dangers of neutrality’
Being a councillor was challenging
would prevent me from laying low on
to live on, so I started working as an
From time to time I would revert to
continuum of my degree. Dealing with
my way as a conservative. In my last
and enjoyable but it wasn’t enough
contentious policy issues and speak up.
estate agent. Not quite the expected
Edmund Burke when I felt I was losing
people in the property world tested my theories on human nature and ethics.
Theories quickly turned into practice.
Negotiating and closing were becoming highly honed skills with both house buyers and council bureaucrats.
Quite randomly, philosophical concepts
year as councillor, I re-read much of
Adam Smith’s ‘The Wealth of Nations’ to better understand how the Tories
managed to create a own unique form
of capitalism that helped shape the UK
into one of the greatest countries in the world.
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COLUMNS Marble Statue of Socrates seated in a thoughtful pose by Leonidas Drosis. Apollo column in the background. Academy of Athens, Greece (Unsplash)
After 12 years I stood down as
options for university. It amuses
law. However, if my children don’t
and most rewarding job. With
parents' words. Now there is the
be competitive in the market place.
councillor. I was ready for the hardest parenthood came my toughest test
in the practise of the social contract, let alone physical endurance. I also
moved to southwest London, worked at the buying arm of Savills Plc,
invested in a buy to let portfolio and then set up a property search and acquisition company.
To come full circle, my children,
now teenagers, are considering their 28
me how I find myself repeating my added consideration of cost, debt,
intense competition for university places, AI, a weaker economy and reduction in job availability. My
children ask if it is worth it? Good question.
What is the cost/benefit trade off
of a degree exactly? We know that
degrees are essential to qualify if you choose a profession like medicine or
choose that path, they still need to They must have a baseline degree
qualification and a possibly a Masters, if they wish to have a higher earning capacity and be globally mobile.
However, three or four years of study takes you out of the workforce, you
can’t earn, have little work experience and you’re in debt. A degree in an
interest-only subject like philosophy, linguistics or social sciences seems
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like an indulgence. There is also a
burgeoning market for apprentices,
J.R.R Tolkien (Wikipedia.org)
which is gaining traction as well as a good reputation.
“A degree, deemed high/low brow or completely abstract can be useful. It can elevate your appeal as an employee and instil a lifelong interest in critical thinking and a deep inquiry of the fundamental truths about the way we live and our existence.” But is it an indulgence? Interestingly, non-vocational degrees don’t tie you
into one industry and sectors such as
“Would I encourage a or banking roles often appreciate the child to take a degree intellectual capability developed by non-vocational degrees. Which is in philosophy? Yes, why Oxbridge subjects like PPE are of course. It is not heavily oversubscribed. Many lawyers did not study law at university prior to an obvious stepping converting. There can be advantages of a stone for an ambitious wider educational background. career-minded A degree, deemed high/low brow or completely abstract can be useful. If person, but it elevates J.R.R. Tolkien didn’t study classics and English literature and didn’t read ancient your appeal as an Germanic and Old Norse languages, the employee.” world would have missed the magic of management consultancy, civil service
Lord of the Rings. Alan Turing’s study
of Mathematics specialising in abstract probability theory and logic became
Would I encourage a child to take a
degree in philosophy? Yes, of course.
essential in decoding Nazi messages
It is not an obvious stepping stone for
computer.
but it elevates your appeal as an
during the war and established the first
an ambitious career-minded person,
employee. It instils a lifelong interest
in critical thinking and a deep inquiry of the fundamental truths about the way we live and our existence.
Seneca wrote in his Letters for a Stoic “no man is good by chance. Virtue is something which must be learned”.
Meaning that one’s ability to be good
is intrinsic but needs to be taught and developed. This has stayed with me
as a powerful reminder in humanity’s capacity to do good and its thirst to
achieve great things. Seneca believed this even though his personal life
was filled with betrayal and sorrow.
It’s a great life lesson to keep in your pocket.
The writer is the founder of Atkins Property Search.
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Relatively Speaking
EUAN BLAIR
G
The son of the former Prime Minister on growing up in Number 10 – and what he chose to do with it. rowing up in Downing Street sounds like an unusual
childhood, and in one sense it was.
But children don't experience their parents as history does. My father was just my dad — a nice enough
man, nothing special. It was only
later, when I began to understand what the role actually required,
that I grasped how unusual that
environment had been. The lesson I took from it was not political,
and it was not about power. It was
something simpler and, in retrospect, more valuable: if he could go and be Prime Minister, why couldn't I do
anything? That sense of possibility
is, I recognise, pretty unusual. I don't talk about it much. But it was there, and it mattered.
I went into banking partly because I was genuinely interested in how markets work and capital gets
allocated, and partly because I knew I
would always be in my father's shadow in politics. Morgan Stanley gave me the mechanics. But what I actually
cared about — what I couldn't stop
thinking about — was education and
Euan Blair
employment. The question was how
considerably more than simply make
who acquire skills faster in an applied
to set up a charity. Philanthropy has
The route I stumbled into was
academic one. We have spent decades
can construct a commercial model,
how nearly everyone got a job for
on their academic performance in
the flow of work, applied to the actual
Employers, once you actually speak
your job better and faster. It seems
know in the abstract. They care what
to approach it. I was determined not
money.
real limits on what it can build. If you
apprenticeships, which is of course
sorting people into categories based
most of human history. Training in
school and calling it meritocracy.
tasks in front of you, learning to do
to them, don't much care what you
obvious. It is largely how most people
you can do inside their organisation.
you can scale it across geographies and attract the kind of investment that
no charitable foundation could ever
mobilise. We eventually raised $500
million — in dollars because all of it
came from Silicon Valley — in pursuit of something I believed could do 30
actually learn best. There is, I would argue, a majority of the population
working environment than in an
The credential is not the point. The capability is the point.
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“If he could go and be Prime Minister, why couldn't I do anything? That sense of possibility is, I recognise, pretty unusual. I don't talk about it much. But it was there, and it mattered.” Before Multiverse, I spent time
working for an organisation helping long-term unemployed people find jobs. We were, I came to realise, putting a sticking plaster over
something much deeper. Getting
someone a job was only half the battle. Keeping them in it was extremely
hard, and one of the core reasons was
the absence of any training component — any structure for navigating the
early experiences of work, which are
genuinely difficult not just for young people but for anyone changing
career. That gap between placement
and retention is where so many social programmes quietly fail. The skills pipeline, rather than the academic
credentialing pipeline, felt like the thing that actually mattered.
There's a Picasso story — probably apocryphal — where he sketches a
woman in a café in about a minute.
She reaches for the napkin and he says that'll be ten thousand francs. She
protests: it only took you a minute.
It took me forty years, he says. What
AI is doing is compressing forty years of human expertise into something
available at a fingertip. The question
this raises for young people entering
the workforce is genuinely open, and I
Freepik
don't think anyone yet has an honest
These are also things that don't
that as expertise gets commoditised,
academic credentials. That matters
answer to it. The optimistic case is
a different set of capacities — taste,
judgment, context, the ability to hold other people accountable, the ability
to discern which of ten AI-generated outputs is actually the right one —
becomes newly valuable. The founder
correlate straightforwardly with
enormously for who gets access to
the best opportunities. We have 150 to 200 qualified applicants for every apprenticeship place we offer at
Multiverse. The mismatch between supply and demand is stark, and it
of On Running told me recently
has less to do with AI than with
the most important people were the
this country about how training is
shoes. Those people have largely been
levy was introduced with the right
is done by AI. The most important
workforce training than almost any
creation will actually sell. A whole new
a serious structural problem — but the
set of instincts, has moved to the
and the result is that it hasn't flowed
to see this play out across every sector,
likely to move the dial is a serious
that when he started the company,
conscious political choices made in
craftsmen literally designing the
funded and valued. The apprenticeship
sidelined now because the crafting
intentions — Britain invests less in
role has become discerning which AI
other developed economy, and that is
group of people, with a whole different
Treasury treats the money as its own,
centre of the company. We are going
properly. The single intervention most
in ways we can't fully imagine.
wage subsidy linked to long-term
“What AI is doing is compressing forty years of human expertise into something available at a f ingertip.”
calculation that makes employers
employment, reducing the risk-reward reluctant to take on entry-level talent at scale. That has never been made with the seriousness it requires.
On Ofsted: the criticism was that we weren't having enough careers
conversations with our apprentices. Last year, through our AI agent Atlas, we had 800,000 careerwww.finito.org.uk
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not historically the most digitally
agile large economy — 80 percent
of German companies still use a fax
machine, which is one of my favourite statistics — has just enshrined in its
coalition agreement a commitment to train and upskill 46 million workers.
France under Macron made sovereign AI a national priority and has made
reasonable progress on it. The events of recent months have made clear that we cannot rely on the United States when it comes to technology sharing, even with its closest allies. We are going to have to build our own solutions.
At the moment I don't think we are taking that seriously enough, and the political instability — we are
approaching our fifth Prime Minister in five years — does not help.
“We are going to have to build our own solutions. At the moment I don't think we are taking that seriously enough, and the political instability does not help.”
(Freepik)
Britain does still have real advantages.
specific conversations with people
with is a regulatory and political
recognised. We also see 60 percent of
— completion rates, qualification
on our programmes. Those weren't
our apprentices receive a promotion or pay increase while still on their
programme. One of the most common reasons someone leaves a qualification with us before completing it is that their employer has promoted them
and told them they no longer need it. I am entirely comfortable with that
outcome. What I am less comfortable 32
framework that still measures inputs attainment — rather than the hard economic outcomes that actually change lives.
The schools question is the one that genuinely frightens me. We are still
having debates about whether teachers
are allowed to use AI in the classroom. Teaching unions have all sorts of
views about it. Meanwhile Germany,
We are ahead of most of the world
in embedding technology across the
workforce. We are not going to build the most sophisticated foundational models — the compute costs alone make that impossible, and we have
the second highest industrial energy
costs in the world — but we could be
the fastest adopters of AI anywhere, if
there were the political will to back it.
That requires a seriousness of purpose, a willingness to make decisions
and stick to them, that has been
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Euan Blair
conspicuously absent. The window in
read Suetonius on the youth of
unlimited.
their criminality, their indifference
which we can make that choice is not
“Britain could be the fastest adopters of AI anywhere, if there were the political will to back it. That requires a seriousness of purpose, a willingness to make decisions and stick to them.” On the question of attitude and
entitlement among young people: I studied ancient history, and if you
ancient Rome — their indolence,
to honest work, their obsession with spectacle over substance — you
recognise that every generation has said exactly this about the next.
I simply don't see young people
today as differently motivated from
previous generations. Most of them
want to work. Most of them wouldn't rather rely on benefits. Most of
them are not the creatures of social media caricature. What's different now is that social media has given a global platform to influencers
peddling a version of young people
that has genuinely poisoned employer perception, and employers arrive
at the hiring process with a set of
assumptions that make placement harder than it needs to be.
“The government's ban on social media for under-sixteens is one of the few recent policy decisions I would applaud without qualification.” The government's ban on social media for under-sixteens is one of the few
recent policy decisions I would applaud without qualification. It has been,
for this generation, one of the most damaging developments in living
memory. The harm is not hypothetical. We see it directly in the people we work with every day.
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Ten Thousand Hours
JON PETTMAN
F
Jon Pettman felt he was different growing up – but in time found his way to a remarkable career in service
inding My Corridor: From a Sixteen-Year-Old Footman to
Building an International Service Empire
The first time a teacher asked me to
stay behind after class, I expected the
usual speech: drifting off, not applying
myself, disappointing potential. School
had always been a long corridor of those conversations. I was bright in flashes –
particular, neat, obsessed with order and presentation – but I couldn’t make my grades reflect any of it. It wasn’t until
But I said yes. The Door That Changed Everything That weekend at Buckingham Palace was my first glimpse into a world
that would become my life’s work.
The moment I stepped into uniform,
something clicked. Service had structure. It was choreography – a quiet, exact,
almost meditative rhythm. There were rules, standards, details that mattered. And in this environment, for the first
time, I felt in time rather than behind.
my early forties that I was diagnosed
I learned how to hold a salver so it
years finally lifted. By then, my life had
without interrupting it, how polished
with ADHD and the fog of those early already taken a very different direction. At sixteen, I left school with no
remarkable qualifications and headed to Thanet Catering College – now
seemed to float, how to read a room
glass could hold light like crystal water. In those grand halls, I discovered
something essential: the things I’d
been told were flaws were, in the right
Broadstairs College – convinced that
environment, strengths. My hyperfocus,
I’d thrive as a chef. I imagined kitchens
the small things – these were assets in
were hot, chaotic, and unforgiving. I
I began taking regular placements
tasking felt like trying to tie shoelaces
additional staff, each one refining
my love of neatness and beauty meant
my obsession with precision, my care for
as temples of order. In reality, they
private service.
could plate exquisitely, but the multi-
whenever the Royal Household needed
in a storm. It was clear: my instinct for precision was not enough to keep pace with the adrenaline of the pass.
my understanding of discretion, Uri Levine (Wikipedia)
anticipation, and the elegant invisibility of professional service. Eventually I
Jon Pettman
transforms the lives it touches – quietly, but profoundly.
The industry needed a place where the right people could be matched to the right households and trained to the highest standards.
I founded Exclusive Household Staff (EHS) to provide exactly that – an
agency that understood not just roles,
but the nuances of culture, compatibility, personality, and craft. EHS grew
Six weeks in, my lecturer, Mr Southgate,
grew into roles in stately homes, private
gentleness about him, a quiet old-world
a House Manager to Chief of Staff.
him, bracing myself – only to be handed
the threads together. What had been
But recruitment was only half the
become the architecture of my success.
mentorship, discipline, and example –
asked me to stay behind. He had a
households, becoming a Butler, then
dignity shaped by service. I stood before
Much later, my ADHD diagnosis tied
a doorway to my future.
“How would you like to work at
Buckingham Palace this weekend as a Footman?” he asked.
I didn’t even know what a Footman was. 34
labelled as difficulty in school had
Building Companies with Purpose As my career developed, I realised two things clearly: Exceptional service
quickly, expanding across the UK and
internationally, building a reputation for
excellence that I am incredibly proud of. picture. Service is a skill honed through just as I had been mentored. To honour that lineage and formalise the craft, I
founded: The Exclusive Butler School
(EBS) – to train new generations in the
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traditions and modern realities of private service.
I also launched Luxury Yacht Interior Training (LYIT) – specialising in the
unique exactness required aboard luxury vessels.
immensely proud of. I also maintain work-experience
partnerships with two places close to
my heart: Broadstairs College, where my journey began, and The British Embassy in Paris, where I worked early in my
Today, these companies operate
career.
exceptional individuals in households,
students each summer have spent a
internationally, training and placing
For more than 25 years, one or two
estates, yachts, and private offices across
month at the British Ambassador’s
the world.
A Career Built on Apprenticeship and Opportunity
Because of the way my own career
residence, learning the true art of service.
Seeing them step into that historic house – exactly as I once did – remains one of the most meaningful parts of my work.
began – with someone taking a chance
Closer to home, we welcome students
in creating pathways for young people.
placements, giving them an early
on me – I have always believed fiercely
from local schools for work experience
Apprenticeships, mentorships, and early
glimpse of the workplace and the
opportunities are not just add-ons to
my business model; they are part of its foundation.
Over the years at EHS, I have taken on
possibilities within it. Many go on to
careers in hospitality, service, events, or management, and all leave with more confidence than they arrived with.
These are the very skills employers across every sector are desperate for. Young people who train in private service learn discipline, detail, confidence,
communication, timing, and poise.
Whether they stay in the industry or not, these skills are transformative.
“Service teaches you to take pride in excellence – to care not because someone is watching, but because the standard matters.” Service teaches you to take pride
in excellence – to care not because
someone is watching, but because the standard matters.
Finding Your Corridor If there is one message, I hope young
more than 10 apprentices straight from
I believe wholeheartedly in the power
same nervous hope I once had. Two are
point – Mr Southgate, senior butlers,
Not doing particularly well in one room
unspoken rules, clients who trusted me.
house. You may simply not have found
is a thank-you letter to the people who
I didn’t excel at school. I didn’t shine
Why Service Matters for Young People
Buckingham Palace, into the quiet
college. Many of them arrived with the
still with us today. Two more have grown through the ranks internally, carving
out careers within my companies and proving what potential can look like when given the right structure.
To ensure students from all backgrounds can access training and opportunity,
we also offer a fully funded scholarship place every year to our two-week
Exclusive Butler School programme.
This scholarship – worth over £7,500 –
is awarded to the most suited student at
their college and provides an immersive,
of mentors. I had them at every turning housekeepers who taught me the
doesn’t mean you don’t belong in the
In many ways, each of my companies
your corridor yet.
helped me step forward.
in a kitchen. But when I stepped into
Today
Service is so often misunderstood. It
is seen as old-fashioned, deferential, a world of stiff uniforms and rules. But
true service is something deeper and far more modern. It is:
professional training experience that
Discretion
to. Since launching the programme
Anticipation
many would otherwise never have access in 2018, we have placed numerous
scholarship students, often with no prior experience, into private households, luxury residences, and top hotels
worldwide.Watching them flourish in
roles across the globe is something I am
people take from my journey, it is this:
Emotional intelligence Resilience
Professionalism Precision
choreography of service, something
aligned. My instincts, my strengths, my
quirks – they belonged there. And from that moment, my path unfolded.
Today, as I lead EHS, EBS, and LYIT, expanding internationally, training
new generations, and championing
apprenticeships, that young sixteen-
year-old is never far from my mind. The one who stood nervously waiting for
another reprimand and instead received an opportunity.
Teamwork
A single “yes” changed my life.
Leadership disguised as support
those yeses for others.
Adaptability
My hope – my mission – is to create
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Tomorrow’s Leaders
SHAUNA TIFFANY The winner of the King’s Trust Young Changemaker Award on her astonishing career Can you take us back to a moment
Shauna Tiffany
you first had the idea for Lighthouse Therapy Hub? Where were you and what made you think this could actually be a business?
That is a really good question. It sits in a period of time where I was doing my
own healing from my own experiences, and I realised that there wasn’t access
to creative arts and wellbeing support available in the city that I lived in, or
it wasn’t easily accessible. I sat on it for years before I decided to do anything about it.
There were always roadblocks -
things happening in my life, with
my grandparents or other situations that meant I couldn’t take the steps forward. It wasn’t until I had my children that I realised I sat in a
really unique position of having lived
but it doesn’t have to be the end of
show up for myself, for my children,
it shouldn’t have happened, but it has,
move forward rather than being
my story. It’s a quiet acceptance that and I’m still capable of phenomenal
things. I would never have thought it was possible for me to have the life I have now.
experience and also being a parent.
What was it about play therapy and
to create a business that had an impact
other approaches didn’t?
That meant I could combine the two on other people.
How did your early experiences affect your self-belief when starting the
business, and how did you manage those feelings?
creative arts that reached you when
What’s not talked about when you’ve
experienced care or childhood trauma is the shame that comes with it. I couldn’t face that through words
because I thought I was a bad person.
and in my business. It means I can dragged back.
What made you apply to the King’s
Trust Enterprise programme despite doubting your idea?
I was afraid of being rejected, that
my idea would be seen as silly or that I wasn’t the right fit to turn it into a business.
We have a saying at home: ‘take the risk or lose the chance.’ My partner said the only way we’d find out is if I tried. If I didn’t, I’d be stuck not
It’s still something that happens now,
Play therapy and creative arts got
to be gentler with myself. I have a
to accept and understand that these
Ultimately, it was the not knowing
it wasn’t my fault. I don’t have to carry
children and everything happening
and I’ve come to accept that. I have
phenomenal skill set, but I also have to battle the things I’ve grown up with.
The belief that I wasn’t good enough, that I didn’t have anything, that my life would be nothing.
That’s part of my narrative, and I have
to hold it and accept that it happened, 36
underneath that. They allowed me
knowing.
things happened to me as a child, and
that pushed me, along with my
that shame anymore.
at the time. I couldn’t sit on the idea
The shame cycle still shows up,
anymore.
especially when things go wrong, but
What would you say to someone
it go. It’s completely changed how I
considering going for it anyway?
I know it’s not mine to hold. I can let
who finds it hard to reach out but is
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Find the people that you trust and the
places where you want to be. You want to be looking forward. It’s reaching out to people who are where you
want to be, because that gives you the motivation to continue.
Some people might hold you back
because they think it’s too risky, and
that’s okay, but you also need to find the people who tell you it’s possible. Even one person can make a
difference. Surrounding yourself with
those people can completely shift your mindset.
What did the practical business
support change for you, and what would have happened without it?
It took out the scary part of it, because once you know how to do it, it’s easy. Knowledge is power.
At the beginning, you think you
solicitors, judges and arbitrators as an equal, all with the same aim.
Even six months ago, I wouldn’t have thought somebody like me would be invited into those spaces. With my
background, I never thought I’d be in rooms like that.
But we are, and it’s working really
Every family is different, but ultimately we want them to be thriving in their own way. Was your shift in confidence a turning point or gradual? It’s been gradual. Reaching out to the King’s Trust was the first step, and
well. It shows there are solutions if we
there have been lots of small moments
look outside the box.
since then.
What did being named Young
Things like naming the business,
Changemaker mean to you?
registering it—things I didn’t think I
It means everything. It’s a title I’m
could do. Each step proved to me that
unbelievably proud of.
I could.
The first person I thought of was Anu,
Now, even if I don’t know the answer
who told me amazing things were
coming for me when I didn’t believe it. And I also thought of my children.
If it hadn’t been for them, I wouldn’t have believed this was possible. I
yet, I know I have the capacity to find it. What kept you going through your qualification over four years?
wouldn’t be here.
I knew I deserved a chance, just like
HMRC, sort accounts, create a
How does being a visible example for
everyone else. I wanted to be someone
where to start. The support breaks it
I hope that whatever situation
need to do everything; register with business plan. But you don’t know down into actionable steps.
Without that information, I would have been too scared to take the
chance. I was worried about getting things wrong, but actually it’s fairly simple once you know how.
Can you explain simply why
metaphor and creative approaches work?
An object is an object until we assign meaning to it. We use that meaning to help express thoughts, feelings,
emotions and memories. It’s in that meaning where the magic happens.
Looking at how far you’ve come, what moment has surprised you the most? Recently, we’ve been working with
professionals in collaborative law, and we had an event supporting children. I was sitting there with lawyers,
others sit with you?
someone is in, they see that there’s a
possibility. Because possibility creates hope, and hope creates change.
The King’s Trust is a family I never knew I needed, but now I’m in it,
I know it’s somewhere I can turn. People genuinely care, and I want others to feel that too.
What are families like when they
arrive, and what change looks like over time?
Usually they’ve tried everything and feel like there’s no hope left, like
nobody understands them. They feel lonely and unsupported.
They leave feeling heard, seen and
validated, and with the confidence
to create the change they need. They
move forward—whether that’s school,
work or improved family relationships.
my children were proud of, and I wanted to create a service I believed in. It was hard, and sometimes I had to take breaks, but I always came back. I also had support through the King’s Trust—someone to turn to if I needed help. That belief, both in myself and from others, kept me going. What would you say to your younger self entering the care system? I would say that things will be tough, but there’s a life you could only ever have dreamt of. I would never have thought I’d have children, run a business, or win awards. It’s just insane. I’m so proud, and it’s something I’ll hold onto for a lifetime. www.finito.org.uk
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Those Are My Principles
ROB RINDER MBE
I
The TV presenter and author reflects on what 20th century history can tell us about the state of things today t is difficult to begin any reflection on moral responsibility
Rob Rinder MBE
without turning to a voice that still cuts through time with startling
clarity. A teenage girl, writing in
hiding in 1944, gave us a sentence we repeat so often that we risk
draining it of meaning: “In spite of
everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.”
We quote it because it comforts us.
But it was not written for comfort. It was written in defiance.
Anne Frank wrote those words after
two years concealed behind a movable bookcase, cut off from school,
friends, daylight, and ordinary life.
Deportations were already underway. People vanished. Letters stopped.
Rumours of camps, starvation, and
forced labour circulated, though not yet in their full horror. Her world
had already narrowed almost beyond recognition. And yet, at precisely
Science was advancing. Conversations
promised to send me details of past
were emerging. The arts reflected a
I realised the date: the ninth of
about women’s rights and sexuality
belief that humanity was progressing.
performances. Later, in my hotel, November.
That date should trouble all of us.
a long-standing fascination with
“Catastrophe does By the time I returned to my room, not enter our world she had emailed me the programme solely through hatred. for that very day in 1938. Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony had been It enters through performed. A magnificent work, full and hope, expressing the our capacity to carry ofvastgrandeur possibilities of human existence. on as normal while The reviews were glowing. “What a night had been had by all,” they others are pushed out great declared, noting the standing ovation. of sight.” I remember the moment the translation
of the late nineteenth and early
halls, with their chandeliers and
Because those concertgoers, applauding
of extraordinary cultural confidence.
about the building’s history. She
a city where synagogues were burning.
that moment, she insisted on the possibility of human goodness.
That is what gives the line its power. Not innocence. Not naivety. Moral resistance.
A few years ago, I found myself
in Vienna, a city that represents,
perhaps more than any other, the height of a particular moment in
Western civilisation. I had arranged
a visit to the Konzerthaus, indulging Mahler and the great composers
As I walked through those grand
twentieth centuries. It was a period
painted ceilings, I asked an usher
38
was read to me. I froze.
Bruckner that evening, stepped out into
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Vienna Konzerthaus, Large Hall, Vienna, Austria
It was Kristallnacht. “What a great night had been had by all.”
That is the moment that matters. Not only the violence, but the applause. Because catastrophe does not enter our world solely through hatred. It
enters through our capacity to carry
on as normal while others are pushed out of sight.
“ The Holocaust did not begin with camps. It began with restrictions. With separation. With the quiet, bureaucratic shrinking of life.” Anne Frank’s diary reminds us of something we often forget. The Holocaust did not begin with
camps. It began with restrictions.
closed. Movement restricted.
bureaucratic shrinking of life. Jews
And what did most people do?
With separation. With the quiet,
could no longer go here, could no longer do that. Schools changed.
Belonging made conditional. They adjusted.
Friends disappeared. “Life went
When people approach me to talk
everyone else.
often follows a familiar pattern. They
on,” she wrote. Yes, life went on. For This is where our understanding
so often fails. We begin at the end. We picture barbed wire and gates, the words “Arbeit macht frei,” the
photographs taken after liberation
when the horror is undeniable. But by then, the essential work had already
about the Holocaust, the conversation ask what they should read. They tell me they have visited Auschwitz. They say
it moved them deeply, that they cried, that they returned changed.
And I am glad they went. But that is not enough.
“People become bystanders first. Those Before the camps came the language. Jews described as vermin, as who hid the Frank contamination, as a threat. Words that turned neighbours into enemies. Words family were courageous. that made cruelty sound like duty. But they were rare. Before the violence came the law. They were the exception, Rights removed not through chaos, but through civilised edict. Professions not the rule.” been done.
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COLUMNS
a culture that normalised exclusion. If there is one book I recommend above all others, it is Christopher Browning’s *Ordinary Men*. It
shows how individuals who were not fanatics or ideologues, but ordinary
people with families and jobs, became participants in atrocity. Not because they were uniquely evil, but because
they did not want to stand out. They did what was expected.
We like to imagine that we would be the heroes in such a story. The
rescuers. The brave few who resisted.
But history tells us something far less Because the essential question is not what happened at the end. It is how it began.
The guards at Auschwitz were not
born into that role. A man standing there at twenty-one had been an
eleven-year-old child just a decade earlier. He had absorbed ideas
gradually, through small steps, through
40
comfortable.
People become bystanders first.
memory. In small habits, like the
handkerchiefs filled with food he kept hidden in drawers. When I
asked him why, he said simply: “Just in case.”
“ The danger is not only open hatred. It is indifference. The moment when people decide that something is unfortunate, but not their concern.” Despite everything he had endured, he believed in this country. He
Those who hid the Frank family were
described arriving here as coming
were the exception, not the rule.
democracy, in the rule of law, in the
courageous. But they were rare. They I grew up in the shadow of a
grandfather who survived the
from hell into heaven. He believed in idea that these values could heal and protect.
Holocaust. He did not speak about
That belief feels harder to hold now.
in fragments. In sudden flashes of
identical form, but because the early
it often. His trauma revealed itself
Not because history repeats itself in
COLUMNS Anne Frank Statue (Wikipedia.org)
itself in the language of politics or inquiry. It appears in WhatsApp
Maya Angelou (Wikipedia.org)
groups among educated professionals. It presents itself as “just asking
questions.” But the patterns are unmistakable.
I have spoken recently with Jewish students about their sense of the
future in this country. Too many do
not feel safe. Too many believe their prospects here are narrowing.
That should concern all of us. Because it signals a stage that history teaches us to recognise. Not the end of the story, but the middle.
This is why education matters. Not as a form of remembrance alone,
but as a means of interruption. The
point is not only to look back, but to
identify the early signals. The shift in language. The joke that humiliates. signs are familiar. The danger is not only open hatred. It is indifference.
The moment when people decide that something is unfortunate, but not their concern.
Today, we hear language that echoes
the past. Groups described as threats, as invasions, as contaminants. We
see rights framed as privileges to be earned. Conspiracy theories spread
with extraordinary speed, amplified
by social media until fantasy takes on the weight of fact.
The stereotype that hardens. The silence that permits.
“In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.” Education can look like a student challenging a remark instead
of laughing along. It can mean
recognising conspiracy thinking and
“Goodness does not happen by accident. It requires effort. It requires practice. And above all, it requires courage.”
refusing to pass it on. It can mean
Antisemitism, in particular, has not
but without courage, none of them
disappeared. It has adapted. It dresses
standing beside someone who is being
“As Maya Angelou reminded us, you can practise all the virtues you like, but without courage, none of them endure.” Anne Frank never stopped observing, even in hiding. She insisted on describing the world as it was, not as she wished it to be. Her words leave us with a question that remains urgent. Are we willing to see what is happening around us, even when it would be easier not to? “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.”
singled out, rather than looking away.
Whether that remains true is not a
Goodness does not happen by
matter of quotation. It is a matter of
accident. It requires effort. It requires practice. And above all, it requires courage.
As Maya Angelou reminded us, you can practise all the virtues you like, endure.
choice. Of what we allow ourselves to see. And of what we decide to do once we have seen it. Those are my principles. And they are only worth anything if we do not depart from them. www.finito.org.uk
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EVENTS
Latest Event
TIM CLARK LAUNCHES HIS LATEST BETTER SCHOOLS REPORT: “SCHOOLS CANNOT SURVIVE IF THEY ARE HAMSTRUNG” Tim Clark
T
here is a particular pleasure in hearing a former headmaster
address a room. He does not need the microphone, he does not need notes, and he is not afraid to ask for a show
of hands. So it proved at Simpson’s in the Strand, where Ronel Lehmann,
founder of Finito Education, welcomed some eighty guests to the launch of
the organisation’s latest report on how schools might better prepare young people for the world of work. “We
need good ideas,” he said by way of
introduction, “and he is the man who has got them.” What follows is Tim Clark’s
address, lightly edited, in his own words. In 1918 David Lloyd George claimed that 42
the most formidable opponent Britain
operative word is good. A good education
German school system, because it was
or an apprenticeship, though it might be
had faced in the First World War was the that system which had allowed Germany to become an industrial and military
powerhouse. His point was that a school system can transform a country. With a million young people not in education,
employment or training, many of them for the long term, we need a transformative school system more than ever.
Our research, both in this report and in the work we did earlier this year with the Jobs Foundation, shows that the single biggest factor in preventing a
young person from becoming NEET
is, unsurprisingly, a good education. The
is not necessarily university, or college,
any of those. It is one that allows every
individual, regardless of background or
ability, to grow, to develop, to mature, and then to play an active and positive part in
the workforce, the economy, and society as a whole.
I want to make three points. The first is that this report argues, absolutely
unequivocally, that schools can be better equipped and better empowered to
prepare young people for work, and most of what we recommend is cost-effective.
Yes, we call for ring-fenced funding so that every school can offer first-class careers
EVENTS
education, the kind that motivates, that stimulates, that opens eyes. As Ophelia
Nick Hennigan, Andre Chris and Liz Brewer
says, “We know what we are, but know
not what we may be”. But that is the only
recommendation aimed directly at careers. The rest are about giving every young
person a good education. We call for a
broader range of subjects at fourteen, as
we have in every one of our reports, and
no, that is not about lowering standards. A broader curriculum raises standards, because by tracking skills, knowledge, attitude and interest it means fewer
sixteen-year-olds leave school as failures
and more leave with the qualifications and,
cognitive skills that employers cry out for.
A recent survey found that a quarter of
a job.
trips, or what the public schools rather
single qualified physics teacher. Almost
above all, the motivation to go out and get We also call for far greater emphasis on
the application of knowledge, in lessons and in examinations. We call for a nonacademic employability certificate that records and evaluates a young person’s
attendance, behaviour, attitude and work, because that is exactly what employers need to know, and because there is no better preparation for adult life than
It fully supports sport, music, drama and
better call co-curricular activities, because for many youngsters what they learn on the sports field, in the choir or on the
mountainside is of at least equal value to what they learn in the classroom. That is where they learn about risk, leadership, losing, failure, resilience and working together. Again, the very attributes employers pray for.
