UK £4.80; Republic of Ireland €4.
90
Property special
HMRC admits errors over Zahawi
3 Tax body denied existence of probe 3 FOI request led to blunder 3 Tory chair fights on
JIM PICKARD
CHIEF POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT
The UK tax authority has admitted that
it gave misleading information last sum-
mer when it said that no government
minister was being investigated even
though Nadhim Zahawi was the subject
of a probe.
HM Revenue & Customs has now
apologised for wrongly stating last June
that no ministers were under investiga-
tion — mistakes it blames on a botched
response to a freedom of information
request. Zahawi paid £5mn to HMRC,
including a £1mn penalty, to reach a set-
tlement with the UK tax authority while
he was chancellor last summer. How-
Theatre of war
Putin admits
prison recruits
Residents take shelter inside a subway
station during a Russian rocket attack in
Kyiv, Ukraine, this week.
After the US labelled the Kremlin-
linked Wagner Group a “transnational
criminal organisation”, Moscow admit-
ted yesterday it had pardoned convicts
to allow them to fight in Ukraine with
the paramilitary group.
Dmitry Peskov, Vladimir Putin’s
spokesperson, praised one convicted
armed robber recruited by Wagner for
“heroism” on the battlefield after the
president awarded him a medal.
Ex-convicts in army page 4
Propaganda push page 6
Big Read page 9
Fraud claim fallout wipes
$52bn from Adani’s value
Billionaire Gautam Adani, one of the
world’s richest men, has seen $52bn
erased from the value of his business
empire this week after a US short seller
alleged fraud. The 60-year-old Indian
industrialist has faced intense scrutiny
since Hindenburg accused his group of
stock price manipulation and accounts
fraud over the course of decades. The
critique threatens to dent demand for
a share sale to raise Rs200bn ($2.4bn).
Report i PAGE 15
Spotlight i PAGE 16
Subscribe In print and online
www.ft.com/subscribenow Tel: 0800 028 1407
NATIONAL NEWSPAPER OF THE YEAR
ever, the details have come out only
gradually after misleading statements
and legal threats by him.
Zahawi, the Conservative party chair,
is fighting for his political life after
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak referred the
issue of the tax affairs to ethics adviser
Sir Laurie Magnus. Sunak, who prom-
ised that his government would be one
of “integrity, professionalism and
accountability” is lagging 20 points
behind the opposition Labour party,
which sees the saga as an open goal.
People inside HMRC yesterday said
that major blunders led to it releasing
incorrect information.
In response to a Financial Times
High demand for chrysanthemums a
sign of surging Covid deaths in China
KAI WALUSZEWSKI — HONG KONG
Chrysanthemum flowers, a symbol of
mourning in China, are selling out in
cities across the central province of
Hubei, with prices rising sharply as
demand surges following a wave of
Covid-19 deaths.
Li, who works at the Green Plant Shop in
Wuhan, the provincial capital where the
virus first emerged in late 2019, said he
now charges Rmb45 ($6.60) per basket,
a 50 per cent year-on-year increase.
“Last year we only charged about
Rmb30 for a basket of chrysanthe-
mums,” he added. “This year isn’t com-
parable with last year. So many people
died of Covid this year, which has
boosted market demand.”
Niu, who works at Xingfu Flower
Store, has also taken advantage of the
increased demand, charging Rmb50 per
STOCK MARKETS
inquiry last year, the department said
that no minister was being investigated
but Zahawi, then education secretary,
was subject of a tax probe at the time.
HMRC now admits that it failed to
look properly into the issue.
Officials say that the department
blundered by searching only the part of
HMRC that deals with self-assessment
disputes, rather than a broader compli-
ance division search, which would
include the Fraud Investigation Service.
Maurice Frankel, director of the Cam-
paign for Freedom of Information, said
there was “no excuse” for the HMRC’s
failure to do a proper search. “It looks
like they were trying to answer it in a
basket. “Chrysanthemums are almost
sold out. We’ve only got several baskets
left,” she said.
While chrysanthemums symbolise
mourning in China, their use to com-
memorate the dead during the lunar
new year is particularly prevalent in
Hubei. “It’s a lunar new year tradition in
Hubei province to buy them for visiting
homes of relatives [of those] who
recently died,” said Guan, a taxi driver
in Wuhan. “This year, however, there
are a lot more chrysanthemums than
usual.”
After China lifted its zero-Covid
restrictions last month, outbreaks
surged in urban areas, and internal gov-
ernment estimates suggest hundreds of
millions of people caught the virus in a
matter of weeks.
Authorities have reported about
73,000 Covid-related deaths since pan-
World Markets
CURRENCIES
SATURDAY 28 JANUARY / SUNDAY 29 JANUARY 2023
East meets west
Fashion edition
London homes HTSI
and ‘inheritocracy’
HOUSE & HOME
What next for
UK’s buy-to-let?
FTMONEY
The trouble with bubbles
Tim Harford
FT WEEKEND MAGAZINE
way that doesn’t reveal anything signifi-
cant,” he said. People at HMRC say the
department had also made a previous
mistake in a response to a freedom of
information request by Dan Neidle,
founder of Tax Policy Associates.
Nadhim The HMRC said its processing of the
Zahawi’s tax FOI request “was subject to a series of
affairs have administrative errors”.
been referred The initial information provided to India against Gandhi
to the ethics
adviser by
Neidle was incorrect — HMRC officials
thought — because they told him on
A legacy rewritten 75 years on
Rishi Sunak June 15 a minister was under investiga- LIFE & ARTS
tion, when in fact the person they were
referring to was a backbench Tory MP
Johnson loan and the BBC page 3
Camilla Cavendish page 14
A Moscow editor
Lunch with the FT
LIFE & ARTS
Efrem Lukatsky/AP
demic controls were reversed. Analysts
say the figures are an underestimation
and point to signs of a rising death toll,
including overcrowded hospitals, over-
burdened morgues and, in Hubei’s case,
omnipresent chrysanthemums.
One government epidemiologist sug-
gested about 80 per cent of China’s pop-
ulation had been infected with Covid.
Many Chinese families have crossed
provincial borders and reunited over
the lunar new year holiday for the first
time since 2019, spurring fears of a fur-
ther rise in cases.
The chrysanthemums have under-
scored Covid’s heavy impact on Hubei
province. As of late December, it had the
fourth-highest infection rate among
China’s provinces, after Sichuan, Beijing
and Henan, according to an estimate by
Huachuang Securities.
China’s singles resist pressure page 6
GOVERNMENT BONDS
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© THE FINANCIAL TIMES LTD 2023 (XUR6WR[[    ge   eLQGH[   8.\U   
)76(    6)Ué   6)Ue   8.\U   
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2 ★ FTWeekend 28 January/29 January 2023

NATIONAL

Chancellor’s speech

Business attacks Hunt’s ‘empty’ growth plan

Lobby groups say no new
policies were offered to
boost flagging economy
JIM PICKARD, DAN THOMAS AND
CHRIS GILES
Business lobby groups yesterday criti-
cised a keynote speech by chancellor
Jeremy Hunt about the government’s
plan to boost economic growth, com-
plaining that it offered no new policies.
Hunt used the speech to highlight the
government’s “plan for growth”, and its
focus on the “four Es” of enterprise,
education, employment and every-
where — a reference to reducing
regional inequalities.
He also signalled that the Budget on
March 15 would not contain big tax cuts,
despite calls from some Conservative
MPs, because of the need to focus on
curbing high inflation.
With the UK braced for recession,
Hunt acknowledged the country had
significant weaknesses including poor
productivity, a skills gap and low busi-
ness investment.
But he said talk of “declinism about
Britain is just wrong”, adding that the
UK had big opportunities to use regula-
tory freedoms stemming from Brexit to
boost sectors including technology, life
sciences, clean energy, creative indus-
tries and advanced manufacturing.
Hunt told executives from companies
including Meta, Microsoft, Amazon,
Apple and Google, Hunt: “I want to ask
you to help turn the UK into the world’s
next Silicon Valley.”
He went on to say the government
recognised the need for lower taxes in
the medium to long term.
He also indicated he was focused on
solutions to the UK’s labour shortages,
saying he wanted people who retired
early during the pandemic to return to
work. “Britain needs you,” he said.
But Kitty Ussher, chief economist at
the Institute of Directors, said Hunt did
not have any new policies to announce,
saying the speech was “E for empty”.
There was a “gap in the chancellor’s
rhetoric”, she said, adding: “While of
course we should seek to ensure that
firms operating at the frontier of new
technology can come to Britain and
thrive, our future growth path also
depends on the many millions of indi-
vidual decisions taken by leaders of
smaller businesses across all sectors.”
Shevaun Haviland, director-general
of the British Chambers of Commerce,
said that beyond some existing pledges
— including using reform of EU-era
insurance regulations known as Sol-
vency II to unlock infrastructure invest-
ment — “there was very little meat” in
Hunt’s speech.
Stephen Phipson, chief executive of
Make UK, which represents manufac-
turers, said there were some “hugely
damaging big picture issues caused by
the absence of an industrial strategy”.
Craig Beaumont, chief of external
affairs at the Federation of Small Busi-
ness, suggested that the test for Hunt
would be whether the ideas in his
speech turned into policies in the March
Budget, “when we hope he follows
today’s bark with a bite”.
Tony Danker, CBI director-general,
said Hunt had rightly “shifted gear to
renew his focus on growth”, adding:
“And we hope the Budget in less than
two months will show strong actions to
move us forward.”
After the speech, Hunt met a group of
tech founders and investors to talk
about ways to boost innovation. Romi
Savova, chief executive of PensionBee, a
financial tech group, said that while
“fintech was acknowledged as a top pri-
ority, actions speak louder than words”.
“We have yet to see concrete next
steps on the UK’s data protection
approach, open banking is falling
behind on an international scale and the
lack of a pension switch guarantee con-
tinues to keep the pensions sector in the
dark ages,” she added.

Migration. Brighton

Missing children at mercy of criminals, say charities

Warnings about gangs preying
on young asylum seekers
in hotels fell on deaf ears
WILLIAM WALLIS — BRIGHTON
Alarms began ringing among local poli-
ticians from the moment in July 2021
that the first group of teenage asylum
seekers was dropped off at a Brighton
hotel from which dozens have since dis-
appeared.
Brighton and Hove council, which in
normal circumstances would have been
responsible for their care, said it
received no prior warning from the
Home Office of their arrival. After har-
rowing journeys across Europe and the
sea some of the children were in severe
distress. Covid restrictions complicated
things further.
“It’s hard to explain in words what I
saw,” said Peter Kyle, the Labour MP for
Hove and Portslade.
Kyle is among those who from day one
have been seeking answers from the
government after visiting the hotel that,
in an unrelated twist, is owned by a com-
pany whose directors include children
of Nicholas Van Hoogstraten, the noto-
rious property magnate and former
convict.
The furore over Home Office handling
of unaccompanied minors among
migrants arriving by sea from France
has been limited until now. That
changed this week after reports, first
carried in the Observer newspaper, that
hundreds of child asylum seekers had
disappeared from the hotel in Brighton
and others like it, potentially at the
behest of criminal gangs.
Not for the first time, the government
finds itself on the back foot over its han-
dling of migration, accused by more
than 100 charities of being in breach of
its obligations to safeguard children,
forced to admit in parliament that many
have gone missing and at pains to coun-
ter a portrayal of wider chaos in the asy-
lum system.
Six hotels along the south coast were
initially commissioned as a temporary
Home Office measure in 2021 to accom-
modate children seeking asylum. This
was part of a national transfer scheme
introduced when reception centres in
Kent became overwhelmed by the
number of migrants arriving in small
boats.
Migrants But the charities, in a letter to Prime
arriving by sea Minister Rishi Sunak, said it was no
from France. longer possible “to justify the use of
Below, Maddie hotels as being ‘temporary”.
Harris from Reports of disappearances from them
Humans for are not new. They were flagged last
Rights October in a report by the independent
Sameer al-Doumy/AFP/Getty;
Charlie Bibby/FT
border watchdog, and earlier freedom
of information requests by Ecpat, the
children’s rights organisation. But sinis-
ter tales from Brighton have galvanised
government critics. Sussex Police con-
firmed that of 137 unaccompanied asy-
lum seekers aged under 18 reported
missing from the hotel in Brighton, 76
have yet to be found.
In parliament, Robert Jenrick, the
immigration minister, acknowledged
that of 4,600 such minors seeking asy-
lum who have been accommodated in
hotels since July 2021, 440 had at some
point disappeared. Of these 200 are still
unaccounted for, 13 of them under 16.
The charities contend that these teen-
agers’ care is outside the government’s
obligations under the 1989 Children’s
Act and thus made them vulnerable to
the criminal gangs suspected of involve-
ment in disappearance cases.
Hannah Allbrooke, chair of the chil-
dren, young people and skills commit-
tee at Brighton council, said more than
1,000 refugee children had passed
through the city under the Home Office
transfer scheme. The Home Office, she
said, had regularly conceded that the
council, which would usually have legal
responsibility for taking unaccompa-
nied minors into care, did not in this
case.
“Vulnerable children and young peo-
ple who have come to the UK to be safe
are being left in legal limbo with govern-
ment failing in its statutory duty to
ensure they are given a corporate, legal
parent to look after them,” said Enver
Solomon, chief executive of the Refugee
Council charity.
Kyle said safeguarding measures at
the Brighton hotel were inadequate, and
teenagers there were left in the dark as
to their fate.
One Iranian boy he met had lost both
his parents back home. On arrival in
Brighton he had been separated from
the friend, who had tested positive for
Covid, with whom he had journeyed
with from Iran.
“He was in a state of such anxiety his
face was pinched and his legs were buck-
ling. He didn’t know where his friend
had gone,” he said.
This fits the wider picture of uncer-
tainty painted by non-governmental
organisation workers monitoring the
children.
Ellen Tansey, safeguarding manager
at the Refugee Council, said the children
in the Brighton hotel, as in others she
visited, appeared to have no designated
social worker and none of the usual
access to services. They were mentally
affected by the haphazard way in which
some among them were moved swiftly
into care while others were stuck in the
hotel for more than a month, she said.
This state of uncertainty made them
more open to exploitation, she said.
“You can appreciate if someone turns
up and says to a child without any
knowledge of how the UK asylum and
child protection systems work, ‘you
could be deported, or I could drive you
to London and give you a job in a car
wash’, even though it’s a risk, they might
take it,” she said.
In one case last year, when a
bystander had reported two boys being
driven off from outside the Brighton
hotel, Sussex police intercepted the
vehicle on the motorway. Two men were
arrested and are under investigation for
human trafficking.
There has been widespread specula-
tion that children like them who have
gone missing, more than 80 per cent of
whom are Albanian according to the
Home Office, have been drafted into the
criminal underworld.
But Maddie Harris, who runs the non-
governmental organisation Humans for
Rights network, and has worked with
‘The hundreds of unaccompanied minors
seeking asylum, said it was misleading
children to portray this as “random kidnap-
going ping”.
“It’s children coerced, exploited and
missing trafficked,” she said, adding that some
from hotels of them would already have had contact
with trafficking networks to get to the
is really due UK.
to a lack of “The children going missing from
hotels is really due to a lack of support
support being provided to understand the needs
being and individual risks that relate to each
of them,” she said.
provided’ The Home Office said that as part of
efforts to phase out the use of the hotels,
it was offering £15,000 to local authori-
ties taking children seeking asylum into
care.
“Robust safeguarding procedures are
in place to ensure all children and
minors are safe and supported as we
seek urgent placements with a local
authority,” it said, adding: “Any child or
minor going missing is extremely seri-
ous, and we work around the clock with
the police and local authorities to
urgently locate them and ensure they
are safe.”

Secrecy legislation

MPs and peers work to reform sweeping national security bill

ROBERT WRIGHT tions in the bill apply both to official threaten journalists, activists and was added only after its Commons com-
MAKE A WISE information that is classified and infor- whistleblowers”. mittee stage. MPs consequently had no
MPs from across the political spectrum
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Subscribe today at the House of Lords to amend govern-
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freedom and whistleblowers’ rights.
of interests of the UK” — a definition the legislation. The MPs hope to press any group with foreign funding to pos-
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28 January/29 January 2023 ★ FTWeekend 3

NATIONAL

BBC chair faces mounting pressure

Agriculture

over alleged link to Johnson loan
Staff express disquiet about potential conflict of interest as broadcaster’s impartiality is questioned
ALISTAIR GRAY AND OLIVER BARNES
Pointed questions from BBC journalists
are often directed at politicians. But at
an internal meeting this week, the pub-
lic broadcaster’s own leadership was
under the spotlight.
Director-general Tim Davie was
flooded with queries from staff about
claims that chair Richard Sharp helped
to arrange a personal loan worth as
much as £800,000 for Boris Johnson
shortly before the then prime minister
recommended him for the post.
“Could the BBC be more impartial
with a politically neutral chairperson?”
asked one employee. “Will the BBC have
a new chairman by February?” asked
another.
As well as bringing renewed scrutiny
to the BBC’s impartiality in news, the
conflict-of-interest allegations against
Sharp have raised broader concerns
about deteriorating standards in UK
public life. Whitehall’s appointments
watchdog, William Shawcross, has
launched a review of the process that led
to the nomination of Sharp, who denies
any wrongdoing.
Sharp’s appointment in 2021 was met
with relief at the BBC. While the former
Goldman Sachs banker had no back-
ground in broadcasting, his business
nous — and ties to Downing Street —
were seen as useful to the corporation,
especially during negotiations with the
government over funding. Ministers set
the level of the television licence fee,
which accounts for about three-quar-
ters of the BBC’s budget.
Sharp, who has donated £400,000 to
the Conservative party, made no secret
of his political leanings, nor his connec-
tions to the top of the party — he was
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s boss at
Goldman Sachs. But unlike others on
the right, the arts patron broadly sup-
ported the licence fee system. He was
seen as a relative centrist, not a BBC
arch-critic, as Johnson had initially
threatened to install.
Two years on, the connections that
were supposed to be assets have become
increasingly problematic.
In an email to BBC staff this week,
Sharp denied he was involved in arrang-
ing any financing for Johnson. He said
that Sam Blyth, a Canadian business-
man, had approached him with a view
to assisting Johnson with what he
described as the then prime minister’s
“financial pressures”.
According to the memo, Sharp said he
then put Blyth in touch with the cabinet
secretary, Simon Case, the country’s
most senior civil servant.
Sharp, who at the time was an eco-
nomic adviser to the Treasury, added
that when he referred that matter to
Case, he reminded him of his outstand-
ing application for the BBC position.
“We both agreed that to avoid any con-
flict that I should have nothing further
to do with the matter,” he said.
The government said the process that
led to Sharp’s appointment was “rigor-
ous”, adding: “All the correct recruit-
ment processes were followed.”
But critics inside and out-
side the corporation say
that, however indirect,
Sharp’s association with
such a large loan to a serv-
ing prime minister while
his application to head
In the spotlight: the BBC’s board was under considera-
the BBC’s tion makes him an unsuitable guardian
objectivity and of the corporation’s independence.
the political “It’s not rocket science: he should sim-
connections of ply have said [to Blyth] ‘I can have noth-
Richard Sharp, ing to do with this’,” said Steven Barnett,
below, have professor of communications at West-
come under minster university. “The man he was
scrutiny being asked to help financially was the
Henry Nicholls/Reuters man who was ultimately to decide
whether he was going to be BBC chair-
man. His position is unsustainable.”
The issue has caused disquiet among
the BBC’s workforce of more than
20,000, including managers in news and
other divisions. “There was a lot of
respect for him in the organisation, but
that has evaporated quite quickly in the
last few days,” said one top insider.
A spokesman for Johnson said the
allegations against him were “rubbish.
Richard Sharp has never given any
financial advice to Boris Johnson, nor
has Mr Johnson sought any financial
advice from him. There has never been
any remuneration or compensation to
Mr Sharp from Boris Johnson for this or
any other service.
“All Mr Johnson’s financial arrange-
ments have been properly declared and
registered on the advice of officials.”
Sharp is not the first BBC chair to
draw fire for having a close relationship
with the government of the day. In the
1980s, Labour attacked Margaret
Thatcher’s choice of Marmaduke Hus-
sey as “provocative” — the former news-
paper executive led Times Newspapers
in its battle against the print unions —
but he served two terms.
Later in opposition, lead-
ing Conservatives com-
plained that the BBC was
being “taken over” by
Labour “cronies” when
Gavyn Davies, a friend
of then chancellor Gor-
don Brown, took the chair. Chris Patten,
the one-time Hong Kong governor who
headed what was then known as the
BBC Trust during David Cameron’s coa-
lition government, was a former Tory
party chair.
But critics say that any link between
Sharp and the prime minister’s personal
finances would be more serious than a
close political connection. In his review,
for which no deadline has been speci-
fied, Shawcross is expected to examine
whether the BBC chair should have dis-
closed his connection with Blyth to the
four-member advisory panel that
advised ministers on the appointment.
Peter Riddell, commissioner for pub-
lic appointments at the time, said that
he “and all the others involved knew
nothing about the loan. Those are new
facts. But it’s up to William [Shawcross]
and his inquiry to judge.”
Sharp also faces a grilling next month
from the Commons culture committee,
which approved his appointment. The
BBC board’s nomination committee is, at
Sharp’s behest, conducting its own
review led by independent director
Nicholas Serota, although it does not
have the power to remove the chair,
which rests with ministers.
In line with the governance code of
public appointments, candidates for the
role were required to declare any inter-
ests that “could lead to a real or per-
ceived conflict of interest”. That sounds
broad, but how such conflicts are
defined is open to interpretation.
“I veer on the side of transparency
rather than necessarily the letter of the
code,” Riddell said. “It would have been
much more sensible” for Sharp to have
made the disclosure. “That would then
be taken into account. Whether it would
have made any difference [to the
appointment] I have no idea.”
Sharp insists he was appointed on
‘There was merit and there was no conflict of inter-
est. In the memo to staff he wrote: “Even
a lot of now, I don’t know any more than is
respect for reported in the media about a loan or
reported guarantee.”
him but Ed Vaizey, former Tory culture minis-
that has ter, said: “It’s always been clear that he
has close links to the Conservative party.
evaporated Frankly I don’t think it [the Johnson
row] threatens Richard Sharp’s position.
quite I think he’ll be judged on how well he
quickly stewards and defends the BBC — not on
in the last what I regard as a very minor issue.”
Such stewardship is needed as the
few days’ BBC faces challenges to retain viewers in
the age of streaming. Despite hopes that
Sharp would secure a favourable fund-
ing settlement with the government, the
corporation was blindsided a year ago
‘I think by one of its least generous funding
packages in decades, with the licence fee
[Sharp will] frozen for two years at £159.
be judged Sharp, who donates the £160,000 he
earns from the chairmanship to charity,
on how well has recognised the controversy over
he stewards Johnson has been a “distraction”, but
with two years of his four-year term left
and defends to serve, he has no plans to stand aside.
the BBC — The broad expectation among BBC
insiders is that unless damaging new
not on what details about the affair come to light,
I regard as a Sharp will probably survive.
But they warn the episode under-
very minor mines Sharp’s credibility as a champion
issue’ of impartiality, which has been one of
his top priorities at the corporation,
even if it did not stop him again stressing
its importance at an “away day” for BBC
managers in Greenwich this week.
Former BBC presenter Andrew Marr,
who now has a show on rival LBC, said
the row came at a time of “immense
public scepticism” about the broad-
caster. He called for Sharp to stand
down, describing his connections with
Johnson as “toxic”, adding: “It looks
cosy in a way the country hates.”
Halt in hiring
of Nepalese
adds to farm
labour woes
OLIVER TELLING AND JUDITH EVANS
Farms have stopped recruiting work-
ers from Nepal following warnings the
immigration system was exposing the
south Asian migrants to exploitation.
All five of the recruitment companies
licensed to bring farm labourers to the
UK on temporary visas have publicly
announced or told the Financial Times
that they are not hiring workers from
the country this year.
Not all the UK-based agencies had
recruited from Nepal but the abrupt
halt to recruitment from the Himalayan
nation, where almost a 10th of seasonal
workers came from in 2022, risks exac-
erbating the acute labour shortage on
farms.
Last summer, fresh produce worth
tens of millions of pounds was left to rot
because there were not enough workers
to carry out the harvest.
In 2022, the number of Nepalese
arriving through the seasonal worker
scheme more than quadrupled to 2,472,
after Brexit and the Ukraine war left
farms more dependent on workers from
outside Europe.
But the surge in Nepalese arrivals
sparked warnings from campaigners,
who said workers were routinely
charged excessive recruitment fees by
job-finding agencies in their home
country and struggled to pay their debts
and afford accommodation and food.
Last month, investors with £800bn in
assets called on big food retailers to
work with suppliers to ensure seasonal
workers were repaid the millions that
they were estimated to have collectively
spent to secure jobs in Britain. They also
called on the government to bring the
seasonal worker scheme into line with
its commitments on labour rights.
The rapid expansion of the scheme,
launched in 2019, had raised concerns
about the difficulty of maintaining over-
sight in countries where UK regulations
were not enforced. A report last month
by the Independent Chief Inspector of
Borders and Immigration found that the
Home Office “did not act promptly or
seriously” when workers in the UK
reported “serious concerns”.
Despite the move by the recruitment
companies, Nepalese workers remain
eager to travel, lured by the hope of
higher wages. One Facebook group
advertising UK seasonal work has more
than 41,000 members. Andy Hall, a
labour rights campaigner in Asia,
warned many posts are fake.
Lucila Granada, chief executive of the
charity Focus on Labour Exploitation,
said: “We need proper mapping of the
supply chains and a careful process to
work with the relevant authorities in
each country the UK aims to bring
workers from before operations start.”
Retailers, recruiters and growers have
been holding talks on combating worker
exploitation, according to activists.
Recruiters want the government to set
out visa allocations earlier each year to
enable more time for planning.
The Home Office said it “takes work-
ers’ concerns very seriously”, adding
that improvements had been made each
year “to stop exploitation and clamp
down on poor working conditions”.
It said it encouraged people to report
abuses and would take action when an
offence was proved, but any compensa-
tion would be a matter for the worker
and their recruiter to resolve.

Brexit Transport

‘Significant’ progress on NI protocol claimed
GEORGE PARKER AND PETER FOSTER
Rishi Sunak has mobilised two top offi-
cials in a final push to resolve the row
over post-Brexit Northern Ireland
trade arrangements, with hopes rising
in London after insiders reported “sig-
nificant” progress in talks this week.
Sir Tim Barrow, the prime minister’s
national security adviser and former
ambassador to the EU, has been
deployed to help with the diplomacy
around the highly sensitive discussions.
Simon Case, cabinet secretary, is said
by colleagues to be playing an increas-
ingly important role, drawing on his
experience of EU negotiations. Case led
early discussions on the Irish border
problem thrown up by Brexit.
Barrow has been using his diplomatic
contacts in Europe and the US to pre-
pare the ground for a possible deal with
the EU, said two officials close to the
talks.
Joe Biden, the US president, is putting
pressure on London and Brussels to set-
tle the disagreement, which has soured
relations between Britain and the EU
since Brexit took full effect in January
2021.
Three people familiar with the talks
said there had been a “significant” step
forward and that the outline of a frame-
work agreement was crystallising.
But two EU insiders cautioned that
converting the outline of a deal into a
viable political agreement “depended a
lot” on whether Sunak could sell the
deal in London.
Talks between London and Brussels
Biden is putting pressure
on both London and
Brussels to settle
the disagreement
have intensified in recent weeks to
thrash out a deal to minimise the impact
of the Northern Ireland protocol, which
created a trade border in the Irish Sea.
Under the terms of the deal, Northern
Ireland will follow EU rules for goods,
VAT and state aid policy, which both
Conservative Brexiters and the main
Democratic Unionist party in Northern
Ireland have said impinged unaccepta-
bly on UK sovereignty.
The DUP has refused to re-enter
Northern Ireland’s stalled power-shar-
ing executive until issues over the proto-
col are resolved. Sir Jeffrey Donaldson,
the DUP leader, has repeatedly said any
deal must “restore our place in the UK”.
A deal will turn on whether the agree-
ment can reduce checks at the Irish Sea
trade border to manageable levels and
resolve the role of the European Court of
Justice in enforcing the protocol.
A system of “red” and “green” lanes is
expected to form the basis of a plan to
reduce checks on goods going from
Great Britain to Northern Ireland, with
products destined to remain in the
region being clearly labelled.
On Wednesday Archie Norman,
Marks and Spencer chair, warned the
foreign secretary that a Northern Ire-
land-specific labelling system would
create “overbearing and prohibitive
costs” for retailers trading with the
regions.
Insiders said other retailers has raised
concerns about the costs of the disagree-
ment, but UK officials noted that label-
ling had been part of the solutions to the
protocol proposed by Boris Johnson’s
government. Retailers, they said, would
have to “suck up” the costs.
Hunt insists HS2 rail line will finish at Euston
GILL PLIMMER AND JIM PICKARD
Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has insisted
the High Speed 2 railway will finish in
central London as officials at the
project connecting the capital and
northern England examine measures
to prevent a further surge in costs.
The estimated price tag for Britain’s big-
gest infrastructure scheme has soared
from £33bn to more than £100bn since
it was first conceived a decade ago,
prompting alarm within the Treasury
where ministers are determined to pre-
vent further cost escalation.
As a result, senior figures in the
Department for Transport and HS2
have discussed solutions ranging from
dropping the surviving stretch of the
eastern second leg of the project or
axing the redevelopment of Euston sta-
tion, where costs have risen by more
than £1bn in just two years. “Clearly
there are inflationary pressures . . . and
that means the government is having to
work through those challenges,” said
one person involved in the project.
The Sun reported yesterday that HS2
executives were considering terminat-
ing the line at Old Oak Common on the
outskirts of London instead of Euston.
Commuters would have to use the Eliza-
beth line to travel into central London to
finish their journey.
But Hunt rejected that idea in media
interviews yesterday, saying: “I don’t
see any conceivable circumstances in
which that would not end up at Euston.”
Redeveloping Euston is crucial to the
controversial 225mph rail project,
£100 bn £4 bn
Estimated cost of Cost of Euston
the HS2 project,
up from £33bn a
station revamp in
2019 prices, up
decade ago from £2.8bn
which was first sold as an alternative to a
third runway at Heathrow or an exten-
sion to the existing high-speed link to
Europe, but now has no direct connec-
tion to either.
The state-funded scheme, which has
faced protests and criticism since its
inception, has been repeatedly scaled
back and is now planned to run from
London to Birmingham in its first phase
and then to Manchester airport, Wigan
and Crewe in the north-west.
In 2021, Boris Johnson’s government
announced it was axing most of the east-
ern second leg of the project — from East
Midlands Parkway, just south of Not-
tingham, to Leeds — to find cost savings.
Now some senior government figures
have discussed killing the remaining
part of the eastern leg, from Birming-
ham to East Midlands Parkway, to cut
costs further. Euston also remains a
potential target for savings because,
despite significant preparatory work,
the design has yet to be completed.
Estimated costs for the Euston rede-
velopment have risen from about
£2.8bn to nearly £4bn in 2019 prices,
according to an internal document pre-
sented last year to HS2’s board by Sir Jon
Thompson, the former head of HM Rev-
enue & Customs who became deputy
chair of the project in April 2021.
That report also warned that HS2 was
running “billions of pounds” over
budget in its first phase, which began in
2020 and is due to be completed
between 2029 and 2033.
The DfT said: “The government
remains committed to delivering HS2 to
Manchester, as confirmed in the
Autumn Statement.”
4 ★ FTWeekend 28 January/29 January 2023

INTERNATIONAL

Conflict

WORLD|
WEEK IN REVIEW|
US economy beats growth forecasts
despite Fed’s campaign of rate rises
The US economy posted better than expected growth
in the final quarter of 2022, even as the Federal
Reserve’s rate rises started to weigh heavily on busi-
ness activity.
The world’s largest economy expanded 2.9 per
cent on an annualised basis between September and
December, according to data published by the com-
merce department, slightly higher than economists’
forecasts of a 2.6 per cent increase.
That marked a slowdown from 3.2 per cent growth
in the third quarter, reflecting the steps the US cent-
ral bank has taken to damp demand.
The Fed has raised its policy rate more than 4 per-
centage points since March, moving in 0.75 percent-
age point increments in an attempt to curb inflation.
Kremlin admits Wagner hires convicts
Putin pardons prisoners
to join ranks of Russia’s
paramilitary group
MAX SEDDON — RIGA
Russian president Vladimir Putin is par-
doning convicts to allow them to fight in
Ukraine with the Wagner paramilitary
group, the Kremlin has admitted.
Russia also dismissed the US Treas-
ury’s move to label Yevgeny Prigozhin’s
group, which is playing a prominent role
on the front lines as Putin’s full-scale
invasion enters its 12th month, as a
“transnational criminal organisation”.
Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov,
yesterday said prisoners were being par-
doned “in strict adherence with Russian
law” and praised one convicted armed
robber recruited by Wagner for “hero-
ism” on the battlefield after the presi-
dent gave him a medal.
After nearly a decade of shrouding the
mercenary operation’s activities in
secrecy, with its founder Prigozhin even
claiming it did not exist, the Kremlin
has embraced Wagner as a key element
of its faltering efforts to defeat Ukraine
and rally support for the war.
Though Russia initially denied the
group was fighting in Ukraine, the poor
performance of Russia’s regular army
and discontent about the campaign
among Russia’s elite have allowed the
former caterer, nicknamed “Putin’s
chef” and himself a former convict, to
establish a role as the leader of a hard-
line pro-war faction.
Russia’s constitution gives Putin sole
authority to pardon prisoners, though
Peskov said “there are open decrees and
there are decrees marked classified”,
declining to comment further. On New
Year’s Eve, Putin gave Aik Gasparyan,
serving a seven-year sentence for an
armed robbery in 2019, a medal. Peskov
said Gasparyan “is participating in the
special military operation, and he dem-
onstrated heroism, which was rewarded
with a state honour”.
Peskov shrugged off Washington’s
recent move to limit Wagner’s interna-
tional reach in response to extensively
documented reports of alleged atroci-
ties committed by the group in coun-
tries such as the Central African Repub-
lic, Libya and Syria, where it has taken
part in covert mercenary deployments.
Peskov claimed the US had been
“demonising” Wagner for “many years”
and said the accusations were
“unfounded”. As part of the designation,
the US issued new sanctions on Thurs-
day against Wagner, and 15 other Rus-
sian entities, eight individuals and four
Convicted aircraft, in an attempt to target Russia’s
armed battlefield resources in Ukraine.
robber Prigozhin has been under US sanc-
tions since 2017 over his alleged role
recruited running an infamous troll farm in St
by Wagner Petersburg whose employees attempted
to influence the 2016 US election by pos-
praised for ing as Americans on social media.
‘heroism’ In a statement by Concord, his cater-
ing company, yesterday, Prigozhin said:
on the “We have held an internal investigation
battlefield into Wagner’s crimes but have not found
anything damaging. If anyone has any
information about Wagner’s crimes,
please send it to our press service or
publish it in the media. So we can help
our American colleagues form their
position.”
UK intelligence estimates Prigozhin
has recruited at least 50,000 prisoners
to fight for Wagner in Ukraine.

Eurozone will avoid recession this

year, says survey of economists
The eurozone will avoid a recession this year, accord-
ing to a widely watched survey of economists that
illustrated the sharp about-turn in global economic
sentiment in the past couple of weeks.
As recently as last month, analysts surveyed by
Consensus Economics were predicting that the bloc
would plunge into recession in 2023. But this month’s
survey found they now expected it to log growth of
0.1 per cent over the course of this year. This is
because of lower energy prices, bumper government
support and the reopening of the Chinese economy.
It came after officials and business leaders at the
World Economic Forum in Davos also embraced a
more upbeat outlook and the IMF signalled it would
soon upgrade its forecasts for global growth.
Burkina Faso gives French troops a
month to withdraw from country
An anti-France protest in Ouagadougou, capital of
Burkina Faso, ahead of the military junta’s order for
French troops to withdraw from its territory within a
month. The African country signed a deal in 2018 to
allow the former colonial power to fight terror groups.
‘Mr Fixit’ sworn in as New Zealand
premier after Ardern steps down
Chris Hipkins was sworn in as New Zealand’s prime
minister and said he would make the cost of living
the central issue of his policy agenda.
Labour’s unanimous choice to replace Jacinda
Ardern, who resigned last week, will lead the party
into elections this October. The party is behind in the
polls and facing a backlash against its economic and
pandemic management.
Analysts said the quietly competent Hipkins,
whose role in leading the Covid-19 response helped
earn him the “Mr Fixit” tag, may suit a party seen to
have lost touch with “middle New Zealand”.
New Zealand announced annual inflation was 7.2
per cent in the fourth quarter.
Ukraine. Corruption
Rations racket Zelenskyy could not stomach
President responded to public
sacrifices, needs of troops in
the field and EU perceptions
CHRISTOPHER MILLER — KYIV
When Ukrainian journalist and anti-
corruption activist Yuriy Nikolov was
tipped off about an overpriced catering
contract for the defence ministry, he
knew the story could get him in trouble.
By publishing it, not only would
Nikolov break a taboo on criticising the
Kyiv government during wartime. He
knew it could also cast a shadow over
Ukraine and the reputation of Oleksiy
Reznikov, defence minister and one of
the most prominent figures of the war.
Nikolov said he approached the min-
istry but was brushed off. He then pub-
lished his findings, which showed the
ministry had signed a $350mn deal with
a catering company to pay wildly
inflated prices for troop rations.
The story of overpriced eggs and gher-
kins set off alarm bells for Ukrainians,
who have donated about $500mn of
their own money to the army, according
to the country’s central bank. Many rec-
ognised it as a classic scheme used by
powerful officials to line their pockets.
That it was money meant to help feed Food scandal: but in our circumstances, at our level of a digital procurement system to 122nd out of 180 countries, a slight
their defenders made it all the more Ukrainian development in our democracy and increase transparency and competition, improvement over the previous year. In
scandalous. soldiers at an fighting against Russia, the cost is very Yurchyshyn said. 2018, however, Ukraine came in as the
The military procurement scandal outpost in the high, it’s people dying every day,” said In comments about the government 120th.
broke as Ukraine was pleading with its country’s Yaroslav Yurchyshyn, a lawmaker and shake-up on Tuesday, Zelenskyy said: Tetiana Shevchuk, legal counsel for
western partners to provide it with Kramatorsk first deputy head of the parliamentary “It is fair, it is needed for our defence Ukraine’s Anti-Corruption Action Cen-
tanks and other critical arms supplies region. Below, committee on anti-corruption policy. and it helps our rapprochement with tre, a leading watchdog, said that Zelen-
for the fight against Russia’s invasion President Ukrainians are focused on defeating European institutions. We need a strong skyy’s crackdown showed he was trying
forces. The country’s ambition to Volodymyr Russia, Nikolov said, “but it turned out state, and Ukraine will be just that.” to live up to his promise. “There was a
become an EU member state will Zelenskyy that, in fact, [Ukrainians] really don’t The European Commission said Brus- lot of tension inside the country,” she
Scott Olson/Getty Images
depend on credible rule of law and anti- like corruption and want justice too”. sels, which has made Ukraine’s poten- said. But civil society was wary of caus-
corruption reforms. “Soldiers in the trenches,” he said, tial accession to the 27-member bloc ing a public outcry, lest it inadvertently
The army food scandal was the first in were among many who had written to conditional on it cleaning up corrup- harm the country by fuelling Russian
a cascade of stories that would lead to thank him for exposing the deal and tion, was pleased with Zelenskyy’s propaganda or presenting an image of
resignations and sackings of senior gov- stopping it before payment was made. response but more progress on reforms Ukraine as a corrupt place to western
ernment officials, as well as the biggest Reznikov denied any wrongdoing in a was needed. backers.
government shake-up since the start of fiery Facebook post and passed the In particular, the EU wanted to see the Shevchuk said anti-corruption activ-
Russia’s full-scale invasion. blame to Vyacheslav Shapovalov, his reform of Ukraine’s historically prob- ists had operated under an “unspoken
In a matter of days, one of President deputy, who oversaw procurements lematic Constitutional Court and the agreement” with the government. “It
Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s deputy chiefs and who quit when the scandal broke. selection process for judges. was as follows: ‘we don’t criticise you as
of staff, five governors of frontline prov- Yurchyshyn, who sits on a parliamen- Zelenskyy swept into power in 2019 long as you do the right thing. If you do
inces, four deputy ministers and two tary committee dealing with anti-graft largely on the promise of ending the war something wrong you have time to fix
members of the president’s ruling Serv- policies, said the shake-up demon- with Russia and tackling graft. In Trans- your mistakes’.”
ant of the People party in parliament strated that anti-corruption reforms parency International’s most recent But setting up a scheme to steal
would resign or be fired because of scan- were working. “We created Nabu, an Corruption Perceptions Index pub- money from Ukraine’s vital war chest,
dalous or allegedly corrupt behaviour. anti-corruption court, a special anti- lished just before Russia’s February 24 she added, “crossed a red line”.
“Corruption is a negative in any case corruption prosecutor, and ProZorro” — full-scale invasion, Ukraine ranked See FT Big Read

Middle East

Jerusalem synagogue shooting leaves at least seven dead

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JAMES SHOTTER — JERUSALEM
At least seven people were killed in a
shooting at a synagogue in Jerusalem,
Israeli officials said last night.
The ambulance service said that there
were further injuries.
Israel’s police commissioner, Ya’akov
Shabtai, said that the gunman had been
“neutralised” and that police were
investigating whether anyone else had
been involved.
The incident came after Israeli jets
bombed Gaza in response to rocket fire
from the Palestinian coastal enclave,
amid a sharp escalation in tensions fol-
lowing a deadly Israeli raid in the occu-
pied West Bank.
Israel said its armed forces had hit a
military base and an underground
rocket manufacturing site operated by
Hamas, the militant group that has con-
trolled the hemmed-in Gaza Strip since
2007. It added that the rockets that
reached Israel were either intercepted
or fell on open ground. No casualties
were reported on either side.
The exchange of fire in Gaza followed
the worst day of violence in the West
Bank for years, after Israeli commandos
on Thursday killed at least nine Pales-
tinians, including one elderly woman,
during a raid on the Jenin refugee camp
that targeted militants from Palestinian
Islamic Jihad. Islamic Jihad subse-
quently said it was responsible for
Thursday night’s rocket fire.
The spasm of violence, which fol-
lowed months of near-nightly clashes
between Israeli security forces and Pal-
estinian militants, has exacerbated
longstanding fears that the security situ-
ation in the West Bank — which forms
the bulk of the Palestinian territories
but has been occupied by Israel since
1967 — could spiral out of control.
Last year was the bloodiest for Pales-
tinians in the West Bank since 2005,
according to the UN, with Israeli forces
killing 151 Palestinians in the territory
after stepping up operations there fol-
lowing a spate of attacks by Palestinians
that began last spring and killed 31
Israelis in 2022.
The flare-up is the first big clash since
Benjamin Netanyahu’s hardline new
government, widely seen as the most
rightwing in Israel’s history, took office
in December, with ultranationalists in
key security posts pledging to take a
tougher stance against the Palestinians.
Following the raid in Jenin, which
Israel said was carried out to foil an
imminent threat, the Palestinian
Authority said it was stopping its secu-
rity co-operation with Israel, which
helps the Israeli security forces prevent
attacks.
The PA has cancelled the co-opera-
tion before, most recently in 2020 when
Netanyahu’s previous government con-
sidered a plan to annex parts of the West
Bank. Co-operation resumed after
Israel dropped the plan.
Michael Milstein, head of the Pales-
tinian Studies Forum at the Moshe
Flare-up: an explosion in Gaza City
during the Israeli air raid yesterday
Dayan Center of Tel Aviv University,
said that although the security co-oper-
ation was useful for Israel, the symbolic
effect of it being cancelled could end up
being more important than the practical
consequences.
“My main fear is that people [lower
down] in the security forces of the
PA . . . will understand this as a green
light to promote violent steps against
Israel, that they will understand [it as
meaning] that we have entered into a
new context . . . and that they got
permission to return to violent struggle”
he said. “Even one or two cases of mem-
bers of the Palestinian security forces
promoting terror attacks could cause a
very rapid and a very tough escalation,
which no side really wants.”
The US has warned the PA against
withdrawing co-ordination. Barbara
Leaf, assistant secretary of state for near
eastern affairs, said during a briefing
with journalists that it was not the “right
step to take at this moment”.
Antony Blinken, US secretary of state,
is due to travel to both Israel and the
West Bank next week for a planned visit
to the region. William Burns, CIA chief,
was also visiting yesterday.
28 January/29 January 2023 ★ FTWeekend 5
6 ★ FTWeekend 28 January/29 January 2023

INTERNATIONAL

China’s singles resist family pressure

East Asia

South Korea’s
state pension
to marry despite population decline fund forecast
to run dry
Drive to produce more babies moves into political arena as fewer taxpayers support ageing country
CHRISTIAN DAVIES AND SONG JUNG-A
ELEANOR OLCOTT — HONG KONG SEOUL

South Korea’s National Pension Service

An estimated 200mn unmarried Chi-
nese returned home this week to cele-
brate the lunar new year, arriving at
houses filled with steaming dumplings
and fish and greeted by relatives brim-
ming with questions about when they
plan to get married and start a family.
The annual inquisition is such a pre-
dictable part of life for young Chinese
that social media channels are filled
with viral how-to guides coaching peo-
ple on how to bat away pushy parents.
“Everyone has their own technique,”
said a Beijing teacher in her late 20s,
who has been keeping her boyfriend a
secret from her family for years as a
pre-emptive strategy against demands
for marriage.
Young Chinese have for decades
invented creative tactics to allay paren-
tal demands for marriage and grand-
children, put off by the exorbitant costs
of modern child rearing while juggling
taxing jobs and sky-high property prices
in large cities.
The fight to get Chinese youngsters
married and producing babies is mov-
ing from the family home into the politi-
cal arena as the world’s most populous
country enters a long-term and irrevers-
ible population decline.
Last week, Chinese authorities
announced that a long-anticipated turn-
ing point had finally been reached: the
population officially shrank in 2022 for
the first time in 60 years, losing 850,000
people as deaths outstripped births.
China’s demographic outlook is set to
darken further, as a rapidly ageing pop-
ulation is supported by an ever smaller
number of taxpaying workers funding a
strained welfare and hospital system,
which Beijing’s reversal of anti-corona-
virus restrictions last month revealed to
already be in a fragile state.
In response, local governments have
started providing subsidies to families
with more than one child. Others are
also adopting more creative tactics.
Ningling county, in the central prov-
ince of Henan, assumed the role of
matchmaker in December, sponsoring a
speed dating event in which masked sin-
gletons gathered in the cold with num-
bers pinned to their winter coats. But
experts are pessimistic the govern-
ment’s efforts to lift the birth rate will be
more effective than those of parents.
“So far nothing seems to have stuck,”
said Wang Feng, a sociologist and expert
in demographics at the University of
California, Irvine. “It’s easy for the gov-
ernment to write new slogans, but it’s
quite another to change the work and
life environment of young people.”
In 2016, Beijing scrapped the nearly
four-decade-old one-child limit, the
world’s most severe population policy,
and in 2021 went as far as to encourage
couples to have up to three children. But
the expected baby boom never materi-
is forecast to run out of money in 2055,
adding to pressure on the government
to implement reform in the face of low
births and an ageing population in
Asia’s fourth-largest economy.
The fund will start running a deficit
from 2041 before it runs out completely
in 2055, a pension service budget com-
mittee said yesterday. Experts said the
government would have to borrow more
money from 2041 to make up the short-
fall and continue paying pensions.
“If the current pension structure is
maintained, its incomes will outpace
payouts for the next 20 years but the
trend will reverse from 2041,” said Chun
Byung-mok, the committee chair.
“The need for pension reform has
become stronger because of the deterio-
rating fiscal situation.”
The government is expected to
announce reforms this year. The NPS
administers one of the largest pension
funds in the world, with assets under
management of Won915tn ($742bn). It
has made a cumulative return of
Won480tn since 1988.
Working-age people contribute 9 per
cent of their income to the fund, and the
NPS paid out a total of Won24.2tn in the
past year. The maximum people can
receive is Won2.5mn a month.
Working-age people accounted for
71.7 per cent of the wider population in
2021 but that share is expected to
Marriage falls out of fashion Birth rates are declining decline to 51.3 per cent by 2050, accord-
Share of unmarried people (%) % change (2021 compared with 2019) ing to government figures.
Age group 20-24 25-29 30-34 35-39 -40 -30 -20 -10 0 The number of over-65s will rise from
Hubei 8.53mn in 2021 to 17.22mn in 2040, and
Male Female Heilongjiang
Shandong could account for 43.9 per cent of the
2010 2020 2010 2020 Fujian population by 2050, according to a
91.1 Jiangsu
82.4 Zhejiang report by Statistics Korea, a state body.
80.4 Hebei In 2018 South Korea reported more
Jiangxi
67.5 Shanghai deaths than births for the first time. Last
Hunan
52.9 Henan year its fertility rate fell to 0.81, the low-
Guangxi
Yunnan est in the world, from 0.84 in 2021. It has
36.3 Guangdong declined for the past six years in a row.
33.2 Xinjiang
21.6
Inner Mongolia That compares with an average of four
20.5 Shanxi
12.6 Beijing children per woman in the 1970s.
9.4 5.4 9.3 Qinghai Economists argue the South Korean
6.4 4.1 Guizhou
1.8 Gansu
Source: National Bureau of Statistics of China; FT calculation
labour market is further undermined
by the underemployment of the elderly,
the young and women.
Tying the knot: alised — after rising in the first year, the Lü Pin, a Chinese feminist activist in ‘Young ful disincentive to starting a family. Even though levels of educational
a couple number of infants in China has fallen New York, said government initiatives One Beijing resident in her 20s said attainment of South Korean women are
celebrate on every year thereafter. to encourage marriage had been “inef- people no she responded to relatives’ inquiries by among the highest in the OECD, the
the Bund That decline accelerated during the fective” because they did not tackle the longer feel asking if matrimony was “a cult of peo- country has a female employment rate
promenade in pandemic as many Chinese delayed or “real reason young people don’t want to ple who want to grab more people into of 57.7 per cent. That compares with
Shanghai, but decided against having children, with have children”, which has cultural and bound by the institution once they get married”. 76.6 per cent in the Netherlands, 73.3
the pool of the health crisis and economic instabil- economic roots. “Young people no traditions Another tactic promoted in online per cent in Sweden, 72.2 per cent in Ger-
China’s ity weighing on couples. Henan’s birth longer see giving birth as an inevitabil- videos is for women to undergo a human many and 71.3 per cent in Japan.
marriageable rate plummeted nearly 30 per cent from ity,” she said, pointing to changing social of raising papillomavirus vaccination course over Earlier this week, Japanese prime
youth is 2019 to 2021. and professional goals among China’s children’ 18 months, during which time they are minister Fumio Kishida warned that it
shrinking Young people who do get married are youth. “They no longer feel bound by advised against becoming pregnant. was “now or never” for Japan to address
Hector Retamal/AFP/Getty doing so later, while the total pool of traditions of raising children.” Lü predicted that young people would the effects of its own low birth rate and
China’s marriageable youth continues to Rising youth unemployment, soaring continue to shun official attempts to shrinking population. The country has a
shrink. The number of women of child- prices for housing and education in cit- boost fertility. “They don’t want to be a fertility rate of 1.3. “Japan is standing on
bearing age, defined as between 15 and ies and the looming healthcare costs birthing tool for the country,” she said. the verge of whether we can continue to
49 years old, fell by more than 4mn last of caring for the ageing relatives who Additional reporting by Xinning Liu in function as a society,” Kishida told law-
year, a legacy of the one-child policy. outnumber them have created a power- Beijing makers on Monday.

Ukraine war. Propaganda push South Pacific

South Africa gives Lavrov a welcome that shows Russia is not alone
Western ally softens stance
on supporter of ANC during
struggle against apartheid
JOSEPH COTTERILL — JOHANNESBURG
South Africa’s foreign minister was all
smiles this week as she hosted Russian
counterpart Sergei Lavrov for the first
time since Russia invaded Ukraine.
Naledi Pandor said her government,
nominally neutral in the conflict, was
now less inclined to criticise Moscow
due to the west’s supply of battle tanks
to Kyiv. A repeat of the call South Africa
made early in the war for a Russian
withdrawal would be “simplistic and
infantile, given the massive transfer of
arms that’s occurred” since, she said at a
briefing, with Lavrov beaming on.
Her comments are a warning to Kyiv’s
allies that, almost a year into the full-
scale invasion, Moscow is far from iso-
lated in the court of global opinion. Pre-
toria’s warm relations with Moscow will
be highlighted next month when it con-
ducts naval exercises with Russia and
China during the first anniversary of the
invasion on February 24.
Fears about Russian influence in
Africa often centre on what the west
views as the Kremlin’s attempts to
destabilise fragile countries, such as
Mali and Burkina Faso. But the shifting
position of South Africa, the continent’s
most advanced economy with strong
ties to western Europe, reveals Mos-
cow’s success in stoking doubt about
responsibility for the war through a
friendly government that can spread its
message in its region and beyond.
“For Russia, this is another opportu-
nity to show that they are not as isolated
as the west sees or expects them to be,”
said Steven Gruzd, head of the Russia-
Africa project at the South African Insti-
tute of International Affairs.
William Gumede, chair of the Democ-
racy Works Foundation, said: “It means
Russia is succeeding in its global cam-
paign to make out this war is about Rus-
sia versus the US and the west, not Rus-
sia versus Ukraine.”
Russia can tap into a rich seam of sus-
picion of the west in President Cyril
Ramaphosa’s African National Con-
gress. “Part of it is the resonance of Rus-
sian narratives of anti-colonialism and
anti-imperialism. That strikes a chord
with ANC factions who are nostalgic for
the Soviet Union’s support in the libera-
tion struggle,” Gruzd said.
South Africa is far from alone among
countries of the global south in declin-
ing to be drawn into the Russia-Ukraine
conflict. Latin American nations also
remain wary of taking sides. Gustavo
Petro, Colombia’s leftist leader, told a
regional summit in Buenos Aires this
week that he had refused a US request to
supply Ukraine with unused stocks of
Russian-made weapons.
Russian narratives are not going
unchallenged. Janet Yellen, US Treasury
secretary, also visited Pretoria this
week, armed with warnings about the
threat the war posed to Africa’s food
security — an issue on which the African
Union and most of its member states
have backed Russia, which blames
western sanctions for supply shortages.
Alexander Gabuev, senior fellow at the
Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace, said African countries were able
to use Russia’s stand-off with the west to
their advantage. “Many of them are wel-
coming Lavrov in anticipation that the
west will ultimately come and outbid
him. And if not, they ultimately get
something from Russia.”
But there are concerns that South
Africa’s support for Russia is an example
of a country progressing from rhetoric
to acquiescing in the Kremlin’s cam-
paign to beat international sanctions.
Western diplomats were alarmed in
December when a Russian container
ship under US sanctions docked at Cape
Foreign ministers Sergei Lavrov and Naledi Pandor in Pretoria — Siphiwe Sibeko/Reuters
Town’s naval base under cover of dark-
ness. The Lady R, owned by Transmor-
flot, a group placed under US sanctions
last year, appeared to have turned off its
transponder during the stop as tracking
data from Spire, a data and analytics
company, recorded no transmission of
its position to and from the port.
The ship delivered a consignment for
South Africa’s defence forces that was
“ordered long before Covid started”,
Thandi Modise, South Africa’s defence
minister, said after the ship left port.
The Ukraine war has highlighted
South Africa’s economic ties to the EU,
its biggest trading partner. Its coal has
helped Europe replace some of the lost
Russian gas over the past year.
A munitions joint venture between
state arms producer Denel and Ger-
many’s Rheinmetall supplies ammuni-
tion to Nato countries — although South
African arms control rules would forbid
their transfer to Ukraine. Yet next
month’s naval exercise suggests that
South Africa also wants deeper military
ties with Russia.
While those exercises focus on train-
ing in maritime policing and humani-
tarian relief, Russia will use South Afri-
can waters to display the Admiral Gor-
shkov, an advanced frigate that carries
its latest hypersonic cruise missiles.
“It’s obvious the value for Russia
[from the exercises] is to showcase its
geopolitical influence in southern
Africa,” said Kobus Marais, shadow
defence minister in South Africa’s main
opposition Democratic Alliance.
Lavrov’s African tour this week also
showed the limitations of the Kremlin’s
diplomacy on the continent. The Rus-
sian foreign minister also stopped off in
Angola, a buyer of Russian arms that
nevertheless voted at the UN to con-
demn Russia’s annexations of Ukrainian
territory. A trip to Botswana, also a critic
of the annexations, was called off.
But in South Africa, the war in
Ukraine remains a quandary for a post-
apartheid democracy torn between a
tradition of defending the sovereignty of
weaker countries and affection among
ANC elites for Russia.
“Our identity since Nelson Mandela
has been as a moral power,” Gumede
said. “That’s gone now.”
Additional reporting by Michael Stott in
Bogotá and Max Seddon in Riga
Fijian leader
ends Beijing
security pact
NIC FILDES — SYDNEY
Fiji’s newly elected prime minister has
terminated a security agreement with
China a month after he was sworn in, as
geopolitical divisions in the Pacific
deepen.
Sitiveni Rabuka told the Fiji Times that
a memorandum of understanding with
China signed in 2011 to train Fijian
police would not continue.
“Our system of democracy and justice
systems are different so we will go back
to those that have similar systems to us,”
said Rabuka. Police from Australia and
New Zealand would remain in Fiji.
The move comes against a backdrop
of tension in the Pacific as the Solomon
Islands signed a security pact with
China last May, which included police
training and equipment measures.
Australia has raised its aid budget and
diplomatic efforts in the region since the
election of the Labour government last
May. The US has stepped up its develop-
ment spending and presence in the
region to counter China’s influence.
Australian prime minister Anthony
Albanese and foreign minister Penny
Wong visited Suva, Fiji’s capital, in July
to attend a regional leaders’ meeting.
China’s influence in Fiji has waned in
recent years with major development
projects stalling but the police pact was
still active under Frank Bainimarama,
who was replaced by Rabuka after he
formed a coalition government.
28 January/29 January 2023 ★ FTWeekend 7
8 ★ FTWeekend 28 January/29 January 2023

INTERNATIONAL

Memphis incident Eurozone

Spain sees off

Video of beating puts US on protest alert
Black motorist’s death
leads to murder charges
for sacked police officers
STEFF CHÁVEZ — CHICAGO
Authorities across the US were braced
for protests ahead of the release of video
footage showing the events leading to
the death of black motorist Tyre Nichols
at the hands of police in Memphis, Ten-
nessee, this month.
On January 7, five police officers
attempted to arrest Nichols, 29, after
pulling him over while driving just
before 8.30pm. The incident escalated
into a physical altercation that resulted
in Nichols’ hospitalisation, state investi-
gators said. He died three days later.
The five officers involved, who are all
black, were fired following Nichols’
death. They were indicted by a grand
jury in Memphis’s Shelby County on
Thursday for second-degree murder,
among other charges relating to the kill-
ing. “They beat my son to death,”
Nichols’ mother, RowVaughn Wells,
told CNN.
Footage of the incident was to be
released publicly yesterday evening,
with demonstrations expected in cities
throughout the country in response.
“In a word, it’s appalling,” said David
Ranch, director of the Tennessee
Bureau of Investigation, of the footage of
the assault. “Let me be clear: what hap-
pened here does not, at all, reflect
proper policing. This was wrong. This
was a crime.”
US politics. Republican race
US attorney-general Merrick Garland
told reporters yesterday he had been
briefed on the video, calling it “deeply
disturbing . . . horrific, from the
descriptions I’ve been given”. Garland
‘Let me be clear: what
happened here does not,
at all, reflect proper
policing. This was wrong’
urged the public to be “peaceful and
nonviolent” on release of the footage.
Christopher Wray, FBI director, said
all FBI field offices had been told to
“work closely” with partners, particu-
larly in Memphis, “in the event of some-
thing getting out of hand”.
US president Joe Biden said in a state-
ment yesterday that he joined “Tyre’s
family in calling for peaceful protest.
Outrage is understandable but violence
is never acceptable.”
For Memphis, a majority-black city of
630,000, the incident has revived mem-
ories of the infamous assault of Rodney
King by Los Angeles police in 1991. It is
also one of the most high-profile police
killings in the US since the deaths of
George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and oth-
ers triggered nationwide protests three
years ago.
On Thursday, the five now former
Memphis police officers involved in
Nichols’ arrest — Tadarrius Bean,
Demetrius Haley, Emmitt Martin III,
Desmond Mills Jr and Justin Smith —
were charged on seven counts: second-
degree murder, aggravated assault, two
forms of aggravated kidnapping, two
forms of official misconduct and official
oppression.
Bond was set for each at between
$250,000 and $350,000.
Memphis police department chief
Cerelyn Davis said in a video statement
that “this incident was heinous, reckless
and inhumane” and that the public
would see this for themselves when the
video was released.
“I expect you to feel what the Nichols
family feels. I expect you to feel outrage
in the disregard of basic human rights,”
she said.
Nichols’ death is being investigated by
city, state and federal officials, while the
Department of Justice is conducting a
civil rights investigation.
‘prophets of
doom’ with
economic
expansion
VALENTINA ROMEI — LONDON
Spain’s economy expanded more than
expected at the end of last year, in a sign
of resilience in the face of high inflation
and rising borrowing costs.
Gross domestic product inched up 0.2
per cent between the third and fourth
quarters of 2022, the INE statistics
bureau said yesterday. The growth rate
was unchanged from the revised pace of
the previous three months. But the
reading surpassed the 0.1 per cent fore-
cast by economists polled by Reuters.
Compared with the fourth quarter a
year earlier, output rose 2.7 per cent,
against 2.2 per cent forecast by analysts.
The expansion “confirms the strength

Trump hits campaign trail early as rivals dither
Former president starts his
2024 run small while potential
contenders weigh their bids
LAUREN FEDOR — WASHINGTON
Donald Trump is hitting the campaign
trail this weekend for a whistle-stop
tour of New Hampshire and South Caro-
lina, two key early voting states, as the
former US president presses ahead with
his as yet uncontested bid for the
Republican party’s presidential nomi-
nation in 2024.
But, despite his eagerness to secure a
head start in the race while his rivals
dither, there are signs that Trump, who
has faced calls to step aside after many
of his handpicked candidates fell short
in last November’s midterm elections,
may face a lacklustre reception.
While the former president built his
political brand on raucous rallies
attended by thousands of his support-
ers, this morning he will speak at a rela-
tively small venue: an annual meeting of
state party officials at a high school in
Salem, New Hampshire. Later in the
day, he will appear in what has been
described as an “intimate” event inside
South Carolina’s state capitol building.
“How it is being done makes you
scratch your head,” said Mick Mulva-
ney, Trump’s former chief of staff who
was a state legislator in South Carolina
before being elected to Congress.
Trump will receive welcome support
this afternoon from South Carolina gov-
ernor Henry McMaster and US Senator
Lindsey Graham, who are among the
state’s highest-profile Republicans. But
notably absent from the stage will be
two other household names in the state
who are widely reported to be consider-
ing their own bids for the White House:
former governor Nikki Haley and cur-
rent US Senator Tim Scott.
Meanwhile, in New Hampshire,
prominent Trump critic Chris
Sununu, the state’s Republican gover-
nor who handily won re-election by
more than 15 points last Novem-
ber and has flirted publicly with
running for president, is not
expected to appear at the ear-
lier event in Salem.
The absences underscore
how many national Republi-
cans are wrestling with
whether — and how — to take
on Trump in 2024, given his
and resilience of the Spanish economy”,
said Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez on
Twitter. “In the face of the prophets of
doom, today we have strong economic
growth, the lowest inflation in Europe
and record employment.”
Spain is the first eurozone country to
publish its fourth-quarter GDP data,
with figures for the region expected on
Tuesday. Analysts forecast a 0.1 per cent
contraction for the currency union over
the same period.
Elsewhere, French consumer confi-
dence was lower than expected in Janu-
ary, according to a monthly survey,
despite inflation pressures easing in the
region’s second-biggest economy. The
Insee national statistics office said yes-
terday that consumer sentiment fell to
80 points this month from a revised
reading of 81 in December 2022.
The figure for Spain means “it likely
fared better than the other major euro-
zone economies”, said Melanie Debono
senior Europe economist at Pantheon
Macroeconomics, a consultancy.
However, Spain remains 1.1 per cent
below its pre-pandemic level. In the
third quarter, eurozone GDP was
already 2.3 per cent above pre-pan-
demic levels.
“It’s still a laggard in Europe,” said
Adrian Prettejohn, Europe economist at
Capital Economics, a research firm. The
economy grew for the “wrong reasons”.
The quarterly expansion was largely
driven by a rise in net exports as imports
fell 4.1 per cent, reflecting the impact on
demand from high inflation and rising
borrowing costs.
Getting ahead: enduring popularity with a plurality of described her as a “very capable politi- ‘Donald would have a difficult time winning in Household consumption was down
Donald Trump the party’s grassroots. While recent cian”, while Dawson insisted she could South Carolina against Donald Trump.” 1.8 per cent, wiping out the previous
announces his opinion polls suggest alternative poten- stand up to inevitable attacks from Trump Trump allies and critics alike quarter’s expansion. Investment fell
campaign to be tial candidates such as Florida governor Trump, saying: “She can catch those fast does have acknowledge that the former presi- sharply for a second consecutive month.
president again Ron DeSantis are gaining traction, balls and throw them right back.” dent’s strength in the primaries across Both the services and manufacturing
last November. Trump remains the most popular Rob Godfrey, a former adviser to weaknesses the country will depend in large part on sectors registered an expansion, while
Below, Nikki option among likely Republican voters Haley, said: “More than ever, people are and can be how many fellow Republicans choose to construction shrank.
Haley, who is in most surveys. going to be looking for a candidate run against him. Growth is expected to be subdued at
also eyeing a bid “[Trump] is the only one running whose message resonates more than his beaten in a “Donald Trump does have weak- 0.9 per cent for this year, according to
Octavio Jones/Reuters
right now, so he has or her distractions. And that is going to one on one nesses and can be beaten in a one on one Consensus Economics, a forecast aggre-
some clean air to be critically important when you are or two on one race,” Mulvaney said. “But gator, with Spain likely to be hit hard by
run in, but there will talking about taking on an incumbent or two on I think as soon as you get to five or six rising interest rates as many household
be some more people party in a presidential election.” one race’ people in the race, he becomes the pro- mortgages are on variable rates.
soon,” said Katon Daw- But others are more sceptical. Gibbs hibitive favourite just because that 35 The European Central Bank is
son, a former chair of the Knotts, a political-science professor at per cent of the base is always going to expected to raise rates again by 50 basis
South Carolina Republican the College of Charleston and the author vote for him.” points at the next meeting on Thursday,
party who is voicing his of First in the South: Why South Carolina’s Dawson agreed — and warned that taking the deposit rate to 2.5 per cent
support for a possible Presidential Primary Matters, noted Republicans would be unlikely to coa- from minus 0.5 in June last year.
Haley candidacy. Trump won the 2016 Republican pri- lesce around one or two alternatives in Debono said new fiscal support,
Haley, who was Trump’s mary in South Carolina, which helped any organised fashion. “That never hap- including the government-instructed
ambassador to the UN, previ- shore up his successful bid for the pens. In Republican primaries, they just cut to mortgage rates for the lowest
ously said she would not challenge the party’s nomination in what was then a don’t pal around and say: ‘Hey man, I’ll income earners and an extension of the
former president, but told Fox News last crowded field. get out and you do this for me,’” Dawson limit on rent increases, would help ease
week that she was “leaning in” to a 2024 “Trump did so well in the state, said. “Democrats do a pretty good job, some inflationary pressures “but won’t
bid. and the governor now is extremely pop- I’m envious of it . . . We don’t. We just be a game-changer”.
Many South Carolina Republicans are ular, and he is a Trump supporter,” circle the wagons and shoot each other Additional reporting by Daria Mosolova
bullish on a Haley campaign. Mulvaney Knotts said. “Right now, Nikki Haley for about six months.” and Barney Jopson

Entertainment industry

Uruguay offers scenery, stability and subsidies to become South American film hub
LUCINDA ELLIOTT — MONTEVIDEO
Trunks of palm trees in the central
square of Uruguay’s capital have been
covered in neon-green cloth so special
effects can be added to a science-fiction
series starring Keanu Reeves.
At the racecourse across town, Berlin’s
1936 Olympic Games stadium has been
recreated for a Chile television drama.
The scenes are part of Uruguay’s
effort to become an audiovisual hub in
Latin America by tempting foreign pro-
duction companies with tax credits for
shooting on location.
Tax breaks introduced in 2019 have
helped to lure producers, offering
projects worth $300,000 to $4mn a
rebate of up to 25 per cent, capped at
$700,000 a production, with a sliding
scale for films with bigger budgets.
This year the government is expected
to set aside $12mn for the rebate, up
from $4mn earmarked in 2019. At the
height of the pandemic, Uruguay
offered production teams daily Covid-19
tests and had flexible entry require-
ments, capturing demand when many
destinations were closed to filmmakers.
Time dedicated to shooting films and
television series has more than tripled
over the past three years, from about 24
weeks in 2019 to 80 last year, according
to data compiled by Musitelli Film and
Digital, a Uruguayan firm that rents
broadcasting equipment. A single pro-
duction can take four to 16 weeks to
film. Before 2019 the number of weeks
dedicated to filming in Uruguay rarely
surpassed 20 on average.
“This is a big moment for us,” Ernesto
Musitelli, the company’s founder, said
from one of two film studios he owns in
the capital, Montevideo. “Importantly
the trend is continuing in 2023, with
projects already in the pipeline.”
Musitelli, 51, began renting cameras
in the late 1990s, mainly to regional
advertising agencies and aspiring Uru-
guayan filmmakers. Today his parent
company, Reducto, offers studio and
post-production services, and his clients
include Amazon Prime, Disney, HBO
and Netflix.
Fundamental to the sector’s recent
growth was the flexible and “open atti-
tude” of the Uruguayan government,
Musitelli said, when international
streaming platforms were looking for ana Wainstein, Uruguay’s national ulation and reputation for political and
more attractive and affordable loca- director of culture who is supervising macroeconomic stability have boosted
tions. the establishment of the Cinema and its local tech sector. Microsoft last year
To help ease state bureaucracy over Audiovisual Agency (ACAU). “There’s selected Montevideo for an innovation
issues such as filming permits and hir- now a need for one coherent point of hub, alongside Munich and Shanghai.
ing local talent, the government this contact for those interested in coming to Geography is also playing its part.
month also established a new audiovis- Uruguay and those working locally. This Uruguay’s varied landscapes — includ-
ual agency, bringing state bodies and the agency gives us stability.” ing gaucho farms and European-style
private sector under one umbrella. The launch of the audiovisual agency boulevards — plus shorter distances
“Our vision as a government was to is part of a broader business strategy in between sets have encouraged produc-
adapt quickly and respond to demand Uruguay, whose free-trade zones, ers to consider it as a location over
for something entirely new,” said Mari- research institutes, well-educated pop- neighbouring Argentina or Brazil.
Across the river in Buenos Aires the
environment is more unpredictable, say
industry leaders, with fluctuating costs
due to spiralling inflation — of 95 per
cent in 2022. Argentine production
companies have also heavily criticised
the government for failing to support
the industry and attract big foreign
shoots.
Uruguay production companies hope
the agency can keep up with the chang-
ing business environment and help pro-
mote the country abroad so it can
attract projects worth upwards of
$8mn. “We’ve reached a fork in the
road, either we jump or stay where we’re
Action: the film ‘The Uruguayan’ is shot in Montevideo — Pablo Porciuncula/AFP/Getty Images sitting,” said Musitelli.
Productions filmed in Uruguay in
2022 were mostly smaller, with budgets
of about $1mn, according to Musitelli
Film and Digital research. But it is now
attracting larger projects — Santiago
López at Cimarron Cine, who said he
“never thought” he could take on multi-
million-dollar budgets, co-produced
several projects beyond $8mn last year.
Montevideo was also chosen as a loca-
tion for Society of the Snow, one of the
most anticipated Spanish-language
films of 2023 due to be released by Net-
flix later this year, which documents a
1972 Andean plane crash disaster.
Fiona Pittaluga, director of Uruguay’s
annual José Ignácio International Film
Festival, hopes the agency can help
strengthen the exhibition spaces availa-
ble in the country and the distribution
of locally made films. “Our objective has
always been to put Uruguay on the map
through cinema,” she said.
Each January projection screens are
set up in José Ignácio, a remote fishing
village. “Big changes are afoot at an
institutional level in Uruguay,” said Pit-
taluga. “The industry feels more alive
than ever.”
28 January/29 January 2023 ★ FTWeekend 9

FT BIG READ. WAR IN UKRAINE

After months of pressure from Kyiv, particularly on the German government, Ukraine’s western allies
agreed this week to send more battle tanks. Is the country now in position to launch a decisive offensive?
By Ben Hall, Christopher Miller and Laura Pitel

U
krainian soldiers will face a
steep learning curve when
they clamber into a Leop-
ard 2 tank for the first time
next month. But the new
tanks will be a serious upgrade from the
Soviet-era models they have been fight-
ing in over the past year.
“It’s like you have a car from the 1950s
and then you sit in a Porsche,” says a
person involved in organising training
for Ukrainian troops.
The German government’s decision
this week to send Leopard 2 tanks to
Ukraine — and allow other European
capitals to do the same — will give the
Ukrainian army vital new firepower as
it sets out to liberate its country from
Russian occupation.
With Ukrainian forces having made
some decisive advances before winter
set in, Kyiv and its allies are now racing
to establish the new tank force in time
for a possible offensive later this spring.
However, it could take several months
for the bulk of the force to arrive, and it
could be considerably smaller than Kyiv
had hoped. Some military analysts fear
that western tanks may not prove to be
the game changer that many Ukrainians
and their supporters imagined — even
if the Ukrainians are talking up the
potential.
“The question is whether 100, 150 is
enough. Well, it’s enough to make a big
difference,” says Andriy Zagorodnyuk,
a former Ukrainian defence minister.
For months, Berlin and other western
capitals had rebuffed Kyiv’s pleas for
western main battle tanks, saying they
were too difficult for Ukrainian forces to

maintain and risked provoking Moscow.
After prevaricating for weeks in the face
of mounting pressure from allies, Ger-
man chancellor Olaf Scholz acquiesced
after securing a US promise to send Kyiv
some of its own M1 Abrams tanks.
The policy shift was another pivotal
moment for Ukraine’s allies as they
reassess Ukraine’s changing military
needs and adjust their own calculations
about escalatory risk. It prompted cele-
brations in Kyiv where the slogan “free-
ing the Leopards” — the most widely
available modern battle tank — has
become a proxy for the west’s willing-
ness to stand behind Ukraine all the way
to victory.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zel-
enskyy hailed the German and US
moves to unlock an international tank
coalition as a historic achievement. But
he immediately questioned the scale of
the commitment.
“The key thing now is speed and vol-
ume,” he said.
Ukraine says it needs 300 western
heavy tanks to seize back its territories.
It needs them fast to conduct a widely
expected offensive this spring and to
help fend off a possible Russian attack
before then.
US president Joe Biden laid out the
reasons why Ukraine needed modern
tanks as he confirmed plans to send 31
M1 Abrams on Wednesday.
“To liberate their land, they need to
be able to counter Russia’s evolving tac-
tics and strategy on the battlefield in the
very near term. They need to be able to
improve their ability to manoeuvre on
open terrain,” he said. “And they need
an enduring capability to deter and
defend against Russia’s aggression over
the long term.”
Tactical knowledge
The Abrams may be the fastest mass-
produced heavy tank in the world, but it
will be slow to arrive in Kyiv. The contin-
gent of 31 is coming directly from the
manufacturer using a US government
funding facility and could take several
‘The months, if not longer, to be deployed.
That gives plenty of time for training
question is and potentially a long-term commit-
whether ment of US armour in Ukraine. But it
will count little in the battles of 2023.
100, 150 is In the meantime, Ukraine will receive
enough. two battalions of Leopard 2s and one
company of British Challenger 2s, mak-
Well, it’s ing a total of about 100 tanks.
enough to German defence minister Boris Pisto-
make a big rius, who is now leading the effort to
assemble a fleet of Leopard 2s from mul-
difference’ tiple European armies, says they will be
delivered to Ukraine in two phases: a
first battalion of 40 Leopard 2s, includ-
ing 14 from Germany, in about three
months and a second batch of an older
version of Leopard 2s, including 14 from
Poland, later on. Spain could end up
being one of the largest contributors to
this second group, but it intends to draw
on older tanks that have been moth-
balled and kept in storage for 10 years.
Finland, the Netherlands, Portugal and
Canada are also expected to contribute.
Before they can take to the battlefield,
there needs to be substantial training
not just for tank crew but also for repair,
maintenance and sustainment units.
Logistical support and supply chains
also need to be put in place.
A tank crew will require a minimum
of five to six weeks of basic training,
according to the International Institute
for Strategic Studies. But Ukrainian
forces have shown they can adapt
quickly to multiple weapons systems
provided by the west.
“Ukrainian soldiers are known as fast-
learners,” says Oleksiy Melnyk, co-di-
rector of the Razumkov Centre think-
tank in Kyiv. After a year of war,
Ukraine now has some of the most expe-
rienced tank operators in the world.
However, making use of the new
Tank angst
tanks is not just about acquiring the
technical knowhow. It will also require
tactical training — learning how to
exploit the advantages of western battle
tanks such as their superior armour, fir-
ing range and targeting.
To make the most of the firepower,
tanks need to integrate with infantry,
artillery, air defence and electronic war-
fare systems — so-called combined
arms manoeuvre. The US began com-
bined arms training for Ukrainians at its
Grafenwoehr training area in Bavaria
this month.
“There are some units of land forces
which are already operating as com-
300 31
Number of western Number of M1
tanks Ukraine says Abrams that the
it needs to seize US has confirmed it
back its territories will send to Kyiv
bined arms groups,” says Zagorodnyuk.
“So it’s not like Ukraine will start com-
pletely from scratch. But there is a lot of
learning that needs to take place.”
Ukraine’s allies are not just donating
tanks but hundreds of infantry fighting
vehicles, self-propelled howitzers and
other artillery pieces. This gives
Ukraine the opportunity to learn how to
integrate this new equipment into
offensive operations — assuming it can
spare enough troops from the frontline.
“It means we can train coherent units
at the same time,” says Yohann Michel,
of the IISS. “We need to make sure the
Ukrainians can make the best use of it.”
Ukrainian officials have been vocal
about their desire to launch a spring
offensive while it has momentum
and before Russia has a chance to
regroup and train the hundreds
of thousands of troops it has mobilised.
Western officials and many analysts
expect Kyiv to try to regain the initiative
and exploit the heavy losses that Rus-
sian forces appear to have suffered in
the fierce battles around Soledar and
Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine. However,
it is unclear how many casualties
Ukrainian forces have also sustained in
the fighting around Bakhmut and how
many additional troops Kyiv has kept
back for a counter-offensive. Military
experts contends that for an offensive to
succeed, attacking troops need to out-
number defensive ones by three to one.
Avenues of attack
One place where Ukraine could try to
attack is along the Svatove-Kreminna
line, a stretch of the front in the Luhansk
province. A major breakthrough there
could threaten Russia’s north-south
supply routes to its forces trying to seize
the rest of Donetsk province — one of
Vladimir Putin’s main war objectives.
A much bigger prize for Kyiv would be
to push southwards into Zaporizhzhia
province all the way to the Azov sea, sev-
ering Russia’s so-called land bridge to
occupied Crimea. Either of these direc-
tions would be through open terrain,
where mechanised force would be indis-
pensable, as opposed to the more urban-
ised Donetsk province.
But the Russian defensive lines along
both of these axes are likely to be more
formidable than anything that Ukraine
has so far overcome. In the meantime, it
could be the Russians who attack first.
Moscow has been holding back about
half of the 300,000 troops that it mobi-
lised in the autumn.
“Heading into 2023, Ukraine no
longer has a manpower advantage and
difficulties lie ahead,” says Michael Kof-
Ukrainian man, director in the Russian studies
president programme at CNA, a think-tank. “This
Volodymyr will require large numbers of armoured
Zelenskyy has fighting vehicles and to a much lesser
hailed the extent tanks. Consequently it is a num-
promise of tanks bers game, where more is more.”
but questioned Mykola Bielieskov, an analyst at
the size of the Ukraine’s National Institute for Strate-
commitment gic Studies, says tanks integrated with
FT montage: AFP/Getty artillery and infantry would be vital to
Images/AP
any Ukrainian offensive or defensive
operation. How many western tanks
Ukraine needs depends on the sequence
of events on the battlefield, he says. If
Russia attacks first and is then weak-
ened, giving Ukraine a counter-attack-
ing opportunity, Kyiv will need fewer. If
Ukraine embarks on its own offensive, it
would need more because it would first
need to break through enemy lines and
then conduct a second phase of envelop-
ing and destroying Russian troops.
Seizing a defensive position ulti-
mately involves getting infantry into
‘There are trenches, says Rob Lee, senior fellow at
some units the Foreign Policy Research Institute,
adding that the key is getting your sol-
of land diers across open terrain protected from
forces which artillery fire. “It hasn’t really changed
that much in warfare since the second
are already world war or before that.”
operating as “In some ways the deliveries of Brad-
combined leys, or Marders or Strykers and those
types of [infantry fighting] vehicles
arms may be even more significant,” says Lee.
groups. It’s The upgrade in Ukrainian capability
from a Soviet-era armoured vehicle to a
not like US-supplied Bradley may be greater
Ukraine will than that from a shift from T-72 to Leop-
ard tank. “We shouldn’t jump to conclu-
start sions that tanks by themselves will win
completely this war,” he says. “But they are an
important contribution, and they’ll give
from Ukraine a better chance of success in
scratch’ 2023 and in 2024.”

Obituary In 1992, Gordon Brown, then a rising

star of the UK Labour party, delivered
a lecture on constitutional reform to a
the work of the Italian Marxist Antonio
Gramsci, who died shortly after
leaving a Fascist prison in 1937. He
during this period was on developing,
in tandem with Anderson, an account of
the morbid symptoms of the British
His return to his homeland coincided
with the emergence of a new strain
of Scottish nationalism very different
Intellectual large audience in central London.
Afterwards, Brown approached the
would later play a decisive role, along
with Perry Anderson, in introducing
polity and the apparently inexorable
decline of the British economy which
to earlier forms propagated by what
he memorably dismissed as “a junta of

known for his organiser of the event, Anthony

Barnett, who recalled: “His first words
to me . . . were not about the thousand
Gramsci’s thought to the English-
speaking world.
He thrived in the intellectual atmos-
came to be known as the “Nairn-Ander-
son thesis”.
This traced the crisis of Britain’s
corporal punishers and Kirk-going
cheese-parers”.
In his magnum opus, The Break-Up
views on the people but about one: ‘Was Tom
Nairn here?’”
phere surrounding the Italian Commu-
nist party, which was considerably less
political economy back to its historical
roots in the emergence of capitalism
of Britain, which was published in 1977,
Nairn argued that this “neo-national-

British union Last week, Brown hailed Nairn,

who has died at the age of 90, as “a great
writer [and] thinker”. Nicola Sturgeon,
Scottish first minister, described him as
“one of the greatest thinkers [and]
Tom Nairn political theorists . . . that Scotland
Political theorist has ever produced” — stirring tributes
1932-2023 to the “intellectual godfather of the
modern Scottish independence move-
ment” who never held a permanent
academic post in his native land.
Thomas Nairn was born in 1932 in
Freuchie, Fife, where his father was the
headmaster at a local school. Nairn
studied philosophy at the University of
Edinburgh and at Oxford, and in 1957
took up a scholarship at the Scuola
Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy. This
Italian sojourn would have a lasting
impact on him.
It was in Pisa that Nairn discovered
stultifying than its moribund, Moscow-
centric counterparts in other western
European countries.
Tariq Ali, the writer and leftwing
activist, remembered meeting Nairn for
the first time in 1968. “His interests
were Italy and Gramsci, Marxism and
the Labour party,” Ali said. “The fact
that he was Scottish meant little to those
who knew him at the time. That bit
came later.”
Through the 1960s, Nairn ricocheted
from one temporary teaching job to
another, setting a peripatetic pattern
that he would not break for the rest of
his professional life. In 1968, he was
dismissed from a post lecturing in
sociology at Hornsey College of Art
after he supported a weeks-long student
occupation.
The principal focus of his work
under a landed aristocracy. The
absence in Britain of a “second” bour-
geois revolution, of the sort that
had delivered more “rational” states
on the European continent, had lasting
and deforming effects, Nairn and
Anderson argued.
The thesis, though influential, was not
without its critics. Most vocal among
these was the historian EP Thompson,
who found in Nairn and Anderson “a
ruthlessness in their dismissal of the
English experience, which stirs uneasy
memories”.
After a period teaching at the Tran-
snational Institute in Amsterdam,
Nairn returned to Scotland in the mid-
1970s. In 1975 he contributed to The Red
Paper on Scotland, a collection of essays
edited by Brown, who was then a youth-
ful rector of Edinburgh university.
Nairn believed the ‘foundering of the
state’ fed Scottish nationalism
‘He ricocheted from
one temporary teaching
job to another, setting a
peripatetic pattern that
he would [keep] for life’
ism” emerged not from the “Celtic
bloodstream”, as more atavistic
versions of Scottish self-assertion
maintained, but instead from the
“foundering of the British state” that
he and Anderson had anatomised a
decade earlier.
Other books followed, notably The
Enchanted Glass: Britain and Its Monarchy
in 1988, in which Nairn dismembered
“crown ideology”, a distinctively British
form of “surrogate nationalism”.
The Scottish independence referen-
dum in 2014 placed Britain’s multina-
tional state under unprecedented
strain. But the union has not broken up
— yet. Interviewed in 2020, Nairn
insisted that it was only a matter of time.
“In one form or another, break-up is
likely to come about.”
Jonathan Derbyshire
10 ★ FTWeekend 28 January/29 January 2023

The FT View
Coding is still a good career bet
Job losses and AI advances
do not mean computers can
program themselves
“Just one word . . . plastics” is the career
advice offered by the family friend Mr
McGuire to a bemused Benjamin Brad-
dock, played by Dustin Hoffman, in the
1967 movie The Graduate. A modern-day
Mr McGuire might well advocate coding
as the route to decently paid job secu-
rity. Or he might have done before the
tech industry axed 200,000 jobs in the
past 12 months — and the clamour
around the artificial intelligence plat-
form ChatGPT raised awareness that
machines can write code, too. Comput-
ers, it seems, may soon be programming
themselves. So is what we’ve been tell-
ing our kids about safe jobs all wrong?
Parental panic would be premature.
Widespread lay-offs may indeed signal
that the days of perpetual growth in Big
ft.com/opinion Tech companies are ending and they are
starting to behave more like banks —
hiring in good times and firing in bad.
Some are, for the first time, being
pressed by activist investors to raise
profitability. But after their extraordi-
nary hiring sprees during lockdown, the
job cuts represent only a modest
retrenchment. Many of the axed roles
are in sales and marketing, not pro-
gramming. And if the arms race among
tech companies to secure computer sci-
ence graduates is abating, other previ-
ously outgunned sectors — from engi-
neering to media and finance — will be
happy to pick up the spare talent.
The need for software will only grow.
The pandemic drove demand from con-
sumers needing to work, shop, educate
and entertain themselves at home —
and from businesses struggling to con-
trol supply chains. Now organisations
are looking to IT to blunt the impact of
inflation. Robotics, automation, and the
digitisation of even everyday products
will require a lot more code. And a lot of
legacy systems will need replacing.
Rather than being a big threat to cod-
ers, generative AI can help. Computers
are unlikely to be writing their own pro-
grams any time soon, but Copilot, a kind
of super-smart autocomplete function
for coding from Microsoft’s GitHub divi-
sion, is already raising productivity.
Coders write a prompt on what they’re
aiming to do and Copilot suggests lines
of code. Andrej Karpathy, a former
director of AI at Tesla, tweeted last
month that Copilot was writing 80 per
cent of his code, with 80 per cent accu-
racy. Programmers say the tool both
speeds up their work and frees them to
be more creative.
Advances are also opening coding to
non-specialists. Low-code or no-code
development platforms allow users to
create application software by using a
graphical interface. Microsoft’s CEO
Satya Nadella suggests this could help
close skills gaps: someone with exper-
tise in, say, media or logistics, but no
coding knowledge, can get involved in
developing business apps. This shifts
If automation the balance a little towards business
makes IT units and away from IT.
Those who understand coding from
brains more
scratch will still be needed — not least to
productive, this oversee the AI and correct any machine-
is a positive generated mistakes. But as the grunt
thing. Scaling work is automated away, their skills will
the capabilities have to move up the value curve. The US
of talented Bureau of Labor Statistics projects US
employment among “programmers”,
people is likely narrowly defined, will fall 10 per cent
to lead to more over the next decade, but sees the
breakthroughs number of software developers, includ-
ing those responsible for planning, qual-
ity assurance, testing and integration,
rising by a quarter.
If automation makes IT brains more
productive, this is a good thing. Scaling
the capabilities of talented people is
likely to lead to more breakthroughs.
Computers taking over more technical
work as humans move up to a higher
level of abstraction has been happening
since the dawn of computing. For the
graduates of today, that means coding is
still a good place to start.

Opinion Society
Letters
Email: letters.editor@ft.com
Include daytime telephone number and full address
Corrections: corrections@ft.com

‘Having it all’ was always

If you are not satisfied with the FT’s response to your complaint, you can appeal
to the FT Editorial Complaints Commissioner: complaints.commissioner@ft.com

a poor measure of success Democracy, like a rugby player, must get its retaliation in first
Rory Griffiths/FT/Getty Images Martin Wolf starts his Weekend Essay
article on the role and durability of
democratic capitalism (Life & Arts,
January 21) by recounting the personal
tragedy that brought his immediate
family to the UK. It is strange then, that
in his “areas of needed reform”, he
places so much emphasis on
institutions — and so little on the power
(or impotence) of individuals.
Few readers of the FT would dispute
the idea that the vitality of our
democracy is essential to “preserve
peace, prosperity and planet”. But the
question is not “what” but “how” to do
this? What is it about autocracy and
anti-pluralism that has made it more
durable and longer lasting than
democratic capitalism?
Part of the answer is surely that (in
poet William Blake’s words) the tigers
of wrath are wiser than the horses of
instruction. In other words, democracy
may benignly teach us the benefits of
preserving law, liberty and prosperity
but must always deal with the fact that
violence has a stronger and more
immediate influence on our behaviour.
Demagogues do not seize power — we
hand it over to them and would rather
join the bully than oppose him.
To be effective democracy must, like
a rugby player, “get its retaliation in
first” — but also must work hard and,
in so doing, may destroy democracy’s
integrity.
That analysis applies not only to
Donald Trump or Jair Bolsonaro or
Brexit supporters being unwilling to
accept the pluralistic nuances of
democratic decisions, it also applies in
economics as well.
David Boorer
Llandovery, Carmarthenshire, UK

Businesses need sport’s Having an economist as a Don’t blame podcasts for

wants to spend more time at home, in
Anne- part to relieve the guilt she must feel
about not being with her children. The
Marie BBC used and then retracted the head-
line, “Jacinda Ardern Resigns: Can
Slaughter Women Really Have It All?”
Enough. All human beings who
approach to competition landlord has its advantages our book reading failings
Competition both underpins and It was very sad to hear about the death There are worse background noises
undermines Martin Wolf’s marriage of of Sir Alan Budd. I am neither an than a pseudointellectual podcast.
capitalism and democracy (The economist, nor a government grey-hair In “Podcasts aren’t as smart as you
Weekend Essay, January 21). Like
sports teams, businesses and political
or academic (Obituaries, January 21).
In fact, when I first met Sir Alan, I
think” (Opinion, Life & Arts, January
21) Janan Ganesh tells us that people
parties rightly compete red in tooth
and claw on the field, subject to the
didn’t know of his many achievements.
Thanks to his wonderful humility, he
will do “almost anything” other than
read a book, at length. But he may be
rules. But, unlike sport, many
businesses then use their winnings off
was just Alan.
He was my landlord for a year, when
missing the point.
Doing almost anything is how many

I
t is time to retire the idea of “hav-
ing it all”. The phrase, popularised
by Cosmopolitan’s Helen Gurley
Brown, captured the goal to which
many women like me aspired in
the 1970s and 1980s. We wanted to
have the same careers as our fathers
without giving up the family lives
many of our mothers had, with an
extra dash of superwoman-hood
thrown in. But this version of femi-
nism was far too narrow.
Then, a decade ago, I wrote an arti-
cle explaining the dilemma that had
led me to quit my high-powered job at
the US State Department. To my sur-
prise, it went viral. The essay was enti-
tled “Why women still can’t have it
all”, focusing on the major changes
society still needed to make to adapt to
the needs of working women.
Since then, authors, filmmakers,
Throughout her
premiership, Ardern has
pioneered a far more
human style of leadership
and headline writers have wrestled
with the controversial phrase but kept
using it. Look at the 2022 film Having
It All, following the lives of three
women who “set out to live their
dreams of balancing careers, mar-
riage, and children.” Or the Cosmo
article on the 40th anniversary of Gur-
ley Brown’s book asking, “What does it
really mean to have it all in 2022?”
In 2023, the answer is that the
phrase itself is a tone-deaf, dispiriting
and deeply sexist way to frame the
debate about work and family — and
about leadership. People around the
world apparently agree, given some of
the reactions to the media coverage of
Jacinda Ardern’s resignation as New
Zealand’s prime minister.
The double standards swirling
around Ardern’s treatment are egre-
gious. If a male leader with a young
child had resigned, citing burnout,
after five and a half years of leading a
nation through multiple crises, we
would have been pitched into a debate
about post-pandemic mental health. If
he had said he was leaving “to spend
time with family” (that age-old
euphemism for men forced out in dis-
grace), there would have been specu-
lation about a hidden scandal.
Yet when a woman leader says she
has “nothing left in the tank”, much of
the media assumes it is because she
work and have loved ones who need
care feel the tug of dividing their time
between work and family. Women feel
it most intensely because society
expects them to be caregivers — and
castigates them when they are not.
Throughout her premiership, Ard-
ern has pioneered a far more human
style of leadership. Bringing her three-
month-old baby to the UN general
assembly acknowledged the obvious
fact that many babies are breast-fed
by their mothers. It also highlighted
her partner’s critical role as lead par-
ent — either home full time or with a
flexible enough schedule for the many
demands of parenting, from meetings
with teachers to ear infections.
After the deadly 2019 attack on two
Christchurch mosques, Ardern’s
empathy was a model for all leaders
navigating terrible human crises. And
that same year saw her explicitly try
to redefine the metrics of a healthy
economy, with the release of the first
New Zealand “Wellbeing Budget.” Her
government aimed to tackle stubborn
social problems by looking beyond
traditional measures such as GDP and
employment figures. The budget
prioritised mental health, child well-
being and support for the indigenous
Maori and Pasifika populations while
still striving for a productive nation
and economic transformation. Critics
have challenged how well New Zea-
land has performed against these new
metrics, but the budget and the rea-
soning behind it accelerated a world-
wide debate about what it means for a
country to thrive.
From national wellbeing to her
quick and decisive action to protect
her people from Covid-19, Ardern has
put New Zealand on the map for hav-
ing the courage to elect her, twice, as
she changed what leadership looks
like. Her decision to step down, and
her frank explanation, are of a piece
with this new iteration — not of female
leadership, but human leadership.
So unless we are prepared to apply
the same standard to men, let’s banish
the phrase “having it all” from our
vocabulary. We must stop pitting
women’s careers against bringing up
children. It is long past time to move
on to the far more interesting ques-
tion: how can we rejig the metrics of
success for all of us — whether individ-
ual leaders or entire economies — so
that we can make room for care and
wellbeing alongside competition and
ambition.
The writer is chief executive of the New
America think-tank and an FT contribut-
ing editor
the field to change the rules in their
favour. Gambling, pharmaceuticals and
energy are just three of many
industries that bear the scars. For the
system to work, firms must uphold
higher moral standards in their
political activities, and restrict their
competition to the field. Messi never
asked for wider goalposts.
Alan Schwartz
Melbourne, VIC, Australia
Samuel Wills
Queenscliff, NSW, Australia
T-bills are shaky edifice of
a make-believe economy
Brendan Greeley (The Long View,
January 21) is certainly correct that the
US Treasury’s resort to the printing
press is “no sleight of hand”. But the
slope leading from government debt to
a make-believe economy is an
increasingly slippery one.
US government debt was less than
$1tn on the eve of the first Reagan
administration. Real investment and
growth were weakening at the time, so
the economy required a jolt of
stimulus. But because neoliberalism
was the new name of the game, it was
to be financed through borrowing
instead of progressive taxation.
Continuing for the next 40 years, the
consequences of such reckless policy
were fourfold. First, income inequality
started to increase and has only
continued intensifying. Second — and
largely as a result — household debt has
spiralled upwards since the late 1970s.
Third, the increased inflows from
foreign purchases of US Treasury
securities paved the way for a
middle-class import binge that was
financed by the unprecedented growth
in household debt.
Finally, and most important, the
resulting hit taken by “real” domestic
production had to be counterbalanced
by the creation of new, fictitious values
to preserve the illusion that US living
standards were at least not slipping.
The result is a make-believe system
of values in which increasingly dubious
debt instruments and derivatives are
layered over more reliable types of
loans, which ultimately takes us back
to Treasuries, upon which the entire
edifice is founded.
It is a nifty piece of legerdemain
which unfortunately will grow more
unstable as debt layering continues.
It seems no longer a question of
whether the game will eventually be
up . . . rather of when.
Mariano Torras
Professor of Economics
Adelphi University, Garden City, NY, US
Collapse of Ronan Point: the London
tower block was demolished in 1986
Any debt ceiling solution
is likely to be just as silly
Of course I agree with Brendan Greeley
that minting a trillion-dollar platinum
coin is “silly” (The Long View, FT
Weekend, January 21).
But is not the existence of a debt
ceiling — coming on top of normal
restrictions on federal spending — also
silly? Perhaps it will take an equally
silly solution to solve the problem. But
why waste money on platinum — make
it out of aluminium.
Stephen Eccles
Annandale, VA, US
I should know, I’ve lived in
Hotel Chelsea for 25 years
I have lived in the Hotel Chelsea for
25 years and cannot remember anyone
calling any of us a “freak or lost soul”
as one of the directors of the
documentary Dreaming Walls is quoted
as saying in the article by Nick Hasted
(“Possessed by the Chelsea spirit”,
Film, Life & Arts, January 17).
It is actually offensive and insulting
to all of us who live in the hotel, as was
the comment that the “Chelsea can
seem like a tomb”. I can assure you
we’re not dead yet. There are also
young people in this establishment!
Moreover some tenants were not
“moved to huddle on the first floor”, as
you write. It was their choice to
relocate to new, renovated apartments
with bathrooms and kitchenettes —
some of whom prior to this had never
had such amenities. I think you should,
out of curiosity, if not journalistic
responsibility, do a little more research.
As for the building “being broken”,
that may have been true in the past
but it is now a truly beautiful
establishment with gorgeous guest
rooms, an elegant lounge, an event
space and a few restaurants after an
expensive renovation — plus the
famous art collection. More than that,
the “huddled ones” enjoy getting their
coffee in the bar or spending leisure
time in the lobby!
Nicholas C Pappas
The Chelsea Hotel, New York, NY, US
I rented a dreamy apartment he owned
in Highgate, north London.
Towards the end of that year, as I
planned to move from renting to
buying a flat of my own, having
realised his huge expertise (and the
fact that he had just stepped down
from the Bank of England’s rate setting
MPC), I asked for some advice about
mortgages and interest rates.
True to the wisdom and humanity of
the man, his main message was this:
“Remember, you are buying a home,
not an investment.” I still live in the
area and we would have occasionally
chatted outside the newsagent or
waiting at the bus stop. The fact that he
wore his achievements so lightly
elevates his memory: a true gent.
Chris Salt
London N10, UK.
Explosives or the wrecking
ball, it’s all a matter of size
Julian Baggini, in his article “A period
romance” (House & Home, FT
Weekend, January 14), quotes with
apparent approval the architectural
historian Owen Hatherley dismissing
claims that modern buildings are badly
built. Hatherley says: “If you want to
demolish a Victorian house, usually
you send a wrecking ball through it. If
you want to demolish a tower block,
you’ve got to plant explosives.”
Hatherley is not comparing like with
like. If you want to demolish a modern
house of the same dimensions as a
Victorian one, would a wrecking ball
not have the same effect? The
difference is simply one of size, not
quality of construction. Ronan Point
was badly designed, but it had to be
demolished with the same degree of
care as any other tower block.
Brent Elliott
London HA1, UK
Cities grow organically,
with people their lifeblood
With reference to “How to create a
city” (House & Home, January 21),
may I, as an architect, point out the
obvious. Cities are created by those
who inhabit them, organically, over
time. People are the lifeblood of places,
yet are notably absent in plans for
Itana, the city in Nigeria in David
Pilling’s article, and other “charter
cities”, which take to the extreme a
misapprehension common to so much
development — that places can be
created from scratch by investment in
structures and systems.
Clare Richards
London EC1, UK
of us spend our lives outside of work.
Sorting the laundry before school runs,
lengthy commutes along motorways
and a DIY list, that loved ones keep
adding to, provide vast swaths of inane
cerebral activity.
Not reading at length is not
attributable to a lack of patience so
much as an oversupply of life.
Substituting the hum of a Dyson,
the whirr of a drill or the wallpaper of
the car radio for a podcast that lends
half an hour of singular focus props
up the brain precisely while doing
something else. That is, until the kids
trot off to university and we rediscover
the “patience” to get into a good
read again.
Mark Toon
Senior Lecturer in Marketing and Strategy
Cardiff Business School, Cardiff, UK
Slade vs Strawbs — there
was really no contest
The paean to Slade’s “Cum On Feel the
Noize”(Life of a Song, January 21)
caused me to check the charts for
February 1973 where I found an
extraordinary number of rather good
songs in the hit parade that month.
Even so, the song that you ought to
have written about was the number
two that Slade stopped from getting to
number one: “Part Of The Union” by
Strawbs, a song which became an
unofficial anthem of the trade union
movement. This is a far better song
any way you care to analyse it —
musically superior, culturally relevant,
historically prescient. But then were
the charts ever really a good guide?
Yann Maidment
Edinburgh, UK
That takes the biscuit!
In respect of Miranda Green’s article “A
cakeist manifesto: let us eat what we
want” (Opinion, January 21) I recall
that 33 years ago, my now husband,
Philip, walked past my desk at work
and blatantly took one of my biscuits. I
demanded recompense for something
so precious and he asked what I would
suggest. I thought dinner at the Ritz for
the two of us that same evening would
be a fair trade. The rest is history.
Liz Ehrmann
Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, UK
Correction
c Individual retail investors hold about
15 per cent of UK shares, not 50 per cent
as we regrettably misquoted in an article
in FT Money on January 21.
28 January/29 January 2023
A legal victory over Google could yet dent Big Tech’s armour
TECHNOLOGY
Richard
Waters
I
t is easy to view the US govern-
ment’s latest legal challenge to the
power of Big Tech as a case of too lit-
tle, too late. Years of almost negli-
gent disregard from the trust-
busters has allowed a handful of compa-
nies to entrench themselves in the
booming digital markets. But as another
lawsuit from Washington lands, there is
a sense that something significant is
shifting, and that even relatively small
victories could go a long way.
The new case from the Department of
Justice accuses Google of playing all
sides of the market to its own advantage
when it comes to arranging ad sales on
behalf of other websites. Google sup-
plies the software used by many pub-
Oscar nominations for
‘The Banshees of
Inisherin’ are a landmark
in the writer’s evolution,
writes Danny Leigh
M
artin McDonagh recently
discussed The Banshees
of Inisherin with Taylor
Swift. The singer told the
writer-director she was a
fan of his film, a black comedy of two
warring friends on a small Irish island in
1923. The movie features the self-
inflicted severing of a man’s fingers.
Swift said that she had talked about this
with a therapist friend, who analysed
the symbolism. McDonagh smiled. “I
just thought it was funny,” he said.
This week, The Banshees of Inisherin
received nine Oscar nominations.
McDonagh was shortlisted both as
writer and director. His conversation
with Swift had been staged by industry
trade paper Variety as part of awards
season in Hollywood. The attendant
glitz can feel an odd fit for the
movie, which is expertly grim and not
wholly kidding.
Indeed, McDonagh’s idea of funny has
always been macabre, and his work
filled with petty grievances, absurdist
murders and dead cats. But publicly
unpicking deeper meanings has never
enthused a man who began his career as
a playwright.
Matthew Dunster has worked with
McDonagh for several years, directing
his plays Hangmen and A Very, Very, Very
Dark Matter. “It’s strange,” he says.
“Martin’s communiques are loud and
clear. People can be brutal to each other.
And he is a punk rocker. But the actual
Martin is a long way from that side of
the writing.”
McDonagh describes the film that
may now sweep the Oscars as a
“break-up story” — a melancholy
bookend to his first feature-length film,
2008’s In Bruges. There, Colin Farrell
and Brendan Gleeson played gangsters
forging an unlikely bond. Now, their
new characters’ friendship crumples
amid what the director calls “male ego
and male despair”. When I talked to
McDonagh recently, we discussed
research suggesting older men often
withdraw from friendship altogether.
McDonagh is 52. I asked when he last
made a male friend. He paused. “Do
friends of your partner count?” he asked
eventually. “I’m counting that.”
McDonagh’s partner is writer and
actress Phoebe Waller-Bridge. They live
in east London, though McDonagh grew
up south of the Thames, in Camberwell.
In the 1980s, the area was home to a
large Irish community, McDonagh’s
parents among them. While he speaks
with a London accent, McDonagh said
recently he didn’t have a British pass-
port. He described himself as “London
Irish.” Later, his parents moved back to
Galway, on the Irish west coast. Inish-
more, where The Banshees of Inisherin
was filmed, is out to sea in Galway Bay.
The Oscar nominations are land-
marks in a double evolution: from thea-
tre to film and from writer to director.
McDonagh was 25 when his first play,
The Beauty Queen of Leenane, was staged.
Like the quick-fire productions that
followed, it was set in a pinched rural
Ireland. It was also the first of six hit
plays in seven years, leading to his work
smoothly transferring from London’s
lishers and advertisers, while also own-
ing the exchange where their orders to
buy and sell ad inventory are matched.
It used that power to direct orders to
its exchange and influence pricing,
according to the DoJ. In the words of one
Google executive quoted in the lawsuit,
it is as if “Goldman or Citibank owned
the NYSE”. The US government asked
the court to force the company to spin
off parts of its advertising technology,
including DoubleClick, a company it
acquired 15 years ago.
This week’s lawsuit might once have
shaken Google — and indeed, the entire
digital advertising industry — to its
foundations. Not anymore.
When it bought DoubleClick, selling
ads on behalf of other websites was a big
deal for Google, accounting for about 40
per cent of revenue each year. It has now
fallen to less than 12 per cent. Google’s
own search business ended up eclipsing
the other forms of advertising.
At the same time, the digital advertis-
ing landscape has been going through
dramatic change. Not long ago, Google
Person in the News | Martin McDonagh
A reluctant playwright
turned movie director
Royal Court or National Theatre to
Broadway. Avid press attention in
Britain and the US fell on an uncom-
monly frank young gun, who spoke
openly of wanting a future in movies
and felt limited affection for the stage.
“I would be unhappy if I wrote 90
good plays and didn’t make a good film,”
he told journalist Fintan O’Toole. After
In Bruges, McDonagh would continue to
write hugely successful plays, while
speaking of theatre in the tone of some-
one mentioning a first marriage.
Among the Oscar nods, his nomina-
tion as best director will probably mean
most to him. If triumphs as a playwright
fast-tracked him into directing films,
McDonagh has sometimes seemed
uncertain in his own abilities. In Bruges
won a cult fan base, but he credits Glee-
son and Farrell for having helped guide
him through filming. And meteoric rises
can still stall. His next movie, comic
crime thriller Seven Psychopaths, failed.
A sudden question mark was placed
over his brilliant new career. Critical
★ FTWeekend
Opinion
and Meta, Facebook’s parent, looked
like an unassailable duopoly. But by
showing ads when people search for
products on its own site, Amazon has
grown rapidly. It now earns a third of the
advertising income of Meta and is
expanding much faster.
The rest of Big Tech is waiting in the
wings. Apple has made it harder for
services such as Facebook to collect data
on its devices, hitting the value of their
advertising and laying the ground for an
assault of its own on the mobile ads busi-
ness. Meanwhile, Microsoft last year
won the bidding to sell advertising on
behalf of Netflix.
Even if the justice department pre-
vails before a judge, a trial is years away.
The DoJ’s first lawsuit against Google,
claiming the company negotiated exclu-
sive distribution deals for its search
engine in order to shut out rivals, will be
nearly three years old if, as expected, it
finally gets to court in September.
Legal appeals and potential changes
in political leadership in Washington
add to the unpredictability.
drubbings were hard, too, for someone
who admits to reading his reviews.
Some in the industry report a sharp
edge to their dealings with McDonagh.
There is also unprompted affection.
While men have dominated his writing,
colleagues note he has found crucial
roles for women. Among the cast of his
While men have
dominated his writing,
he has also found crucial
roles for women
latest film is Irish actress Kerry Condon,
who worked with him on his 2001 play
The Lieutenant of Inishmore. She went on
to a solid career, but not, perhaps, of the
scale her talent deserved. McDonagh
then cast her in his well-received third
feature-length film, Three Billboards Out-
side Ebbing, Missouri. And a starring role
in Banshees was written for her. “It’s
As they take a belated swing at groups
like Google, the US trustbusters only
have themselves to blame for taking so
long to level charges. But they are not
the only ones to have failed. Despite
considerable grandstanding from both
political parties, legislation to stem Big
Tech’s power has stalled.
A single issue, above all, has blocked
Politicians only have
themselves to blame for
such a belated swing at a
changing industry
the progress of tech regulation in Wash-
ington, and shows every sign of remain-
ing a serious obstacle. Republicans have
sought to turn any new law into a vehi-
cle to prevent what they claim is censor-
ship of conservative viewpoints by a
left-leaning tech establishment.
The most promising of the recent
antitrust bills, sponsored by Democratic
funny when you’re friends with some-
one who can also employ you,” she told
me recently. “They are two different
things. But he is a good friend.” She was
also nominated for an Oscar this week.
Dunster too speaks warmly of a figure
who is, he says, comradely even when
the most powerful person in the room.
But he wonders whether multiple
Oscars may seal a permanent change. In
2020, with Britain emerging from a
Covid lockdown, he and McDonagh had
dinner at a Mexican restaurant in King’s
Cross. “And Martin said, ‘You know, I’m
not sure I’ll write another play.’ He said
he was concerned about how much time
he had left. He wanted to leave these
indelible marks behind. Which films
are, and plays can’t be.”
On seeing The Banshees of Inisherin,
Dunster smiled. “Because then he goes
and makes a film about a man cutting
off his fingers. Like a bit of his life he
didn’t want anymore.”
danny.leigh@ft.com
senator Amy Klobuchar and Republi-
can senator Chuck Grassley, would have
barred the biggest platforms from dis-
criminating against other companies by
giving preferential treatment to their
own services. Republicans, though,
wanted to use the anti-discrimination
provision to prevent internet platforms
suppressing rival viewpoints — a back-
door way to weaken content modera-
tion, and a deal-breaker for Democrats.
It’s hard to see this divide being
bridged in the near future. A Republican
party under the sway of a radical right-
wing minority is now in control of one
arm of Congress and a presidential cam-
paign is in the offing, deepening the par-
tisan divide.
Yet it is worth noting that the DoJ has
aimed its legal challenges astutely, and
could still score some victories. Selling
ads for other websites may be a rela-
tively small — and falling — part of
Google’s overall operations, but it was
still worth more than $30bn last year.
For many publishers the case would be
significant if it left them paying lower
Generative AI should pay
human artists for training
John
Gapper
All Consuming
A
flat above a fried chicken
shop in Notting Hill is an
odd place to be at the heart
of what has been called
“one of the most important
legal questions” of the 21st century. It is
the registered office of Stability AI, an
artificial intelligence group that is
upsetting artists around the world.
Stability AI is run by Emad Mostaque,
a computer scientist and former hedge
fund employee. It operates the image-
generating software Stable Diffusion,
described in a US lawsuit as “a 21st-cen-
tury collage tool that remixes the copy-
righted works of millions”. Type in
“Elon Musk in a Van Gogh painting” and
it produces an amusing pastiche.
The three women artists behind the
US lawsuit have backing. Getty Images,
the stock photo group with 135mn copy-
righted images on its database, last
week started another legal action
against Stability AI in the UK courts.
Getty’s images, along with millions of
others, are used to train Stable Diffusion
so it can perform its tricks.
The generative AI revolution has
erupted fast: Stable Diffusion was only
released in August, and promises to
“empower billions of people to create
stunning art within seconds”. Microsoft
has made a multibillion-dollar invest-
ment in OpenAI, which last year
unveiled the text-to-image generator
Dall-E, and runs ChatGPT.
Visual art is not the only discipline in
which AI agents threaten havoc. The
music industry is quaking at the pros-
pect of millions of songs (and billions in
intellectual property) being pored over
by AI to produce new tracks. Tencent
Music, the Chinese entertainment
group, has released more than 1,000
tracks with synthetic voices.
In theory, algorithmic art is no more
able to escape copyright and other IP
laws than humans: if an AI tool pro-
duces a song or an image that does not
transform the works on which it draws
enough to be original, the artists who
have been exploited can sue. Using a
black box to disguise what has been
dubbed “music laundering” is not a con-
vincing legal strategy.
Nor is an AI agent learning from a
database wholly different from what
humans have always done. They listen
to songs by rival bands, and study other
artists to learn from their techniques.
Although courts are full of disputes over
whether songwriters have copied ille-
gally, no one tells them to block their
ears, or warns painters to close their
eyes at exhibitions.
But scale makes all the difference, as
the music industry knows very well. It
was safe enough in the pre-digital era,
when music was sold on vinyl and CDs
and sometimes copied on tapes by fans.
Top reads at FT.com/opinion
3 Politicians are unhealthily obsessed
with getting to zero
The key to sensible policy is to be honest
about the trade-offs, writes Stephen Bush
11
fees to the “ad tech” providers who han-
dle their advertising sales, though that is
by no means a sure thing.
As a result, the DoJ’s cases may at least
end up making more of a dent in
Google’s armour than the European
Commission’s long-running legal battles
with the company. Brussels has levied
three fines totalling €8.25bn but not
forced any meaningful changes in
Google’s business practices. If it eventu-
ally succeeds in splitting off part of
Google’s ad tech operations and limiting
the company’s ability to reach search
distribution deals, the DoJ will be able to
claim more direct hits.
Google would still have plenty of time
to find ways to lessen the damage. But a
legal victory for the US government
would prove that Big Tech’s legal
defences are not impregnable and could
shift public opinion in favour of greater
controls. Maybe at that point Congress
would finally summon the will to act.
But it wouldn’t do to hold your breath.
richard.waters@ft.com
When Napster enabled mass download-
ing and distribution of digital tracks, the
industry faced deep trouble before it
was rescued by Spotify and licensed
streaming.
AI tools not only crunch databases but
manufacture images to order: why stop
at Van Gogh when you can get Musk by
Monet, Gauguin or Warhol just by
typing in prompts? It is not high art
but Estelle Derclaye, a professor of intel-
lectual property law at Nottingham
university, observes that “if AI starts to
replace human creativity, we have a
problem”.
Humans retain plenty of advantages:
a synthetic version of Harry Styles
called by another name would not be a
fraction as popular a performer, even if
the owner of the AI tool got away with it.
But there are other uses — background
music in video games, for example — for
which a synthetic band sounding like
BTS might be good enough.
Trying to halt AI artistry would be
impossible, as well as undesirable. But
the legal framework needs to be set to
prevent human creativity becoming
financially overwhelmed. The issue
raised by Getty is whether companies
such as Stability AI should be able to
train their AI tools on vast amounts of
copyright material without asking per-
mission or paying licence fees.
This is legal for research in many
countries, and the UK government has
proposed extending that to commercial
use. There have been similar calls in the
US for AI models to gain the right to “fair
The judicial framework
needs to be set to prevent
creativity becoming
financially overwhelmed
learning” on such data because it would
be impossible to track down all the
licence holders of gigabytes of stuff
scraped from the web, seek approval
and reward them.
That strikes me as too blasé, and simi-
lar to arguments in the days of illegal
downloading that the digital horse had
bolted, and everyone had to get used to
it. Stability AI has been valued at $1bn
and Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI
shows that there is money around; what
is needed is a mechanism to distribute
more among creators.
Individuals need further protections:
it is one thing to train AI software on a
mass of material, but what if someone
feeds in the works of a single living artist
and then asks for a new sketch in her
style? One Los Angeles illustrator was
subjected to such AI “fine-tuning” by a
Stable Diffusion user recently; it is not
clear whether a court would call that fair
use, but I don’t.
“Please know that we take these mat-
ters seriously,” Stability AI promised
last week. Was its statement drafted by a
human or by an AI tool? These days, it is
so difficult to tell.
john.gapper@ft.com
3 UK chancellor shows how (not) to
explain economics to the public
His attempt risks widening a deficit of trust
and understanding, writes Sarah O’Connor
12 ★ FTWeekend 28 January/29 January 2023
28 January/29 January 2023 ★ FTWeekend 13
14 ★ FTWeekend 28 January/29 January 2023