English secondary schools do not have a half rely on non-specialists to teach
mathematics. Despite a manifesto promise of six and a half thousand new teachers, the latest Department for Education
figures suggest there are two thousand fewer teachers in the system than two
years ago. No school system can be better than the quality of its teachers. I used the word criminal at our last launch and it
making young people responsible and
My third point is to state the obvious:
upset some people, but I think it is the
which may seem odd in a report about
However fine the product a school turns
no government of any colour in the last
to go to, there is a problem. We cannot
and resolved it. Only when we have an
training young people if their sole reward
motivated, highly effective classroom
young people to leap out of bed with
I began with Lloyd George. Let me
accountable for themselves. And we call, jobs, for far greater emphasis on the early years. The charity Kindred Squared has shown that by the age of twenty-two months the educational trajectory of
most children is already set. For many
children in this country, the whole of our
compulsory school system is too late, and is about catching up.
My second point is that this is
emphatically not a call for a sterile,
utilitarian school system geared purely to
schools cannot operate in a vacuum.
right word. This crisis is resolvable, and
out, if there are no jobs for young people
twenty years has seized it by the throat
expect employers to keep taking on and
adequate supply of highly trained, highly
is higher taxation. And we cannot expect
teachers will our school system deliver.
alacrity to find a job if they can earn two
thousand pounds a month by staying in it. Those things are beyond the remit of this
report, and beyond the control of schools, but they bear massively upon them.
the current economic needs of the country.
So let me finish with a point that is
academic subjects, the humanities,
every report, and on which nothing has
The report fully supports the traditional
languages, mathematics and the sciences, the arts, because it is in subjects such as
history that young people learn to read, to analyse, to reach conclusions from evidence, to think critically: the very
within our remit, one we have flagged in happened. Schools cannot deliver if they are hamstrung, and the single biggest
thing that hamstrings them is the teacher recruitment and retention crisis. It is a
crisis of quantity and it is a crisis of quality.
be non-partisan and end with George Lansbury, the Christian socialist who
led the Labour Party in the 1920s, who wrote towards the end of his life that if he had his time again he would invest
far more in changing people and far less in programmes. That is exactly what
this report asks for: a school system that develops every young child and changes
every young person for the better. Because if we change young people, we change
the economy, we change society, and we change the future.
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FEATURES Deep dives into the issues that matter
66 | INNOVATION NATION
America’s contribution to the world of work
44
76 AMAZING EDMISTON How to sell a superyacht
82 UTTERLY HEXAGONAL Katia Luna Benai’s latest designs
90 VALE, CHRISTOPHER CLARK Finito’s late great mentor
Donald Trump (Wikipedia.org)
46
COVER STORY
THE DISPLACER:
HOW DONALD TRUMP RESHAPED THE AMERICAN PRESIDENCY Christopher Jackson
I
t's often said the Oval Office is smaller than you think. The
rectangular waiting room with its
people rushing in and out has doors on three walls, and when two are ajar at
once you can hear the famous voice of its occupant spilling into the corridor
before you have even been shown in. It is a threshold of sorts, which very few people cross. Conrad Black, who has
known Trump more than twenty five
years and has written some two million words about him, was shown through it not long ago, and what struck him
once he was inside was less the room than the atmosphere around it: "it
was possible to see how the private
office functioned, and it was clear the president's staff is devoted to him personally."
Well, of course, you have to be – if you’re in any way anti-Donald Trump you can’t seriously expect your boss not to notice. But the smallness of the setting is a
metaphor for power and its limits. The White House, like Downing Street, is
notable for its physical smallness against its symbolic immensity, and this in turn makes you think that most presidents
fall short of really exercising the power of the office. As America turns 250, its current occupant, the 45th and 47th president, Donald Trump, whatever
one may think of him – and for most people the verdict will be decidedly
mixed – is one of the rare politicians
who seems now, especially in this second
term, to know exactly where the levers
where countries were, in many cases,
as people plausibly did of some of his
thirty five, a hundred and thirty seven
are. One cannot accuse him of inaction, predecessors.
“We have accomplished more in 43 days than most administrations accomplished in four years, or eight years, and we are just getting started.” It is, in fact, a roster of achievement on his own terms whether one likes it or
not, and the man himself never lets you forget it. "We have accomplished more in 43 days than most administrations accomplished in four years, or eight
years, and we are just getting started,"
Trump told Congress within weeks of
returning to office in 2025. He was not exaggerating the pace, whatever one
thirty, thirty one years, a hundred and years they've been fighting," Trump
explains, "and I brought peace. And I did it through, in not all cases but
probably at least five of the seven that
we've done so far, it was through trade." His first term, for its part, had already
delivered unemployment at a fifty year low, the largest corporate tax reform
in a generation, the Abraham Accords, three Supreme Court appointments,
and the replacement of NAFTA with the USMCA. A year into his second,
standing at the White House podium on the anniversary of his return, he
put the two terms together in his own inimitable idiom: "We have a lot of
accomplishments... we've done more than any administration has." Fact
checkers picked apart plenty of the
specific figures that day, the gasoline
price, the jobs numbers, the size of the
investment pledges, but the underlying
claim, that this is a presidency organised entirely around the accumulation of
visible, countable wins, is not in dispute even among people who despise him.
makes of the substance: 228 executive
Gilt Edge
for modern presidents; the first negative
close, and what does he sit in front
orders in his first full year back, a record
What does he actually look like, up
net migration in fifty years; and, by his
of. The Resolute Desk itself has not
own count, seven or eight peace deals brokered abroad, a tally independent observers regard as generous but not
fantastical. "I've made seven peace deals
changed, but almost everything around
it has. Gold cherubs, brought over from
the Louis XIV ballroom at Mar-a-Lago, now peer down from above the doors. A www.finito.org.uk
ISSUE 19
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COVER STORY
portrait of Reagan hangs prominently
inclined to do this. The comedian and
cause will be essentially impossible
new, much larger George Washington,
the personal side of Trump over a two
Trump phenomenon is all about pace
to his left, and above the fireplace a painted with a sword, has replaced
the modest version Biden left behind. Close to twenty portraits in total now
crowd the walls, nearly all gold-framed: Jefferson, Franklin, Jackson, Lincoln,
a bust of Churchill returned to its old spot, so that the whole room reads
less like a working office than, in the
description more than one visitor has
reached for, a gilded gallery. A button on the desk still summons a Diet Coke at
the press of a thumb, a first term flourish he brought back on the first day of his second.
talk show host Bill Maher discovered
and a half hour dinner arranged by their mutual friend Kid Rock. He brought a
printed list of nearly sixty insults Trump had aimed at him down the years and
asked him to sign it, which Trump did,
laughing, without once asking Maher to
put on a MAGA hat for the cameras. "A crazy person doesn't live in the White
House," Maher told his own audience
afterwards. "A person who plays a crazy person on TV a lot lives there, which I know is messed up. It's just not as messed up as I thought it was." He
added that the strangest part of the
By most reports, he is frailer in the flesh
night came hours later, switching on the
allows, the years showing in the walk, in
back in the other register, denouncing
One, and yet the energy in the room
twenty years writing jokes about.
nearly everyone who sits across from
himself. "What happened to Glenda the
than of a very particular quality of
The Feed
than the television lighting generally
news at home to find Trump already
the grip on handrails boarding Air Force
enemies exactly as Maher had spent
when he is talking is remarked upon by
"Who's that guy," Maher thought to
him, a matter less of physical vigour
good witch."
attention: reading you, deciding within
a minute whether you are friend or foe, and enjoying, with what looks like real relish, the whole adventure of it, even
though he insists, against all available
evidence, that he is not really a politician at all.
The critic Clive James, interviewed by
this writer for the New Statesman not long before his death, put the visual
comedy of the man better than anyone I have read since. "I wouldn't want my
suspicions about the support mechanism of Donald Trump's hairstyle," James
said, "to get in the way of my lingering memories of how Colonel Gaddafi
looked in full dress uniform." It is a joke, but not only a joke. James was saying,
as only he could, that we must learn to
perspectivise Donald Trump if we’re to understand him at all.
Some, though not many, have been 48
for future historians to gauge. The
and magnitude conducted through the internet. He is a man who has never needed the press office, the network
anchor, or the newspaper of record to
be heard the moment he wants to be – though he has command of those too.
There is a sort of thoroughness when it
comes to self-image; each day he comes out swinging on every front.
This instinctive sense of how to be
ahead of the media is probably the
single biggest ingredient in his success.
When Sir Keir Starmer left office earlier this year, it seemed partly a lesson in what happens when you don’t seize
the narrative as Trump does. It also
showed what Trump is determined to avoid: essentially, he refuses to have
the narrative defined by someone else, and so is also prepared to destroy the credibility of anyone likely to have another viewpoint to his own.
first term, when a single early morning
“He refuses to have the narrative defined by someone else, and so is also prepared to destroy the credibility of anyone likely to have another viewpoint to his own.”
dollars off General Motors before
actually takes in the world beyond his
But really Trump’s power has always been, first and foremost, to do with
omnipresence. "Without Twitter, there
would be no Donald Trump presidency," the CNN analyst Kirsten Powers once said, "and I think he knows that."
His former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski put the mechanism
even more plainly: "Donald Trump's Twitter account is the greatest bully pulpit that has ever existed. In 140
characters, he can change the direction
of a Fortune 100 company, he can notify world leaders, and he can also notify government agencies that business
as usual is over." That was true in the
tweet could knock two hundred million
It is worth pausing, too, on how he
breakfast. It is an aspect of the scale and
own feed, because the reporting is more
impossibility of him: the sheer volume of ‘truths’, and the engagement they
interesting than either his admirers or
his critics generally allow. He has never
COVER STORY (Wikipedia.org)
hidden his preferences. "I like bullets, or
fewer than either Obama or Biden,
and aides and his own talking points,
as his first term began, adding that he
to read the written document itself.
more to repetition than to verification,
I like as little as possible," he told Axios did not need two hundred page reports on something that could be handled on a page. Intelligence officers spent
that first term building presentations
heavy with maps and graphics to hold his attention, and National Security
Council staff reportedly learned that
briefing papers worked better if his own
name appeared in as many paragraphs as possible.
If anything, the habit has hardened
in the second term: Politico reported he had sat for only twelve in-person
presentations of the President's Daily Brief in his first several months back,
both of whom, unlike him, were known By autumn 2025 his own Director of National Intelligence was reportedly
exploring whether the briefing could
be reformatted to resemble a Fox News segment simply to keep him watching.
And yet sit through any of his marathon
press conferences and what strikes you is not an absence of numbers but a fluency with them, tariff figures, trade deficits,
investment pledges cited to the decimal point, delivered without notes and at speed, some accurate and some, on
repeated with a confidence that owes
and it may say less about this particular
man than about what happens to anyone thoroughly steeped in the same job,
across two non-consecutive terms, for the better part of a decade. Five Names After Obama heard of the defeat of
Hilary Clinton by Trump in 2016, he
summoned his aides to the Oval Office. “I’m trying to place him in American
history,” he reportedly wondered aloud.
inspection, simply invented. The fluency
We’re in a better position to that
a saturation absorbed from cable news
is categorically not an incrementalist.
is real even where the figures are not,
now than Obama was then. Trump
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49
Alamy.com
(Alamy)
50
COVER STORY
In fact, there is a school of thought
federal government bore permanent
actual renegotiation of the alliance's
associated above all with the Yale
of ordinary citizens, an assumption
polite communiqués about burden-
among American political scientists, professor Stephen Skowronek, that
presidents come in a small number of
recurring types, and that only a handful in any century qualify as what he calls "reconstructive," a figure who does
not simply occupy the office but clears the field of the old political common
sense and replaces it with a new one, so thoroughly that everyone who follows, of either party, is obliged to govern on his terms. Skowronek's list of genuine reconstructive presidents is short:
Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Reagan.
Each name on that list earned its place by closing a genuine argument rather than merely winning an election.
They weren’t so much stewards as
surreptitious revolutionaries. Jefferson's Republicans dismantled the Federalist assumption that a strong central
government and a monied elite were the
natural custodians of the young republic, and no president after him seriously
tried to restore that older settlement. Jackson smashed the idea that the
presidency was a restrained, quasi-
aristocratic office answerable mainly to Congress and the propertied classes,
and replaced it with a mass democratic mandate exercised personally, often
ruthlessly, a template every populist
since (including Trump) has drawn on whether he admits it or not.
Lincoln – one of the few people I’ve
never heard Trump dare to criticise – did something starker still: he used the war power to end slavery and to settle, by
force, whether the Union was a compact that states could unmake at will,
foreclosing a question that had run since the founding and has never seriously reopened.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt answered the Depression by deciding the
responsibility for the economic security that outlived him by half a century,
trimmed but never removed even by the president most determined to try. And Reagan reconstituted the office once
more by convincing both parties that
lower taxes, deregulation, and suspicion of government spending were now the default setting of American politics,
a proposition Bill Clinton effectively
ratified when he told Congress the era of big government was over.
What unites them is not ideology, since between them they span the whole distance from expansive to
restrictive government, but the fact that each closed off an argument that had
genuinely still been open before him, so completely that no successor has been able to simply reopen it.
Does Trump belong on this list? It
would seem so. It is hard to imagine
any of his successors failing to see the
possibilities his second term has opened up. His direct, unfiltered style, saying
exactly what he thinks, in real time, in his own voice, without waiting for a
press office to launder it, has already
shown a future president that the old
filter was a convention rather than a law
of physics; whoever follows him will find it very hard to go back to speaking only through spokespeople.
Meanwhile, his use of tariffs as a
diplomatic instrument, not a last resort
buried in a trade filing but a first-resort tool of statecraft, has been vindicated often enough. NATO's shift to a five
percent of GDP spending commitment is chief among the results, so that no successor is likely to leave the
instrument in the drawer once they have watched it work. His open scepticism
of NATO's old assumptions, that allies could underspend indefinitely beneath the American umbrella, produced an
terms rather than another decade of sharing. And his targeted, boots-off-
the-ground approach to foreign policy, shown to most effect in the raid that
captured Nicolás Maduro inside his own fortified compound in January 2026, has
handed the office a working template no future president is likely to unlearn: that a hostile government can be removed
and a region's balance of power reshaped in a single night's operation, without
the decade of occupation that swallowed two previous administrations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Whichever party
wins next, it is difficult to imagine any
of them closing all four of those doors again.
Back to Queens Everyone who arrives in the Oval Office carries an unexpected story into it, and
Trump is no different. His narrative has an undeniable New York flavour that
has led more than one historian to reach for Alexander Hamilton as the nearest founding-era comparison – another
striving, status-anxious New Yorker who talked his way from the margins of the
establishment into the centre of national finance by sheer application of nerve. We see him so often on our screens and in our feeds, that it is tempting
sometimes to forget to ask who he is
and where he came from. He was born on the 14th of June 1946 at Jamaica
Hospital in Queens, the fourth of five
children, and the facts of the childhood are more ordinary than the adult they produced suggests. He attended the Kew-Forest School, a private day
school a short drive from home, where
a pattern of fighting, name-calling and
arguing with teachers eventually became, in his niece Mary Trump's account, too
disruptive for even his father's tolerance. It’s worth noting that Mary’s account is disputed by the president himself who www.finito.org.uk
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COVER STORY
dismissed her as a ‘seldom-seen niece’.
(Wikipedia.org)
In 1959, at thirteen, Trump was sent
to the New York Military Academy in
Cornwall-on-Hudson, sixty miles up the river, a regimented boarding school built for exactly this purpose, straightening
out boys whose families had the money to outsource the job.
He arrived, in the memory of the
training officer Theodore Dobias,
unable to make his own bed or shine
his own shoes, and left, five years later, having made himself into one of the
school's more effective operators, rising to cadet captain and leading the entire academy down Fifth Avenue in the
1963 Columbus Day parade. He has often mentioned it since. "I did very
well under the military system," he said decades later. "I became one of the top guys at the whole school." In his own book, The Art of the Deal, he put it in
terms that anticipate everything that follows: he learned, he wrote, "a lot
about discipline, and about channelling
my aggression into achievement." From there he went to Fordham University for two years, then transferred to the
Wharton School at the University of
Pennsylvania, graduating in 1968 with a
degree in economics, and walked directly into his father's company, which he
would rename the Trump Organization and, within a few years, remake in his own image.
That father is worth introducing
properly, since the rest of the story does not make sense without him.
softness. A lot in Trump may be to do
at forty two, of a heart attack brought
around the building of things and the
Trump has said, more than once and
with that Queens childhood organised ranking of people by strength.
Fred Trump Sr was not a Manhattan
Trump's elder brother, Fred Trump Jr,
profitable, unglamorous middle-class
to become a commercial airline pilot, a
tens of thousands of apartments over
close to a demotion, comparing it,
the way he ran his business, according
that of a bus driver. Freddy's drinking
glamour developer but a builder of solid,
known as Freddy, left the family firm
housing across Brooklyn and Queens,
decision the family treated as something
four decades, a man who ran his family
according to his daughter Mary, to
to a strict internal ledger of winners
worsened, possibly under the weight
and losers with almost no tolerance
for anything that looked, to him, like 52
of that disapproval, cost him his career and his marriage, and he died in 1981
on by alcoholism, alone in a hospital.
with what reads as real feeling, that his
own lifelong abstinence from drink and
tobacco owes everything to watching his brother's decline. "Every day he lectured
me," Trump has recalled, quoting Freddy verbatim, "'Look at the mess I'm in. If I ever catch you smoking, you'll be sorry, drinking even a glass of booze because you'll like it too much.' Freddy did a good job."
It is one of the few touching threads in
COVER STORY
and the skyline all were. He would
Trump Tower (Wikipedia.org)
later describe the philosophy behind
that move in terms that have not really changed since. "I like thinking big," he
wrote in The Art of the Deal. "I always have. To me it's very simple: if you're
going to be thinking anyway, you might as well think big. Most people think
small, because most people are afraid
of success, afraid of making decisions,
afraid of winning." This might be true to an extent – and yet it might be
objected other people like to use their
thinking time to do such comparatively
unTrumpian things as to seek peace and
quiet, to love unobtrusively, and in many cases, to avoid the spotlight if at all
possible in favour of regular pauses for contemplation.
His first major deal, in 1978, was the rescue and rebuilding of the derelict Commodore Hotel next to Grand
Central, the same building the novelist Sir Martin Amis would later use,
correctly, as the defining case study of
his method. After identifying his target, Trump struck, buying it a knockdown
price and renaming it the Grand Hyatt. The deal was secured with a forty-year property tax abatement that Trump negotiated by threatening the city
with the alternative of a permanently boarded-up eyesore. the whole story, a real discipline forged
it at the end. For now it is enough to
His niece Mary, a clinical psychologist
at two settings ever since: a puritan
in real grief, held for close to fifty years.
say that something in him has run
whose book on the family carries the
discipline about drink, and an appetite
Created the World's Most Dangerous Man,
buy which is arguably the dominant
Freddy taught the young Donald a
Build, Build, Build
not unbiased subtitle How My Family
for achievement and the bling it can
argues that Fred Sr's cruelty toward
leitmotif of his career.
colder lesson still, that any display of
ordinary kindness was itself a kind of
exposure, and that the only safe posture was his father's own emotional remove. Kindness – not necessarily Trump’s
strength, and we shall come back to
How did he do it? The young Donald's first real move, once he took charge of
the family firm in the early 1970s, was to cross the river: from Brooklyn and
Queens rental housing into Manhattan
itself, where the money, the newspapers
He was on a roll. Trump Tower followed in 1983, the pink marble atrium on Fifth Avenue that turned his own
name into a piece of architecture you could point at, and by the late 1980s
the Trump Organization's holdings ran to office towers, apartment buildings,
golf courses, an airline shuttle and three Atlantic City casinos, an empire he
described, without much modesty, in the language of art rather than commerce.
"I don't do it for the money," he wrote. "I've got enough, much more than I'll
ever need. I do it to do it. Deals are my
art form. Other people paint beautifully www.finito.org.uk
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COVER STORY
DONALD J TRUMP: ED 1946
1964–1968
Born Donald J. Trump in Queens, New York, the fourth of five children of Fred Trump, a property developer, and Mary Anne MacLeod Trump.
Two years at Fordham University, then transfers to the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in 1968 with a degree in economics.
1959–1964
Sent to the New York Military Academy, Cornwall-on-Hudson, at thirteen after a disruptive spell at the Kew-Forest School. Rises to cadet captain.
Alamy
The Boston Globe
Wikipedia
1946
1952
1960
1968
1976
on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I
Then came Atlantic City, and things
that's how you learn. There has never
That's how I get my kicks." The bravado
separate corporate bankruptcies tied to
skater who didn't fall on the ice."
deliberate strategy rather than simple
again in 2004, and a fourth restructuring
like making deals, preferably big deals. was, on his own account, entirely
boastfulness. "The final key to the way I promote is bravado," he explained.
"I play to people's fantasies... A little
hyperbole never hurts. I call it truthful hyperbole. It's an innocent form of
exaggeration, and a very effective form
of promotion." It is the same approach he would bring to the office of the presidency one day. 54
nearly came apart altogether: three
his casino empire, in 1991, 1992 and
been, and will never be, an Olympic You're Fired
in 2009, each one a personal financial
By the early 2000s that appetite had
and his own lenders' reluctance to
worth a fraction of his own legend,
allowed him to survive largely intact.
that fixed the legend permanently in
underlying appetite for risk rather than
an Englishman who had been a
catastrophe that the corporate structure,
produced a man who was, on paper,
write off a name that still sold tickets,
and it was television, not real estate,
He has always preferred to describe the
place. The producer Mark Burnett,
the wreckage it periodically left behind. "Most people are afraid to fail, so they don't try," he wrote. "Even if you fail,
paratrooper in the Falklands before
reinventing himself in Los Angeles as
the creator of Survivor, pitched NBC a
COVER STORY
DUCATION TIMELINE 2004–2015
2020–2024
Hosts NBC's The Apprentice for eleven years, a role that recasts a man who had been through multiple corporate bankruptcies as the country's foremost popular symbol of business success.
Defeated for re-election, faces multiple criminal indictments and an assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, and is widely written off before returning to win the popular vote for the first time in his career.
2025–present
Second term. Cabinet built around Susie Wiles, Scott Bessent, Marco Rubio and JD Vance; the Venezuela raid and Midnight Hammer strikes on Iran; NATO's shift to 5% of GDP; tariffs deployed as a primary tool of statecraft.
Getty Images Wikipedia
2015–2016
Announces his candidacy, defeats a crowded Republican field including Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, and wins the presidency.
Wikipedia
Wikipedia
1984
1996
2004
2020
2026
business version of the same format in
suite," and Trump, unimpressed by the
symbol of successful enterprise in the
job working for a real billionaire. NBC's
fired" instead.
had watched, week after week, sit in
2003: contestants competing for a real head of entertainment, Jeff Zucker,
needed little persuading. "Being from
New York, I understood what a publicity magnet Donald Trump was," Zucker
said years later. "I knew, if nothing else,
wordplay, proposed simply saying "you're The Apprentice ran for eleven years and
turned that two-word sentence into one of the most recognised catchphrases in American television, delivered,
country, a man millions of Americans judgement over other people's careers.
It is not a coincidence that the sentence he made famous on a reality set is the same one his administration would
go on to apply, literally, to inspectors
it would generate a tremendous amount
invariably, with the same cocked-
line was, by the account of its own
for Trump's business reputation that
rather than scripted genius: contestants
never quite achieved: it made a man
Amis, writing decades before any of
either "hit the street" or "hit the
four times over into the most famous
vessel," a man who stood for nothing
of publicity." The show's most famous
finger gesture, and it did something
producers, a piece of on-set economy
decades of actual dealmaking had
were originally to be told they should
who had been bankrupt in effect
general, United States attorneys and
FBI directors, within weeks of his first taking office.
this, called Trump "a spotless, empty
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(Getty Images)
beyond money and the accumulation of
which I think encapsulates this
ability to ask oneself what one can
and no curiosity," qualities Amis
could get rid of the then Chair of the
maximise timing for political effect. This
attention, possessed of "no conscience thought far more sustaining than any amount of cleverness. "That
question, how do you sleep at night, is meaningless to him," Amis said. "He sleeps fine. He sleeps like a baby."
underestimation. Asked whether he
Federal Reserve Jay Powell with whom he was in perennial disagreement over
interest rate policy, Trump paused and
thought and replied: “If I asked him to resign, I don’t think he would. If I told
On the other hand, Amis, as any reader
him to, that’s a different story.” It’s this
not really a political animal and there
the boundary of what’s doable, which
an underestimation that would become
of power.
of Koba the Dread soon discerns was
ability to scent weakness, and to probe
is contained in his essay the seeds of
plainly makes him a formidable wielder
widespread. There runs through Amis’
verdict a sense that Trump doesn’t quite understand life as he should which
should remind us that Hilary Clinton was a huge favourite in the 2016
election precisely because nobody quite saw Trump coming because nobody
knew what Trump had gleaned: that
globalisation wasn’t working for many
people in the crucial swing states in the mid-West.
There is a story in his second term 56
“If I asked him to resign, I don’t think he would. If I told him to, that’s a different story.” It’s precisely this which certain leaders, often derided as too nice – one thinks of Starmer again – appear to lack: the
get people to do, and to know how to
isn’t enough for greatness if what you’re seeking to achieve is wrong or selfish
as it often is with Trump, but it is still a lesson in power and what to do with it, whether we like it or not. The Tutor It’s not hard to know, looking at Trump’s biography, how he acquired this skill.
Roy Cohn is the man who turned that temperament into a method, and he
deserves more than a walk-on part in
the story. Cohn was born in the Bronx
in 1927, the only child of a Democratic judge and a wealthy, ferociously
connected mother, educated at Fieldston and then Columbia, from which he took both an undergraduate and a law degree
while still a teenager. He made his name at twenty three on the prosecution team that sent Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair for atomic espionage,
reportedly the one who pushed hardest
COVER STORY
for Ethel's execution. Then, barely into
by a New York court in 1986 for a
to him personally rather than to the
counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy
died of AIDS-related illness within
from. The resulting churn – names
his mid twenties, Cohn became chief
for the Army-McCarthy hearings, the
televised 1954 spectacle that destroyed McCarthy's career and nearly took Cohn's with it.
Cohn survived by retreating into private practice in New York, where he spent the next two decades as a fixer for
clients that included all five of the city's organised crime families alongside real estate developers, media figures and a cardinal, operating on the same three rules he would later hand down as
doctrine: attack, attack, attack; admit
catalogue of ethical violations and
weeks of the ruling, having spent his
final months publicly insisting to Mike Wallace and Barbara Walters that he
had liver cancer and was not gay, even as friends say Trump himself grew visibly distant from a dying man he had once called irreplaceable. He proved, in the end, exactly that: three decades later, as president, frustrated that his own
attorney general would not fight for
him the way Cohn once had, Trump was overheard asking, to nobody in
particular, "Where's my Roy Cohn?"
nothing, deny everything; and always,
Amis understood what Cohn
victory. Trump's own later formulation
Trump's defining asset, he wrote, was
whatever actually happened, claim total of the same instinct, offered as business
advice rather than autobiography, could almost be a translation of Cohn's rules into commercial language: "The worst thing you can possibly do in a deal is
seem desperate to make it," he wrote.
"That makes the other guy smell blood, and then you're dead. The best thing
you can do is deal from strength, and
leverage is the biggest strength you can have."
Once you know about Cohn, you start to feel that despite being dead he is practically functioning as president
beyond the grave. He met Trump in
1973, at a private club in Manhattan, when Trump was twenty six and the
family firm was facing a federal lawsuit accusing it of racial discrimination
against Black tenants. Cohn's advice,
delivered on the spot, was not to settle but to countersue the government
for a hundred million dollars, a case Trump eventually lost in substance
while declaring victory in public exactly as instructed, and Cohn remained his lawyer, dealmaker and mentor for the next thirteen years.
It all ended badly. Cohn was disbarred
bequeathed the future President.
that his antennae were exceptionally sensitive to weakness, "a crocodilian
nose for inert and preferably moribund prey," the same nose that had already
found the Commodore Hotel. Amis's closing question, posed years before
Trump ever ran for office, was whether that nose could eventually be turned on democracy itself. In 2016 Trump
answered it, diagnosing Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz as symptoms of an establishment gone soft and
compressing the diagnosis into Low
Energy Jeb, Little Marco, Lyin' Ted,
and, for the general election, Crooked Hillary, arguably the most durable
nickname of the social media era. He had sensed, correctly, that the whole
Republican establishment was itself a Commodore Hotel, a grand old asset in real trouble, waiting for someone
unsentimental enough to buy it at a discount.
Into the Wilderness His first term carried a flaw many
of his own allies now identify as the single biggest difference between
the two administrations: he did not surround himself with people loyal
institutions or donors they arrived
that seem passé now, Tillerson, Mattis,
Bolton, Scaramucci – consumed energy that might have gone into governing. Trump 1.0 seems now an oddly
undisciplined affair full of infighting
and incompetence, culminating in the
misery of Covid-19, defeat to Biden and the madness of the 6th January 2021 Capitol Riots.
Then came the wilderness years, and it is here that the case for his resilience,
whatever one makes of him otherwise,
is at its most striking. After January 6th, Senator Lindsey Graham, no natural
enemy, told reporters through evident anguish, "Trump and I, we've had a
hell of a journey. I hate it to end this
way... count me out, enough is enough." Most contemporary observers assumed exactly that. He spent the next four
years absorbing multiple indictments,
civil judgments running into hundreds of millions of dollars, and then, after
becoming the nominee, an assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania that
came within an inch of ending his life on stage.
The photo of him emerging bloodied
and defiant that day changed him – and everything else. From that moment on,
he always seemed the stronger candidate against a flat-footed and ill-prepared
Kamala Harris. Trump would go onto win the popular vote for the first time in his career. Graham had by now
performed a volte-face, and thanked
him the following spring, putting the reversal as plainly as anyone could:
"On a professional level, I am proud to
have been there at the beginning when President Trump, through sheer force of will, achieved the greatest political comeback in American history." He wasn’t done with Trump, after all. Should presidents have to take a www.finito.org.uk
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the one Maher and every other visitor
(Wikipedia.org)
to that room eventually face: are you
with him? What that discipline actually
produced becomes visible only once you watch the presidency in action, room by room, ally by ally.
Zelensky, in the Room Trump’s vision of foreign policy is
impulsive and theatrical, but beneath the apparent chaos reasonably coherent if
we accept that he is essentially looking mandatory four years off to recharge
would have been unthinkable in almost
from having held the office? It wouldn’t
Security Adviser at the same time, a
their batteries and consider lessons
necessarily be a bad idea. The clearest evidence of what Trump did with his exile is the team he built the second
time round, and whatever else is said of it, its central figures are demonstrably better at their jobs than their
counterparts in Trump 1.0. Susie Wiles, his chief of staff, is by every account the load bearing wall of the administration, credited even by critics of the President with running the tightest, least leakprone West Wing operation in a
generation, blunt enough in interviews with the journalist Chris Whipple to
call Elon Musk "an avowed ketamine" user and "an odd, odd duck, as I think geniuses are," and to concede that the President himself "has an alcoholic's
personality" in his bottomless need for stimulation, without ever once, in JD Vance's own words, being disloyal to him personally.
Meanwhile, Scott Bessent at Treasury is the most intellectually serious
occupant of that office in a generation,
a genuine macroeconomic heavyweight whose 3-3-3 plan (increasing growth, lowering taxes, and increasing energy
production) has been taken seriously by investors and rivals alike regardless of
its eventual verdict. Marco Rubio, once Little Marco, now serves as Secretary of State, and, in an arrangement that 58
any previous administration, National consolidation of two roles historically
kept separate precisely so that no single voice could dominate the President's view of the world. Rubio himself, a
former rival with two decades of foreign policy experience in the Senate, has by most diplomatic accounts handled the
double load with more competence than the arrangement's critics predicted. And what of Trump’s most likely
successor? JD Vance has grown, across eighteen months, from an untested running mate into a genuinely
consequential Vice President, the
administration's sharpest voice on
where to draw lines with both Ukraine and Silicon Valley. Musk's own
Department of Government Efficiency, for all the chaos of its exit, did what
previous efficiency drives in Washington had mostly only promised, it found
real, auditable waste and cut some of it,
for transactional relationships which will further American dominance. But at the same time, he believes in the reciprocal good of deals he’s prepared to make: in that sense it’s a businessman’s foreign policy. Everybody’s buying off each
other, everyone’s receiving something. Of course, this approach sounds
reasonable but it doesn’t include
something which can often prove
defining in reality: namely, Trump’s
extremely unpredictable temper. This fact, probably the chief among him
alongside the supreme self-confidence that Susie Wiles noted and which is
probably a sine qua non for presidents
anyhow, is sometimes overlooked now
that it has been our daily reality for over
a decade. For instance, it was in the Oval Office, on the 28th of February 2025, that the second term's foreign policy showed its teeth for the first time, in public, on camera, in a way no Oval
Office meeting had quite done in the modern era.
even if the headline savings figures were
Trump took office making it clear that
own claims, and his tenure still ended
as almost embarrassingly soluble. At
that required both Wiles and Vance to
worked out that way. Its intractability
rather than left to fester, which is
quagmire of the Ukrainian battlefield.
considerably smaller than DOGE's
he regarded the Russia-Ukraine conflict
within months in a bitter public breach
time of writing, it certainly hasn’t
intervene personally, a rupture managed
seems to stem in part from the specific
itself the whole difference between
the two terms in miniature. It is, taken
together, a cabinet built on a mix of real competence and a single shared test,
But it also has something to do with his own bizarre liking for Vladimir Putin. A charitable explanation of this, as
offered by Conrad Black, is that Trump
(Wikipedia.org)
wisely thinks that Russia ultimately
thing so that you can learn more about
American presidents before this one,
(to the extent that under Trump 2.0
they react to it. This has had noticeable
side for most of the meeting, leaned in
belongs in the Europe-America camp that is still a camp) as it did during the
Second World War – and not alongside China. Another view is that Trump, an authoritarian instinctively, tends
to warm to other authoritarians with an added warmth reserved for those
who don’t have to face elections of any serious kind whatsoever.
My own sense is that a certain vanity is likely in play, but not always the
kind we think. Trump often likes to
seek movement on problems by doing something no one else can do, partly
so that he can be seen to be doing it,
and partly so that he can test a stagnant situation and rearrange it. This sort of
instinct was on display when he began imagining Gaza as a piece of pleasant real estate, and also when he began to
allies and enemies alike by seeing how wins – with NATO spending, in the
Middle East (though the record isn’t
to accuse the Ukrainian president of
ingratitude – "have you said thank you?"
straightforward), and in Venezuela.
– and of touring frontline suffering as
sometimes redundant and his approach
theme, told Zelensky flatly that he was
the case of Iran, may even have had
did not, in the phrase that would outlive
exhausted himself.
Zelensky was, in effect, asked to leave.
Anyhow, Volodymyr Zelensky had come
the minerals deal unsigned, and Trump
The trouble is that bizarre behaviour is
propaganda. Trump, warming to the
can simply exhaust everyone – and in
"not in a very good position," that he
backfired to the point where he has
the meeting itself, "have the cards."
to sign a minerals deal. Within minutes it had become something else. "You're gambling with the lives of millions
of people," Trump told him, his voice rising. "You're gambling with World
War Three." It was something he would never have said to Putin, who actually started the war.
fantasise openly about the acquisition
Zelensky, trying to explain that
seems to amount to doing the unusual
aggression since 2014 under three
of Greenland. The Trumpian approach
got nowhere. JD Vance, sitting to one
Ukraine had been fighting Russian
The press conference was cancelled,
posted afterwards that his guest could return "when he is ready for Peace,"
capitalising the word as though peace
were now a personal possession of his to grant or withhold.
It was, whatever else it was, the most extraordinary thing to happen inside that room in decades, a head of state
harangued on camera by his host, and it told you something true about the
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time round: nothing, not diplomatic
the term he had called him a con man in
fly direct, and build alongside Israel
television cameras, not centuries of
men stood together at the White House
that arrangement more attractive than
convention, not the presence of
Oval Office custom, would be allowed to get between him and the version of events he wanted the country to
see. Zelensky did, eventually, return,
chastened and more careful with his
gratitude, and the relationship settled into something workable rather than
warm, closer to the transactional register Trump prefers with everyone, allies
included, than to the moral solidarity
Western leaders had extended Ukraine
in the war's earlier years. Whether that
colder, more mercantile approach to an ally under invasion produces a durable peace or simply a durable resentment
is, at the time of writing, still an open
question, and probably the single most consequential one this presidency has yet to answer.
Being with Bibi If Zelensky got the rebuke, Benjamin Netanyahu got something closer to a marriage, one with all the tenderness and all the exasperation that word
implies. Trump has called him "a very, very special person" and has described
the American relationship with Israel in
the warmest terms available to him. This is broadly reciprocated in Israel – as was shown by the welcome Trump received in Knesset in early 2026.
Even so, according to the journalists
Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan,
private. And yet by September the two announcing what Trump called, with
his usual appetite for understatement,
one of the great days ever in civilization, the outline of a deal to end the Gaza
war. The relationship runs on the same
operating principle as everything else in
contain absolute submission to his will. During last September's push for a
Gaza ceasefire, Trump reportedly told
Netanyahu, in front of his own Jewish
aides, that everybody, including the Jews on the call, was sick of him. Earlier in 60
truth about how people actually behave once the abstractions are stripped
away: nearly everyone, in Riyadh or
theatrical fury the moment they are not,
wants, money, security, and a good life
for the quieter register most leaders
can plausibly promise more of that is
the same thing Trump himself visibly
with remarkably little space in between
for their children, and a leader who
reserve for their closest allies.
harder to refuse than one arguing from
"The most profane and least deferential figure in American public life... has spent a lifetime being the most powerful figure in every room he enters, and simply requires, every so often, a room with someone plausibly above him in it." underneath the theatre sits a theory of
relationships – at least none which don’t
the Accords is close to a universal
when things are going his way, and total,
first year, the warmth has coexisted with one suspects there are no cloudless
makes of the man, the wager underneath
Rabat or rural Ohio, wants roughly
whose book Regime Change draws on
real fury. With someone like Trump,
the old grievance was. Whatever one
this presidency: total, theatrical loyalty
But it would be a mistake to read the
internal accounts of the administration's
rather than against it will eventually find
volatility as the whole story, because
diplomacy that is more coherent than Trump is usually given credit for. The
Abraham Accords, his first-term legacy
achievement, were never built on historic grievance being resolved or ancient
enmities being reconciled. They were
built on the much cruder and, it turns
out, much more durable proposition that a Gulf monarchy which can trade freely,
history or justice alone. It is, in its way, the least romantic and most effective
diplomatic instrument available to him, considerably more effective than any
speech about shared values – witness for instance Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech – has proved to be.
It is in that light that his most startling remark on the subject deserves to be
taken seriously rather than dismissed
as a stunt. In the course of pushing to end the war with Iran in May 2026,
Trump told a group of Muslim leaders
that he expected all of them, in time, to join the Accords, and floated, almost in passing, the idea that Iran itself should
one day do the same. Said of any other country in the region this would have sounded routine. Said of the Islamic Republic, a state whose founding
posture toward Israel is annihilation
rather than accommodation, it sounded
close to unsayable. And yet it is difficult, once the thought is out, to unthink it. A great deal of the misery of the last half century in that region has been
justified in the name of ideology, faith,
and history. Almost none of it has been justified in the name of prosperity. If Trump's crude wager is even partly
right, that people will generally choose the good life over the old grievance
if someone credible enough offers it
to them, then the outlandish idea of
COVER STORY
Tehran at an Abraham Accords signing table is not a fantasy so much as the
logical endpoint of the whole project, the one door left genuinely closed. Crown and Country Of all the foreign leaders and heads of
state Trump has met across two terms, none has produced quite the same
register in him as the British monarchy, and the reason for it is, on the record,
not really a mystery. His mother, Mary Anne MacLeod, was born in 1912 in a fishing village called Tong on the Isle of Lewis, in Scotland's Outer
Hebrides, the youngest of ten children
added with his usual repetitive logic. Building on this theme, at the Windsor Castle banquet he called it "one of the
highest honours of my life," and of the King himself, whom he had known,
in his own words, "long before he was
king," he said simply, "it's an honour to
and it plainly passed to her son. Landing in Aberdeen for a golf course opening in 2023, Trump told reporters, "It's
great to be home, this was the home
of my mother," and the White House itself, briefing his second state visit in
2025, put the connection on the record
without embarrassment: the relationship, a deputy press secretary said, was
"bolstered by President Trump's family ties to Scotland."
That inheritance meets, in the King,
the one kind of authority Trump has
never had to compete with or discredit
to enjoy. Here is pageantry without the indignity of an electorate, hierarchy
without the need to argue for it, a status secured by simple accident of birth
a rival's death into a talking point about himself. Whatever else the monarchy has that Trump wants, it appears to
be the one context reliably capable of making him behave.
how differently he treats everyone else
power to back it up. Sir Keir Starmer's turn in the Oval Office came three
days before Zelensky's, and it could
hardly have gone more differently from that encounter, at least at first. Starmer cannily arrived bearing an actual letter from King Charles inviting Trump to
that second state visit, and delivered it with a ceremonial warmth that, by all accounts, genuinely moved his host. "We're very long-time partners and
allies and friends," Trump said of him
later that year, "and we become friends in a short period of time. He's slightly
more liberal than I am, to put it mildly." The two men went on to land a trade deal on cars and aerospace that six
years of prior negotiation had failed
to produce, Trump crediting Starmer directly for succeeding "where other people... haven't been able to."
rather than by combat, focus group or
As with almost all of Trump’s
in public. He was given, in September
as the coalition around the Iran war
the endless corrosive work of being right 2025, the honour no American president had received before him, a second state
visit, and he did not undersell it. "It's the first time this has ever happened where
somebody was honoured twice," he told reporters. "So, it's a great honour," he
terms of a relationship that remained exactly as asymmetric as before the King's letter was delivered.
man is willing to defer to and which
who has extended him warmth without
Crown she had grown up a subject of,
changed nothing about the underlying
man who calls reporters piggy or turns
for a domestic's job in New York. She faintly wide-eyed reverence for the
and mutual compliment at Windsor, and
It is tempting to read something larger
the transcripts of that visit, to locate the
Because it is worth being honest about
kept, by every account, a lifelong and
when it came, was full of royal pageantry
have this king." It is very hard, reading
of a Gaelic-speaking sub-postmaster,
and left at eighteen with almost nothing
never quite did. The state visit itself,
relationships, it didn’t last. By summer, frayed and Britain grew more openly
critical of the toll in Gaza, Starmer was telling his own MPs he was "fed up"
with an ally he could not always predict
and rarely controlled, and the steel tariffs he had been promised would fall to zero
into which authority this particular
he is not. The most profane and least
deferential figure in American public life, a man who has called a sitting
NATO ally's leader ungrateful to his face, has never once, on any available
record, been anything but reverent in a room with the King of England. More than that, it’s impossible to imagine
him being so. Nowadays, and especially since the first assassination attempt at Butler, Trump invokes God's favour
regularly, insisting he was spared for a purpose. Whatever the true extent of
his belief, it shares an odd kinship with the deference he shows Charles: both responses reach for something above
the transactional register that otherwise governs every one of his relationships,
ally and adversary alike. It may be that a man who has spent a lifetime being the most powerful figure in every room he enters simply requires, every so often,
a room with someone plausibly above
him in it, and that of all the candidates
available on Earth, only a crown and, on his own account, God himself have so far qualified.
What Cannot Be Undone What's plain by this point is that
Trump didn't seek a return to power
simply to occupy the office. He sought
a more disciplined operation, staffed by
people who knew what they were doing. Speaking on a Council on Foreign
Relations panel this year, the historian Hal Brands recalled that when The
Atlantic told Trump it meant to profile him as the most consequential modern www.finito.org.uk
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COVER STORY
happening, which we’ll come onto in a
(Wikipedia.org)
moment – has a real argument behind it, which sensible people espouse. It
goes roughly like this. Total government spending, federal, state and local, stood at 21 percent of GDP just after the
Second World War. By 2025 it was an estimated 40.6 percent, nearly double,
according to budget office data. Federal spending alone hit 22.8 percent of
GDP in fiscal year 2025. Federal tax receipts, meanwhile, haven't moved:
they've averaged close to 18 percent of GDP every year since 1946, in a band between 14 and 21 percent, whoever
held the White House, whatever the marginal rate. Economists call this
stubbornness Hauser's law. Spending doubled. Revenue didn't. The gap has been financed by debt rather
than honesty, because honesty would have meant telling voters what the president, he took the description as
a compliment, untroubled by the fact
that consequential says nothing about
whether history judges the consequences good or bad. "I thought it was really revealing," Brands said, "seeing
consequential as the goal regardless
of whether the outcome is defined or thought to be, in the end, by history positive or negative."
It’s a reminder that with Trump, as
with all presidents, people sometimes hear what they want to hear. I doubt
very much Trump thought Brands was
openly suggesting his agenda was wrong, and that he was voicing an indifference to the outcomes of his policies. But
the story is worth relating because it
shows what ground his opponents are prepared to cede him, even if they’re inclined to misrepresent him while
ceding it. In Trump’s case, nobody says he’s ineffective at getting things done, so it’s a reasonable inference that he
has achieved more than is usual of his 62
agenda in the presidency. This is Skowronek's reconstructive
president: one who measures success
against the durability of the disruption, not the approval of the moment,
binding "every one of his successors,
settlement actually cost. Trump's case
for concentrating power back in the one office the country actually elects is that the administrative state has drifted out of reach, both of the voters who live
under its rules and of the revenue meant to pay for it.
even those from the opposite party,"
So far, so good. But then there’s what
expectations that he set."
gets more complicated. Trump's first
in Skowronek's words, to "political
Despite some talk of Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan, and a few pieties about Clinton and Obama, the last
president really to change the game like this was probably FDR. Roosevelt's reconstruction rested on durable
institutions and a domestic settlement, Social Security, the regulatory state,
that no later president seriously tried to dismantle, because it worked. On the face of it, Trump's runs the opposite
way: contracting those commitments, concentrating executive power at the centre in the person of a strongman: him. What sometimes gets missed is that this reversal – if it’s really
gets said versus reality. This is where it term added $7.8 trillion to the national debt, and the pandemic explains only part of that: the Committee for a
Responsible Federal Budget traces $1.9 trillion of ten-year borrowing to the
2017 tax cuts alone, agreed before Covid existed. His second term is repeating
the sum, not correcting it. The One Big
Beautiful Bill Act, signed on the Fourth of July 2025, is projected by the CBO
to add $3.4 to $4.1 trillion to the deficit over the next decade, pushing debt held by the public toward 124 percent of
GDP by 2034. This is why Elon Musk
fell out with the administration calling it a "disgusting abomination" and said
flatly that "Congress is making America
COVER STORY
bankrupt." House Republicans elected
on the same small-state argument voted for it anyway. One of them, a Freedom
Caucus founder, admitted the numbers gave him "heartburn" and voted yes
regardless. The diagnosis, that a state spending nearly double what it once did on a tax base that hasn't grown,
is heading somewhere unsustainable, may be correct. The cure, on the only
numbers that matter, isn't working. The
bill built to prove the state could finally
be cut instead became one of the largest single additions to the debt in the
country's history, on arithmetic his own party doesn't dispute. The Ledger Yet as you put together the broader
picture, it is plain that Trump is indeed remaking America and the world in
some crucial respects. On immigration, ICE street arrests rose more than
elevenfold in 2025, and Goldman Sachs
estimates net immigration has collapsed by roughly eighty percent, though
economists using the Deportation
Data Project's own figures have so far
found no corresponding wage gains for American-born workers in the areas
most heavily targeted. On tariffs, the
underlying critique, that three decades of globalisation left manufacturing communities exposed, carries real weight, but the Yale Budget Lab
estimates the 2025 programme leaves
the economy permanently around 0.6 percent smaller, and manufacturing
employment fell by 68,000 jobs in 2025
even as the tariffs were meant to protect it. On NATO the record looks close to
unambiguous vindication: every member bar Spain has committed to five percent
of GDP by 2035, and Secretary General Mark Rutte has credited sustained
American pressure, across both terms,
for a shift a decade of quieter diplomacy never achieved.
"This is Skowronek’s reconstructive president: one who measures success against the durability of the disruption, not the approval of the moment, binding 'every one of his successors, even those from the opposite party' to political expectations that he set."
sending Brent crude back toward
eighty dollars a barrel. Trump called the resulting pain "a small price to pay," a
formulation that will be judged, like the rest of this record, by results rather than rhetoric. Lord Hague is among those who think Trump’s MOU with Iran
was far too lenient, though he himself has called it a ‘test’ distinct from any
finalised deal. If so, it is a test which Iran has surely failed, and at time of going to press there seems to be no end in sight to yet another conflict in that unhappy part of the world. The Verdict The question of the Straits of Hormuz and the price of oil might prompt us
to ask what kind of economy is Trump
actually building, and what does it mean
for anyone trying to build a career inside it, or alongside it?
The honest answer is a more closed one than the world has operated under for
In January 2026, American special
thirty years, and its effects are already
Nicolas Maduro in a night raid on his
In September 2025 the administration
American power," Trump said within
visa applications, the main channel
would "run the country until such time
have long imported skilled foreign
transition.” Tim Kaine’s answer is worth
healthcare, the sectors Trump's own
Trump put American service members
programme to undercut American
For Trump the second half of the
of one immigration lawyer, a "luxury
forces captured the Venezuelan dictator
visible well beyond American borders.
Caracas compound. "We are reasserting
imposed a new $100,000 fee on H-1B
hours, adding that the United States
through which American companies
as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious
engineers, chiefly in technology and
quoting in full: "Maduro is terrible, but
proclamation accused of using the
at risk with this unauthorised attack."
wages. The fee makes it, in the words
sentence is justified by the first.
work permit," survivable for Amazon,
And the same would be true when it
comes to the ongoing question of Iran. In this instance, strikes badly degraded
Iran's nuclear infrastructure, the Iranian leadership was wiped out, and yet the administration seems to have badly
miscalculated the economic effects of an otherwise disciplined set of actions. By
July, the ceasefire collapsed after attacks on shipping in the Strait of Hormuz,
Microsoft, Meta, Apple and Google, and close to prohibitive for the seed-stage AI startups that cannot absorb it. Nvidia's chief executive Jensen Huang has said plainly that his own family's move to
America, the move that eventually built one of the most valuable companies on earth, "would not have been possible" under the current rules.
The predictable consequence is that other www.finito.org.uk
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COVER STORY
countries have started making the opposite
falling sharply to 3.5 percent from 5
closed the door: China launched a new
the Fund attributes substantially to the
bet at exactly the moment Washington visa category in October 2025 aimed at young STEM researchers without
an employer sponsor, and Canada, the
UK and several European governments
have quietly widened their own skilledworker routes to catch whatever talent
bounces off the new American wall. For
percent the year before, a deceleration fragmentation of trade relationships that Trump's tariff programme has
It is worth asking, of a fortune and an office this large, what either one is actually for, if not, eventually, to be kind with. Nobody watching Trump, or for
driven. Energy exporters and countries
that matter Elon Musk, over the past
and AI investment boom are broadly
confidence that either man is greatly
plugged directly into the technology
better positioned; commodity importers without that exposure are seeing their
a Finito World reader building a career
growth forecasts quietly marked down.
anywhere outside the United States, that is
translation is this: a young professional's
widening of where the best jobs, and the
they did a decade ago on which side
two years would come away with much troubled by the welfare of people who cannot do anything for him. Toughness is
in engineering, data science or medicine
For employability specifically, the practical
not the missing ingredient. Presidents are
not an abstraction. It is a genuine, current
career prospects now depend more than
memory has been tougher than this one.
best colleagues, might plausibly be found.
of that divide their country and sector
The domestic picture is similarly twosided. The same instincts behind the
H-1B fee and the immigration crackdown are aimed explicitly at reserving entry-
happen to sit, a divide substantially shaped,
this piece began in.
after Butler, where he has said more than
by decisions made in the same small room
Howard Lutnick has said as much
what can genuinely be learned from a
born workers, and Commerce Secretary
for the whole verdict, because ignoring
without euphemism: "Train Americans.
man this consequential is its own kind
produces the wage gains promised
remains, as this piece has already shown, a genuinely open question, but its secondorder effect on employability is already
measurable: companies unable to sponsor the talent they want are accelerating
investment in domestic upskilling, in
automation, and in what recruiters now
call nearshoring, hiring or subcontracting talent in Canada and Latin America
instead. None of that is necessarily bad news for those workers. It is simply a
different map of opportunity than the
one that existed in 2016, redrawn by tariff schedules and visa fees rather than by universities or by merit alone.
Zoom out to the global level and the picture sharpens further. The IMF's
most recent World Economic Outlook, published over the summer, projects global growth slowing to around 3
percent for 2026, with global trade growth 64
was always supposed to be in service of. Trump invokes God's favour often and
None of that, though, should be mistaken
jobs." Whether that reservation actually
What is missing is the thing toughness
whether intentionally or as a side effect,
level and mid-skill jobs for American-
Stop bringing in people to take our
tough by definition, and none in modern
of failure, exactly as serious as ignoring
without embarrassment, most memorably once that he believes he was spared for a purpose. It is worth remembering, in that light, that the tradition he is claiming as his witness has a long and exacting
his worst side. To do the first is to miss
memory for exactly this kind of language,
of his own country, and what turns out
choose which of his own words get quoted
what he represents to enormous swathes to be possible when someone is willing to be creative, even reckless, with the
actual machinery of power rather than merely custodial of it. But what would have made the whole story something more than consequential, what would have made it great in a sense even his
and has never yet let a powerful man back to him. Whatever else this piece has established about the scale of what Trump has done to the American presidency, and it has been a great deal, the anniversary in the
critics could not argue with, is if the same
previous pages is as good a place as any
effective, and this is precisely where the
point. However vast the power of that
man had managed to be kind as well as case for Trump falls apart. Hours after the killing of Rob Reiner, he chose to
post that Reiner's death was "due to the
to end on a smaller and more sobering office, however completely one man has managed to bend it to his own account
anger he caused... known as TRUMP
of himself, its limits remain exact and
Months later, in front of cameras, he told a
that he cannot maintain, all that was never
DERANGEMENT SYNDROME."
female reporter to be "quiet, piggy." These are not slips. They are a pattern, and the
pattern is the point: a man with the tools to be magnanimous choosing, again and again, not to be.
unmoved: all that he cannot change, all his to begin with. Even from behind the Resolute Desk, even holding the loudest microphone on Earth, that turns out to be nearly everything.
(Wikipedia.org)
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AMERICA
AMERICAN WORK:
THE 25 PEOPLE WHO SHAPED THE COUNTRY DECADE BY DECADE
Thomas Edison
66
AMERICA
A
s Finito World marks the 250th anniversary of American
prison, an irony not lost on those who
patented in 1794 that separated
narrower question than the usual list
built, of banks, bonds and public credit, outlived his own fortune and became
than hand labour. Its economic effect
independence, we set out to answer a
of great presidents and generals: who,
in each decade since 1776, did the most
to build the actual economy Americans – and the rest of us – work within? The
followed him. But the architecture he
the template Alexander Hamilton would later formalise.
cotton fibre from its seeds far faster
was immediate and immense: cotton
became profitable at a scale previously
unimaginable, and the American South reorganised its economy around it,
rule was simple. Only one figure per
Samuel Slater
entrenching rather than easing the
specific, traceable contribution to work,
Samuel Slater arrived in America in
even as it removed the bottleneck
law forbade the export of textile
contribution, developed as he sought
Arkwright's spinning frames from
was the pursuit of interchangeable
Pawtucket, Rhode Island, he rebuilt
a common standard so that any part
partnered with local merchants to
a craftsman's individual adjustment.
cotton mill in the United States in 1793.
realisation took other engineers decades
imported an entire mode of production,
contracts helped establish the principle
decade, and each had to have made a industry or commerce, not political power for its own sake. The result is a history of America told through
invention, labour and capital rather than through elections and wars, a
history in which a canal commissioner, a stopwatch-wielding engineer and a shipyard owner turn out to matter as much as any president.
Robert Morris 1776 - 1785
1786 - 1795
use of enslaved labour, since the gin
increased the value of cotton picking
1789 having memorised, since British
of seed removal. Whitney's second
machinery designs, the workings of
government contracts for muskets,
his apprenticeship in Derbyshire. In
parts: components manufactured to
those machines from memory and
would fit any equivalent gun, without
open the first successful water-powered
The idea predated him and its full
The mill did more than spin thread. It
to perfect, but Whitney's advocacy and
the factory system itself, with its fixed
in American manufacturing, later called
Robert Morris was the wealthiest man
hours, wage labour and concentrated
Revolution, a Philadelphia merchant
previously organised most work around
skill kept the Continental Army
mills became the seedbed for the
Appointed Superintendent of Finance
method of recruiting whole families,
and imposed order on it: he founded
around the mill established a labour
chartered bank in the United States,
wrestle with for a century. Whatever the
by wartime inflation. He personally
often called the father of the American
own fortune against government debt,
what changed: work in America stopped
credit system almost from nothing.
became something done at a machine,
the American System of Manufactures, which underlay everything from
in America at the outbreak of the
machinery, into an economy that had
whose personal credit and organisational
the household and the farm. Slater's
supplied when Congress could not.
textile towns of New England, and his
in 1781, he took a bankrupt government
including children, to live and work
the Bank of North America, the first
model that industrial America would
Robert Fulton
and used it to stabilise a currency ruined
precise origin of the phrase, he is still
Robert Fulton did not invent the
guaranteed loans and pledged his
industrial revolution, and it captures
building the rudiments of a national
being something done at home and
Historians have called him the Financier
on someone else's schedule.
proving that a war fought on borrowed
Eli Whitney
of the Revolution, a title earned by
money required a permanent institution to manage that debt, not sporadic
1796 - 1805
in bankruptcy and a spell in debtors’
cotton gin, a simple mechanical device
improvisation. His later life ended
Eli Whitney is remembered for the
the assembly line to modern mass
production. Few figures better illustrate how a single decade's invention can
cut two ways, driving both economic
expansion and its darkest human costs.
1806 - 1815
steamboat, but in 1807 he built the
first one to operate commercially and
reliably, the Clermont, which travelled up the Hudson from New York to
Albany in thirty-two hours, a journey
that had taken days under sail. Fulton's achievement was less mechanical
originality than systems engineering:
he combined an efficient British engine with a hull design suited to American
rivers and secured a monopoly on steam navigation in New York waters that www.finito.org.uk
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AMERICA
made the venture commercially viable.
throughout American economic history,
Washington to Baltimore demonstrating
economy was the collapse of transport
undertaken when private markets judge
than any person or vehicle carrying it.
The consequence for the American
costs and transport time on the inland waterways that were, before railroads,
the country's economic arteries. Goods and passengers that had depended on
that public infrastructure investment, the risk too great, can open entire regions to commercial life.
that information could travel faster
The economic consequence was the
collapse of the time cost of business
information: prices, orders and news
wind, current and muscle now moved
Cyrus McCormick
that had taken days to travel by post
weather, and steam navigation spread
Cyrus McCormick patented a
rights of way across the country, and the
cut grain far faster than a man with
passengers, the other information, grew
limited the size of a farm to what a
valuable. Commodity markets began
narrow window between ripening and
previously operated on local information
save labour, it changed the calculus of
is the direct ancestor of every later
could profitably work, since harvest,
information faster than goods, from the
McCormick spent the following
line, and it established that the timing
and marketing operation, based in
economic value.
mass production with instalment credit and a network of travelling salesmen
Isaac Singer
its completion in 1825. The canal's
the sales infrastructure later industries
Isaac Singer did not invent the sewing
immediate and structural: freight costs
spread through the Midwest coincided
fell from around a hundred dollars a
emergence as the world's breadbasket,
from weeks to days. Midwestern grain
American East and, increasingly, export
markets cheaply, and New York City's
did as much to convert agriculture from
port dates directly from the canal's
intensive industry.
not engineering, since he was neither surveyor nor builder, but political
Samuel Morse
for over a decade against considerable
Samuel Morse was a portrait painter
private capital would not commit, and
his forties, developing both the electric
on a predictable schedule regardless of rapidly to the Mississippi and Ohio
river systems, opening the interior to
commercial agriculture. The monopoly Fulton secured was eventually broken by the Supreme Court in Gibbons v. Ogden in 1824, a ruling that shaped the constitutional law of interstate
commerce, an indirect but lasting legacy of the same decade's innovation.
DeWitt Clinton 1816 - 1825
DeWitt Clinton, governor of New York, was the political force behind the Erie
Canal, a 363-mile waterway connecting
the Hudson River to Lake Erie, derided
1826 - 1835
two networks, one carrying goods and
a scythe, mechanising a task that had
up together, each making the other more
family could harvest by hand in the
to synchronise across cities that had
spoilage. The reaper did not simply
with a lag of days. Morse's telegraph
how much land a single farming family
communications network built to move
not planting, had been the constraint.
transatlantic cable to the fibre-optic
decades building a manufacturing
of information, not just its content, has
Chicago from 1847, that combined
and demonstrators, an early version of
effect on the American interior was
would take for granted. The reaper's
between Buffalo and New York City
with, and helped drive, the region's
ton to roughly ten, and journey time fell
feeding both the growing cities of the
and goods could now reach Atlantic
markets in Europe. Few single machines
rise as America's dominant commercial
subsistence to a commercial, capital-
persistence: he championed the project
1836 - 1845
scepticism, secured state financing when
by training who turned to invention in
lived to see it vindicated. The canal
proved something that would recur 68
decade, telegraph lines followed railroad
mechanical reaper in 1834 that could
by opponents as Clinton's Folly before
completion. Clinton's contribution was
could now move in minutes. Within a
telegraph and the code that bears his
name. In 1844 he sent a message from
1846 - 1855
machine, several earlier versions existed, but the model he patented in 1851 was the first reliable enough for continuous commercial use, and the company he built around it turned a mechanical
curiosity into a mass consumer product. Singer's most consequential decision
was commercial rather than technical: recognising that his machines cost more than most households could
pay outright, the company pioneered instalment purchase plans that let ordinary families buy on credit, a
model that would later underlie the sale of everything from furniture
to automobiles. The machine itself
transformed the garment trade, allowing a single worker to do the sewing work of several, and it accelerated the shift
AMERICA
patchwork of state bank notes that had made interstate commerce genuinely
hazardous, and the Morrill Act of 1862 endowed land-grant colleges dedicated to agriculture and engineering,
embedding technical and scientific
education in the public university system for the first time. Taken together, these acts did more to determine the shape of the post-war American economy, continental in scale, industrially
financed, agriculturally educated, than any single wartime measure. Lincoln
did not live to see most of these projects mature, but the economic infrastructure of the following half-century, the
railroads, the banks, the universities,
the settled West, was substantially his design.
John D. Rockefeller 1866 - 1875
John D. Rockefeller founded Standard
Oil in 1870 and, through a combination of operational efficiency and ruthless competitive practice, brought the
chaotic, boom-and-bust oil refining
Abraham Lincoln (Wikipedia.org)
of clothing production from the home
thoroughly as the war reshaped its
the beginning of the American ready-
offered 160 acres of public land to any
to organised workshops and factories, to-wear industry. Singer's company
also became one of the first American manufacturers to establish serious
international sales operations, exporting both the machine and the financing model that sold it, well before most
American firms thought in global terms.
Abraham Lincoln 1856 - 1865
Abraham Lincoln's economic legacy is easy to overlook beside the war
that defines his presidency, but the legislative programme he signed
reshaped the American economy as
politics. The Homestead Act of 1862
settler willing to work it for five years,
a redistribution of the continent's most basic economic asset that opened the
West to a scale of settlement no private land company could have organised.
The Pacific Railway Acts of the same
year committed federal land grants and loan guarantees to the transcontinental
railroad, a project too large and too risky for private capital alone, and set the
pattern for public-private infrastructure
partnership that would recur throughout
American history. The National Banking Acts of 1863 and 1864 created a system of federally chartered banks and a
national currency, replacing the chaotic
industry of the 1860s under a single
organisational structure within little
more than a decade. He achieved this
through means that would define, and eventually threaten, an entire style of
American capitalism: rebate agreements
with railroads that undercut competitors' shipping costs, systematic acquisition
of rival refineries, and a relentless focus on reducing waste at every stage of
production, from the barrel to the byproduct. By the mid-1880s Standard
Oil controlled some ninety per cent of
American oil refining capacity, and the legal structure Rockefeller's lawyers
devised to manage this scale, the trust, in which shareholders of nominally competing companies handed their
stock to a single board of trustees, gave the era its name, the age of trusts, and www.finito.org.uk
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AMERICA
eventually its own body of law, as the
Dow Jones Industrial Average. Edison's
his fortune, funding some 2,500 public
the Supreme Court's dissolution of
than the recognition that a technology
world on the principle that a fortune
Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 and
Standard Oil in 1911 were both direct
responses to what Rockefeller had built. His philanthropy in later life, funding
medical research and public health on an unprecedented scale, was itself a
kind of second economic legacy, but it is the earlier one, the demonstration that an entire industry could be organised,
standardised and controlled by a single
firm, that set the template, for good and ill, that American big business would
spend the next century either emulating or being regulated to prevent.