Opinion
How not to
Sunak’s failure to sack Zahawi handle classified
adds insult to all our injuries documents: a
masterclass
Tax avoidance and asset-boosting policies contribute to the widespread view that politicians cannot be trusted
Adam
POLITICS LeBor
Camilla

W
Cavendish e’ve all done it. We’ve
had that vital piece of

I
n politics, they say, the cover-up is
often worse than the crime. Nadhim
Zahawi’s “error” in overlooking
millions of pounds he owed in tax is
gobsmacking enough, to those of us
who are slogging to file our own returns
by next week’s deadline. But his denials
of what turned out to be true should
have been a strong indicator, even to the
bewilderingly timid Rishi Sunak, that
he was not fit for office.
The story of Zahawi’s shares and off-
shore family trust shows that the whole
concept of “legal” tax avoidance has
become absurd. The UK has a long tra-
dition of respect for entrepreneurs. But
we also used to believe in fair play. Now,
one section of the population seems to
think that it’s clever to avoid tax: to
cheat the hospitals, schools and police
we all rely on. Of course, many wealthy
people see it as their duty to pay up and
more: including members of the rather
wonderfully named Patriotic Million-
aires. But others seem to believe they
are entitled to duck and weave, abetted
by the myriad loopholes of our mon-
strously overcomplicated tax system.
Sunak’s failure to sack Zahawi has
undermined his own promise to restore
integrity to a government which is still
suffering symptoms of “long Boris” —
the casual approach to standards which
Britain has a long
tradition of respect for
entrepreneurs, but we also
used to believe in fair play
tainted so many in Johnson’s orbit. But
the problem goes even wider. This kind
of scandal taints all politicians. The pub-
lic conclude that they’re all the same
and everyone is at it — that the only MPs
who aren’t on the make are too stupid to
pull it off. This growing suspicion, ever
since the expenses scandal of 2009, is
dangerous for our democracy. Accord-
ing to the ONS, only a quarter of the UK
population now think that a high-rank-
ing politician would refuse to take
money in exchange for granting a politi-
cal favour; nearly two-thirds think they
would be unlikely to refuse. This level of
cynicism is unwarranted. There are
many decent MPs in all parties, but
scandals feed the fire.
Now, more than ever, the UK needs a
sense of social solidarity. We are getting
poorer as a nation, with fraying public
services and rising homelessness. Rich-
ard Walker, executive chair of Iceland
supermarkets, told me some of his cus-
tomers have only £25 a week to spend
on food (the company has launched a
micro-loan scheme). But businesses are
told off for “talking Britain down” by
Conservatives ignoring reality.
Chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s speech on
Friday was an attempt to inject some
hope, by painting a vision of an entre-
preneurial future. But it was overshad-
owed by the simmering scandals. Hunt’s
audience was made up of business lead-
ers and City executives who want stand-
ards and stability from government.
Several have pointed out to me that
Zahawi had already saved money
because the tax due was on capital gains,
not income. “At that level of money, it’s a
decision,” one said. “It’s not something
you fail to notice.”
In this bleak time, it is worth remem-
bering how unified the nation felt at the
start of the pandemic. Neighbours
helped each other out, the young ran
errands for the old, villages clapped for
the NHS. There was a genuine hope that
we could “build back better”, a realisa-
tion by many of just how much others
were suffering, and a huge appreciation
for what key workers were contributing.
The Johnson government squandered
all that. He made the law-abiding feel
like fools by breaking the very rules he
had made, and presiding over a gold
rush for cronies in sales of PPE. His own
endless and never quite explained hun-
ger for cash is now devouring Richard
Sharp, enthroned as chair of the BBC
shortly after helping the then prime
minister secure an £800,000 loan in
opaque circumstances. The impression
of chumminess was bad enough in the
Blair years — now it is obscene.
If Britain is to unite and prosper again,
we need leaders who demand complete
transparency from ministers, a radical
programme of tax simplification and a
crackdown on offshore trusts. Govern-
ments always fear that they will lose the
very rich — whose spending is worth a
great deal, especially in the luxury
goods market, and who could easily
move elsewhere. That is why non-dom
status has never been abolished. But the
door is now open for the Labour party to
take a radical look at taxes.
Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves
stresses that she does not want to raise
the current tax take. But others are
more radical. The Resolution Founda-
tion think-tank has named “five terrible
tax breaks” which it claims cost £4bn a
year; the Institute for Fiscal Studies Tax
Lab has suggested aligning taxes on
business and employment income. This
debate is surely coming.
The wider context is that the pan-
demic has added insult to the injury of
the 2008 financial crash. No one was
jailed in the UK; many bankers seemed
to carry on as if nothing much had hap-
pened while the average worker
endured a decade of wage stagnation.
True, during Covid the government
gave unprecedented support to workers
and businesses. But those who owned
their own homes, or had share portfo-
lios, did even better. In Coventry, strik-
ing Amazon workers are repeating the
GMB union’s claim that Jeff Bezos could
give them all a bonus and still have more
money than before the pandemic.
Voters may not fully understand how
quantitative easing buoyed up the
wealth of those with assets, but they do
know about fairness. Downing Street
insists the public hasn’t really noticed
the Zahawi scandal. But beyond the
bunker, this looks like a classic David
and Goliath story, in which Zahawi’s
murky tax affairs were exposed by a
dogged solicitor, Dan Neidle. We Brits
love the underdog. But in this case, we
are all the underdogs. And we are mad
as hell.
camilla.cavendish@ft.com
paper in our hands, put
it down somewhere, got
distracted, then forgot-
ten all about it. The shopping list, the
plans for a child’s birthday party, highly
classified analyses of potential terrorist
threats, top secret presidential docu-
ments — they can all wander off. And
they do.
US presidents seem especially prone
to taking sensitive government material
and squirrelling it away somewhere
insecure. Donald Trump liked to stash
important stuff at his Mar-a-Lago club.
Joe Biden favours his garage, next to his
Corvette. In Britain, absent-minded
officials take a more eclectic approach.
Secret government documents and data
have been left on a train from London’s
Waterloo, gone missing from a Birming-
ham car park and a military laptop has
even been snatched from under the
table at McDonald’s. The most recent
tranche of wayward documents was dis-
covered at a bus stop in Kent. This was
less James Bond than Mr Bean.
Or maybe that should be Mr Biden. To
paraphrase Oscar Wilde, “to lose one
box of secret documents may be
regarded as a misfortune; to lose both
looks like carelessness”. The White
House recently disclosed that it found a
cache of sensitive material from Biden’s
private office at a Washington think-
tank last November. Then Biden’s law-
yers found more in his garage. Merrick
Garland, US attorney-general, has now
appointed a former federal prosecutor
as special counsel to investigate. Ques-
tioned about this, Biden snapped back:
“By the way my Corvette’s in a locked
garage . . . it’s not like they’re sitting out
on the street.” So that’s all right then.
Republicans were delighted at such
carelessness. Mike Pence, vice-presi-
dent under Trump, crowed in a radio
interview, “There’s an old saying in the
A tranche of wayward files
was discovered at a bus
stop in Kent. This was less
James Bond than Mr Bean
Bible that what you sow, you reap. And I
couldn’t help but think that headline
yesterday was an example of the truth of
that proverb.” Reassuringly, a few days
later, he too reaped what he had sown —
and turned over a “small number” of
classified documents to the Department
of Justice.
When the FBI raided Trump’s Florida
home last August, they discovered some
13,000 documents, of which more than
100 were marked classified, including
54 marked secret and 18 top secret. He is
now the subject of a federal criminal
investigation.
At least the US papers were dry and
intact. In June 2021, a member of the
public discovered sensitive defence
papers in a soggy heap behind that Kent
bus stop. According to the BBC, they
originated in the office of a senior minis-
try official and, among several highly

Probation failures have deep roots and horrific consequences
without reducing the population of pris-
Frances oners, leaving more of them crammed
Crook into fewer spaces without adequate
staffing.
This set challenges for probation
given to private contractors with disas-
trous, and predictable, consequences.
Overall, some 200,000 men and
women are supervised by probation at
any one time. The majority of those
ognise that the service was failing and it
was brought back under state control in
2020. Unfortunately, instead of reinstat-
ing local links, the functions were
squeezed into the civil service. The
so that housing, health, police and vol-
untary organisations can play a part.
Yes, strategic direction and inspection
must be central but local management
is the best chance for reviving the proba-
sensitive topics, discussed a possible
British military presence in Afghanistan
and the passage of the HMS Defender
warship through Ukrainian waters.
We must hope that all this is not a
throwback to 2008, when vast amounts
of highly classified British government
data went walkabout, including the per-
sonal details of 600,000 people who had
applied to join the armed forces and a
seven-page file, classified as “UK Top

T
he murder of Zara Aleena
by a man just released from
prison was a tragedy wait-
ing to happen. Assessed by
the probation service as not
posing a high risk to the public, he killed
her just days later in a gut-wrenchingly
awful case raised by Keir Starmer dur-
ing the last prime minister’s questions.
This was the first time the dire state of
the service has been brought up at PMQs
for several years. It is about time.
How did a public service dedicated to
public safety get into such a state? As
recently as 2013, the inspectorate
assessed the service across England and
Wales as delivering good or excellent
provision. What happened to destroy
this was three years with Chris Grayling
in charge. During his time as Lord Chan-
cellor and secretary of state for justice
he was a man in a hurry. Grayling closed
prisons and reduced prison officers but
officers working in prisons and tasked
with supporting the reintegration of
former prisoners into the community.
Some of these individuals have previ-
ously committed very serious and vio-
lent offences and could be a danger —
especially after experiencing years of
filthy, violent, drug-ridden prisons.
For a hundred years, probation has
benefited from local connections,
autonomy and professionalism. Having
someone to look after you, somewhere
to live and something to do all day pro-
vides the best chance of leading a crime-
free life and being able to contribute to
the local community. In 2014, at a
stroke, all this was destroyed by the gov-
ernment’s short-sighted desire to find
something — anything — to privatise.
Because the court functions could not
be given to a private company that
might be managing the very sentence it
had recommended to the judge, this ele-
ment of probation had to remain a state
function. The rest was divided up and
overseen by the service have been sen-
tenced to a community penalty.
This unpaid work — a success story
when linked to local neighbourhood
needs — has now became symbolic of
the wider failures. Private companies
The things that are proven
to prevent reoffending are
gone. Ultimately this
endangers the public
sent men to sit in car parks all day to ful-
fil their hours. The profit motive took
possession of a process once firmly
linked to the decisions of the courts;
staff struggled to find purpose with
what they were supervising. In 2018 and
2019, the then chief inspector of proba-
tion, Glenys Stacey, published a series of
excoriating reports.
Eventually, even ministers had to rec-
independence and ability to speak out
about local issues has gone. On-the-
ground contacts with voluntary organi-
sations and essential services such as
housing have gone. The things that are
proven to prevent reoffending are gone.
We now have a service that the cur-
rent chief inspector describes as “shock-
ingly bad” in many places. Heavy work-
loads, high vacancy rates, newly
recruited, young and inexperienced
staff who lack managers to guide their
complex work: all these factors lead to
mistakes. Ultimately they endanger the
public. This deterioration only makes
more pointless deaths like Aleena’s
more likely.
Ministers repeat the familiar mantra
that new staff are being recruited, but
they are coming in to a service where
colleagues have lost faith and direction.
It doesn’t have to be like this. Minimal
reorganisation could revive a service
essential for public safety. We should
reinstate the links to local government
tion service.
I have one final suggestion. We need
an expert body similar to the National
Institute for Health and Care Excellence
(Nice) to provide evidence-based guid-
ance on what works and to make sure
that future ministers cannot announce
new punishments or big changes for
their own self-aggrandisement.
There will always be mistakes and
there may still be tragedies — human
beings can be unpredictable. Some-
times professionals fail and people who
are already damaged and violent may go
on to do something awful. But we can
limit the chances, help offenders to
change and save on the costs of reof-
fending.
There is a body of research that shows
how to help people who have committed
crimes to atone for what they have done
and turn their lives around. Let’s use it.
The writer is former chief executive of the
Howard League for Penal Reform
Secret” and dealing with al-Qaeda and
Iraq, which was left on a train. That July,
the Ministry of Defence admitted that
121 memory sticks had disappeared and
747 laptops had been stolen. In October,
a hard-drive contained the details of
100,000 members of the armed forces
was reported missing. And so it went on.
Human error means that wherever
there are safeguards and procedures
there will be failures. One answer could
be to use RFID tags to track sensitive
documents, memory sticks and laptops.
The tags are already used to track stock
in shops, luggage and even by the US
military.
Back in today’s Washington, “to-do”
lists were among the materials found by
US authorities at the Biden residence.
Here’s my suggestion for the next one
the president should write: MEMO TO
SELF: DO NOT TAKE THIS DOCU-
MENT HOME.
The writer is a novelist and critic
28 January/29 January 2023 ★ FTWeekend 15

On the mend Air travel recovery fuels boom Green knight The heat pump fully deserves
for jet repair shops and parts makers — PAGE 17 to be warmly welcomed into the home — PAGE 24

Goldman chief ’s pay falls

Adani’s value plunges $52bn almost a third to $25mn
after short seller alleges fraud JOSHUA FRANKLIN — NEW YORK

Goldman Sachs paid chief executive

David Solomon $25mn for 2022, down
almost 30 per cent year on year, after
resulting in a cut to bonuses for employ-
ees in that unit.
Goldman was hit by sharp mark-
downs in public equity holdings at its

3 Shares extend losses ahead of fundraising 3 Indian billionaire’s group denies claims the Wall Street bank reported a steep
drop in profits, cut thousands of jobs
and slashed employee bonuses.
In a regulatory filing yesterday, Gold-
man disclosed that Solomon received a
base salary of $2mn, and $23mn in vari-
able remuneration.
Goldman said its compensation com-
mittee based its decision in part on “the
firm’s 2022 performance, both on an
absolute basis and relative to peer
results, as well as in comparison to the
record performance delivered in 2021”.
Solomon’s pay for 2022 had been the
subject of speculation among Goldman’s
rank and file in recent weeks, with many
expecting a sizeable cut given the bank’s
financial performance and a far-reach-
ing review of expenses at the company.
The cut to Solomon’s pay is larger
than that taken by Wall Street peers and
reflects a challenging year for Goldman.
However, it is still less than the cut to the
bonus pool for the senior partner ranks,
which is roughly 40 per cent, according
to people familiar with the matter.
Last year, Goldman’s net profits fell
almost 50 per cent from record earnings
in 2021 and the bank fell short of a key
profitability target. Its investment
banking business suffered from an
industry-wide dearth of dealmaking,
asset management division and
reported $2bn in losses for 2022 at its
fledgling Platform Solutions unit, which
houses part of its retail banking busi-
ness that has been pared back following
disappointing performance.
The bank this month cut about 3,200
jobs, or roughly 6.5 per cent of its work-
force, as part of its biggest cost-reduc-
tion exercise since the 2008 financial
David Solomon’s
reduction in pay is
bigger than that
taken by Wall
Street rivals after a
challenging year
crisis. Goldman has also embarked on a
review of spending across the bank.
JPMorgan Chase chief executive Jamie
Dimon was paid $34.5mn in 2022,
unchanged from the prior year, while
Wells Fargo CEO Charlie Scharf’s pay
was also flat at $24.5mn.
Goldman’s spending on pay and bene-
fits for 2022 was down 15 per cent year
on year at $15.1bn.
Solomon’s remuneration for 2022 is
his lowest since the $17.5mn he earned
in 2020 when his pay was hit by Gold-
man’s involvement in the 1MDB corrup-
tion scandal.

Technology

Salesforce shakes up board

Under scrutiny: Hindenburg Research has accused the Adani Group of engaging in stock price manipulation and accounting fraud — T Narayan/Bloomberg
HUDSON LOCKETT — HONG KONG
JOHN REED — CHENNAI
EMMA DUNKLEY — LONDON
Indian billionaire Gautam Adani had
$52bn wiped from the value of his busi-
ness empire this week after a US short
seller alleged fraud, threatening the suc-
cess of a share sale designed to attract
international investors.
Shares in the Adani Group’s flagship
company fell a further 19 per cent yes-
terday, leading steep declines in the
Mumbai-listed groups that make up
businesses from energy to airports.
Adani, one of the world’s richest men,
has faced intense scrutiny since short
seller Hindenburg Research on Wednes-
day accused his group of engaging in
stock price manipulation and account-
ing fraud over the course of decades.
The group has denied the allegations.
Hindenburg’s critique came days
before Adani Enterprises launched a
share sale to raise Rs200bn ($2.4bn). Its
stock closed 18.5 per cent lower at
Rs2,761 yesterday, an almost 16 per cent
discount to the Rs3,276 that a group of
institutional investors anchoring the
share sale have agreed to pay. Jupiter
Asset Management, BNP Paribas,
Société Générale and Goldman Sachs
are among the institutions that were
already allocated shares before the
fraud allegations were made public.
The steep sell-off in Adani Enter-
prises threatens to dent demand from
retail investors in India, who were per-
mitted to start bidding for the shares
yesterday. The sale is expected to com-
plete on Tuesday.
Deepak Shenoy, chief executive of
CapitalMind Wealth in Bangalore, said
the extent of the fallout on retail
demand would not be clear until next
week. “Monday and Tuesday are when
any real demand will come in,” he said.
Adani Group has vowed to press
ahead with the share sale despite the 60-
year-old billionaire facing the biggest
challenge of a career that turned him
into one of India’s most powerful men.
After starting life as a commodities
trader, Adani built India’s largest pri-
vate infrastructure group and has been
growing his empire at a rapid pace. The
expansion has left the combined Adani
companies with $24bn of debt, prompt-
ing CreditSights to warn last year that
the group was deeply “overleveraged”.
The company has denied the allega-
tions from Hindenburg, calling the
report “a malicious combination of
selective misinformation and stale,
baseless and discredited allegations”.
India’s opposition Congress party
called for the country’s securities regu-
lator and central bank to investigate the
allegations. Jairam Ramesh, a Congress
‘[The report is] a malicious
combination of selective
misinformation and stale,
baseless allegations’
MP and the party’s general secretary for
communications, said the Hindenburg
report “demands a response” because
Adani Group was “closely identified
with prime minister Narendra Modi”.
Modi was previously chief minister of
Gujarat, Adani’s home state.
The Adani turmoil has hit broader
sentiment in India, with the benchmark
Nifty 50 stock index down almost 3 per
cent since market close on Tuesday.
Other Adani companies slid, with
Adani Green Energy and Adani Trans-
mission each losing 20 per cent. The
declines took the total drop in the mar-
ket capitalisation of Adani groups to
$52bn, down about a fifth from Tuesday.
One of the investors involved in the
share sale said: “They [Adani Group]
probably can’t raise that by Tuesday
unless the share price goes up.”
Adani owns substantial stakes in all
the group’s listed companies, including
roughly three-quarters of Adani Enter-
prises. Adani Enterprises declined to
comment on the fall in its shares yester-
day, but said that the company is “confi-
dent of the fundamentals”.
Adani has said it is considering legal
action against Hindenburg. The short
seller said it “would welcome it”.
Bill Ackman, the billionaire hedge
fund manager, on Thursday described
Hindenburg’s report as “highly credi-
ble” and “extremely well researched”.
Spotlight page 16
after agitation from activists
ORTENCA ALIAJ AND
JAMES FONTANELLA-KHAN — NEW YORK
Salesforce appointed three new direc-
tors to its board yesterday as the soft-
ware giant seeks to fend off criticism
from activist investors and turn round
a business hit by the tech downturn.
The San Francisco-based group has
appointed Arnold Donald, former chief
executive of cruise operator Carnival
Corporation, Sachin Mehra, chief finan-
cial officer of Mastercard, and Mason
Morfit, chief executive of ValueAct Cap-
ital, an activist fund that is also an inves-
tor, say people familiar with the matter.
“As highly respected business leaders,
they each bring valuable experience to
further enhance and balance the diverse
skills on the board and advance our
value creation initiatives,” said Marc
Benioff, chair and co-chief executive.
The company added that Sanford
Robertson, co-founder of buyout group
Francisco Partners, and Hasbro chair
emeritus Alan Hassenfeld — who have
both sat on Salesforce’s board since
2003 — will step down.
Benioff has come under pressure to
improve Salesforce’s performance after
several activist investors disclosed they
had built positions in the company. Elli-
ott Management said this week it had
built a multibillion-dollar stake in the
company, joining Starboard Value, the
activist fund run by Jeff Smith, which
disclosed a position in October.
ValueAct also has a stake in the com-
pany, as does Inclusive Capital, the firm
set up by Jeff Ubben, former head of Val-
ueAct, say people briefed on the matter.
Salesforce has become a target
because of its dismal performance over
the past year after a pandemic-driven
boom that bolstered profits and valua-
tions. Salesforce’s market value has
dropped almost 50 per cent since its
2021 peak to about $165bn.
The activist investors want Salesforce
to cut costs, boost profit margins and
evaluate the sale of assets. Salesforce
acquired workplace productivity tool
Slack for $27.7bn in 2020, a 55 per cent
premium to its share price at the time,
but has struggled to integrate the app
into its platform. Benioff has already
taken some measures, including cutting
about 10 per cent of its workforce.

Travel & leisure. Sport finances

Football fans cry foul as investors tap into multi-club ownership trend
Uefa monitors fast-growing
business model linked to half of
English Premier League teams
SAMUEL AGINI AND JOSH NOBLE
Bill Foley’s budding football network is
in expansion mode. The US billionaire
made his first move into the sport in
December, buying English Premier
League club AFC Bournemouth for
£120mn. Less than a month later, he
added a stake in French team FC Lori-
ent, a decision he said would help turn
his new venture, Black Knight Football
Entertainment, into a “leading multi-
club football operator”.
Foley is just one among a host of US
investors seeking to tap into the football
boom by snapping up stakes in several
clubs. The model was pioneered more
than 15 years ago by energy drinks
maker Red Bull but has recently become
a mainstream investment play, with half
the clubs in the Premier League now
linked to counterparts elsewhere
through their owners.
But as the multi-club structure gains
traction, it is also beginning to ruffle
feathers among fans and regulators.
Foley’s arrival as a shareholder at Lori-
ent was met with an open letter from
one of the club’s fan groups warning that
the club’s heritage was at risk.
“FC Lorient has boasted for years that
it’s a family club with a strong identity,”
they wrote. “Why then would an Ameri-
can, who knows nothing of our history,
be allowed to buy shares?”
Days later, the mood worsened with
the transfer of Dango Ouattara, Lori-
ent’s star player, to Bournemouth.
Other investors are also encountering
pushback. John Textor, whose Eagle
Football Holdings owns a 40 per cent
stake in Crystal Palace, was greeted with
protest banners at a recent home game
following a report in the Financial
Times that he was planning to list the
group in New York.
“Multi-club ownership. Stock market
gambling. Textor, we don’t trust you,”
the message read. Eagle Football also
owns Brazil’s Botafogos, Belgian tier-
two club Molenbeek and acquired
French team Olympique Lyonnais in
December for €800mn.
Football clubs have increasingly
turned to investors for capital since the
coronavirus pandemic battered balance
sheets. European governing body Uefa
estimated that top-division clubs lost
€7bn because of the pandemic over the
2019/20 and 2020/21 seasons.
About 200 football teams belong to a
wider ownership group operating a mul-
ti-club model, according to CIES Sports
Intelligence, an increase from 111 before
the pandemic.
That number is growing fast. Qatar
Sports Investment, which has owned
Paris Saint-Germain since 2011,
recently bought a 22 per cent stake in
Portuguese title challengers SC Braga,
and has its sights on an ambitious move
into multi-club ownership this year.
Miami-based 777 Partners is awaiting
approval for its acquisition of a majority
stake in Hertha Berlin. It also has a
minority stake in Sevilla FC and Mel-
bourne Victory, and owns Genoa, Stand-
ard Liège, Red Star FC in Paris and the
Rio club Vasco da Gama.
Advocates of the multi-club model
say it can bring financial stability, with
benefits including shared central costs
and a broader platform of teams across
markets to attract sponsors.
“It is possible that global brands
would be more attracted to a global club
network even if [the clubs] are individ-
ual brands,” said 777 managing partner
Joshua Wander.
“We do believe that the overall multi-
Lloyd Kelly, left,
of Bournemouth
in action. The
Premier League
club was
acquired by US
tycoon Bill Foley
in December
John Sibley/Lloyd Kelly
Action Images/Reuters
club strategy will help these clubs pre-
vent long periods of distress.”
But fans of Red Star FC protested
against the 777 takeover. Wander said:
“It’s really a small percentage of fans that
are opposed to us [and] in most cases
we’ve been welcomed with open arms.”
For owners, the multi-club model also
hedges the risk of relegation. In the US,
leagues are typically closed and the
same teams play against each other
every year, but in Europe clubs fight to
avoid dropping to a lower division with
greatly reduced income. Genoa was rel-
egated to Italy’s second tier soon after
being bought by 777.
“When you think about why not to
invest in a football club, it’s relegation,”
said Patrick Massey, a partner at Portas
Consulting. “[But] if you invest in six
clubs and one gets relegated, you still
have five that haven’t.”
The same works in reverse — owning a
handful of lower leagues clubs gives a
number of shots at promotion.
While there are few restrictions on
investing in or owning clubs in different
countries, there are rules on whether
clubs controlled by the same entity can
participate in the same European com-
petition, such as the Champions League.
Industry executives say Uefa, which
runs these competitions, is closely mon-
itoring the trend. Uefa’s latest report on
the European club landscape found that
multi-club ownership “is becoming
more and more of an issue”.
Tim Bridge, head of Deloitte’s sport
business group, said: “I definitely think
that the regulators will be considering
this . . . not just to protect sporting
integrity, but also to keep the European
football market free and open.”
Some investors recognise that regula-
tion is likely to rise up the agenda as
more clubs join multi-club groups. Wan-
der of 777 Partners said: “My sense is, in
the coming year or two, there’ll be a lot
of engagement with global football gov-
erning bodies about what multi-club
ownership should look like.”
Others question whether clubs and
officials can afford to rebel against the
model. Jeff Luhnow, the former baseball
executive who led the buyout of Spanish
second division team Leganés through
his investment firm Blue Crow Sports
Group, said: “The multi-club model is
drawing a lot of money and attention
and interest into the game. I don’t see
why any governing body would want to
do anything to stop that.”
16
Big Tech’s winners
and losers send out
the job-loss memos
The Top Line
Tom
Braithwaite
India mogul faces onslaught from hard-boiled US activist
Spotlight
Gautam Adani
Founder and chair,
Adani Group
With share-based wealth of $118bn,
Gautam Adani briefly overtook
Jeff Bezos as the second-richest man
last year, becoming the face of the
fast-growing economy of what
will this year become the most
populous country.
The industrialist who once
described himself as an “introvert”
has basked in his newfound
prominence, hobnobbing with leaders
including Emmanuel Macron and
Boris Johnson.
But this week Adani and his empire
have been in an unwelcome and
costly spotlight.
Hindenburg Research, a US-based
short seller known for targeting
Twitter and electric vehicle start-up
Nikola, said it had taken positions
against listed Adani Group companies
such as Adani Enterprises and Adani
Green Energy.
Hindenburg accused the group of
“pulling the largest con in corporate
history”.
The report has wiped more than
$40bn off the combined $200bn-plus
market capitalisations of the founder
and chair’s seven listed companies.
Hindenburg, which said that it had
spent two years on its investigation,
claimed that the Adani Group had
“engaged in a brazen stock
manipulation and accounting fraud
scheme over the course of decades”.
Among its allegations were that a
brother of Adani used offshore
entities to launder money into the
group’s listed companies,
contributing to their “sky-high
valuations” after a surge in stock
prices over the past three years.
Hindenburg questioned what it said
were high amounts of leverage in the
group’s entities.
Jugeshinder Singh, Adani Group’s
chief financial officer, branded
Hindenburg’s claims “a malicious
combination of selective
misinformation and stale, baseless
and discredited allegations”.
The company declared that it
operated “in compliance with all
laws” and that it was weighing up
“remedial and punitive action”
against Hindenburg.
The business questioned the timing
of the report, just as Adani embarks
Retail
Soaring clothes prices, Russian exit and cost-cutting hit H&M’s profit
RICHARD MILNE — OSLO
ABBY WALLACE — LONDON
H&M blamed high clothes prices, its
exit from Russia and a cost-cutting pro-
gramme for an unexpectedly large col-
lapse in its earnings as the world’s sec-
ond-largest fashion retailer’s struggles
with profitability continue.
Operating profit plunged 87 per cent to
SKr820mn ($80mn) in the fourth quar-
ter to the end of November from a year
earlier. Analysts expected an average of
SKr3.7bn.
Shares in H&M fell more than 4 per
cent to SKr125.80 yesterday, having lost
nearly half of their value since their
recent peak in April 2021.
Chief executive Helena Helmersson
told the Financial Times that it had been
“a very turbulent quarter”. She added:
“The hikes in raw materials and freight
costs combined with a historically
strong US dollar resulted in extensive
cost increases for purchases of goods.”
The Swedish retailer, which lags
★ FTWeekend
COMPANIES & MARKETS
The advent of human-sounding robots
really exposes robot-sounding humans.
No machine could sound as devoid of
human feeling as the Amazon memo
sent at the start of the year, titled:
“Update from CEO Andy Jassy on role
eliminations.”
After taking a sideswipe at “one of
our teammates [who] leaked this
information externally”, Jassy failed to
give much explanation for 18,000 job
cuts other than “the uncertain
economy and that we’ve hired rapidly
over the last several years”. It is
questionable how much comfort “those
impacted by these reductions” took
from Jassy’s attempt at consolation:
“You have made a meaningful
difference in a lot of customers’ lives.”
Amazon was the worst in the series
of Big Tech lay-off memos. The least
wooden, perhaps surprisingly, came
from Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, who is
cutting 11,000 jobs. The Facebook co-
Hindenburg on a $2.5bn share offering in India
that is due to close next week.
accused the With the Adani Group’s interests
business of ranging from heavy industry to
media, and its position as a leading
‘pulling the employer and taxpayer, the challenge
largest con to the group’s integrity is significant
for India Inc and its financial markets,
in corporate regulators and politicians. It comes as
history’ Adani has begun an ambitious
international expansion, enlisting
global partners and investors to back
the group.
“Given the size and impact and scale
of their investments, this is something
that everyone will have their eye on
now,” said Amit Tandon, managing
director of Institutional Investor
Advisory Services, a Mumbai-based
proxy advisory firm.
The questions over Adani’s personal
integrity resonate all the more
because of his longstanding
association with Narendra Modi, who
hails from the same state of Gujarat.
The ties to Modi have been subject
to fierce scrutiny from critics, who
accuse the Adani Group of using its
position to secure sweetheart deals.
In 2019, for example, the business
bought all of a batch of six airports
being privatised by the government,
after rule changes allowed a company
behind Inditex, the Spanish owner of has often ended up with large amounts
Zara, in sales and profitability, launched of garments that it has had to discount.
a SKr2bn cost-cutting programme last Helmersson said H&M was increasing
year that included 1,500 job losses. its production in Europe and looking at
H&M’s sales in the fourth quarter Latin American countries as part of an
were up 10 per cent to SKr64.4bn but attempt to do more “nearshoring” and
flat in local currency terms. It said sales be able to respond more quickly to fash-
from December 1 to January 25 had ion trends.
increased 5 per cent in local currencies. The retailer said it expected to have
“Sales in the new financial year have lower inventory in 2023 but avoided giv-
started well,” said Helmersson. She ing precise financial guidance for this
hoped that sales, profitability and inven- year. It added that capital expenditure
tory levels would rise this year. “The would increase 50 per cent to SKr10bn.
external factors are still challenging but The company’s board is planning a
are moving in the right direction.”
She reiterated H&M’s goal for next
year of a double-digit operating profit
margin, from 3.2 per cent in 2022.
Its operating margin was more than
20 per cent in 2010 but has been about
half of Inditex’s for the past four years.
Its results in the fourth quarter were
weighed down by an SKr836mn cost for
its restructuring programme. The
Swedish retailer has struggled to match
Inditex’s manufacturing flexibility and
founder fessed up to his company’s
specific predicament: tougher Apple
privacy measures mean advertisers
receive less information about Meta’s
users so they have cut their spending.
But he also neatly summarised the
pandemic tech bubble: “At the start of
Covid, the world rapidly moved online
and the surge of ecommerce led to
outsized revenue growth. Many people
predicted this would be a permanent
acceleration that would continue even
after the pandemic ended.” But, he
concluded, “I got this wrong.”
He was not alone. At the start of the
pandemic, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella
trumpeted “two years’ worth of digital
transformation in two months” and
confidently identified “systemic
structural changes across all of our
solution areas that will define the way
we live and work going forward”.
Announcing 10,000 lay-offs this
month, Nadella only hinted at his
with no experience to swiftly become
one of India’s largest airport groups.
One opposition leader called it an
“act of brazen cronyism”.
Adani, 60, acknowledges that
aligning business interests with
government policy has given him a
“tailwind”. But he denies impropriety.
Asked in a television interview this
month by India Today’s Rajat Sharma
about his rapport with Modi, he said
one “cannot take personal help from
Modi ji”, using an honorific for the
prime minister.
Asked about bids, he said that
“not one business has been secured
without bidding”.
He has presented his life story as
that of a self-made man, who first
made money under a government run
by the opposition Congress party.
Adani was born in Ahmedabad in
1962 in a middle-class family, with a
textile merchant father. He left school
at 16, dropping out without getting a
degree to work in Mumbai.
He dabbled in the diamond trade,
returning four years later to Gujarat
to run his brother’s plastics factory.
He began borrowing based on one
business to finance expansion into
new ones.
Adani developed a port and special
The Swedish
fashion chain
says the outlook
is improving
after a good
start to 2023
Jason Alden/Bloomberg
error: “We saw customers accelerate
their digital spend during the
pandemic, we’re now seeing them
optimise their digital spend to do more
with less.” Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai,
who is cutting 12,000 roles, got a bit
closer: “Over the past two years we’ve
seen periods of dramatic growth. To
match and fuel that growth, we hired
for a different economic reality than
the one we face today.”
All that hiring still leaves the
companies with many more staff than
in 2020, even after the lay-offs. But
beyond these common errors about
lasting change from the pandemic and
the adaptation of cutting jobs, there is a
hugely varied market performance.
Amazon shares are barely changed
compared with the start of 2020 — in
the intervening years hundreds of
billions of dollars of equity value was
added, then vaporised. At Meta, it is
much worse. A year ago the social
Adani Group,
led by Gautam
Adani, has
branded the
short-seller’s
report
‘a malicious
combination of
selective
misinformation
and stale,
baseless and
discredited
allegations’
Siddharaj Solanki/FT
economic zone in Mundra, Gujarat,
that grew into one of India’s largest and
a hub of his empire, with facilities
including a coal-to-plastic factory and
a copper smelter on site.
Adani has pushed heavily into
renewable energy, aligning himself
with New Delhi’s decarbonisation
goals, while remaining one of India’s
biggest operators of coal-fired power
plants.
Last year he launched a successful
hostile bid for broadcaster NDTV — a
move that critics said was ominous for
India’s shrinking press freedoms — and
said he aimed to build a “global
footprint” for it, giving India an outlet
comparable to Al Jazeera.
Hindenburg’s questions bring more
attention to the fundamentals of
Adani’s businesses, including the
source of the company valuations that
have made him one of the richest men.
During the India Today interview
Adani waved away talk of his soaring
wealth — “I don’t chase numbers” —
and dismissed a question over
what would happen if “the Adani
bubble bursts”, saddling banks with
unpaid debt.
“This balloon will keep flying as long
as India is progressing,” he said.
Benjamin Parkin and John Reed
SKr3bn share buyback for this year but
will “wait to see how the company
develops during the year and the
authorisation will only be used if certain
conditions are met”.
Separately, shares in UK retailer
Superdry fell more than 17 per cent
yesterday after it warned on profits.
The company warned that cost-con-
scious consumers spending less on
clothes could lead to a “soft spring” for
the fashion chain. It also blamed its per-
formance on its struggling wholesale
arm, which had been hit by shipping
constraints, as it posted a pre-tax loss of
£17.7mn in the 26 weeks to October 29.
“While we did trade well through
November and December, the outlook
for the remainder of the year is uncer-
tain and, as a result, we are moderating
our profit outlook to broadly break-
even,” said co-founder and chief execu-
tive Julian Dunkerton.
Group revenue was up 3.6 per cent to
£287.2mn as people flocked back to high
streets, the company added.
28 January/29 January 2023
Not every
pandemic
network group was still ranked in the
top 10 in the Financial Times’s
prospering in the pandemic series for
high was
followed by
market value added. Its shares have
since halved; it is down more than
$200bn on its pre-pandemic value.
a decline.
Microsoft
Not every pandemic high was
followed by a comedown. For all their
challenges, Microsoft and Alphabet are
and still in the top five companies for
equity value added since the start of
Alphabet 2020. Their pandemic predictions of
are still in digital transformation fell short, but
they still came out on top.
the top five Or near the top. The very top spot is
for equity occupied by the sole big tech company
to avoid mass lay-offs. Unless there is
value added unwelcome news when Apple reports
earnings next week, the company has
escaped the mass lay-offs of its peers —
and chief Tim Cook has avoided the
memo-writing competition.
tom.braithwaite@ft.com
BUSINESS
WEEK IN REVIEW
Citadel’s $16bn
3 Ken Griffin’s Citadel made $16bn profit for inves-
tors last year, the biggest dollar gain by a hedge fund
in history and a haul that establishes his company as
the most successful of all time. The firm, which man-
ages $54bn in assets, made a 38.1 per cent return in
its main fund driven by bets across a range of asset
classes including bonds and equities.
3 Tufan Erginbilgic, chief executive of Rolls-Royce,
gave a brutal assessment of the UK group, telling staff
that it must trans-
form the way it
operated or would
not survive. “Every
investment we make,
we destroy value,”
he said.
3 The US Department
of Justice is suing
Google for allegedly
exercising monopo-
listic control of the digital advertising market, in the
latest legal broadside against the group.
3 Rupert Murdoch scrapped a proposal to combine
Fox and News Corp after shareholders resisted his
attempt to reunite the two halves of his media empire.
3 US investment bank Morgan Stanley has hit staff
with financial penalties running up to more than
$1mn per employee for conducting official business
on WhatsApp and other messaging platforms.
3 Blackstone is facing more than $5bn in redemption
requests from another set of property funds, equal to
Stock in Tesla climbed 11% after
Musk said the EV maker could
deliver as many as 2mn cars
this year following price cuts
7 per cent of their $73bn net asset value, adding to
pressure on the world’s largest alternative asset man-
ager as investors try to pull out cash.
3 Tesla shares rose 11 per cent after Elon Musk said
the electric vehicle maker could deliver as many as
2mn cars this year following price cuts, with the aim
of reaching more customers at the short-term
expense of profit margins.
3 Truphone has been sold to a pair of European busi-
nessmen for £1, taking the small British telecoms
company owned by Roman Abramovich out of the
limbo it had faced since the Russian oligarch was hit
by UK government sanctions last March.
3 Meta said it would reinstate Donald Trump to Face-
book and Instagram, following his suspension in the
wake of the US Capitol attack, in a polarising move
that will hand back a vital platform to the former US
president ahead of his 2024 bid for the White House.
£1 6 %
Price that two Proportion of
businessman paid Spotify staff
for UK telecoms that are in line to
group Truphone lose their jobs
3 EY Germany is planning to cut 40 partners and
shed 380 staff as the Big Four firm attempts to
improve profitability after the damage caused by the
Wirecard scandal. Most of the cuts are aimed at
reducing back-office costs. The majority of the part-
ners heading for the exit are in the audit practice.
3 Music streamer Spotify plans to cut 6 per cent of its
workforce — about 600 workers — as part of an over-
haul, becoming the latest tech group to reduce staff
in an attempt to reverse a pandemic-induced hiring
spree. Dawn Ostroff, hired in 2018 to push expansion
into podcasting, will depart.
3 Eurostar is being forced to run trains more than a
third empty during its morning peak because of
delays caused by post-Brexit border arrangements,
the rail service’s new chief executive revealed.
28 January/29 January 2023 ★ FTWeekend 17

COMPANIES & MARKETS

Google faces innovator’s dilemma

Technology

in battle to dominate world of AI
Silicon Valley group confronts new technology’s regulatory risks and threat to search engine revenues
RICHARD WATERS — SAN FRANCISCO
MADHUMITA MURGIA — LONDON
In the AI arms race that has just broken
out in the tech industry, Google, where
much of the latest technology was
invented, should be well positioned to
be one of the big winners.
There is just one problem: with politi-
cians and regulators breathing down its
neck and a hugely profitable business
model to defend, the internet search
giant may hesitate to wield many of the
weapons at its disposal.
Microsoft threw down a direct chal-
lenge to the search giant this week when
it sealed a multibillion-dollar invest-
ment in AI research company OpenAI.
The move comes less than two months
after the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a
chatbot that answers queries with para-
graphs of text or code, suggesting how
generative AI might one day replace
internet search.
With preferential rights to commer-
cialise OpenAI’s technology, Microsoft
executives have made no secret of their
goal of using it to challenge Google,
reawakening a rivalry that has sim-
mered since Google won the search wars
a decade ago.
DeepMind, the London research com-
pany that Google bought in 2014, and
Google Brain, an advanced research
division at its Silicon Valley headquar-
ters, have long given the search com-
pany one of the strongest footholds in AI.
More recently, Google has broken
ground with variations on the so-called
generative AI that underpins ChatGPT,
including AI models capable of telling
jokes and solving maths problems.
One of its most advanced language
models, known as PaLM, is a general
purpose model three times larger than
GPT, the AI model that underlies Chat-
GPT, based on the number of parame-
ters on which the models are trained.
Google’s chatbot LaMDA, or Language
Model for Dialogue Applications, can
converse with users in natural language,
in a similar way to ChatGPT. The com-
pany’s engineering teams have been
working for months to integrate it into a
consumer product.
Despite the technical advances, most
of the latest technology is still only the
subject of research. Google’s critics say it
is hemmed in by its hugely profitable
search business, which discourages it
from introducing generative AI into
consumer products.
Giving direct answers to queries,
rather than simply pointing users to
suggested links, would result in fewer
searches, said Sridhar Ramaswamy, a
former top Google executive.
That has left Google facing “a classic
innovator’s dilemma” — a reference to
the book by Harvard Business School
professor Clayton Christensen that
sought to explain why industry leaders
often fall prey to fast-moving upstarts.
“If I was the one running a $150bn busi-
ness, I’d be terrified of this thing,” Ram-
aswamy said.
Google said: “We have long been
focused on developing and deploying AI
to improve people’s lives. We believe
that AI is foundational and transforma-
tive technology that is incredibly useful
for individuals, businesses and commu-
nities.” But the search giant would “need
to consider the broader societal impacts
these innovations can have”. Google
added that it would announce “more
experiences externally soon”.
New capabilities: While leading to fewer searches and
Microsoft has lower revenue, the spread of AI could
made no secret also cause a jump in Google’s costs.
of its goal of Ramaswamy calculated that, based
using OpenAI’s on OpenAI’s pricing, it would cost
technology to $120mn to use natural language
challenge processing to “read” all the web pages in
Google — FT montage/ a search index and then use this to gen-
Getty Images/Dreamstime
erate more direct answers to the ques-
tions that people enter into a search
engine. Analysts at Morgan Stanley esti-
mated that answering a search query
using language processing costs about
seven times as much as a standard inter-
net search.
The same considerations could dis-
courage Microsoft from a radical over-
haul of its Bing search engine, which
generated more than $11bn of revenue
last year. But the software company has
said it plans to use OpenAI’s technology
throughout its products and services,
potentially leading to new ways for
users to be presented with relevant
information while they are inside other
applications, thus reducing the need to
go to a search engine.
A number of former and current
employees close to Google’s AI research
teams say the biggest constraints on the
company’s release of AI have been con-
cern about potential harms and how
they would affect Google’s reputation, as
well as an underestimation of the com-
petition. “I think they were asleep at the
wheel,” said one former Google AI scien-
tist, who now runs an AI company.
“Honestly, everyone under-appreciated
how language models will disrupt
search.”
These challenges are exacerbated by
the political and regulatory concerns
caused by Google’s growing power, as
well as the greater public scrutiny of the
industry leader in the adoption of new
technologies.
According to one former Google exec-
utive, the company’s leaders grew wor-
ried more than a year ago that sudden
advances in the capabilities of AI could
lead to a wave of public concern about
the implications of such a powerful
technology in the hands of a company.
Last year it appointed former McKinsey
executive James Manyika as a senior
vice-president to advise on the broader
social impacts of its new technology.
Generative AI, which is used in serv-
ices such as ChatGPT, was inherently
prone to giving incorrect answers and
could be used to produce misinforma-
tion, Manyika said.
Speaking to the Financial Times only
days before ChatGPT was released, he
added: “That’s why we’re not rushing to
put these things out in the way that per-
haps people might have expected us to.”
But the interest stirred by ChatGPT
has intensified the pressure on Google to
match OpenAI more quickly. That has
left it with the challenge of showing off
its AI prowess and integrating it into its
services without damaging its brand or
provoking a political backlash.
“For Google it’s a real problem if they
write a sentence with hate speech in it
and it’s near the Google name,” said
Ramaswamy, a co-founder of search
start-up Neeva.
Google was held to a higher standard
than a start-up that could argue that its
service was just an objective summary
of content available on the internet, he
added.
The company has come under fire
before over its handling of AI ethics. In
2020, when two prominent AI research-
ers left in contentious circumstances
after objections to a research paper
assessing the risks of language-related
AI, a furore erupted around Google’s
attitude to the ethics and safety of its AI
technologies.
Such events have left it under greater
public scrutiny than organisations such
as OpenAI or open-source alternatives
‘If I was such as Stable Diffusion. The latter,
which generates images from text
the one descriptions, has had several safety
running issues, including with the generation of
pornographic imagery. Its safety filter
a $150bn can be easily hacked, according to AI
business, researchers, who say that the rele-
vant lines of code can be deleted manu-
I’d be ally. Its parent company, Stability AI,
terrified of did not respond to a request for com-
ment.
this thing’ OpenAI’s technology has also been
abused by users. In 2021, an online
game called AI Dungeon licensed GPT, a
text-generating tool, to create choose-
your-own storylines based on individ-
ual user prompts.
Within a few months, users were gen-
‘Everyone erating gameplay involving child sexual
abuse, among other disturbing content.
under- OpenAI eventually leaned on the com-
appreciated pany to introduce better moderation
systems.
how OpenAI did not respond to a request
language for comment.
Had anything like this happened at
models will Google, the backlash would have been
disrupt worse, a former Google AI researcher
said. With the company now facing a
search’ serious threat from OpenAI, the
researcher added, it was unclear
whether anyone at the company was
ready to take on the responsibility and
risks of releasing AI products more
quickly.
Microsoft faces a similar dilemma
over how to use the technology. It has
sought to paint itself as more responsi-
ble than Google in its use of AI. OpenAI,
meanwhile, has warned that ChatGPT is
prone to inaccuracy, making it hard to
embed the technology in its current
form in a commercial service.
But as the most dramatic demonstra-
tion yet of an AI force that is sweeping
through the tech world, OpenAI has
given notice that even entrenched pow-
ers such as Google could be at risk.
Investors
back $550mn
war chest for
start-ups
TIM BRADSHAW
Artificial intelligence pioneers are
backing a new $550mn fund dedicated
to investing in AI start-ups, in a move
that bucks the wider downturn in tech
dealmaking.
Toronto-based Radical Ventures said it
has received investment from several
leaders in the AI field.
This includes Fei-Fei Li, creator of the
influential ImageNet project, Geoffrey
Hinton, the pioneer in neural networks
who is also a member of the Google
Brain team, and the family office of
former Google chief executive Eric
Schmidt. Radical said it so far raised
more than half of its $550mn target.
Corporate investors such as Micro-
soft, SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2, IBM Ven-
tures and Alphabet’s GV have for several
years made big bets on AI start-ups
through their venture arms.
But as an independent fund focused
exclusively on AI and associated inno-
vations, Radical’s war chest will be the
largest of its kind. The group previously
launched a $350mn fund in 2019.
Radical’s fund comes amid a huge new
wave of interest from venture capitalists
in start-ups after San-Francisco based
OpenAI released ChatGPT, a question-
and-answer tool, in November. Earlier
this week, Microsoft invested $10bn in
OpenAI at a $29bn valuation.
“There’s no question there’s a lot of
hype and money flowing into this
space,” said Jordan Jacobs, managing
partner and co-founder of Radical Ven-
tures. “We’ve had an enormous flood of
inbound [interest in investing] from
everyone you can imagine.”
Radical is already an investor in
Cohere, a rival to OpenAI; Reka, a new
start-up founded by former engineers at
Alphabet-owned DeepMind; and
You.com, an AI-powered search engine.
Dozens of generative AI start-ups
raised early-stage funding in the final
months of 2022. PitchBook, which
tracks VC activity, estimates $1.4bn was
invested in AI last year, almost as much
as in the previous five years combined.
Other Radical backers include
Advance, the group that owns Condé
Nast and a big investor in Reddit and
Warner Bros Discovery; the Singapore
investment group Temasek; and CPPIB,
Canada’s largest pension fund.
Dominic Barton, former global man-
aging partner at McKinsey and chair of
mining group Rio Tinto, is joining Radi-
cal as an adviser and investor, helping its
portfolio companies to build connec-
tions among large corporate customers.
Radical has also hired Aaron Rosen-
berg, former head of strategy and opera-
tions at DeepMind, to oversee a new
London outpost, as it boosts its Euro-
pean investments.
Radical plans to invest in companies
that are building the models that form
the foundation of a wide range of AI
applications, as well as more narrowly
focused start-ups that might build on
top of those models.
Jacobs said that ChatGPT and image-
generation tools such as Stable Diffusion
and Midjourney were “the very tip of
the iceberg” when it came to the poten-
tial of AI.
“You’ll see all the world’s software
replaced by AI over the next decade,”
said Jacobs. “Every business will end up
using this [generative AI technology],
either directly or via third-party soft-
ware that is incorporating it.”

Aerospace & defence. Fleet maintenance

Revival of air travel fuels boom for jet repair shops and parts makers
Carriers turn to AAR, Heico
and peers as supply of new
planes falls short of demand
CLAIRE BUSHEY — CHICAGO
Aerospace suppliers that maintain aero-
planes and furnish spare parts are
enjoying a boom thanks to a revival in
air travel and slow deliveries of new air-
craft.
Strong demand for their services is
evident in the Rockford, Illinois, hang-
ars of AAR, one of the leading compa-
nies in the sector with a market value of
$1.7bn. Technicians there are busy
working on jets for customers such as
United Airlines and Southwest Airlines.
“We’re basically full in our hangars,”
chief executive John Holmes said.
“When you have people, and you have
aeroplanes, that’s a good combination.”
Two main forces are bringing aero-
planes to AAR’s facilities, and Holmes
said they were likely to persist for years.
Passenger traffic recovered dramati-
cally last year after collapsing in the first
years of the coronavirus pandemic.
While global air travel is still down
about 20 per cent on 2019, in the US it
has largely returned to pre-pandemic
levels.
Nearly 76mn people flew in the US in
October, just 3 per cent lower than the
same month in 2019, according to the
latest available government data.
China’s reopening after strict Covid-19
lockdowns is expected to return many
more flyers to the skies.
At the same time, top manufacturers
Boeing and Airbus have struggled to ful-
fil all the new plane orders from airlines.
The result is that carriers must stick
with older jets for longer and pay more
for replacement parts and service.
Repair shops reported a 19 per cent
increase in sales in the fourth quarter of
2022 compared with a year earlier,
according to research from analyst Ken
Herbert at RBC Capital Markets, while
revenue for parts sellers grew 15 per
cent.
“Airlines are scrambling to keep up,
which means they have to spend more
on the aeroplanes [in their fleets],” Her-
bert said. “That’s been a big tailwind.”
United spent $2.2bn on parts and
repairs in 2022, a 20 per cent rise com-
pared with 2019 and a 64 per cent
increase from 2021. The airline said it
flew more, scheduled more engine over-
hauls and heavy maintenance and
absorbed price increases. Delta Air
Lines also reported a 13 per cent
increase in parts and repair costs over
2019.
Grounding jetliners early in the pan-
demic had another effect. Airlines,
strapped for cash, deferred mainte-
nance. They avoided expensive engine
overhauls by swapping out their oldest
engines for so-called “green-time”
engines that have racked up fewer flying
hours.
With manufacturers’ supply of new
planes bottlenecked and a dwindling
pool of green-time engines, airlines
“have to continue flying older, out-of-
warranty aircraft that consume parts
and need repairs”, said Melius Research
analyst Robert Spingarn. “Commercial
after-market companies [businesses
Southwest
Airlines is
among carriers
that use the
repair services
of AAR, a US
business with a
market value of
$1.7bn — Drew
Angerer/Getty Images
that sell spare parts and accessories] are
benefiting.”
Among them is Heico, a Florida-
based company with a market capitali-
sation of almost $20bn that produces
replacement parts for aircraft. Its sales
of $610mn and operating income of
$147mn both hit records in the quarter
ended October 31, topping levels from
before the pandemic in 2019.
Heico competes against businesses
such as General Electric’s aerospace
division, which makes spare parts for
the jet engines it manufactures.
GE reported on Tuesday that it sold
$32mn worth of spare parts per day in
the fourth quarter, a 34 per cent
increase from the same period in 2021.
Boeing on Wednesday reported that its
services business, which includes selling
spare parts, earned $634mn in the
fourth quarter of 2022, a 58 per cent
increase from a year earlier.
Airlines have historically resisted
alternative spare parts, but Heico co-
president Victor Mendelson said their
stance is changing as they confront the
challenge of servicing planes with fewer
parts available from original equipment
manufacturers.
“We already sell to just about every
airline that could buy from us, but we
have been selling more,” he said. “The
resistance drops . . . because, one, they
need the parts, and two, they like the
value proposition.”
Holmes of AAR also reported
increased demand for the used spare
parts it sells to airlines and engine over-
haul companies. But because fewer air-
lines are retiring older aircraft, the
source of used parts, AAR has had to
scour the market to find them. A total of
366 aircraft were retired in the 12
months to December, a 15 per cent
decline from a year earlier.
AAR reported sales of $470mn in the
quarter to November 30, down 16 per
cent from the same quarter of 2019. The
group’s net income of $23mn was 58 per
cent higher than the same period in
2019.
While AAR’s sales volumes have not
recaptured levels from before the pan-
demic, Holmes said: “We feel like we’re
well on our way.”
18 ★ FTWeekend 28 January/29 January 2023

COMPANIES & MARKETS

Insurance Technology

Direct Line chief exits after profit warnings
James steps down with
immediate effect in wake
of scrapped dividend
OLIVER RALPH AND IAN SMITH
The chief executive of Direct Line has
stepped down, two weeks after the
motor and home insurer issued its
latest profit warning and scrapped its
dividend.
The insurance group said yesterday
that Penny James had agreed with the
board that she would leave immediately
and that Jon Greenwood, the chief com-
mercial officer, would become acting
chief executive.
“It has been a privilege to lead Direct
Line Group for nearly four years,” said
James. “While the business was
impacted by significant headwinds at
the end of 2022, the group has contin-
ued to make strategic progress.”
Direct Line’s chair Danuta Gray
thanked James for her service since join-
ing as chief financial officer in 2017, and
getting the top job two years later. A per-
son close to James said the departure
was a mutual decision.
Gray said the board would work
closely with the interim chief executive
to focus on “our priorities of driving our
performance and restoring balance
sheet resilience, following the signifi-
cant headwinds the business faced in
recent months”.
Greenwood has been at the company
Electricity grids. Interconnectors
since 2000 and previously built up its
commercial insurance division.
Direct Line moved to strengthen its
balance sheet on Thursday with a rein-
surance deal that it said lifted its sol-
vency ratio.
Pressure has built on James as spiral-
ling inflation in used car prices and
other costs pushed up the size of its pay-
outs, forcing Direct Line to issue a profit
warning last July. In November, it fur-
ther revised down its underwriting
profit guidance.
Earlier this month, the insurer’s
shares sank further after it said a spell of
severe cold weather in December had
pushed up the cost of home claims, com-
pounded by further inflation in motor
payouts, meaning it could no longer pay
a final dividend. At the time, Citi ana-
lysts said the news tested “management
credibility” following reassurances the
market had been given as recently as
November.
Earlier this week, rival Aviva
announced that its own general insur-
ance business was trading in line with
expectations.
“We believe [James’s] replacement
will need to be an external hire, mean-
ing difficult decisions need to be made
in the absence of a leader or more likely
delayed,” said analysts at Panmure Gor-
don. They said the management had
over-distributed capital through share
buybacks before inflation and bad
weather fuelled claims costs, while
some peers had “seemingly acted
faster” to confront the problem.
The insurer’s shares, which have
fallen more than 40 per cent over the
past year due to the profit warnings,
slipped 2.8 per cent yesterday.
James is the second chief executive in
the sector to step down in two days.
French reinsurer Scor announced on
Thursday afternoon that Laurent Ros-
seau, who took the top job in mid-2021,
had resigned.
The reinsurer’s share price has fallen
by a fifth over the past year, as natural
catastrophes and claims inflation
weighed on the group. He has been
replaced by Thierry Léger, former chief
underwriting officer at rival Swiss Re.
Scor’s shares were down more than 7 per
cent yesterday.
EY weighs up
merits of five
rival bids for
Britishvolt
HARRY DEMPSEY AND PETER CAMPBELL
LONDON
NIC FILDES — SYDNEY
Britishvolt’s administrator EY has nar-
rowed down the list of potential buyers
of the collapsed UK battery start-up to
five suitors, with Australian peer
Recharge Industries among the leading
contenders.
A consortium of existing investors in
Britishvolt, which attempted last-gasp
rescues of the battery maker before it
fell into administration this month, is
among the other groups to have made it
through, according to three people
familiar with the matter.
EY is under pressure to wrap up the

North Sea power link sparks energy security fears

Critics of planned cable from
Denmark fear reliance on EU
but others point to advantages
GILL PLIMMER
From a remote field in Lincolnshire,
teams of engineers are installing a high-
voltage cable to carry electricity 765km
to and from Denmark.
The world’s longest “interconnector”,
the Viking Link, will pass under the
North Sea and four nations’ waters,
dodging unexploded bombs and pagan
burial sites along the way. It will eventu-
ally have the capacity to supply energy
to 1.4mn homes in the UK, or 2mn in
Denmark where average consumption
is lower.
Interconnectors are crucial to Brit-
ain’s energy transition, in which the
share produced from renewable sources
has risen to 40 per cent from almost
zero in 2010. But they also raise ques-
tions over the UK’s continued depend-
ence on overseas power supplies.
The Viking Link — a joint venture
between FTSE 100 group National Grid
and the Danish government’s transmis-
sion system operator — will be able to
bring energy from Danish biomass
plants on days when the UK wind tur-
bines refuse to turn, providing a fallback
to help resolve the intermittency of the
UK’s main supply of renewable energy.
Britain already has eight electricity
interconnectors — to Ireland, France,
Belgium, the Netherlands and Norway
— and capacity has risen to 8.4 gigawatts
from 2.5GW in 2011. Energy regulator
Ofgem wants this to more than double
to 18 gigawatts by 2030 as electricity
demand rises to power vehicles and gas
boilers are replaced with heat pumps.
National Grid owns five of the eight.
Ofgem in December gave “pilot
project” status to interconnector
projects to Belgium and the Nether-
lands, meaning they will undergo fur-
ther assessments to decide whether
they meet consumers’ needs.
But experts say there are drawbacks
to the ramp-up of the connections.
“It’s all part of creating a Europe-wide
grid that is a back-up to renewables
intermittency,” said Michael Bradshaw,
global energy professor at Warwick
Business School. “The downside is it’s
exposed to energy security threats — it’s
just like a gas pipeline except it’s elec-
trons not molecules.”
Observers say there are risks in
Supply chain: remaining reliant on the goodwill of
the Lincolnshire neighbours. Although the UK has since
converter April exported more energy than it has
station for the imported, there is a question as to
Viking Link, whether there will be sufficient supplies
which will be if the situation reverses and cold snaps
Britain’s ninth drain European storage.
interconnector National Grid was forced to ask the
allowing Netherlands this week for an emer-
electricity to be gency increase in imports via the subsea
sent from and to cables to avoid blackouts in the south-
the EU and east of England.
Norway Dieter Helm, energy professor at
Nick Dimbleby/National Grid
Oxford university, said there was a
“huge vulnerability in the UK relying on
external energy supplies in the face of
shocks”. He added: “We are doing it with
gas, where there is almost no storage
and no back-up, which requires us to
pay the highest price for LNG tanker
loads, which is one reason the gas crisis
hit the UK so hard.”
“With electricity it is good to trade but
if the great Brexit game is taking back
control, the right answer is to make sure
we have enough domestic generation
capacity, especially with so much inter-
mittency from wind.”
Brexit has also made it less clear what
would happen if the EU decided to stop
energy exports to non-EU countries to
conserve their own supplies. Before
Brexit the interconnector flows between
Britain and continental Europe were
determined by an algorithm to ensure
electricity flowed according to price dif-
ferentials. Now it is conducted manu-
ally, adding to the complexity.
“Instead of being part of the develop-
ment, co-ordination and rules of a
pan-EU grid, we are playing a unilateral
game,” said Helm. “The UK post-Brexit
wants its cake and to eat it — it wants to
benefit from the links to France and to
north European countries, whilst not
having to follow the Internal Energy
Market rules and regulations.”
The interconnectors could also be
used as political bargaining chips, said
Bradshaw. “It may sound a trivial point
but it is not that long ago the French gov-
ernment threatened to switch the power
off to Guernsey because it had a squab-
ble over fishing rights.”
The department for business, energy
and industry insisted the “concerns are
unfounded”, saying “the trade of energy
with our European partners over inter-
connectors is subject to robust regula-
tory and commercial arrangements,
underpinned by International Treaties
with the EU and Norway”.
National Grid said there was “strong
political support” for cross-border co-
‘If the operation. “We don’t see this as a risk,”
said Cordi O’Hara, president of National
great Brexit Grid Ventures. “There is a clear recogni-
game is tion that our interconnectors to Europe
are mutually beneficial.”
taking back But any dependency could drive up
control, costs. In the UK — unlike most other
European nations — interconnectors are
the right owned by businesses in the private sec-
answer is to tor, most of which are protected from
risk through a cap and floor system,
make sure where the government “tops up” reve-
we have nue to a minimum level and collects
excesses over a defined amount.
domestic Bradshaw has concerns over private
generation sector ownership. “One of the lessons of
the energy crisis is that if everything is in
capacity’ private hands it’s harder for govern-
ment to influence control,” he said.
“Things in private ownership have to
deliver a return on investment and a
return to shareholders, and the owners
might shut things down if it’s more prof-
itable to do so,” he added.
But National Grid argues that private
investment has driven “a doubling of
interconnector capacity in the past four
years, with the cap and floor mechanism
preventing companies from taking
excessive profits”. It added: “Intercon-
nectors are just one important part of
the UK’s broader energy mix.”
process to sell a package of the com-
pany’s intellectual property and land by
the end of the month after receiving
indicative bids on Tuesday. Shortlisted
bidders were told they had been chosen
on Thursday, according to four people.
Britishvolt had been planning to build
a £3.8bn gigafactory in Blyth, north-
east England, that would have formed a
keystone of the UK electric car industry
but fell into administration this month
after running out of cash.
If no deal is reached by the end of Jan-
uary, the site will be sold independently
of the intellectual property, which
includes battery technology, and 26
Britishvolt staff.
Recharge Industries, which is also
planning to build a battery plant in the
Australian city of Geelong, has made a
bid of about £30mn. It has shown proof
of funds to EY, and executives from the
company are visiting the Blyth site,
according to two people familiar with
the matter.
The Australian company was
launched in 2021 by Scale Facilitation, a
New York-based investment vehicle
that has backed a handful of start-ups in
the medical technology and green
energy sectors.
With only five days left, EY is working
through bids to evaluate the value on
offer for creditors and the extent to
which the deals can pay off key suppli-
ers that are owed funds and could then
work with the new business.
Taking on the business will be compli-
cated for any buyer because of the huge
cash flow outlays needed either to adopt
Britishvolt’s strategy or to redraw it
from scratch, adding to the challenge for
EY in identifying whether bidders have
access to sufficient funds.
Before it fell into administration this
month the company was seeking close
to £200mn in funding to keep it running
until later this year, when it expects to
receive orders from carmakers.
Britishvolt’s in-house technology is at
a late prototype stage and requires more
funding to commercialise. Several car-
makers and battery experts that have
tested its wares have deemed it impres-
sive, and Mercedes-Benz placed a small
order with the business last year,
according to two people.
Buyers that show they have sufficient
working capital will be hoping to secure
the £100mn grant that the UK govern-
ment had previously pledged to British-
volt, although the eventual buyer is
likely to have to reapply for the money,
according to two people with knowledge
of the process. Covenants on the site in
Blyth require it to be used for a battery
facility.
EY declined to comment.
Additional reporting by Michael O’Dwyer
and Thomas Wilson

Banks Retail

Perella Weinberg banker suspended after raid Wholesaler Bestway bags Sainsbury’s stake
OLAF STORBECK — FRANKFURT
Perella Weinberg suspended a London-
based banker after its European head-
quarters were raided this week as part
of an insider trading probe by German
police and regulators, according to
people familiar with the matter.
German law enforcement suspected
that the Perella Weinberg employee
shared sensitive information about
looming mergers and acquisitions deals
with four German citizens who traded
on the information, officials said.
The insider trading, which can be
punished with up to five years in jail, is
alleged to have occurred between 2017
and 2021. Prosecutors say the deals
could have generated a double-digit
million-euro profit.
A 47-year-old German citizen who has
been accused of trading on the insider
information was arrested in Munich
earlier this month and is in police cus-
tody. Three other individuals, including
the 82-year-old father of the arrested
trader, are under investigation.
The 47-year-old, whom the Financial
Times is not naming for legal reasons, is
a former journalist who became an
executive at German publishers before
starting a communications advisory
business, people familiar with the mat-
ter said.
Perella Weinberg said: “The firm is
Data on forthcoming M&A
deals were allegedly shared
with four Germans who
traded on the information
assisting in an investigation by German
law enforcement authorities. The firm is
not the subject of the investigation, and
there is no suggestion of wrongdoing on
the part of the firm.”
The suspension was first reported by
Manager magazine, a monthly business
publication.
Over the past few years, Perella Wein-
berg, led by former Morgan Stanley
banker Dietrich Becker, has risen to
become one of the leading M&A advis-
ers in Germany. It has been at the centre
of most large-scale transactions in Ger-
many, including the €29bn takeover of
Deutsche Wohnen by Vonovia in 2021,
the €4.5bn takeover of Osram in 2019
and the €59bn asset swap between RWE
and Eon in 2018.
German law enforcement officials,
including the Federal Criminal Police
Office, have been investigating the
alleged insider trading since November
2021 after regulator BaFin flagged sus-
picious trading patterns.
The probe, which involved raids at
eight premises in Germany, the UK and
Austria, was disclosed without naming
Perella Weinberg. BaFin and Frankfurt
prosecutors declined to comment on
the identity of the bank.
The case is the third big insider trad-
ing scandal involving a large financial
institution in Germany over the past
two years. In September 2021, a former
senior funds manager at Union Invest-
ment was sentenced to three-and-a-half
years in jail. Last year, a former Lazard
investment banker who shared confi-
dential information with a trader
received a suspended jail term.
ARJUN NEIL ALIM AND AKILA QUINIO
Retail conglomerate Bestway has
bought a stake worth £193mn in J
Sainsbury, the UK’s second-largest
supermarket chain.
The company, the seventh-largest fami-
ly-owned business in Britain with a
turnover of about £4.5bn, has acquired
a 3.45 per cent holding for investment
purposes, stating it “may look” to buy
more shares “from time to time”.
It was not considering an offer for the
chain, it added, and would be “support-
ive” of the executive management team.
Sainsbury’s said it would engage with
Bestway “in line with our normal inter-
actions with shareholders”.
Shares closed up nearly 5.5 per cent at
252.5p a share, but remain below their
pandemic high of 310p in 2021.
The move from the owner of Costcut-
ter, the cash-and-carry chain, is the lat-
est sign of interest in UK supermarkets
from private capital, following TDR and
the Issa brothers’ purchase of Asda and
the sale of Morrisons to US fund Clay-
ton, Dubilier & Rice. Sainsbury’s has a
number of high-profile investors,
including the Qatar Investment Author-
ity and Czech billionaire Daniel Kre-
tinsky, which together own about a
quarter of shares.
Shore Capital’s Clive Black said the
news highlighted investor interest in UK
supermarkets and the belief that many
of them are underpriced by the stock
market. “If equity capital markets don’t
value the recurring revenue and free
cash generation of supermarkets then
other buckets of capital will,” he said.
Under Takeover Panel rules, Bestway
will not be able to make an offer for
The deal is for a 3.4% holding in the
country’s number two supermarket
Sainsbury’s for six months unless the
company receives an offer from another
suitor. Based on Sainsbury’s share price
at the close on Thursday of 239.4p, the
stake would be valued at about
£193.4mn.
Founded by a British-Pakistani family
in 1963, Bestway is the UK’s largest inde-
pendent wholesaler and largest inde-
pendent community pharmacist. It also
owns Bestway Cement, Pakistan’s sec-
ond-largest cement business, and
United Bank, Pakistan’s third-largest
private bank, which are both listed on
the Karachi stock exchange. In 2014, it
bought the Co-operative Group’s phar-
macy business for £620mn.
Sainsbury’s is Britain’s second-largest
supermarket, with a 15.5 per cent of
share of the grocery market, according
to researcher Kantar.
Over Christmas it reported a 7.1 per
cent increase in sales year on year, and
said that its full-year profit could reach
the top of its guidance at £690mn,
which is still down on the £730mn it
reported the year before.
See Lex
28 January/29 January 2023 ★ FTWeekend 19

COMPANIES & MARKETS

Equities. Doubtful windfall Equities

Intel slides as
Meme stock businesses raise guidance torn
up on ‘macro
$4.7bn since trading frenzy headwinds’
RICHARD WATERS

Intel has taken an axe to its financial

Bonanza from retail investors
has not been accompanied by
performance improvements
JENNIFER HUGHES AND ANDREW
EDGECLIFFE-JOHNSON — NEW YORK
Companies at the centre of the meme
stock mania that began two years ago
have raised a collective $4.7bn from
the hype, according to calculations by
the Financial Times, even as the
windfall has done little to boost their
performance.
The eight stocks have also gained a
combined $7.5bn in market capitalisa-
tion since the retail trading frenzy at the
start of 2021. On January 28 of that year,
popular US broker Robinhood outraged
customers by limiting their ability to
buy those companies’ shares, causing
their prices to suddenly plunge.
The small investors who helped send
a series of mostly consumer names
rocketing 10-fold or more in mere
weeks began with the aim of crushing
hedge funds betting on the companies’
collapse, as well as bolstering once-
beloved brands such as video games
retailer GameStop.
Another consequence of the share
rally was to allow companies including
cinema operator AMC Entertainment
and GameStop to raise new capital,
highlighting how markets that are sup-
posed to reflect corporate fundamentals
can sometimes change them instead.
“Some bubbles do not really translate
themselves into the real economy but
some bubbles do,” said Itay Goldstein,
professor of finance at the University of
Pennsylvania’s Wharton business
school, who now cites meme stocks in
his lectures on the real-world effects of
trading frenzies.
The alacrity with which some
companies used inflated stock prices to
improve their finances “is the
mechanism through which a trading
frenzy can become self-fulfilling”, he
Meme stock craze has 2nd anniversary
Change in share price (%)
GameStop
AMC
Entertainment
Cenntro (formerly
Naked Brands)
Bed Bath
& Beyond
Robinhood limits
purchases of eight
meme stocks
2021
Source: Refinitiv
added. The lesson was to “grab this
opportunity and issue more equity”.
Since its shares soared almost 20-fold
in January 2021, AMC has raised $2.8bn
from sales of equity, new debt and luring
big new investors, according to FT
calculations. Last month, it proposed to
further rejig its capital structure.
AMC has talked up the potential for
recovery following the coronavirus
pandemic but rivals have struggled.
Cineworld, the world’s second-largest
cinema chain, filed for bankruptcy pro-
tection in September and pointedly
lamented its bad luck in not getting the
same meme stock benefit as its rival.
GameStop has raised $1.8bn in the
past two years. By contrast, Bed Bath &
Beyond, another retail investor darling,
has warned of possible bankruptcy and
on Thursday disclosed receiving a notice
of default from bank JPMorgan Chase.
The home goods chain was far slower
to tap shareholders, only raising new
equity late in 2022 after it bought back
$400mn of its shares in 2021 in a bid to
show confidence in a turnround plan.
“The big difference between the
meme frenzy of AMC and the meme
frenzy of Bed Bath & Beyond is the
underlying market timing and condi-
tions are quite different,” said James
Gellert, chief executive of RapidRatings,
a data analytics group that tracks finan-
3,000
2,500
2,000
1,500
1,000
500
0 already on their books.
-500
22 23
cial health. “When AMC and GameStop
were at their height and when AMC
issued more equity, we were in a bull
market with a tremendous amount of
liquidity. Today, we are in a high volatil-
ity environment in the closing hours of a
credit cycle with reduced liquidity.”
AMC boss Adam Aron put it more
bluntly this month when discussing the
collapse of US cinema rival Regal, part of
Cineworld. “If you question why AMC
keeps on raising so much cash: in tough
times companies who don’t, just die,” he
wrote on Twitter.
However, the gap between fundrais-
ing and performance suggests painful
lessons may still lie ahead for meme
stock investors.
GameStop’s fresh funds have helped
it transform net debts of $690mn in
2020 — more than twice its market
capitalisation at that time — into a net
cash pile worth $468mn as of October,
according to S&P Capital IQ data.
Yet it has not produced operating
profits since early 2019 and since it shot
to meme stock fame, a 17 per cent rise in
sales has been matched by a similar
increase in costs, suggesting that posi-
tive returns on its new funds are elusive.
“In an extended bull market period,
companies can survive for a very long
time as unprofitable entities and, as long
as you can raise capital to burn you’re
Blind faith: fine. But at some point, the music stops,”
Gamestop has said Gellert.
not produced It was rational for companies caught
operating up in “the meme mania” to seize the
profits since it chance to raise capital at attractive
shot to meme rates, said Harry Mamaysky, a Colum-
stock fame bia Business School finance professor.
Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg
However, he added, “how much time
they bought themselves” depended on
how much equity they managed to raise
compared with the amount of debt
Alongside GameStop, AMC and Bed
Bath & Beyond, Robinhood’s January 28
2021 buying ban included BlackBerry,
Nokia, audio equipment maker Koss,
retailer Express and lingerie seller
Naked Brands Group, since taken over
by Hong Kong-based electric-vehicle
maker Cenntro Electric.
Naked Brands’ chair and chief
executive, Australian Justin Davis-Rice,
was second only to AMC’s Aron in
spotting the fundraising opportunity.
After raising $50mn selling new
shares in January 2021, Naked raised
that to $183mn in total by July.
During that time, the group
announced a “transformative” appr-
oach to its online unit and sold its loss-
making bricks-and-mortar for NZ$1
($0.64) to Davis-Rice, who also
assumed the business’s debts.
However, in November that year,
Naked issued new shares to Cenntro to
give the Hong Kong group 68 per cent
control. One condition of Cenntro’s
reverse takeover was that the new
‘Some owners inherited at least $280mn cash
bubbles do and no more than $10mn of liabilities.
They also sold the Frederick’s of
not really Hollywood lingerie label to Davis-Rice
translate for A$1 ($0.71) plus $12.6mn to cover its
liabilities while forgiving $9.5mn in
themselves inter-company loans.
into the real Cenntro said it would deliver 20,000
vehicles in 2022. Unaudited first-half
economy figures reported sales of 337 units. Its
but some shares have fallen 90 per cent since the
takeover.
bubbles do’ Additional reporting by Madison Darbyshire
guidance for the first quarter of the year
as the collapse in PC sales and falling
market share in its server chips division
late last year proved even worse than
Wall Street had been expecting.
The news sent its shares down more
than 10 per cent at the start of trading
yesterday.
Chief executive Pat Gelsinger blamed
the latest setback in Intel’s prospects on
“persistent macro headwinds” and a
much sharper chip inventory correction
than it had been expecting.
Intel did not issue financial guidance
for the rest of the year but Gelsinger
held out hope for a rebound in the
second half of 2023 on an economic
recovery in China and improving
demand from large customers.
The chipmaker said it expected
revenue in the current quarter to fall
to $10.5bn-$11.5bn, pointing to an
accelerating decline in its business after
a slump in the second half of 2022.
At the midpoint, the company’s
revenue forecast was nearly $3bn below
analysts’ expectations and implied a 40
per cent tumble from a year before.
The sombre forecast came as Intel
revealed that revenue had fallen 32 per
Cash flow had been
affected and Intel is
‘committed to maintaining
a competitive dividend’
cent in the final months of 2022 to
$14bn compared with expectations of
$14.45bn.
Adjusted earnings per share in the
period were 10 cents, down from $1.15 a
year before and below the 20 cents that
Wall Street had forecast.
The latest figures also pointed to a
sharper deterioration in Intel’s finances,
rekindling worries that it will be forced
to slash its dividend payments.
The company reported negative
adjusted free cash flow for the year of
$4.1bn. It had cut its forecast to a decline
of $2bn-$4bn only three months before.
David Zinsner, chief financial officer,
said that the cash flow had been affected
by the delay of $3bn of subsidies that
had been expected in 2022 and that
Intel was “committed to maintaining a
competitive dividend”.
Most analysts had already cut their
expectations for Intel in recent
weeks, despite the positive reaction to
the launch two weeks ago of a new
generation of server chips designed to
make up lost ground on arch-rival AMD.
Though an important step in reducing
the technology gap that had opened up
between the two companies, most
analysts predicted that it would not be
enough to win back market share and
that Intel’s market position would con-
Our global tinue to slip until it manages to catch up
team gives you
market-moving
in advanced manufacturing with TSMC.
In the latest quarter, revenue from
news and views, Intel’s client-computing group fell 36
24 hours a day
ft.com/markets
per cent to $6.6bn while sales in the data
centre and AI division fell 33 per cent to
$4.3bn.

Commodities Commodities

Chevron’s earnings hit record high despite
slip in fourth quarter and falling oil prices
JUSTIN JACOBS — HOUSTON
Chevron announced record earnings
for 2022 but its fourth-quarter profits
slipped from previous months in a sign
that Big Oil’s cash surge is cooling after
fossil fuel prices retreated from near
all-time highs in the wake of Russia’s
invasion of Ukraine.
The US oil supermajor’s fourth-
quarter profit of $6.4bn was down
sharply from $11.2bn in the third
quarter, well shy of Wall Street
expectations of $8.2bn, according to
estimates compiled by S&P Capital IQ.
Chevron said lower global oil and gas
prices were responsible for most of the
decline in earnings while it also took a
$1.1bn writedown in its international
production business.
The fourth-quarter profit was up
about 25 per cent from the same time a
year earlier.
Chief executive Mike Wirth touted
2022 as a year in which Chevron
“delivered record earnings and cash
flow” at the same time that it was
“increasing investments and growing
US production to a company record”.
Its 2022 profit of $35.5bn comfortably
beat the previous annual record of
$26.9bn in 2011.
Chevron on Wednesday announced a
$75bn share buyback programme, its
largest ever and equivalent to roughly a
fifth of its current market value.
It also increased its quarterly
dividend 6 per cent to $1.51 a share. The
company said it expected to repurchase
about $15bn in shares this year.
The buyback programme defied
President Joe Biden, who has criticised
the industry’s big shareholder returns
“at a time of war”, arguing companies
should instead be spending more to
‘Doing it all’: Chevron maintains a
large presence in the Gulf of Mexico
increase supply to help bring down fuel
prices at the pump.
“For a company that claimed not too
long ago that it was ‘working hard’
to increase oil production, handing
out $75bn to executives and wealthy
shareholders sure is an odd way to show
it,” Abdullah Hasan, a White House
spokesperson, said on Twitter.
Pierre Breber, Chevron’s chief
financial officer, defended the buybacks
in an interview with the Financial
Times, pointing to sharply rising spend-
ing and output in the Permian Basin, a
huge oilfield in Texas and New Mexico,
saying the company was “doing it all”.
Chevron’s results kick off Big Oil’s
earnings season, in which the western
oil supermajors — which also include
ExxonMobil, Shell, BP and TotalEner-
gies — are expected to report a record
combined profit haul of about $200bn
in 2022. Exxon reports on Tuesday.
But oil prices have fallen from the
highs of last summer, in part on worries
about a potential economic downturn,
and natural gas prices have fallen even
further this winter. Brent crude was
trading at about $87 a barrel yesterday
down from nearly $130 in June.
ICE to launch ‘insurance’ of London
gas contract against EU price cap
PHILIP STAFFORD — LONDON
ALICE HANCOCK — BRUSSELS
Intercontinental Exchange has
unveiled plans to launch a London
natural gas benchmark after warning
that the upcoming EU price cap could
disrupt trading on its main hub in
continental Europe.
The exchanges operator said yesterday
that it will debut the London-based gas
contract on February 20, five days after
the controversial EU cap comes into
force.
The move comes after ICE warned last
year that energy traders would have to
stump up billions of dollars in extra
margin payments when the cap comes
into place.
EU energy ministers agreed on the
price limit on the derivatives price of gas
traded in Amsterdam before Christmas
when the bloc was reeling from a
historic surge in energy costs.
“ICE’s purpose is to create markets to
allow our customers to manage their
risk and we have a duty to our custom-
ers to provide solutions to the problems
they face,” said Trabue Bland, senior
vice-president of futures exchanges.
The continental European market,
known as the Dutch Title Transfer Facil-
ity (TTF), is the region’s main centre for
trading and setting the price of gas but
became a totemic issue as politicians
tried to find ways to insulate consumers
from a repeat of soaring energy prices.
Bland said the exchange would aim to
preserve the market structure as best as
possible while it implements the cap on
‘We have a duty to our
customers to provide
solutions to the
problems they face’
TTF in Amsterdam. “Simultaneously,
we are preparing an alternative venue in
London to act as an insurance option for
customers if the [cap] prevents them
from trading and adequately managing
their risk exposure,” he added.
ICE said that gas traded in London
would still be delivered to the existing
Dutch facility.
EU ministers settled on a cap of €180
per megawatt hour on prices of
wholesale gas, which will only come into
action when prices hit that level for
three consecutive days.
Prices must also be €35/MWh above
an average of global liquefied natural
gas prices for three days in order for the
cap to be triggered.
Prices of gas in Europe spiked to
record levels last summer after the
market struggled to price the impact
of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and
scorching temperatures.
Several large energy companies were
forced to seek billions of euros from
their governments in emergency funds.
Brussels has said it could consider
including off-exchange trades within
the scope of the cap at a later date but
several analysts have warned this would
be nearly impossible to police.
Henning Gloystein, director of energy,
climate and resources at Eurasia Group,
said creating a shadow exchange was an
“obvious” move for ICE as a “price cap is
inherently against the DNA of an
exchange”.
But, he added, the new contract could
struggle to attract sufficient trading
volumes and it risked a further rush of
traders into the unregulated over-the-
counter market.
20 ★ FTWeekend 28 January/29 January 2023

COMPANIES & MARKETS

The day in the markets

On Wall Street
Sky is the limit as SPDR What you need to know

enjoys 30th anniversary 3 Wall Street stocks tick upwards as core

inflation edges higher
3 Fed’s preferred measure of price
Semiconductor stocks have climbed in 2023
Philadelphia Semiconductor index
growth advances 0.3% as forecast
3 European equities edge higher while 4,000
US Treasuries slide and dollar rises

Jennifer funds were then — and still are — the

behemoth of the investing industry.
and for high-yield bonds,” she said. The
industry is also enjoying another trend
Wall Street stocks rose yesterday after
the US Federal Reserve’s preferred 3,500

Hughes But SPDR and ETFs offered something

different. Back in 1993, the Boston
Herald described the new product as
“part stock, part mutual fund, part index
product, part S&P 500”.
that vindicates its success: a rising
number of mutual funds are being
converted into ETFs.
Some 35 funds, worth a combined
$55bn, have made the switch in the last
measure of inflation inched higher in line
with expectations while consumer
spending declined for the second
consecutive month. 3,000
Wall Street’s benchmark S&P 500

P
icture the setting: Bill Clinton
has been president for just
over a week, jeans are worn
baggy and Whitney Houston
is topping the charts with “I
Will Always Love You”.
The year is 1993 and a big change in
financial markets and fund
management is being launched with the
hoisting of a giant inflatable spider over
the trading floor of the American Stock
Exchange in downtown Manhattan.
The stunt was to mark the debut 30
years ago of State Street Global Advisors’
S&P 500 Depository Receipt, or SPDR,
on January 29 1993.
It was not the first exchange traded
fund — there was a Canadian one
launched on the Toronto Stock
Exchange in 1990. But it was SPDR that
sparked the development of the huge
ETF industry and led the way since.
The web of US-listed ETFs is now
worth $6.5tn according to SSGA. That’s
roughly two-thirds of the global total.
And SSGA’s initial fund is still the biggest,
at $355bn.
Activity in SPY — its ticker — is even
more impressive: an average $39bn in
trades daily and towards the end of last
year, its volume was almost three times
that of mighty Apple.
Put another way, more than half of all
S&P 500 constituents are each worth less
than the volume of SPY trading on a
typical day. A SSGA survey found 40 per
cent of investors say they own an ETF in
their portfolio,
SPDR remained a financial minnow
for years after launch compared with the
size of the mutual fund universe. Mutual
Being exchange traded, they allow two years, according to Morningstar. The added 0.4 per cent and the tech-heavy
investors to buy and sell units during the conversions follow a rule change from Nasdaq Composite gained 0.7 per cent.
trading day while their rivals offered one the Securities and Exchange Commission Shares in Intel retreated after the 2,500
single price after each day’s close. in 2020 that lowered the costs and eased chipmaker said revenue in the current
The upstarts also charge a fraction of the difficulties of the move. quarter was forecast to come in about
the fees demanded by mutuals and incur Californian boutique Guinness $3bn below analysts’ expectations.
fewer taxes, too. Atkinson was the first in March 2021 and The moves in equity markets came as 2,000
It took time for these tax advantages to bigger names have followed, including December’s core personal consumption
draw in the frequent traders for whom funds offered by the likes of JPMorgan, index, which omits energy and food 2021 22 23
they’re most useful and for professional Neuberger Berman and Franklin inflation, increased 0.3 per cent as Source: Bloomberg
investors to realise ETFs could work for Templeton. Mutual fund titan Fidelity is expected after rising 0.2 per cent month
them as trading and hedging tools as well in the process of converting six funds. on month in November.
“It seems like I get asked about the Yet real consumer spending fell 0.3 per pressure with the yield on the 10-year US Stoxx Europe 600 gained 0.3 per cent
concept of conversion at least once a cent following a 0.2 per cent decline the Treasury rising 4 basis points to 3.53 per while Frankfurt’s Xetra Dax and London’s
The head of distribution week every week now compared with previous month, suggesting to Capital cent after the inflation figures were FTSE 100 edged up 0.1 per cent.
said last week that a once a month not so long ago,” said Economics’ chief North America published. The US Dollar index, a measure of the
Richard Kerr, partner and funds economist Paul Ashworth that the US is US equities had rallied on Thursday currency’s strength against a basket of its
private equity ETF could specialist at law firm K&L Gates. “on the precipice of a recession and may after gross domestic product for the peers, was up 0.2 per cent.
eventually be created Despite the success of ETFs and the already have fallen off the ledge”. fourth quarter of 2022 came in ahead of Brent crude, the global oil benchmark,
recent conversions, they still trail the US Although still near a multi-decade high, projections, rising at an annualised pace fell 1 per cent to $86.54 a barrel, erasing
mutual fund universe in size. Mutual headline US inflation fell to its lowest of 2.9 per cent. earlier gains.
as being the cheap investment vehicle funds managed some $27tn of assets at level in more than a year in December. Investors firmly expect the Fed to raise In Asia, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index
for mom-and-pop investors that they the end of 2021, according to industry Yet Fed chair Jay Powell has insisted rates by a quarter percentage point next rose 0.5 per cent, Japan’s benchmark
were conceived as. But the industry has body the Investment Company Institute. core inflation “often gives a more week, marking a slowdown from the 0.5 Nikkei 225 Average increased 0.1 per cent
since grown like topsy. However, ETFs are faster growing. accurate indicator of where overall percentage point move implemented in and Seoul’s Kospi index gained 0.7 per
One reason for that is the ability of Take equity ones. Net inflows into inflation is headed”. December. cent. Markets in China were closed for the
fund providers to innovate, launching a these have contrasted with outflows US government bonds remained under Across the Atlantic, the region-wide lunar new year holiday. George Steer
myriad of ETFs allowing investors to from their mutual fund rivals each year
gain exposure to an array of assets, since 2006, according to Bank of
including commodities and corporate America research. Markets update
bonds. Inflows of more than$500bn last year
There are even ETFs designed for use in the US were the second-best on record,
as short-term trading tools offering extra in spite of the S&P 500 suffering its worst
leverage for positive and negative bets. year since 2008, losing 19 per cent. US Eurozone Japan UK China Brazil
For those in the industry, the sky At last year’s relative growth rate, Stocks S&P 500 Eurofirst 300 Nikkei 225 FTSE100 Shanghai Comp Bovespa
remains the limit. At an event to mark equity ETFs could overtake mutual Level 4071.56 1795.01 27382.56 7765.15 3264.81 112363.33
the 1993 anniversary last week, Sue funds by 2036, BofA reckoned. % change on day 0.27 0.23 0.07 0.05 0.76 -1.59
Thompson, SSGA’s head of distribution A sharp speeding up of conversions Currency $ index (DXY) $ per € Yen per $ $ per £ Rmb per $ Real per $
for SPDR exchange traded funds in the could change that pace. The latest trend Level 101.972 1.084 129.975 1.236 6.775 5.094
Americas, suggested a private equity of mutual fund switching only amplifies % change on day 0.131 -0.092 -0.368 0.000 0.000 0.204
ETF could eventually be created. how far the upstarts have come. Govt. bonds 10-year Treasury 10-year Bund 10-year JGB 10-year Gilt 10-year bond 10-year bond
“Remember that ‘it can’t be done’ was Yield 3.526 2.238 0.480 3.320 2.943 12.727
what people thought about ETFs for gold jennifer.hughes@ft.com Basis point change on day 2.450 2.700 1.980 0.800 0.000 0.900
World index, Commods FTSE All-World Oil - Brent Oil - WTI Gold Silver Metals (LMEX)
Level 429.15 86.75 80.10 1932.45 23.71 4403.50
% change on day 0.27 -0.82 -1.12 0.09 1.20 0.42
Yesterday's close apart from: Currencies = 16:00 GMT; S&P, Bovespa, All World, Oil = 17:00 GMT; Gold, Silver = London pm fix. Bond data supplied by Tullett Prebon.

Main equity markets

S&P 500 index Eurofirst 300 index FTSE 100 index
4160 1840 8000

4000 1760 7680

3840 1680 7360

| | | | | | | | |
3680 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
1600 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 7040 | | | | | | | | | | |

Nov 2023 Jan Nov 2023 Jan Nov 2023 Jan

Biggest movers
% US Eurozone UK
American Express 10.80 B. Sabadell 5.24 Sainsbury (j) 5.47
Tesla 8.68 Saipem 4.50 Persimmon 2.56
Ups

L3harris 7.59 Societe Generale 4.16 Auto Trader 2.16

Robert Half Int 4.12 Fresen.med.care 3.81 Unite 2.02
Aptiv 4.09 Casino Guichard 3.30 Segro 1.96
%
Intel -6.83 Airbus -3.79 Rolls-royce Holdings -2.89
Hasbro -6.62 Dsm -2.74 Antofagasta -2.22
Downs

Eastman Chemical -5.47 Kone -2.25 Jd Sports Fashion -1.70

Kla -5.01 Dassault Systemes -2.19 Flutter Entertainment -1.54
Colgate-palmolive -4.89 Pernod Ricard -2.00 Diageo -1.44
Prices taken at 17:00 GMT Based on the constituents of the FTSE Eurofirst 300 Eurozone
All data provided by Morningstar unless otherwise noted.

Wall Street Europe London

Credit card issuer American Express Sweden’s Husqvarna jumped on news Casual clothes group Superdry dived
jumped to the top of the S&P 500 after that Bosch had increased its stake in the after warning that it expected to “break
offering an upbeat outlook for this year. outdoor power products manufacturer to even” in its fiscal 2023 year, having
It forecast a rise in earnings per share 12 per cent. previously forecast profit of up to £20mn.
of $11 to $11.40 for 2023, comfortably This move was aimed at strengthening For the half year ending October 29, it
topping Wall Street estimates of $10.52, the battery alliance between the two posted a pre-tax loss of £17.7mn, hit by
and planned to boost its quarterly companies, said the German weakness in its wholesale division.
dividend by 15 per cent, beginning in the multinational. J Sainsbury jumped to the top of the
first quarter. Husqvarna, which counts Flymo among FTSE 100 index following news that
Toymaker Hasbro sank after admitting its brands, said it welcomed Bosch’s Costcutter owner Bestway had bought
to a “challenging holiday consumer purchase although it remained subject to shares in the supermarket chain,
environment” and saying it would be regulatory approval. representing 3.45 per cent stake.
cutting staff by 15 per cent this year. Sweden’s Hennes & Mauritz retreated Bestway said it intended “to hold its
Preliminary fourth-quarter results after the world’s second-largest clothing shares in Sainsbury’s for investment
pointed to a 17 per cent year-on-year fall retailer posted earnings considerably purposes” but “may look to make further
in revenue of $1.68bn. below analysts’ estimates. market purchases . . . from time to time”.
Crypto-friendly lender Silvergate For the quarter ended November, Guarantor loans provider Amigo
Capital fell after announcing that it had operating profit tumbled 87 per cent year retreated after revealing that, while it had
suspended dividend payments on some on year to SKr821mn ($79.6mn), missing “received a number of expressions of
of its preferred stock “in order to consensus forecasts by a whopping 78 interest” to support its capital raise, it had
preserve capital”. per cent. yet to reach “the targeted £45mn of
This came just weeks after Silvergate Helena Helmersson, chief executive, equity funding”.
disclosed that its digital assets had fallen said the “decision to wind down the Amigo, which has been embroiled in a
drastically in the wake of a downturn in business in Russia, which was an tussle over compensation for historic mis-
crypto markets last year. important and profitable market . . . had a selling, had its “scheme of arrangement”
Lodged at the bottom of the S&P 500 significant negative impact on our sanctioned by the High Court in May but
index was chipmaker Intel after missing results”. this rescue plan was conditional on the
analysts’ estimates by a large margin. Serie A football club Lazio rallied in completion of a capital raise by May 26
Credit Suisse said the chipmaker, anticipation of gaining a spot in next this year.
burdened by high capital expenditure, season’s lucrative Champions League Amigo warned that, if the capital raise
had been hit by weaker PC and server tournament after Juventus’s recent was not achieved, there was the
chips sales, paving the way for a potential points deduction and beating AC Milan possibility of “an orderly wind-down of
dividend cut. Ray Douglas this week. Ray Douglas the business”. Ray Douglas
28 January/29 January 2023 ★ FTWeekend 21

MARKET DATA

WORLD MARKETS AT A GLANCE FT.COM/MARKETSDATA

Change during previous day’s trading (%)
S&P 500 Nasdaq Composite Dow Jones Ind FTSE 100 FTSE Eurofirst 300 Nikkei Hang Seng FTSE All World $ $ per € $ per £ ¥ per $ £ per € Oil Brent $ Sep Gold $

-0.092% -0.368% -0.228%

No change
0.27% 0.70% 0.17% 0.05% 0.23% 0.07% 0.54% 0.27% 1.23% 0.09%
Stock Market movements over last 30 days, with the FTSE All-World in the same currency as a comparison
AMERICAS EUROPE ASIA
Dec 28 - - Index All World Dec 28 - Jan 27 Index All World Dec 28 - Jan 27 Index All World Dec 28 - Jan 27 Index All World Dec 28 - Jan 27 Index All World Dec 28 - Jan 20 Index All World

S&P 500 New York S&P/TSX COMP Toronto FTSE 100 London Xetra Dax Frankfurt Nikkei 225 Tokyo Kospi Seoul
4,071.56 20,686.58 15,150.03
7,765.15 27,382.56 2,356.73 2,395.26
3,829.25 7,497.19 14,071.72 26,405.87
19,284.10
Day 0.27% Month 6.36% Year -9.04% Day -0.02% Month 6.12% Year -1.87% Day 0.05% Month 3.91% Year 3.06% Day 0.11% Month 0.61% Year NaN% Day 0.07% Month 3.70% Year -0.21% Day 0.63% Month 1.83% Year -11.54%

Nasdaq Composite New York IPC Mexico City FTSE Eurofirst 300 Europe Ibex 35 Madrid Hang Seng Hong Kong FTSE Straits Times Singapore
11,593.33 55,103.49 1,795.01 9,060.20 22,688.90
3,394.21
10,353.23 49,517.86 1,700.26 8,318.30 19,741.14 3,257.70
Day 0.70% Month 12.02% Year -13.14% Day -0.40% Month 8.92% Year 7.41% Day 0.23% Month 6.30% Year -0.81% Day 0.27% Month 9.55% Year 5.50% Day 0.54% Month 15.80% Year -7.67% Day 0.50% Month 4.19% Year 1.89%

Dow Jones Industrial New York Bovespa São Paulo CAC 40 Paris FTSE MIB Milan Shanghai Composite Shanghai BSE Sensex Mumbai
7,097.21 26,435.75 3,264.81
113,007.69
34,005.86 109,734.60
6,573.47 3,068.41 60,910.28
33,241.56 24,056.55 59,330.90
Day 0.17% Month 2.33% Year -3.12% Day -1.59% Month 3.53% Year 0.64% Day 0.02% Month 8.34% Year 2.14% Day 0.83% Month 10.81% Year -0.67% Day 0.76% Month 5.08% Year -2.87% Day -1.45% Month -2.04% Year 1.25%

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24
Tw i t te r : @F T Lex
Sainsbury’s/Bestway:
shrewd for thought
Starting from a corner shop in 1963, Sir
Anwar Pervez built Bestway into one of
Britain’s largest wholesaling businesses.
That underpins the expectation that
some industrial logic lies behind the
family-o-ow
wned company’s surprise
acquisition of a £200mn holding in
Sainsbury’s yesterday.
Announcing the 3.45 per cent stake,
Bestway said it had no plans to launch
a takeover but looked forward “to
supporting the executive management
team”. Shares in Sainsbury’s rallied
up to 5 per cent.
A purely passive investment might
have some merit. Sainsbury’s raised
its full-year guidance after strong
Christmas trading. Its tilt to better-
value food in recent years is helping
fend off tough competition from Aldi
and Lidl. The discounters took market
share from recently acquired Asda and
Morrisons. Those two are constrained
by high debt-servicing costs, which
should support remaining listed
groups Sainsbury’s and Tesco.
After a couple of years when returns
for Tesco and Sainsbury’s lagged
behind the FTSE All Share, Sainsbury’s
has outperformed since last October.
It is up almost 40 per cent. A valuation
gap with Tesco has closed. Both trade
at just under twelve times forward
earnings, according to Refinitiv.
Bestway should come under
some pressure itself. Like most UK
wholesaling groups, it is active in
convenience retail via its Costcutter
chain. Competition eased because of
consolidation led by Tesco’s acquisition
of wholesaler Booker in 2017, but has
returned. Nisa, acquired by Co-Oo-Opp
in 2017, pledged to lower prices at
the end of last year.
When Tesco acquired Booker, it
estimated it would make cost savings
of about £175mn a year, largely in
procurement and distribution. Booker
also managed to take market share as
a result. As rising costs put the squeeze
on every part of food supply chains,
greater collaboration between Bestway
and Sainsbury’s cannot be ruled out.
Chipmaking gear:
ban plan
Blockades often rely on the
co-o
o-opperation of allies. The US has
every reason to want Japan and
the Netherlands to join its ban on
exporting advanced semiconductor
machinery to China.
But governments are reluctant
to undermine their tech champions.
Expect close scrutiny of the fine print
once an agreement is concluded.
The Netherlands is expected to
expand curbs on its largest chip
equipment maker ASML, which would
prevent it from selling some of its
machines with extreme lithography
tech — crucial to making the latest
chips. Japan could set similar limits
on Nikon and Tokyo Electron.
For ASML, the damage will be
shortlived. It has no competitors and a
long waiting list. Any sales lost to China
would quickly be made up elsewhere to
companies such as Intel and TSMC.
This year, ASML’s net sales are
expected to grow over 25 per cent,
faster than last year’s 13 per cent. China
accounts for about 15 per cent of sales.
China is much more important to
Cold snap hits Asia
Minimum 2-metre surface
temperature on Jan 22
-45 0C 45
Moscow
More than 120 people
in Afghanistan have
died as a result of
freezing temperatures
over the past fortnight
Source: Noaa GFS
Carbon counter: warming to greener heating
Annualised cost of new heating technologies, when switching from a gas boiler
in an efficient, owner-occupied house (£ per year, 2020 real)
Capex Transition cost Opex
Ground Air source Gas
source heat boiler
heat pump pump
2021
FT graphic Source: Aurora
What a to do when a boiler shrugs off
its mortr al
a coil? Replace, or switch to a
heat
a pump? It is a crucial a question fo f r
households looking to sav a e money,
and fof r governments. In th t e UK,
28mn homes account fo f r ab
a out 15 per
cent of tht e country r ’s emissions.
If carb
r on were no issue, th t e boiler
would be th t e waya to go. The
inv
n estment is lower: £3,000
compared with t £8,000 fo f r a pump,
even including a subsidy. y The latatter
maya ala so require more insulat a ion,
bigger radiat a ors or underfl f oor heata ing
The heat a pump is more eff fficient,
delivering th t ree times th t e energrgy
required to run it. But electricity ty, at
34p per kW k h on price cap levels, is
t ree times dearer th
th t an gas.
While th t e pump might be ab a le to
compress th t at
a by using power when it
is cheaper, r litt
ttle is to be sav
a ed on
running costs: probab a ly £1,200-
£1,300 fo f r botht technologies. That a is
lower-tech chip equipment makers
such as Nikon and Tokyo Electron.
It accounts for more than a quarter
of sales for the latter. Local chipmakers
use gear running on older standards
that Japanese makers provide.
Tokyo Electron has downgraded
its full-year earnings forecast. In
November, it said consolidated net
profit for the year to March was
expected to drop 8 per cent, against the
previous guidance of a 20 per cent rise.
ASML’s shares are up a quarter this
year and trade at 33 times forward
earnings, a more than 40 per cent
premium to Japanese peers.
That gap should widen further. A
slump in the chip industry looms as
demand for consumer products drops.
Meanwhile, raw materials prices and
spending on research and development
— which companies must maintain to
keep up with rapidly changing tech —
remain high. Expect lower dividends
and share price upside.
Amex:
plastic fantastic
f US consumers are worried about the
economy, they are not showing it. Even
as some of the bigg
ggeest names in finance
and technology announced fresh job
cuts, Americans have continued to
spend at a brisk pace.
At American Express, shoppers
made over $1.5tn in purchases on their
cards last year, a 21 per cent jump from
2021. Full-year revenue net of interest
expense at the credit card group was up
a quarter at $52.8bn, a high. Executives
said the good times should continue.
Amex is expecting revenue to increase
Tongulakh
R U S S I A
Mohe
Beijing
C H I N A
Sign up for The Climate Graphic: Explained newsletter ft.com/climate
★ 28 January/29 January 2023
Smart money is
still wary of the
equity revival
Fuel cost
1,800
1,600
Katie Martin
The Long View
1,400
1,200
1,000
800
600 hatever the conspiracy l u s a f t e r t h e o u t b re a k o f Cov i d h a d being back to normal, don’t worry about
400 t h e o r i s t s t e l l yo u , n o p u l l e d a l o t o f “c r a p” o n t o s t o c k it’,” Karniol-Tambour said. “We don’t
200 one plugs a microchip in exchanges. He said the oil fund’s 2022 think that’s right.”
0
to your brain at the reg- performance — a 14 per cent decline in Bridgewater’s flagship Pure Alpha
Ground Air source Gas istration desk of the total
tot al — was one of its wors orstt run
runss sin
since
ce fund churned out a gain of 9.5 pe perr cent
source heat boiler World Economic Forum in Davos to inception, but it would have been worse last year, roughly in line with its long-
heat pump pump
ensure perfect harmony of thought. if it had not decided to avoid some of run average and a performance that
2030
I t i s p o s s i b l e t h e m i c ro c h i p s w e re those new market listings. l o n g - o n ly a s s e t m a n a g e r s c a n o n ly
inserted this year at the Global Collabo- Now, Tangen said, a good deal of the d r e a m o f . T h e r i s e c o u l d h av e b e e n
f ffor one year only; boilers and heat a r a t i o n V i l l a g e — a “ p u r p o s e - d r i ve n froth had been blown off the markets, more if Bridgewater had chosen to jump
pumps last a long time. The bett t er metaverse” — just up the main street but investors should accept that the on board the market rally in the fourth
choice will be determined by relat a ive from the conference centre, but sadly, Fed may very well restart rate rises and quarter. Instead it stuck to its view that
competitiveness of gas and power. this correspondent’s schedule did not t h a t a ve r y l o n g , s l ow g r i n d o f l ow the impact of already aggressive rate
Removing distort r ions would be a permit time to find out. returns lies ahead. rises has not yet play ayeed out, and that
place to startr . Electricityt is weighed Nevertheless, the consensus around Ag a i n , w i t h o r w i t h o u t t h e m i n d - markets are just too rosy.
down by levies th t at
a hava e litt
ttle to do the direction of global markets in the controlling microchip, big money man- Jonathan Hausman, senior managing
with
t reala cost — £120 on th t e av
a eragae c o m f o r t a b ly c a r p e t e d c o r r i d o r s o f agers agree this is a very likely sounding director in global investment strategy at
annual a bill. Lop th
t ata off
f and tht e power at the ann annual
ual getget-to -toget
gether
her ththis
is the $250bn Ontario Teachers’ Pension
diff
fferential
a will narrow. month was striking. In short, the think- Plan, is relatively optimistic. For OTPP,
Heat a pumps are green and gett t ing ing among managers of serious money
The Fed ma
The may
ay very wel elll t h e a n s w e r i s t o t r y t o l o o k b e yo n d
greener.r Buildings are not subj b ect to is: don’t believe the hype. res
esta
tart
rt rat
atee ri
risesess, me
mean
aniningg short-term conflicting signals and hunt
any carbr on price but accounting fo f r Markets have certainly started 2023 f o r m o re d u r a b l e b e t s i n t h e l i ke s o f
n. t eir emissions at
th a th
t e ETS price of in ebullient form, with a gain of around
a very lo
long
ng,, slo
low
ow grgrin
indd of inf
infras
rastru
trucctur
turee and real esta state.
te. It ma
may ay
£80/
0 tonne would add £200 to th t e 6 per cent in the MSCI World stocks low
lo
ow ret
etur
turnsns lilies
es ah
ahea
eadd sound b oring and basic, but b onds —
a erag
av a e bill. Even with t tht e current index before January is even over. That both corporate and sovereign — are also
a mix, pump households would pay a takes the gain since the lowest point in outcome that a lot of investors are reluc- more alluring now yields have pushed
less th
t an hala f th
t at
a . The rising of th t e October to a stonking 20 per cent. tant to take on board. Investors broadly higher and default risks still seem low.
carb
r on price and th t e greening of th t e Not for the first time, this is fuelled know that this time is different, that But he also agreed that investors are
grid would widen th t e gap. Pumps p r i m a r i ly by h o p e s t h a t i n f l a t i o n 2022 taught everyone that they didn’t working hard to convince themselves
may
a not be th t e only decarb r onisat a ion appears to have come off the boil and understand inflation after all, and that t h a t m a r ke t s a re i n re c ove r y m o d e .
tech in town but th t ey can help that the US Federal Reserve might the Fed can stay hawkish longer than “The mood is schizophrenic,” he said.
start
r ing now.
w The government should therefore be minded to scale back, then you can remain solvent. But they are “Among the cognoscenti, there’s a sense
extend its warmest support r. stop, then even potentially reverse the still struggling to shake off the muscle that the institutions — the Fed and the
i n t e re s t r a t e r i s e s t h a t b l a s t e d i n t o memory built up from previous cycles. European Central Bank — are really in
many fund managers’ returns last year. “We think we are shifting from one this for the long haul, not to be the ones
in a range of 15 per cent to 17 per cent Futures markets show that traders see a type of environment that ex exiisted for that let inflation rip. Your heart says ‘I
in 2023 and earnings to grow between near-20 per cent chance of rate cuts by 40 -plus years,” said Karen Karniol- think this is going to be OK’ but your
11 per cent and 16 per cent. the end of the year. Tambour, co-chief investment officer head says ‘I know these guys are playing
Even so, Amex shares, despite a near Just becbecaause this narrative has bee beenn for sustainability at Bridgewater Associ- for keeps’.”
11 per cent rise yesterday, are flat over wrong on several occasions since the ates, the hedge fund behemoth. “We As 2022 wound to a close, the notion
the past 12 months. The stock trades at start of 2022, it is not necessarily wrong think we are moving to an environment that central bankers could quash a mar-
almost 16 times forward earnings, now. But it was hard to find anyone in where inflation will be more volatile, kets resurgence this year was seen as a
twice that of rival credit card the Swiss Alps who was buying it. more entrenched.” small possibility, high-impact tail risk.
companies such as Synchrony Nicolai Tangen, head of Norway’s That will demand that monetary pol- But it is clear that the smart money is
Financial and Discover Financial enormous $1.3tn oil fund, is among the icy is tighter for longer, even despite the taking this prospect seriously. If you are
Services. The premium reflects Amex’s party poopers. With a dash of Nordic damage this may inflict on the real econ- rushing headlong in to this rally, this
focus on more affluent consumers and straight talking, he told me the fizzing omy, and on jobs. should be enough to give you pause.
business travellers. market conditions that stemmed from “ T h e m a r ke t h a s h a d a c o u p l e o f
The meagre share price gains sugg ggeest the global injection of monetary stimu- months of saying ‘maybe we’re back to katie.martin@ ft.com
the market remains apprehensive over
credit card companies, even high-e -en
nd
ones. At the top of investors’ concerns
are credit quality, higher funding costs
and rising marketing expenses.
Of these, credit quality looks to be
the lesser worry. Borrowers at least
30 days behind in their loan payments
increased slightly to 1 per cent from
0.7 per cent a year ago. The company
also increased its loan loss reserves by
$617mn. But keep in mind that these
credit reserves end up getting released
if loan delinquencies stay low.
New card accounts grew by 12.5mn
at Amex last year. That did not come
cheap. Expenses rose 24 per cent to
$44.1bn last year. Within this, rewards
for customers increased 27 per cent
while spending on services for
members was 48 per cent higher.
Amex will need to make sure it does
not get carried away in the fight for
cardholders if it hopes to boost its
share price.
Lex on the web
For notes on today’s stories
go to www.
w ft.com/lex
On Jan 18, temperatures
in the Siberian village
fell to -62.7C, the lowest
level recorded in Russia
since 2002
Parts of Japan
suffered record
snowfall this week
Maniwa
Temperatures in
northeastern China
hit a record low of
-53C on Jan 22
Saturday 28 January / Sunday 29 January 2023

Darren Aronofsky The director on his Oscar-nominated ‘The Whale’ — PAGE 13

D
Follow us on Instagram @ft_weekend

the other end of the ide ological sp e c - preserving them from destruction.”
trum. For the past eight and a half Gandhi’s efforts to maintain religious
ye a r s , t h e H i n d u r i g h t h a s b e e n i n harmony enraged the head of the RSS,
power in India, and Gandhi’s philoso- an intense bearded man named MS Gol-
phy of non-violence and his commit- walkar. A police report of an RSS meet-
ment to interfaith harmony are anath- ing in Delh
elhii in Decem
cembber 194
19477 tel
tells
ls us
ema to it. While he is still officially the that, “referring to Muslims”, Golwalkar
“father of the nation”, with his birthday remarked that “no power on earth could
a national holiday and his face on the keep the
them m in Hin
Hindus
dustan
tan.. Th
Theey woul
ould d
currency notes, the public mood has have to quit the country. Mahatma Gan-
turned hostile to Gandhi. dhi wanted to keep the Muslims in India
so that the Congress may profit by their
To understand why Gandhi is increas- votes at the time of election. But, by that
ingly unpopular in his homeland, one time, not a single Muslim will be left in
must go back to the circumstances of his Ind
India
ia . . . Mahatm
Mahatmaa Gan
Gandhi
dhi cou
could
ld not
death 75 years ago. He was murdered on mislead them any longer. We have the
January 30 1948 by Nathuram Godse, a means whereby such men can be imme-
m e m b e r o f a s e c re t i ve p a r a m i l i t a r y diately silenced, but it is our tradition
organisation called the Rash-
triyya Swa
tri Swayayams
amseevak San Sangh.
gh.
Founded in 1925, the RSS
believed — and still believes
— in the construc tion of a
Hindu theocratic state in
India. Its leaders and cadres
insist that demographic
superiority and the Indic ori-
gin of their faith makes Hin-
dus natural and pe perrmanent
rulers of the land. They have
a particular suspicion of
Muslims and Christians, on
account of the fact that their
religions originated outside
India and their sacre d
shrines are outside India too.
Gandhi, on the other hand, held the The main attacks on him
view that India belonged equally to all now come from the Hindu
its citizens, regardless of their religious
affiliation. After the subcontinent was right. His philosophy is
partitioned in August 1947, separating anathema to it
Hindu-majority India and Muslim-
dominated Pakistan, he worked strenu-
o u s ly t o s t o p v i o l e n c e a g a i n s t t h o s e not to be ini
inimic
mical
al to Hin
Hindus
dus.. If we ar
aree
Muslims who remained in India, going compelled, we will have to resort to that
on a fast in Kolkata and later in Delhi. course too.”
Gandhi’s fast in Delhi was conducted in A few weeks later, Gandhi was mur-
a home opposite the office of the British dered in Delhi by the RSS’s Godse. The
High Commission. organisation was immediately banned,
Having watched events unfold, the and Golwalkar himself put in prison.
deputy
dep uty hig
high h com
commismissio sioner
ner wr wroteote in a After it agreed to abide by the Indian
report to London that “day in and day constitution, the RSS was unbanned. In
out, Muslims of all classes of society, the decades that followed, it steadily
many of whom had also suffered per- built up its following across India. In def-
sonal bereavements in the recent distur- erence to the status that Gandhi then
bances, came to invoke [Gandhi’s] help. enjoyed, its members even occasionally
Normally too fearful even to leave their praised him, albeit merely as one patriot
homes, they came to him because they among many. The gulf between his ide-
had learned and believed that he had als and their ideology remained vast.
their interests at heart and was the only
real force in the Indian Union capable of Continued on page 2