Thomas Edison 1876 - 1885
Thomas Edison is popularly remembered as an inventor of individual devices, the phonograph, the incandescent light
bulb, but his more lasting economic
contribution was organisational: the
industrial research laboratory itself. At Menlo Park, New Jersey, from 1876,
Edison assembled a team of engineers, machinists and chemists working
systematically toward commercial
invention, a model that treated innovation not as individual inspiration but as a repeatable industrial process, the
ancestor of every corporate research and development department that followed. The light bulb, perfected in 1879, could
not by itself create an industry, and Edison understood this: he spent the early 1880s
building the Pearl Street Station in lower Manhattan, which in 1882 became the first commercial power plant in the
United States, and with it the entire
infrastructure of generation, distribution
and metering that an electrified economy would require. The company he founded to manage this merged with a rival in
1892 to form General Electric, one of the original twelve companies in the 70
genius, then, was less any single invention only becomes an economy once someone builds the systems, financial, physical and organisational, that let ordinary households and businesses use it
without thinking about it, a lesson every subsequent technology industry, from telephony to the internet, has had to relearn.
Andrew Carnegie 1886 - 1895
Andrew Carnegie built the largest steel
producer in the world by applying to an
entire industry the same relentless focus on cost that Rockefeller applied to oil, but where Rockefeller's method was
consolidation, Carnegie's was vertical integration: he brought ore mines,
coke ovens, railroads and steel mills
under single ownership, eliminating
the profit margins and delays that had previously accrued to independent suppliers at each stage. He was an
early and aggressive adopter of the
Bessemer process, which reduced the
cost of steel production so dramatically that it became the material of choice
for railroads, bridges and the emerging skyscraper, making possible the built environment of industrial and urban
America. Carnegie's methods carried a severe human cost, most visibly
at the Homestead Strike of 1892,
when a lockout at his Pennsylvania
steelworks turned violent after armed strikebreakers were brought in, an episode that remains one of the
defining confrontations of American
labour history. Carnegie sold his steel interests to J. P. Morgan in 1901 for what was then the largest business
transaction in history, forming United States Steel, and spent his remaining years giving away the greater part of
libraries across the English-speaking
accumulated in one generation should be redistributed to the public good within the donor's lifetime.
Frederick Winslow Taylor 1896 - 1905
Frederick Winslow Taylor did not
build a company or invent a machine. He built a method, and in doing so
changed how work itself was measured and organised inside every factory that adopted it. Trained as a mechanical engineer, Taylor spent years timing individual tasks on the shop floor
with a stopwatch, breaking each job
into its smallest component motions and calculating the fastest way to
perform each one, a system he called
scientific management and published in 1911 as The Principles of Scientific
Management. Taylorism proposed that management, not the skilled worker,
should determine the correct method, pace and tools for every task, a radical
inversion of the older craft tradition in which experienced workers controlled
the details of their own labour. Taylor's methods were adopted, in modified
form, across American manufacturing in the following decades, and they underpinned the assembly line
efficiencies that Henry Ford would
soon apply at industrial scale. They also provoked significant resistance from
organised labour, who saw in Taylor's
stopwatch a mechanism for extracting more work for the same pay, and
Taylorism remains a contested legacy, credited with the productivity gains
that built twentieth-century American
manufacturing and blamed for reducing skilled labour to a series of measured, interchangeable motions.
AMERICA
Henry Ford 1906 - 1915
Henry Ford did not invent the
automobile or the assembly line, both existed before him, but he combined them at a scale and price point that changed the relationship between
American workers and the products of
their own labour. The moving assembly line, introduced at the Highland Park plant in 1913, cut the time to build
a Model T chassis from over twelve
hours to around ninety minutes, and the resulting fall in production cost
let Ford cut the car's price repeatedly
through the 1910s, from 850 dollars in 1908 to under 300 dollars by the mid1920s, bringing car ownership within
reach of the same industrial workforce that built the cars. In January 1914
Ford made the decision that arguably
had the greater social impact: doubling the standard wage for an eight-hour
day to five dollars, a figure well above the prevailing industrial wage, which he justified partly on the calculation that well-paid workers would buy
the products they made and partly
as a means of reducing the chronic
Henry Ford
labour turnover that had plagued the
over the following decade, built
Ford in market share by the late 1920s
was denounced by other manufacturers
would define the large American
and consumer choice rather than a
calculated, but it helped establish
Where Ford's genius had been the
that higher wages could expand
in a single colour, Sloan's was the
previous piece-rate system. The move
the organisational structure that
as reckless and was in fact carefully
corporation for the rest of the century.
the idea, still debated in economics,
standardised product, a single model
consumer demand enough to justify their own cost, an idea later given
the name Fordism that would shape mid-century assumptions about the
relationship between mass production and mass consumption.
Alfred P. Sloan 1916 - 1925
Alfred P. Sloan became president of General Motors in 1923 and,
multidivisional structure: GM's
individual brands, Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick and Cadillac, operated as semi-autonomous
divisions with their own management, targeting different price points and
customer segments, all coordinated by a small central staff that set financial
targets and allocated capital between them. This structure, later formalised in business school teaching as the
M-form corporation, let GM overtake
by offering annual model changes
single unchanging design. Sloan also
pioneered General Motors Acceptance Corporation, an in-house financing arm that let customers buy cars on
credit, extending to the automobile the instalment model Singer had
pioneered for the sewing machine. The decentralised, divisionalised corporation Sloan built became
the template that large American
businesses across many industries
would adopt through the middle of
the twentieth century, a management innovation as significant, in its own
domain, as Ford's assembly line had been in his.
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matter of weeks was more typical. Over the course of the war Kaiser's yards
produced nearly 1,500 ships, a volume of production that materially affected the
Allied ability to resupply forces across the Atlantic and Pacific faster than German
submarines could sink the vessels. Kaiser's other significant innovation addressed
a problem his own rapid hiring created:
with a workforce recruited from across the country and far from established medical infrastructure, he set up prepaid group health plans for his shipyard workers
and their families, a scheme that after
the war became the Kaiser Permanente
health system, one of the first large-scale Frances Perkins with Roosevelt Signing The Social Security Act: President Roosevelt signs Social Security Act
Frances Perkins 1926 - 1935
Frances Perkins was the first woman
appointed to a United States Cabinet
position, serving as Secretary of Labor under Franklin Roosevelt from 1933
to 1945, and in that role she built more of the American social safety net than
any other single official in the country's history. Perkins had witnessed the
Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911, in which 146 garment workers, most of
them young women, died partly because
factory doors had been locked to prevent theft, and the experience shaped her lifelong conviction that government
employer-linked health insurance models in the United States and a direct ancestor
Labor Relations Act of 1935, which
of the system of employer-provided
and bargain collectively. Taken together,
economic life today.
to the Depression, they permanently
William Levitt
guaranteed workers the right to organise these measures did not simply respond redefined the economic relationship between the American worker, the
healthcare that still shapes American
1946 - 1955
employer and the state, establishing
William Levitt applied the logic of
conditions that had not previously
had always been built individually
what is still called the American social
Sons, working first on Long Island
decade in office.
Jersey, broke home construction into
a floor beneath wages and working
the assembly line to a product that
existed in federal law, and much of
and slowly: the house. Levitt and
contract descends directly from her
and then in Pennsylvania and New
Henry Kaiser
some two dozen standardised steps,
each performed by specialised crews moving from lot to lot, using pre-
1936 - 1945
cut and pre-assembled components
employment. As Labor Secretary she
Henry Kaiser had made his name building
site. The first Levittown, built from
Security Act of 1935, which established
World War, but it was his shipyards that
insurance as federal programmes for
war economy. Kaiser applied assembly-line
and she was instrumental in the Fair
components to a product, the ocean-going
had a direct responsibility to protect
workers from the hazards of industrial was the principal architect of the Social
dams and highways before the Second
old-age pensions and unemployment
made him indispensable to the American
the first time in American history,
principles, prefabrication and standardised
Labor Standards Act of 1938, which
cargo ship, that had traditionally been built
introduced a federal minimum wage,
a maximum standard work week, and restrictions on child labour. Perkins also helped shape the National 72
individually and slowly, and his yards cut the construction time for a Liberty ship from around a year to, in one publicised case, four and a half days, though a
rather than materials shaped on
1947, could produce a finished house roughly every sixteen minutes at
peak output, and the houses were
priced within reach of the returning veterans whose GI Bill mortgages, requiring no down payment, made
them viable customers at a scale the pre-war housing market had never
served. Levittown's economic effect
went beyond the houses themselves: it established the postwar model of
AMERICA
mass-produced suburban development
protecting a proprietary system, is
most significant instance in American
American cities over the following
innovation to spread globally within
labour successfully organising against
that would be replicated around most decades, reshaping the construction industry, the mortgage market and the geography of American family life together, and embedding car
ownership and highway commuting as the default condition of middle-
class life. The racially discriminatory
terms on which the original Levittown properties were sold and resold are
now a well-documented part of this
legacy, a reminder that the suburban economic model Levitt built was
never as universally accessible as its marketing suggested.
Malcom McLean 1956 - 1965
Malcom McLean began his career as a truck driver and owner of a
trucking company, and it was watching dockworkers laboriously unload
individual crates and barrels from his trucks onto ships, one at a time, that
gave him the idea that would remake global trade. In 1956 McLean's
converted tanker, the Ideal-X, carried the first modern shipping containers, standardised steel boxes that could
be lifted directly from a truck chassis onto a ship and back again without unpacking their contents, from
Newark to Houston. The container's
effect on the cost of moving goods was enormous: dock labour costs per ton
fell many times over, and turnaround time for ships in port fell from days to hours, since a container ship no
longer sat idle while longshoremen
manually loaded and unloaded cargo piece by piece. McLean's insistence,
unusual for the time, on standardising container dimensions so they could move between different shipping
lines, trucks and rail cars, rather than
widely credited with allowing the
a couple of decades. The container is now understood by economic historians as one of the central
enabling technologies of globalisation, the physical mechanism that made it cheap enough to manufacture a
product in one country and sell it in another.
Cesar Chavez 1966 - 1975
Cesar Chavez co-founded, with
Dolores Huerta, the organisation that became the United Farm Workers,
and built the first sustained, successful labour movement among America's
agricultural workers, a workforce that had been explicitly excluded from
the collective bargaining protections the National Labor Relations Act
had extended to industrial labour in the 1930s. The Delano grape strike, begun in 1965 and running for five
years, combined a labour strike with a nationwide consumer boycott of table
grapes, a tactic that drew support from urban consumers who had no direct
connection to the fields but responded to Chavez's appeal to conscience,
delivered in the language of nonviolent civil disobedience he had studied
from Gandhi and King. The strike
ended in 1970 with contracts covering a substantial share of California's
grape industry, establishing minimum
wages, health benefits and restrictions on the pesticide exposure that had
caused serious health problems among farmworkers and their children.
Chavez's movement changed the
economics of American agricultural
labour permanently, forcing growers to negotiate with an organised workforce for the first time, and it remains the
history of low-wage, largely migrant a powerful, geographically dispersed industry through sustained public
pressure rather than federal legislation.
Steve Jobs 1976 - 1985
Steve Jobs, with Steve Wozniak,
founded Apple in 1976 in the garage of Jobs's parents' home in Los Altos. The Apple II, released in 1977, was
among the first personal computers
sold as a complete consumer product rather than a kit for hobbyists to
assemble, a decision that did as much
as any single technical feature to open computing to a mass market beyond engineers and enthusiasts. Jobs's
particular contribution was less the
engineering, which was substantially
Wozniak's, than an insistence on design and usability as commercial priorities:
the Macintosh, launched in 1984 with
its graphical interface and mouse, both
adapted from technology Jobs had seen demonstrated at Xerox's research labs, made computing accessible to people
with no interest in learning a command line. The economic consequence over
the following decades was the creation of an entirely new industry, personal computing, that reorganised how
offices, then homes, then eventually
most human work was conducted, while Jobs's insistence on tightly integrating
hardware, software and industrial design established a business model, since
revived at Apple after his return in 1997 and extended through the iPod, iPhone and iPad, in which a company captures
value not from any single innovation but from the coherence of an entire product ecosystem. Few individuals are as
directly responsible for the assumption, now nearly universal in the developed www.finito.org.uk
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AMERICA
reshaping the economic geography of
Steve Jobs with an apple computer (Wikipedia.org)
rural and small-town America over a
single generation, in ways that remain contested between economists who
point to lower consumer prices and
advocates for small business who point to the hollowing out of Main Street
commercial districts across the country.
Walton's model of supply-chain-driven, data-intensive retail at enormous scale became the template that Amazon
and other later retailers would apply, in different form, to the internet.
Jeff Bezos 1996 - 2005
Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in 1994 as an online bookseller, choosing books partly because the sheer number of
titles in print made a comprehensive physical bookstore impossible but
made a searchable online catalogue
practical. Over the following decade
Amazon expanded far beyond books,
and Bezos's central strategic decision, to prioritise growth and market share over short-term profitability, funding
this expansion through investor capital
while the company ran losses for years, was widely doubted by markets and economy, that a personal computing
economics that worked in cities, thin
a specialist instrument.
be replicated in small rural towns if a
device is a basic tool of work rather than
Sam Walton 1986 - 1995
margins offset by high volume, could
company built the logistics to support it: Walmart invested heavily and early in computerised inventory tracking, satellite communication between
Sam Walton opened the first Walmart
stores and a centralised distribution
the following decades, culminating in
faster and more cheaply than smaller
and, for a period, the largest private
This combination of scale purchasing
in Rogers, Arkansas, in 1962, but it was
network that let it restock shelves
the company's rise to the largest retailer
regional competitors could match.
employer in the United States by the
power and logistics efficiency let
1990s, that established the business
model his name is now shorthand for.
Walton's core insight was that the retail 74
Walmart offer prices that competitors, particularly independent small-town
retailers, frequently could not sustain,
commentators through the dot-com
crash of 2000 and 2001, when Amazon's stock lost the great majority of its value before recovering. The decision proved prescient: Amazon used the capital to
build a logistics and fulfilment network, warehouses, delivery infrastructure and eventually its own cloud computing
division, Amazon Web Services, that
competitors found difficult to replicate. E-commerce's effect on the American retail economy has been as significant as Walton's earlier revolution in
physical retail, shifting an increasing share of consumer spending away
from traditional stores and toward
warehouses and delivery networks, with
AMERICA
consequences for retail employment, urban commercial property and the
structure of supply chains that are still
working through the economy. Bezos's insistence on customer-obsessed long-
term thinking over short-term earnings, laid out repeatedly in his shareholder letters, became a widely cited, if not always successfully imitated, model
for how a technology company could
reinvest at scale rather than distribute
profits, reshaping investor expectations for an entire generation of companies that followed.
Travis Kalanick 2006 - 2015
Elon Musk with a Tesla (Wikipedia.org)
Travis Kalanick co-founded Uber in
2009, and the company that grew from it, along with the broader category of
app-based, on-demand labour platforms it inspired, changed the basic terms on which a significant share of American
workers engage with employment. Uber's core proposition, connecting a passenger who needed a ride with a nearby driver using a smartphone app, was not itself
entirely novel, but Kalanick's aggressive expansion strategy, entering cities
frequently in defiance of existing taxi
regulation and daring local governments to shut the service down once enough
following a series of workplace culture
assembly, forced established automakers
company popularised had by then spread
investment far faster than they had
scandals, but the gig economy model his across delivery, freelance and service
work broadly, and the legal and political argument over how to classify this kind of labour remains one of the defining economic disputes of contemporary American work.
Elon Musk 2016 - 2025
to accelerate their own electric vehicle planned, reshaping the competitive
strategy of a global industry that employs, directly and through its supply chains,
millions of American workers. Musk's
SpaceX, founded in 2002 but reaching
commercial and governmental significance through this decade, achieved the first
reusable orbital rocket booster, cutting the cost of launching satellites by a
substantial margin and re-establishing a
riders and drivers had adopted it,
Elon Musk took control of Tesla as
domestic, commercial launch capability
transport law that other industries had
becoming chief executive, and over the
programmes and foreign competitors.
unresolved economic question Uber
American automaker in nearly a century
across both companies, an insistence on
as independent contractors rather than
to significant scale, doing so specifically
automation, alongside a demanding and
flexibility over their hours but denied
most established manufacturers regarded
has drawn significant labour criticism at
forced a confrontation with labour and
an early investor and chairman before
that had been ceded largely to government
mostly avoided. The central and still
following decade built it into the first
Musk's manufacturing philosophy
raised was the classification of its drivers
to be founded from scratch and survive
extreme vertical integration and heavy
employees, a structure that gave drivers
around electric vehicles at a point when
often disruptive management style that
them the minimum wage guarantees,
them as a niche product rather than
unemployment insurance and collective bargaining rights that employees
were entitled to under the labour law
framework Frances Perkins had helped build decades earlier. Kalanick was
forced out as chief executive in 2017
a plausible mass-market alternative to the internal combustion engine.
Tesla's Gigafactory model, vertically
integrating battery production, which had previously been outsourced to specialist
manufacturers in Asia, alongside vehicle
both Tesla and SpaceX, represents one of the most consequential attempts of
the current decade to reassert American manufacturing capability in industries, automotive and aerospace, where the
country's global position had appeared to be in long-term decline.
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LUXURY
HOW DO YOU SELL A SUPERYACHT?
T
he yachts themselves are conspicuous, but the business of
buying and selling them is anything
but. Finito World looks at Edmiston,
the British-founded brokerage behind some of the largest deals in yachting, and at the peculiar combination of
knowledge, judgement and discretion
required to sell one of the world's most expensive assets.
There are difficult things to sell, and then there is a 119-metre superyacht.
The number of credible purchasers is vanishingly small. The asset may be moving between jurisdictions. The
prospective buyer is unlikely to welcome publicity. There are valuations, surveys,
lawyers and negotiations to navigate, and even once somebody has decided that
they would quite like a 119-metre yacht, there remains the relatively significant question of which one.
Yet in September last year, the British76
founded yacht brokerage Edmiston
The transaction offers a glimpse into a
119-metre Feadship which it described
We know what estate agents do and have
announced the sale of Breakthrough, a as the most significant brokerage
transaction in the industry's history. Edmiston’s chief executive Jamie
Edmiston represented the seller, while his colleague Alex Busher represented the buyer.
profession most of us rarely think about. some idea of the work of an art dealer. But how do you sell a superyacht?
Edmiston is an interesting place to look for the answer. Nicholas Edmiston founded the company in 1996 after what is now
more than half a century in the industry.
"There are difficult things to sell, and then there is a 119-metre superyacht."
His son Jamie joined in 2001 and today
Breakthrough is no ordinary boat, even
familiar around the great yachting centres
by the standards of people for whom the word ‘boat’ begins to seem inadequate.
Built by Feadship and designed by RWD, she is the largest Feadship yet built,
and the world's first hydrogen fuel-cell superyacht.
runs the business as chief executive. From its offices in London, Monte Carlo, New
York, Miami and elsewhere, the company operates across yacht sales, charter,
management and new construction. The red Edmiston branding has become of the Mediterranean, but the glamour
can obscure the mechanics of the business. Selling a yacht at this level isn't chiefly about finding somewhere attractive to
advertise it. It is about knowing what it is
really worth, knowing who might actually
LUXURY
state of the market. And a broker must
sometimes tell an owner that the yacht on which they have spent a fortune is worth rather less than they imagine.
Edmiston explicitly describes its
philosophy as one of “straight talking”
and realistic market analysis rather than telling clients what they want to hear.
That may be easier to put on a website than to practise when the client is a
billionaire, but it points towards one
of the transferable truths of brokerage: buy it, and having sufficient credibility
simply a profession for people who
That means the commodity being
The Edmiston team includes finance,
information.
specialists alongside sales and charter
with both parties to bring them together. brokered isn’t simply the yacht. It is also
happen to like boats.
technology, strategy and commercial
Edmiston's own account of the market
brokers, yacht managers and new-build
international networks and speed of
through different routes. Alex Busher,
its transactions never enter the public
before entering yacht brokerage; he has
of this year, when Edmiston completed
26 years and completed more than 100
million, it said a notable proportion had
"The spectacular object is visible; the transaction behind it may be almost invisible."
makes much of pricing intelligence,
experts. Its brokers themselves arrive
execution. A significant proportion of
for instance, worked in currency trading
marketplace at all. In the first quarter
now worked in the sector for more than
nine yacht sales worth more than €200
yacht transactions.
been conducted off-market.
There is something fascinating about a
business in which discretion is itself part of the product. The spectacular object is
visible; the transaction behind it may be almost invisible.
And the sums are considerable. The
global brokerage market enjoyed a record 2025, with 363 yachts over 30 metres
changing hands for a total transaction
value exceeding €7.1 billion. Edmiston says its own sales exceeded €3 billion:
44 yachts representing more than 40 per cent of the global market by value.
There is an even better way of visualising it. Put those 44 yachts bow to stern and they would stretch for some 2.5 kilometres.
Those numbers also tell us something
about brokerage as a career. This is not
It is easy to see why some financial
experience might prove useful. At the
upper end, the numbers would not look out of place in corporate finance. In
April 2025, for example, Edmiston was
marketing the 115-metre Lürssen Ahpo at €340 million.
But the more intriguing skill is probably judgement. Unlike a share traded
thousands of times a day, every significant yacht is different. Its age, builder, design, condition, maintenance history and
technical specification matter. So does the
relationships matter, but relationships without judgement aren't much use.
"Relationships matter, but relationships without judgement aren't much use."
There is another peculiarity. At this level, a transaction doesn’t necessarily end the
relationship. The buyer may subsequently
require management services, commission a new yacht, sell the existing one or place it on the charter market. Breakthrough itself illustrates the point. Having
brokered its sale, Edmiston became its exclusive central agent for charter.
The business therefore rewards the long
view. Nicholas Edmiston has spent more than 50 years in yachting; Busher more than 26. The boats change, fortunes
change and clients come and go, but
accumulated knowledge and trust are difficult for a newcomer to replicate. For all the images of Mediterranean
sunsets, teak decks and swimming pools, then, superyacht brokerage turns out to
possess some surprisingly old-fashioned virtues. Know your market. Know your client. Understand what something is
worth. Don’t disclose what shouldn’t be disclosed. Pick up the telephone. And
when buyer and seller are finally in the same place, know how to get the deal done.
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CORPORATE SERVICES
THE HERITAGE OF HARRODS OUR EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH HEAD OF CORPORATE SERVICES TRACY FINN ON WHAT MAKES A GIVES A GREAT INSTITUTION STAYING POWER IN THE MODERN WORLD
Harrods has always traded on a reputation for craftsmanship and rarity. What does “luxury” mean at Harrods today that it didn’t fifty years ago?
customers and corporate clients come
The key is that speed should come from
tastes, cultures and expectations. What
taking shortcuts in quality. Luxury is the
Our heritage gives us a strong foundation
to understand those nuances while
although we are equally focused on
remaining contemporary, innovative and global in our outlook. Luxury
today is about much more than rarity or craftsmanship – it is about the
combination of exceptional products,
creative curation, hyper personal service
and bringing an experiential aspect and a little bit of magic to everything we do. We are proudly British while our 78
from all over the world, with different
makes Harrods distinctive is our ability delivering the warmth, expertise and
attention to detail that people associate with the brand. Modern luxury is
ultimately about an experience that
is thoughtfully considered, as well as relevant and personal.
expertise and preparation, not from
pursuit of quality, with thought given to every step of the relationship.
For Harrods Corporate Service, that
means doing the complex work behind the scenes so that the experience feels effortless for the client. We curate
carefully, pay attention to the smallest
details and draw on Harrods’ breadth of brands and categories to find the right
Craftsmanship is often about slowness and tradition, while retail today moves fast. How do you reconcile the two?
solutions. The product can be rare or
beautifully made, and the service around it should feel just as special.
CORPORATE SERVICES
Is there a moment or artefact from Harrods’ history that you think captures what the brand still stands for?
The Harrods hamper is a good example. Harrods began as a grocer and tea dealer, and the hamper still captures many of the qualities that define the brand today: curation, quality, generosity and a sense of occasion. What I particularly like about the hamper is that it can be unmistakably Harrods while still feeling entirely personal to the recipient. The contents can be selected around individual tastes, with artisanal products and personalised details, so it becomes more than a collection of items and acts as a showcase to all that Harrods offers. The Harrods teddy bear has a similar emotional resonance and is an iconic gift that embodies the tradition of the brand.
How has the definition of a “Harrods experience” changed for a modern clientele, particularly international and younger corporate customers?
Technology and personalisation have transformed retail. Where has Harrods embraced that shift, and where has it
Today’s clients are highly informed, internationally minded and confident in their own tastes. They are looking for much more than an impressive product; they want relevance, access, ease and an experience that feels genuinely personal.
Technology has an important role in
For Harrods Corporate Service, this has made our role more consultative and lifestyle-led. We are there to understand what a business is trying to communicate, who the recipient is and what will make the gesture meaningful. That might mean a carefully curated gifting programme, access to a special edition or exclusive release, or a more bespoke experience. The Harrods experience is increasingly about the relationship - trusted advice, thoughtful curation and faultless execution.
resisted it deliberately?
helping us understand customers and
clients more intelligently. We use insight to make our marketing more relevant,
improve the way we anticipate clients’ needs and to help make the practical
side of working with us as seamless as possible.
Where we are very deliberate is in
protecting the human relationship -
understanding why a client is gifting, what a relationship means to them
and what will feel appropriate requires
personal insight. Business relationships are strictly personal and will remain
human led. The best technology enables our people to deliver a more personal
service, rather than the other way round. Heritage brands can risk feeling like museums. How do you keep Harrods Corporate Service feeling current without losing what makes it distinctive?
We see heritage as the foundation -
Harrods has always evolved, and it is
the responsibility of a heritage brand to remain interesting and relevant to the current market.
For Corporate Service, that means
continually looking for what is new: emerging brands, changing client
expectations, creative partnerships, new forms of personalisation and different
ways to bring an element of discovery
to gifting and service. At the same time,
the principles remain consistent. We still care deeply about curation, expertise and presentation.
What has surprised you most about how corporate customer expectations of luxury have shifted in recent years?
Perhaps the most significant shift, rather www.finito.org.uk
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CORPORATE SERVICES
than a surprise, is that sustainability
Sustainability cannot operate as a
consideration to a core expectation.
decisions across the business. Quality,
a gifting or services partner?
thoughtful consumption increasingly
level of trust, but what’s important to
has moved from being an additional Corporate clients increasingly want to
understand how a gift has been sourced,
produced and packaged, and what values sit behind it.
This is entirely consistent with how we think about modern luxury. 80
stand-alone initiative; it has to inform
How does the Harrods name change the calculation for a corporate client choosing
longevity, responsible sourcing and
The Harrods name brings an immediate
belong in the same conversation. For
corporate clients is that they are working
clients, that means that often the story behind a product matters almost as much as the product itself.
with a partner who will represent their own brand to employees, customers or important stakeholders, so they need
CORPORATE SERVICES
confidence in both the idea and the
curation rather than the volume. We can
What Harrods brings is a combination of
Food Halls, selecting artisanal producers
We can draw on an extraordinary breadth
recipient’s tastes, the occasion and the
special editions and exclusive releases,
The final details are equally important.
international distribution network. We
beautiful packaging help make the gift
execution.
hand-pick products from the Harrods
heritage, creativity, expertise and access.
and individual items around the
of products and brands, including
client’s budget.
while supporting clients through an
Handwritten cards, embossed tags and
work with businesses ranging from startups to multinational companies, and
the brief is rarely simple such as “find the most expensive gift”. Our clients
understand quality and want the right
choice for the relationship. Our role is to make that choice feel effortless and memorable.
What does “trust” look like in a corporate relationship, and how does Harrods’ heritage help earn it faster than a newer brand could?
Trust comes from consistency and
knowing that someone will do what they say, exercise good judgement, protect
your reputation and handle every detail with discretion. In corporate gifting,
there are often important relationships at stake, so reliability matters just as much as creativity.
feel genuinely personal and this is where craftsmanship enters the service itself:
in the editing, the selection and the care
taken over how the gift is received. It is a
demonstrate the standards behind the service. If you had to define “staying ahead of
the curve” in one sentence for Harrods Corporate Service, what would it be?
For Harrods Corporate Service, staying ahead means anticipating what clients will value next and combining rare access, thoughtful personalisation and
good illustration of why the best option
innovation with the exceptional service
expensive one.
know and trust.
does not necessarily have to be the most
As corporate clients become more valuesdriven, how does Harrods communicate its own values in a commercial services context?
The most important thing is that our values are visible in how we operate,
not simply in what we say. The Harrods Path places sustainability at the heart of the business across five areas: Our Business, Our Products, Partnership & Innovation, Our People and Our
Community. It gives corporate partners
a clear framework for how we approach
Harrods’ history gives clients an
responsibility, from operations and
the brand has been built over more than
community impact.
immediate sense of confidence because
credibility comes from being able to
sourcing to supplier relationships and
175 years. Yet whilst that opens the door;
and precision that clients have come to
What’s the next evolution for Harrods, in the way that customer experience or e-commerce was the last one?
I think the next evolution is moving beyond broad demographic assumptions towards a much more individual, precise understanding of what each client values. For Harrods Corporate Service, this will mean using deeper insights to make recommendations more relevant, while scaling the highly personal elements that matter most – dedicated consultation, tailored gifting, exclusive access and continuing to innovate.
the relationship still has to earn trust over "We are One, We Take Digital advancements should make those time. We do that by taking responsibility, Pride, We Strive to experiences easier and more responsive, investing in our knowledge and while the relationship itself remains understanding each client’s business. Our Exceed, We Build Trust human. ambition is to be more than a supplierand We are Human." we aim to be a trusted expert and partner Sustainability will also continue whom clients can repeatedly rely on.
Our employee values are equally relevant: We are One, We Take Pride, We Strive
Can you give an example of a corporate gifting or services solution that draws directly on Harrods’ craftsmanship heritage rather than simply its retail scale?
to Exceed, We Build Trust and We are
Our bespoke hampers are a very good
way to understand our progress and
example because the value lies in the
Human. Those principles shape how we
work with clients every day. Transparent ESG reporting also gives partners a
accountability. In a B2B relationship,
to become more deeply embedded in that evolution. The future is not about choosing between heritage and innovation, or between physical and digital. It is about bringing them together in a way that feels effortless, responsible and unmistakably Harrods. www.finito.org.uk
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DESIGN
THE ECOLOGY OF THE HEXAGON
On Fragrance as the Activator of Collective Memory and Cultural Transmission BY KATIA LUNA BENAÏ
S
ome inquiries do not simply evolve, they combust. The Ecology of the
Katia Luna Benaï
Hexagon is what became of Tessellation once it caught. My practice, through Luna Benaï, has long celebrated
Amazigh heritage through sculptural objets d'art, and last year that lineage
arrived at Palazzo Litta with the debut
of Helix Bespoke Studio's Tessellation
collection: an inquiry into repetition as a structure of transmission, rooted in
Mediterranean, Amazigh, and Arabic
traditions where recurrence was never ornament but living intelligence.
This year's theme at MoscaPartners
Variations, Metamorphosis, extends
that inquiry from object into ecology:
geometry no longer a fixed composition, but a living grammar shaped through collective labour, memory, and becoming.
Against the Race for the Eye Milano Design Week moves fast. Images, objects, and installations
accumulate into visual saturation,
larger rooms, louder colour, spectacle
calibrated to be photographed before it is understood. We composed its
counterpoint: not an exhibition to be
seen, but an encounter to be had. The
result is not an immersive installation. It is an emersive one. Scent, texture, a
a feeling half-remembered, a recognition
given new life through a contemporary
without a name. The visitor is no longer
lens. Archaeology is not simply a
consuming; they are remembering. The
reference in my work; it is its method
memory surfaces through collective
true art was never the objects alone. It
and the reason that, at Luna Benaï, we
was what surfaced in each visitor, felt
have never called our objets anything
and something more intimate takes over:
by them, unearthed by our research, and
but artifacts.
shifting shadow, each reaches the visitor differently, tapping into something
already held within them. Individual material intelligence. The object recedes
82
DESIGN
Tafukt (ⵜⴰⴼⵓⴽⵜ)
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DESIGN
Teryei (ⵜⴻⵔⵢⴻⵢ)
"It was to let it speak its own memory." It was at Volubilis, the UNESCOlisted Roman-Amazigh archaeological site in Morocco, that this research first took root. A body of imagery taken there in collaboration with
Morocco's Ministry of Culture formed the installation's quiet undercurrent,
returning visitors to its point of origin and reminding us that nothing of
value is invented at the surface; it is uncovered, layer by layer.
Each artifact here revealed itself the same way, through discovery rather than selection. The innovation was
never to force material into becoming
something else, the reflex of an industry that treats matter as raw and mute. It was to let it speak its own memory. 84
DESIGN
A Living Geometry: Sun, Water, Life Left under constraint, materials arrive at the hexagon on their own: wax
settling into its most efficient packing, basalt cooling into columns. Nowhere is this intelligence more complete
than in the hive, structure that holds while everything inside it circulates
and transforms. The same geometry
slowly releasing, holding fragrance the way earth holds moisture. That choice of cork is, quietly, the most radical
proposition in the room. Fragrance diffusion has barely changed in
decades. Cork's cellular structure, the same porous architecture that lets a
tree breathe, turns out to be a natural diffusion system.