India against Gandhi

alcohol was both a source of nutrition
He was the ‘father of the nation’, the hero who led the struggle for and an aid to dance and music), and of
his exaltation of celibacy, which Elwin
thought damaging to everyone.
freedom against British rule. But 75 years after his assassination, his Elwin’s strictures were mild, even
timid, when compared with those of the
Marxist intellectuals of Kolkata, whom I
legacy is being rewritten by those in power. By Ramachandra Guha encountered in the 1980s when begin-
ning my academic career. These schol-

B
ars identified with the Naxalites, a band
of insurgents who were inspired by Mao
o r n i n 1 95 8, a d e c a d e a f t e r This was the autobiography of Verrier Clockwise from Zedong and who vandalised and
Gandhi
Gan dhi’’s dea
death,th, I gr
grew
ew up in Elwin, an Oxford scholar who became above: Mahatma destroy
royeed Gandhi statues where reveverr
an atmosphere of veneration a leading ethnographer of the trib e s Gandhi in 1945; the
theyy fou
found nd the
them.m. Books wer eree writtitten
en
towards the Mahatma. One of o f c e n t r a l I n d i a . E lw i n k n e w G a n d h i an RSS rally in arguing that Gandhi was an agent simul-
my great-uncles helped to well, and at one time considered himself New Delhi, taneously of the British colonial state
edit Gandhi’s Collected Works; another a disciple. c1977; Narendra and of the Indian capitalist class; non-
founded a pioneering initiative in com- In later years, while he retained his Modi at the violence was presented as a cunning
munity health inspired by Gandhi. admiration for the Mahatma’s moral Gandhi statue in device ttoo w weean tth
he m maasses aaw way ffrrom
These familial influences were con- courage and religious pluralism, Elwin Washington in the revolutionary path.
solidated and deepened by the public became critical of Gandhi’s advocacy of 2014 — Getty Images; I had many arguments with my Marx-
Sondeep Shankar/Getty
c u l t u re o f t h e t i m e . G a n d h i w a s t h e prohibition, which he thought damaging Images; Nicholas Kamm
ist friends about Gandhi. I sought to per-
father of the nation, the leader of the to tribal culture (where home-brewed suade them that his adherence to non-
struggle for freedom against British violence arose out of a disinclination to
rule, whose tec echhniques of non-violent take human life. I asked them to give
resistance had won admirers and imita- Gandhi at least the qualified praise that
tors across the world. Mao himself had bestowed on Sun Yat-
It was largely because of him that we sen,, the fir
sen first
st pr
preesid
sidentent of the ChiChinenese se
were free and proudly independent, and re p u b l i c , a s c re a t i n g a r u d i m e n t a r y
i t w a s l a r g e ly b e c a u s e o f h i m t h a t — nation
nat ionalal conconsci
scious
ousne nessss on whwhich
ich was
unlike neighbouring Pakistan — we glo- built a superior socialist consciousness.
ried in the religious and linguistic diver- On these subjects my interlocutors at
sity of our land. In our school assembly least talked back, but our relations came
we sang a 17th-century hymn that Gan- to breaking point when I chose to focus
dhi was particularly fond of, which he my own research on a forest protection
had rewritten to reflect his vision of the movement led by Gandhians, which the
India he wished to leave behind. Hindus Marxists dismissed as a bourgeois devi-
saw God as Ishwar; Gandhi’s adaptation ation from the class strugg gglle.
asked us to see him as Allah too. And it Those debates with Marxists shaped
was to these lines that our teachers drew me profoundly, personally as well as
our particular attention. intellectually. Yet recalling them here
The first criticisms of Gandhi that I perhaps conveys a whiff of antiquarian-
remember encountering were in a book ism. For now, in the 2020s, the main
I read as a student at Delhi University. attacks on Gandhi in India come from
2 ★ FTWeekend 28 January/29 January 2023

Life

A lexicon of It’s 9.30am and I’m brushing my

teeth in a car park, watching a pair of
sparrows fight over a Stockans oatcake.
It’s a beautiful day, the morning sun is
Left:
Campaigners
gather last
weekend on

Life & Arts bursting lustily above the tree line and
I’m acutely aware that I’ve never seen a
protest quite like this before.
Dartmoor after
a court ruling
removed the
Everywhere, merry demonstrators right to wild
Her trousers are unpacking hiking poles, donning
mirrored shades and gaiters. We’re in
camp without
the landowner’s
draw attention Ivybridge, close to the Devon-Cornwall
border, one of those parts of England
permission

where place names seem to reflect Photographed

to a part of the whatever was listed in the Domesday by Fern Leigh
Book. Just to the north is Dartmoor, a Albert
body that for many huge craggy section of national park
shrouded in mysticism and prehistory.
men is squeamish’ Dartmoor is essentially sacred to
ramblers. It is the only place in England
Style, page 4 where you have a right to camp out in
the wild without permission. At least it
was until, earlier this month, a man
‘Basalt cliffs, scarred named Alexander Darwall took the
Dartmoor park authorities to court,
with scree and arguing that camping was not
“recreation”, and therefore not
avalanches, fall off protected by the Dartmoor Commons
Act 1985. Darwall, a hedge fund
manager, owns the 4,000-acre
into a churning sea’ Blachford Estate, as well as 16,000 acres
Travel, page 7 in Sutherland, in the Scottish Highlands
(where he has antagonised gold-
panners by limiting their access to

The ramblers’ revenge

rivers). The mere mention of his name
‘The US’s dominion triggers boos that ripple through the
crowd. His court ruling is the reason
is contested, not least everyone’s here today.
A day earlier, a private deal had been
by China’s rise and by struck between Dartmoor National
Park Authority and Devon landowners,
Russia’s revanchism’ allowing limited wild camping in
return for an undisclosed sum. This
Books essay, page 8 was received by campaigners as a
sellout, reducing public access by
restricting campers to specified areas.
People here want an appeal in the
‘I knew it was going courts, and organisers are threatening
ancient magic on the landowner: the
to be a marathon return of Old Crockern, a pre-Christian
guardian of the moor, a “gurt old
of both technical sperit” astride a skeleton horse, coming
for greed with “eyes as deep as peat
and emotional water pools”.
The group I’ve joined at Ivybridge is
proportions’ just a small part of the protest.
Following a 40-minute hike over the
Darren Aronofsky, page 13 hill to the village of Cornwood, we’ll
join a much larger group. No one is sure
how many will turn out: thousands
‘The BBC’s Open have signed up online. It’s obvious this
is about more than just wild camping.
Door films were the One man from nearby Kingsbridge,
who “thinks” he’s 69, tells me he is also
test-bed for a new inspired by a wider push for access to
land at a national level. “I look to
countries where they have a right to
form of television’ roam with absolute envy,” he says.
Arts, page 14 People who grow up in cities often
have a view of the countryside as a
broad, expansive land through which
one can wander in any direction.
‘For geographic However, according to Right to Roam,
one of today’s main organisers, 92 per
determinists, plains cent of the countryside (and 97 per
cent of the rivers) in England and
are said to instil Wales is out of bounds — much of it
controlled by a handful of landowners.
a martial The public do have some roaming
rights: 1932 brought the Rights of Way
paranoia Act, which allowed people in England
and Wales to claim paths if they could
Janan Ganesh, prove 20 years of unhindered public
back page use. However, the landowners could
simply rebut these presumptions by,
DARTMOOR for example, posting notices.
In 2000, the Countryside & Rights of
DIARY Way act set in law public access to
roughly 8 per cent of England. Since
MILES then, groups such as Right to Roam,
started by Nick Hayes, author of The
ELLINGHAM Book of Trespass, and the environmental
campaigner Guy Shrubsole have
pushed for an expansion. Their aim is
to extend access to “woodlands, all
downland, Green Belt land, rivers
and river banks”, an arrangement
similar to that in Scotland — and, as
anyone involved in this movement will
tell you, Scandinavia.
This is no easy task in a country so
deferential to power and rigidly
enclosed as England. Between 1604
and 1914, around 5,000 enclosure acts
saw more than a fifth of England
transferred from common ownership.
Many people have attempted to buck
this trend, and in 1932 about 400
young communists conducted a mass
trespass on Kinder Scout in the Peak
District. Many were arrested and
beaten by gamekeepers, but the action
helped lead to the creation of the
National Parks Commission by the
Attlee government.
It’s an unlikely Emerging on to Dartmoor, you’re
struck by the endlessness of the
alliance of pro- landscape. There’s a brutal beauty to
this place, one that inspired Arthur
hikers in expensive
gear, second-
Conan Doyle’s Baskerville hound, as
well as the folklore of Old Crockern and
homers with a local ogre called the Cutty Dyer. To
the north, rolling tors extend like the
pedigree dogs and spine of a terrible sleeping giant.
Traversing streams and rock-strewn
barefoot crusties in footpaths, one protester tells me how
handmade helmets access to Dartmoor has helped him in
his struggle with mental illness. “It’s
about walking in a landscape that
doesn’t care for you . . . It really zones
you in and, with that, you forget your
worries.” Another recalls how, after the
death of his father-in-law, he and his
family packed up to camp on the moor
and grieve under the stars. When they
came back, ready to face the world,
they learnt that one of their best
friends was in hospital. “We wouldn’t
have had the strength [to visit her] if
we hadn’t been out on the moors.”
Arriving at Cornwood, the true scale
of the protest becomes clear. There are
thousands of people milling around,
bottlenecking the narrow village
streets. They cover the full archetypal
gamut of rural Britain, an unlikely
alliance of pro-hikers in expensive gear,
second-homers with pedigree dogs,
students with field recorders and
barefoot crusties in handmade helmets.
There’s a brief address and a
reminder to leave no trace, then we’re
off up the hill, the lot of us. There’s
clear blue sky overhead, people sharing
out homemade fudge, and children
splashing in the brooks that flank the
paths. At our rear is the Devon flag —
green for the hills, black for the moors,
white for the salt spray. Among the
throng, I find Guy Shrubsole, looking
slightly overwhelmed. “This is more
than we could possibly have hoped for,”
he says. “It feels quite historic.”
Shrubsole runs the “Who Owns
England?” blog, an invaluable resource.
“Land in England is owned by a
vanishingly small number of people
and Dartmoor is no different,” he tells
me. “Fifteen landowners own about
half of Dartmoor National Park, and
there’s the contradiction — ‘National
Park’, but it isn’t owned by the nation.
It would be fantastic if we took a leaf
out of Scotland’s book. It does go
beyond a right to roam. It goes to a new
relationship with nature, with the land.
We’re trying to reconnect more people
with the countryside and ensure those
people become careful stewards of it.”
As the hills’ bald heads come into
view, I reflect that Dartmoor — and
indeed, the UK — wasn’t always like
this. Shrubsole’s latest book, The Lost
Rainforests of Britain, tells us that
temperate rainforests once covered a
fifth of the country, a proportion that
has been reduced by sheep farming
and timber extraction to just 0.5 per
cent. About 16 miles north of here is
Wistman’s Wood, home to one of the
last ancient groves. People speak of it in
hushed voices — a weird place of
tangled, searching branches.
At the top of the hill, the landscape
opens up again. We’re on the roof of the
world. People are strumming banjos,
sharing tea, Pot Noodles and hasty
sandwiches. The sun is beginning to set
now, and we are addressed by Martin
Shaw, a “teacher of the mythic
imagination”. He gets the crowd to call
out “We are Crockern!” and tells them
to take that deep into their “secret little
mischievous hearts”.
Led by Shaw, we embark on a sort of
ritual summoning. Then, over the crest
of the hill, trailed by dancers, guitars
and drums, Crockern comes — a figure
twice the size of a normal man, covered
in streamers. The children rush to him
with open arms. Delight abounds in this
rebellion. For people here, the right to
wild camp, the right to roam, is not an
innate departure from tradition. People
here don’t want something new, but
something that’s been lost. A simpler,
more innocent reading of the past,
projected into the future.
Miles Ellingham is an FT editorial assistant

India against Gandhi What was most striking about the

Continued from page 1
The RSS is the mother organisation of
the Bharatiya Janata party, which has
been in power in India since May 2014.
The prime minister, Narendra Modi,
joined the RSS as a young man, as did
many of his ministers. In control of the
state, of education and propaganda, and
with a very efficient social media
machine, the BJP and the RSS have
assiduously attempted to rewrite the
historical narrative. Past Muslim rulers
of India are portrayed as cruel maraud-
ers, and Muslims today made to answer
for their (mis)deeds. The leadership of
Gandhi and his Congress party in the
freedom struggle is denied, and those
who advocated armed revolution
against the British extolled as the true
patriots. The formative role of the pro-
gressive and secular constitution of
1950 in shaping the democratic republic
is ignored. Instead, Indians are told that
they have been a Hindu nation from
time immemorial.
Professional historians derisively
refer to these claims as “WhatsApp his-
tory”, but the tragic truth is that they are
gaining ever wider currency. In this new
narrative, Gandhi is the major hate fig-
ure. He is blamed for emasculating Indi-
ans by preaching non-violence; blamed
for choosing the modernising Jawaharlal
Nehru as his political heir instead of a
more authentically “Hindu” figure;
blamed for not stopping the creation of
Pakistan; blamed for insisting that Mus-
lims who stayed behind in India be given
the rights of equal citizenship.
BJP members of parliament hail Gan-
dhi’s assassin Godse as a true “deshb-
hakt” (patriot); praise for him trends on
Twitter every January 30; there are
periodic plans to erect statues to him
and temples in his memory. YouTube
videos mocking Gandhi and charging
him with betraying Hindus garner mil-
lions of views.
This decertification of Gandhi has
been aided by the hypocrisy and mis-
conduct of the Congress party. In its
many decades in power, the Congress
invoked Gandhi often, while in practice
moving ever further from his ideals.
Congress politicians ostentatiously wore
homespun cotton while promoting cro-
nyism and corruption. They centralised
power in the state and harassed human
rights activists.
The political rise of the Hindu right
has been accompanied by the construc-
tion of a colossal personality cult around
Modi. While his followers revile Gandhi,
Modi himself has adopted a position of
strategic ambivalence. On the one hand,
he professes veneration for VD Savar-
kar, a Hindu nationalist who detested
Gandhi and Muslims with equal vehe-
mence, and whom Godse regarded as
his ideological mentor. On the other
hand, recognising that Gandhi is the
best-known Indian globally, Modi has
instrumentally used him to advance his
own profile by taking visiting presidents
and prime ministers on tours of Gan-
dhi’s ashram in Ahmedabad.
On October 2 2019, the 150th anniver-
sary of the Mahatma’s birth, the New
York Times published an article in
praise of Gandhi, written by Modi. The
piece was artfully constructed; it began
by speaking of the admiration for Gan-
dhi expressed by one great American,
Martin Luther King Jr, and ended by
speaking of the admiration for him
expressed by another great American,
Albert Einstein. Modi proclaimed: “In
Gandhi, we have the best teacher to
guide us. From uniting those who
believe in humanity to furthering sus-
tainable development and ensuring eco-
nomic self-reliance, Gandhi offers solu-
tions to every problem.”
article, however, was what it did not say.
There was not a word about the cause
for which Gandhi lived his life, indeed
for which he gave his life — that of inter-
religious harmony. The omission was
not accidental. For the idea that India is
a land that belongs equally to people of
all faiths is not something that Modi
shares with Gandhi. Modi sees himself
as a Hindu first and foremost; indeed,
even as a redeemer sent to avenge the
insults and injustices, real and imag-
ined, heaped on his co-religionists down
the centuries.
Such is the broader context for the
now widespread animosity towards
Gandhi in the land of his birth. It has
principally to do with his commitment
to religious pluralism. While Modi stays
silent, BJP leaders taunt and intimidate
the 200mn-strong community of Indian
Muslims, asking them without reason
and provocation to prove their “loyalty”
to the motherland. (Notably, among the
300 or so BJP members of parliament
elected in May 2019, there was not a sin-
gle Muslim.) While Modi praises Gandhi
— selectively — many of those who sup-
Hindu nationalists place garlands on a statue of Gandhi’s assassin, Nathuram
Godse, in Meerut in 2020 — Smita Sharma/New York Times/Redux/eyevine
port and vote for him believe Godse was
right in murdering Gandhi; indeed, that
he should have murdered him earlier,
before the Mahatma’s last fast in sup-
port of equal rights for those Muslims
who chose to express their own patriot-
ism by staying in our country, which was
also theirs.
There are other ways in which the
India of today bears little resemblance
to the India that Gandhi had struggled to
build. He would have been appalled, for
instance, by the rapacious pillaging of
the natural environment encouraged by
successive governments since inde-
pendence. He had precociously warned
against emulating the resource- and
energy-intensive model of industrialisa-
tion favoured by the west, writing in
1926 that to “make India like England
and America is to find some other races
and places of the earth for exploitation”.
Without the access to resources and
markets enjoyed by those two nations
when they began to industrialise, India
has had to rely on the exploitation of its
own people and environment. Under
both Congress and BJP regimes, the
most brutal assault has been by large
mining companies, to whom successive
governments have given free licence to
destroy forests, displace villagers and
foul air, water and soil in search of mas-
sive monetary gains. Many of the most
polluted cities in the world are in India;
our great and supposedly sacred rivers
are biologically dead through untreated
industrial and domestic waste; our aqui-
fers are rapidly declining.
Writing for an international audience,
our prime minister might laud Gandhian
prescriptions for “sustainable develop-
ment”, even as these prescriptions are
being violated most thoroughly in his —
and Gandhi’s — homeland. Even without
In school assembly we sang
a 17th-century hymn that
Gandhi had rewritten to
reflect his pluralistic vision
the threat of climate change, India is an
environmental basket case.
Consider next the perilous state of
press freedom in India, which, as an
independent-minded editor himself,
Gandhi would surely have found dis-
tressing. The British Raj jailed Gandhi
(and many other writers) for inciting
“disaffection” merely through their
words in print. Gandhi hoped the clause
allowing such arbitrary arrest would be
repealed when India became free. It
remains on the statute book, increas-
ingly used to imprison journalists, stu-
dent leaders and social activists.
Gandhi would also have been dis-
mayed by the deceit and dissembling of
the political class, saddened by the
growing gulf between rich and poor, and
distressed by the continuing attacks on
low castes and women. His country has
turned its back on its greatest modern
figure in many respects.
The lives and legacies of major histor-
ical figures are always subject to reinter-
pretation, and that is how it should be.
Consider thus the revaluation of Ameri-
can icons such as George Washington
and Thomas Jefferson because of their
complicity with slavery; or of the pre-
eminent British war hero Winston
Churchill, because of his imperialism
and indifference to the deaths of Indians
through famine.
Revisionism and iconoclasm are infi-
nitely preferable to idolatry. The
unthinking adulation of Gandhi in the
early years of Indian independence may
have been extreme. Yet what we now
have is not revisionism or iconoclasm
but parricide, the outright repudiation
of the person who perhaps did more
than anyone else to nurture this nation
into being. India surely needs Gandhi’s
ideas still, to check the slide of the
republic into a Hindu Pakistan, to stall
the destruction of the environment and
the economic and social costs it
imposes, to restore a semblance of civil-
ity in public discourse, to renew the
institutions of civil society currently
being crushed by an overbearing state.
Many years ago, when the demonisa-
tion of Gandhi was first becoming
apparent, I was speaking with my friend
Gopalkrishna Gandhi, a diplomat and
scholar and also, incidentally, a grand-
son of the Mahatma. Gopal said that
Gandhi’s posthumous fate might
increasingly come to resemble that of
the Buddha, scorned by the land where
he forged his moral and social philoso-
phy, yet with followers and admirers in
distant parts of the globe that he had
never visited and possibly did not even
know about.
As that prediction comes starkly true,
I find it simultaneously depressing and
comforting. We Indians seem to have
rejected Gandhi, as we once rejected the
Buddha; no matter, humans elsewhere
will take up and nobly affirm the ideals
of those we have so cruelly and care-
lessly discarded.
Ramachandra Guha’s books include
‘Gandhi: The Years That Changed the
World’. He lives in Bengaluru
28 January/29 January 2023
Lunch with the FT Alexei Venediktov
‘We didn’t hear the sound O
of army boots marching’
The Russian radio host condemns the war
in Ukraine but stays on friendly terms
with Kremlin insiders. Over mortadella
in Moscow, he talks to Polina Ivanova
about the self-deceptions of the
elite, preaching to the ‘indifferently
loyal’ — and what he told Putin
about his place in history
L
ately, prominent Russians
keep ending up on lists: the
Kremlin’s lists of dangerous
“foreign agents”; lists drawn
up by those same “foreign
agents” of the Kremlin’s stooges.
Alexei Venediktov is in the rare posi-
tion of having ended up on both. With
his lion’s mane of gravity-defying white
hair, the 67-year-old radio host has
come to be at once respected and
treated with suspicion by both sides.
He’s also one of the only well-known
independent journalists still in Russia.
“I’m just an unemployed pensioner
now,” he says with something of a grin,
as we meet in a Tuscan restaurant in
central Moscow beloved by the city’s
elite; he calls it his “dacha”, a home away
from home.
Echo of Moscow, the radio station he
ran for decades, was shut down by the
Kremlin soon after the invasion of
Ukraine began, along with many other
outlets. Venediktov, however, quickly
switched to broadcasting online, his lan-
guage unchanged but much of his team
now based abroad.
Cantinetta Antinori could feel like a
sanctuary from this turbulence. The
lights are dimmed, the tablecloths
heavy and perfectly white. European
wine bottles line the walls. But talking
about war in the lap of luxury, fine din-
ing in the capital of a country accused of
war crimes — every step in invasion-era
Moscow is steeped in moral anxiety.
Venediktov revels in the ambiguity.
He remains on friendly terms with many
members of Vladimir Putin’s circle, the
very elite accused of launching and ena-
bling this war. He also excoriates the
invasion live on air. Some are repulsed
by his proximity to power, but for Ven-
ediktov, it is just how he defines his job.
“My position was pretty unique even
before the start of all this, because I
spoke with everyone,” he says. “Despite
growing conflict within the country,
despite invective from both sides, I con-
tinued to speak with, to be friends with,
to drink with and meet with and talk
with everyone . . . And I continue to do
S
so without batting an eye.”
itting in a Moscow radio stu-
dio on the first morning of
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,
facing a microphone that
would broadcast his words to
millions, Venediktov had a single mes-
sage to share: Russia had made a colos-
sal mistake. “I went on air and said: we
have already lost it. We have already lost
the war,” he recalls. “No matter how it
ends, even if a Russian flag flies over
Kyiv, the consequences for Russia, for
my generation, for my son’s, will be cat-
astrophic.”
Days later, the station was closed. “I’m
told Putin flew into a rage,” he says, as
we are seated in the restaurant’s “winter
garden”, a closed-off patio where we are
the only guests. In the paranoid atmos-
phere of wartime Moscow, the privacy is
a relief. Only waiters come by to take
our order — a mortadella focaccia and
tomato salad, both to share.
But the station’s closure was also inev-
itable, Venediktov continues. Echo was
a go-to for urban and educated Rus-
sians, its airtime filled with critical
voices. Venediktov, the eternal editor,
stood at its heart. The station’s regular
parties were attended by both opposi-
tion leaders and their jailers, by propa-
gandists and Pussy Riot, by mayors,
ministers, Mikhail Gorbachev and eve-
ryone in between.
This, coupled with the fact that it was
part of the state-owned Gazprom Media
empire (Venediktov had a minority
stake), is perhaps what kept Echo on
air, and its hosts speaking freely, even
as the screws tightened over the years.
Until the war. “In wartime, propaganda
must be total,” Venediktov recalls being
told at a meeting with ministers and
generals in March, as they pulled the
plug on his station. “They said, ‘You
would have sown confusion in the
minds of the decision makers’.”
★ FTWeekend
But he also refers to that meeting as a
CANTINETTA “big friendly gathering” — and I wonder
ANTINORI if he’s joking, or if it’s yet another
Denezhnyy Pereulok 20, reminder that nothing in his world is
Moscow 119002 black and white. On April 22, the Krem-
lin branded him a foreign agent. “On
Focaccia Rb580
Lenin’s birthday!” he laughs. Some of
Mortadella with his government contacts quickly shut
pistachio Rb700 him down. “They told me straight up,
Tomato salad Rb750 ‘I’m sorry, you’re toxic now’.”
Ricotta tortellini Rb1,600 Many others, however, kept in touch.
He name-drops some people he texted
Brugal 1888 Reserve
x2 glasses Rb2,380 with that morning, government mem-
bers, some ardently pro-war. You can’t
Espresso x3 Rb1,050
miss a note of pride.
Bottle of still water Rb900 As the first wave of people fled Russia
Fruit jelly x2 Rb1,100 and its new military censorship laws last
Total (inc spring, Venediktov watched his beloved
discount) Rb8,184 (£95.45) team disperse. Hundreds of journalists
from other media, protesters and aca-
demics left too. Some were jailed. A pig’s
head was left outside Venediktov’s front
door. No longer at Echo, he ran out of
money to pay his security guards, and
let them go. Still, he dug in.
“I’m useful here,” he says. Hundreds
of thousands of listeners, two-thirds of
them in Russia, follow his broadcasts on
YouTube, the only major western plat-
form that has not been blocked. There,
he doesn’t flinch from using the now
banned word “war”. Listeners expect
insights, he says, and so he has to stay.
Many Russian journalists, I point out,
would have also loved to stay. Some
clung on as long as they could, accumu-
lating notices from the police until it
became impossible to do so any longer.
Is Venediktov really in the same boat?
His well-known friendship with Putin’s
spokesman Dmitry Peskov comes to
mind, as do his cosy selfies from before
the war with RT editor-in-chief Margar-
ita Simonyan and foreign ministry
spokeswoman Maria Zakharova.
“Maybe they’ll blink, and maybe they
won’t,” Venediktov says. “I’m not brave,
I’m a coward. If I’m told, ‘That’s it’, then
I’ll think about next steps. If I don’t get a
warning, and just get grabbed, then
someone else will be deciding my next
steps for me anyway.”
As we wait for our food to arrive, staff
pop by one by one to say hello to their
regular customer. They give him quick,
quiet updates about how the war has
affected their families and lives. “If I
ever have to emigrate, and it might hap-
V
pen, I will lose this,” Venediktov says.
endiktov calls them the
“cannibals” — those in Mos-
cow with whom he will not
speak. It’s a common term
among the opposition, and
it refers to the believers: those who not
only support the war but preach death
and destruction for Ukraine.
“It’s hard to speak with cannibals,
they always want a bit more human
flesh,” he says. A heraldic lion roars at
me from his bright red shirt. It’s the logo
of the Machiavellian House of Lannister
from Game of Thrones.
Venediktov grew up in Moscow in the
1970s, and describes himself as a “law-
abiding member of the Komsomol”, the
communist youth movement, who
gradually became a critic of the Soviet
system. But it’s to the 20 years he spent
as a history schoolteacher that he
attributes his approach to journalism.
He peppers our conversation with para-
bles from this past life, while Canti-
netta’s chef comes by to take another
order: a plate of ricotta tortellini, off the
menu, once again to share.
Nowadays, across the Russian political
landscape, Venediktov spots the same
character types he knew and saw in
class. “I had little Putins too,” he says. As
a teacher, he also learnt to speak to peo-
ple in their language, he adds. Now, the
people he wants to address are the Rus-
sians who neither truly support the war,
nor particularly oppose it, the “indiffer-
ently loyal” who make up, he believes,
around two-thirds of the population.
“Speaking with people who already
share your point of view, I don’t need
that, I’m sorry,” Venediktov says.
Many among his interlocutors in
the elite were shocked by the outbreak
of war but over time, he’s watched
them adapt. Some of those he recalls
seeing in tears now air pro-war posi-
tions on TV. Some have developed a
sense of professional excitement,
revved up by the challenge, say, of how
to keep a state bank afloat in the face of
western sanctions.
His favourite response, he says: “OK,
but maybe the price tag is too high?”
Then he names the number of children
killed or injured in Ukraine. “That’s
usually when the screaming starts, call-
ing me a manipulator and so on,” he
says. “But people scream when they’re
in pain. It’s important to understand
that.” Understanding someone does not
mean approving of them, he adds.
But the line between the two feels
blurred when he begins to offer
defences for some officials’ choices dur-
ing the war. A Kremlin spokesman is
just doing his job. The elite had no
choice but to rally around Putin, since
sanctions cut them off from the world.
As our main dish arrives, I tell Ven-
ediktov that it’s my first trip back to
Moscow since the start of the war, and
that I have found some of my conversa-
tions deeply disturbing, and some of my
acquaintances transformed. That I feel
a little shell-shocked.
“You think I’m actually this calm? I’m
in a state of madness and rage,” he says.
“But to sit down with my friends and tell
them what bastards they all are, and
how I am guilt-free in my spotless white
coat — OK, that will take seven seconds.
What happens after that? . . . What’s
the result?”
n several occasions over
our lunch, Venediktov
describes his interactions
with Putin. In his telling,
Putin sometimes calls him
by the familiar diminutive of his first
name — not just Alexei, but “Lyosha”. In
one tale, just after the 2008 Russia-
Georgia war, Venediktov is called in for
a meeting and sits with Putin for two
hours, drinking white wine and discuss-
ing the war. “Then [Putin] says, ‘Listen,
you were a history teacher. What will
they write about me in the school text-
books?’” Venediktov recalls. The editor
stumbles out an answer about events
during Putin’s first two terms in office.
Putin is not pleased. “‘That’s all?’”
Six years later, in 2014, Venediktov
finds himself in the Kremlin for a meet-
ing with Putin and other editors. Putin
greets each one, and upon reaching Ven-
ediktov, says: “‘What about now?’” The
journalist was stumped. “I didn’t know
what he meant, I didn’t make the link,”
he recalls. “‘The textbooks’,” Putin says.
He had just annexed the Crimean penin-
sula from Ukraine.
In subsequent years, as protests
against Putin picked up, Venediktov
participated in government structures.
The Moscow mayor’s office put him for-
ward for its “civic chamber”, a forum for
bringing public issues to officials, but
one that many saw as a smokescreen.
Outside, protests were picking up, and
real civil society was being crushed. He
also agreed to be the face of the govern-
ment’s drive to introduce electronic vot-
ing, a system many in the opposition
now believe was used to steal the vote.
It’s a charge that Venediktov dis-
misses — but in October, his name was
added by the team of jailed dissident
leader Alexei Navalny to a list of people
they believe should be sanctioned by the
west, for helping Putin commit election
fraud. Venediktov says he won’t dispute
it now, as doing so is ineffective — both
he and Navalny’s people are against this
war. The editor has also faced an accusa-
tion of two inappropriate encounters
with women, which he denies.
I recalled a Moscow summer before
the war, when a widely admired investi-
gative journalist was arrested, falsely
accused of dealing drugs. Thousands
protested, calling for his release, and
many were detained, including some
journalists. The same week, Venediktov
was photographed at an elite confer-
ence, sharing a table with government
officials and propagandists.
It was a frustrating contrast for some.
But others would later recognise Ven-
ediktov as one of the people that pulled
strings and got the charges dropped.
The journalist walked free.
“That’s what I spent my reputation
on, my resource. And do you think I
regret it?” Venediktov says. “I am a per-
son of compromise and I continue to be
a person of compromise. Under Ivan the
Terrible, under Stalin, we always live
within the confines of the system,”
3
Life
Venediktov says. Nowadays, however,
his “resource” is depleted. “The head of
the Moscow police doesn’t pick up the
phone anymore. I can’t get anybody
out,” he says. “But I can still speak.”
Instead, he’s passed the baton.
“Roman continues.” Roman Abramov-
ich, the sanctioned oligarch who has, in
the shadows, been involved in prisoner
exchanges and other negotiations dur-
ing this war. “I told him: ‘don’t stop, no
matter what anybody says’,” says Ven-
ediktov. “‘Those people, they’ll put in a
word for you on Judgment Day.’”
Outside, snowflakes shimmer. Mos-
cow bustles. Shop shelves are filled with
foreign foods. But bus stop billboards
now carry portraits of soldiers killed or
fighting in Ukraine. It’s like an atomic
bomb went off, Venediktov says, but the
shockwaves have not yet reached the
city. “And though the radiation has, we
do not see it or feel it. It has no smell.”
Instead, it pervades people’s private
lives, splitting families along political
lines, and leaving the city dotted with
the empty desks of the tens of thousands
that have left.
Venediktov’s son was in the army
when the war began, halfway through
his mandatory military service. Con-
scripts were not supposed to be sent
then to Ukraine (although some were,
and were killed), so he spent the spring
posted to a military hospital near Mos-
‘I continued to speak
with, to be friends with, to
drink with and meet with
and talk with everyone.
And I continue to do so
without batting an eye’
cow instead. “Washing bandages! It’s the
21st century, and they were short on
bandages,” Venediktov exclaims.
Our meal was good, but I barely
noticed what we ate. I feel like I’ve still
not pinned him down. Never interview
an interviewer, I make a mental note.
Coffees and jellies arrive.
What, if anything, I ask, does he feel
guilty for? “We didn’t hear the sound of
army boots marching,” Venediktov
responds. For years, he says, he thought
that the main vice of the country’s rulers
was corruption. “Why would they want
war? For what? They want palaces!
Yachts! Sicily! Sardinia! . . . It turned
out to be a veil,” he says. A veil obscuring
a deep militarism and revanchism.
The last time he spoke with Putin was
in the spring of 2021. He asked him
about political prisoners, but not a ques-
tion about war — even though already
then, troops were massing on Ukraine’s
borders. “We could’ve started talking
about it already after the Georgia war,”
Venediktov explains, referring to the
conflict in 2008. “He didn’t lie. Putin
didn’t try to trick us. We could’ve seen it
all already back then.”
“I was standing so close to it all, I
could’ve seen it,” Venediktov says. “We
bloody blew it, as they say.”
Polina Ivanova is a foreign correspondent
for the FT covering Russia, Ukraine and
Central Asia
4 ★
Style
I
n the mirrored ballroom of Inter-
Continental’s Le Grand hotel in
Paris on a Wednesday afternoon, a
model wearing stilettos and an
upside-down ballgown that
ascended from her hips up towards the
ceiling, shrouding her face, made small,
uncertain steps into the carpeted show
space. Offstage, a producer directed her
to turn left, then right, via a microphone
sheathed audibly within the gown.
Welcome to the topsy-turvy world of
haute couture. The show was by Viktor
Horsting and Rolf Snoeren, the Amster-
dam-based duo behind OTB-owned
Viktor & Rolf. They like to poke fun at
the ultra-serious, ultra-exclusive world
of haute couture, where a one-of-a-kind
skirt suit can cost upwards of €40,000
and an evening dress several times that.
The pair described this collection,
titled “Late Stage Capitalism Waltz”, as
“an absurd take on a stereotypical cou-
ture ballgown for the 21st century”. And
it was absurd, with flouncy pastel
dresses of chiffon and tulle attached to
the models’ bodies at various angles,
sometimes in front, sometimes at a 45-
degree tilt, at other times intersecting
the body at 90 degrees, revealing the
flesh-coloured corsetry underneath.
They aren’t dresses you’d wear out to
dinner, and it doesn’t matter. Horsting
and Snoeren are free of the strategic
demands faced by most other designers
showing this week — their Flowerbomb
fragrance is so successful that they were
able to shut down their ready-to-wear
line in 2015, leaving them free to dream
up collections that need not appeal to
Hollywood stylists or wealthy individu-
als (their biggest clients, they say, are
museums). And the dresses were tech-
nically a marvel, able to repel gravity
with 3D-printed structures crafted with
the help of Hans Boodt Mannequins.
Unserious it may have been, but the
collection tapped into deeper themes at
play at Haute Couture Week: of the dual-
ity of performer and performance, of
representation and artifice. Much of the
discussion in the front rows — and online
— centred on the real-looking animals
Daniel Roseberry conceived for Schia-
parelli, which raised important ethical
questions about the ways animals are
used and represented in fashion.
It kicked off when Kylie Jenner
arrived at the Schiaparelli show dressed
in a long, narrow black bustier dress
affixed with a lion’s head. The head was
startlingly lifelike, sculpted from resin
and embroidered with faux fur. It was a
technique that Roseberry described in a
studio preview as “faux taxidermy”, and
featured in three of the looks in the show
that followed — a strapless sheath
moulded into the form of a leopard with
its teeth bared, a one-shouldered black
velvet dress with a roaring lion’s head, a
shaggy coat with a sentinel she-wolf face
on its shoulder — to represent the three
animals of Dante’s Inferno, which Rose-
berry had recently reread.
He’d been struck, he wrote in the
show notes, by the narrator’s fear of
reaching middle age and realising “how
little he actually knows” — and so he
made his show a “homage to doubt”.
But such subtle references are lost on
Instagram, where Jenner and the other
faux taxidermy looks were widely con-
demned (and often mistaken for the
real thing). The usually tame fashion
press criticised it too, for glamorising
safaris and hunting of wild animals.
(In contrast, no such outrage was
stirred by the two gold-inlaid handbags
Don’t be shy about this intimate detail of good tailoring
Menswear Trouser design would benefit from more open discussion of the crotch, writes Charlie Porter
I
have long had a problem with
crotches. When I was the menswear
critic for this paper, I would find
myself focusing on the crotch to
encapsulate the failed cut of a pair
of trousers. It was usually with London’s
heritage tailors who were trying to
mimic international luxury brands on a
catwalk. About a Hardy Amies show in
2015, I wrote the tailored trousers “were
woeful around the crotch.” I would then
find myself apologising for it: “This isn’t
being prurient, honest.”
The reason is simple. Traditionally
tailored trousers are cut to sit flush
under the skirt of the jacket. This high-
waisted cut gives the effect of a crotch
that is empty, even concave. Contempo-
rary casual trousers, like jeans or chi-
nos, have evolved from functional work-
wear or uniforms, cut for brisk ease of
movement. They have a roomier, more
flattering crotch.
This season, the issue has come unex-
pectedly to the fore. Towards the begin-
ning of the Martine Rose spring/sum-
mer 2023 show in London last June, a
model walked out with busted fly. At
most brands, it would be a styling faux
pas that would probably cause the
designer to be sacked.
For Rose, it was intentional. She is a
designer-as-agitator, unafraid of per-
versity in fashion. In previous collec-
tions, she’s shown city-boy shirts cut so
tight it was like they’re bursting at the
buttons. Her terrible crotch trousers
were to draw attention to this part of the
body that for many men is squeamish.
Haute couture, turned on its head
Paris | From Schiaparelli’s lion heads to Chanel’s circus ringmasters,
showmanship and surrealism took to the catwalk. Lauren Indvik reports
Traditional trousers in a 1914 advertisement by JC Leyendecker — Alamy
Too often labels rely on cut-
and-paste design, rather
than creating patterns that
respond to the body
“I’m playing with stuff that’s really on
the nerve,” Rose once told me.
Meanwhile, that same season in
Milan, Prada showed a series of black
leather short shorts with zips on either
side of the crotch, creating a flap like a
fold-down hatch. The zips act like
sight lines to the crotch, and were shown
in tandem with conservative black
tailoring. Nothing on the Prada catwalk
happens by accident: it appeared
co-creative directors Miuccia Prada and
Raf Simons were interrogating why
certain cuts are acceptable in mens-
FTWeekend
wear, and others are considered outré.
Back in London, young designer Ste-
ven Stokey Daley of SS Daley, latest
winner of the prestigious talent-scout-
ing LVMH Prize, manipulated trousers
to render the crotch irrelevant. Only
graduating in spring 2020, Daley made
his name a few months later when
Harry Styles wore a pair of his super-
sized trousers, made from some old flo-
ral curtains. As with many young
designers, Daley’s catwalk goes beyond
gender. A couple of days before his most
recent show, he said to me, “What’s an
SS Daley gown?”
His answer: a super-supersized pair of
trousers, cut so roomy they could be
hoicked up to the chest, what would
have been the crotch now a long languid
line over the sternum and stomach. The
look was an extreme for the catwalk,
but it chimed with how many twentys-
stitched from real alligator that also
appeared in the show — nor for the copi-
ous amounts of feathers, lambskin and
calfskin at other shows, which did
involve real animal suffering and were
therefore more deserving of censure.)
It’s a shame because the collection was
beautifully finished and full of surprises
Top, from left: that riffed on couture archetypes and
feathery green the house’s longstanding associations
dress from with artifice and surrealism: dresses
Valentino; with shield-like bodices moulded in
Viktor & Rolf’s undulating waves of mother of pearl and
upside-down panels of lemon tree wood; an hourglass-
ballgown; shaped bustier top and skirt that shiv-
Schiaparelli’s ered with row upon row of tiny pieces of
lion’s headdress leather-wrapped tin; a 1940s-ish suit
Team Peter Stigter;
Giovanni Giannoni
paired with an enormous bronze mask
(a reference to the giants Dante encoun-
Left: Chanel; ters in the ninth circle of hell).
Dior; Jean Paul Animals also took centre stage at
Gaultier; Giorgio Chanel, with plywood sculptures of a
Armani lion, crocodile and an elephant designed
Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images; by French installation artist Xavier Veil-
Alfonso Catalano han. Models emerged from the sculp-
tures, Trojan horse-style, in the hats and
bow ties of circus ringmasters. It was an
odd twist on the lion bronzes and coro-
mandel screens painted with exotic
birds with which Coco Chanel furnished
her Rue Cambon apartment — not least
because of circuses’ problematic history
of coercing wild animals to perform
“tricks”. But again, no outrage here.
The sculptures were toylike and the
clothes seemed made for the children
who would play with them — little pastel
tweed jackets with short ruffled sleeves
omethings like Daley view gender and car while ignoring the front bumper.
the body. The point is innovation. When tai-
I’m sure there are some readers who’d lored suits evolved from military and
like to cover their ears and pretend I’d riding garments, it was through acts of
not started talking about it: they just innovative, intuitive design. That design
want to wear a good pair of trousers. is now called “traditional”, as if it had
But, as Robert Armstrong recently always been that way, ignoring the radi-
pointed out in these pages, the general calism of its beginnings. Too often,
design of trousers is well below par. It’s menswear labels rely on cut-and-paste
been this way for so long, we just accept design, copying what was done before
it. But what if we moved beyond the rather than creating original patterns
uncomfortableness of talking about the responding to the body. Copies become
crotch? We could encourage better cut- copies of copies, and any sharpness or
ting. At the moment, it’s like designing a purpose to the design is blunted.
Leather shorts by Prada with zips; trousers from a 2015 Hardy Amies show; a
Martine Rose model with a busted fly; Prada’s crotch zips — Monica Feudi; Gamma/Getty
28 January/29 January 2023
paired with even littler matching shorts
or pleated skirts, and cap-toe boots laced
midway up the calf. They made their
wearers look very young. The longer
dresses, with their ankle-grazing coats,
were more grown-up — easy and airy and
hanging lightly from the shoulders. It is
these relaxed, unrestrictive clothes that
best capture the spirit of Chanel’s
founder, and represent Virginie Viard’s
best work during her tenure at the house.
Since she began at Dior in 2016, Maria
Grazia Chiuri has relaxed many of the
sharp lines and waspish waists favoured
by her predecessors — even the Bar-
jacketed skirt suits had an inviting
roominess in this collection. Josephine
Baker was this season’s muse — a
woman who bought pieces from Chris-
tian Dior and “understood immediately
the power of fashion”, Chiuri said. That
sophisticated take translated to the
clothes, which borrowed more from the
softly moulded tailoring Baker favoured
in her later years than the revealing
frocks of her stage career.
Such sophistication was missing at
Valentino, where the melange of ruffles,
polka dots, big bows, shirts with ties,
and skirts too brief to sit down in looked
more parody than pastiche. But that
might simply have been the unfortunate
result of its nightclub inspiration. The
show did feel like an “event”, held under
The faux taxidermy stirred
more outrage than alligator
skin handbags that involve
real animal suffering
the bridge of the Port des Champs-
Élysées with Anne Hathaway and her
husband intertwined on the front row.
There was a more melancholy quality
to Armani’s collection and to the harle-
quin dresses and bejewelled diamond-
print jackets, some paired with clown-
like ruffs, that appeared on the catwalk.
And a repetitiveness: the harlequin pat-
tern appeared again and again, without
taking on any fresh meaning.
And then there was Haider Acker-
mann’s masterful guest collection for
Jean Paul Gaultier, where actor Timo-
thée Chalamet — whose daring, gender-
flouting red carpet persona Ackermann
has helped architect — sat front row.
Since Jean Paul Gaultier himself retired
from haute couture in early 2020, his
namesake company has invited a rotat-
ing cast of creative directors to design
haute couture collections in his place —
and it has worked surprisingly well.
Ackermann and Gaultier sit at the
opposite ends of the style spectrum —
one known for his austere tailoring and
artful draping, the other for camp.
Through Ackermann’s lens, Gaultier sig-
natures — the bustier dress, safety pins
and seatbelt straps, the conical brassiere
worn by Madonna — became simplified,
reduced to polygons, as if they had been
sketched while squinting at a real Gault-
ier dress. There were tributes to other
designers too, most notably to Madame
Grès, her signature pleats worked into
bustier dresses and suits, and to Cristo-
bal Balenciaga, his influence unmistaka-
ble in a diamond-shaped violet dress
that appeared to be all of a piece.
The guest designership only lasts one
season — but here I was left wanting for
an encore.
Lauren Indvik is the FT’s fashion editor
Converging are three separate tides.
The tailored trouser that has histori-
cally sat flush but now needs a rethink to
work as separates; the functional trou-
ser that has lost touch with its roots and
could do with a reboot of its function;
the exploration of looseness and silhou-
ette by a new generation of designers
approaching the body beyond binary.
There are some producing intuitive,
thoughtful cuts. Service Works is a
three-year-old London-based label that
updates chef pants for everyday wear.
The cut is roomy yet specific; the
elasticated waist can sit either high or
low; the pants are flattering to men
across generations.
Meanwhile, the Norfolk-based label
Old Town uses precise pattern-making
and historical knowledge to make con-
temporary pants that work with the
body. I’ve worn a pair of its Stove Pipes
design for years, cut from navy cotton
twill. The Stove Pipes sit flush, yet also
have functional roominess.
Both are brands that clearly take
pleasure in the act of design, including
how the trousers work around the
crotch, rather than avoiding the subject
and cutting them inadequately with
no thought.
But recently, I’ve taken a different
path. I know what I want in a pair of
trousers, I know my own body best, and
feel no embarrassment at taking my
own measurements. Home-sewing has
typically been a gendered tradition,
laughable for men. Why? I’ve started
making trousers for myself.
28 January/29 January 2023
Interview | Roger Burton’s youth subculture
archive has been a treasure trove for performers,
from David Bowie to Harry Styles. By Helen Barrett
R
oger Burton — stylist, cura-
tor and owown ner of one of the
world’s biggest collections of
street fashion — is showing
m e t h e o n e p i e c e h e wo u l d
save were his premises to catch fire.
“Terry Hall’s suit,” he says, grabbing a
pole hook and retrieving a bagged gar-
ment in a room stuffed to the rafters
with triple-d e-deecker rails of clothing.
The suit, worn by The Specials front-
man in the 1981 video for Ghost Town, is
a beauty; hand-tailored in Chicago in
the 1950s and bought by Burton when it
somehow turned up in a Nottingham
flea market in the 1970s.
It looks like a cartoon mobster cos-
tume: damson gabardine with chalk
pinstripes pes,, squared shoulders, crazily
exaggerated lapels.
“Terry really loved it,” says Burton.
“So much so, he also wore it on Top of the
Po p s . A f e w ye a r s l a t e r I s t y l e d T h e
Kinks’ video for Come Dancing and I put
Ray Davies in it.”
Did Davies love the suit as much as
Hall? “Oh god, yes.”
Burton, 73, is one of pop culture’s
great custodians. The Contemporary
Wardrobe Collection, his vintage cos-
tume -hire company, is made up of
20,000 rare pieces of youth subculture
s t y l e , f r o m t h e m i d -1 9 4 0 s t o t h e
preseseent day. It has taken him since the
mid-1960s to assemble these racks of
t e d d y b o y d r a p e s, m o d s u i t s, p u n k
b ondage gear and new romantic
flounces (Burton started out trading in
second-hand clothing before founding
his hire venture). And the costumes of
countless more genres and sub-genres
that lie between.
H i s 4 5 -ye a r - o l d h i re c o m p a n y
acquires clothes from dealers, auctions
a n d m a r ke t s a l l ove r t h e w o r l d a n d
lends garments to films, music videos,
fashion houses, advertising agencies
and photographers.
It started in 1978, when Burton, then
running a second-hand clothes stall in
Portobello Market, was asked to find
gear for The Who’s mod re revvival film
Quadrophenia. (“They had to buy all the
suits because of the fight scenes where
Visions of the well-dressed man
Paris Fashion Week
Designers mixed precision
and polish with a couture
spirit — and an awareness
of what men want to wear,
writes Alexander Fury
J
nuary menswear we ek in
Paris has traditionally run just
before the city’s haute couture
presentations, and the influ-
ence of the latter on the former
is particularly pointed in the autumn/
winter 2023 season.
T h e c o u t u re e f f e c t b e g a n w i t h
Anthony Vaccarello’s breathtakingly
polished Saint Laurent collection. It fea-
tured models moving glacially through a
concrete rotunda designed by architect
Tadao Ando in the art foundation Bourse
de Commerce. The week closed on Sun-
day night with a thumping show and
shindig in the new headquarters of the
John Galliano-helmed Maison Margiela.
In between we had some of the best
menswear shows of the season —
Jonathan Anderson’s Loewe, where
models were dressed as angels or clad in
f u l l - m e t a l j a c k e t s, p a i n s t a k i n g l y
crafted; Rick Owens’ swirling capes,
gloved and cuffed, inspired, he said, by
“sleazy ’70s pseudo-mys ystticism” and
Egyptian ceremony (what else?); and
Matthew M Williams’s Givenchy, where
the house’s couture technicians hand-
made the exceptional select ctiion of suits
that opened the show.
everyone jumped in the sea,” he recalls.)
Next came Jazzin’ For Blue Jean, Julien
Temple’s 1984 short promotional film
for David Bowie, then Temple’s 1986 fea-
ture film Absolute Beginners.
Burton’s venture has grown ever
since. A week before our interview,
Harry Styles es’’s team was here, hunting
for retro stage gear.
“It’s the most thorough, comprehen-
sive collection that reflects what young
people really looked like,” says Temple,
who has worked with Burton since the
late 1970s. “A moving, living testament
to all those eruptions of youth energy
and culture; the attitude young people
felt when they put those clothes on and
carried them out into the world.”
But the immed ediiate future of the col-
lection is precarious. It is housed on the
top floo
oorr of the Horse Hospital in Lo Lon
n-
don’s Bloomsbury, an 18th-century,
Grade-II listed former station and hos-
pital for working horses that is remarka-
bly well preserved.
Burton has leased the building since
the early 1990s, adding free exhibitions
and low-cost events to the costume hire
service. His longtime friend Vivienne
Westwood, who died in December, held
Vive Le Punk, her first retrospective
exhibition, here in 1993, drawing heav-
ily on Burton’s collection.
After years of what Burton describes
As a prequel to that Margiela presen-
tation, we paraded tth hrough tth he llaabe
bell’s
grand new building , a short distance
f ro m t h e A rc d e T r i o m p h e , a n d p a s t
works from Galliano’s July 2022 cou-
ture. One grand evening coat looked like
1950s Balenciaga, bar the fact that the
“coral” embroidered around the neck-
line included a few spray-painted Lego
f i g u r e s. G a l l i a n o c a l l s h i s c r e a t i v e
scheme at Margiela “pyramidical”, with
the haute couture at the top inspiring all
product in a “trickle-d e-doown” effect.
There were clear through-lines from
the one - off handcrafted clothes
displayed in the building’s basement —
next to tools of the couture trade such as
s e w i n g t a b l e s a n d d r e s s m a k e r ’s
dummies — to Galliano’s bouncy cy,
y, ener-
getic Margiela ready-to-wear. The looks
were vaguely westernwear-influenced,
with curvy yoke lines, topstitching and
fringing, and tailoring and trenchcoats
for all genders chopped up, cut out and
often literally worn back to front.
Couture’s sense of the handmade in
t h i s s h o w w a s a b o u t t h e ro u g h a n d
ready, the perfect imperfection of the
human touch. It is something that is res-
onating with consumers: 2022 figures
hav
ha ave yet to be rele leaase
sedd but Ma Margi
rgieela la’’s
p a re n t c o m p a n y O T B a n n o u n c e d
that the house’s sales rose 25 per cent
globally and across all channels in 2021
to hit about €400mn, and increased 107
per cent between 2019 and 2021.
Most other houses interpreted cou-
t u re v i a a s e n s e o f re f i n e m e n t a n d
embracing of tradition. It was often
quiet — Williams’s Givenchy trousers
w e re i n g e n i o u s ly c u t t o e r a s e s i d e
★ FTWeekend
The pop
culture
costumier
as “tricky” relations with the building’s
o w n e r s, h i s l e a s e i s s e t t o e x p i r e i n
less
le ss tha
than n tw
twoo yea earsrs’’ tim
timee and musmustt be
renegotiated quickly if he is to stay.
Like many of central London’s inde-
p e n d e n t v e n t u r e s, B u r t o n f e a r s a n
accompanying substantial rent hike: “I
w o u l d n e e d t o f i n d s o m e w h e re e l s e ,
probably not in central London, and
definitely give up the exhibitions.”
The loss of such a central resource to
the film and fashion industries “would
be a great shame”, says Temple. (In a
statement, the building’s owners, Evan-
nance Investment, says it hopes to reach
an agreement with Burton on terms for
a new lease before 2024.)
Burton is liberal with anecdotes from
his time as a stylist in the 1980s, working
on music videos. He went shopping with
Bowie (“A mob of fans followed us down
South Molton Street and we had to hide
in a café”); Keith Richards of the Rolling
Stones was reluct ctaant to return a prized
leather jacket. Debbie Harry fell for a
leopard-print dress. Hall, who died last
month, was a regular.
The rails reach to the ceiling of this
vast room, where London’s work horses
once rested: thousands of suits, hats,
seams, a mind-bog gling fact that you
only realised when examining them in
the showroom. And while Louis Vuitton
wasn’t ostensibly about couture, the col-
lection was heavy on suiting too, and
one-off, esoteric accessories that occa-
sionally felt like luxurious gadgets for
the oligarch who has everything. Louis
Vuitton camcorder-bag, anyone?
Vu i t t o n’s m e n s w e a r h a s b e e n
designed by a creative team since Virgil
Abloh’s death, an approach that has pos-
itives — a wide range of product, a vari-
ety of outlooks — but also the negative of
From left: Hermès; Louis Vuitton; Saint Laurent — Filippo Fior/Gorunway.com
b a g s, b a l l g o w n s, t o w e r i n g b oxe s
o f sho e s; drawers and drawers
o r g a n i s e d w i t h a re c e d i n g s e a
of labels.
There are shoes hanging every-
where: glam rock- era platform
boots fringed with scarlet feathers;
w h i m s i c a l p a t e n t b ro g u e s w i t h
added angel wings from Mr Free-
dom, the de cadent 1960s Chelsea
b o u t i q u e ; h o b n a i l b o o t s wo r n by
Angelina Jolie in Hackers, her break-
through 1995 movie.
And inevitably, rows and rows of
original punk gear by Westwood,
some of it used as reference material
in last year’s punk history TV series
Pistol. A handmade 1980s Westwood
bra made of bones, chains and studs
is draped across a dummy near Bur-
ton’s desk.
The fashion industry and its stu-
dents, too, draw on Burton’s collec-
tion for reference and study — often to
evoke a certain era, or to study accurate
period details. “For the last 10 years,
that has been the mainstay of the busi-
ness,” says Burton.
M a rc Ja c o b s w a s a m o n g t h e f i r s t .
“He’d send a team of creatives to root
a l a c k o f o v e r a l l f o c u s. T h i s t i m e t h e
designer Co Collm Dillane of buzzy label
KidSuper was recruited to collaborate,
but he stistill
ll se
seeme
emed d one cr creat
eatiive voic oicee
among many. Following the switch of
CEO Pietro Beccari from Dior to Vuit-
ton, effe c tive from February 1, an
announcement of a new design lead is
expected soon.
Switch from that to Hermès, where
Véronique Nichanian has headed the
menswear since 1988, an indicator that
perpetual change isn’t always needed to
ignite desire. How about, simply, great
Clockwise from main: Roger Burton;
shoes and rare objects from The
Contemporary Wardrobe Collection;
The Specials frontman Terry Hall
wears a suit sourced by Burton in
‘Ghost Town’; outfits from Burton’s
archive. Photographs by
Stephen Burridge for the FT
design? Incredible fabrics, different
techniques, a strong awareness of your
customer and what men want to wear?
Shown in the Maison de l’Unesco, this
w a s a d i p l o m a t i c t o u r d e f o rc e o f
designer innovation, fashion engage-
ment and don’t-scare- e-tthe-
e-hhorses luxury
stalwarts. It’s tricky to highlight a partic-
ula
ularr ar area
ea of excelcellen
lence,
ce, but the wh whole
ole
thing lingered in the mind as a sum-total
v i s i o n o f w h a t a w e l l - d re s s e d m a n
should look like.
Kim Jones’s Dior collection had a simi-
l a r e f f e c t . H e i s, p e r h a p s, t h e h a n d
There was a frisson of
femininity in crisp shirts,
wide-legged trousers and
hyper-elongated coats
responsible for this whole notion of cou-
ture pour homme, as from the outset his
Dior collections have taken inspiration
from the house’s made-to-order opera-
tion and stories archives.
This collect ctiion, however, shifted to a
new gear. It’s easy to give a couture bent
to a tailored suit, but how abo bouut haute
couture gestures in a big old jumper, or a
pair of shorts, or even galoshes? Jones
tossed those out alongside references to
Yves Saint Laurent’s time as Dior’s dau-
phin in the late 1950s.
There were also bold reconfigurations
of archetypal garments: his jumpers
were pulled apart on one side, a sleeve
dissolving into a fluid drape, and kilts
e n d e d w i t h s h o r t s. T h e c o l l e c t i o n
5
Style
through, pick a couple of rails, ship it all
out to New York, then ship it all back,”
says Burton.
These days, fashion designers are his
best clients. Brands including Margaret
Howell use the collection to plug gaps in
archives. Burberry dispatches creative
teams to inspect vintage fabrics, zips
and buttons for creative inspiration.
The list goes on.
The Contemporary Wardrobe Collec-
tion is the only commercial costume
archive in the world focused entirely on
you
yo uth subcultures, as far as Burton
knows. What made him so obsessed?
Burton grew up in Leicester, until the
1980s the centre of the UK’s textile
industry, and as a young man was a ded-
icated mod. He still dresses like a mod,
the 1960s UK youth subculture devoted
to sharp, Italian style. Today he is wear-
ing a slim, Italian-cut cardigan in fine,
moss-green w woool aan
nd nneeat, eexxpensive-
looking brogues.
Burton’s is one of the few remaining
independent creative businesses from
the punk era. He left scho ol at 15 and
started collecting clothes from the 1920s
and 30s in the mid-1960s. One of his first
moves was to raid his grandfather’s col-
lection of Art Deco ties.
He starte d trading in se cond-hand
clothes, found his way to London. By the
mid-
mid-197
1970s
0s he was sel
sellin
lingg gea
gearr out of a
van on the King’s Road in Chelsea and
Keith Richards of the
Rolling Stones was
reluctant to return
a prized leather jacket
trading with Japan. Various subsequent
second-hand fashion ventures included
shops in a then-deserted Covent Garden
and the Portobello Market stall.
Inevitably, he met Westwood and
h e r p a r t n e r M a l c o l m Mc L a re n , w h o
admired Burton’s creativity and com-
missioned him to design and build the
interiors of their shop at number 430
when they renamed it World’s End in
1979. Later, he kitted out Nostalgia of
Mud, another Westwood-McLaren
fashion retail venture on St Christo-
pher’s Place in the West End. The inte-
rior was dressed to resemble an archeo-
logical dig. In the centre was a pool of
bubbling liquid. It was shortlived, but
somehow Burton had stumbled on the
right connections. “I was just in the right
place,” he says.
Burton has spent his life with clothes
and his accumulated knowledge of fash-
ion’s subcultures is astounding. He has
served as a costume judge for Bafta.
W h a t e ve r I p o i n t o u t , h e r a t t l e s o f f
details. The Westwood bone bra is a
1 9 8 0 s re m a ke o f a 1 9 70 s o r i g i n a l ; a
voluminous corduroy coat designed
and worn by the avant-garde dancer
Leigh Bowery in the 1980s is one of the
rarest items in his collection.
The film, music and fashion indus-
tries he serves may still be obsessed
with evoking the past. But do subcul-
tures still exist?
“I’m not seeing much sign,” says
Burton. He believes the 1980s style
press, with its endless barometers of
what was “in” and “out”, marked the
beginning of the end. Later, he says, the
internet allowed young people to be
whatever they wanted to be without
having to dress up.
“I sense young people have lost confi-
dence in their instincts,” he says.
showed the breadth of Jones’s creative
dexterity, while being packed with cov-
etable jewellery and hyper-luxurious
polished crocodile accessories.
This season, however, the couture
mood was nailed early on by Anthony
Vaccarello’s sleek, chic Saint Laurent
show. Pick the reference you saw within:
David Bowie’s Thin White Duke? The icy
perfection of Robert Mapplethorpe’s
’80s society portraiture? Saint Laurent’s
own heritage of superlative haute cou-
ture under its namesake, and his love of
menswear for women translated back to
men again? That, for me, was the over-
riding impression, a frisson of feminin-
ity in crisp shirts, wide-legged trousers
and hyper-elongated wide-shouldered
coats. It was a vision of polished power,
severe yet seductive.
This was the first standalone mens-
wear show that Vaccarello has pre-
sented in Paris since he debuted at the
label in 2016. “Before . . . maybe it was
too separate from women,” Vaccarello
said, quietly. “More and more I want
them
the m to be alm almost
ost one pers erson.
on. Befo
eforre
they were not at the same level. I want to
put them at the same level.”
That level was haute. And while this
c o l l e c t i o n i s u n d o u b t e d ly a s p e c i f i c
proposition — that elongated propor-
tion necessitates clearing 6ft not just to
pull it off, but to actually pull it on — it is
a definition of what fashion can, and
should, offer: a dream. Its specific sil-
houette and overall sense of precision
and p olish will doubtle ss influence
designers across the world. In short, get
ready for lots of ruffled big girl’s blouses
for spring/summer 2024.
6 ★ FTWeekend 28 January/29 January 2023