This ecology crystallises into three
"The fragrance does not merely evoke a mood, it unlocks something latent."
for an elemental force. Tafukt, the
smell the sculptures, the distance
through a cultural archive. Honey carries
of honeycomb, where resin rests in
before any conscious decision was made.
Quran, used as medicine, its keeping
receives the fragrance, giving it back to
it is foundational to my work. The
generation. In Saudi Arabia, the ancient
from cork, a porous body shaped
it unlocks something latent: associations,
persists at the smallest scale, many scent molecules built around the aromatic
ring, stable through circulation rather
than fixity. Geometry, here, is a method of transmission.
Cristiano Canali
sculptures, each named in Tamazight
Visitors were instinctively drawn to
sun: a form touched by the memory
between body and object dissolving
ritual, faith, and life itself. Praised in the
its openings like held honey and cork
The neuroscience here is not incidental;
a living heritage passed generation to
the air gradually. Aman, water: formed
fragrance does not merely evoke a mood,
by moisture and drought, carrying
something of an ancient fragment worn
embodied knowledge, memories a visitor did not know they were carrying.
calm by the long patience of water.
The composition was built in three
severe and watchful, holding at their
cultural coordinates.
Teryei, life: two great linden presences, centre a faceted form that seems, for a
moment, released from weight, carved from the bees' tree, its grain a slow archive of season and light. The Architecture of Scent Scent operates as an invisible
architecture, carrying the same spatial authority as built form, defining
thresholds, guiding movement, and
holding atmosphere while remaining
entirely outside the visible. The fragrance is the result of an olfactive collaboration with French fragrance house MANE at their Milan creative centre with
renowned nose Cristiano Canali, an
iterative dialogue between the ecological research of the installation and the
raw materials that could carry it. Cork became the medium, absorbing and
registers: not fragrance notes, but
Solar nectar: the raw, waxen honey of
collective labour, of blossom gathered
under light. Ritual air: the dry mineral clarity of aromatic smoke, resins
burned at thresholds across millennia, from Mediterranean temples to
Amazigh purification rites to Tibetan sang offerings ascending through
hive complex of Al-Kharfi, 1,200 stone
hives cut into a mountainside near Taif, was tended by the same families for
a thousand years: honeycomb built as
architecture long before anyone named it that.
"The visitor should feel the work before decoding it, knowledge sensed before it is named."
mountain air. Living wood: cedarwood,
The visitor should feel the work before
trade, carried along the Incense Road
is named. It extends through everyone
"Honeycomb built as architecture long before anyone named it that."
extends a field. And it continues through
sandalwood, vetiver, materials of ancient
decoding it, knowledge sensed before it
and the Silk Road.
who experienced it, the way pollen
To smell this fragrance is to move
the artifacts themselves, now entrusted to Galerie Philia, whose curatorial
presence spans Geneva, New York,
Singapore, and Mexico City, carrying a cell of the larger ecology into new hands.
www.finito.org.uk
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MOTORING
EXCLUSIVE
LIZ BREWER MEETS LORD MONTAGU OF BEAULIEU Impresario Liz Brewer meets the 4th Baron Montagu of Beaulieu
Lord Montagu outside his Palace House
I
'd hurriedly bottled a curious cocktail of various drinkable
at Beaulieu, to discuss his colourful
Foundation, the DCMS/Wolfson
realising quite how intoxicating the
spectacular National Motor Museum, home to approximately 285 vehicles,
Fund, Indigo Blue European,
goody-bag goodies for the journey, not concoction was. That, combined with hours of quality time with my dear
friend Ralph Montagu, the present Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, made
for a very good train ride indeed. We
travelled together on the fast train from Waterloo to Brockenhurst, on our way to his recently restored Palace House 86
life. Ralph is now President of the
and I was joining him for the unveiling
Museums and Galleries Improvement Brookspeed, the Caroline Montagu
Weston Fund, the Beaulieu Beaufort
of its impressive £700,000 new creation,
Foundation, Lucas Oil and the Marcos
The exhibition was supported by the
This new landmark exhibition
Garfield Weston Foundation, the
how motoring shaped Britain and
"Driven, Britain's Motoring Story."
National Lottery Heritage Fund, the Wolfson Foundation, the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Community
Motor Company.
reimagines the museum, exploring transformed everyday life. It's built around immersive sections and
MOTORING
aristocrat and Conservative politician, who married twice. His first wife was Ralph's talented mother, Belinda,
née Crossley, who died on the 15th
of December 2022 at the age of 90.
She was a renowned embroiderer, and created the incredible wall hangings depicting the history of Beaulieu
Abbey. I had the pleasure of meeting
her daughter, Ralph's sister, the Hon.
Mary Montagu-Scott, some years ago,
at one of Edward's memorable themed parties. We both went as the Spirit
of Ecstasy. Edward's second wife was Fiona Herbert, with whom Ralph
has a half-brother, the Hon. Jonathan Lord Montagu and presenter Jon Bentley opening the new DRIVEN Gallery
rare, spotlight loan vehicles, all
As 2026 marks the 140th anniversary
sound and film. It has already proved
invented by Karl Benz in 1885 and
accompanied by captivating archive
that catering for hardcore enthusiasts
still has its worthwhile place in today's world.
“This new landmark exhibition reimagines the museum, exploring how motoring shaped Britain and transformed everyday life.” This huge new exhibition gallery
was opened by the TV presenter Jon
Bentley. It adds to everything already spectacular on the Beaulieu Estate:
the Adventure Playground, the Secret Army exhibition, unlimited rides
on the Tree-Top Motorail, and the
"We Had One of Those" collection
featuring cars from the 1960s onwards. There was also the best home-made
tomato soup I've had in a long while,
at the museum's marvellous restaurant.
of the petrol-powered motor car,
on the road by 1886, changing the
world forever, it was a real treat and
a privilege to stay at Ralph's glorious house at Beaulieu.
Ralph is known to some, along with
his family, as the Motoring Montagu. He is the grandson of John, 2nd
Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, a leading advocate for the development of the
car and a campaigner for the motorist in Parliament. John was followed by Ralph's father, my good friend, the
Douglas-Scott-Montagu.
“Ralph is known to some, along with his family, as the Motoring Montagus.” After breakfast with Ralph the
following morning, I was given an excellent, in-depth private tour of
Palace House. Since April this year,
some of the previously private rooms there have been open to the public. With the help of students from
the Interior Design Department
at Southampton Solent University,
exuberant, unstoppable Edward, 3rd
Ralph has created some remarkable
2015). The family home, Palace House,
own distinct theme and a matching,
pay for it Edward decided to open it
Ralph and Liz at the official party of Peninsula London
Lord Montagu of Beaulieu (1926–
new bedroom suites, each with its
required a great deal of upkeep, so to
exotic bathroom. These include the
to the public in 1952. He displayed a
collection of five early motor cars there as a tribute to his own father. The
collection and its popularity quickly
outgrew Palace House, so a separate motor museum was established in the grounds, eventually leading to
the creation of the National Motor Museum.
Ralph's father was a leading British www.finito.org.uk
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MOTORING
An exhibit in the new DRIVEN Gallery at National Motor Museum
Circus Room, complete with a Big
illustrated with a map recalling
extensive grounds of Palace House.
is the Heraldry Room, with copies of
Tour of Lord Montagu's ancestor,
the building of the National Motor
Top, and the Meadow Room. There
seventy heraldic shields belonging to his forebears, and the Griffin's Nest,
awash with eagles, stags and rampant griffins. There is also the Motor
Room, Ralph's personal tribute to
his father, with bespoke wallpaper in a vintage tyre-tread pattern
and a bookcase full of motoring
memorabilia and volumes written by his father. Its adjacent bathroom has
a very different theme, Water Babies, inspired by Charles Kingsley's classic children's novel. Finally, there is
the Oak Room, its walls and ceiling
the eighteenth-century Grand
the Marquess of Monthermer. Its bathroom is styled as a Throne Room, complete with its own
throne lavatory and a gothic canopy
created by Alex Webster of TV's The Woodland Workshop, filmed on the Beaulieu Estate.
I particularly loved the collection of bronzes and paintings by the
artist Charles Sykes, exhibited in
the bedroom corridor. It was Sykes
who created the Spirit of Ecstasy as the official mascot for Rolls-Royce. His model, Eleanor Thornton, was John Montagu's assistant. With
some modifications, her likeness
has remained the official mascot for Rolls-Royce to this day.
During his early years, Ralph had the freedom to borrow some of
the Edwardian pedal cars from the
collection and drive them around the 88
As the museum grew, he witnessed Museum, a monorail system, and
a marina at Buckler's Hard on the
Beaulieu River. By the time his father
passed away, he was already fairly well versed in the running of the Beaulieu attraction as a business.
“At one time people drove for sheer pleasure, the Sunday drivers of old.” At one time people drove for sheer
pleasure, the Sunday drivers of old.
Now it's all about getting from A to B as easily and quickly as possible, fighting traffic and the frustration
of speed controls. "Rent it and leave
it" is becoming the norm. But people still grow nostalgic looking back on the cars they owned in their youth, realising how quickly time has
MOTORING
A few of Sir Michael Kadoorie's collection of Phantom Rolls Royce motor cars at the Peninsula, Hong Kong
flown, and that is where part of the museum's appeal lies. There are, however, a growing number of serious, hardcore collectors worldwide, fascinated by motoring history and by the skills required to maintain classic cars. It is not just old-fashioned engineering, but coach building, leatherwork, upholstery, special paint finishes and much else besides. One such collector is the Hong Kongbased Sir Michael Kadoorie, GBS, Chairman of the Hongkong and Shanghai Hotels group, which owns and operates the Peninsula Hotels. Sir Michael recently donated one of the Rolls-Royce Phantoms from his Hong Kong Peninsula fleet to the museum, with an unveiling scheduled for late June 2026 at the National Motor Museum, Beaulieu.
Lord Montagu of Beaulieu & Sir Michael Kadoorie
www.finito.org.uk
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OBITUARY
An Indelible Mark
CHRISTOPHER CLARK 1942 -2026
Christopher Clark (1942–2026) was a distinguished City investment analyst and stockbroker, a mentor, marathon runner and family man. A former Head of Research and star-rated pharmaceutical analyst, he later became a valued mentor at Finito, where his wisdom, exacting standards and kindness were appreciated by candidates and colleagues alike. Following his death in May, we remember him through the words of those who knew him.
Ronel Lehmann This is as personal as it gets. I was truly devastated to learn of the sad news
of Christopher Clark’s passing. For
helping to inspire the next generation.
who could further enhance the quality
knowledge, and he showed them how to
all a former Head of Research and star
Our candidates valued his depth of be the best version of themselves.
forty years, he has played a massive
Chris proofread the early issues of this
first employers at Citicorp Scrimgeour
joy after years of him correcting my own
to working for me both in my marketing
spot any errors.
recently as one of our valued mentors
us to countless prospective contributors
part in my life, from being one of my
magazine, and nothing gave me more
Vickers when I thought that I knew it all,
English and punctuation, that he didn’t
communications agency and more
He adored our magazine and introduced
90
and reach of the editorial. He was after rated pharmaceutical analyst who valued the written word.
I adored Christopher and we spoke often during his illness. He always
implied that as soon as he had regained his strength we would meet again for lunch at his favourite Le Beaujolais
tucked away on Litchfield Street, just a
OBITUARY
short walk from Leicester Square and
memories blend into a feeling; a feeling
making. By the time I came along, he'd
He never let on the seriousness of his
that we did things as a family, and that
children what mattered most and what
visit him, which I would have done had
Gavin also recalled one final
We spoke ten days before his birthday.
death:
my own news. This was a mark of a
by the staff for a period. As I lay down
There are so many things I love about
Then he suddenly said, “Gavin, are you
generosity that stands out. He was
the Seven Dials.
of how he made us feel. For me, that was
suffering, nor did he encourage me to
we were loved.
I known.
conversation, two days before his father's
already learned from raising his older he wanted to hold on to. The father I
was so lucky to have was, in large part, the one that they had already shaped him into. I'll love you forever, Dad.
Piers Clark
He was only ever interested in me and
At about 2:00 AM, we were left alone
man who showed great compassion and
next to him, his breathing calmed.
my father, but it was his incredible
awake?”
born into a proper working-class family
kindness despite his serious medical
conditions. I never got to wish him a
Happy Birthday on his special day. He leaves a huge void in our organisation
Quite surprised, I said, “Yes.”
and will never be forgotten by me and
He said, “It's a long process, this dying
those candidates who were lucky enough
thing. Good opportunity to practice
to enjoy his loyal stewardship.
stoicism or prayer.”
At Christopher's memorial service, his
And we shared a smile. We're going to
the same man: the competitive runner,
Jack Clark
children and wife recalled other sides of the generous father, the terrible joker,
the adventurer and, above all, the person around whom a large family had grown.
Gavin Clark
miss him.
Dad was many things to many people. He was a husband to Angela for 60 years, but he was also a kind friend, a respected colleague, and a loving
Dad was a family man. That was his
grandpa. The man I'm about to describe
of the time we’re not doing very much,
best.
foundation. He often used to say, “A lot actually. The occasions that really matter are the family occasions. Those are the high points in our lives.”
is just the corner of him that I knew
He was 53 when I was born, older than the average father, but it meant that he could give me the most precious thing
I think back to the 1970s, when he
that anyone can give: his time. He was
across the road to Rochford Golf Course
present at every major life event.
began a habit of taking us children
to run around the church wall. Dad
wanted us to run around not just as a
family occasion, but also as a personal time trial, including for himself.
I remember clearly the first time that we did this. We lined up on our imaginary start line. “Ready, steady, go,” he said,
and he bolted off at top speed. When we finished, he celebrated the fact that we'd all run and said, “One day, you'll all beat me, and I’ll look forward to that day.”
Sure enough, one year we did. When I
look back on those ten years, all of those
there for the daily school run and was
As I got older, he became my personal
where money was extremely tight.
Because of that, he was appropriately frugal and never one for grandiose
displays of wealth. He became wealthy as his career took off in his 40s, but he never forgot his roots.
"There are so many things I love about my father, but it was his incredible generosity that stands out." Despite this – perhaps because of it –
my father lovingly supported my siblings
and myself as we bought our first homes, and he continued that generosity by
similarly supporting his grandchildren. He extended that generosity to paying for the big family get-togethers in
Wales or other places. Without that financial support, those big family
taxi service. This was never more useful
gatherings would never have happened.
alcohol. It just had two conditions: one,
together, bonded, and created those
midnight; and two, that no one puked
made possible by his uncomplicated,
only one of these was regularly upheld.
those breaks.
than when my friends and I discovered
Those key moments when we all got
that he'd be home tucked up in bed by
lifelong family relationships were only
on his leather seats. I can report that
unspoken, generous gift of paying for
I was lucky to get a polished version of
And there were the smaller things:
I understand that the patient, present
the same lick,” when it came to sharing
my dad. But the older I get, the more
There are the classic Dad phrases: “All
father I knew wasn't built from scratch
food, or, “Good for the lower bowel,”
just for me. He was decades in the
which he'd use when referring to eating www.finito.org.uk
ISSUE 19
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OBITUARY
something healthy. That last one I recall
illustrate certain qualities in Dad:
what a bowel was, let alone a lower one.
contagious giggling fits –and adventure.
from my childhood, when I had no idea
a sense of security, fun – including
And then there's the secret knock.
They start at four years old when I had
together, he'd come to the door and
a tonsil removal. I recall being extremely
Whenever we were doing something adopt some elaborate knocking rhythm. When the door was answered, often
to stay in Southend General Hospital for upset and worried that I'd be in trouble with the nurses for not being able to
for more than six decades: Chris and I were together for 63 years. The first was as university students,
where we held hands in lectures and still
made notes, being right and left-handed. He introduced me to the rock and roll music of the '50s and '60s and taught me to jive to it. We went to Rolling
before the rhythm was fully completed,
swallow the peaches and ice cream for
“secret knock” – such a dad joke.
secretly ate them for me during visiting
with screaming fans when they were still
time. I didn't get told off, and I felt safe.
a novelty.
We married young and quickly produced
For a brief, confusing moment, I
"Dad to the rescue! His solution: he secretly ate them for me during visiting time."
for his own, with his sockless foot now
a tiny book constructed of cut-up
remodelling and tackled big family
a glimpse of what I now appreciate as a
Drawn with black biro stick figures
their children above all else.
girl with lots of younger brothers.
he would declare that he was doing the
Duncan Clark I have an early memory of a family
country walk. I was miserable with a
cold, wet foot, having lost a wellington
boot in the mud. Dad took off one of his huge, warm, dry socks to swap for my wet one.
tea. Dad to the rescue! His solution: he
realised he’d swapped my discomfort
To keep me entertained, he made me
rubbing inside his own cold boot. It was
pieces of lined paper stapled together.
family principle: my parents prioritising
and handwritten, it was all about a
Duncan remembered, too, the contrast between home and the City:
Leaving early for the train to work, he would cheerfully declare, “I’m off to
make life tough for the competition.” In my early teens, I joined Dad on a
trip to Paris, seeing him in some work
meetings for the first time. Somehow he
was still the same familiar dad we would relax and watch TV with, but I caught a glimpse of his professional, competent and authoritative side. Back then, I
was struck by how Dad's counterparts respected him and complimented his intelligence.
Dad himself described his own
professional success as a product of luck and a bit of hard work.
Me! I absolutely loved this book, and it sparked a realisation in me that it was possible to actually make one's
a family. For years, Sunday lunch was a
full family event. Chris was keen for the
children to succeed at sport and physical challenges, and spent many weekends at cross-country and athletics events.
In the last 30 years with grandchildren, we have revisited Southwold beach
walks up and down Cadair Idris. Recent weddings have been fun and a chance
to revisit our dancing skills, rather more slowly than 60 years ago. Handholding was one way to help Chris through his painful last weeks.
own book. I then spent much of my
Our circle is now complete. We miss
There was a remarkable coda to that
within our open hearts. Rest in peace.
childhood doing so. childhood memory:
During his last few weeks in the
hospital, one of the only things Dad felt able to consume was peaches and ice
cream. And on the day he died, my own book was published. Although he never got to see it, he exists in its pages in so
you, but our memories will keep you
At the service, the final contribution came from Christopher himself. A
poem he had written was read aloud. Its subject was the accumulation of
apparently ordinary experiences which finally make a life:
many ways. Having keenly followed its
“These are the moments, precious and
progress, he always had faith in me.
short,
It feels like things have come full circle
That teach who we are, and which can't
from my early childhood memory. Peaches and ice cream will always remind me of that.
Emma Clark
Angela Clark
The memories I've chosen to share
Finally, Angela, his wife and companion
92
Stones and Beatles concerts and mixed
be bought.”
In the recollections of his family, friends and colleagues, Christopher Clark
left an abundance of precisely those moments.
OBITUARY The United Grand Lodge of England in London which Christopher Clark was a member of Aldwych Chapter No. 3096 (Alamy)
www.finito.org.uk
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BURSARY
Bursary Candidate
HARVEY HOUNSLOW: “GOOD AT SOMETHING, OR JUST GOOD?” Harvey Hounslow
A
fter experiencing a personal tragedy in late 2021, I found
This was a firm that offered top-class
along in a job that I neither particularly
everything: the idea that work should
myself back at work in 2022, drifting enjoyed nor hated. While I could
honestly say at the time that I was doing my job to the best of my ability, I also
didn’t feel any particular connection to the industry I found myself in, and I
knew that there was more out there for
me. Noticing my predicament, a family friend kindly introduced me to the bursary scheme at Finito.
Following initial introductions, phone calls and, before long, an in-person
meeting with Ronel Lehmann, I became aware of how unusual and compelling a
proposition Finito really was. This wasn’t your typical recruitment consultancy! 94
mentoring and career guidance but with a true and noble ethos underpinning
be a positive force in the individual’s life and society at large.
More than anything, Finito gave me the opportunity to talk to a group of mentors who share in this ethos and
have achieved great success in the world of work. Amanda Brown, Robin Rose,
much as they are for credentials.
“Employers are looking for character as much as they are for credentials.” Perhaps it’s easier to see this when
you’re not actively involved in looking for work, worrying whether your
Merrill Powell, Derek Walker, Matt
qualifications and career history are
Sophia Petrides, Sam Pearce and of
the right fit for a particular role. But it’s
with, and each had unique insights to
are trying to make a positive change in
thread in these conversations – that
sense of positivity to your prospective
Thompson, Claire Ashley, Claire Coe,
quite good enough or whether you’re
course Ronel were all a pleasure to speak
really important to remember why you
offer. But there was also a common
your life and career, and to convey this
employers are looking for character as
employer. Of course, this understanding
BURSARY
comes naturally with age and experience
of education and experience to fulfil. If
technical skill or strategic vision takes
as well as or better than a human
in the world of work, much like any time to master.
And so, armed by Finito with a polished new CV and a newfound confidence from my conversations with the
it becomes evident that AI can perform
Stuart Dench
when given executive responsibilities,
then I believe we will soon see AI-run companies, regardless of the ethical implications.
“Individuals – and organisations – that industry only tangentially related to my previous one. I even negotiated a modest are driven not just increase on the initial salary offer, by a list of contingent something I’m sure I would have found difficult to do without the support and goals but by a true counsel provided. underlying ethos will Fast forward three years and things have changed with incredible pace. During be better equipped to that time, the company has acquired weather the coming five others and maintained its position as a market leader. Inevitably, my role storm of technological and responsibilities have also changed. I change.” now find myself asking whether it would aforementioned mentors, I soon secured a new role at an exciting firm in an
be more rewarding to pursue my career internally or to begin seeking my next
move. Either way, I am happy with my current position, and I am grateful to
have the flexibility to work from home
but also from the company office in the City on a regular basis. I believe there’s
nowhere more interesting to work in the UK (and perhaps the world) than the
City of London, with its unique blend of history and hypermodernity.
Given the incomprehensibly broad knowledge base of LLMs, it seems
inevitable that knowledge itself will
begin to lose some of its currency in
the marketplace, perhaps leaving room for other qualities to come to the fore. Within artistic fields, AIs trained
extensively on the output of the very best humans will have no trouble in producing works – in fractions of a
second – that feel indistinguishable from
Speaking of hypermodernity, something
a Mozart symphony or a Rembrandt
radical change of the last few years is
should find that they are able to stand
(LLMs) and (perhaps) the first true
is not derivative but original.
company we are not only encouraged
economies that have demanded
which has contributed massively to the
painting. But even still, a true artist
the advent of Large Language Models
apart with a spark of creative genius that
stirrings of artificial intelligence. In my
We have existed for millennia within
but required to use AI in our work and
specialisation and the division of labour.
I suspect this is not now unusual. AI
competency is an increasingly important
skillset and we are entering an era where it may become routine for organisations
to leverage AI to perform entire business functions, roles that once required whole teams packed full of people with years
This in turn has shaped our perception of the world and our understanding of ourselves. Most people’s sense of
self-worth is in some way tied to being
endeavour, perhaps AI will ultimately prompt a change in the way we think about ourselves. Can we refocus the source of our self-worth away from
being good at something and instead towards ‘just’ being good?
Classically, one of the first questions
asked when two people meet for the first time is ‘What do you do?’ Not so often is this question followed up with ‘and
why do you do it?’ I envisage a society
where it becomes increasingly common to ask the latter question. Individuals – and organisations – that are driven not just by a list of contingent goals
but by a true underlying ethos will be
better equipped to weather the coming
storm of technological change. Finito is unquestionably one such organisation. Having become a father recently, these topics increasingly give me
pause for thought. I do worry that our
daughter’s childhood could be stymied by technology dependency; quick
answers and instant gratification do not provide the challenge and stimulation
which are essential for early intellectual development. There is something very grounding about going back to basics
and actually doing or creating something – however simple – with your hands,
from beginning to end. My partner and I will ensure that our daughter knows this simple fact.
good at something or other. But by
We are grateful to the Stewarts Law
performance in almost every field of
Bursary Scheme.
demonstrating superhuman levels of
Foundation for their support of the Finito
www.finito.org.uk
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CULTURE The lighter side of employability
118 | THE MONROE DOCTRINE
What can Marilyn teach entrepreneurs?
96
Marilyn Monroe (Wikipedia)
102 MEET THE SOPRANO Katerina Mina
114 THE GREAT GAME How Football Conquered America
122 MOORE, PLEASE Sarah Tucker at Kew Gardens
ART
THE WORLD WITHOUT A SHORE A hundred years after Claude Monet’s death, the water lilies still ask us to look - and, looking, to care. Robert Golding Jeremy King
I
was perhaps nine when my mother and father took me through the
Water Lilies and the Japanese Bridge, 1897–1899
the rooms where the light seemed to
than grown. I remember the sensation
change. He stopped me in front of The
exactly, because it was the first time a
Water-Lily Pond: a small arched bridge
picture altered my sense of what was
steering me past the gold-leaf saints
over a pool so thick with green, violet
possible. Colour, until then, had been
and the brown Dutch interiors towards
and silver that it seemed less painted
a fixed and practical thing – the red of
National Gallery on a wet Saturday,
98
ART
a bus, the grey of the river. Here was
and later confessed to his horror at
envelope of light around a thing before
seemed to belong to the inside of a
yellows of her face even in grief. In
Cabot Perry remembered his advice to
colour that drifted and dreamed, that thought. I had not known the world was permitted to look like that.
Over time I have come to feel that
Monet is less a painter of things than of the moment before things are
named – the instant when a willow is
not yet a willow but a cascade of bluegreen light. He died at Giverny on 5
December 1926, at the age of eighty-six, and the centenary is being kept across two continents. In Tokyo, the Artizon
Museum opened the commemorations in February with Questioning Nature, hanging Monet beside the ukiyo-e prints he loved. In Normandy, the
Musée des impressionnismes at Giverny returned the paintings of his first years in the village to the valley where they
were made, and Le Havre gathered the work of his boyhood. This autumn in
finding himself noting the blues and 1883 he rented a pink house with green shutters at Giverny, and there, over
forty-three years, he found his last and
greatest subject. ‘My garden,’ he said, ‘is my most beautiful masterpiece.’
"Monet is less a painter of things than of the moment before things are named – the instant when a willow is not yet a willow but a cascade of blue-green light." That garden was, in part, a Japanese print made real. Monet collected
it changed. The American painter Lilla forget what you were looking at and
think only: here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak
of yellow. Cézanne’s famous remark –
that Monet was only an eye, but, good
God, what an eye – is usually read as a tribute to this swiftness of perception.
Yet the speed was also a kind of illusion.
Many of those fleeting impressions were worked and reworked in the studio for months. The swiftness is in the seeing; the labour is in keeping it alive.
I have never thought Cézanne’s phrase quite fair. ‘Only an eye’ suggests a
painter without a heart, and no one
who has stood before the Nymphéas
could believe that. I sometimes wonder
whether Cézanne, himself the prickliest
of men, was gesturing at something else:
Hiroshige, Hokusai and Utamaro –
the distance between the man and the
line the walls of the house – and from
The household at Giverny lived by the
the ground towards the viewer, to let a
rain spoiled a motif he would withdraw
as Fuji returns in Hokusai’s views. He
learned to tread softly until the weather
planted bamboo and wisteria, and built
Normandy coast seethe at the clouds.
Claude sold caricatures of the town’s
Late in life he told a visitor that what he
exhibition and destroyed canvases he
Boudin coaxed him out of doors to paint
evokes presence through a shadow, the
scraped, slashed and burned many more.
Renoir, Bazille and Sisley, and was poor
a description of his own late manner as
wrote to him in exasperated anger
friends while producing some of the
What still astonishes is the speed.
War in 1870 sent him to London, where
the sun. At Étretat, at Rouen, in the
Paris, the Musée de l’Orangerie has
more than two hundred sheets still
work. For Monet was famously difficult.
them he learned to crop boldly, to tilt
barometer; when the light failed or
single motif return through the seasons
into black, silent moods, and the family
diverted a stream to dig his lily pond,
turned. His letters to Alice from the
a wooden footbridge painted green.
In 1908 he postponed a long-awaited
worthies until the painter Eugène
admired in the Japanese was an art that
judged unworthy, and over the years he
the sky directly. In Paris he fell in with
whole through a fragment. It is as good
Even Clemenceau, his most loyal friend,
for decades, writing begging letters to
any critic has managed.
in 1924 when Monet threatened to
most radiant canvases of the century.
Monet painted against the clock of
opened Monet, Painting Time, while the Musée Marmottan Monet traces
his long inheritance from the 1890s to David Hockney. On the anniversary
itself, flowers will be laid at his grave. The life is easily told and hard to
imagine. Born in Paris in 1840 and
raised in Le Havre, the young Oscar-
he looked hard at Turner and Constable
and painted fog on the Thames. In 1874 he showed a hazy view of Le Havre harbour, Impression, Sunrise, and a
mocking critic gave the movement its name. His first wife, Camille, died in
1879; he painted her on her deathbed
poppy fields, he worked with a row of
canvases, moving from one to the next
as the light shifted, sometimes for only minutes at a time. ‘Instantaneity’ was
the word he used to the critic Gustave Geffroy in 1890, while labouring over
the Haystacks: what he wanted was the
withdraw his gift to the nation. Yet out
of this irascible, exacting, often wretched temperament came the most consoling pictures of the age. Perhaps that is
the real shape of his career: a lifelong
separation of the work from the life, so that everything troubled stayed on this side of the canvas and only the light passed through.
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on the later Monet, argued that the old man had arrived first at the open field of colour the New York painters were
claiming as their own. ‘Colour,’ Monet
confessed, ‘is my day-long obsession, joy and torment.’
Nowhere is that obsession more
completely felt than in the two oval
rooms of the Orangerie. Monet offered the panels to France the day after the
Armistice of 1918, a gift for the peace arranged with his friend Georges
Clemenceau; they were installed in
1927, months after his death. André
Masson called the rooms the Sistine
Chapel of Impressionism. To enter them
Claude Monet in his studio
from description towards dissolution.
the reds turned muddy and the blues
Argenteuil gave way in the 1890s to
1923. Out of all this came the Grandes
The bright, legible boating scenes of the series – haystacks, poplars, the
façade of Rouen Cathedral rendered thirty times like a cliff in changing
weather – and then to the pond, which absorbed the last quarter-century of
his life. Grief came thickly: his second
wife, Alice, died in 1911, his son Jean in 1914. Cataracts clouded his sight until
went dark; he submitted to surgery in Décorations, panels two metres high
whose surfaces are scumbled, scraped and flooded with colour. Kandinsky,
encountering a Haystack in Moscow
in 1896, had been unsettled to find he could not at first tell what it showed,
and yet could not forget it. Sixty years later Clement Greenberg, in his essay
is to step out of the noise of the Tuileries into a soft, diffused daylight and find
that the walls have become water. There is no horizon. The banks are gone. You stand where the shore ought to be.
Willow trunks rise at the edges like the
pillars of a cloister, their fronds hanging
over you, and in the reflected clouds you sense depths that are also heights. At
moments you feel what lies just beyond the painted water – the next curve of the bank, the cooler air beneath the
Claude Monet - Stacks of Wheat (End of Summer) - 1985.1103 - Art Institute of Chicago
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ART
Claude Monet - Impression, Sunrise
trees – and you seem to be almost at the
lake, leaning out over it. Monet described precisely this ambition in 1909: he
wanted ‘the illusion of an endless whole, of water without horizon or shore’, a
refuge where nerves overstrained by work might rest, a place of peaceful meditation at the heart of a flowering aquarium. It is this that makes him, a century
on, something like a prophet. Monet painted the Seine as it was being
industrialised, railway smoke and all,
before withdrawing into a paradise of his own making, tended by a team of
Monet does not lecture us about
"To stand inside the fragility. He lets us feel what it would Nymphéas is to practise be to lose it. When Monet was buried at Giverny, a different kind of Clemenceau is said to have pulled attention – patient, the black cloth from the coffin and unhurried, receptive replaced it with a flowered one: no black for Monet. I think of that often, – the attention that of my father, steering a small boy comes before love, and and towards a painting of a pond. What therefore before care." he gave me that afternoon was not an We live at a time when the natural
opinion about art but a widening of
world feels breakable, when the willow
the world – the discovery that colour
decay, regrowth. The curators at the
are no longer givens. To stand inside
the painter’s death, that is still the gift.
commemorations around Monet’s idea
kind of attention – patient, unhurried,
sky. And for a moment, in a gallery
question feels newly urgent.
before love, and therefore before care.
almost at the lake.
gardeners. Yet that paradise was never
complacent. It is all flux: weather, season,
and the dragonfly and the clean pond
could dream. A hundred years after
Musée d’Orsay have framed this year’s
the Nymphéas is to practise a different
The lilies open. The water holds the
of nature in an age of industry, and the
receptive – the attention that comes
in London or Paris or Tokyo, we are
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EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW
SOPRANO KATERINA MINA: The singer on her passion for Wagner, mentorship, and why the setting matters when it comes to live performance You are preparing to sing the role of
Katerina Mina, ©️Jedrek Koh
Brünnhilde in Opera Forge’s inaugural production of Wagner’s Die Walküre, one of the most demanding roles in
the repertoire. What first drew you to
Wagner, and why does this role feel like the right moment now?