Travel

T
ucked between the Corso successful, an undeniably stylish and
Venezia and Via Sant’And- comfortable hotel with a few spatial
rea, in the heart of Milan’s dead spots (such as the quite clinical
Quadrilatero fashion dis- vestibule off the main corridor) perhaps
trict, is a building that was unavoidable, given the vast expanses of
one of Europe’s first seminaries. It is unalterable space to fill.
noteworthy on several fronts: the For the interiors, Ferragamo relied on
integrity of its Late Renaissance bones; longtime collaborator Michele Bönan, a
its provenance — commissioned in 1565 relative unknown when he was tasked
by Carlo Borromeo, Archbishop of with renovating the Lungarno in 1995.
Milan and leading light of the Counter- Three decades on, Bönan’s unerringly
Reformation, later canonised Saint cool house style — which favours carved
Charles; and the interventions it under- stone panels and varnished hard woods,
went at the hands of Piero Portaluppi, collectible European mid-century fur-
the pre-eminent architect of the city’s niture and the liberal mixing of marbles
20th-century golden age. in bathrooms — is recognisable to any-
But for the past 20 years the most one who has visited a Lungarno Collec-
notable thing about this erstwhile tion hotel (or any of the beautiful JK
treasure of Milan’s built environment Place hotels in Rome, Capri or Paris).
was its obscurity: secreted away behind Bönan leaned into Milan’s 20th cen-
closed gates, unoccupied, it was a place tury design heritage, with specific nods
few contemporary Milanese seemed to Portaluppi’s Villa Necchi Campiglio,
to even know existed, much less had the 1935 Milanese mansion that had a
ever visited. star turn in Luca Guadagnino’s I Am
Love. The hotel’s bedrooms, on the first
500 m and second floors, mix grey peperino, a
MILAN regional volcanic stone, with gleaming
Sforzesco wood panelling and shelves. Velvet,
Castle piped tweed and soft leather cover sofas

Cocktails in
QUADRILATERO and chairs; doors are inset with rattan
La Scala DELLA MODA panels. The floors are larch planks — a
Theatre hallmark of 18th-century Lombardian
Portrait
bourgeois homes, and an unexpected

the cloisters
Galleria Vittorio Milano
Emanuele II
The challenge was to
Milan
Cathedral translate an ecclesiastical
building into a modern host
©Mapcreator.io | OSM.org for secular luxury services

That changed on December 14, when
Giuseppe Sala, the city’s mayor, offici-
ated at the ribbon-cutting for Portrait
Milano, the hotel-restaurant-retail
complex which the seminary now
houses — the culmination of a decade-
long restoration project spearheaded by
Leonardo Ferragamo, chairman of the
Florence-based fashion and luxury
goods house Salvatore Ferragamo.
The seminary’s vast courtyard has
been rechristened Piazza del Quadrilat-
ero and opened to the general public for
the first time, providing walking access
between the neighbourhood’s two main
arteries. Besides the hotel, it showcases
fashion boutiques and drinking-dining
venues and, beginning later this year,
will host art exhibitions, performances
and other cultural events.
It’s quite the side project for Ferrag-
amo, who has not one but two day jobs:
in addition to running global operations
for the company his father founded (a
role he assumed in 2021), he is chair-
man of Lungarno Collection, his family’s
hospitality portfolio, started in 1995
with the acquisition of Florence’s his-
toric Hotel Lungarno. It has since
expanded to six properties, including
two under the Portrait brand: one over-
looking the Arno in Florence and
another on Rome’s Via Condotti. Por-
trait Milano, the Collection’s seventh
hotel, is leased from the Catholic Church
under a 30-year agreement. It is the
company’s maiden foray into Italy’s cap-
ital of design and fashion — and by far its
most ambitious development to date.
Ferragamo and Valeriano Antonioli,
Lungarno Collection’s chief executive,
are coy about their total spend (while
Salvatore Ferragamo is listed on the
Milan Stock Exchange, the Lungarno
Collection is strictly a family affair). But
when we meet at the hotel, the dapper
Antonioli winces slightly when he
admits the final tally was “much more
than we wanted,” citing pandemic-
related business woes then delays on
materials coming from eastern Europe,
as a result of the war in Ukraine.
Antonioli first spotted the seminary
in 2013, from the top floor of another
site. “I went back to my office and
mapped it on Google, and was
astounded. I’d lived around the corner
Milan | One of Europe’s oldest seminaries has been opened to the public
for the first time — with a plush hotel at its heart. By Maria Shollenbarger
for five years; I’d
cycled past the gate
[at 11 Corso Venezia]
dozens of times, and I
had no idea of its mag-
nitude.” He made con-
tact with the diocese
through a family
friend. Initially, he
says, the decision
makers were “not
interested in trans-
forming” along the
lines he and Ferrag-
amo proposed (read: no way in, ahem,
Clockwise from top: the seminary’s Hell would there be a hotel on seminary
courtyard has been rechristened premises). But Antonioli persisted and
Piazza del Quadrilatero; one of negotiations continued for two years.
Portrait Milano’s 73 bedrooms; Finally they arrived at an agreement
bathrooms feature a mix of marbles; — at which point, Antonioli recalls,
an aerial view of the courtyard of the “They said, ‘You’ve convinced us! But
former seminary; the basement we can’t go ahead with you; we have to
swimming pool; the hotel lobby have an open bid.’” He and Ferragamo
Roberto Zabini
won that, too, something Antonioli
credits to their proposal’s “inclusivity,
which they [the diocese] cared about.
We had always had the total restoration
i / D ETAI L S and public use of the courtyard in our
plan. We used the example of the Salone
Maria Shollenbarger was a guest of the Portrait [del Mobile — Milan’s annual furniture
Milano (lungarnocollection.com). Double rooms fair, which sees the city welcoming the
cost from €935 per night including breakfast. For public into normally inaccessible
more on visiting the city see the tourist board spaces] to describe the kind of ‘inclusive
website, yesmilano.it exclusivity’ we wanted to create.”
They hired architect Michele De Luc-
chi of Milanese studio AMDL Circle, a
71-year-old whose CV reads a bit like a
potted history of modern Italian design.
He was an influential member of the
Memphis movement, has been creative
director at Olivetti and editor of the
design monthly Domus, while designing
buildings ranging from the Deutsche
Bahn office in Frankfurt to NTT Group’s
headquarters in Tokyo.
The challenge was to translate a heav-
ily listed ecclesiastical building into a
modern host for very secular luxury
services. De Lucchi describes his man-
date as “intervening in an invisible but
substantial way” — which meant
researching the building’s 400-plus-
year history of demolitions and recon-
stitutions to understand how to best
accommodate exigencies like elevator
banks and geothermal exchange sys-
tems. One of his interventions was to
enclose the first-floor loggia with an
ingenious series of sliding glass panels
that sit behind the colonnade, a sleek
structural element that can be used to
retain heat or air conditioning.
Milan’s Superintendency of Fine Arts,
the civic body that oversees heritage
renovations, was also heavily involved.
“We worked incredibly closely with
them,” says Antonioli. “We spent hours
— hours — sitting in chairs in the court-
yard, deciding the precise shade of grey
for the walls. You cannot imagine how
many tones of light grey exist in this
world until you have done this with the
Sovrintendenza.”
But the results seem to be pleasing
those who’ve discovered the “piazza”,
now the largest one in the Quadrilatero.
Throughout my two-day stay, it was
constantly peppered with curious
locals. In the ground-level colonnade,
opposite the hotel’s lobby, I went to the
opening party for Antonia, a second out-
post of Milan’s celebrated concept store,
where boutiques-within-boutiques host
rotating brands ranging from Gabriela
Hearst to Courrèges. Next door is Beef-
bar, the haute “street food” concept res-
taurant that has played well in places
like Monte Carlo, Dubai and Sardinia’s
Costa Smeralda. Across the piazza is the
flagship boutique of SO-LE Studio, the
jewellery brand created by Ferragamo’s
daughter, Maria Sole — a space age-y
room displaying her unusual, direc-
tional pieces, which often substitute
leather in place of precious metals.
As well as inviting Milan in, Ferrag-
amo and Antonioli have reckoned on
the appeal of showing hotel guests
around Milan. The concierges have cre-
ated a series of private experiences and
itineraries, most lasting between a cou-
ple of hours and a half day. I spent an
educational afternoon exploring some
of the city’s finest contemporary build-
ings (including De Lucchi’s own strik-
ing, wood-clad UniCredit Pavilion) with
an urban-planning graduate student —
an itinerary that culminated with a
charming aperitivo at the Triennale,
after a walk around its gallery.
With its 73 rooms and suites, the hotel
itself — the largest of the three Portraits
(Florence has 37 bedrooms, Rome
only 14) — is the “exclusive” part of
this domain. It is for the most part
moment of rustic Gemütlichkeit in an
otherwise conspicuously polished whole.
Bathrooms, in contrasting combina-
tions of marble and coloured granite,
are indulgent in the extreme. Rooms on
the first floor each have their own desig-
nated sitting area in the loggia, directly
outside their door. Though the rattan
furniture is gorgeous, and they’re sepa-
rated by artfully-placed palms and foli-
age, don’t expect privacy.
At ground level, the restaurant, 10_11
(the name marries the piazza’s street-
entrance addresses on Via Sant’Andrea
and Corso Venezia) is an all-day venue
in a pretty room with ceilings painted to
resemble the fabric of a marquee (they
took a Florentine father-daughter team
of trompe l’oeil artists two weeks to
complete). Overseeing it is 32-year-old
Alberto Quadrio, a bit of a gamble as a
relative unknown — though in lieu of a
famous name, he brings a decade-plus
of experience working with a lot of
them, including Gualtiero Marchesi,
Norbert Niederkofler and Alain
Ducasse. The Mondeghili, his signature
bar snack — tiny fried meatballs with a
saffron mayonnaise — are worth the
indulgence, though your arteries won’t
forgive you any time soon.
Despite the globally recognised name
behind it, Lungarno Collection is a rela-
tively tiny chain hoping to make an out-
sized mark here. “Until now we had six
hotels, with a total of only 300 rooms —
which is, like, the Principe di Savoia,”
Antonioli says with a laugh, citing
Milan’s longstanding landmark hotel.
The Portrait isn’t the only new
challenger in the city: last September,
Venetian hospitality impresario Arrigo
Cipriani opened Casa Cipriani, a hotel-
restaurant-members’ club, in an
18th-century building in the city’s leafy
Porta Venezia neighbourhood; its
interiors were also designed by Bönan.
Early next year Rocco Forte Hotels will
take over and reopen The Carlton,
another Quadrilatero stalwart, after a
multimillion-euro renovation with its
own tranche of new restaurants and
retail. Meanwhile, though, try for
a room at the Portrait during the
spring collections, three weeks hence,
and you’ll be told there’s already a
waiting list.

POSTCARD
FROM ...
MENTON
i / DE TA IL S
This year’s Fête du Citron runs from February
11-26, see fete-du-citron.com. Carolyn Boyd
was a guest of Atout France, Menton Tourism
(menton-riviera-merveilles.co.uk), Tourisme
Côte d’Azur (cotedazurfrance.fr) and The
Maybourne Riviera, which has double rooms
from €750 (maybourneriviera.com)
A
giant violin made from
oranges and lemons stands
in the gardens outside
Menton’s opera house in
tribute to Mozart’s The
Marriage of Figaro. Eight metres high, it
incorporates 10 tons of fruit. Nearby in
the Jardins Biovès, a citrus Aïda sits
atop two enormous sphinxes, alongside
seven other towering sculptures.
I’ve escaped the winter gloom for a
weekend on the Côte d’Azur during
Menton’s Fête du Citron, a celebration
of all things citrus held every February.
The town, sandwiched between
Monaco and the Italian border, is
known for its lemons, which thrive
beneath steep cliffs that shelter the
groves from northern winds.
Prized for their sweet flavour and
edible peel, Menton’s lemons hold IGP
(Protected Geographical Indication)
status. They’re so precious, in fact, that
the 150 tons of lemons and oranges
that are used for the festival’s
showpieces aren’t Menton lemons at all
— they’re imported from Spain. “We
don’t produce enough lemons here for
all the statues and floats,” says
Christophe Ghiena, technical director
of the town council. “Besides, ours are
better saved for eating.”
The 15-day festival takes most of the
year to prepare for, with Ghiena’s
council employees helping to build the
enormous structures in metal scaffold
and wire mesh on to which the
thousands of oranges and lemons are
attached. “The fruit is added just a few
days before the festival starts, so
they’re as fresh as possible,” says
Ghiena. Afterwards, nothing goes to
waste — the fruit is sold in €1-bags and
the locals use it to make jam or juice.
More visitors are arriving, and a buzz
is building, as I wander between the
statues on Saturday morning. During
the weekend, 200,000 visitors are
expected in the groves and the open-
houses of producers before filling the
town centre for the Sunday afternoon
carnival parade.
More orange-and-lemon statues
stand on street corners and along the
Matthew Cook
seafront. Even more extraordinary is
how ubiquitous the fruit trees are. I spy
them in gardens, squares and the main
shopping street, Rue Saint Michel, is
lined with orange trees. Here between
the lemon-themed gift shops is La
Maison Herbin, established in 1975 and
known for its jams; its workshop is
open for the public to see the
production in action. Manager Maxime
Lefort tells me how the original
Madame Herbin had been inspired by
a marmalade recipe brought by the
British residents who first came to
Menton in the late 19th century.
In the workshop, myriad jams are
made by hand in huge copper pans.
Lefort takes a lemon and shows me
that it’s bigger and rounder than usual,
then cuts it open for me to see the
centimetre-thick peel, giving me a slice
to taste. I bite into it, skin and all,
expecting that familiar wince at the
sourness but it doesn’t come. “It’s
gentle isn’t it?” he says. The flavour is
indeed sweeter, fresh.
The shop’s famous lemon conserve is
therefore much less bitter than the
marmalade I’m used to, with just a
little zing. Beside it on the shop shelves
sit jams from all the various citrus
fruits grown in Menton: mandarins,
yuzu, kumquats, cedrat, bergamot,
sweet orange, bitter orange, grapefruit
and pomelo.
Along the street is the market hall
with counters selling meat, aromatic
spices and cheeses. There’s also Mitron,
the bakery of adopted local hero Mauro
Colagreco, the Argentine chef at the
helm of Menton’s three-star Michelin
restaurant Le Mirazur. I devour a
sticky, sweet almond and citrus slice,
licking my fingers as I go.
In the groves behind the town, I visit
La Maison du Citron, run by father and
son duo Laurent and Adrien Gannac.
They have 750 trees, of which 300 bear
fruit. When Laurent moved to Menton
in 1988, he was shocked to find that
lemon cultivation had fallen out of
favour with locals who were more
concerned with selling land for real
estate than growing lemons.
“You could see trees laden with fruit,
but people weren’t really harvesting
them. There was still a kind of folklore
around citrus fruits but the local
economy had moved on,” he says.
“Coming from outside, I saw they had
something totally exceptional.”
Menton’s municipal grove, La
Casetta, is only open to the public
during the fête. I join a tour around the
nine terraces, home to an extraordinary
collection of citrus plants, from lemons
to bergamots, grown here so the
council always has its own supply for
use in events and promotions.
Sunday is carnival day so I head to
the town centre where I watch a troupe
of cancan girls warming up their high
kicks. Before long, the parade starts
and the girls head off around the
circuit, whooping as they go. Musicians
pass by — there’s everything from a
brass band to a traditional Peruvian
group — interspersed with the floats: a
native American headdress created
from oranges and lemons, a giant
dancer lifting her skirt behind a citrus-
clad Moulin Rouge, a vast mechanical
insect followed by a robotic elephant
spraying water from its trunk. For two
hours, the air is filled with confetti,
music and the excited cheers of the
audience. The scene is pure joy — the
best antidote to the February blues I
could have wished for.
Carolyn Boyd
28 January/29 January 2023
Iceland | With 1930s Europe in turmoil, the poets WH Auden and Louis MacNeice found escape in a journey
to the strange, spectacular Westfjords. Sophy Roberts follows in their footsteps — in the midst of winter
R
ecently, I’ve found myself
drawn to the travel writing of
the 1930s. The themes reso-
nate with me — the pastoral
versus the political, escape
versus exploration — as journalists,
poets and novelists tried to make sense
of (or walk away from) the issues of their
decade: the rise of fascism in Europe, the
outbreak of the Spanish civil war,
Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia.
In some ways, I feel as if I’m living in
parallel times: confusing, violent,
nationalistic. I keep questioning the eth-
ics of escaping reality — in simple terms,
taking a holiday, which is what a great
deal of travel writing is about. Then I
read Letters from Iceland, a strange and
subversive book mixing poetry, pas-
tiche, reportage and packing lists, about
a trip the poet WH Auden made to Ice-
land with his friend Louis MacNeice in
1936. Unlike many of their contempo-
raries’ machismo-fuelled exploits, the
authors’ only test of endurance was “a
sixteen mile scramble in gumboots to
look at dead whales”.
I loved the book — a reminder of sat-
ire’s value when our faces are so long
with worry that we can forget to laugh.
Auden’s tone is witty and optimistic,
MacNeice’s more melancholic: “Here is
a different rhythm, the juggled balls/
Hang in the air — the pause before the
In the footsteps of . . .
This is the latest in a series
in which writers are guided
by a notable earlier traveller.
For more see: ft.com/
footsteps
soufflé falls/Here we can take a breath.”
MacNeice wanted their travels to
have “a definite flavour”, a counter to
his mood at home. Auden wanted to
experiment with the genre: “The trou-
ble about travel books as a rule, even the
most exciting ones, is that the actual
events are all extremely like each other
— meals — sleeping accommodation —
fleas — dangers etc, and the repetition
becomes boring.”
To avoid other tourists, I decided to go
in winter and head for the island’s
north-west. It was “the most beautiful
and least visited part of Iceland”,
claimed the poets, who recommended a
fortnight’s stay at ĺsafjörður. Back then,
you could only reach this pocket of the
Westfjords by boat from Reykjavík. I
could make the journey by road but,
given the time of year, I’d need help to
pull it off.
I called a travel operator, Pelorus. I
explained the book to them, with a
request: I didn’t need to follow the poets’
exact path — Auden and MacNeice
spent three months in Iceland — but it
would be good to lean into the north-
west and the spirit of their adventure.
This would mean staying in farmhouses
and homestays, which was what the
authors had done, with some camping
too, in spite of the season. Pelorus’s
Clockwise from main:
Arnarfjörður fjord; the
Old Bookstore in Flateyri,
which claims to be the
oldest store in Iceland;
Pelorus co-founder
Jimmy Carroll with guide
Gunnar Guðjónsson;
Carroll goes for a dip in the
geothermal pool at Hótel
Laugarhóll; a house on the
shore at ĺsafjörður, in the
winter solstice twilight.
Photographs by Sophy
Roberts
More winter trips to Iceland
Skiing Over the past decade, the Troll
Peninsula in the far north has become
known as a destination for heli-skiing,
with three companies now offering
trips (the original, arcticheliskiing.com,
has four-day packages from €8,470).
However, there is also cat skiing, where
participants travel up the mountain in
a caterpillar-tracked vehicle (from
ISK59,000/£330 per day; sporttours.is)
and three small conventional ski
areas, with seven lifts in total; see
visittrollaskagi.is. Stay at the Sigló
Hótel (keahotels.is; doubles from €177)
in the fishing town of Siglufjörður, at
the tip of the peninsula.
Self-drive Launched in 2019, the Arctic
Coast Way is a 900km route winding
along the sparsely inhabited north
coast, via remote fishing villages and
★ FTWeekend
Letters from the
edge of the world
expertise, they told me, included setting
up pop-up accommodation in ice caves
and on glaciers.
Auden liked the Icelanders, finding
them realistic and unromantic, with an
excellent sense of humour. I lost mine
immediately, along with my luggage,
when I arrived in a winter storm so fero-
cious that the plane from London had to
sit on the tarmac for almost as long as I’d
been in the air. I disembarked into
chaos: cancelled flights, and snow blow-
ing so hard that roads were closed all
over the country. When I finally made it
out of the airport, I was met by Jimmy
Carroll, an ex-British Army officer and
co-founder of Pelorus, who often leads
the company’s remote journeys.
“Our plans might need to change,” he
warned me, as Gunnar Guðjónsson, the
local guide and driver, cranked out
some steps from the side of his vehicle so
I could climb into the souped-up Ford
Excursion. For the next few days, it
would be carrying not just me, but also
my husband and two sons, who’d
arrived from London a few days earlier.
In the morning, my lost luggage
replaced with new essentials, we set out
north from Reykjavík on the same road
as Auden and MacNeice. The polar
dawn came up peacefully, spreading its
weird half-light. We passed through the
suburbs, through mounds of snow like
whipped cream. Then the blizzard came
in. Within an hour, the wind was travel-
ling at 33 metres per second.
“We call it White Darkness,” said
Guðjónsson, his confidence with deep-
field logistics now coming into its own.
Guðjónsson co-founded the Iceland
Space Agency, an organisation set up in
2017 to promote Iceland’s desolate inte-
rior as a destination for training astro-
nauts for lunar or Martian missions. He
spends much of his year working on Ice-
land’s glaciers, which the poets explored
with tents and ponies.
We stopped for something to eat — rye
bread baked in a geothermal oven in the
ground at a horse-breeding farm close
to Reykholt, an area which the poets
natural hot springs. In summer, many
bring tents or campervans, in winter
you are better off indoors. Discover the
World (discover-the-world.com) offers
a week’s self-driving trip, including 4x4
car rental and accommodation, from
£847 per person.
Arctic foxes and northern lights The
Hornstrandir Nature Reserve is one of
the world’s best places to spot Arctic
foxes and, given the total lack of light
pollution, is also ideal for viewing the
northern lights. An hour’s boat ride
from Ísafjörður, Kvíar Lodge is the only
occupied building for at least 40km; a
former farm, it’s now a six-room lodge,
with a cook, wood-fired sauna and
hide for watching wildlife. A six-day
winter trip costs ISK365,00 (£2,046),
see boreaadventures.com
recommended for “riding for riding’s
sake” on relatively flat ground. The
owner explained the Icelandic breed’s
unique “flying gait” (Auden just called
his horse “frisky”) and how there were
strict rules to protect the equine blood-
lines. She showed us her champion
ponies in stables heated from the natu-
ral springs. “We have so much free heat-
ing in Iceland,” she said, “we just throw
it away!”
It was too cold to ride. In fact, all our
plans were changing with new storm
warnings, including any notions of
snowshoeing, cross-country skiing or
sleeping in an ice cave. When we walked
the short distance to a waterfall, the
wind-chill took its toll in minutes: nei-
ther my fingers nor camera would work.
I took comfort in Auden’s line — “One
waterfall is extraordinarily like another”
— but when darkness fell at 3pm, I
started to worry the windows of light and
weather were too brief to do anything
with. I was concerned about our fast-
changing itinerary, which was being
managed by Caroll in silent WhatsApp
messages to keep the stress concealed.
Then we arrived at a modest wooden
home in Húsafell, and the catalyst to this
journey fell back into place. It felt as if we
were entering Auden’s notes from almost
90 years ago: “The sitting-rooms of Ice-
landic farms are all rather alike. Like
English cottages they are crammed with
furniture and knick-knacks,” he wrote.
Our host was Sæmundur Ásgeirsson
— a friend of Guðjónsson’s, with a long
white beard and raisin eyes. For 57
years, he worked across Iceland con-
structing power lines. He made us vöfflur
með rjóma — waffles — served with thick
cream, on mismatched crockery. Wear-
ing a Viking hat he’d fashioned from his
grandmother’s flower pot, he told us
about the church next door. He pointed
out the gravestone of one of Iceland’s
greatest ghost slayers, an 18th-century
priest called Snorri Björnsson.
Then, at the moment my boys might
have turned for their phones, the aurora
borealis came up in front of us: swirls of
green, twisting and arcing through the
sky. That night, snuggled under warm
blankets watching this northern light
show play out, we felt about as far from
home as it was possible to get — at least
until the next day when we hit the road,
and a strange red spot blinked in the
darkness ahead. “We’ve been seeing a
lot of Jupiter in the last couple of weeks,”
said Guðjónsson, as if it were com-
pletely normal to catch a planet with the
naked eye at 9am.
On our way into Strandir, a region
steeped in folkloric magic on the Westf-
jords’ eastern frill, we stopped at the
Museum of Sorcery and Witchcraft at
Hólmavík (in 1936, this was where the
motorable road ended). In one of the
museum’s display cases, there was a
life-size latex replica of a pair of “necro-
pants”. Long ago, or so the story goes,
they were sourced from a corpse flayed
from the waist down. The skin was
tanned and used as “trousers” by a liv-
ing person, who would find magical
coins inside.
We bore on through the blizzard, at
times almost tipping into a hurricane, to
reach a farmhouse for lunch. Next door
was a former school, converted into a
guesthouse, the Hotel Laugarhóll.
Hosted by a local couple, Victoria Rán
Ólafsdóttir and Hlynur Gunnarsson,
this was another deep dive into the cul-
ture. We heard how, in the old days,
when someone appeared to have died of
cold, the biggest man in the community
would lie in bed next to the corpse. His
job was to break the corpse’s back if it
showed any sign of returning life — the
people didn’t understand how, on rare
occasions, slow heat can bring the all-
but-dead back from hypothermia.
My children loved the northern story-
telling with the same enthusiasm Auden
evoked. They listened to tales of Green-
land sharks, which might live for 400
years, and the narwhal horns the locals
found on beaches, which looked as if
7
Travel
they came from unicorns. They loved
hanging out in blizzards in the hot geo-
thermal springs. I too could have stayed
longer, for the delicious Arctic char, the
meaty cod, the lamb that tasted of
mountain herbs. (Like the poets, I didn’t
enjoy the dried fish: “The tougher kind
tastes like toe-nails, and the softer kind
like the skin off the soles of one’s feet.”)
But we had to move with the weather
openings if we were ever going to reach
ĺsafjörður. It would be a long journey,
and in the luminescent polar light,
ravishingly exciting: the howl of wind,
the crinkled snow, the lurch of stom-
achs as we followed the narrow hem of
tarmac between us and the North
Atlantic Ocean.
The fjords appeared ahead of us, lay-
ered one behind the other in indigoes
and chiffon pinks. The basalt cliffs,
scarred with scree and avalanches, fell
off into a churning sea. The beaches
beneath the hairpin bends glittered with
ice and driftwood. Occasionally, we’d
see a church, or a blood-red farmhouse
sharply drawn against the treeless
white. As we drove down to the head of
one sheltered fjord, the colours changed
again: an obsidian sea, spangled
lagoons, the frozen cascade of a water-
fall, strung with tubes of milky blue.
When we pulled into town, we hit the
©Mapcreator.io | OSM.org Greenland
Sea
Ísafjörður Hótel
Laugarhóll
Hólmavík
Denmark
ICELAND
Strait
Húsafell
Reykholt
Reykjavík
50 km
winter solstice: sunrise at 12.09, sunset
at 14.51.
“Would you ever want to live here?”
my husband asked me later that night.
We were in an ĺsafjörður homestay, in a
converted coffin workshop, the weather
rattling the building’s sides. On the floor
above us was the owner’s private
museum, devoted to his mother’s col-
lection of dolls.
I told him I loved the landscape —
adored it, just as the poets promised —
and the feeling of being on the edge of
the world. But I wasn’t so sure about the
necropants. Or the dolls. I thought this
would be the end of the conversation,
one I imagine other couples having after
a good holiday — the equivalent of want-
ing to buy a ruin in Tuscany because the
mini-break was a success.
But it turns out my husband, who
spends his summers hiking in Green-
land, has been nurturing different ideas
since we got home. When he read the
draft of this article, he showed me a new
app on his phone. It tracks the trawler
traffic going in and out of the Westf-
jords. “One day,” he told me, “we’re
going to move there.”
I showed him Letters from Iceland, and
a couplet from Auden: Islands are places
apart where Europe is absent/Are they?
The world still is, the present, the lie.
My husband doesn’t much care for
poetry, so I spelt it out for him: there’s
such a thing as holidays, but there’s also
no running away.
“There,” he said, pointing to a line
from MacNeice that I’d highlighted in
the text: “Your poet thinks the same as
me: ‘That the North begins inside’.”
Jaja ding dong! I wanted to shout. Our
trip to Iceland was an even bigger suc-
cess than I’d thought. For the first time
in 30 years of knowing him, my hus-
band was quoting me a line in literature
other than Lee Child’s.
i / DETAILS
Sophy Roberts was a guest of Pelorus
(pelorusx.com). Its winter 4x4 adventure to the
Westfjords costs from £2,300 per person per day,
including glacier exploration, snow-shoeing,
cross-country skiing, camping in ice caves and an
overnight in the remote Hornstrandir Nature
Reserve (much of which wasn’t possible on
Sophy’s trip due to the extreme weather)
8 ★
America first
or foremost
Essay | Global guardian or go-it-alone
superpower? Philip Stephens on the competing
impulses in US politics over the past century
B
ritain strode out in its quest
for empire. Colonialism, it
told itself, carried its superior
sys t e m o f g ove r n m e n t t o
remote corners ooff the w woorld
and bestowed power and riches along
the way. The US was a reluctant entrant
to the club of great powers. Its economy
surpasse d that of Britain during the
1870s, but it wasn’t until 1945 that
it fully took its place at the centre of
world affairs.
America’s journey from Thomas
Jefferson’s aversion to foreign entangle-
ments to its post-1945 restructuring of
the international order was stuttering
and painful. The forces that pulled it by
turns towards isolationism and inter-
ventionism still live on — witness Presi-
dent George W Bush’s military misad-
ventures in the Middle East and Donald
Trump’s America First unilateralism.
Those on b oth side s of the argument
have generally paid scant attention to
consequences elsewhere.
For Europeans, if there is something
worse than an over-mighty superpower
it is an absent America content to leave
the rest of the world to settle its own
scores. Even now, as Joe Biden’s admin-
istration leads the west’s response to
Russian aggression in Ukraine, Europe-
ans fret that Trump might yet find a way
back to the White House in 2024.
Robert Kagan, a scholar at the Brook-
ings Institution, is an unabashed apostle
for the utility of US power in upholding
international order. He was prominent
among the cheerleaders for GW Bush’s
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a critic
of Barack Obama’s efforts to draw a
tighter line around Washington’s
responsibilities. Americans are from
Mars and Europeans from Venus, he
observed, when allies protested at the
toppling of Saddam Hussein.
So in charting America’s hesitant
path during the four decades of the
20th century before its hand was forced
by the Japanes esee bo
bommbing of Pearl Har-
b or in 1941 , Kagan has an agenda: the
c o l l a p s e o f wo r l d o r d e r d u r i n g t h a t
period was in no small part due to
America’s refusal to pick up the baton
from the British empire.
Today’s isolationists, Kagan believes,
should take note. The world, though,
has changed. A century on, the US
remains the world’s pre-eminent power
but its dominion is contested, not least
by China’s rise and by Russia’s revan-
chism. And it confronts enemies within.
As Richard Haass, a former US diplo-
mat, explains, if America wants to hold
its own in a world that could sleepwalk
a g a i n i n t o g re a t p owe r c o n f l i c t , i t
needs to fix its democracy. Trump’s
attempted coup in January 2021 spoke
to de ep -seate d cracks in the founda-
tions of the republic.
The Ghost at the Feast, the second in
Kagan’s planned trilogy charting Amer-
ica’s foreign po pollicy, sets the competing
impulse s in dome stic p olitics — the
instin
ins tincct to stastand
nd bac
backk vers
ersus
us shi
shinin
ning-g-
city- on-the -hill internationalism —
Model citizen
A young woman flees her
homeland to seek ‘freedom
and fantasy’ in 1920s Paris.
By Bryan Karetnyk
M
y dear, let me repeat — we
are in Paris, thanks be to
the October Revolution,
and all that twaddle has
been consigned to the
dustbin once and for all.” Dismissing
centuries’ worth of Caucasian custom
and Islamic modesty in a single, smoke-
filled breath, these airy words alerted
t h e A z e r b a i j a n i w r i t e r Um m u l b a n u
Asadullayeva — better known by her
pseudonym, Banine — to a radical
change in circumstance. Life in Paris, so
her sister informed her, would be a far
cry from their childhood in Baku.
First published in 1947, the second
volume of Banine’s memoirs, Parisian
against the breakdown of the balance
of power arrangements that had kept
the global peace since the Congress of
Vienna of 1814-15. The story is fluently
t o l d , i f s o m e w h a t ove r b u r d e n e d b y
footnotes.
At the opening of the 20th century,
America had already established itself
as the preponderant global economic
power. Geology gave it an abundance of
the energy and mineral resources that
powered industrialisation. Geography
— the natural defences provided by two
oceans — provided a unique degree of
security. Americans saw no reason to
engage in the great-power rivalry that
wo u l d l e a d E u ro p e i n t o t wo wo r l d
wars. Pacifying Cuba and seizing the
Philippines from Spain to protect the
Atlantic and Pacific approaches was as
far as its foreign adventurism went. As
Kagan says: “Whatever being a ‘world
power
ower’ meant, most Americans we werre
not interested.”
When the world went to war in 1914,
the US was determinedly neutral. East
Coast sympathies for Britain were tem-
pered by the countervailing loyalties of
German and Irish Americans. “We defi-
nitely have to be neutral,” Woodrow
Wilson warned in September 1914,
“since otherwise our mixed populations
would wage war on each other.” It was
not until 1917, when the Kaiser’s U-boat
fleet resumed indiscriminate attacks on
Atlantic shipping, that Wilson reframed
the war as a st strug
ruggle
gle betw
etweeen de demomoc- c-
racy and tyranny and dispatched Amer-
ican troops to Europe.
The change of heart did not survive
the peace. Congress disowned Wilson’s
grand plan for a rule s-base d interna-
tional system by refusing to sign up to
t h e L e a g u e o f N a t i o n s . S u c c e s s i ve
America as a global economic power
Estimated share of world GDP*, 1870-2022 (%)
1870s: Populous but rural,
China is the largest economy.
Its share of output falls
as others industrialise.
The US overtakes the UK
30
20
10
Germany
Japan
0 today, as China challenges US primacy,
1880 1900 1920 1940
*At purchasing power parity **Russian empire pre-1917; successor states post-1991
Source: Angus Maddison, Conference Board, IMF, FT
Days, picks up where its rakish compan-
ion piece, Days in the Caucasus, left off. It
opens with its young heroine, still only
17, h avin g lo st h er va st f ort u n e t o
“democratisation” in the aftermath of
revolution. Aboard the Orient Express
— her unwanted, witless husband aban-
doned in Constantinople — she speeds
towards the “promised land” of Paris,
where she hopes to leave behind the
“years of . . . ruin and terror amid the
rubble of an abolished world”.
Arriving at the Gare de Lyon, she finds
the city of light “teeming with émigrés
f ro m eve r y c o r n e r o f t h e Ru s s i a n
Empire” — all down-at-heel, all desper-
ate to get their former lives back. But if
in exile her former compatriots live on
“memories and a host of pretensions”,
Banine, we observe, prefers to move
with the times, seizing opportunities
that allow her to realise her dreams of
“freedom and fantasy”.
Aided by her sister Zuleykha, who has
now taken a lover (a Catholic Spanish
FTWeekend
Republican presidents were more inter- Germany by the Versailles treaty. On the
e s t e d i n s e c u r i n g t h e re p a y m e n t o f other side of the world, Washington was
American war loans than the chaos of equally resolute in its inaction when
Weimar Germany. imperial Japan invaded Manchuria as a
For Kagan, Europe’s descent into fas- prelude to the occupation of China.
cism owed more to this US refusal to Franklin D Roosevelt, president from
serve as the guardian of international 1933, spoke out occasionally against Hit-
order than to the burdens place d on ler’s Nazis and Japanese militarism,
warning in 1937 that the “contagion” of
war could threaten the US. But his politi-
c a l e n e r g i e s w e re d i re c t e d t o w a r d s
securing recovery from depression. “I
The US share peaks China once again hate war,” he declared during his 1936 re-
as WW2 is fought becomes the world’s election campaign. “You will get nothing
in other countries largest economy out of the Americans but words,” was the
caustic judgment of Britain’s interwar
prime minister Stanley Baldwin. Britain
had to wait
wait untiluntil Japan
apan bombe
ombed Pear earll
US Harbor and Hitler declared war on the
U S b e f o re A m e r i c a n t ro o p s a g a i n
crossed the Atlantic.
Kagan overstates his case. His analysis
of the competing impulses in US politics
is ssttronger than tth hat of the n naationalist
dynamics of interwar Europe. It’s not
self-evident that a more active US would
have saved the continent from itself or
China China from Japanese aggression.
For all that, the underlying argument
USSR**
— that America’s studied absence sent a
powerful signal to Mussolini, Hitler and
Franco in Europe and to the militarists in
Tokyo — is well made. It also encouraged
appeasement. However much it might
like to retreat from the world, the US
UK cannot avoid the fact of its power. Even
1960 1980 2000 2020 the war in Ukraine is a reminder that the
advanced democ ocrracies still take their
Data visualisation by Keith Fray
cue from Washington.
Parisian Days
P riotous “every man’s land” that was
by Banine,
b Montparnasse in the 1920s, rubbing
ttranslated by shoulders with the likes of Ossip Zadk-
Anne Thompson-
A
Ahmadova
A
ine and Ernest Hemingway in the grand
cafés. She encounters a dubious cast of
Pushkin Press £16.99
P
2256 pages
Russian generals, Georgian princes,
bohemia
ohemian n art
artist
istss and Ame
Americ rican
an heir eir--
esses in the city’s many Russian night-
clubs, where, with an air of desperation,
a simulacrum of old empire plays out
nightly. But if the gloom is briefly lifted
with Veuve Clicquot, the darkening
painter descended from a line of hidal- political reality soon manifests, and Gul-
gos), and their emancipated, “liberally nar’s German lover vanishes.
shameless” cousin Gulnar, Banine Part memoir, part social history,
transforms herself into a paragon of Parisian Days reads like a novel, its
we s t e r n l i b e r a l i s m . S h e c a s t s o f f h e r sumptuous and unsparing prose once
veil, cuts her hair, learns to apply again beautifully carried over into Eng-
m a ke - u p a n d g e t s a j o b w o r k i n g a s a lish by Anne Thompson-Ahmadova. Yet
“mannequin”, first for the House of w h e re D a y s i n t h e C a u c a s u s c a s t s a n
Worth and later for Irfé, the maison de irreverent eye over the Islamic stric-
couture founded by Rasputin’s mur- tures and inequalities of life in the Cau-
derer, Prince Yusupov, and his wife casus Viceroyalty, Parisian Days, for all
Irina, the niece of Tsar Nicholas II. its comic bravura, takes unflinching
By evening , she ventures out to the aim at Russia’s colonial legacy amid the
The Ghost at the Feast:
America and the Collapse
of World Order, 1900-1941
by Robert Kagan
Knopf £28.23, 688 pages
The Bill of Obligations:
The Ten Habits of Good
Citizens
by Richard Haass
Penguin $28, 240 pages
Above: Franklin D
Roosevelt inspecting US
troops in Morocco in
January 1943 — a little
over a year after America
joined the second world
war — Corbis/Getty Images
Below: Ummulbanu Asadullayeva —
better known by her pseudonym,
Banine — in Paris in 1931
28 January/29 January 2023
Haass, the president of the Council on
Foreign Relations, has written exten-
sively about America’s role as an organ-
isi
ising
ng power er.. Esc
Eschew
hewinging the uni
unilat
later
eral
al
interventionism of neoconservatives,
he is a cheerleader for American
alliance -building. In this late st short
book, The Bill of Obligations, however, he
admits a deeper concern than threats
from China, Russia or North Korea
and Iran. Foreign p olic y b egins at
home, and “The most urgent and signif-
icant threat to American security and
s t a b i l i t y s t e m s n o t f ro m a b ro a d b u t
from within.”
At risk, in Haass’s mind, is the very
fabric of American democracy. The
Trump supp orters who storme d the
Capitol on January 6 2021 failed in their
attempt to overturn the 2020 presiden-
tial election. The message they carried
is chilling nonetheless. A sizeable seg-
ment of the US electorate still rejects
the legitimacy of Biden’s pres esiidency —
a n d d o s o w i t h e n c o u r a g e m e n t f ro m
prominent figures in the Republican
party. When the outcome of a free and
fair election is rejected by “tens of mil-
lions” of Americans, democracy is in
serious trouble.
Behind this, Haass argues, lies the fad-
ing of the shared belief that citizens
remain part of a single community. Stag-
nating middle-class incomes and the clo-
sure of traditional industries in the face
of technological advance have created an
era of economic insecurity. Upward
mobility, once at the very heart of the
American dream, “has become more
dream than reality”. The global financial
crash drained public confidence in the
government’s capacity and willingness
to respond to the concerns of voters.
Electoral gerrymandering has shrunk
the space for bipartisan collaboration.
The fragmented world of digital media
has empowered populists by creating
echo chambers calculated to amplify the
anger and fears of the excluded.
Underneath this, Haass says ays,, lies a
dangerous erosion of the nation’s politi-
However much it might
like to retreat from the
world, the US cannot avoid
the fact of its power
cal culture. American democracy, long a
beacon for nations escaping tyranny,
has been drained of civility, respect for
truth and facts, appreciation of values
and norms and willingness to compro-
mise. The rights of citizens are guaran-
teed by the constitution and enforced by
the law, but a healthy democracy also
depends on broad acceptance of an eco-
system of obligations. Without mutual
respect for civic values, rights become a
source of conflict.
Haass’s answer is “nothing less than ‘A
Bill of Obligations’” to sit alongside the
Bill of Rights embedded in the constitu-
tion. Some will ask whether that is a
practical proposition, but it is hard to
disagree with the sentiments expressed
in former president Jimmy Carter’s
inaugural address: “Our nation can be
s t ro n g a b ro a d o n ly i f i t i s s t ro n g a t
home. And we know that the best way to
enhance freedom in other lands is to
demonstrate here that our democratic
system is worthy of emulation.” A
thought, perhaps, for neoconservatives.
Kagan’s case for muscular American
interventionism sits uneasily alongside
the power shifts of the present century.
Biden’s recasting of the US role as that of
the west’ st’ss con
convveni
ening
ng power fit fitss mor
moree
comfortably with the geopolitical reali-
tiess of the 202
tie 2020s0s.. For its par
partt, Haa
Haass ss’’s
analysis of the threats within feels overly
pessimistic. What’s true is that, as during
the first decades of the 20th century, the
rest of the world will not escape the con-
sequences of America’s choices.
Philip Stephens is an FT contributing editor
privations of exile. Not only do two of
her fellow mannequins, both Russian,
make attempts to “colonise” her, but the
émigrés of the Left Bank “assimilate
badly”, notes Banine, scorning their
host country and deeming integration a
“betrayal” of the motherland.
“We were pawns on the chessboard of
our fates,” Banine at one point reflect ctss,
“and had been moved without compas-
sio
sion.
n.”” But it was an unexp unexpeecte ted
d qui
quirk
rk
of fate that, in emigration, she should
both lose and gain so much more than
other former subjects of the empire.
In Europe, the immense fortune that oil
barony had brought her in pre-revolu-
tionary times was exchanged for such
freeedom
fr domss, opp opport
ortuniunitie
tiess, and — mos
mostt
crucially of all — hope that her more
nostalgic, sentimental compatriots
denied themselves.
P a r i s m a y w e l l h av e b e e n a w o r l d
apart from where she was born, but for
Banine the bittersweet experience of
exile was the making of her.
28 January/29 January 2023
Mississauga Chippewa chief Maungwudaus (second left) visited Europe, making sharply cynical observations on European society in an 1848 pamphlet — Alamy
Countering Columbus
A courageous reversal of the conventional ‘discovery’ narrative puts indigenous
Americans who came to Europe at the centre of the story. By Suzannah Lipscomb
D
id Columbus “discover”
America? How much our
choice of words matters is
clear from the first page of
Caroline Dodds Pennock’s
courageous new book about the pres-
enc
encee of Azt Azteecscs,, Ma
May
aya, Toto
otonac
nacss, In
Inuit
uit
and other indigenous Americans in
early modern Europe. Rather than the
“Spanish conquest” of Mexico, she calls
it “Cortés’s ongoing, unsanctioned inva-
sion”. The effect is startling — convinc-
ingly shattering conventional historical
framing. It’s a clue to what’s to come.
The indigenous people who “discov-
ered” Europe, as her subtitle frames it,
are the thousands of native peoples who
travelled eastward, away from their
homelands, from the 1490s. On Savage
Shores — focusing on the first 100 years
o f m e a n i n g f u l e xc h a n g e b e t w e e n
E u ro p e a n d t h e A m e r i c a s — c e n t re s
t h o s e w h o n o r m a l ly o n ly s u r f a c e a s
exotic oddities. These include a Brazil-
ian kin
kingg at the cou court
rt of Hen
Henryry VII
VIII; I; an
Inka princess, Doña Francisca Pizarro
Yupanqui, who acted as an indigenous
ambassador; and the remarkable Diego
de Torres y Moyachoque, who became
a n a dvo c a t e i n S p a i n f o r i n d i g e n o u s
rights in the late 16th century.
The story that is normally told is of
C h r i s t o p h e r Co l u m b u s a n d o f o t h e r
explorers, colonists and settlers in his
wake “discovering” America in 1492.
Behind the idea of “discovery” was a
legal fiction, dating from the Treaty of
Tordesillas of 1494, that divided up the
“New World” between the Spanish and
the Portuguese, and permitted Europe-
ans to settle “discovered” lands as if they
didn’t already have inhabitants.
But , for thousands of indigenous
Americans, discovery went the other
way. When they reached European
Nietzsche versus the narwhal
Katy Guest on what animals
teach us about intelligence
— and why human morality
‘kind of sucks’
H
umankind is “the brother-
hood of death”, wrote Frie-
drich Nietzsche, cheerily,
in 1887.
Probably uniquely
among all the animals, humans under-
stand the reality that one day every-
thing living must die. We can mentally
project ourselves into the future and
imagine the results of our actions, a con-
cept known as episod odiic fores esiight. But,
o w i n g t o a n e vo l u t i o n a r y a n o m a ly
called prognostic myopia, we can’t
real
eallly eng
engagagee emo
emotio
tional
nallly witwith h muc
much h
beyond our immediate survival.
Thanks to our highly evolved intelli-
gence, we humans are killing ourselves,
other species and our planet. We under-
stand the consequences but we don’t
c a r e e n o u g h t o s t o p. N o w o n d e r
On Savage
O Ojeda, for example, wrote in 1499 that
SShores: How
IIndigenous
Americans
A much obfuscatory work. Yet elsewhere,
Discovered
D the predatory treatment of native peo-
Europe
E ples is in plain view. Columbus’s second
by Caroline
b voy a g e i s n o t o r i o u s f o r t h e d e t a i l e d
Dodds Pennock
D account of the rap e of an indigenous
W
Weidenfeld &
Nicolson £22
N da Cuneo.
3320 pages
shores they discovered societies whose
wonders were equalled by their brutal-
ity, whose riches by their extreme dis-
parity, and whose learning by their
intolerance. In telling the other side of
the encounter between the “Old World”
and the “New”, Dodds Pennock casts an
entirely new light on one of the most
famous episodes of history.
Most indigenous travellers did not
cross the Atlantic of their own volition.
Although theoretically native peoples
could not be enslaved, except under cer-
tain conditions, those conditions (if
thought to be cannibals, resesccued from
human sacrifice or enslavement to a
non-Christian, or captured in a “just”
war) were malleable and capacious.
The scale of indigenous enslavement
is bogg
gglling. Dodds Pennock — senior lec-
turer at the University of Sheffield and
the UK’s only Aztec historian — quotes
Andrés Reséndez’s book, The Other Slav-
ery (2016), in which he estimates that
1mn-2mn native people were enslaved
before 1600, of whom some 650,000
were forcibly transported to foreign
lands. Columbus alone seized some-
where between 3,000 and 6,000 Carib-
bean men, women and children.
These are estimates because the real-
ity of indigenous slavery is shrouded in
the records. Conquistador Alonso de
Nietzsche was miserable. It’s a wonder
any of us can get out of bed.
In the introduction to Justin Gregg’s
surprisingly not- depressing book If
Nietzsche Were a Narwhal, the dolphin
communication expert and lect ctuurer on
animal behaviour sets out his thinking.
“If we look at intelligence from an evo-
lutionary perspe c tive,” he writes,
“there re’’s eve
verry re reaason to believe that
complex thought , in all its forms
t h ro u g h o u t t h e a n i m a l k i n g d o m , i s
often a liability.” Gregg wants us to con-
s i d e r w h e t h e r s u p p o s e d ly s u p e r i o r
h u m a n i n t e l l i g e n c e i s a c t u a l ly a n y
b etter than the simple thoughts of a
cow, a slug or indeed a narwhal.
Fro m t h e o u t s e t i t s e e m s t h a t t h e
answer is “no” — as he points out, it’s
hard to imagine a narwhal trying to jus-
tify genocide or having an existential
crisis. But, to explore the subject thor-
oughly, complex concepts need to be
unpacked. For a start, what do we mean
by “intelligence”, and what do we mean
by “better”?
The b boook delves iin nto mmaatters ssccien-
tific, scatological and philosophical as it
★ FTWeekend
odds Pennock acknowledges this and
says there is “every reason to believe the
dialogues could be genuine” while also
telling us it is fictionalised.
It is tricky to distinguish authentic
and historic indigenous values —
towards trade, money and the accrual
of resources — without producing what
L i n d a T u h i w a i S m i t h, a u t h o r o f t h e
he had “obtained some Indian women of groundbreaking De Deccolonizing Methodol-
notable beauty”. The verb “obtain” does ogies, has called “a mystical, misty-
eyed discourse”. There are interesting
q u e s t i o n s a b o u t a g e n c y : we re t h e
Taíno people of Cuba who were bap-
tised in 1493 in the presence of Fern-
ando of Aragón and Isab el of Castile
Caribbean woman by his friend Michele christened “of their own will and coun-
sel”, as the Spanish source confidently
C e n t r i n g i n d i g e n o u s p e o p l e ove r - re p o r t s, o r f o rc i b ly c o nve r t e d , a s
turns many historical verities. Consider Dodds Pennock suggests?
Thomas Hariot’s famous creation of a To write history that puts marginal-
phonetic alphabet to transcribe an ised people in the foreground necessar-
Algonquian language in 1584. i ly i nvo lve s re ly i n g o n f r a g m e n t s —
The manuscript, mostly in Hariot’s m o m e n t s w h e re p e o p l e f l i t i n t o a n d
neat hand, also b ears the inscription straight out of the historical limelight.
“MANTEORO ROIIDN”, which has been This means stories that are uncertain
and inconclusive. It means reckoning
Indigenous Americans with the need for some speculation. It
challe
cha llenge
ngess som
somee of the sureti
suretiees of th thee
discovered societies whose historical method. Some of the old
wonders were equalled guard will carp. But it makes us attend
to the ways in which our picture of the
by their brutality past has been shaped by the sources we
have available.
Dodds Pennock is clear- eyed and
deciphered as “Manteo roi done” or frank about these challenges. She ends
“King Manteo did this”. It sug gests with the story of an Inuit baby called
authorship, Dodds Pennock says — Nutaaq, abducted on Baffin Island, Can-
that the extraordinary achievement ada and buried in St Olave’s Church on
of Hariot’s alphabet was not his alone, Hart Street in the City of London, yards
b u t a c o l l e c t i v e e n d e av o u r w i t h h i s from Samuel Pepys, about whose life we
indigenous partner, Manteo. have so many words. The juxtaposition
As this example shows, locating indig- encapsulates the comparative difficulty
enous people in Europe means relying on of researching indigenous lives. In On
archival slivers. Elsewhere, native voices Savage Shores, Dodds Pennock has per-
are ventriloquised by European scribes. formed a monumental work of histori-
Some of the sources are problematic — cal excavation. Beautifully written and
the record (written down by a Euro- painstakingly researched, this is first-
pean in 1703) of a conversation in which rate scholarship.
an earlier Wyandot chief of the Turtle
Clan in mod odeern-day Canada critiqued Suzannah Lipscomb is a historian, writer
the values of European society has been and broadcaster and professor emerita of
embraced by some native scholars. history at the University of Roehampton
IIf Nietzsche and it enables animals to deceive. Play-
Were a Narwhal:
W ing dead is a simple example of how ani-
What Animal
W mals trick each other. A more impres-
IIntelligence sive illustration is the cuttlefish who
Reveals About
R makes the male rival on his left think
Human
H he’s female while revealing his true col-
SStupidity ours to the female love interest on his
by Justin Gregg
b right. But humans, with our complex
Hodder & Stoughton
H social networks and language, are mas-
££22, 320 pages ters of deception. Our ability to lie, com-
b i n e d w i t h o u r i n s t i n c t t o b e l i e ve ,
“makes us a danger to ourselves”.
i nve s t i g a t e s i d e a s t h a t t h o u s a n d s o f Chapter by chapter, Gregg describes
years of thinking are yet to resolve. these different aspects of intelligence,
“There is, and never will be, any agree- explaining which animals share them
ment as to what intelligence is,” Gregg but why humans’ abilities are much bet-
says, but if it’s consciousness — “what t e r — a n d t h e re f o re w o r s e . W h e n a
happens when your brain generates a chimpanzee in a zoo calmly stockpiles
s e n s a t i o n , f e e l i n g , p e rc e p t i o n , o r rocks or his own faeces to throw at tour-
thought of any kind that you are aware ists later, in anticipation of his own
of” — animals have it. As for emotions, anger, he is display ayiing episodic fore-
m o s t m a m m a l s e x h i b i t s e ve n b a s i c sight. When humans think forwards to a
types: seeking, lust, care, play, rage, fear time after we are dead, we create art and
and panic. culture, and also holy wars. When a
Even a “theory of mind” is not unique stump-tailed macaque violates social
to humans. This is the awareness that rules he’ll get a smack and then a hug.
other beings hav avee thoughts in their But humankind’s ability to create com-
heads that may be different from ours, p l ex m o r a l sys t e m s l e a d s t o l aw a n d
Forced to forget
Yuan Yang on a lyrical account of China’s Cultural
Revolution, told through the stories of its survivors
Red Memory
by Tania
Branigan
Faber £20
304 pages
A
nother book about
the CulCultur
tural al Revoluolu--
tion? Why do foreign-
ers like to read abo bou ut
it so much?” was my
mother’s response when I told her
I was reading Red Memory by Tania
Branigan.
I n d e e d , t h e re a re n u m e ro u s
E n g l i s h - l a n g u a g e t ex t s o n t h e
chaos and violence of 1966-76, the
decade of internal factional strug-
gle s under Chairman Mao that
killed around 2mn people — teach-
ers bludgeoned to death by their
students, class enemies hounded
by their neighbours. Among the
books credited by Branigan, The
Guardian’s China corres espo
ponndent
between 2008 and 2015, are vet-
eran journalist Yang Jisheng ’s
recently translated The World
Turned Upside Down, Jung Chang’s
autobiographical Wild Swans and
the post-1970s “scar literature” of
writers such as Lu Xinhua.
What makes Branigan’s account
special is captured in a line at the
end of her work: “This book could
not be written if I were to be beggin it
today.” Her posting in Beijing
began during the giddy optimism
of the 2008 Olympic Games, when
the foreign ministry relaxed regu-
l a t i o n s o n i n t e r n a t i o n a l c o r re -
spondents, allowing them to roam
everywhere, except Tibet, without
permission. It finished just before
the July 9 mass arrest of human
r i g h t s l a w ye r s , i n t h e f i r s t f e w
years of an increasingly censorious
presidency under Xi Jinping.
Red Memory assembles reported
accounts of the Cultural Revolu-
tion from survivors still in China —
a rarity, given the increasing sensi-
tivity of the Communist party to
its own history and its desire to
cleanse public memories.
Branigan’s central theme is that
one cannot understand China with-
out understanding the Cultural
Revolution. The book flits between
the past and present, exploring
how survivors of that era manage
its personal legacy, through tightly
c h o re o g r a p h e d c o n f e s s i o n s o r
cheerful group reunions.
In one way, her argument is
clearly true: the era shaped China’s
current leadership, particularly Xi
Jinping, who spent seven years
labouring as a “sent-down” youth.
But it is also elusive, because so
few families like to discuss the Cul-
tural R Reevolution, eevven w wiith tth
heir
children. It has left be beh hind inter-
generational traumas that families
are still strugg gglling to understand.
In one case, Branigan describes a
father who taught his son never to
trust anyone, not knowing when
people would betray him. It may
partly explain the broader fears of
my grandparents’ generation,
their warning to my parents not to
study the humanities or arts (often
the first scholars to b e purge d),
their desire to have the protection
of those in power, and yet their
Narwhals swimming in
Lancaster Sound, off
Baffin Island, Canada
Flip Nicklin/Minden Pictures/Alamy
9
Books
fear of engaging with politics.
The author does not shy away
from making analogies to political
crises in the west, while avoiding
f a l s e e q u i v a l e n c e s. D o n a l d
Trump’s “love of disruption and
discord, his ability to channel the
public’s id” echo Mao’s style of
leadership, Branigan remarks. “No
country faces its past honestly,”
she writes, reflecting on the omis-
sion of colonial history in English
education, adding: “More Britons
believe the empire was a source of
pride rather than of shame, a
benevolent institution.”
But Beij eijing
ing’’s for
form
m of enf enfororcecedd
forgetting is unique in its power
and scope. Fear of gove overrnment
reprisal caused several of Brani-
gan’s would-be interviewees to
self-censor, an occupational haz-
ard for journalists in China that has
worsened severely since she left.
Amid the growing difficulties of
a c c e s s i n g l i ve d e x p e r i e n c e s i n
China, Branigan’s lyrical style of
writing lends itself well to intimate
encounters with interviewees. She
tells the story of a city girl and a
married farmer who were brought
together when Mao sent 17mn edu-
cated youth to toil in the country-
side. They had an affair, leading to
the man’s imprisonment; decades
later, they got back together. “I
wondered if love had really lasted
all those years apart, or if some-
thing stronger had pulled them
back, guilt or complicity, their debt
to each other, a kind of revenge on
the p e ople who had thwarte d
them,” Branigan writes.
H e r h u m a n i s i n g a p p ro a c h i s
‘No nation faces its past
honestly’ — but Beijing’s
enforced forgetting is
unique in its scope
particularly valuable amid our
current polarising geopolitical
narrative, which loves strong lines
betw
etweeen ene enemie miess and all
allie
iess. It is
also appropriate for capturing a
decade in which the line between
hunter and hunte d shifte d with
the political winds of the day. As
B r a n i g a n w r i t e s, w i t h n o t a b l e
e m o t i o n a l o p e n n e s s f ro m t h e
start: “The Cultural Revolution
was a time of imp ossible moral
choices, a time when you could not
do the right thing because there
was no right thing to do. Worse, I
recognise in it the youthful Round-
head thirst for purity.”
My own posting in Beijing began
the year after Branigan’s ended.
Over the following six years, I saw
mistakes from the Cultural Revo-
lution era repeated, in the mass
internment of Uyghur Muslims in
X i n j i a n g a n d i n t h e Co m m u n i s t
party’s ev eveer-tighter grip on his-
tory. Perhaps that is why it is so
exhausting to remember the Cul-
tural Revolution. When Europe-
ans recall the world wars or the
Holocaust, we remind ourselves to
be vig vigila
ilantnt agaagains
instt the ththrreat
eatss of
conflict and anti-Semitism, which
s t i l l a f f l i c t u s ; re m e m b r a n c e
s e r ve s a c o l l e c t i ve p u r p o s e . I n
C h i n a , c o l l e c t i ve p u r p o s e i s a
threat to the party.
Yuan Yang is the FT’s Europe-
China correspondent
community, and also bigotry and vio-
lence. “Which is why human morality,”
Gregg argues, “kind of sucks.”
Gregg’s colloquial language (“For an
existential philosopher . . . that was a
real bummer”) and occasional jumping
to questionable conclusions (Nietzsche
was “a hot mess, the quintessential
example of how too much profundity
can literally break your brain”) will
appeal to some readers and irritate oth-
ers. It’s also worth noting there is disap-
pointingly little about narwhals. But
Gregg’s understanding of human and
animal cognition provides real insight
into how we think, why our brains have
evolved to think that way, and what we
might want to do about it — since, per-
haps uniquely as a species, we can.
It’s a sad admission that life on Earth
would be better for everyone if humans
were narwhals, or bacteria, or chickens.
What we celebrate about humanity is
simultaneously the millstone around
o u r n e c k . B u t s t i l l , i f G re g g w e re a
narwhal he couldn’t have written this
book. There’s an upside to everything
then, even the inevitability of death.
10
Books
O Blue-sea thinking
n a snowy day in the early
spring of 1911, a grand-
mother sits at home in a
rocking chair, as a storm
rages outside, telling a
t h r i l l i n g s t o r y t o t h e g r a n d c h i l d re n
curled up around her. The tale she
r e l a t e s, o f a b i b l i c a l h u r r i c a n e t h a t
nearl
nea rlyy de destr
strooyed an ear earli
lier
er bra
branchnch of
their family, will turn out to be a fore-
warning of the catastrophic events of
Paul Harding’s This Other Eden, set on
tiny, buffeted Apple Island off the coast
of Maine, “a granite pebble in the frigid
Atlantic shallows”.
Harding’s new novel is suffused with
t h e t re m u l o u s i m a g e r y a n d s o a r i n g
imagination that won him the Pulitzer
Prize for his first novel Tinkers (2010),
but it is based on unpalatable fact. His
Apple Island is the stand-in for Malaga
Island , home for six generations to a
small inter-racial fishing community. In
1912, government officials decided that
the island’s contented and largely self-
sufficient residents were a problem and
ordered their eviction.
O n e f a m i ly w a s c o m m i t t e d t o a
“school for the feeble-minded” on the
m a i n l a n d , a t r a u m a t i c ex p e r i e n c e
brought to vivid life in one of the book’s
ugliest scenes. The remaining inhabit-
‘Terrible how good
intentions turn out terribly
every time’, the sagacious
grandmother thinks
ants fled, some dismantling their small
clapboard houses — the rest were burnt
down by the evictors — before taking the
piec
eceses with them across the water and
into history.
Racism and eugenics are one driving
force of the book, as are Harding’s lav-
ish, detailed depictions of Apple Island
and its few families. These are the Hon-
eys, the McDermotts and the Larks (the
Larks “most likely half-brother and sis-
t e r ” ) re p re s e n t i n g “ t h e l a s t o f t h e
island’s variety of traits inherited from
African fathers and Irish mothers”.
There’s also the wonderfully named
Zachary Hand to God Proverbs, a vet-
eran of the American civil war who lives
in a hollowed-o -ou ut tree.
The opening deluge of intimate
knowledge about the characters of This
Other Eden appears at first overwhelm-
i n g . A s t h e n a r r a t i v e c o n t i n u e s, i t
becomes clear that it is necessary, if not
urgent, to itemise this way of life before
it is expunged for good.
The island had originally been settled
by a formerly enslaved man, Benjamin
H o n ey, i n 17 93. We l e a r n t h a t t h e
descendent islanders largely subsist on
cod, clam fishing and wild mushrooms
g a t h e re d b y t h e c h i l d re n f ro m t h e
woods. The McDermott sisters, Violet
and Iris, take in laundry from single
farmers on the mainland. Rabbit La Larrk,
a n o t h e r w o r l d ly c h i l d , s e e m s t o e a t
nothing but tree bark. It is an impover-
ished existence in economic terms, but
one rich in tradition, observation,
silence and camaraderie.
The intensity of Harding’s prose, his
long paragraphs with looping, ecstatic
sentences, the sheer unconventionality
of personalities and the frequent Scrip-
tural references recall the work of Mari-
ly n n e R o b i n s o n — i n p a r t i c u l a r h e r
astonishing first novel Housekeeping
(1980). It comes as little surprise to learn
Mind-body complex
An intense debut novel
explores perceptions of
homosexuality in Victorian
society. By Michael Arditti
W A
hen the eponymous
hero of EM Forster’s
Ma u r i c e ( w r i t t e n i n
1 9 1 3 -1 4 b u t n o t p u b -
lished until 1971) seeks
to explain his condition ttoo aan nuun ncom-
prehending physician, he has no words
to des esccribe himself other than “I’m an
unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort.”
H a d h e m a n a g e d t o o b t a i n a c o py o f
Henry Havelock Ellis and John Adding-
ton Symonds’ book Sexual Inversion,
published only a few years earlier in
1897, he would have found one: homo-
sexual. Despite disliking a word that he
described as “barbarously hybrid”, Ellis
is credited with its first usage
in English. In fac t , that distinc tion
g o e s t o Sy m o n d s i n h i s 1 8 7 3 wo r k A
Problem in Greek Ethics, which was
printed in a private edition of a mere
10 copies.
The two men were drawn to the sub-
ject of homosexuality for very different
r e a s o n s. S y m o n d s w a s a r e n o w n e d
poet, critic and author of, among much
e l s e , a g ro u n d b re a k i n g s t u dy o f t h e
Re n a i s s a n c e . H e w a s a l s o a m a r r i e d
homosexual, with four daughters, who
believed that the highest form of love
was based on the Platonic ideal of male
comradeship. Ellis, his junior by nearly
two decades, was a heterosexual doctor,
★ FTWeekend
A shattered idyll
The tragic true story of a mixed-race island community destroyed by the
arrival of outsiders is given vivid fictional form, says Catherine Taylor
that Robinson was once Harding’s crea-
tive writing tutor. Of a cigarette being lit,
he writes: “He struck a match against the
barn door and touched it to the end of his
cigarette and drew his breath as if to pull
the flame through the tobacco and paper
into his mouth and over his tongue and
down his throat, as if it were fire itself
with which he meant to fill his lungs.”
Matthew Diamond, a mission-
ary from the mainland, seems initially
This
hi Other
O h Eden
d t o b e a h o p e f u l f i g u re . H e s e t s u p a
by Paul Harding schoolroom, finds talented pupils such
Hutchinson Heinemann £16.99 as Tabitha Lark, who has a gift for Latin,
224 pages a n d E t h a n H o n e y, w h o i s a l re a dy
accomplished at drawing. But he will
prove to be the catalyst for their down-
fall. “Terrible how good intentions turn
out terribly every time”, Esther Honey,
grandmother and sagacious matriarch
of Apple Island, thinks to herself.
Sure enough, officials soo oon n arrive in
Diamond’s well-meaning wake, meas-
uring the children’s heads, photograph-
ing the families almost as an anthropo-
logical curiosity, and afterwards con-
demning “Negro Island” as “polluted”,
painting the islanders as “squatters”.
Ethan’s prodigious talent is fostered by
D i a m o n d c r u c i a l ly b e c a u s e h e c a n
“pass” for white in the wider world.
Some of the fine st passage s in the
book arrive when 15-year-old Ethan has
The New Life h i m f ro m c h a r g e s o f d i s t o r t i o n . O n e
by Tom Crewe change
cha nge,, ho
howwever er,
r, is mor
moree sub
substastanntia
Chatto & Windus Ad d i n g t o n S y m o n d s d i e d i n 1 8 9 3 ;
£16.99, 384 pages/
Scribner $28
Crew
Cr ewee keeps his Addi ddingt
ngtonon ali
alivve both
for the prosecution of Oscar Wilde and
400 pages
t h e p u b l i c a t i o n o f S e x u a l I n ve r s i o n .
Whereas Ellis’s interest in homosexual-
ity is tha
thatt of a lib libera
erall freeth
ethink
inkerer,
r, who
beli
elieeves tha
thatt sesexx “was
“was an insinstin
tincct tha
took countless forms, all within the
range of human possibility,” Adding-
ton’s is deeply personal. When a book-
It is refreshing to find any seller is arrested for selling the book, he
p u t s a l l i nvo lve d a t r i s k b y m a k i n g a
contemporary novel, let veiled confession of his inclinations at a
alone a debut, which is first supporters’ dinner.
While se eming to accept her hus-
and foremost one of ideas band’s nature, even tolerating his bring-
ing his younger working-class lover,
Frank, into the marital home, in prac-
arried to a lesbian, whose own tice Catherine deplores it. A very differ-
urophilia sparked his interest in trans- ent character from Edith, an admirer of
gressive sexuality. Ibsen and lecturer on feminism, she
Tom Crewe’s debut novel The New Life nonetheless proves to be equally deter-
depicts each man’s intellectual develop- mined to assert her rights. Her predica-
ment and the process of their collabora- ment, redolent of Constance Wilde’s, is
tion in extensive and fascinating detail. the most moving in the book.
Yet, while he is faithful to both of their It is refreshing to find any contempo-
ide
ideolo
ologic
gical
al posi
ositio
tionsns,, Cr
Crew
ewee mak
makees it raryy no
rar novvel, let alo alonene a debut
debut,, which
which is
clear from the start that he has departed f i r s t a n d f o re m o s t o n e o f i d e a s.
from the historical record. The main Although at times overwritten, The New
charac ters b e come Henry Ellis and Life also contains highly accomplished
John Addington. Likewise, Ellis’ wife, descriptive passages, and Crewe writes
E d i t h L e e s, i s r e n a m e d E d i t h V i l l s, with particular intensity and precision
and Symonds’ wife, Janet, Catherine. about sex. Ellis is dismayed when, prior
The Fellowship of the New Life, at which to its prosecution, Sexual Inversion sells
Ellis and Edith met , becomes The o n l y a h a n d f u l o f c o p i e s. H e s e e s i t
Society of the New Life, giving the novel “fall noiselessly into vanishment, like a
its title. r a i n d ro p s l i p p i n g f ro m a l e a f i n t o a
T h o s e c h a n g e s s e r ve p r i m a r i ly t o pond.” The New Life deserves to make a
free Crewe’s imagination and defend biggggeer splash.
Laurel Molly
the opportunity to leave Apple Island,
staying at a remote estate in Massachu-
setts thanks to a wealthy benefactor, in
o r d e r t o p re p a re f o r a r t s c h o o l . T h e
g ro w i n g d e s i re b e t w e e n E t h a n a n d
another outsider, young Irish servant
Bridget, is subtly developed, and Hard-
ing
ing’’s wri
writin
tingg ab
about
out art is exqui quisit
site.e. In
one scene, Bridget serves Ethan iced
lemonade. “You could read a book
through it. It was like crystal”, he mar-
v e l s. T h e i c e , t h e l e m o n a d e a n d t h e
m o m e n t a re s p u n i n t o s i g n i f i c a n c e .
Later, they will make their way into one
of Ethan’s paintings.
Ethan’s time at the estate quickly
loses its rose-tint. In a poignant fore-
s h a d o w i n g e a r l i e r i n t h e n ove l , h e
attempts his first self-p ortraits: four
s i m p l e d r a w i n g s, t h e l a s t o f w h i c h
“looked commemorative, as if copied
f ro m a s t a t u e . Mo re l i ke a n A f r i c a n
made to look European . . . he didn’t
want to disappear from his family’s life,
their memories, their pict ctuure of him in
their heads”.
A 2 1 s t- c e n t u r y c o d a t o t h e b o o k
makes this a novel of both emblem and
reality. In 2010, an official apology con-
d e m n e d t h e ev i c t i o n o f t h e M a l a g a
islanders. By that time, even the bones
of their ancestors had been removed
and reburied elsewhere.
Life on the edge
A tale of reindeer poaching in
tial.l.
Sweden’s far north sheds light
on the plight of the Sámi
people. By Christian House
thatt t last year’s Venice Bien-
nale, the Nordic countries
reimagined their entry as
the inaugural Sámi pavil-
ion, a bracing presentation
that included the gut linings of reindeer,
which was a reference to the enforced
slaughter of herds because of claims of
overgrazing. The plight of the Sámi — an
indigenous people in northern Norway,
S w e d e n , F i n l a n d a n d Ru s s i a c a u g h t
between centuries of tradition and con-
temporary values and conflicted land
rights — is the focus of Ann-Helén Laes-
tadius’s novel Stolen.
First published in Swe wedden in 2021,
and now being adapted for Netflix, the
story offers a moving account of a Sámi
girl growing up in a reindeer-herding
community in the Swedish slice of the
Arctic. It highlights the paradox of being
oppressed in one of the most egalitarian
countries in the world. A smooth trans-
lation from the Swedish by Rachel Will-
son-Broyles retains many Sámi words
and expressions, adding to a sense of a
world within a world.
The novelovel begins in 2008, as nine-
year-old Elsa, the daughter of reindeer
herder Nils Johan, witnesses a poacher
kill a calf at the corral, the reindeer gath-
e r i n g g ro u n d . S h e i s t e r r i f i e d i n t o
silence: “It was him. She never said his
GENRE ROUND-UP
ENVIRONMENT
By Pilita Clark
T
he new year has brought a
batch of books bristling
with views on the widening
debate aab bout the b beest way
to deal with climate change.
Their authors want to change your mind
about everything , from the power of
renewables to the need for net zero poli-
cies and machines that can suck carbon
dioxide out of the air.
For a shishiftft of pac
pace,e, the
therre is a gen gentle
tlerr
tale of what a voyage in a 100-year-old
sailing vessel can tell us about the future
of shipping.
T h e w e i g h t i e s t w o r k c o m e s f ro m
Mark Z Jacobson, a Stanford University
professor who has spent years arguing
that wind, water and solar power can
provide 100 per cent of the world’s
energy. Climate campaigners from Hol-
lywood to Washington have seized on
his work, which has also drawn fire from
critics questioning the feasibility of 100
per cent renewables.
Ja c o b s o n a d d re s s e s a l l s i d e s i n N o
Miracles Needed: How Today’s Technol-
ogy Can Save Our Climate and Clean
Our Air (Ca (Cambr
mbridg idgee Uninivvers
ersityity Pr
Preess
ss,,
£ 1 1 .9 9 ) . M u c h o f t h e b o o k e x p l a i n s
in meticulous — and I do mean meticu-
lous — detail how each of the wind,
water and solar technologies works,
and why the theyy araree ne
neeede
dedd to eli elimin
minateate
air pollution, global warming and
energy insecurity.
More contentious sections address
detractors who say 100 per cent renew-
ables would risk blackouts on windless
or cloudy days, or require too much land
to be slathered in wind and solar farms,
or cost too many jobs.
Jacobson responds to each charge,
adding that the big advantage of renew-
a b l e s i s t h a t t h e y a re b e t t e r t h a n a l l
alternatives. Natural gas still causes
g l o b a l w a r m i n g . Nu c l e a r p owe r i s
costly. Biofuels cause air pollution. And
so on. He is equally dismissive of direct
a i r c a r b o n c a p t u re , a re l a t i ve ly n e w
technology that extracts carbon diox-
ide from the air.
This is unlikely to upset Paul McKen-
drick, a Canadian writer who makes his
admiration for direct air capture plain
in Scrubbing the Sky: Inside the Race to
C o o l t h e P l a n e t ( F i g u re 1 , C $ 2 8.95 ) .
This is the story of the scientists, phi-
lanthropists and investors who have
spent more than 20 years bringing to
life direct air capture, which uses chem-
icals to extract CO₂ from the air that is
then captured for underground storage
or use elsewhere.
Stolen
by Ann-Helén
Laestadius
Bloomsbury
Circus £18.99/
Scribner $18.99
400 pages
The novel highlights the
paradox of being oppressed
in one of the world’s most
egalitarian countries
name . . . He grinned and pointed at her,
holding an index finger to his thin lips —
shhh — before drawing his finger across
his throat.” Suspicion falls on a local rac-
ist, Robert Isaksson, but the police are
indifferent. The offence is dismissed as a
theft . Elsa, who had name d the calf
Nástegallu, considers it murder.
The se cond part of the b o ok is set a
decad
de cadee lat
later
er,
r, wit
withh Els
Elsaa no
now
w a tho
thorn
rn in
the sid
sidee of poac
oacher
herss and pers
erseecut
cutor
orss,
gathering evidence of reindeer killings,
vandalism and threats. But she also has
to contend with constraints within her
own community. This is a distinctly
patriarchal society, of which Elsa is
made constantly aware at the corral,
where she is called “Nils Johan’s Elsa”.
Laestadius, who is well known in Swe-
den for her children’s books and fiction
for young adults, is of Sámi and Torned-
28 January/29 January 2023
t is a timely boo book k. Scientists say car-
bon removal measures will probably be
needed to avoid more harmful global
temperatures. Co Com mpanie s including
Microsoft and Swiss Re have started to
pour millions of dollars into direct air
capture start-ups.
But as McKendrick explains, none of
this seemed likely back in 1992 when
US-based scientists such as Klaus Lack-
ner first came up with the germ of the
idea for direct air capture. Bill Gates,
Elon Musk and Richard Branson also
feature in the tale of a technology we are
likely to hear a lot more about.
Direct air capture gets a mention too
in the anti-net zero polemic of British
journalist Ross Clark, Not Zero: How an
Irrational Target Will Impoverish You,
Help China (and Won’t Even Save the
Planet) (Forum, £20). Clark’s argu-
ment, which will be well known to read-
ers of his British newspaper columns, is
that the UK was mad to make a legally
binding pledge to cut its emissions to net
zero by 2050.
He says there should have been more
debate about a policy fed by alarmist
“ h y p e r b o l e ” t h a t c o u l d c a u s e “h u g e
damage to our ec ecoonomy” while bigger
carbon polluters such as China let them-
selves off the hook.
So far, so familiar to students of what
has come to be known as “climate inac-
tivism”, a newer breed of scepticism that
no lon
longer
ger reje ejeccts cli
climat
matee sci
right but questions the extent and pace
of action needed.
Clark is on more interesting ground
when he complains that the UK’s net
scienc
encee out
out--
zero goal is impractical in a country with
a “hopelessly inadequate” electric car
charging network; meagre hydrogen
infrastructure; insufficient energy stor-
age and other shortcomings.
Frustrated net zero advocates make
similar arguments. But very few agree
with the concept underpinning Clark’s
thesis: even if the downsides of global
warming outweigh any benefits “there
is nothing coming that will be beyond
our ability to cope”. Trusting that blithe
prediction is, of course, a luxury most of
the world cannot afford.
Finally, Melbourne-based academic
Christiaan De Be Beu ukelaer has written a
moree gen
mor gentle
tle but ad advventur
enturousous cli climat
matee
book, Trade Winds: A Voyage to a Sus-
tainable Future for Shipping (Manches-
ter University Press, £20/$29.95).
In February 2020, D e B eukelaer
b o a r d e d t h e Avo n t u u r, o n e o f t h e
world’s largest sailing cargo vessels,
f o r w h a t w a s s u p p o s e d t o b e t h re e
weeks of field work on the prospects for
reviving emissions-free shipping. The
three weeks became five months as De
B e u ke l a e r a n d h i s 14 f e l l o w c re w
m e m b e r s w e re c a s t o u t a t s e a b y t h e
Covid-19 pandemic.
The result was what he calls, with
some understatement, “a confronting
journey”. The ups and downs of life on
board make a lively travel story.
But interwoven is an engaging tale of
efforts to dec ecaarbo
bon nise the global ship-
ping industry — and a compelling
assessment of the role sail cargo ships
might play.
Pilita Clark is an FT business columnist
alians (a minority group originally from
Finland) descent. Her novel touches on
u n i ve r s a l p ro b l e m s e x p e r i e n c e d b y
indigenous peoples, particularly the
men: alcoholism, mental illness, unem-
p l oy m e n t a n d s u i c i d e a re r i f e . W i t h
fathers and husbands absent as they fol-
low the reindeers’ migration paths, it is
mothers and wives who prop up family
morale and household budgets.
Laestadius has a keen eye for the steely
reserves of Sámi women. She also cap-
tures the elemental hardship of life on
the edge of a wilderness: “The wind blew
hard, whining between the houses scat-
tered around the lake. The streetlamp at
the crown of the village had the hiccups.”
As a mystery, though, Stolen is over-
long and light in suspense. But it should
be app
applaulaudededd for its unsunspar
paringing,, oft
often
en
grue some, account of crime s against
nature in general and animals in partic-
ular. And Elsa is extremely believable as
an effective, forensically minded, ama-
teur detective. Her doggedness can be
amusing. Inspecting one reindeer car-
cass, she sticks her finger in a bullet hole
and snaps a picture for proof.
The novel brings to mind Peter Høeg’s
1992 Danish eco-thriller Miss Smilla’s
Feeling for Snow, which also used genre
fiction to address social issues in Scandi-
navia. While there are larger conspira-
cies lurking in Høeg’s novel, Laestadius
details the ev eveeryday damage done to
Sámi culture, both by state policies and
colonial attitudes. But the heart, and the
great appeal, of this novel is its empa-
thetic portrait of a young woman who
flourishes in this harsh, but be beaautiful,
landscape.
28 January/29 January 2023
From the English countryside
to Bulgaria’s herbalists, healers
and horse whisperers — two books
offer to help us find our way back
to nature. By Chris Allnutt
I
cry because good things are dwin-
dling,” writes Kapka Kassabova in
Elixir, her journey up the Mesta val-
ley — and back in time — in Bul-
garia. “Snow, edelweiss, mursala,
clean water, and I am meeting creatures
shortly before they become extinct.”
Kassabova, author of the travelogues
Border and To the Lake, has embarked on
another trip in which the troubled past
collides headfirst with an impatient
present. For the third book in her “Bal-
kan quartet”, she returns to the country
of her birth over the course of several
seasons to meet the relics of old-world
Bulgaria before the 21st century catches
up with them completely.
Among these “last unknown Europe-
ans” — herbalists, healers and horse
whisperers from Bulgaria’s Pomak com-
munity — she hopes to find her elixir, a
mythical, life-giving substance that can
cure disease or unhappiness. As climate
change, water pollution and human
development irreversibly scar the natu-
ral world, Kassabova seeks to turn over
a new leaf — or a hundred — in one of the
last unspoilt valleys in Europe.
“The world of herbs is full of mysteri-
ous things,” a plant dealer named Rocky
the Enchanter tells her. Of the 60,000 to
80,000 tonnes of wild plants collected in
Bulgaria every year, he highlights white
bryony root as an anti-inflammatory
and dandelion as a laxative. Elsewhere,
elecampane is used to treat chronic
fatigue, false hellebore is recommended
Pictured from for hair loss and caltrop is vaunted as an
main: an elderly aphrodisiac — and for undoing spells.
Bulgarian Kassabova is unfailingly patient with
woman from these suggestions, not least because
the Pomak some of the plants are toxic to humans.
community; the And with the healer who instructs her to
Whispering place a prayer paper in a pot of water
Knights stone and sugar, and sip it for seven days. “I
circle, an was not convinced, but I hadn’t come to
ancient site in be convinced,” she later writes of a par-
Oxfordshire, ticularly suspect divination ritual
England — Pavel involving an egg. “I’d come to have an
Dudek/Alamy; Tim Gainey/
Alamy experience.”
CHESS LEONARD BARDEN
Magnus Carlsen has had successive rounds to Anish
a rollercoaster ride in the Giri of the Netherlands and
past few days at Tata Steel then to Uzbekistan’s
Wijk aan Zee, the most Nodirbek Abdusattorov,
competitive event on the 18, who has emerged as a
international chess circuit. leader of the new teenage
Norway’s world champion, generation of grandmasters.
32, has formally renounced Three days later, after
his title, but remains two wins and a draw,
number one in the rankings. Carlsen’s optimism was
He has won Wijk a record back. After eight of the
eight times, and has finished 13 rounds Abdusattorov
below second only once in had an unbeaten six points,
his last 12 attempts. but Carlsen is making a
That proud record was in strong recovery.
danger when Carlsen lost in The final two rounds are
POLYMATH 1,215 SET BY HAMILTON
★ FTWeekend
Lessons of lost worlds
Elixir: In the The Bulgarian-born writer is not the
Valley at the only one on the trail of the lessons of a
End of Time lost world. In Grounded, James Canton
by Kapka Kassabova seeks to understand how the modern
Jonathan Cape £20 English landscape might have looked to
400 pages our ancient ancestors. Such a picture, he
believes, might prove akin to Kassab-
Grounded: A ova’s elixir: “If we are to thrive and sur-
Journey into vive another 6,000 years as a species on
this planet, then we would do well to
the Landscapes
remember something of that connec-
of Our Ancestors
tion with the earth,” he writes.
by James Canton
Canongate £18.99 This is, of course, an inexact science:
272 pages the archaeological records and finds
that Canton relates provide us with
clues, but we cannot know for sure what
the ancients would have seen. The best
we can do are “time-thin truths”, as
archaeologist Aubrey Burl put it — ideas
and practices, such as the planting of
hedgerows or the centrality of the
hearth in the home, that are as valuable
Diversions
8
2504
7
Hugh Alexander vs Edward
6 Marshall, Cambridge 1928.
5
White to move and win.
Alexander, the then future
4
British champion, FT chess
3 correspondent and
2 Bletchley Park and GCHQ
1
codebreaker, wanted to
A B C D E F G H checkmate his opponent
on the g1-g8 file. It can be
on Saturday (1.15pm GMT done, but White has to be
start) and Sunday (11.15am careful to avoid a couple of
start). The games can be sneaky traps. Can you break
viewed live and for free on the code?
Chess24.com. Solution, back page
now as when they were first discovered.
Like Kassabova, Canton’s aim is to use
those truths to map out a path closer to
nature, away from our wasteful ways.
Following in the footsteps of pilgrims,
he starts with the obviously sacred —
churches, chapels, shrines — but soon
realises that to feel truly “grounded”
requires looking at the soil beneath
them, at the landscape that outlasts
the buildings. In doing so, he assumes a
role somewhere between that of an
archaeologist, ghost hunter and pilgrim,
and a tone that alternates between awe
and whimsy.
A chapter on the decline of the Meso-
lithic hunter-gatherers and the emer-
gence of farmers in the Neolithic around
6,000 years ago best synthesises Can-
ton’s research (chiefly in local historical
and archaeological records) and his
observations, painting a convincing pic-
BRIDGE PAUL MENDELSON
The third hand of the first
event of the year featured
another slam. This time, the
problem seemed to be
bidding it, but there are two J85
perfectly reasonable roads AKQ 9 5 3 W
J 74 3
to the best contract. K J 10
East’s 3S bid was forcing,
and West correctly rebid 4D.
This is a Splinter, showing
three-card support or better
for spades and a singleton
(or, rarely, a void) in the of the opposition’s suit at the
opponents’ suit. Even if four-level (or jump-bid in
Splinters are not part of their suit) is, in effect, a
your regular system, any bid Splinter bid, indicating mild
CROSSWORD 17,317 SET BY LEONIDAS
11
Books
ture of the English landscape and the
people who lived in it. But while the past
is present in Canton’s writing, the
future, alluded to obliquely in
bookends, remains disappointingly eva-
sive. He never quite grapples with the
concrete lessons we can learn from the
ancients, or how they will help us to live
sustainably now.
“One of the wonders of musing on the
remote past is that little can be said
definitively,” admits Canton. True
though this may be, it leaves rather a
heavy burden for the writer to shoulder.
There are clumsy turns of phrase too:
of curlews, he notes “the elliptical per-
fection of their curved bills”; at a bar-
row, “the sun splinters spectacular
shards of light from behind cloud in the
west”; elsewhere, “spring has certainly
sprung”. The author is director of “wild
writing” at Essex University, so it is a
shame that the writing in Grounded is
not, well, wilder.
Kassabova’s guides are as wild as they
come, however, and she immerses her-
self in their wisdom, no matter how
improbable it appears. Emin, a horse
breeder, lives an unimaginably lonely
‘If we are to survive another
6,000 years, we would do
well to remember that
connection with the earth’
five months of the year in the forest with
his animals.
At a geological anomaly called The
Stone of the Black Snake, meanwhile,
pilgrims are led by old women through a
sacred rock formation in the hope of
curing ailments that modern medicine
cannot reach, while their futures are
read in the melting of a lead bullet.
Kassabova’s ability to bring out the
best in her subjects is born of a genuine
horror at the unsustainability of the
ways we live and the toll they are taking
on places such as the Mesta valley. But
Elixir is not a lecture (nor indeed is
Grounded). Like the forests and fells it
inhabits, it is by turns dark and mysteri-
ous and beautiful. Ecologically minded
writing can often tell too much and show
too little, but Kassabova sensibly lets the
landscape and locals do the talking.
One of them, an elderly woman she
meets in an orchard, makes perhaps the
most convincing case for a difficult,
albeit grounded, life — more or less as
Candide once concluded. “If we don’t
work, all we have left is death and the
telly,” she remarks. “And it’s a fine day
for weeding.”
Dealer: South E/W Game
97 4 3 North East South West
mean? Sadly, West did not
J86 2 — — 3D 3H know and passed.
K5 NB 3S NB 4D Most experts play a free
98 7 NB 5C NB 5S
N bid to five of a major to
AKQ3 2 mean: I have two quick
E
7 slam interest. East should losers in the key suit (either
AQ6 2 now use Blackwood or bid one bid by the opposition or,
S
6S but, instead, he cue-bid in an uncontested auction,
10
104 5C; West signed off, and so the only unbid suit). If you
A Q 10 9 8 6 2 did East. can help, there will be a
54 3 At another table, one slam. With a protected king,
player used a different bid. or a singleton, you bid six of
Instead of re-bidding 4D, the suit; with the ace or
West merely raised to 4S. void, you cue-bid the suit.
East persevered, deciding to Here, if West held A♦, 7NT
bid 5S. What does that would be cold.
12
Artist,
activist,
prophet
Joseph Beuys | A show of unseen drawings
reveals how he combined his far-sighted
interest in the environment with a delicate
visual touch, writes Jackie Wullschläger
H
o w h a s t h e a r t o f Jo s e p h
Beuys — activist, mystic,
romantic, sculptor of fat
and felt — endured without
his own charismatic, hec-
toring presence? Beuys died in 1986 and
it was an inspired move of Dresden’s
Staatliche Kunstsammlungen to cele-
b r a t e t h e c e n t e n a r y o f h i s b i r t h t wo
years ago not with heavyweight sculp-
tures but, in Joseph Beuys: 40 Years of
Drawing, with rare, eclectic drawings —
on paper
paper, r, beer matmatss, a cigcigar
aretettte pac
pack k,
plants. A tiny bear is ink-brushed on to a
shrivelled hazel leaf, a pencil sketch of a
deer hoof leaps out on a page from a spi-
ral noteb o ok and a fragmente d ara-
besque nude, curvy torso and legs
flecked with blue blots of flowers, emu-
lates the patterned poise of late Matisse.
T h e e x h i b i t i o n , w h i c h t o u re d t o
Paris’s Musée d’Art Moderne last year,
now arrives in London, generously laid
out at Thaddaeus Ropac’s Ely House in
Mayfair. Never displayed before in the
UK, the works — from the Beuys family
collection — offer an archaeology of how
the artist’s lexicon of images came into
being, but in their feather-light touch,
spontaneity, elegance and intimate
manner they are refreshingly different
from what we remember of Beuys the
bombastic performer.
Although the subjects are diverse,
they are united by the environmental
THE LIFE
OF A SONG
THE MAN WHO
BROKE THE BANK
AT MONTE CARLO
O
n a bank holiday
afternoon in 1893, a crowd
gathered outside
Wormwood Scrubs prison
in London to serenade an
inmate called Charles Deville Wells.
They were singing Fred Gilbert’s 1891
music hall hit — “The Man Who Broke
the Bank at Monte Carlo” — for the
man widely believed to have inspired
it. Wells, a serial fraudster, was in
prison for embezzlement, but the
public saw him as a Robin Hood figure;
hence the serenading.
A former engineer and failed
inventor (born in Hertfordshire and
raised in Marseille, where his father
taught English), Wells became a con
artist in his forties. He moved to
Clockwise from top: ‘Zwei
Frauen’ (1955); ‘Learning
to Think X’ (2021) by
Antony Gormley; ‘Untitled
(2 Materials)’ (1947/
1966); ‘o. T. (Petticoat)’
(1951). Above: Beuys on
site in Kassel, Germany,
with his piece, ‘7000 Oak
Trees’ (1982) — Ulrich Ghezzi;
Thaddaeus Ropac gallery; Joseph Beuys Estate;
Robin Holland/Getty Images; Charles Duprat
London, where he duped investors into
giving him large sums of money to
develop fictional inventions. His
embarrassed wife took their daughter
and fled back to France, while Wells
took up with the glamorous Jeannette
Pairis, almost 30 years his junior.
Determined to sate Pairis’s demands
for a luxurious lifestyle, he headed out
to Monte Carlo in the summer of 1891.
According to Robert Quinn’s excellent
2016 biography, Wells sat down at one
table with £4,000 at noon one day and
stayed there until 11pm. The roulette
wheel kept spitting out his numbers.
He slept with his winnings under
his pillow and returned every day
until he had amassed around
£4mn in today’s money. As
gambling chips were not used
back then, it was said the pile of
banknotes in front of him grew
so tall his moustache was no
longer visible as he achieved the
rare feat of “faire sauter la banque”
(win more money than the table at
which they’re playing has available).
Although Wells always put his
winning streak down to luck, it’s
possible that he was in cahoots with the
★ FTWeekend
c o n c e r n s a n d ye a r n i n g f o r h a r m o n y
with nature which make Beuys resonant
today. One of the most playful pieces,
“Tartaruga”, is a collage with an ear of
wheat placed above an autumnal leaf
from a mountain turtle plant. Beuys
rubbed the leaf with oily black pigment
then engraved in white ink the outline of
a turtle striding forward, face alert ,
body arched to follow the leaf ’s rim, and
dedicated it to his daughter, Jessyka. A
collage of strawberry-tree leaves is
pasted on an orange domestic gas bill.
There are fragile sketches of glaciers
from the 1950s, already melting , and
splashes of gestural paint around a pool
of deep blue, inscribed “two minerals”.
Beuys considered his drawings “the
first visible form of the thought” and
one senses a mind open to a maelstrom
of geopolitical problems and art’s post-
war possibilities, Most of the pieces date
from the late 1940s-1950s, when Beuys
remained traumatised by war and Ger-
many’s collapse. The legend of his being
shot down as a Luftwaffe pilot and
wrapped in felt and fat by Tatar rescuers
is a poetic rendering of his own and the
nation’s wounds, and the longing for
healing. Making these early, fluid draw-
ings was a weap on in a battle with
depression; Beuys evolved in them an
iconography denoting survival, suste-
nance, degeneration, rebirth, and devel-
oped his idea of “social sculpture” — the
world as an artwork in progress.
I n t h e s e f i r s t d r a w i n g s, h e s u b s e -
quently explained, “everything is in
principle already foreshadowed”.
There’s a lovely watercolour of a golden
“Young Hare” — swift, adaptable, ener-
getic, also full of sadness when cradled
in his arms in the absurdist p erform-
ance “How to Explain Pictures to a Dead
Hare” — and a drawing of a dead deer,
animal emblem of grandeur and sacri-
fice. There are sketches of sleighs, antic-
ipating “Packed”, the Volkswagen spew-
casino director, who arranged for Wells
to play on a biased wheel — the buzz
generated by big winners attracted
more punters.
London-based singer and theatrical
agent Fred Gilbert instantly knocked
out a jaunty song marking Wells’s feat.
Although there are a few lines in the
song about the casino action, it’s really
the 19th-c
-ceentury version of a rapper’s
brag about having loads of swag and
sweethearts. “As I walk along the
Bois de Boulogne/With an independent
air/ You can hear the girls declare/
‘He must be a millionaire’/You can
hear them sigh and wish to die/
You can see them wink the other
eye . . . II’’m a mass of money, linen, silk
and sta-ha-ha-harch.”
The rights to the song were bought
for £10 by Stepney-born singer and
Music hall star Charles Coborn
in 1937 — TopFoto
comedian Charles Coborn, who
created a new act around the number,
which he delivered dressed as a toff.
Audiences bellowed along with the
chorus and howled with laughter as he
staggered around the stage, acting
increasingly inebriated with each
verse.
Coborn later estimated that he
had performed the song 250,000 times
in the course of his career, and claimed
he could sing it
in 14 languages. He also
made several recordings,
beginning in 1902.
Inevitably, given that it is
something of a period piece, the
song has been only sporadically
covered. During the first world
war it was repurposed as the
patriotic “The Tanks That Broke
the Ranks Out in Picardy”,
celebrating the game-c
e-ch
hanging
new war machines.
In 1935 a film starring Ronald
Colman, The Man Who Broke the
Bank at Monte Carlo, was released
— though its plot bore almost no
resemblance to the real-life events
that inspired the song.
28 January/29 January 2023
ing out so many little sledges with their
neatly curled felt blankets, and water-
colours of plump flabby seals — “Sea
Angels”, embodiments of Beuys’ love
o f l i f e - g i v i n g o i ly f a t — b e a c h e d o n
blank paper.
Communal, food-supplying bees, cel-
ebrated in installations such as “Honey-
pump at the Workplace”, with tons of
honey piped around the Fridericianium
M u s e u m f o r D o c u m e n t a i n 1 9 7 7,
already have significance: “Beehive” is a
grid animated by the insects in darting
movements, and the punning “Honey
Pot” encases a sketch of a female torso
on a torn envelope in honeyed hues.
Two colours dominate throughout:
that honey-gold watercolour, relating to
alchemy’s transformations, and Beuys’
trademark Braunkreuz, a deep rust-
brown oil paint sometimes the subject
as well as the material in drenched mon-
ochrome panels. Enriched with iron
compound, it signifies fertility by its
link to blood and earth.
The symbolism goes further back, all
the way to Bismarck’s 1862 “blood and
iron
iron”” sp speeech, set settintingg Germ
ermany
any on the
path to military expansion which ended
in “Zero hour” in 1945. Like German
artists of his and the next generation —
Richter, Baselitz, Kiefer — Beuys’ work
is a lamentation and an attempt to
understand, infused with the horror of
war, hope for reconciliation. Thus the
delicate 1950s leaf collages, evoking for-
estts and their role in German national
es
identity, can be seen as attempts to
recla
claim im an asp aspeect of Germ erman
an folfolklo
klorre
from brutal Nazi ideology.
They also anticipate Beuys’ green pol-
itics, as in “7000 Oak Trees”, his inter-
vention at Documenta in 1982 with a
plan to plant oaks in the host city, Kas-
sel. That event is memorialised in a col-
His work is an attempt
to understand, infused
with the horror of war,
hope for reconciliation
lage of dried poppy and cyclamen flow-
e r s, t h e D o c u m e n t a s t a m p “ 70 0 0
Eichen” and a scatter of repeated initials
FIU — the anarchic “Free International
University for Creativity and Interdisci-
plinary Research” which Beuys founded
in 1973.
These later works, including black-
board diagrams from the artist’s lec-
tures, function less as a spark to ideas
t h a n a s re l i c s o f h i s h a p p e n i n g s a n d
installations. I found them dense with
obscure signs relating to Beuys’ role, in
his felt trilby and fishing vest, traversing
the globe as self-appointed prophet/
shaman/teacher/healer. What is enjoy-
able in the earlier pieces is that they are
so far from those self-conscious epic-he-
roic performances.
The blackboards (1974-82) are on dis-
play in the Chapel Gallery upstairs, but
the show ends on a fresher note, in a
c o d a w h e re A n t o n y G o r m l ey h a s
selecectted further early Be Beu uys drawings
juxtaposed with a handful of his own.
The interest is a conceptual sculptor’s
view of a conceptual sculptor: the
emphasis on Beuys’ sketches of the body
i n m ove m e n t , a n d i n c o n n e c t i o n t o
space, in the Bewegung Rhythmus series,
s h a re s a d i a g r a m m a t i c q u a l i t y w i t h
Gormley’s figures set in minimalist grids
in the recent carbon and casein draw-
ings “Set III”, “Search III” and “Hold”.
Gormley says thes esee “acknowled edgge the
body as a zone of becoming”, the need to
re t h i n k h u m a n re l a t i o n s h i p s w i t h
nature and buildings.
It is an engaging dialogue, bringing
Beuys into the present, as he would have
love
oved d , f o r h e i n s i s t e d , a n d t h i s s h ow
demonstrates, that his art was “not
f i xe d a n d f i n i s h e d . P r o c e s s e s c o n -
tinue . . . chemical reactions, fermenta-
t i o n s . . . Eve r y t h i n g i s i n a s t a t e o f
change.”
To March 22, ropac.net
n 1958 pianist Russ Conway
tinkled the ivories in a saloon bar-
instrumental version. The previous
year Burl Ives belted out a jolly, brass-
backed version, and Bing Crosby gave
it his usual smooth treatment as part
of a 1961 medley.
It was later quoted in nostalgia pieces
including British comedian Bernard
Manning’s “Seaside Melody” (1975)
and a 1985 cockney medley by the cast
of the BBC TV soap EastEnders.
The tune continues to echo through
our culture. Peter O’Toole sings a
snatch of the tune while riding through
the desert in the title role of the 1962
film Lawrence of Arabia. Fifty-five years
later, the android David (who idolises
Lawrence) hums it while cutting his
hair in the 2017 film Alien: Covenant.
Charles Wells — a talented organist
who played the organ in prison chapel
services — performed the song for his
fellow inmates shortly before his
release in 1899. He lived out his final
years in London with Pairis and died in
1922, owing two weeks’ rent. He was
buried in a pauper’s grave.
Helen Brown
More in the series at ft.com/life-o
-of
of-a-s
-soong
28 January/29 January 2023
Cruelty and
compassion
Darren Aronofsky | The director of obesity drama
‘The Whale’ tells Raphael Abraham about making
films that challenge actors and audiences alike
L
ike the morbidly obese pro-
tagonist of his new film The
Whale, Darren Aronofsky has
become accustomed to peo-
ple recoiling in disgust. With
gruelling melodramas such as Requiem
for a Dream, The Wrestler and Black Swan
the American director has won numer-
ous awards and admirers but has also
been vilified for his graphic depictions
of human suffering. This reached its
apotheosis (one hopes) with 2017’s
Mother!, in which he put Jennifer Law-
rence through a torturous mangle of
home invasion and gross-out allegory.
Audiences scarred by that experience
may approach his latest film with trepi-
dation. I was one of them, as I admit to
him when we meet in a smart central
London hotel suite. It doesn’t help that
the opening shot of The Whale shows the
enormous and sweat-lacquered Charlie
(played by Brendan Fraser) masturbat-
ing, wheezing and turning an alarming
shade of mauve. My first thought, I tell
him, was: “Oh God, is this going to
be . . .” He finishes the thought for me:
“. . . another Darren Aronofsky?”
There is also the first impression made
by that title: both playground jibe and
allusion to Moby-Dick, a key reference in
Samuel D Hunter’s 2012 play, which
Hunter adapted for the screen. Aronof-
sky, 53, assures me that there were “a lot
of discussions. We talked to the Obesity
Action Coalition . . . We got to a place
where we all felt comfortable with it.”
The director does not want you to
jump to conclusions. Or rather he does,
so that he can then subvert them. “It’s
really important that people watch the
movie and not judge something from
the cover,” he says. “In fact, that cliché is
really apt to Sam’s writing. You, the
entire audience and every single char-
acter judge [Charlie] from the cover,
and then Sam’s beautiful writing slowly
dissolves that and makes you think
much deeper.”
It’s true that everything is not what
it first seems in The Whale, and its
surface cruelty eventually gives way to
an almost sugary softness. But surely
Aronofsky must have been aware
that this brutally frank film would
prove provocative?
“I wasn’t conscious going in,” he says,
his bearing defensive but his tone
unapologetic. “I came from it the other
way. I noticed my own prejudices when
the play started. And, by the end, I felt so
deeply for Charlie. That’s what attracted
me . . . I didn’t really think about it in
How TV treachery is taking over the world
UPSTREAM
FIONA STURGES
W
hen reality series The
Traitors arrived on UK
screens in November, it
did so quietly, like a
thief in the night. Real-
ity TV shows are ten a penny, and much
of last year’s output, which included
Next Level Chef (Gordon Ramsay reduces
young cooks to tears) and The Ultimatum
(reluctant partners are dragged to the
altar), was typically forgettable.
But then word started to spread about
a wildly addictive show set in a 19th-
century Scottish castle where members
of the public undertake team challenges
by day and stab each other in the back
by night. Two months on, The Traitors
has been streamed more than 28mn
times on BBC iPlayer, and has spawned
an American version, The Traitors US.
The series is an adaptation of a Dutch
game show called De Verraders and pits a
small band of secretly assigned “trai-
tors” against a majority group of “faith-
fuls”. Each evening, under the watchful
eye of host Claudia Winkleman, contest-
ants gather around a table to “banish”
someone they suspect of treachery. Cue
much weeping and gnashing as, more
often than not, the banished person
reveals themselves to have been faithful
the fantastical showman side of creating
controversy. I don’t ever really. I just fol-
low the stories I want to tell. It might be
that my taste takes me there.”
The same could be said of Aronofsky’s
casting of Fraser, which has turned out
to be a masterstroke, his performance
showered with praise by critics and fans
alike. It only adds pathos that Fraser
himself has gained considerable weight
since playing the six-packed action hero
in films such as The Mummy nearly 25
years ago. (That he wore a fat-suit and
prosthetics to play Charlie has stoked
more controversy.)
Fraser spent years in the showbiz wil-
derness after alleging sexual miscon-
duct in 2003 against Philip Berk, former
president of the Hollywood Foreign
Press Association. (Berk has denied the
allegation and that the decline in Fra-
ser’s career had anything to do with
him.) But since the premiere of The
Whale, an internet army of millennials
who grew up on the star’s 1990s hits,
have risen up to propel him to new Hol-
lywood heights.
“I can’t take credit for it as if it was cal-
culated,” says Aronofsky. “I actually
didn’t realise how much love was out
there for him. I’m not that generation. I
saw the Mummy movies, but George of
all along. That same evening, the trai-
tors meet in secret to pick a person in
the group to “murder” (eject from the
game) overnight. All are vying for prize
money raised as a team through the
daily challenges. This, in the final epi-
sode, can be split between the surviving
faithfuls, but if any traitors make it to
the end, they pocket the lot.
On paper, it might sound like a
zhuzhed-up version of Cluedo or the
children’s game wink murder. In prac-
tice, it is a brilliant recipe for multi-lay-
ered manoeuvring and top-tier bluffing.
Emotions run high at the roundtable
discussions where individuals are called
on to defend their shady behaviour.
Viewers know who the traitors are and
can bask in contestants’ hubris as they
declare themselves terrific judges of
★ FTWeekend
the Jungle I missed and Encino Man I Clockwise from
never saw. I didn’t realise how seminal above: Darren
they were for so many people. I’m Aronofsky,
thrilled. People are really excited to wel- photographed
come him back.” by Justin J Wee;
For Aronofsky this is not entirely new Mickey Rourke,
ground. He performed a previous Laza- right, as Randy
rus-like resurrection by casting a box- ‘The Ram’
ing-weathered Mickey Rourke in 2008’s Robinson in
The Wrestler. This case is different, he ‘The Wrestler’;
says. “There was more of a calculation Jennifer
with Mickey because I knew the deep Lawrence in
respect he had from the actors of his ‘Mother!’;
generation. With Brendan it was really Brendan Fraser
just the right actor at the right moment.” as Charlie in
That moment was an initial meeting in ‘The Whale’,
Aronofsky’s office in New York’s China- for which he
town, which was followed by a live stage is Oscar-
reading at a small East Village theatre in nominated;
front of the director and a handful of oth- Ellen Burstyn
ers. “I watched him and I was, like: ‘OK, with Aronofsky
he’s going to be interesting.’” Two major on the set of
questions remained: “Physically could he ‘Requiem for a
do it? And could he emotionally do it? Dream’ — Alamy
Because I knew it was going to be a mara-
thon of both technical proportions and
emotional proportions.”
By now, anyone auditioning for
Aronofsky knows what they are getting
The speed with which the declare they are “100 per cent faithful”
majority change tack and go
at roughly three-minute intervals. In
the British series, one man who had
after one person is enough been flying comfortably under the radar
for weeks found himself the focus of sus-
to give you whiplash picion, prompting him to leap to his feet
and, between panicked sobs, shout: “I
swear on everything, I’m faithful. If you
character. For those around the table, want me to swear on anyone’s life I will.”
the bonds forged through cosy daytime Ten minutes later, he was revealed as a
chats in which they reassure each other wrong ’un.
that “it’s not personal” are quickly for- This is the kind of drama that we fans
gotten as they fight to stay in the game. of The Traitors now live for. Having pow-
The herd mentality is strong, and the ered through the British series, I am now
speed with which the majority change working my way through the US ver-
tack and go after one person is enough to sion, which is hosted by Scottish actor
give you whiplash. Alan Cumming, who gleefully chews the
Like many reality series, The Traitors scenery in an array of loud tartan suits.
has developed its own lexicon. Every- Indeed, the American show, though
one, traitor or not, feels compelled to filmed in the same castle, feels like a dif-
ferent beast. The British series featured
Contestants in a call centre worker, an estate agent and
‘The Traitors’ a spa therapist. It harked back to the
gather around early days of reality TV, when contest-
the table to ants were everyday people, rather than
discuss who to influencers focused on post-show
‘banish’ — BBC/Studio career-building.
Lambert Associates/
Llara Plaza
The US version, however, favours
more cartoonish characters, half of
whom have been plucked from shows
such as The Bachelor and The Real House-
wives of Beverly Hills. The result is a more
confrontational spectacle, with a cast
clearly playing to the cameras — “I’m so
pumped to murder someone,” declares
one newly recruited traitor.
Nonetheless, it is testament to the
show’s clever and adaptable format, and
the skills required to win it, that both
versions are instantly addictive and the
results unpredictable. And, at a time
when the reality juggernaut Love Island
continues to be mired in controversy
over the welfare of contestants, there is
something sweetly innocent about a
show that essentially provides players
with a puzzle to solve.
In blending the present-day reality
format with an old-fashioned murder-
13
Arts
themselves into. His exacting methods
are legendary — Lawrence tore her dia-
phragm and dislocated a rib after hyper-
ventilating during the filming of Mother!
— and they are not for everyone. Brad Pitt
quit the director’s third feature film, The
Fountain after two and half years of prep-
aration and has not worked with him
since. I ask Aronofsky whether he enjoys
pushing actors to their limits, but he
resists the suggestion.
“I’ve never forced an actor into a feel-
ing, because it doesn’t work,” he says. “It’s
never pushing, it’s sometimes reaching
down a hand to pull them up . . . That
was the beauty of finding Brendan right
when he wanted that . . .
I don’t know if he felt that way in the mid-
1990s when he was on his fourth leading-
man role.”
Aronofsky, it seems, still believes in
the unfashionable notion of suffering
for your art. “When actors start, they all
want to cry, they all want to show their
insides — the ones that aren’t searching
for fame and really love the art. That’s
why they go to acting school: to cry and
to scream and to feel. So I’m just
reminding them that, oh, here’s an
opportunity to do that.”
He accepts that not all stars have it in
them to go through an emotional wringer
in film after film, and he cites contrasting
examples: “Daniel Day-Lewis is his own
self-torturer, and maybe that’s part of the
reason he doesn’t work [often], because
it’s super-hard work for him. Then there
‘When actors start, they all
want to cry, they all want to
show their insides — the
ones that really love the art’
are actors like Ellen Burstyn [star of Req-
uiem for a Dream] who it doesn’t hurt. She
loves it; it inspires her. She would leave
the set floating on a cloud because she got
to leave it all on the screen that day.”
For The Whale, as for any film adapted
from the stage, one of the biggest chal-
lenges was how to make it sufficiently
cinematic. This meant devising inventive
ways of blocking scenes (arranging
actors’ movements in relation to the
camera). “It became about: how do we
block this so that it constantly helps the
narrative of the story?” says Aronofsky.
He cites a scene in which Charlie’s
resentful teenage daughter Ellie pays
him a rare visit but paces up and down
behind her armchair-bound father
while she harangues him. Aronofsky
places the camera behind Charlie so that
we see him craning pathetically to catch
a glimpse of her. “You empathise with
Charlie, because he wants to look at his
daughter. And you see how hard it is for
him to move. She just keeps going
behind him, working his blind spot, and
it underlines her messing with Charlie.
She’s taunting him.”
Aronofsky has been accused of taunt-
ing audiences and having a blind spot
himself when it comes to cruelty, but he
might argue that, like Charlie, he should
not be judged by appearances. After all,
he only wants to break your heart.
“Every single person that walks into
the theatre and sees Charlie is going to
have a pre-judgment about him, espe-
cially with how the film starts. But within
five minutes, he starts to open up your
heart. And by the end, hopefully, he
breaks it.”
‘The Whale’ is in UK cinemas from
February 3 and in US cinemas now
mystery, the creators of The Traitors
have come up with something that is
fresh, immersive and, outside of the
show’s own rules, resistant to the
manipulations of producers. I am, as
they say, 100 per cent faithful.
‘The Traitors’ and ‘The Traitors US’ are on
BBC iPlayer. ‘The Traitors US’ is on Peacock
in the US
14
Arts
S
ome of the loudest noise at the
Sundance Film Festival can
come from the quietest
places. In a line-up of movies
where you could find Anne
Hathaway as a seductive prison psy-
chologist and Mia Goth as a sadistic gun-
toting vacationer, it was the unassuming
drama Past Lives that won a loud chorus
of praise. Celine Song’s debut feature is
the kind of sensitively wrought, sneak-
ily devastating story one hopes to stum-
ble on at Sundance — fresh where so
many indie films felt formulaic.
Past Lives is an exquisite chronicle of a
missed connection between former
childhood friends in South Korea whose
lives diverge. Nora (Greta Lee) heads off
to the US with her family and then pur-
sues her ambitions as a playwright in
New York; Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) studies
to become an engineer. Nora settles
down with another writer, Arthur (John
Magaro); Hae Sung pines after her,
remembering the girl who was miffed
when he earned better test scores.
Song skilfully stretches and com-
presses her storytelling as the two find
each other online, take a break, then
have the opportunity to cross paths
again. It’s a movie that understands how
yearning lives in your body even when
you think you’ve set it aside. Lee’s won-
‘Sometimes I Think About
Dying’ restricts Daisy
Ridley to a bonsai-like state
of emotional constriction
drously controlled performance, with a
serene dash of wit, anchors Song’s brand
of romantic realism, which soars further
by resisting the easy answers we’ve
come to expect from other movies.
Another festival highlight, Rotting in
the Sun, is definitely not a shrinking vio-
let; it’s a hilarious hot mess. Sebastián
Silva, a criminally under-appreciated
Chilean satirist, directs and stars as a
hapless film-maker in Mexico City who
just might quiet-quit and become a
painter. He contemplates suicide, gets
zonked on ketamine and is besieged by
horny men. One of them, a motormouth
influencer named Jordan Firstman
(played by comedian Jordan Firstman),
insists on developing a project with
Silva, who eventually agrees despite
regarding Instagram as a pathetic void.
A marvel of comic timing shot in deft
handheld, Rotting in the Sun is full of
unpredictable turns as it mocks the
state of perpetual distraction that
afflicts Silva and his friends. When
the plot lurches in a wild direction
(best left unrevealed), the focus
switches to Silva’s bewildered cleaner,
Vero (Catalina Saavedra), who finds
herself in hot water.
As always, Silva isn’t afraid to ruffle
feathers with jabs at classism and solip-
sism, or with comically rampant male
nudity. But his healthy sense of life’s
absurdity has far more heart than bile.
Silva’s risky verve was rare; several
character studies at Sundance seemed
convinced of their boldness but felt
oddly similar. Fantasy sequences —
When the BBC put cameras into viewers’ hands
Television A London exhibition presents 100 films that were made by the public in the 1970s for the groundbreaking ‘Open Door’ series. By Peter Aspden
A
television camera slowly
zooms in on a small tree. A
man with an ape mask
appears. He is carrying a
billboard explaining that
the tree will “speak” to the audience on
the film-makers’ behalf. He runs off. A
voiceover representing the tree begins
to put forward slogans that make vary-
ing degrees of sense: “Use your birth cer-
tificate as a credit card” and “Aeroplanes
are a substitute for levitation”. We are in
the realm of deep surrealism.
Welcome to early 1970s British TV,
and one of the most audacious and fasci-
nating broadcasting projects from that
time, now the subject of a new exhibi-
tion titled People Make Television at east
London’s Raven Row gallery. The show
celebrates the first 10 years of the BBC’s
Community Programme Unit (CPU),
and the Open Door programme, which
allowed groups and individuals with
“voices, attitudes and opinions” to
make and broadcast programmes on,
well, pretty much anything they liked.
The talking tree was featured in a 10-
minute short from the Albion Free State
group, a hippy eco-anarchist collective.
But most of the 243 programmes that
were made between 1973 and 1983 had
more serious ambitions, and together
they form a punchy commentary on a
fast-changing, highly polarised time.
“One was never quite sure what one
was going to get,” says exhibition co-
curator Alex Sainsbury. “Sometimes it
was riveting and compelling, sometimes
it featured material that didn’t quite
know what it was . . . What you are watch-
ing is something that has its own gram-
mar, and the deeper you engage with it,
the more fascinating it becomes.”
The programme-makers included
marginalised groups of all kinds, raising
issues that are familiar in today’s cult-
Beyond the indie movie formula
Sundance Film Festival | Nicolas Rapold samples wildly diverse offerings, from
a drama of quiet yearning to hospital body horror to a hilarious hot mess
especially deadpan visions of dying —
were rife in Eileen, Cat Person and Some-
times I Think About Dying — all imagined
by young, lonely female protagonists.
Eileen and Cat Person — which do have
their mercilessly funny moments —
make third-act dramatic swerves that
seem self-defeating, while Sometimes I
Think About Dying restricts Daisy Ridley
to a bonsai-like state of emotional con-
striction as a taciturn office drone.
Relationship dramas cut more deeply
when marriage was involved, as with
one of the festival’s biggest acquisitions,
Fair Play — bought for $20mn by Netflix.
Two hedge fund analysts are about to
get married, when one (Phoebe
Dynevor) unexpectedly wins the pro-
motion coveted by her fiancé (a wea-
selly Alden Ehrenreich). It’s a lacerating
and violent look at toxic male resent-
ment and finance-bro chest-thumping,
but some unforced plotting errors show
ural landscape — gender politics, immi-
gration, neurodiversity — but which
were largely neglected in the main-
stream broadcasting of the time. “We
cannot underplay how shocking it was
to see what it dealt with, compared to
what came before and after it,” says
Matthew Harle, another co-curator.
The impulse to open up programme-
making to the public, at a time when it
was controlled by a professional elite,
sprang from similar initiatives in the US,
and a groundbreaking 1971 edition of
the BBC’s Late Night Line-Up documen-
tary series, in which a film of factory
workers discussing the increase in the
BBC licence fee was broadcast in
unedited form. Their conversation
‘Open Door’ provided ‘a
model for participatory
democracy, and a very
eloquently expressed one’
included sceptical remarks over
whether their views would be fairly rep-
resented, adding a layer of sophistic-
ation to the piece. Corporation execu-
tives (including director of programmes
David Attenborough) could not help but
be smitten by this verité approach to
news features.
What is most striking about the style
of the films, many made on handheld
Portapak cameras rather than the BBC’s
preferred 16mm equipment, is the raw-
ness. “The pacing is different, convers-
ations go on for ages, all the rhythm of
standard television is gone,” says Harle.
Sainsbury adds that the programme-
makers’ inexperience constituted a
style of its own. “It is not seamless,” he
says. “It is full of seams.”
★ FTWeekend
Clockwise from top left: ‘Eileen’;
‘Past Lives’; ‘Polite Society’; ‘You
Hurt My Feelings’; ‘All Dirt Roads
Taste of Salt’; ‘Infinity Pool’; ‘A Still
Small Voice’. Below: ‘Cat Person’
Courtesy Sundance Institute
The politics behind the films, more
than 100 of which will be presented at
the exhibition, are mostly from the left:
trade union groups making pieces about
their own working conditions, debates
over feminist issues, radical housing
associations voicing concerns over gov-
ernment policy.
But there are contributions from the
other end of politics too: films made by
blood-sport groups and the fringe Chris-
tian organisation, the Campaign for the
Feminine Woman. The theme of immi-
gration gave the series its most contro-
versial moment in 1976, with the airing
of an episode by the British Campaign to
Stop Immigration. That programme
prompted a rebuttal in the form of a
stinging polemic, It Ain’t Half Racist,
Mum, co-presented by cultural theorist
Stuart Hall and actor Maggie Steed.
“Basically it is Stuart Hall doing cult-
ural studies on TV, doing a close reading
of [1970s sitcom] It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum,
and essentially just shaking his head
that the dark delights of Succession
aren’t so easy to replicate.
Sundance veteran Nicole Holof-
cener’s You Hurt My Feelings stars Julia
Louis-Dreyfus as a novelist who over-
hears her therapist husband dismissing
her book. The admirably concise
premise blooms into a sticky dissection
of trust, though the flat storytelling
takes its sweet time. Holofcener’s
comedic powers of observation remain
sharp, but the cynicism — about church
charity, therapy, interior design, you
name it — leaves a sour taste.
While You Hurt My Feelings sticks to
well-trodden stretches of New York,
Raven Jackson’s All Dirt Roads Taste of
Salt takes a supremely tactile approach
to the lives of two sisters growing up in
rural Mississippi. From the flair and col-
our of the clothes, the setting looks to be
the 1970s or 1980s, but Jackson’s film is a
memory piece that shifts forwards or
Below: the title card of the
1979 ‘Open Door’ film ‘It
Ain’t Half Racist, Mum’,
a riposte to a film by an
anti-immigration group
Bottom: a still from a 1973
‘Open Door’ film by the
Street Farm collective
Courtesy the BBC
backwards in time. A mother’s death
and an intense teenage romance change
the courses of the sisters’ lives, but this is
a film of gestures that dwells on clasped
hands as much as faces, or simply sits
with the sound of rain and insects. It
achieves a level of total stylistic commit-
ment more common in European art
cinema than American indies, but with
a voice all its own.
Sundance also knew how to let loose
and have fun with its genre films this
year. A raucous tale of two sisters, Polite
Society, bops along with 16-year-old Ria,
an aspiring stuntwoman who is cata-
strophically loyal to her older sibling
Lena, due to be married off to a surgeon.
The repartee is peppy and clever, and
the scheming, fighting and colourful
design delightful. Birth/Rebirth stars a
mordantly funny Marin Ireland as a
tunnel-visioned hospital pathologist
experimenting with bringing the dead
back to life in her home-turned-lab. An
equally strong Judy Reyes plays a nurse
who is the mother of one such revived
child and turns her grief into action.
Infinity Pool was a much-hyped title,
not for the faint of heart. Director Bran-
don Cronenberg crossbreeds two differ-
ently squirmy scenarios — vacation
going, ‘I can’t believe this racist shit is
being broadcast on TV’”, says Harle.
Hall’s incredulity is buttressed by fur-
ther examples. In an extract from the
Tonight current affairs show, inter-
viewer Denis Tuohy is shown asking the
American white supremacist David
Duke: “What is your message to the peo-
ple of Britain?” Duke replies: “One of the
main things is that they are not alone,
that there are white people all over the
globe who sympathise with them”.
Another interview, by top BBC politi-
cal pundit Robin Day, is picked apart for
the way he frames his questions in a
show devoted to immigration. But that
particular critique evidently touched a
nerve. “Suddenly,” says Harle, “the CPU
[Community Programme Unit] gets a
letter from on high in the BBC saying, ‘I
think you ought to apologise to Mr Day
for broadcasting a programme criticis-
ing his interviewing style.’ You see the
clout of these big BBC figures leaning on
these tiny minority programmes.”
The CPU was commonly referred to as
the “Communist Programme Unit” by
non-sympathisers within the corpor-
ation. Running the CPU was a bit like
“being a goalkeeper” says Harle. “If you
did your job, nobody noticed you, if
things went wrong, it was all your fault.”
But the waspish reprimand over the Day
incident was evidence of a subtle shift in
the balance of power between pro-
gramme-makers and their audience.
Ratings were hardly a priority for
Open Door. While an episode by the
Transex Liberation Group attracted an
impressive 500,000 viewers, one by the
Science Fiction Foundation failed to reg-
ister above zero. After a decade of pro-
gramming that veered from the bizarre
to the earnest, Open Door was super-
seded by Open Space, a new, more struc-
tured show relying on a greater input
28 January/29 January 2023
nightmares and dystopian cloning — to
birth a bloody, nihilistic beast. Alexan-
der Skarsgård plays a tourist who starts
running with a fast crowd led with glee-
ful perversity by Mia Goth’s louche
thrill-seeker. It is a self-conscious but
effective midnight movie, with strobe
and bad-trip sequences that make you
want to stay at home for spring break.
But perhaps nothing is quite as daunt-
ing as the vision of mortality confronted
by A Still Small Voice — my favourite of
Sundance’s annually anticipated docu-
mentary selection. Luke Lorentzen’s
breathtaking film joins Mati, a hospital
chaplain in training, as she counsels
patients and their families and lends a
sympathetic ear to those facing illness
or death. But this isn’t a pious, dutiful
look at end-of-life planning: Mati strug-
gles mightily under the emotional
weight of her job. She isn’t afraid to voice
her fears — about God, work, herself —
and so becomes a vessel for reflecting on
our own.
A Still Small Voice is one of several
standouts at Sundance that one hopes
will find an audience beyond Park
City, Utah.
To January 29, festival.sundance.org
from professional producers with a big-
ger budget. Inevitably, some of the
urgency and rawness was lost.
Another decade later came another
incarnation, Video Nation, which ran
from 1994 to 2004, when the BBC dis-
banded the CPU. By then, the unit’s work
had left its mark on the style of British
television. “During the 10-year slice that
we have chosen to look at, there was the
ongoing debate about a fourth channel,
and the exhibition ends at the point
when Channel 4 is founded,” says Harle.
Sainsbury adds: “Open Door was the
test-bed of what a new form of television
would look like. Channel 4 reflected the
desire to get real people on television,
which was written into its founding. The
word ‘community’ is so overused, it has
become a cliché, but here it was defined
as a number of people working to make
a film together.”
Today’s media landscape is replete
with the voices of real people, transmit-
ted all over the world, loud and fast. But
they don’t — to say the least — always
seem to be harnessed to any wider social
movement. Sainsbury says Open Door
provided “a model for participatory
democracy, and a very eloquently
expressed one, that we don’t see at stake
in the social media now. Here were polit-
ical ideologies being contested in a pub-
lic space. It was a very exciting time.”
I ask if we should be nostalgic about
the era. “Nostalgia is always wrong,”
asserts Harle. “But if there is something
that is missing now, it is this sense of
monoculture, the idea of there being a
shared space. This was a time before
media bubbles, when television was
switched off, when event TV happened.
It was our companion in the evenings, in
a way that it is not any more.”
January 28-March 26, ravenrow.org
28 January/29 January 2023 ★ FTWeekend 15