A couple of years ago I was asked to
sing Senta from Wagner’s opera Der fliegende Holländer in an orchestral
concert at the Cadogan Hall in London. I accepted the engagement without
being entirely sure Wagner was for me
… That was, however, exactly what drew me to Wagner! The feedback after the concert was mind-blowing, and the
vocal direction towards Wagner became a reality. Together with my husband’s
huge passion for Wagner’s music, and a
visit to Bayreuth that same summer, the signs were loud and clear. Over these
last few years, I have worked intensely on building the technical foundation,
would be my next role! The Valkyries
an apprenticeship within Wagner’s
required for this repertoire, and now
moral tension of the entire Ring
me not only vocally, but artistically and
stamina, and dramatic understanding feels like the moment where those elements are beginning to align
naturally. Preparing this role for Opera
Forge has therefore become much more than learning the score; it feels like the beginning of a major artistic chapter. How has your experience
understudying the roles of Helmwige and Gerhilde informed your
understanding of the world of the Ring Cycle as you move into Brünnhilde herself?
Understudying Helmwige and Gerhilde verified to me that Brünnhilde herself 102
embody the atmosphere, energy, and Cycle. Being inside those ensembles taught me how Wagner constructs
mythological world — one that prepared psychologically, for the extraordinary journey of Brünnhilde.
drama on an almost symphonic
You are mentored by Susan Bullock,
every character relationship carry
of our time. What has her guidance
scale, where every musical line and psychological and philosophical
weight. What was especially valuable was observing Brünnhilde from
within the sisterhood of the Valkyries. You begin to understand why she
stands apart — not only vocally, but
spiritually. That experience became an
invaluable foundation as I now approach Brünnhilde. In many ways, it felt like
one of the great Wagnerian sopranos given you, both technically and
psychologically, as you approach these roles?
Working with Susan Bullock has been
one of the most remarkable experiences of my life. She brings not only an
extraordinary technical understanding of the Wagnerian repertoire, but also the rare perspective of someone who
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artistic identity as I move deeper into Wagner’s world.
“What fascinates me about Wagner is that everything is interconnected — the orchestra, the libretto, the dramatic structure, the leitmotifs, the psychology.” Susan Bullock, ©️Frances Marshall
has truly lived these roles on the world’s great stages. Technically, her guidance
has been invaluable in teaching me how to approach Wagner with freedom and
Wagnerian singing is often described as requiring not just vocal power but stamina, architecture and emotional
control. How do you prepare for that level of demand?
lyricism, rather than force. The role of
I increasingly see these roles almost
vocal discipline, and emotional range,
profound psychological storytelling.
Brünnhilde demands immense stamina, and Susan has consistently emphasised the importance of grounding the voice
in line, breath, and text, rather than ever trying to just “sing heavily”. She has
helped me understand how to pace the
role intelligently, how to conserve energy across the long dramatic arc, and how to allow the orchestral texture to support the voice rather than compete with it. Psychologically, her mentorship has
been equally profound on my journey to sing one of the greatest dramatic
soprano roles in opera. I feel incredibly
privileged and honoured to be mentored
by Susan Bullock, who I admire not only for her voice but also for her honesty
and strength. She understands both the immense demands and the immense
rewards of this repertoire, and she has given me the confidence to trust my
own artistic instincts while remaining
disciplined and patient in the process.
Working with Susan has strengthened not only my vocal technique, but also
my psychological resilience and sense of
like athletic events combined with
For me, preparation begins long before stepping into the rehearsal room. I
have my everyday regimes that keep me spiritually grounded; other daily regimes that help my body muscles
to relax and at the same time tone, in
order to build and sustain the physical
stamina I need for Wagnerian singing.
Aside of these, nutrition and hydration
are also key, together with good quality sleep. Vocally, I follow the invaluable
instructions of Susan Bullock and the rest of my vocal coaches, and I learn
how to pace myself both vocally and
emotionally. I spend a great deal of time studying the libretto and then working with the vocal score; finding where the climaxes truly are, where energy must be conserved, and how the text itself
guides the vocal line. With Brünnhilde especially, the emotional evolution is
immense, and I think emotional control comes from clarity of intention. If you truly understand why the character is saying something, the emotional
intensity can remain truthful without
becoming uncontrolled. What fascinates me about Wagner is that everything
is interconnected — the orchestra, the libretto, the dramatic structure, the
leitmotifs, the psychology. Preparing
these roles feels less like learning isolated scenes and more like constructing a vast architectural world piece by piece. That is precisely what makes the experience so demanding, but also so rewarding. You have sung a remarkably wide
repertoire, from Mozart and Verdi to Puccini and Strauss. How has that
breadth shaped your voice as you begin to focus more on dramatic roles for the soprano?
I believe that singing a broad repertoire has been one of the greatest gifts for my development as an artist. Each composer teaches you something
fundamentally different about technique, style, discipline, and expression, and I feel that those experiences now
form the foundation upon which
I can approach the more dramatic
repertoire with maturity rather than impatience. Mozart, for example,
teaches honesty and technical precision. There is nowhere to hide in Mozart;
the line, the breath control, the purity
of legato, and the relationship between text and music must all function
with absolute clarity. Verdi brings
an entirely different discipline — a
heightened sense of dramatic pacing, vocal line, and emotional intensity
while still maintaining elegance and
structure. Puccini requires vulnerability and immediacy, an ability to sustain emotional truth while allowing the
voice to bloom lyrically through the
orchestral texture. Strauss, meanwhile,
introduces a richer orchestral landscape
and a more symphonic approach to vocal writing, which in many ways becomes an important bridge toward Wagner.
What has been invaluable is that these www.finito.org.uk
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one of the great cultural capitals of the
world, and being surrounded by its opera houses, orchestras, theatres, and artists
constantly challenged me to grow. You are continually exposed to the highest level of artistry, and that inevitably
shapes your standards and ambitions. I also think living between cultures
has given me a certain dual perspective artistically. I carry the Mediterranean emotional instinct and intensity of
my upbringing, but it has been refined through the structural discipline and musical rigor of my training and Katerina Mila as a child with her mother @Studio Minas
professional life in Britain.
composers collectively taught me
early age. Even though Cyprus hasn’t
Your debut album Angel of Fire
wanted to rush into dramatic repertoire
it has a culture with deep warmth,
repertoire but also world premieres
to storytelling and expression, and I
yourself. How does writing your own
of who I am as a performer. At the same
performer?
at the Guildhall School of Music &
of Fire’ with the Royal Philharmonic
flexibility rather than force. I have never simply because I knew I had to buy time until my voice would naturally move
in that direction. As I now move into
the pure soprano dramatic roles, I feel I carry elements of all those worlds with
me. I still want the clarity of Mozart, the line of Verdi, the emotional immediacy
of Puccini, and the orchestral awareness of Strauss inside the Wagnerian
repertoire. In many ways, the dramatic
voice is not about abandoning lyricism, but about expanding it while retaining
beauty, control, and colour. A bel canto approach to Wagner is, for example, what Opera Forge and our Artistic
Director and Conductor Kelvin Lim,
are working towards for our inaugural
production of Die Walküre at the end of this year!
You were born in Cyprus and are now
based in London, having trained at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama. How did that journey shape your musical identity?
Being born in Cyprus and later building
my life and career in London has shaped me profoundly, both personally and
artistically. Cyprus gave me a very strong emotional connection to music from an 104
got a massive tradition in classical music,
included not only core operatic
passion, and an instinctive relationship
of songs you wrote the poetry for
think those qualities remain at the core
texts influence your approach as a
time, moving to London and training
Working on my debut album ‘Angel
Drama opened an entirely new world
Orchestra and maestro Grzegorz
for me artistically. I initially entered
the GSMD as a concert pianist, and
I graduated as an opera singer! What
was particularly transformative about
London was the sense of possibility. It is
Nowak, was an unbelievably fascinating
experience; it allowed me to inhabit not
only the role of performer and recording artist, but also that of creator. Including world premieres of two songs that were
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set to music by Swiss composer Stephan Hodel, on two of my poems, changed
my relationship with interpretation in a very profound way. When you write your own texts, you become acutely aware of the weight and intention
behind every single word, every silence, every emotional shift. That process
has greatly influenced the way I now
approach all repertoire as a performer. It has made me far more attentive
to language and to the psychology
hidden inside the text. Writing also gives you enormous vulnerability.
When performing your own material, there is nowhere to hide because the
emotional world comes directly from
you. That experience taught me a great
deal about honesty in performance and
about the importance of communicating something authentic rather than merely producing beautiful sound. I think it also deepened my empathy towards
composers and librettists. ‘Love’ and
‘Angel of Fire’ are the two poems from
my poetry collection EROS that are part of my debut album. Later on this year, I will premiere the song cycle ‘At Your
Touch’ composed by Richard Blackford, on seven of my own poems, from the same poetry collection. The premiere
concert with pianist Andrew West will take place in Folkestone New Music Festival.
You have performed in a wide range
of venues, from major concert halls to more intimate spaces. How does the
setting affect the way you inhabit a role or communicate with an audience?
The relationship between performer, space, and audience is incredibly
important, and I think every venue
changes the psychological atmosphere
of performance in a unique way. Singing in a major concert hall requires a certain breadth of communication — vocally,
physically, and emotionally — because the scale of the space demands a
larger dramatic architecture. You
where the connection with the audience
presence, intention, and energy across
experiences can be equally powerful,
have to project not only sound, but
an enormous environment while still
maintaining nuance and truth. In more
intimate spaces, however, the experience
feels almost conversational. Both
but in very different ways. Ultimately, I
believe opera is about human connection above all else. Whether singing for two
can become almost microscopic. The
thousand people in a large hall or for a
smallest emotional or vocal detail, which
setting, the responsibility is the same: to
In those settings, communication often
real and emotionally necessary is
almost like chamber music or spoken
Opera can often feel rooted in
the essence of the role should remain
with organisations like Opera Forge
audience is close enough to perceive the
much smaller audience in an intimate
creates a very different kind of intensity.
make the audience feel that something
feels more immediate and vulnerable,
happening in that moment.
theatre. What fascinates me is that
tradition, yet your involvement work
truthful regardless of scale, but the
means of communication inevitably adapt. I also think different venues
shape the audience’s energy in very
distinct ways, and performers feel that immediately. There are spaces with
tremendous historical and/or spiritual weight where you become intensely
aware of the artistic legacy attached to them, and there are intimate venues
suggests an interest in how the form evolves. What do you think opera needs to do to remain vital now? I think opera remains profoundly relevant because it deals with the
most fundamental aspects of human
experience — love, power, loss, sacrifice, conflict, transcendence — and those themes never cease to matter. The
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Katerina Mila at Dartington Hall Estate with stage director Charlie Edwards. ©️Julian Guidera
still has something to say, but how we
life without losing the depth and
The emotional core of opera is universal,
contemporary audiences in a world that
I do not believe opera survives by
indeed vary enormously. With the more
communicate its emotional power to
moves very differently from the one in
which many of these works were created. Working with Opera Forge, the newest
London-based opera company, has been incredibly inspiring in that respect,
because the company approaches opera with imagination, flexibility, and a real
desire to connect with audiences in fresh ways while still respecting the integrity of the art form. I think that balance is
crucial; and for opera to remain vital, I believe accessibility is essential — not
in the sense of simplifying the art form, but in removing unnecessary barriers
around it. Opera should not feel like an
exclusive world that audiences are afraid to enter. I also think storytelling must
remain central. Whether through new
richness that make it unique. Ultimately, abandoning tradition, nor by preserving
found that audiences often respond very
works to continue breathing, evolving,
of language. Certain countries also carry
generation.
specific repertoire, and you feel that
survives by allowing these extraordinary
instinctively and emotionally, regardless
and communicating with each new
very deep historical relationships with
“Preparing this role for Opera Forge has therefore become much more than learning the score; it feels like the beginning of a major artistic chapter.” You have already built an international
engagement, or the commissioning of
How do different audiences respond to
new works, opera must continue finding ways to speak directly to contemporary 106
dramatic repertoire especially, I have
tradition as something untouchable. It
productions, imaginative performance spaces, educational outreach, digital
but the way audiences engage with it can
career across Europe and beyond.
this repertoire, particularly the more dramatic works?
collective familiarity and expectation in the theatre. Performing Wagner, for example, in front of audiences
with a long Wagnerian tradition like in Bayreuth, where audiences are
famously knowledgeable, attentive to
orchestral detail, sensitive to interpretive traditions, and highly opinionated
about staging. The Maestro’s tempo
choices may be scrutinized, orchestral transparency matters enormously,
and vocal endurance is judged against historic Wagner singers. A Bayreuth audience may remain almost silent
during a performance, but then erupt
into extremely long ovations, or intense booing directed at stage directors or
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Katerina Mila ©️Marios Askanis
conductors. The Teatro alla Scala
psychological resilience, and a very
demanding; she inhabits an immense
for booing, including booing the
that, I believe one has to approach
world. I think some roles reveal
audiences, for example, are notorious opera singers, if they don’t like them! What I have personally learned is
that audiences everywhere ultimately respond to sincerity and conviction.
stable vocal foundation. Because of them with great patience and longterm perspective. For me, the most
important principle is allowing the voice to develop organically rather
emotional, spiritual, and philosophical themselves fully only when an artist
has reached a certain stage of artistic
and personal maturity. I also believe it
than forcing it towards any repertoire
is vital to maintain balance and variety
ability to create shared emotional
incredibly rewarding, but they also
moving towards heavier dramatic
despite differences in language or
that longevity in this profession comes
musical refinement, or flexibility. The
remains remarkably universal.
you can sing, but when you should
Even in very different cultural
contexts, music has an extraordinary
prematurely. Dramatic roles can be
within the repertoire. Even while
understanding. It reminds us that
demand respect. I have always felt
roles, I never want to lose lyricism,
tradition, human emotion itself
from understanding not only what
Looking ahead, with roles like Isolde and Turandot on the horizon, how do you think about pacing a career
in repertoire that is both vocally and emotionally demanding?
I think pacing is absolutely essential
in this repertoire, perhaps more than in almost any other area of singing. Roles such as Isolde and Turandot
require enormous physical and vocal endurance, emotional maturity,
sing it. That is why I value the journey through repertoire as well my own
goal is to sing with beauty of sound,
colour, and expressive range within a
larger dramatic framework. These great
life journey so much. Ideally, by the
heroines deserve patience, preparation,
Turandot, the voice has acquired not
right moment, they can become some
technical efficiency and interpretative
opera singer can have.
time one arrives at roles like Isolde or
and respect; when approached at the
only the necessary power, but also the
of the most profound experiences an
depth to sustain them healthily.
Emotionally, these characters also
Art has always asked humanity a
require a certain life experience and
simple but enduring question- “what
for example, is not merely vocally
answer has never mattered more.
psychological understanding. Isolde,
will you leave behind?” Today, that
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MENTORSHIP
A TALE OF MENTORSHIP
STEPHEN SONDHEIM AND THE MAKING OF AMERICAN MUSICAL THEATRE
W
hen Stephen Sondheim died in 2021 at the age of ninety one,
Stephen Sondheim (Alamy.com)
the tributes reached for superlatives that in almost any other case would
sound like exaggeration. Frank Rich,
for decades the most influential critic in American theatre, had already
called him, simply, the greatest and best known artist working in the
American musical. The numbers bear the claim out with unusual precision. Sondheim won eight Tony Awards,
more than any composer in the prize's
history, alongside an Academy Award, eight Grammys, five Laurence Olivier Awards and the Pulitzer Prize for
Drama, which he received in 1985 for Sunday in the Park with George. He was awarded the Presidential Medal
of Freedom in 2015 and the Kennedy Center Honors in 1993, and by the
time of his death his collected works,
across Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, Into the Woods and Passion, had accumulated more
than sixty individual and collaborative Tony Awards between them. Theatres bear his name on both Broadway and in the West End, a rare honour for a living writer and a rarer one still
for two different countries to bestow independently.
Victorian melodrama and abattoir at
Grimm fairy tales, and the collision of
the work itself is harder to compress
rendered as a grotesque carnival,
ceremony in Pacific Overtures, each
that astonishes as much as the depth:
turned into an act of self-portraiture,
In some respects that's the least of it. What he was able to achieve in
once, a chorus of presidential assassins
into a sentence, since it is the range
Georges Seurat's pointillist canvas
a demon barber's revenge staged as
the darker undertow beneath the
108
American gunboats with Japanese court cast in a musical and lyrical idiom built
entirely for that story and set aside once it had served its purpose. He did not
MENTORSHIP
so much develop a style as a method,
it has something serious to say about
character as functions of each other
are built rather than simply discovered.
one that treated rhyme, harmony and rather than separate problems of craft,
so that a chord progression could carry
psychological information no lyric alone could supply, and a rhyme scheme could
betray a character's self-deception before a line of dialogue did. It is this, more
than any tally of prizes, that persuaded a generation of composers and critics
that the American musical could bear the weight of ambiguity, cruelty and
real intellectual seriousness, and that
persuasion is the inheritance the rest of this story is really about.
“He did not so much develop a style as a method, one that treated rhyme, harmony and character as functions of each other rather than separate problems of craft.”
mentorship. It reminds us that careers It is also, I think, a useful mirror in
which to examine what British musical theatre has and has not managed to build for itself.
The story begins in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where Sondheim's
parents divorced when he was a boy and his mother moved them near
the Hammerstein family farm. The
young Sondheim became friends with Hammerstein’s son, Jimmy, and Oscar
Hammerstein II, already one of the most successful men in the American theatre, became something close to a surrogate
father. At fifteen, attending the George
School, Sondheim wrote a school revue called By George, a comic send-up of the faculty and his fellow pupils, and
was, by his own later account, entirely
convinced of its brilliance. He showed
Oscar Hammerstein (Wikipedia.org)
Hammerstein. It is a strikingly modern
piece of mentoring advice, less concerned with producing a disciple than with
producing an independent artist, and it is worth holding in mind against
everything that follows, because not every senior figure Sondheim worked with in those early years shared it.
thing that had ever crossed his desk,
“It reminds us that careers are built rather than simply discovered.”
What is easy to miss amid the roll call of
because the boy lacked talent. He then
afternoon. He set the teenager a course
his own achievement as self-made in
Sondheim later said he learned more
spoke often, and with evident feeling,
afternoon, a session of some two and a
shaped him before he had written
lifetime.
much of his own long career trying to
to correct. It was to redirect the boy
Horseback. The second was to musicalise
teacher’s. Sondheim recalled him
which he chose Maxwell Anderson’s
it to Hammerstein and, fatefully, asked to be read not as a family friend but as a professional. Hammerstein agreed,
and summoned him the next day to tell him, in essence, that it was the worst
though not, he was careful to specify,
Hammerstein did not stop at one
prizes is that Sondheim did not regard
went through the script line by line, and
the way the word usually implies. He
about writing musicals in that single
of a debt to a single man who had
half hours, than most people learn in a
a professional word, and he spent
Hammerstein’s method was not simply
Kaufman and Connelly’s Beggar on
repay that debt forward, to a fourth
toward his own voice rather than his
a play he liked but thought flawed, for
saying, more than once and in various
High Tor. The third was to adapt a novel
generation of writers who in turn owe
him what he owed Oscar Hammerstein II. That chain, running from Jerome
Kern through Hammerstein through Sondheim to Adam Guettel and
Jonathan Larson and Lin-Manuel
Miranda, is one of the great stories of
professional formation in any field, and
forms, that Sondheim's concerns were not Hammerstein’s concerns, and
that he would be, in Hammerstein's
own estimate, ninety per cent ahead of everyone else if he could learn to write like himself rather than like
of study that would occupy him through his years at Williams College: four
assignments, each designed to teach something different about dramatic
adaptation. The first was to musicalise a play he admired, and Sondheim chose
or story never before dramatised, which led him to an unfinished attempt at
Mary Poppins. The fourth was to write
something wholly original. None of the four was ever produced, and that was
rather the point. Hammerstein was not www.finito.org.uk
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MENTORSHIP
trying to get a prodigy onto Broadway.
disagreed over billing and royalties, with
Hammerstein’s gift to Sondheim was
the understanding that craft has to be
Sondheim’s one, and though Bernstein
competitive world to conduct themselves
He was trying to get him trained, on
earned in private, through a controlled
and properly supervised apprenticeship of failure, before it can be spent in public.
Bernstein receiving three per cent to offered to even the split, Sondheim
declined, satisfied with the sole lyric credit instead. A further attempt to
collaborate, a show called The Race to
In 1957 it was Hammerstein who
Urga, collapsed in 1969 when Robbins
Sondheim to take the job of lyricist
auditions, and Sondheim later said
by Jerome Robbins with music by
“I was ashamed of the whole project.”
own instinct was to hold out for a
career never again matched the success
and words. Bernstein and Sondheim’s
lyricist went on to eight Tony Awards
pushed the twenty-five-year-old
abandoned the production during
on West Side Story, a show conceived
flatly of the whole misbegotten effort,
Leonard Bernstein, when Sondheim's
Whether Bernstein, whose own theatre
project where he could write both music
of West Side Story while his onetime
collaboration on that score was genuine
and a Pulitzer, ever entirely made his
and, by both men’s later accounts,
mutually admiring, and their friendship endured, in warm letters and shared wordplay, until Bernstein’s death in
1990. But it was not without friction,
and the friction is instructive precisely
because it complicates the story rather than confirming it. The two men later 110
peace with being remembered as the composer his lyricist eclipsed is not the kind of thing that settles into a
tidy verified quotation. But the friction is real enough, and worth naming,
because it is a useful corrective to any account of mentorship in this world
that makes it sound uniformly generous.
rare precisely because others fail in this similarly.
It is worth going back one generation further, because the chain did not begin with Hammerstein either.
Hammerstein himself had been shaped by an older, more established figure a
decade his senior: the composer Jerome Kern, already one of Broadway’s most
accomplished tunesmiths when the two men met in the mid-1920s after their
first collaboration on Sunny in 1925. It
was Kern who had the idea, against the advice of colleagues who thought the
subject matter of racism and a broken marriage entirely unsuited to musical
comedy, of adapting Edna Ferber’s novel Show Boat, and it was Kern’s ambition
for the piece that pushed Hammerstein to abandon the looser, number-driven
structure of operetta in favour of a storyfirst, dramatically integrated musical play. That conviction, that a musical
MENTORSHIP Jerome Kern (Wikipedia.org)
bare music, thirty two measures that
most striking instance involves Adam
wanted to be wanted,” unconvincing
who at fourteen showed his own songs
he later said “sounded to me like they until he saw them again days afterward with Hammerstein’s words written in. It was only then, Bennett said, that
it became a song at all, a point Kern himself seemed to concede: when
Bennett praised the finished number,
Kern reminded him drily that he had
not said so when the music alone was
in front of him. Dorothy Hammerstein put the same point more pointedly could be as serious as any other dramatic form, stayed with Hammerstein for the
rest of his career and was precisely what he later transmitted, more deliberately and more explicitly, to the teenage
still, telling a party guest who had
complimented Kern on the song that her husband, not his, had actually
written Ol’ Man River, since all Kern
had supplied was, in her demonstration, a wordless string of notes. The anecdote
Sondheim. Kern himself described
is unfair to Kern's melody, which is one
telling an interviewer late in life, “I
but it captures something true about
the lyrics in plays,” a self-portrait of a
of this stature was, and about the
for inspiration, and it is that same
of a mentorship conducted through
story that Hammerstein absorbed and
Kern taught Hammerstein by example
his own working method modestly,
of the most haunting he ever wrote,
write music to both the situations and
how hard-won even a masterpiece
craftsman rather than a genius waiting
particular, sometimes prickly intimacy
workmanlike insistence on serving the
collaboration rather than instruction.
passed on.
Nowhere is the difficulty and the
strangeness of that creative partnership
more visible than in the writing of Show Boat's most famous song. According to Hammerstein’s biographer Hugh
Fordin, Kern at first resisted the idea of a river song altogether, not seeing
how it would be intrinsic to the story,
much as Hammerstein himself would
later resist writing the title number for Oklahoma! Kern eventually found his
way into it not through Ferber's text but through the sound of Paul Robeson's
speaking voice, which he said he heard
once and from which the melody of Ol’
Man River followed almost immediately. Even then, the tune alone was not yet
a song. The orchestrator Robert Russell Bennett recalled being handed Kern’s
and by sheer ambition for the work; Hammerstein taught Sondheim by
direct instruction. It is, in essence, the
same lesson, passed down twice before it reached its fullest flowering.
"It is, in essence, the same lesson, passed down twice before it reached its fullest flowering."
Sondheim did not simply receive what
Hammerstein gave him and keep it. He said of his own later mentoring that
he loved passing on what Oscar had passed on to him, and he did so in a
spirit that was recognisably the same,
rigorous and sometimes uncomfortable, rather than merely encouraging. The
Guettel, Richard Rodgers’s grandson,
to Sondheim expecting the unqualified enthusiasm a famous family friend
might offer a gifted child. Guettel later recalled arriving, in his own words, “all puffed up thinking I would be rained with compliments,” only to receive instead some direct and unsparing
criticism. Years afterward Sondheim
wrote to apologise, not for the substance of what he had said but for the way
he had delivered it, which had landed as discouragement rather than the
challenge he had intended. It is a telling correction of the Hammerstein story: Sondheim had absorbed the rigour of his mentor’s method but had to
learn, separately and through his own mistakes, the gentler art of delivering
hard truths to the young. Guettel went
on to become one of the most distinctive composers of his generation, with Floyd
Collins and The Light in the Piazza, and has himself become a teacher of younger writers, extending the lineage a further generation.
The same pattern recurs with Jonathan Larson, who corresponded with
Sondheim while working on what would become Rent. When Larson wrote to tell him about the new piece he was
attempting, he described it, with the
earnestness of a writer who did not yet
know what it would become, as a project he was “working on passionately,” and
Sondheim, by several accounts among the first people outside Larson’s circle
to know the show existed, encouraged him through it. Sondheim spoke
afterward, with evident grief, of Larson’s sudden death on the eve of that show’s opening. It recurs again, more publicly
than either, with Lin-Manuel Miranda, who has said of Sondheim's notes on his own developing scores, delivered
in the same spirit Hammerstein had
once delivered his, simply that “variety, www.finito.org.uk
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MENTORSHIP
Lin-Manuel Miranda and the cast of Hamilton (Wikipedia.org)
variety, variety” was the recurring
in the creative professions are actually
or forty years their junior, on the
relationship in the plainest terms: “it
not talent alone. American musical
capable of hearing hard truths and
instruction, and who has credited the made my work infinitely better, and it
made my life infinitely better.” Miranda has since become an active mentor and producer for a younger cohort
of musical theatre writers, much as
Sondheim did for him. The chain runs, with real continuity but never with the frictionless neatness of legend, from
Kern through Hammerstein through
Sondheim to Guettel and Larson and Miranda and onward: a transmission
of standards, vocabulary and a certain moral seriousness about the form, passed person to person across a
century, in conversations that were
rarely comfortable and were almost
always generous, even when, as with
Bernstein, the generosity ran alongside something more complicated.
This is where the story becomes, I
think, a genuinely useful case study
for anyone thinking about how careers 112
built, because what it describes is
theatre has never lacked for talent.
What it describes is an infrastructure of apprenticeship that talent by itself cannot create. Hammerstein did not simply tell the fifteen year old he
was good. He gave him exercises,
deadlines, a body of completed but
unproduced work, and an unambiguous account of exactly where he currently fell short, which is closer to the craft
apprenticeship a young cabinetmaker or a junior surgeon might recognise than to the more diffuse, encouragementshaped mentoring that culture often substitutes for it. And it persisted
institutionally as well as personally, in workshops and writing programmes such as the BMI Lehman Engel
Musical Theatre Workshop, and in a continuous culture in which senior
writers read and respond seriously to the unfinished work of writers thirty
assumption that the junior writer is improving because of them.
It is against this backdrop that the
comparative thinness of an equivalent tradition in British musical theatre becomes interesting, and worth
asking about honestly rather than
simply lamenting. Britain has, after all, produced figures of real stature in this sphere. Noel Coward’s wit
and theatrical instinct were sufficient to make him a dominant figure
across several forms for decades, but he worked, by most accounts, in a
fundamentally solitary way, a brilliant performer-writer-composer who was his own institution rather than the
founder of a school, and he mentored almost nobody in any formal sense. A generation later, Andrew Lloyd Webber built something different
again: not a culture of dramaturgical apprenticeship in the Hammerstein
MENTORSHIP
Stephen Sondheim receives the Special Award at the Evening Standard Drama Awards for his contribution to musical theatre, presented to him by the Princess of Wales. (Alamy.com)
mode but an industrial model, the
teenager with an absent father, and
shown enough promise to be worth
and replicable, designed for scale
for four years, an act of attention that
have simply praised the fifteen year
megamusical, internationally franchised rather than the kind of intimate
textual conversation that produced Sweeney Todd or Sunday in the
Park with George. Both Coward’s
solitary brilliance and Lloyd Webber’s
commercial scale are real achievements, and Britain should be proud of them. Neither, though, produced what
Hammerstein produced almost in
passing: a living chain of mentorship
that has now run for four generations and is still running.
chose to take that obligation seriously no institution can fully replicate but that institutions can certainly try to encourage. And part of it, frankly,
is cultural: an American tradition,
inherited partly from a general belief in technical training and partly from
the conservatoire and studio systems that fed Broadway throughout the
mid-century, that craft can and should be taught directly, generation to
generation, by people who have already done it.
the trouble. Hammerstein could
old's show, sent him on his way with his self-belief intact, and remained
merely a kind family friend. Instead
he treated him, in his own words, like a professional, which is to say, like
someone capable of hearing the truth and using it. That decision, made on
an ordinary afternoon in Pennsylvania
in the 1940s, is still, by way of Guettel and Larson and Miranda and all
the writers they in turn encourage,
shaping the American musical stage
It is worth asking why. Part of the
For a publication committed to the
today. British theatre has produced its
theatre and opera ecosystem has
apparently inspired and least apparently
yet quite produced is that particular,
answer is structural. America's regional historically given serious, difficult
work more places to fail honestly and improve, away from the immediate
commercial pressure of the West End. Part of it is generational proximity
and personal accident: Hammerstein happened to live near a clever, lonely
idea that careers, including the most
own kinds of genius. What it has not
teachable ones, are built rather than
unglamorous, generation-spanning
simply discovered, the lesson of Kern, Hammerstein and Sondheim is not
really about musical theatre at all. It is about what serious attention from an elder, rigorously and honestly given, can do for a young person who has
discipline of one artist taking the
trouble to tell a younger one, in detail and without flattery, exactly why the
work is not yet good enough, and then staying around long enough to see it become so.
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SPORT
THE WORLD’S GAME
HOW FOOTBALL BECAME THE PLANET'S LARGEST BUSINESS George Achebe
Lionel Messi (Alamy.com)
T
hey think it’s all over. It is now. So said Kenneth Wolstenholme,
almost as an aside, as Geoff Hurst
hammered his third goal past Hans
Tilkowski in the final seconds of the
1966 World Cup final at Wembley. The words were unrehearsed, a reflex rather
than a composition. Wolstenholme had
noticed the supporters spilling onto the pitch, assumed the game was over, and
improvised. He was right, of course, in ways he could scarcely have imagined.
England had won. But something larger had also begun. 114
Watch the footage today and what
something rather closer to a geopolitical
music quality of it all: the modest
In 1966, Geoff Hurst, the only man to
strikes you is the almost chamberroar, the unassuming stadium, the
gentle propriety of the commentary.
Wolstenholme spoke as a man who had absorbed the codes of public restraint, the radio presenter’s awareness that to over-emote is to risk absurdity. And
yet what he was describing, with such
understatement, was the moment when professional football stopped being a Saturday afternoon ritual and began
its long, strange metamorphosis into
phenomenon.
score a hat-trick in a World Cup final, was earning roughly £80 a week. His teammate George Cohen, England’s
right-back, was on a similar wage when
a knee injury ended his career three years
later. The maximum wage cap for English footballers had only been abolished in
1961, following Jimmy Hill’s landmark
campaign as chairman of the Professional Footballers’ Association, and the game was still feeling its way towards the
SPORT
economics of abundance. Johnny Haynes
Cup in history: forty-eight nations, one
a week that same year, a figure treated at
countries, and economic projections that
had become the first player to earn £100 the time as a mild scandal.
hundred and four matches, three host read less like a sports event and more
The contrast with the present is not
like a medium-sized war. Independent
Haaland, the current highest earner in
commissioned by FIFA in association
home around £525,000 a week, £27.3
estimated that the tournament could
League wage now sits at something in
output and $40.9 billion in gross
happened between Wolstenholme’s
time equivalent jobs were projected to be
merely striking. It is vertiginous. Erling
consultancy OpenEconomics,
the Premier League, is estimated to take
with the World Trade Organization,
million a year. The average Premier
generate $80.1 billion in global economic
the region of £44,000 per week. What
domestic product. Nearly 824,000 full-
measured apostrophe and Haaland’s
financial stratosphere is not just the story of a sport. It is the story of globalisation itself: of how a game invented on the playing fields of Victorian England
became, by any measure, the largest
cultural industry on the face of the earth. The Scale of the Thing Numbers, in this context, have long since ceased to be numbers in the ordinary sense and have become something
more like theology. Consider the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. The Argentina–
France final drew an audience of 1.42
billion viewers, not the population of a large country, but of a large continent, watching the same ninety minutes of
football at roughly the same time. Across the entire tournament, FIFA estimates
that around five billion people engaged with the competition in some form. To place that in context: the Super Bowl, America’s own cathedral of spectacle,
draws approximately 120 million viewers globally. The average audience for every
single match at the 2018 World Cup in Russia was 191 million people. Not the
created or sustained worldwide as a direct or indirect consequence.
“Numbers, in this context, have long since ceased to be numbers in the ordinary sense and have become something more like theology.” Within the United States alone, the
figures were $30.5 billion in gross output, $17.2 billion in GDP, and the equivalent of 185,000 full-time jobs. Canada was
projected to see up to CAD 3.8 billion
in economic benefit, including CAD 1.3 billion in wages. Mexico, the smallest economy of the three hosts, was in
some respects the relative winner: the
$3 billion in projected economic benefit
represented somewhere between 0.2 and
0.5 percent of the country’s entire GDP, a meaningful uplift for an economy where
the influx of international visitors carries disproportionate weight.
final. Every match.
The Employability Question
FIFA president Gianni Infantino
There is a tendency, when discussing
opened in June across the United States,
aggregate. The headline number, 824,000
described the 2026 World Cup, which Canada and Mexico, as “104 Super
Bowls in one month.” The hyperbole
is, in this case, almost understatement.
The 2026 edition was the largest World
events of this magnitude, to speak only in jobs worldwide, lands with satisfying
weight but tells us relatively little about
the texture of the opportunity. The labour market picture is, in reality, considerably
David Beckham (ESPN)
more granular and considerably more interesting than the summary figure suggests.
In the United States, the accommodation sector was the single largest employment beneficiary: an estimated 31,660 jobs created to service the extraordinary
volume of international visitors during the tournament’s 39-day window. Air transportation followed at 20,055
positions, driven by the added flight frequencies required to move the
projected 1.24 million international
arrivals between host cities. Of those visitors, 742,000 were classified by
Tourism Economics as “additional” trips, travel that would not have occurred
without the tournament, representing genuine new economic activity rather than displacement. Each visitor was
expected to stay an average of twelve days.
Beyond the headline sectors, the
employment picture spread wide and deep. Security, logistics, translation and interpretation services, media
infrastructure, fan zone operations, merchandise, catering, healthcare
provision, digital and broadcasting technology: the World Cup is, in
its operational reality, less a football tournament than a temporary www.finito.org.uk
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SPORT
LA Stadium at the World Cup 2026
civilisation erected in the interstices of
meaning that for every dollar invested
footprint alone is instructive. Fox Sports
value is generated. Infrastructure
the permanent one. The broadcasting committed to 340 hours of first-run
World Cup programming, more than
double its 2022 output, and carried all
104 matches of the tournament across
its networks and streaming platforms, a
commitment that makes Infantino’s “104
Super Bowls” line look less like hyperbole and more like an accounting statement. Telemundo broadcast 92 matches on
free-to-air Spanish-language television,
the most World Cup games ever shown
tend to re-emerge in the economic
“The Economist found that 10 percent of American sports fans now identify soccer as their favourite sport, edging it past baseball.”
whistle.
stands second at roughly 10 percent;
in hosting, $3.64 of social and economic improvements, long-term tourism uplift, accelerated investment in stadium and transport technology: these are the
compounding returns that host cities
have historically failed to account for in their pre-event calculations, and which
literature five to ten years after the final
No other sport comes close. Basketball
The American Complication
baseball at 9 percent. Soccer, in that
on a single US network in any language.
And yet, for all the projected billions and
lies a supply chain of technical, editorial
persistent American paradox. The United
never sees.
world’s wealthiest and most commercially
Behind each of those hours of broadcast
the half-billion screens, there remains the
and support roles that the casual viewer
States is, by any conventional measure, the
It is worth noting, as economists
are beginning to do with increasing frequency, that the longer-term
employment legacy of hosting a World
sophisticated sports market. It is also the
only major economy on the planet where football, the world’s game, remains, by domestic preference, an also-ran.
Cup is more complex and more durable
The data here is worth sitting with. A
suggest. The social return on investment
that 41 percent of American adults name
than the tournament-window numbers calculated by OpenEconomics is 3.64, 116
Gallup poll conducted in late 2023 found American football as their favourite sport.
same survey, registered at 5 percent. A
Pew Research study conducted in early 2024, asking which sport Americans
consider to be truly “America’s sport”, found that 53 percent nominated
football; 27 percent baseball; 8 percent basketball; and soccer a modest 3
percent. American football has been the dominant spectator sport in the United States since 1972, when it overtook
baseball in the polls for the first time. The NFL’s annual revenues have
reportedly surpassed $23 billion, and
the Super Bowl is, effectively, a national
SPORT
secular holiday, commanding over 100
market, has become its most potent
ways that formal economic modelling
All of which makes a more recent
To put the trajectory in the starkest
The Long Shadow of a Summer
survey conducted by The Economist
the percentage of Americans naming
million domestic viewers.
finding genuinely interesting. A 2025 found that 10 percent of American
sports fans now identify soccer as their favourite sport, edging it past baseball, long considered the sacred pastime of
the republic, for the first time. American football retained its commanding
37-percent lead; basketball stood at
17 percent. But soccer’s displacement of baseball in the American cultural
hierarchy is a shift with implications that extend well beyond the sports pages.
As Daniel Monaghan of Ampere
Analysis has observed, the growth of soccer fandom in the United States
derives not only from the expansion of Major League Soccer, now 30
teams, with further franchises planned, but from the accessibility of global
competitions and the European leagues,
which streaming has placed within reach of any American with a broadband
connection. Soccer’s appeal, unlike the
NFL’s, extends beyond a single domestic league: it offers the Champions League, the World Cup, the Copa América,
the Premier League, La Liga. A fan
selling point.
possible terms: between 1937 and 2004, soccer as their favourite sport never
exceeded 2. It has not fallen below 5
since 2008. It now stands at 10. That is, in the timescale of cultural change in a
large democracy, something approaching a revolution.
A Note of Caution, and a Larger Truth Scepticism, in this context, is not only
legitimate but necessary. The economists and journalists at the Financial Study
Association Groningen have noted the
structural tension in FIFA’s projections: the organisation and its commissioned
consultancies have an obvious incentive to forecast optimistically, and the
headline figures, $80 billion in global
output, incorporate assumptions about tourism and consumer behaviour that may not survive contact with reality.
Several economists who have studied previous World Cup hosts have
documented the “halo effect” that tends to inflate pre-event projections. Host cities, meanwhile, were expected to
absorb hundreds of millions in security, transport and infrastructure costs while FIFA itself was projected to generate
consistently struggles to capture. Afternoon
Return, for a moment, to Wembley in July 1966. Geoff Hurst, in his
£80-a-week boots, blasting a hat-
trick past a West German keeper in
a stadium of 96,000 people. Kenneth
Wolstenholme’s steady, slightly amused
voice noting that it was, indeed, all over. England’s players receiving a modest
bonus and dispersing, as professionals then did, back to their ordinary First
Division contracts. The wages of a skilled tradesman. The relative obscurity of men who had, half an hour earlier, been the best footballers in the world.
What the intervening six decades
have produced is a transformation so complete that the 1966 final and the
2026 tournament feel less like points on a continuum and more like specimens
from different civilisations. The game is recognisably the same: eleven players,
two goals, ninety minutes. The industry
around it has become something entirely different, a global economic ecosystem
generating hundreds of thousands of jobs across hospitality, broadcasting, logistics, technology, security and sport itself. A
approximately $11 billion in profits from
game in which the top earners are paid,
The demographic dimension is equally
None of which changes the fundamental
And so it arrived on American soil for
proportionally, the least likely subgroup
for several decades, the single most-
and 104 matches and projections that
Nothing else approaches it for global
where American football still commands
of well over a billion people watching
where baseball, once the sacred pastime,
moment. The industry that has grown
a sport that many Americans still struggle
serious economic force: a generator of
justice, is considerable. The country that
investing in soccer is investing in a
global system, not a domestic franchise. significant. Young Americans are,
to name American football as their
favourite sport: 28 percent of under-30s nominate it, against 46 percent of those
over 50. Soccer’s growth is concentrated precisely in that younger demographic, accelerated by the continued success of the US women’s national team, by the
arrival of marquee European players in MLS, and by a cultural shift in which the sport’s global connectivity, once
its greatest liability in the American
the tournament.
weekly, what Hurst earned in a decade.
reality. The World Cup is, and has been
only the second time, with 48 nations
watched sporting event in human history.
gestured towards $80 billion. In a country
simultaneity, the sheer improbable fact
37 percent of all sporting allegiance, and
the same football match at the same
had just been nudged aside in the polls by
up around that fact is, at this stage, a
to call football. The irony, or perhaps the
employment, a driver of infrastructure, a multiplier of tourism, and an engine of cultural exchange that operates in
most conspicuously declined to call it the world’s game found itself, for a summer, host to the world.
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FILM
Marilyn Monroe in How to Marry a Millionaire (Wikipedia.org)
118
FILM
WHAT ENTREPRENEURS CAN LEARN FROM MARILYN MONROE Sarah Tucker
T
here are few business schools that include Marilyn Monroe on
the syllabus, which is a pity because
she understood several things about
branding, perception, narrative control and human behaviour long before
consultants began charging substantial
sums of money to explain them to other people.
What Monroe appeared to understand,
have succeeded. A business begins
do not merely respond to products,
time customers, investors, journalists,
perhaps instinctively, was that people services or individuals. They respond
to stories. Business people often speak about narrative as though they have
discovered something profound, despite storytellers having quietly cornered the
with one founder and one idea. Over
competitors and increasingly algorithms begin constructing their own versions of what that business represents, after which the founder discovers that the
company now exists simultaneously in
market in narratives several thousand
several realities, a situation that sounds
Hollywood, celebrity and a white dress
about the future. Customers buy stories
involved.
its owner, rather than with strategy,
choose organisations whose values
entrepreneurship. Yet while researching
themselves. Monroe grasped this before
Most people associate Monroe with
years earlier. Investors buy stories
philosophical until investors become
that achieved almost as much fame as
about identity. Employees increasingly
Monroe experienced precisely the
intellectual property, resilience or
reflect stories they wish to tell about
Marilyn Monroe story because it was
my chapter for Encounters with Marilyn Monroe: Celebrating 100 Years, I found
myself increasingly convinced that many modern founders have more in common with Marilyn Monroe than they might initially care to admit, largely because
they face remarkably similar challenges around reinvention, perception and control.
The version of Monroe inherited by popular culture is familiar enough.
A vulnerable blonde. A tragic star. A woman whose life appears to consist
largely of photographs, romances and
eventual catastrophe. The difficulty is not that this version is entirely untrue but that it obscures a far more interesting
many corporations did, and the creation of Marilyn Monroe was not simply
an exercise in image but an exercise in positioning.
“What Monroe appeared to understand, perhaps instinctively, was that people do not merely respond to products, services or individuals. They respond to stories.”
same problem. Hollywood loved the
simple, profitable and easy to market. The complication was that it left very little room for the actual woman. As
contributors to the centenary collection observe, Monroe was intelligent,
analytical, ambitious and determined
to be taken seriously, qualities that sat
rather awkwardly beside the stereotype that had become commercially
successful. Hollywood preferred to tell
a story about a beautiful young woman discovered by chance and transformed
into a star through the wisdom of studio executives, partly because this had the additional advantage of allowing the
studio executives to remain the heroes
of their own story. Organisations have always shown a marked preference for
reality, because Norma Jeane Mortenson
She became memorable because she
complexity when producing annual
connected, which tends to be regarded as
imagination, although the difficulty
human beings.
eventually develop lives of their own.
and private reality should feel familiar
was not born famous, wealthy or
a disadvantage in most industries except
motivational speaking, where overcoming adversity is often treated as a valuable commercial asset after the event.
occupied a distinctive place in the public
reports and simplicity when describing
with successful narratives is that they
That tension between public narrative
Many entrepreneurs discover this at
to many entrepreneurs. At what point
precisely the moment they think they
does a successful brand become a trap? www.finito.org.uk
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FILM
Many founders spend years attempting
of her career and creative direction.
Perhaps the most important lesson of
that visibility and understanding are not
vertical integration, founder control or
facing founders today is rarely a shortage
to achieve visibility, only to discover
remotely the same thing. A company may become famous for one thing
while internally attempting to become something else entirely. Customers often cling to old narratives long
after founders have moved on to new ones, largely because changing one’s
mind requires effort and most people have perfectly adequate uses for their available energy already.
Over the years I have interviewed
enough actors, musicians, broadcasters
and public figures to develop a healthy scepticism about public identities. The person who eventually sits down for
an interview often bears only a passing
resemblance to the version described in
publicity material, not because anyone is necessarily being dishonest but because human beings are complicated and
stories are efficient. Publicists simplify because it is their job. Journalists
simplify because they have deadlines.
Audiences simplify because they have
lives. Somewhere along the way reality develops a habit of disappearing, after
which everyone seems mildly surprised to discover that human beings are
considerably more complex than their publicity photographs suggested.
Journalists like to imagine they reveal people. In practice, we occasionally contribute to hiding them.
Founders experience much the same
thing because markets rarely encounter the whole person. They encounter
a story, and stories have a habit of
becoming more influential than the
people who originally created them. This is one reason Monroe’s decision to establish Marilyn Monroe Productions in 1955 remains so significant. At a
time when Hollywood studios exercised extraordinary control over performers, she attempted to regain ownership 120
Today we might describe that as
strategic independence. In 1955 it was more commonly described as a young
actress becoming inconvenient. History tends to celebrate disruptors once they have become successful enough to be
described as visionaries, although before that point they are frequently dismissed
all concerns ownership. The danger
of visibility because social media has
largely solved that problem. The danger is allowing other people to define the narrative before you do. Investors,
journalists, competitors and algorithms are all enthusiastic storytellers, and not
as difficult by people who would
all of them feel any particular obligation
strongly prefer everything to remain
to consult the protagonist before
exactly as it is.
publishing the next chapter.
Another lesson emerges from resilience.
Marilyn Monroe remains one of the
resilience as though it were a personality
because she mastered the art of creating
Entrepreneurs frequently talk about
trait that can be downloaded from a
leadership podcast. Resilience is usually a consequence of necessity. People
become resilient because circumstances leave them little alternative. Monroe’s life contained repeated setbacks,
disappointments and failures. What
most recognisable people in history
an unforgettable story. Her tragedy was not that she failed to build a powerful
brand. It was that the brand eventually became more famous than the person behind it. Entrepreneurs can learn a
great deal from that distinction because
distinguished her was not an absence of
building a successful narrative is
despite it, which is considerably less
ownership of it may be even more
generally imply but rather more useful.
About Sarah Tucker
difficulty but a willingness to continue
undoubtedly valuable, while retaining
glamorous than motivational speakers
important.
There is also a lesson about perception. Edward de Bono spent much of his career explaining that perception
matters more than intelligence because
perception determines what we notice in
Sarah Tucker is a journalist, author and broadcaster whose work explores the
intersection of culture, psychology, media, creativity and social change. She is the
the first place. Highly intelligent people
author of Love Laterally, the biography of
they are looking in the wrong direction.
lateral thinking. Her work has appeared in
example. For decades people looked
and she regularly writes and speaks on
frequently miss opportunities because
Edward de Bono, creator of the concept of
Monroe’s life provides an unusual
national and international publications,
at Marilyn Monroe and saw glamour.
creativity, perception, artificial intelligence,
Increasingly historians, biographers and cultural commentators are examining exactly the same evidence and seeing entrepreneurship, reinvention and
media and human behaviour.
For Encounters with Marilyn Monroe,
Tucker contributed the chapter When Stars
strategic thinking. The facts themselves
Fall, examining the significant rise in
the angle from which people are viewing
lasting influence that event had on media
valuable insights emerge.
responsibility.
have not changed. What has changed is
suicides following Monroe’s death and the
them, which is often where the most
reporting of suicide, celebrity and public
FILM
Marilyn Monroe (Wikipedia.org)
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HENRY MOORE, KEW GARDENS AND THE FORGOTTEN SKILL OF LOOKING DIFFERENTLY Sarah Tucker
L
ike most modern professionals, I spend far too much of my life
staring at illuminated rectangles while
convincing myself this constitutes living. My phone vibrates before I have fully
collectively pretending not to cry during
completely naked man standing heroically
I do not own a television, although this
For several deeply confusing seconds I
advertisements for insurance companies. sounds more intellectually rigorous
than it really is. The truth is simply that
opened my eyes in the morning. My
televisions collect dust, and I already
with overuse. Entire days disappear
exposing my inadequacies.
laptop remains permanently warm
possess enough household objects quietly
into tabs, messages, alerts and digital
Recently, to become a more balanced and
obligations which somehow all announce themselves with the urgency of a minor constitutional crisis. I occasionally go to the cinema because there is still
something reassuring about sitting
quietly in the dark with strangers while 122
on a platform under fluorescent lighting. assumed this was simply what creative
culture in west London had evolved into. Reader, I stayed. Since then, I have produced sculptures
so anatomically questionable they would
perhaps faintly artisanal person, I booked
concern a medical professional. Yet
calm concentration, elegant bowls and
structural liberties, something unexpected
Instead, I accidentally walked into a
occasionally captured emotion more
myself into a ceramics class. I imagined
despite the alarming proportions and
the vague possibility of spiritual growth.
emerged from the process. The sculptures
figurative sculpture class featuring a
accurately than realism ever could.
SCULPTURE
At Kew this becomes extraordinarily clear.
What makes the exhibition so
successful is not simply the scale of the bronzes, although some appear large enough to require diplomatic negotiations before installation. It
is the way the sculptures have been curated among the trees, lakes and
pathways. Kew is not functioning as a polite backdrop to the art. Nature
itself becomes part of the experience of looking.
You round a corner and suddenly a
sculpture emerges between branches. Another appears reflected in water so that its shape seems to dissolve and reform simultaneously. Some
works frame the landscape behind
them, forcing you to look through the sculpture rather than merely at it.
That subtle shift changes something psychologically.
“Like most modern professionals, I spend far too much of my life staring at illuminated rectangles while convincing myself this constitutes living.” That thought stayed with me while walking through Henry Moore:
Monumental Nature at Kew Gardens, which may genuinely be the most
intelligent exhibition Kew has staged in years.
in 1986, spent much of his artistic life
“Most of modern life encourages us to look quickly and conclude immediately. Social media rewards certainty. Digital culture encourages rapid opinions. We glance, categorise and move on.”
human forms, natural structures and
look quickly and conclude immediately.
think of sculpture as something static
culture encourages rapid opinions. We
that sculpture changes according
sculptures resist this entirely because
perspective. His work is never fully
You have to circle them repeatedly
was never intended to be.
And even then, they continue changing.
The exhibition, which runs until 31
January 2027, includes 30 monumental sculptures placed throughout the
gardens as well as more than 90 works housed inside the Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art. (kew.org)
Henry Moore, born in 1898 and dying exploring the relationship between
Most of modern life encourages us to
landscape. While many people still
Social media rewards certainty. Digital
and decorative, Moore understood
glance, categorise and move on. Moore’s
to movement, weather, light and
they demand patience and movement.
understood from one position because it
before they make sense.
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SCULPTURE
A reclining figure can appear maternal
Moore adored trees because they
This way of seeing has implications far
another. Openings within the bronze
Their forms were shaped by weather,
The most interesting people I know,
from one angle and geological from suddenly become more important
than the solid mass surrounding them. What first appears abstract gradually
becomes recognisably human. You realise that understanding is dependent upon perspective and that perspective itself depends upon movement.
This is perhaps the most valuable thing the exhibition offers.
Not information, but a recalibration in how we look.
The Shirley Sherwood exhibition reveals Moore’s fascination with natural forms
including roots, bones, shells, rocks and trees. What fascinated me most was
learning that during his travels in Italy he became homesick for English trees with their thick trunks and dense canopies rather than the elegant verticality of Mediterranean landscapes.
There is something deeply reassuring about one of the twentieth century’s
greatest sculptors essentially longing for chunky Yorkshire trees. 124
contained both strength and vulnerability. damage, growth and survival. The
same principles appear throughout his sculpture. Bodies become landscapes. Landscapes become bodies.
“Moore’s sculptures become unexpectedly useful reminders that reality is rarely fixed and that certainty is often simply the result of insufficient movement.”
beyond art.
especially founders and entrepreneurs,
rarely succeed because they obsess over one narrow viewpoint. They succeed
because they can move around an idea mentally in the same way you move
physically around a Moore sculpture. They understand that problems alter according to perspective.
A challenge viewed financially may in fact be cultural. A technological issue
may actually be psychological. A business can appear successful from one angle and deeply fragile from another.
Moore’s sculptures become unexpectedly
useful reminders that reality is rarely fixed
Walking through Kew, you begin noticing
and that certainty is often simply the result
Tree roots resemble veins and nervous
One of the recurring themes throughout
twist like torsos. It becomes difficult to
with motherhood, shelter and protection.
the strange visual similarities everywhere.
of insufficient movement.
systems. Branches mirror limbs. Trunks
the exhibition is Moore’s fascination
determine whether Moore was inspired
by nature or whether nature simply solved structural and aesthetic problems long before humans attempted sculpture.
His Mother and Child works are less
sentimental than structural. Bodies curve
around one another protectively. Openings become refuges rather than absences.
SCULPTURE
While I was there, two geese marched
monetised wellness sense currently
part of the point. Perspective matters. The
than twenty goslings with the kind
weighted blankets and speak passionately
matters. What you see depends entirely
across the grass accompanied by more of militant maternal vigilance usually
associated with elite security operations. Against that backdrop Moore’s work stopped feeling symbolic and began feeling observational.
fashionable among people who own about magnesium.
Kew slows you down because the exhibition cannot be consumed
efficiently. You walk. You pause. The
weather changes the work. Shadows
The exhibition also restores something
move across bronze. Wind alters the
namely proportion.
Even time itself begins to feel less
else which modern life quietly erodes,
atmosphere entirely.
Standing beneath Moore’s monumental
compressed.
trees has a curiously humbling effect
throughout the exhibition politely
relationship between observer and object upon where you stand.
That idea stayed with me long after I left Kew.
Perhaps wisdom itself is simply the
ability to keep moving around an idea until you understand it more fully.
If so, Henry Moore may have understood far more about modern life than many
contemporary thinkers currently flooding
bronzes while surrounded by ancient
Naturally, Kew has placed signs
upon anyone who secretly believes
requesting visitors not to climb on the
Kew Gardens has created something
members of the public continue
not merely display sculpture beautifully. It
There is nothing quite like a twelve-
significant artwork as though auditioning
And in an age where most of us spend
cedar to make your own anxieties
intellectual rodeo.
their inbox constitutes the centre of
civilisation. I include myself firmly in this category.
sculptures. Equally naturally, certain
remarkable with this exhibition. It does
attempting to sit on internationally
quietly teaches you to observe differently.
foot sculpture beside a centuries old
unsuccessfully for a particularly
appear faintly melodramatic.
Do not do this.
The experience is also strangely calming,
Moore’s sculptures are best appreciated
although not in the aggressively
LinkedIn with motivational diagrams.
from a distance because distance itself is
our lives staring flatly at screens, that may be one of the most valuable experiences available in London.
Exhibition runs from 9th May – 27th January 2027. Visit kew.org.
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THE HUSTLE MADE AUDIBLE:
RAP, WORK, AND THE MOST CONSEQUENTIAL MUSIC OF OUR TIME By Christopher Jackson Snoop Dog (Wikipedia.org)
I
t was the summer of the Paris Olympics, and the closing ceremony
had just happened. If you were watching, you will remember the sideways piano
the screen during the handover to Los
weather. Snoop embodied it, as he has
she said, "who is that old actor?"
itself a remarkable fact. The man has been
Angeles. Tom Cruise appeared. "Daddy,"
been embodying it since 1993, which is
And then we were in Los Angeles. And
famous for thirty-three years and is still,
"Drop It Like It's Hot" was filling the
A few months later, an email arrived
confidence at full blast, which is to say at
constructed track — and something
can pay celebrities to record personalised
of an institution that has been right
argument, this was culture as energy.
longer imagine being wrong about
confidence, at its best, that is almost
— a Steinway hung vertically on a wire,
then Snoop Dogg was onstage, and
indisputably, Snoop Dogg.
for. France had deployed its cultural
beach — that lazy, insolent, perfectly
from Cameo — the platform where you
full volume and with the self-satisfaction
shifted. If Paris had been culture as
about so many things that it can no
There is a quality to American popular
anything. My eight-year-old looked at
physical: it moves through a crowd like
dangled above the Trocadéro like a
surrealist provocation nobody had asked
126
video messages. “Snoop Dogg is back.” That was the entire email. Curious,
I looked up the price: approximately
£1,200 for a video that, according to the platform's own data, runs to an average
MUSIC DJ Kool Herc (Wikipedia.org)
Out of the Bronx: The Origin Story Rap was born in a specific place at a
specific moment: the South Bronx, New York City, August 11, 1973. A teenager
named Cindy Campbell threw a back-toschool party at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue.
Her brother, Clive — known as DJ Kool Herc — was the DJ. He developed a technique he called the “Merry-Go-
Round”: isolating the percussion breaks in funk and soul records and extending
them by switching between two copies of the same disc. From that isolated beat, an art form grew.
The South Bronx of the early 1970s of around twenty-seven seconds. That works out at roughly £44 per second. For context, the average UK junior
was, by most measures, one of the most deprived urban environments in the
Western world. Whole city blocks had been burned out — some by arson for insurance, some by accident, some by the city’s own urban renewal policies
that had severed communities from their moorings. Unemployment ran above
thirty percent. The official economy had largely withdrawn. What remained was what the sociologists call the informal economy and what the people living
there called, more simply, the hustle. Rap emerged from that hustle. This is
not incidental to what it is. The obsession with money, status, and the mechanisms of survival that characterise so much of
rap's DNA are not a pose or a marketing strategy. They are the subject matter
that was immediately to hand for the Bronx, NY (Wikipedia.org)
doctor earns less than that per hour.
The economics are, depending on your
perspective, either outrageous or simply
the market being efficient about cultural value. Probably both.
“Rap emerged from that hustle. This is not incidental to what it is. The obsession with money, status, and the mechanisms of survival that characterise so much of rap's DNA are not a pose or a marketing strategy.” For perhaps two billion people alive
today, Snoop Dogg needs no introduction – he is one of the most recognisable humans on the planet, and what he represents is one of the genuinely
transformative cultural and economic
forces of the past half-century. Rap music. The hustle made audible.
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MUSIC
“Run-DMC, in particular, understood something that the established music industry took years to grasp: that rap was a total lifestyle culture, not merely a genre.” Run-DMC, in particular, understood something that the established music industry took years to grasp: that rap
was a total lifestyle culture, not merely a genre. Their collaboration with Adidas in 1986 — which resulted in the first major endorsement deal between a
hip-hop act and a sportswear brand,
worth $1.6 million — was the moment
Run DMC (Wikipedia.org)
the boardrooms began to pay attention.
people who made the music – the same
Elvis's hips were the grandparents of
sharecropping South, or that punk
lyrics. The anxiety is always the same:
way that the blues emerged from the emerged from the deindustrialised
Britain of the mid-1970s. When DJ Kool Herc played those break beats, and when MCs began to speak over them, they
were doing what artists have always done: making the specific conditions of their
lives into something universal enough for other people to hear themselves in. The parallel with rock and roll is
instructive. Rock was also born from poverty, also emerged from a Black
the parents who worried about NWA's this music is coming from somewhere we don't understand, and it is aimed
at our children, and it doesn't respect the conventions we spent our lives maintaining.
The Founding Figures and the Grammar of a Genre
The history of rap's founding figures is
the history of people creating an entirely new professional infrastructure where
musical tradition that the white
none existed. Grandmaster Flash and
years being regarded as a menace before
Run-DMC, LL Cool J, Public Enemy,
that employs hundreds of thousands of
merely making music but inventing the
Tupelo, Mississippi, took Black music
sustain careers. Independent labels.
was almost identical in character to the
industry oriented around the music. A
parents of the 1950s who worried about
than radio play.
mainstream then colonised, also spent
the Furious Five, Afrika Bambaataa,
becoming a multi-billion-dollar industry
N.W.A — each of these acts was not
people. Elvis Presley, born in poverty in
mechanisms by which that music could
into white living rooms. The outrage
Street-level distribution. A fashion
outrage rap would later provoke. The
touring economy built on loyalty rather
128
Before Run-DMC, the idea that a rapper could anchor a brand partnership would have seemed faintly absurd. After them, it became the template. Jay-Z, in due
course, would build an empire — Roc Nation, the D'Usse cognac brand, the Armand de Brignac champagne, the Tidal streaming service, a net worth
estimated by Forbes at over $2.5 billion
— that is essentially a scaled-up version of what Run-DMC intuited in a hotel room in 1986.
The scale of what hip-hop has built is
now genuinely difficult to overstate. The global hip-hop market is projected to
reach $30 billion in 2025. In the United States alone, the industry contributes
over $15 billion annually to the economy.
Rap and hip-hop accounted for nearly 28 percent of all music streamed in the US
in 2024, making it far and away the most
listened-to genre on the planet. Kendrick Lamar and SZA's joint tour generated $358.7 million in a single run. The
global streetwear industry, shaped almost
entirely by hip-hop aesthetics, is valued at
MUSIC
$185 billion and growing. In 2020, eight of the ten most streamed songs in the
United States were hip-hop tracks. Jay-Z, Drake, Kanye West, and Diddy have all appeared in Forbes's annual lists of the
highest-paid entertainers — alongside,
increasingly, their business interests rather than their music alone.
The jobs this industry has created are not only the obvious ones. Yes, there
are rappers, producers, DJs, and label
executives — but there are also intellectual property lawyers who specialise in
sample clearances, nutritionists and
personal trainers attached to major acts, documentary filmmakers, merchandise designers, social media strategists, data
analysts tracking streaming performance, brand partnership managers, and a
whole ecosystem of event production,
logistics, and security that travels with
any major tour. The hip-hop industry's
expansion into fashion, alcohol, cannabis, tech, and film has created employment opportunities that would have been
Literature in Disguise In 2003, a journalist asked Seamus
complex rhyme schemes across multi-
celebrated poets in the English language,
dramatic monologue, would be impressive
authority that his opinions on prosody
deploys these skills over a beat rather than
was anyone in popular culture doing for
for instance, his song Stan where a slightly
Lennon had done for theirs. Heaney
Dear Slim, I wrote you, but you still ain't
Heaney — then among the most
syllabic chains, his use of persona and
a Nobel laureate, a figure of such cultural
in any literary form. The fact that he
were reported as news — whether there
on a page does not diminish them. Take,
his generation what Bob Dylan and John
unhinged fan is writing to Eminem:
replied without hesitation: “There is a guy
callin'
Eminem. He has created a sense of what is possible. He has sent a voltage around a generation. He has done this not just
through his subversive attitude but also his verbal energy.”
It was a remarkable endorsement, and it caused the kind of controversy that only
I left my cell, my pager, and my home phone at the bottom
I sent two letters back in autumn, you must not've got 'em
There probably was a problem at the post office or somethin'
the endorsement of an unlikely figure
Sometimes I scribble addresses too sloppy
establishment was divided: was this a
I don’t know too many poets who can
by an unlikely admirer can cause. The
Nobel laureate extending the boundaries of literary seriousness, or had the man
simply lost his mind? But Heaney was
literally unimaginable when Kool Herc
onto something real.
Avenue.
a poet of unusual gifts: his command
was playing those break beats on Sedgwick
of internal rhyme, his ability to sustain
Eminem is, by any technical measure,
when I jot 'em
sustain that rhyme scheme (‘bottom’
‘autumn’ ‘got ‘em’ ‘jot ‘em’), while at the same time capturing that awkward
friendliness, lack of self-awareness and insecurity of the fan as Eminem does here. Zadie Smith, who interviewed
Eminem and Proof (Wikipedia.org)
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Eminem for Vibe magazine and later
work twice as hard.” As Chris Rock once
Miranda told Apple Music's Zane Lowe
precisely. Rap, she wrote, uses “a narrative
America when the best golfer was Black
got everywhere on the strength of his
wrote about him at length, put it
medium that mixes story-telling with dramatic monologue, boasting with
political mission-statements, original poetry with endless quotation.”
Elsewhere she has said that the part of her brain that should be reserved
for poetry is occupied entirely by rap
lyrics – a confession that would resonate with anyone who has found that they
can recite the verse from Jay-Z's "Izzo (H.O.V.A.)" while being unable to
remember even the first line of a poem they were required to study at school.
The literacy argument matters beyond
aesthetics. Hip-hop songs average 3,869 unique words per song — more than
any other genre. The density of reference in a Kendrick Lamar album — to the Bible, to Compton street geography, to jazz tradition, to Greek myth, to
the specific inflections of AAVE — is
comparable to the density of allusion in a poem by Geoffrey Hill or a novel by Toni Morrison. This is not accidental.
The form demands it. To rap well is to do something genuinely difficult, and
the people who do it with mastery know
exactly how difficult it is. “I don’t consider myself a genius,” Lin-Manuel Miranda
has said. “I consider myself someone who works really, really, really hard.”
Eminem’s relationship to the question
of race and rap is itself a literary subject. He is, as Zadie Smith put it with
characteristic precision, one of perhaps four white men in the history of the genre — the Beastie Boys being the
others — who have been accepted as
legitimate rather than derivative. “When
I met him I felt that he gave me a poster,” Smith said. “He was coming at that
tradition from the outside and I thought I was coming at my tradition from the
outside. And it struck me that if you are coming inside-out that way, you have to 130
observed, something had changed in
and the best rapper was white. The racial dynamics of who gets to speak, in what idiom, with what authority, have never
been more legibly dramatised than in the career of Marshall Mathers.
Hamilton, Disney, and the Institutional Reckoning
Hip-hop’s arrival in the institutional
mainstream was signalled, with unusual drama, on May 12, 2009. Lin-Manuel
Miranda was invited to perform at the
White House Evening of Poetry, Music, and the Spoken Word. He stood in
in 2020. “It was the fact that Hamilton
writing. That was the whole idea. That’s what my favourite MCs do.”
“What Hamilton demonstrated, at a scale that could not be ignored, was that rap is a vehicle for storytelling sophisticated enough to carry any subject.”
the East Room, in front of Barack and
Miranda then took those same skills into
opening song of what he described as
Encanto ("We Don't Talk About Bruno"
of Alexander Hamilton.” The audience
songs in history), and effectively creating
at first, nervously. Then they stopped
values and the largest entertainment
Michelle Obama, and performed the
Disney – writing the songs for Moana,
“a hip-hop concept album about the life
became one of the most streamed Disney
poets, academics, dignitaries – laughed
a pipeline between hip-hop’s aesthetic
laughing and started listening.
company on earth. The integration was
Six years later, Hamilton opened on
Broadway. It won eleven Tony Awards,
including Best Musical, Best Book, and
Best Original Score. It won the Pulitzer
complete. The music that had emerged
from a burned-out borough in New York City was now scoring animated films
watched by toddlers in 193 countries.
Prize for Drama. It grossed over $650
The Complications
album became – and remains – the most
without acknowledging what has always
million in its first three years. The cast
It would be dishonest to write about rap
streamed Broadway musical on Spotify.
been its most contested dimension.
When it transferred to Disney+ in 2020, it was watched by more than ten million households in its first month.
The misogyny in the genre – the long-
standing tradition of referring to women in terms that would not be permitted
What Hamilton demonstrated, at a scale
in any professional environment and
is a vehicle for storytelling sophisticated
context – is not peripheral. It is, in too
had taken the rhythmic and lexical tools
The careers of several major figures have
boasting, the battle rhymes, the verbal
and exploitation in ways that the music
that could not be ignored, was that rap
would constitute harassment in any other
enough to carry any subject. Miranda
much of the canon, central.
of the South Bronx – the fast-syllabled
intersected with violence, sexual assault,
dexterity that Heaney had recognised
in Eminem – and used them to tell the story of an immigrant founding father, the revolution, the birth of a nation.
“Hip-hop is the language of revolution
and it’s our greatest American art form,”
itself sometimes anticipated, sometimes glorified, and sometimes directly
documented. Tupac Shakur, Biggie
Smalls, XXXTentacion – the genre has
lost a series of artists to violence that was never entirely separable from the world
MUSIC
the music described. The recent legal
difficulties of Sean “Diddy” Combs are
a reminder that the industry’s founding generation operated in an environment
of power with limited accountability, and that the cost of that was, in some cases, borne by others.
Kanye West – a figure whose musical
genius is matched only by his capacity for self-destruction – has in recent
years descended into a series of public antisemitic statements that have cost him his Adidas partnership (worth
an estimated $1.5 billion), his record deal, and a significant portion of his
Obama greets the cast of Hamilton (Wikipedia.org)
cultural standing. West once said, with
What is remarkable about Snoop is
argument for or against anything.
genius and there’s no other way to word
twenty years, the Stones have lasted sixty
disinterested way, has decided.
characteristic grandiosity, “I’m a creative it.” He may have been right about the
first part, but his behaviour has become
increasingly erratic: sometimes genius can blur for its possessor into rank confusion.
not his longevity per se — Elvis lasted
— but the nature of his transformation. He has moved from gangster rap to reggae (as Snoop Lion), to cooking
shows with Martha Stewart, to Olympic
These are not footnotes to the history of
punditry, to NBC News correspondent
that produced Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp
He is, in a sense, the complete picture
identity, trauma, and resilience so densely
embedded in mainstream cultural life
rap. They are part of it. The same culture
at the Paris games, to the Cameo inbox.
a Butterfly — a meditation on Black
of what rap has become: a genre so
realised that it was immediately entered
that one of its founding figures can serve
into the literary canon by people who had previously insisted that literary canons
could not include rap — also produced a
great deal that celebrates the exploitation
of the powerless. The genre's admirers owe it to the form, and to themselves, to hold both things in mind simultaneously. What Snoop Knows
as a national mascot at a sporting event and this strikes no one as incongruous.
It is simply what the market, in its The genre that began at a back-to-
school party in the Bronx — with a
teenage DJ, a crate of records, and the percussive intelligence to hear what
everyone else had been hearing but not
quite listening to — has become, in fifty years, the dominant cultural force of our time. It is the most streamed music on
earth. It employs lawyers, data scientists, brand strategists, tour managers,
streaming analysts, and merchandise
designers in numbers that would have
The Cameo price — and let us be
seemed fantastical to Kool Herc. It
twenty-seven seconds of Snoop looking
musical. It is in the Disney canon.
friend’s name is an extraordinary piece
Miranda said. He was right, though
honest, approximately £1,200 for
has produced a Pulitzer Prize-winning
directly at a camera and saying your
“Hip-hop is the language of revolution,”
of pricing — tells us something precise
not quite in the way he meant. It is the
language of revolution in the economic
Return, then, to Snoop. He was born
about the economics of cultural celebrity
Beach, California, in 1971. He was
It’s hard to imagine he does. Even so,
arrested multiple times in his teens. He
at this most attenuated level, is robust.
constructed; how storytelling is taught
G in 1992, and the rest is not history so
million dollars on the platform. There
Zadie Smith absorbed it. Lin-Manuel
entire careers in the music industry
most successful theatrical productions of
of work as Snoop earns from a few
And Snoop, as he has always been, is
sense: it has revolutionised how music
Calvin Cordozar Broadus Jr., in Long
in 2025. Does he even need the money?
raised on funk and gospel. He was
the market for Snoop’s attention, even
how careers are built; how brands are
was introduced to Dr. Dre by Warren
He has reportedly earned more than a
in schools. Seamus Heaney heard it.
much as an ongoing event: thirty-three
are producers who have spent their
Miranda channelled it into one of the
and not earned as much from a decade
all time.
hundred short videos. This is not an
back.
years of sustained commercial viability,
cultural relevance, and genuine affection from audiences who have grown up alongside him.
is made, distributed, and monetised;
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BOOK REVIEWS
BOOK REVIEWS
Uplifting Books For Challenging Times Importantly, she does not pretend people are secretly sitting on limitless free
hours. This is not one of those Silicon
Valley fantasies where all problems can be solved with a better spreadsheet. Vanderkam knows modern life is
crowded: work, children, phones, logistics, the strange administrative blizzard of
adulthood. Her point is subtler. Much of our exhaustion comes not from absolute scarcity, but from the feeling that our lives are permanently fragmented.
The book draws on her long-running obsession with tracking how people
Big Time: A Simple Path to Time Abundance BY LAURA VANDERKAM
actually spend their days. Many people
discover they possess more discretionary time than they assumed, but squander
it in tiny anxious fragments. Vanderkam
wants readers to reclaim those fragments and turn them into experiences that feel meaningful rather than merely efficient. There is a humane intelligence
Laura Vanderkam has spent years
performing a minor miracle: writing about time management without
sounding like an over-caffeinated
management consultant. Her latest book, *Big Time*, continues that feat by arguing that the real luxury good in modern life
is not money, status or productivity. It is spaciousness.
The phrase she uses is “time abundance”, and the brilliance of the concept is that everybody instantly understands it.
You know the feeling when a Saturday
morning stretches luxuriously ahead of
you and life briefly resembles civilisation
again. Vanderkam’s argument is that this sensation can be cultivated deliberately
rather than stumbled upon accidentally twice a year during bank holiday weekends. 132
running through the book. Vanderkam understands that productivity
Planet Money: A Guide to the Economic Forces That Shape Your Life BY ALEX MAYYASI
culture often ends up making people
Economics has a branding problem.
optimisation puzzle. Her tone instead
picture gloomy men discussing interest
miserable by turning every hour into an feels restorative. The point is not to
become a better machine. It is to recover
a sense that life contains room to breathe. One of the loveliest lines associated with her work remains: “Time you enjoyed wasting isn’t wasted time.” That spirit hovers over this book too.
Big Time ultimately feels less like a manual and more like permission.
Permission to stop treating every minute as an emergency. Permission to believe
a good life might still contain lingering
breakfasts, long walks and conversations that drift nowhere in particular. Which,
in 2026, may count as radical thought.CJ
Mention the subject and most people rates beside charts that resemble ski slopes. The genius of NPR’s Planet
Money podcast has always been its
ability to make economics feel less like homework and more like detective
fiction. Alex Mayyasi’s Planet Money
book attempts much the same trick on the page.
The central argument is that
economics is not some remote
technocratic discipline operating in
the clouds above ordinary life. It is the hidden architecture shaping almost everything we do: why houses cost
what they do, why supermarket shelves look the way they do, why certain
BOOK REVIEWS
jobs vanish while others mysteriously appear. Mayyasi is especially good at locating the strange stories buried inside apparently dull systems. That has always been the Planet Money style: explain global finance through T-shirt manufacturing or trade policy
‘You Must Change Your Life’ After Rilke
through the price of shrimp. The book reportedly draws on more than a decade of reporting from the podcast team, and you can feel that journalistic instinct throughout. What separates this from textbook economics is its curiosity about human behaviour. Markets here are not
The statues might seem broken: they’re not. Whatever was whole once, lives – as my thinning blood will clot the injury; as my cramped hand still gives.
abstract equations but accumulations of incentives, fears, aspirations and accidents. The effect is oddly reassuring. Once you begin seeing the economic logic behind everyday life, the world starts appearing slightly less random. There is also something timely about
Nothing is left to chance. The shoulder might be torn somewhere near the socket. The clock might proclaim your bones older. Look at these little stones in your pocket:
the book arriving now, when inflation, housing pressures and AI disruption have forced economic questions into ordinary dinner-table conversation. People increasingly sense that invisible systems are shaping their lives without fully understanding how. Mayyasi’s talent lies in translating those systems
one’s a found fragment of the Ca D’Oro; the other’s from the Helios at Rhodes. They shine in silent language the old clue: You must change your life to know the gods.
into narratives people can actually follow. The result is economics for people who dislike economics books. Which may
Lucy Pearl
sound backhanded, but is probably the highest compliment possible. CJ www.finito.org.uk
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INTERNATIONAL
A LETTER FROM UZBEKISTAN Tamsin Aston
(Unsplash)
U
zbekistan is a vast, doublelandlocked country in Central
Asia, with an extensive history &
culture, strongly influenced by its
strategic location on the ancient Silk
Road, between China and Europe. The territory was invaded multiple times through history by near-legendary characters including Timur (also
known as 'Tamerlane'), Alexander
the Great and Genghis Khan. The
practice of those invaders was to raze
the conquered cities to the ground and rebuild entirely, so there was plenty of
history to explore, but maybe not quite so ancient as one may expect.
I was intrigued by some pictures I had
seen of the ancient city of Samarkand’s 134
domes and minarets and an article I’d
formed a nine-day loop from Tashkent
booked myself a place on an organised
and Samarkand, then return to Tashkent
read on the country, so on impulse I group trip for solo travellers. In
the weeks immediately prior to my
departure, I was alternately excited and utterly terrified about what I might encounter, as it promised to be so
different from all my previous travel experiences.
My tour group comprised 16 solo
travellers (including myself ), with an age range from late 40s to early 80s. Nearly everyone in the group had significant
solo travel experience, covering all seven continents between us. I was lucky
enough to be one of the youngest and fittest. Our route through Uzbekistan
to the historic cities of Khiva, Bhukara, to fly back to the UK.
Tashkent, the Uzbek capital is mostly
modern as it was extensively destroyed by an earthquake in April 1966, and
now has a large modern-built market, selling all kinds of produce. Several
unusual (to me) items caught my eye, including dried strawberries; large
displays of strong-smelling and colourful spices; decorative round loaves of
traditional Uzbek bread; sugar sold in
large golden crystals on sticks, like exotic shining kebabs; long strings of dried
chillies; and huge displays of beautifully woven baskets.
INTERNATIONAL
The historic centre of Samarkand
was my high point of the trip, with a
(Unsplash)
fabulous complex of blue-domed and
intricately tiled mosques and madrasas (educational institutions often relating to Islamic studies, usually including
rooms for visitors), at Registan Square. Registan Street, next to the square of
the same name, has been included in a recent list of the most beautiful streets in the world in the British press. We
were given some free time to explore the buildings around the square, so I
grabbed the opportunity to climb the
‘leaning minaret’, which was hot work
to climb up, check out the stunning view
and race back down again in less than 25 minutes, as the spiral stairs were made of old bricks, extremely steep, irregular and with no handrail, just a looped rope to hold onto.
“The historic centre of Samarkand was my high point of the trip, with a fabulous complex of blue-domed and intricately tiled mosques and madrasas at Registan Square.”
rather decorative interior door, when one
portions of the traditional decorative
‘hammam’, one morning in Bukhara.
through the same door, bare-chested,
markets.
significant proportion of its territory,
to ask for another towel. He looked
We visited a local bath house, or
of the Uzbek bathers suddenly appeared
For a country with desert forming a
somewhat dishevelled and flushed,
and the air having extremely low
humidity (around 35% for most of my
trip, compared to 70 - 90%+ in the UK), the Uzbeks really love to bathe.
During our visit, the women were only allowed into the reception area, while
the men were allowed further access, as
a group of local men were already using the facilities.
I was just lining up to take a photo of a
extremely shocked to see the reception area full of European women... and I
took my picture at that exact moment, purely by reflex!
Uzbek bread we had seen at the Unfortunately, by the following
morning, several of the group were
already suffering with ‘Bukhara Belly’, and had dropped out of the planned excursion. Most of us managed to
keep going, but gradually through the
Also in Bhukara, we dined on a home-
next night, 13 out of the 16 started
dish, ‘plov’, a rice-based dish usually
diarrhoea, sickness, physical weakness
to the Turkish ‘pilaf ’. The meal was
Our supplies of Imodium and
cooked version of the Uzbek national
with one or more symptoms, including
served with meat and closely related
and dehydration.
delicious, plentiful and also included
rehydration salts were shared with www.finito.org.uk
ISSUE 19
135
INTERNATIONAL
other travellers as needed and we found
volcanic flush! I found myself leaping
- Pack a good supply of Imodium,
Imodium equivalent. I was fortunate
torrent of water loudly gushed down
and face moisturisers (the low humidity
a pharmacy with a stock of the local to be able to control my symptoms
well enough to continue sightseeing. A
depleted group attended the tour of the
Bukhara Royal Palace and Harem, with
most of the women carrying a full change of clothing, just in case of an accident. Suffice to say that one of the men was not so well prepared that day.
Four weeks after our return to the UK, two of our group (including me) were
tested as we had continuing symptoms. It was confirmed that our bug was a form
of dysentery, caused by a bacteria called ‘shigella’ – a nasty critter that can cause
noticeable symptoms even with only six bacteria present. I had a low level of
infection, but it was extremely persistent. Uzbekistan was a revelation in some areas (for example, the very clean
and odourless markets despite the
September heat), but in the toilets, not so much. Most of the women on my
out of the way almost by instinct, as a
from the cistern. I saw it erupt upwards and out of the toilet bowl, reaching an
impressive height, before a tidal wave of foamy water spread rapidly across the tiles towards my feet.
I had experienced squat toilets in SouthEast Asia, where I learned to ensure I was already decent, re-zipped, and
standing on the edge of the backwash
danger zone before I pressed the flush. I was very grateful for my training on that day.
Considering the dramatic water
eruption, there must have been an extended time since anyone had
ventured to use that cubicle. I was
laughing hard as I made my exit, as I was delighted to have escaped an
unpleasant drenching. Before I left, I warned the other intrepid travellers about the beast within.
“The clash of blue of the seated designs which are more Islamic domes with typical in Western Europe. imposing Soviet-era There was one memorable occasion in a highway service station, when I brutalist architecture couldn’t wait, and ventured to use a squat toilet that was clearly home-made, only occurs at the heart with shiny ceramic tiles placed above a of Central Asia. In manufactured white bowl. Those tiles Uzbekistan, it can be provided no grip at all for one’s feet. On the plus side, I noticed there was a seen simultaneously at strategically-placed handle, to assist with its most jarring and standing up afterwards. wonderful.” After I had completed what I needed tour refused to use squat toilets in favour
to do, I reached for the handle to
help myself stand up… and nearly fell
There were several other things I learned
end of the handle was already loose, so
in the guidebooks:
managed to stand up with no further
including squats and steps, to practice
backwards into the toilet bowl. One
during my visit, which may not appear
it twisted off the wall towards me! I
- Consider an exercise programme
assistance, and blissfully unaware of
getting vertical again after toilet use
what was about to happen, I pushed
the handle. This toilet had a positively 136
and to prepare for exploring historic
minarets with steep and uneven steps.
rehydration salts, like Dioralyte, plus lip dries out the lips and skin really quickly).
- Take extra memory cards for your
camera, or clear out plenty of space in
your mobile phone, as there are a lot of photogenic sights to catch your eye.
- Take US Dollar cash in preference to
UK Sterling money or travellers’ cheques, and change some into Uzbek money on arrival at the airport. Collect low value
Uzbek coins for paying for public toilets they all have a charge for foreigners. - For any solo female travellers who would like to visit, I would strongly
recommend joining an organised tour. It became obvious that the locals are not
used to European females walking alone, even in Samarkand, a city with long established tourist footfall.
As I was writing this article, I noticed
an item in a British newspaper reporting that Uzbekistan tourism had a record
breaking 2025 which pushed the country into the league of fastest growing global
destinations. It aims to attract another 12 million international tourists in 2026. I
was not surprised to learn of the planned increase, and I would encourage anyone
to visit soon if you want to go. The clash of blue Islamic domes with imposing Soviet-era brutalist architecture only
occurs at the heart of Central Asia. In
Uzbekistan, it can be seen simultaneously at its most jarring and wonderful.
I was asked shortly after my return if I would visit Uzbekistan again, even
after my experiences with those pesky
bacteria, and the ongoing side-effect of raw lactose intolerance. My answer six months later remains unchanged: Yes, absolutely I would. It's a fascinating
country, with lots to see. It was even
worth missing out on brandy butter and cream with my Christmas pudding.
INTERNATIONAL (Unsplash)
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FOOD & DRINK
COSTEAU
THE ECONOMICS OF EXCESS How America Learned to Love the Oversized Plate
(Freepik)
138
FOOD & DRINK
T
here is a particular kind of jet lag that has nothing to do with
time zones. It happens the first time an
Englishman, fresh off a flight, sits down in an American diner and is handed a
plate the approximate size of a hubcap,
on which a stack of pancakes rises like a small geological formation, with a side
of bacon that would constitute a week's ration in most of the rest of the world.
The first reaction is delight. The second, slower reaction, somewhere around the third bite, is a kind of economic
curiosity. Why is the food here so large. And why, in particular, is it large in
this specific way, a way that has almost nothing to do with hunger and almost everything to do with the architecture
of a business model that took roughly a century to build.
It is worth saying at the outset that the largeness of American food is not an
accident of culture or a simple matter of
national appetite. It is, in the most literal sense, an economic invention, with a
traceable history, identifiable inventors, and a business logic that, once you see
it, you cannot stop seeing on every plate placed in front of you from Maine to California.
American stomach. What changed was the price of the calorie.
This is the part of the story that the food writer Michael Pollan has told better than anyone, and it is worth pausing
on, because it explains everything that
follows. Pollan observed that what makes the modern practice of selling oversized portions such an effective business
strategy is, simply, the cheapness of
basic foodstuffs in America, a cheapness that is itself the product of decades of
agricultural policy designed to encourage farmers to grow as much corn and
soybean as the land could possibly yield. Once you have an enormous, subsidised national surplus of corn, much of which becomes the cheap starches, sweeteners and oils that bulk out a fast food meal, the marginal cost of making a portion bigger becomes almost trivial. A bit
more bun, a bit more high fructose corn syrup, a few more fried potatoes, costs
the seller pennies. What it does to the
perceived value of the meal in the eyes
of the customer, however, is enormous.
This is the central, slightly uncomfortable economic truth of American food: it got bigger not because anyone particularly wanted more food, but because more
The starting point, and the one that
food became, almost by industrial
looking into it, is how recent this all
relative to what a customer could be
environment have found that American
But cheap corn alone does not explain
dramatic expansion until the 1970s,
psychological lever that the food industry
surprised me most when I went
accident, astonishingly cheap to provide
is. Researchers who study the food
persuaded to pay for it.
portion sizes did not really begin their
the cultural mechanism, the actual
rising sharply through the 1980s in
close parallel with rising body weights, and that for hamburgers, fries and soft drinks the standard size sold today is
between two and five times larger than the original. For most of American
history, in other words, portions were not especially large. They were constrained,
as they are everywhere, by the basic facts of cost, labour and the physical limits of a kitchen. What changed was not the
learned to pull. For that you need the
story of a man almost nobody has heard of, despite having shaped the eating
habits of more people than perhaps any single individual in modern history: David Wallerstein. In the nineteen
fifties and sixties, Wallerstein worked
for a chain of movie theatres in Texas
and Illinois, where his job, in essence, was to sell more popcorn and more
soda, the two items on which a cinema's
profitability has always quietly depended. He tried the obvious things, two for
one deals, matinee specials, and none of
them worked. Eventually he worked out why. Customers did not want to buy
a second bag of popcorn or a second
drink, because going back for seconds, as one account of his research put it, makes people feel like pigs. Nobody
wants to be seen at the counter a second time. But, Wallerstein discovered, those same customers would happily pay
considerably more for a single, much larger serving, because a bigger cup
carries none of the social shame of a
second one. There is no walk of gluttony back to the counter. There is just one transaction, one moment of choice,
and an enormous tub of popcorn that
nobody has to feel embarrassed about.
"What changed was not the American stomach. What changed was the price of the calorie." Wallerstein later took a seat on the board of McDonald's, where he tried to sell
Ray Kroc on the same idea, and where, according to McDonald's own official
history, Kroc was initially sceptical, on the entirely reasonable grounds that if people wanted more fries, they could
simply buy a second bag. So Wallerstein
did what any good consultant does when faced with a sceptical client: he went and watched the customers himself, staking out McDonald's restaurants
around Chicago, and noticed something that should embarrass the entire field
of nutrition science for having missed it for so long. People were finishing their small bags of fries and then digging
around in the bottom of the empty bag for the last salty crumbs. They wanted
more. They simply would not, as a matter of social etiquette, go and buy more. www.finito.org.uk
ISSUE 19
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FOOD & DRINK
Kroc relented. The larger single portion,
it does not, on its own, explain the deeper
intuitively understood: that there was
model not just for McDonald's but for
that the visiting Englishman notices on
and selling the wagons than running
sold as a single transaction, became the
the entire industry that followed it, and
it rests on a piece of behavioural insight so simple it is almost embarrassing: humans are bad at portion control,
but they are catastrophically, reliably bad at it specifically when the larger
cultural feature of American eating
his first morning in a diner: the sense
that bigness itself has become a kind of civic value, a marker of generosity and abundance rather than simple greed.
For that you need the diner itself, which has its own quite separate economic
more reliable money to be made building them. By the early twentieth century, the wagons had become stationary,
prefabricated, and increasingly elongated, deliberately built to resemble the dining
cars of long distance trains, partly because manufacturers shipped them by rail and
history, and one that is, in its way, even
partly because the railroad dining car
"Humans are bad at portion control, but they are catastrophically, reliably bad at it specifically when the larger portion arrives in a single, dignified, unembarrassing serving."
abundance but in genuine scarcity.
disreputable night lunch wagon badly
What is striking, looking back at this
the people whose hours did not match
science fifty years later, is how thoroughly
restaurant. This was not an industry built
cinema concessions manager worked out
the market created by the rigid working
studies on what researchers call satiety,
the simple, durable economic insight that
have shown that people presented with a
at three in the morning whom nobody
per cent more than they would have eaten
What followed was a slow, very American
portion arrives in a single, dignified, unembarrassing serving.
more interesting, because it begins not in The American diner was born in 1872, in Providence, Rhode Island, when a
printer named Walter Scott, who had
been supplementing his income for years by selling sandwiches and coffee from a
basket to night shift newspaper workers,
finally quit his printing job and converted an old freight wagon into a mobile food
cart, which he parked outside the offices
of the Providence Journal. His customers were the people every other business in the city had given up on feeding:
pressmen, late shift workers, theatregoers,
from the vantage point of nutrition
the opening times of any respectable
the science has since confirmed what a
on abundance. It was built on a gap in
by simply watching people eat. Repeated
hours of an industrialising city, and on
the science of when and how we feel full,
there will always be hungry people awake
larger portion will reliably eat up to thirty
else is willing to serve.
from a smaller one, almost regardless of
how hungry they actually were to begin
with. Our sense of being full, it turns out, is not a fixed, reliable internal gauge. It is profoundly influenced by the size of the container in front of us. Wallerstein did not discover a marketing trick so much
as a genuine, exploitable flaw in human appetite regulation, decades before
anyone in a laboratory had bothered to measure it.
So far, this is a story about fast food. But 140
process of industrialisation applied to a humble idea. Other entrepreneurs
copied Scott's wagon. Manufacturers
in Worcester, Massachusetts and New Rochelle, New York began building
larger, sturdier lunch wagons specifically for sale to operators, men like Thomas Buckley, who became known, with a
certain unmistakable American relish for self-mythologising titles, as the Lunch Wagon King, and who worked out
something every diner owner since has
carried a certain glamour that the old, needed. A journalist writing about one
manufacturer's booming business in the 1920s is generally credited with coining the shortened name that stuck: diner,
borrowed from the railroads, attached to a humble roadside cart that had
absolutely nothing gourmet about it, but which benefited enormously from the association all the same.
The diner's golden age, the Edward
Hopper-esque image most people now carry in their heads, arrived properly in
the postwar boom of the late 1940s and 1950s, when the same forces reshaping the rest of American consumer life
- cheap credit, new highways, rising
suburban incomes, durable new materials - remade the diner from a workingman’s curiosity into a genuinely mass
institution. There were, by some counts,
over five thousand diners operating across the country within a decade. And it is
here that the diner’s particular economics, distinct from the supersizing economics of fast food, becomes visible. A diner
has never made its money on the eggs. It has made its money on volume, on turnover, on the coffee cup that gets
refilled four times for the price of one, on the customer who comes in for a
ten minute breakfast and the customer
who lingers for two hours over pie and conversation, both of whom occupy
roughly the same stool and contribute, in their different ways, to a thin but
dependable margin built on extremely
high foot traffic and extremely low prices.
FOOD & DRINK
(Unsplash)
Restaurant economics generally runs
cinema bucket strategy applied to a
cinema, a printer with a freight wagon
the low single digits for a full service
multiplying the number of transactions,
designed in Washington to solve an
on famously slender margins, often in establishment, and the diner survives within that margin not by extracting
burger. The diner makes its money by
keeping the price low enough and the welcome warm enough that the same
more money per customer but by serving
customer returns three times a week for
repeatedly, at almost every hour of the
produce the same visible symptom on
construct that the capital cost could be
feels, to the customer, like remarkably
an enormous number of customers,
forty years. Both strategies, curiously,
day, in a building cheap enough to
the plate: a great deal of food for what
recovered within a few profitable years.
little money. But one is a strategy of
"A culture in which the size of the plate has quietly become a substitute for the price of the meal, a culture in which more is not an indulgence but, somehow, the default."
This is, in its way, the opposite economic logic to the McDonald's supersize. The fast food chain makes its extra money
by enlarging the single transaction, the
scale through portion, and the other is a strategy of scale through loyalty, and any honest economic history of why
American food looks the way it does has
in Providence, and an agricultural policy entirely different problem, namely what
to do with too much corn. None of these people set out to reshape the national
diet. They were simply solving, each in turn, the narrow economic problem in
front of them: how to sell more popcorn without making customers feel greedy,
how to feed night shift workers nobody else would serve, how to support farm incomes through a glut of grain. And
between them, over the course of a single
to hold both of these models in mind at
century, they built something that every
they produced a national expectation.
within an hour of landing: a culture in
simply what a fair price looks like.
become a substitute for the price of the
almost embarrassingly full has somehow
indulgence but, somehow, the default.
once, because together, quite by accident,
visiting Englishman now encounters
The expectation that abundance is
which the size of the plate has quietly
That a plate which is not generously,
meal, a culture in which more is not an
shortchanged you.
It is, when you trace it all the way back,
It is a powerful piece of cultural
a remarkably tidy piece of economic
any grand design but through the
after the third bite of those pancakes, a
of a popcorn salesman in a Texan
needs for breakfast.
conditioning, achieved not through
history. It is also, I would gently suggest
accumulated, decentralised decisions
great deal more food than anyone actually
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KEDGE MARTIN THE ADVISOR ON MENTORSHIP, ENTREPRENEURSHIP AND THE IMPORTANCE OF TRANSPARENCY WHERE DOES MENTORSHIP MAKE THE GREATEST DIFFERENCE FOR FAMILIES DEALING WITH WEALTH? Where wealth intersects with identity/ purpose; responsibility and family dynamics is where we are generally asked to assist. Primarily when someone is trying to work out who they are in relation to wealth, what the wealth is for, and how to live well with the choices and responsibilities wealth creates. WHAT DISTINGUISHES A GOOD MENTOR FROM A CONVENTIONAL ADVISER? The alchemy in the mentor/mentee relationship is trust and chemistry; we all resonate with some people better than others. A good mentor provides unconditional positive regard. A conventional adviser is traditionally an expert in a particular field. Their role is to advise specifically on what's best for the client in a particular area/sector but often without the full picture of all the different demands, needs and emotions. HOW EARLY SHOULD EDUCATION AROUND WEALTH BEGIN? It's never too early! I often think of wealth as an energy flow. It is not static, it can be created, preserved, wasted, shared, invested or transformed. The challenge is to make that flow conscious, to understand where the wealth came from, what responsibilities come with it, where it should be directed, and how it can serve not only the present generation but those that follow. ARE YOUNGER GENERATIONS 144
BETTER OR WORSE PREPARED TO INHERIT THAN THEIR PARENTS WERE TO CREATE? Entrepreneurs are generally builders, used to risk, uncertainty, set backs and momentum; they have resilience. The next generation can face the opposite problem. They may inherit opportunity but also comparison. Never being good enough can create paralysis, guilt and disengagement. HOW DO YOU HELP YOUNGER FAMILY MEMBERS BUILD RESPONSIBILITY RATHER THAN ENTITLEMENT? Entitlement grows when wealth is abstract and unlimited. One of the most powerful tools is exposure. A client travelled with us to see community projects in Africa. It was the first time he felt genuinely liked for who he was, not his father. Our Encounter Journeys for families are life changing, not only for philanthropy but for business too. WHAT DOES THE LOSS OF PURPOSE AFTER A LIQUIDITY EVENT LOOK LIKE IN PRACTICE?
Kedge Martin
Money changes the assumptions people make about one another. As the old saying goes, where there's a will there's a relation. Once money enters the picture, old resentments reappear. The key is transparency, communication and clarity. WHAT DOES A WELL HANDLED TRANSITION LOOK LIKE AGAINST A POORLY HANDLED ONE?
It can be surprisingly quiet. The routine and responsibilities have gone. The late Duke of Westminster commented, "Free time is the devil's playground. If you don't have to go out and earn your money and if you don't have a passion what the hell do you do with your life... You're left thinking well, what's the point of me then?"
In a well handled transition, the family has a shared language. The next generation has been prepared not ambushed. Difficult conversations happen early enough to be useful. In a poorly handled transition, everyone is guessing. With poor or no communications there is a void which fills quickly with assumptions, anxiety, resentments and competing narratives.
HOW DO FAMILY DYNAMICS SHIFT ONCE A LARGE SUM OF MONEY ENTERS THE PICTURE?
The role of a mentor is to help make the most of this one precious life, wherever you are on the conveyor belt!
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