Arts | Collecting

N
owadays when I’m abroad, I tured only Bangladeshi artists. The fol-
meet people who hear we’re lowing year, the Samdanis appointed
from Bangladesh and ask if American curator Diana Campbell
we know about the Dhaka Betancourt as artistic director. Since
Art Summit,” says Rajeeb then, the platform has grown to attract a
Samdani with a laugh. This is the event stellar range of international contribu-
he founded in 2012 with his wife, Nadia tors. It also strives to address issues of
Samdani, which is gearing up for its social justice from the perspective of the
sixth edition next month. “We wanted global south and to foster opportunities:
to put our country on the global art map half the works exhibited are new com-
and we’ve now reached that level.” missions. Each time, curators from glo-
It might sound hyperbolic to credit a bal institutions are invited to spend two
single private initiative with such a shift, years in the local context researching an
but this biennial event has become syn- exhibition for the event. “The idea is to
onymous with the Bangladeshi contem- allow our local audience to see a world-
porary art scene. Its last edition in 2020 class exhibition, but also for the person
attracted an audience of nearly doing the research to take that knowl-
500,000, and the nine-day gala of exhi- edge back with them,” Rajeeb says.
bitions, performances, talks and screen- At the same time, the event remains
ings is now a significant fixture on the firmly rooted in the local, a free public
global cultural calendar — bringing the event for “everybody, from the taxi
art world to Bangladesh and propelling driver to the garment worker, from
its artists far and wide. schoolchildren to grandparents”, says
It is not a commercial event but, over Nadia. In this spirit of inclusivity, this
the years, works exhibited there have year they scrapped special previews and
been acquired by Centre Pompidou, the VIP lounge. “It’s a festival, so every-
Tate, the Guggenheim and the Metro- one has to come, leave and hang out
politan Museum of Art, and exhibitions together,” she says.
curated for it have toured the world. For this year’s edition, the theme is
The couple insist this success is more Bonna, or “flood” in Bengali. In an era of
by accident than design. “I’d love to say climate crisis, its aim is to re-examine a
that we were smart and did a lot of phenomenon associated with Bangla-
research and strategising, but we don’t desh: its links with (metaphorical and
have a background in art and didn’t literal) destruction as well as abun-
know what we were doing — we were dance. Sixty per cent of participating
lucky that we made some good deci- artists will be Bangladeshi, among them
sions and that people opened doors for rising local stars such as photographer
us,” says Rajeeb. Nadia adds: “When we Sumi Anjuman and research-based
started giving people access to the Bang- practitioner Dinar Sultana Putul. Local

Dhaka meets the world

ladesh art scene, we realised everybody
was curious.”
The couple’s network no doubt helped
prise open some of those doors. Their
six-storey home in the capital’s affluent
Gulshan neighbourhood contains a
mind-boggling collection, including
works by contemporary artists such as
Tracey Emin, Anish Kapoor, Ai Weiwei
and Chris Ofili and 20th-century mas-
Clockwise from
top: Rajeeb and ters such as Paul Klee, alongside big-
Nadia Samdani; name artists from Bangladesh, broader
‘The south Asia and its diaspora — from
Shapeshifters multidisciplinary artist Ayesha Sultana
Escape’ (2021) and photographer Munem Wasif to Lon-
by Rithika don-based Rana Begum. An entire wall
Merchant, who is devoted to works by Kolkata’s Tagore
is exhibiting at family, leading lights of the Bengali Ren-
Dhaka Art aissance, including Nobel prize-winning
Summit; views poet Rabindranath and his nephews
of the 2020 Gaganendranath and Abanindranath.
summit — Peter Mallet; Tucked under the grand piano is a
courtesy Rithika Merchant decomposing corpse made of buffalo
and Samdani Art Foundation;
Mithail Afrige Chowdhury/ hide, “Lost and Found” (2012) by Paki-
Pacific Press/Shutterstock stani artist Huma Mulji; by the lift are
artists and people will collaborate with
international contributors, including
Britain’s Antony Gormley, who will
work with artisans on a bamboo instal-
lation; South African Sumayya Vally,
who will work with potters on a per-
formance piece; and Sean Anderson
from the US, who has asked 1,200 chil-
Bangladesh | The Samdanis’ biennial showcase of South Asian dren in flood-affected areas to paint
their ideal future home.
A lot has changed since 2012. “We
art is back with more international collaborations. By Debika Ray used to say we didn’t think we’d see con-
temporary Bangladeshi artists in major
international art institutions in our life-
time,” Rajeeb says. Today, Tate owns
sculptures from Venetians, Polish sculp- international council. works by Naeem Mohaiemen, Ayesha
tor Paweł Althamer’s 2013 Venice Bien- UK-born Nadia, who last year Sultana, Munem Wasif and Yasmin
nale installation; the Samdanis acquired received an MBE, grew up in a family of Jahan Nupur. The infrastructure to sup-
the two Bangladeshi figures from the entrepreneurs and collectors so was port contemporary art in Bangladesh
series of 90. Other pieces are in their interested in art from a young age; has also strengthened, while the Sam-
office or storage, many waiting to be dis- Rajeeb came to it through his wife. danis are striving to make a more per-
played at Srihatta, the cultural centre When they started collecting together manent mark with Srihatta. It will fea-
they are building in Sylhet, the north- about 15 years ago they homed in on ture commissions by artists including
eastern city where their families origi- south Asian modernists such as Zainul Danish collective Superflex, Nepal’s
nate. It will have an exhibition and resi- Abedin, Mohammad Kibria, FN Souza Subas Tamang and India’s Raqs Media
dency space and 100-acre sculpture and MF Husain, but through visits to Collective alongside Begum and Sultana.
park designed by Aga Khan architecture Yet as their impact becomes more
award nominee Kashef Mahboob Chow- concrete, the Samdanis are becoming
dhury and will be completed this year. biennales and art fairs, their interests less interested in permanence than
“When people say we’re passionate turned towards the contemporary. process. “More than collecting art, we’re
about art — I tell them passion you can Noticing the absence of Bangladeshi art- enjoying collecting memories,” Rajeeb
live without; we are addicted,” Rajeeb ists on the global stage, they dug into says, citing a project under way in Sylhet
says. The pair, both in their forties, their local networks and discovered a with Indian artist Asim Waqif: Bamsera
finance that addiction through Golden rich seam of talented people with few Bamsi is a bamboo forest that will act as
Harvest, the business Rajeeb founded in prospects of a career. “We’d visit artists a giant flute when the wind blows
his twenties, which employs more than who were doing great things, but the rest through it, and will take years to grow.
5,000 people across sectors such as of the world had no clue,” Rajeeb says. When Waqif started the work in 2017,
food, property, logistics, infrastructure Bangladesh, they point out, never Rajeeb recalls, the artist warned him it
and insurance, and also funds their lacked artists — only the infrastructure might fail. “I said, fine — then we will
charitable initiative, the Samdani Art to promote them. have the memory. That is what makes it
Foundation. The Samdanis are founding They therefore founded the Dhaka interesting.”
members of Tate’s South Asia acquisi- Art Summit in 2012. The first edition
tions committee and members of its attracted about 20,000 visitors and fea- February 3-11, dhakaartsummit.org

A fresh look at restitution

The Art Market AI platforms face lawsuits; interracial family portrait sells for $1mn; château collection heads to Sotheby’s. By Riah Pryor
Christie’s has launched a year-long
programme concerning restitution,
coinciding with the 25th anniversary
of the Washington Principles, which
were signed by over 40 countries to
support the return of Nazi-looted art.
Events kick off in the auction house’s
Paris galleries this week with a public
exhibition of works by French artist
Raphaël Denis (until February 10),
who sources frames with the exact
dimensions of missing paintings and
fills them with black voids, physically
restaging their loss. “The aim is to
educate collectors, buyers and the
general public on the issue but also on
the Holocaust,” says Richard Aronowitz,
global head of restitution at Christie’s.
The line-up includes Los Angeles
lawyer E Randol Schoenberg, who
worked on the legal battle over a
portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer by Gustav
Klimt (depicted in the 2015 film Woman
in Gold). A conference in Tel Aviv in
December will look at “how the
[Washington] principles will need to
adapt to remain relevant for the future”.
Underlining the relevance of the
topic was the Sotheby’s announcement
that it will be selling a restituted panel
by Edvard Munch, “Dance on the
Beach” (1939), which was hidden from
the Nazis in a barn before its owner,
Curt Glaser, was forced to sell it. The
work will be sold in London on March
1, with an estimate of £12mn-£20mn
and a proportion of the proceeds
headed to Glaser’s descendants.
Two lawsuits have been filed against
artificial intelligence platform Stability
AI, alleging copyright infringement.
The first is a class-action suit from US-
based artists Sarah Andersen, Kelly
McKernan and Karla Oritz. The claim
alleges that the use of open-source
images to “train” the software’s
creation of new images “violate[s] the
rights of millions of artists”. Platforms
Midjourney and DeviantArt are also
named on the suit.
In the same week, Getty Images filed
a claim against Stability AI in London’s
High Court and published a press
statement confirming that while it
“believes artificial intelligence has the
potential to stimulate creative
endeavours”, it thought there had been
an infringement of intellectual property
rights. Stability AI said in relation to the
class action suit that its allegations
“represent a misunderstanding of how
generative AI technology works and the
law surrounding copyright”. It also said
it would “respond
accordingly” to Getty,
having reviewed the
documents.
Such legal headaches
do not seem to be
dissuading digital
initiatives, including the
latest from Susannah
Maybank, former head
of digital at Gagosian:
last week she launched
a platform focused on
generative art, called
Tonic.xyz.
All eyes are on Europe
this week as Belgium’s
key art and antiques fair,
Brafa, opens (January
29-February 5). The
68th edition restores the
event to regularity
following lockdown
closures, a trial run of a
summer edition in 2022 ‘A Portrait of Two Girls’ (c1820)
and its move to Brussels Expo last year,
following 19 years at Tour & Taxis.
“There was a real demand from
dealers, visitors and the market in
general for a return to the January
date,” says Beatrix Bourdon, its
managing director.
The fair is known for its strength in
Oceanic and African art, so items such
as the 19th-century Chiwara
Headdress (from the Bougouni region
in Mali) on offer at Dalton Somaré
should impress the fair’s committed
collectors. Fresh-to-market examples
by Belgian artists are also expected to
sell well, including “London by Night”
(1917) by Emile Claus, at Harold
t’Kint de Roodenbeke gallery (priced
around €50,000).
— Courtesy Christie’s
Simon Dickinson’s son, Milo Dickinson, Jacques Garcia, is known for having Duke of Orléans. The total estimate
is joining the gallery as managing kitted out some of the world’s most is “in the region of €12mn” with
director. He leaves Christie’s, where he luxurious hotels, including La proceeds going towards the
worked for 12 years, most recently as Mamounia in Marrakesh, as well as estate’s restoration.
head of private sales in the Old Masters 35 rooms of 18th-century French Christie’s is offering up its own
department. His appointment will help furniture for the Louvre and, for fans share of exuberance with its sale
fill the void left by Emma Ward, who of TV satire The White Lotus, the villa in entitled An Opulent Aesthetic, from
moved last September to set up a Palermo used in the series (which in an anonymous English country home
dealership in conjunction with Old real life is in Noto). on February 9. Lots include a
Masters specialist Fabrizio Moretti. “Garcia is not only a designer but a Savonnerie carpet fragment (est
“This feels like a transitional collector and connoisseur,” says Mario £40,000-£60,000) from a larger piece
moment in the private art market Tavella, president of Sotheby’s France. commissioned by Louis XIV in 1661
where a lot of the older generations of The 75 lots on offer, spanning French for the Grande Galerie floors of the
dealers, particularly in the Old Master furniture, porcelain and art, can boast Louvre, although his subsequent
and Impressionist markets, are close to impressive provenances, with links to move to Versailles meant they were
retiring and it is an opportune moment Marie Antoinette, Napoleon and the never installed.
for Dickinson to make this transition,”
says Milo. The gallery will expand to
include Old Master sculpture, and the
team are taking a rediscovered work
by Anthony van Dyck, “Saint Jerome
in the Wilderness”, thought to have
been created in 1617 when the painter
was just 17 or 18 years old, to Tefaf
this March.
Philip Mould & Company announced
its own rediscovery last week, having
purchased what they believe is “one of
the earliest depictions of an interracial
family relationship in American art”.
“A Portrait of Two Girls” was bought
for just under $1mn at Christie’s last
week, against a $100,000 top estimate.
“[The consignor] may have seen this
as an attractive and unusual artefact
but little more,” says Mould, who
will undertake further research into
the work.
Opulence abounds as Sotheby’s
announces the Paris sale of a single-
owner collection from Normandy’s
Château du Champ de Bataille,
on May 16. The owner of the château,
16 ★ FTWeekend 28 January/29 January 2023

Television Dan Einav
Pamela, a Love Story
From Tuesday, Netflix
aaaae
After six unhappy marriages,
Pamela Anderson finally
seems to have found
someone who can offer her
deep, meaningful love:
herself. Pamela, a Love Story
is a new, surprisingly
touching Netflix
documentary that follows
the former Baywatch star as
she tries to find personal
acceptance.
Directed by the Emmy-
nominated Ryan White (The
Case Against 8), it gives
Anderson a chance to retake
ownership of a life that has
seemed to belong less to her
than the public. In 1995 a sex
tape she made with her then-
husband Tommy Lee was
stolen and circulated online,
to her horror; last year, the
scandal was dramatised by
Hulu, without Anderson’s
consent, in Pam & Tommy,
leaving her exploited anew.
That Pamela, a Love Story
opens with Anderson at
home on Vancouver Island,
rifling through a box of video
tapes, feels significant: this is
her story to share and to
process on her own terms. It
is one affected by trauma.
We hear how she was
Pamela Anderson tells her own life story on Netflix
Shrinking
On Apple TV Plus now
aaaee
The first episode of this new
comedy opens with a man
joylessly indulging in sex,
booze and drugs, and ends
with someone being beaten
up. Welcome to Shrinking,
the latest piece of comfort
television from the creators
of Ted Lasso.
If the book-ends of the
pilot sound a little dark, then
it’s because the rest of the 10-
part series tells a feel-good
molested as a child, raped
as a pre-teen and physically
assaulted by various
partners. Modelling for
Playboy freed her from the
shame that she felt was
invisibly tattooed on her
body. Yet she is eager
to stress that she is “not
a victim”.
A sense of self-possession
(as evidenced in these
interviews and in narrated
diary extracts) is matched by
a willingness to make fun of
herself — or how she is
perceived by others. “My
boobs had a career and I was
just tagging along,” she jokes.
At other points, light-hearted
remarks about ageing or
lacking purpose seem
flecked with melancholy.
Pamela trades on its
homespun, intimate
approach. There are no
talking heads besides her
parents and sons, no gushing
testimonials from other
famous faces. No make-up
either. Instead there are
lengthy montages of
journalists and chat-show
hosts aiming cheap, sexist
comments at Anderson over
the years. While the film
may not win any awards, it
might elicit some long-
overdue apologies.
tale of emotional
enlightenment, self-
betterment and support. It
follows Jimmy (Jason Segel),
a fortysomething
psychotherapist who has
become all id following the
death of his wife.
While everyone seems
concerned about him, Jimmy
finds himself experiencing
“compassion fatigue” at
work. One day, after being
worn down by an endless
stream of mundane
problems, he decides to
Critics’ choice
Putin vs the West
Monday, BBC2, 9pm
aaaae
Ken Burns’s documentary The US and
the Holocaust recently outlined how
Hitler was afforded the space to take his
expansionist goals and warped ideology
to a devastating extreme. Now a new
BBC series, Putin vs the West, finds
history repeating itself.
The three-part series follows the
decade-long path to Russia’s invasion
of Ukraine and explores whether it
might have been diverted by western
powers. Produced by the veteran
documentarian Norma Percy, the show
may be seen as a return to her 2012
series Putin, Russia and the West — which
provoked the criticism of several
influential Russian dissidents, who
thought it overlooked uncomfortable
truths about the president. Percy
denied such accusations, but this new
programme tells the story of how the
west underestimated Putin’s desire and
capacity to “rock the foundations of
European security”.
The film-maker assembles an
Jason Segel and Harrison Ford in new comedy ‘Shrinking’
Radio
Kissing is an expression of
intimacy that transcends
language, so how do you go
about capturing that
experience in words? In
A Kiss (Thursday, Radio 4,
11.30am), a tender, if very
earnest, discussion, four
poets share their insights
about writing on a subject
that proves inspiring but
frequently elusive.
Gently analytical
observations and illustrative
readings seek to identify the
X-factor that makes a good
kiss poem. While evocative
physical descriptions give a
sense of the erotic, we hear
how comparisons to art,
‘Putin vs the inexhaustible line-up of world leaders the “comfort [of] cheap energy” inform
West’ opens a and diplomats — including Volodymyr their decision to keep sanctions to a
window on to Zelenskyy, David Cameron and minimum after the Crimean invasion.
diplomacy at its François Hollande (to name but a few) Wearing as it can be to listen to
most fraught — to provide the range of perspectives politicians talk of misjudgments and The power of a kiss — Getty
and frustrating and expertise that such a subject missed opportunities, their testimonies
demands. While there’s some concise of dealing with Putin — or talking to
narration along the way, the main draw him “on the blower”, as Boris Johnson nature and time help
of the series is that the commentary and notes with his usual commensurate capture the more
analysis are left almost entirely to those gravity — does open a unique metaphysical sensations
who were in (or adjacent to) high office window on to diplomacy at its most that come from the simple
at critical moments in the slide to war, fraught and frustrating. act of lips meeting lips —
such as Russia’s annexation of Crimea in These insightful recollections of tense well, at least when done
2014 and its deadly interventions in meetings and peacekeeping right. The show also
Syria in 2015-16. negotiations give a real sense of the broaches the politics by
These two portents of the conflict to thorny paradox of engaging with a man considering the power of the
come, and Europe’s hesitant, divided who exploits compromise and becomes queer kiss to “pierce
response to them, are the focus of the firmer in his convictions when through the world’s
first couple of episodes. Many of those challenged. This might sound like the contempt”. AAAAE
revisiting how things played out seem show is giving western leaders an This week’s episode of In
haunted by regrets that they could have opportunity to excuse their The Studio (Tuesday, World
done more to curb Putin’s dangerous shortcomings, but really this Service, 11.30am) visits the
ambitions at that time. But culpability is documentary is sufficiently nuanced to Finnish composer Kaija
also occasionally directed at others as recognise that high-stakes diplomacy Saariaho. Her career has
the series considers the tensions within can at times feel like an impossibility. spanned more than 40
the west itself. The former Lithuanian Then again, shots of bombs over Kyiv years, but this interview-led
president Dalia Grybauskaitė accuses at the series’ end remind us that the appreciation of her singular
the major European nations of letting alternative is worse. sound and artistic vision is
no retrospective.
When host Keval Shah
change tack. Shedding by platitudinous exchanges, offset by Jimmy’s boss and meets her, it’s to discuss her
ethics, he starts telling unearned catharsis and reluctant mentor, Paul, who’s most recent works — the
clients what to do and taking insistent articulations of played by a newcomer to TV epic opera Innocence and a
them out of the clinic to feelings. In fact, for a show comedy called Harrison more intimate collaboration
confront their issues directly. about psychology, there Ford. Crotchety but caring is with the jazz trumpeter
He in turn begins to work seems to be very little hardly a strenuous brief for Verneri Pohjola. If Saariaho
through some of his own — recognition that there’s even him, but he quickly proves to speaks with humility and
not least his strained such a thing as the have a natural instinct for some reserve, her effusive
relationship with daughter subconscious. comic delivery. collaborators are more than
Alice (Lukita Maxwell). Anodyne though it may Other therapy shows willing to sing her praises.
But what begins as an be, Shrinking does have the such as The Patient may be Little of the actual music is
intriguing, sideways look at potential to grow on us. Segel more likely to keep us on heard here though, which
the limitations of traditional is easy to root for as the the couch, but none of them makes this a rather less
therapy — and the troubled rumpled leading man with can boast Indiana Jones rewarding show for casual
inner lives of those who treat “resting dead-wife face”, and himself belting out a 1990s listeners than for the
us — is soon watered down his earnest emoting is nicely pop classic. cognoscenti. AAAEE DE

Pop Ludovic Hunter-Tilney

Sam Smith
Gloria
Capitol Records
aaeee
Sam Smith’s hit single
“Unholy” with Kim Petras
broke ground last year as the
first US number one to be
scored by openly non-binary
(Smith) and transgender
(Petras) solo artists. The
song is a moreish helping of
TikTok-feeding fast food that
lasts less than three minutes,
an entertainingly trashy
earworm with stentorian
Gregorian chants, Middle
Eastern scales, a compulsive
electronic bassline and lyrics
rhyming “daddy” and
“addy”, as in “address” or
“Adderall”, or both.
In terms of making history,
this winningly tasteless track
— an edgy Eurovision
number in all but name —
might reasonably be judged a
small step for humankind.
But it was a giant leap for
Smith. The British singer has
a reputation for making
tastefully sad songs about
break-ups, his ornate torch-
singing smoothed out for
mainstream pop palatability.
The approach has brought
them immense success,
starting with their multi-
platinum debut, 2014’s In the
Unbound: Lonely Hour. Creative change
Sam Smith has been incremental: 2020’s
shifts restlessly Love Goes shifted the dial to a
between styles upbeat style while keeping
on ‘Gloria’ the heartbreak balladry.
Derek White/Getty
This conservatism stands
in contrast to Smith’s
boldness about their
sexuality and gender. From
the beginning of their career,
the addressees of their love
songs were male, an
uncompromising expression
of desire in a chartworld that
was more closeted a decade
ago than now. In 2019, they
came out as non-binary,
among the first major stars
to do so. Their fourth album,
Gloria, is pitched as Smith
unbound, the work of a
singer throwing musical
caution to the wind.
Made with regular
collaborators Jimmy Napes
and Stargate, it packs 11
tracks and two spoken-word
interludes about LGBT+
identity into just 33 minutes.
The songs shift restlessly
between styles. “Love Me
More” is crisply drawn from
gospel-pop and hip-hop/soul,
a mode that suits Smith as
they decorate earnest
platitudes about self-love
with rococo vocal runs.
“Lose You” accelerates
smoothly into disco, a good
change in tempo. The heat is
turned up another notch
with “Unholy” — but then
the album goes awry.
“Gimme” is a sex-focused
dancehall number with
Jamaican singer Koffee and
Canadian singer Jessie Reyez,
whose irritating vocal hook
hammers like a drill.
“Gloria” takes a left turn
into an a cappella choral
hymn, with Smith over-
singing their lead part.
Closing track “Who We
Love” is a maudlin duet with
Ed Sheeran about tolerance.
Undone by stuttering
songwriting quality, the
album can’t consolidate
Smith’s leap forward.
redeeming the travestied famous” with the sarcastic
term “indie” — which turned vim that Alex Turner once
into a vague catch-all for mustered. Bassist Lee
guitar music in the 2000s — Holland, guitarist Joe O’Brien
they proudly advertise and drummer Jamie Todd
themselves as being truly play wiry, hooky riffs and
independent. A small brawny rhythms. Choruses
Manchester label released push their way forwards with
The Reytons their debut album, 2021’s elbows-out, see-you-down-
What’s Rock and Roll? Kids off the Estate. Its follow- the-front energy.
Self-released up, What’s Rock and Roll?, is Gigs are the best place to
aaaee self-released. experience these jostling,
“No backing, no label, all Their local identity is lively songs. On record, the
Reytons” is the motto of the flagged in their name, which cold light of day occasionally
band on course to top this stands for “reyt ’uns” intrudes, as when Yerrell’s
week’s UK album chart. (Yorkshire lingo for “right slice-of-life commentaries
They are The Reytons, a ones”). Their music sounds about fake digital lives and
four-piece from South uncannily similar to Arctic feral youth shade into the
Yorkshire who have come Monkeys before the latter harrumphing tone of a pub
up the old-fashioned way, decamped from Sheffield to grumbler. But the album has
through gigging and word of Los Angeles. Singer Jonny drive. It dashes by at a
mouth. They play a style of Yerrell cries the album’s spirited gallop, a grassroots
music that boomed and then opening words “Let’s all be act of indie revivalism.
fell from fashion in the
2000s — the indie rock that
emerged in the aftermath of
Britpop with the likes of
Arctic Monkeys and Hard-Fi.
By the late 2000s, so many
bands had mushroomed
around this scene that it was
mockingly called “landfill
indie”. Detractors made
jokes about Razorlight and
predicted the death of guitar
music. But the last rites were
wrongly applied. Surging,
big-hearted songs that you
can jump around to, as if
your team has just scored the
winning goal, remain a big
draw. Hence the popularity
of recent practitioners such
as Catfish and the Bottlemen
and The Lathums.
The Reytons continue
the tradition. As though The Reytons’ frontman Johnny Yerrell — Gus Stewart/Redferns
28 January/29 January 2023 ★ FTWeekend 17

Films on release Danny Leigh & Leslie Felperin
The Fabelmans
Steven Spielberg
151 mins (12A) AAAAA
What if Steven Spielberg made the best
films of his life and nobody came? The
overstatement in the question is only
small. His new movie, The Fabelmans,
a memoir of his youth, may not quite
have the popcorn brilliance of Jaws or
the weight of Schindler’s List. It is,
however, a richly insightful, beautifully
made curate’s egg. It has also just
bombed at the US box office. In that, it
follows West Side Story, the last excellent
film Spielberg made for an audience
who promptly stood him up.
Sometimes a review should be
blunt. Go and see The Fabelmans:
a chance to see a maestro at work.
He won’t be around forever. Sceptics
should also know that, while this is
literally the Steven Spielberg movie,
it is also some way from what a
Spielberg movie is thought to be: all
syrup and sentiment.
For one, that reputation was always
unfair. But even taking that into
account, something much stranger is
happening here. Yes, the director’s
proxy Sammy Fabelman (mostly played
by Gabriel LaBelle) duly falls for
cinema. But the spell often seems a
curse. At five, the first movie he sees is
Cecil B DeMille’s lurid The Greatest Show
on Earth; it leaves part of him forever
petrified. Years later, the teenage auteur
watches his own 8mm footage from an
idyllic camping trip and a tiny detail
cracks his world in two. For a love letter
to cinema, The Fabelmans feels a lot like
an exorcism.
Yet the sun is often out. The story
runs the length of the Eisenhower 1950s
into the early 1960s. And here, at first,
the gently oddball Fabelmans fit so well
with each other, it feels as if nothing
very bad could ever befall them.
Michelle Williams is Sammy’s ardent
concert pianist mother, Mitzi; Paul
Dano his computer pioneer father, Burt.
A Spielbergian landscape unfolds: the
suburban lawns of Phoenix, Arizona,
where homemade movies evolve into
Reel life: complex, weekend epics. And all,
Gabriel LaBelle fundamentally, is well.
as Sammy Then the family collapses. The
Fabelman in aftershock would ripple into, among
Spielberg’s other movies, E.T., that American
‘The Fabelmans’ children’s classic set in a broken home.
Will The Fabelmans mean more to those
with an interest in the work of the guy
who made it? Inevitably. But as much as
the film is about the boy director, it’s
about his parents. And parents in
general: those eternal mysteries we all
have in common.
Williams is terrific. It also makes
sense that Spielberg started the project
after the death of his mother, Leah
Adler. This is the true love letter, one as
acutely human as people are.
Mitzi and Burt can also seem a
temptingly neat equation: lyrical spirit
plus master engineer. Put ’em together
and you get the essence of cinema. But
we are, in turn, more than the sum of
our folks. The particular nature of
Sammy is noted by family black
sheep Uncle Boris (a glorious Judd
Hirsch). He alone sees how the kid
regards his camera. Sammy, Boris
knows, loves his family. “But this, I
think, you love a little more.” What a
line. The selfishness of giants laid bare.
Approaching young adulthood, there
are high-school shenanigans, kooky first
girlfriends. Anti-Semitism too. The tone
gets complicated. Adolescence often is.
Flippancy aside, that is the movie’s
signature: the acceptance that two
things can be going on at once. Loving
marriages fall apart; callings are driven
by talent and fear. And films that seem
simple are actually hugely
sophisticated. To finish, you even get a
silly, marvellous, note-perfect joke. May
all our life stories end so well. DL
In cinemas now
Critics’ choice
All the Beauty and
the Bloodshed
Laura Poitras
122 mins (18) AAAAA
Don’t make an enemy of an
artist — they bring down
empires. Such is the lesson
of the unmissable new
documentary from director
Laura Poitras. At its
simplest, it is a record of the
spectacular 2018-19 protests
against the members of the
Sackler family whose
company Purdue Pharma
produced the addictive
opioid OxyContin, staged in
museums whose galleries
bore their name as donors.
Those protests were led by
photographer Nan Goldin,
her work often featured in
those same museums’
permanent collections. She
was not alone; the film
acknowledges her fellow
activists. But Goldin is the
force of nature, the catalyst.
You may already know
from media reports what is
about to go down in the
timecoded footage from New
York’s Metropolitan Museum
of Art, circa 2018, activists
preparing to launch their
first protest in a torrent of
pill bottles. But no one on
camera does. Even Goldin is
clearly unsure what exactly
will happen next. A good
documentarian — which
Poitras is — could mine fine
reportage simply from the
“die-ins” that roll through
various great museums.
But what elevates the film
still higher is the longer story
told of the world that made
Goldin — and the one she
made in turn. We learn of a
childhood in the US suburbs
where the stigma attached to
mental illness delivers raw
Nan Goldin, photographer
and documentary subject
tragedy. Where do you run
after that but the city? For
Goldin, it was 1970s Boston,
then the Bowery of New
York, a tribe found among
the countercultural,
androgynous and marginal,
who became stars of her
radiantly frank photography.
But devastation looms again:
Aids cutting down her
friends. Again, this alone is
the stuff of a whole film. The
wonder is how the different
aspects — biography, elegy,
contemporary journalism —
dovetail so seamlessly.
The narrative finally turns
back to OxyContin. Poitras
measures her attack
flawlessly. The Sacklers and
Goldins are briefly paralleled
as American families, the
way a dramatist would. More
importantly, a different
model of being is kept in
sight too. The Sacklers of
Purdue are easy to loathe.
The triumph of the film is in
making a case for our fury
and, in Goldin, something
better and braver too.
In cinemas now

Shotgun Wedding
Jason Moore
101 mins (15) AAAEE
When I hear the words
“wedding-themed romcom
starring Jennifer Lopez”, I
reach for my pistol. And yet
Shotgun Wedding is a pleasant
surprise. For starters, it’s
consistently funny even
though the set-up sounds
like the dustiest of clichés:
an over-planned and
ludicrously expensive
destination wedding goes
horribly wrong, forcing bride
Darcy (Lopez) and groom
Tom (Josh Duhamel) to
wonder about their
compatibility.
In this case, they’ve flown
everyone out to an island
resort in the Philippines, but
the culture clash between
in-laws and the arrival of
Darcy’s ex (Lenny Kravitz) —
who, shockingly, never
RSVP’d — turn out to be the
least of their worries.
Minutes before the
ceremony, pirates (not the
jolly sort) invade and take all
the guests hostage, forcing
Darcy and Tom to work
together to save them.
The direction by Jason
Moore (Pitch Perfect) is cake-
knife sharp, while Mark
Hammer’s script never
wastes a gag, especially one
that involves pineapples.
But what really helps is the
casting of sleeper agents in
the supporting roles, such as
the divine Jennifer Coolidge
(The White Lotus) and
protean D’Arcy Carden (The
Good Place, Barry). Actually,
everyone is pretty funny
here, even Kravitz and the
often annoying Lopez, who
for once manages a
reasonable simulacrum of
spontaneity. It’s still irksome
that the script contains so
many lines where people
remark on how “hot” she is,
but perhaps that’s one of the
vows filmmakers must make
when they marry their
projects with a star. LF
On Amazon Prime Video
Plane
Jean-François Richet
107 mins (15) AAAEE
It would be easy to nitpick
action-thriller Plane for its
plot holes, old-school
machismo and paint-roller-
broad characterisation of
Asian villains. But it’s also an
adrenaline-pumping banger,
skilfully executed by Jean-
François Richet, the man
behind similarly
entertaining French
franchise Mesrine. And who
doesn’t love gruff and limited
but somehow mesmeric
Gerard Butler?
Here he plays commercial
pilot Brodie Torrance, a
name evocative of both
Muriel Spark and the San
Fernando Valley. In a first act
stuffed with aviation detail,
he just about manages to
land a storm-hit plane from
Singapore on a remote island
in the Philippines. With no
electricity, phone reception
Foreign Legion, his
sharpshooting skills coming
in handy when they’re
attacked by Filipino
separatists. He is also a
convicted murderer — but
nobody’s perfect.
Various subplots scattered
throughout broaden the
canvas, recalling the multi-
star ensembles of disaster
movies of old, such as The
Towering Inferno and Airport.
However, some of these
minor storylines are so
vestigial they’re nearly
Gerard Butler (left) and Mike Colter in ‘Plane’ pointless, like the cutaways
to Brodie’s daughter
and little chance of rescue, recaptured and being (Heather Seiffert), who
he sets out to find help. transported back to US spends the entire film
Weirdly, he takes with him custody. This turns out to be looking worried while sitting
escaped convict Gaspare a good call since Gaspare on a couch in Hawaii. More is
(Mike Colter), recently spent time in the French made of the handful of
passengers and crew
members who survive the
crash, especially handsome
co-pilot Dele (Yoson An) and
level-headed cabin-crew
chief Bonnie (Daniella
Pineda). Meanwhile in New
York, crisis manager
Scarsdale (Tony Goldwyn)
chews out the suits who
made penny-pinching
decisions that sent the plane
into a storm in the first place.
By the end, as storylines
converge in a mighty river of
noise, gunfire and narrow
escapes, it all gets a little
silly, bringing to mind less
the climax of Airport than
that of Airplane! Looks like
Brodie picked the wrong
week to quit sniffing glue. LF
In cinemas now

Classical Richard Fairman Jazz Mike Hobart Theatre Sarah Hemming

disc courtesy of the King’s
Singers and instrumental
ensemble Fretwork.
The two discs are so
different that one really
wants both. With a few
exceptions, the music here is
non-religious — madrigals of
amorous exploits, youthful
The King’s Singers indiscretions, courtship and
and Fretwork melancholy, interspersed
Tom and Will with instrumental numbers
Signum Classics for a consort of viols.
aaaae The programme has been
Tom and Will both died in chosen with an eye to its
1623, a pair of composers entertainment value. “Who
with very different life Made Thee Hob” is a rustic
stories. “Will” was William dialogue, sung with Cornish
Byrd, aged over 80 at his accents. “If Women Could Be
death and renowned today Fair” warns of colluding with
for his great Catholic masses ladies of the night. “Thule,
from the Protestant age of the Period of Cosmography”
Elizabeth I. “Tom” was includes a vivid picture in
Thomas Weelkes, much music of a volcano.
criticised as choirmaster at The contrasts are further
Chichester Cathedral for his accentuated by restlessly
drunkenness and swearing, varying the number of
and dead at 47. voices and accompaniments,
Posterity has brought which can seem a touch
these two Renaissance contrived, but the standard
composers together to mark is high. A bonus comes in
the 400th anniversary of the form of two new pieces
their deaths. The year began from James MacMillan and
with a fine disc of Byrd’s Roderick Williams, tributes
sacred music from Stile in the Tudor manner to Tom
Antico. Now the pair share a and Will.
Renaissancists The King’s Singers and Fretwork — Sam Stadlen
Debashish Bhattacharya playing the Hindustani slide guitar
He has released a number
of records with the British
label Riverboat, the best of
which is Calcutta Chronicles,
an unadorned set that
showed off the three guitars
of his own invention, with
22, 14 and four strings
respectively.
Pandit Debashish The Sound of the Soul,
Bhattacharya released by the North
The Sound of the Soul Carolina label Abstract
Abstract Logix Logix, is another traditional
aaaae work in the spirit of Calcutta
The master, and in many Chronicles, though where that
respects the inventor, of the album had nine tracks, some
Hindustani slide guitar only a few minutes in length,
tradition, Debashish this has just four — the
Bhattacharya has spent longest of which runs to
decades exploring the links almost 40 minutes. It pays
between his instrument and tribute to the master sarod
other cultures. He has player Ali Akbar Khan, with
probed its links with the whom Bhattacharya studied
Hawaiian slide guitar, played as a young man, and
Indo-jazz fusion with John something of his
McLaughlin, collaborated thoughtfulness can be
with everyone from Ballaké discerned in Bhattacharya’s
Sissoko to Bob Brozman. guitar playing.
The format of the four
pieces is roughly the same: a
single percussionist (mostly
Swapan Chaudhuri on tabla)
as a base for Bhattacharya’s
improvisations on his 22-
string guitar (a chaturangui).
On the centrepiece “To His
Lotus Feet”, Bhattacharya
stretches out fully — a
quarter-hour, slowly
climbing opening alap, all
tentative microtonal essays,
with a lower-toned string
coming to the fore, the
instrument in dialogue with
itself. Then Chaudhuri
enters for the jhor, setting up
a slow patter that
occasionally flicks into
double tempo, as if urging
the guitarist from
contemplation into action.
Bhattacharya resists, then
suddenly lets forth a
climactic jhala, tabla and
strings flying everywhere but
always in full control.
Allegiance
Charing Cross Theatre
aaaee
It is a joy to see the Star Trek
icon George Takei on the
London stage. But the story
he’s here to tell is a shameful
one. The 85-year-old actor
stars in Allegiance, a musical
written by Marc Acito, Jay
Kuo and Lorenzo Thione and
inspired by Takei’s own
childhood experience of
being locked up in a US
internment camp during the
second world war.
Takei, just five years old
at the time, was one of
120,000 Japanese Americans
interned by the US
government following the
attack on Pearl Harbor. The
deprivation and humiliation
of this experience form the
texture of the musical, which
follows fictitious families
thrown together in the
“relocation centre” at Heart
Mountain, a dismal cluster of
huts in Wyoming.
A test of allegiance drives
a wedge through the camp —
between those enraged and
determined to prove their
loyalty by fighting for the US
and those enraged and
determined to resist such a
demand. The tension will
eventually rip one family
apart, with young Sammy
committed to fight and his
sister Kei falling for Frankie,
who rebels.
The story is gripping and
bowls along in Tara Overfield
Wilkinson’s compact, pacy
production on Mayou
Trikerioti’s simple wooden
set, evocative of a camp hut.
The show is best when at its
most acerbic. There are
some witty lines — “I’m from
Nebraska: dust is a food
group” — and one of the
standout songs, led by
Patrick Munday’s excellent
Frankie, is “Paradise”, a
sarcastic number extolling
the “virtues” of the camp.
Telly Leung makes a strong,
impassioned Sammy and
Aynrand Ferrer is terrific as
Kei, bringing the show to a
stop with her superb solo
“Higher”.
The piece is held back by
its dual purposes. It’s telling
a dark political story. But it
also conforms to the norms
of the Broadway musical.
Takei lights up the stage,
playing Sammy’s wise,
mischievous grandfather in
the camp, and then the older
Sammy in the modern-day
scenes that bookend the
story. He brings a gentleness
and lightness to the first role
and, to the second, a wealth
of gravitas, anger and sorrow
that is most moving.
Picking sides:
Aynrand Ferrer
as Kei and Telly
Leung as young
Sammy in
‘Allegiance’
Tristram Kenton
18 ★ 28 January/29 January 2023

Geography is (almost)
SNAPSHOT
everything
‘Goalie, Brindley
Road’ (1956) by Janan Ganesh
Roger Mayne
Fourteen years before England’s
Gordon Banks made football’s
Citizen of nowhere

I
greatest ever save, against Pelé in
the group stage of the World Cup
in Mexico, Roger Mayne’s ‘Goalie’ am writing this on the most
performed similar heroics on a precious object I own: a chaise
street in Paddington, London. A longue that I found in one of
new exhibition of Mayne’s work is those treasure-trove furniture
a selection of prints from his time stores in East Hollywood. It took
spent recording the working-class an age to complete its passage to
neighbourhoods of Britain in the London. During the wait, well, there
1950s and 1960s. are pet-owners who have worried less
Mayne’s photographs capture about a dog in the cargo hold. The
neighbourhoods still in war’s shipping delays of 2022 were a
shadow, but filled with the energy harrowing reminder of something that
of the “sidewalk ballet”, as the I believed globalisation had phased
American urbanist Jane Jacobs out: geography.
evocatively put it. Mayne admitted Yes, I ham it up, this denatured
that his subject choices fed a urbanite thing, but the reality is even
desire to “reach for the kind of worse than the shtick. I don’t
childhood I didn’t have”. A understand about pressure systems
lingering sadness frames a high- or harvests or water tables or fauna.
contrast, soot-blackened window
into a country — and social class —
I get rivers confused. As is the way in
British public life, I am educated in
in the throes of change. abstractions. Human rights: a
Alastair Bailey forward step for the species or
hogwash? On which side should one
‘Roger Mayne: What He Saved for have fought at Marston Moor? Who
His Family’ is at the Gitterman invented liberalism, David Hume or,
Gallery, New York, to March 25 perversely, by stressing the moral
equality of all, St Paul? I can do this
stuff all day.
But it isn’t the stuff that makes the
world turn. If the events of recent
years show us anything, it is how
much of life comes down not to
to buck. Geography is, if not
everything, then almost everything.
Back when this was denied, when
tech and trade were held to have
shrunk and “flattened” the world,
some intellectuals kept going with
their heresies. Ian Morris argued that
Geography is Destiny. David Landes
said that climate is under-discussed as
an enricher or impoverisher of
nations. Jared Diamond went down to
the level of plant and animal life to
explain the divergence of civilisations.
Tim Marshall, in works of Naipaulian
bleakness, said that war is almost
inevitable in certain terrains. (If
geographic determinists have a
Much of life comes down
not to human-generated
ideas but to immutable
facts of nature
recurring obsession, it is with plains,
which are said to instil a martial
paranoia in their inhabitants by
exposing them to ground invasion.
Beware Nebraska.)
This worldview can be so fatalistic
side. Britain in particular accords a
prestige to the study of ideas that it
doesn’t to earthlier subjects. (I recall a
colleague of hers mocking Theresa
May as a “geographer”.) The life of
the mind is only somewhat more
rounded in America. Perhaps it all
goes back to the Enlightenment view
of the world as whatever human will
and reason make of it. The idea that
we are boxed in by intransigent facts
of geography is not just dull to
contemplate. It is an affront to a
founding conceit of our civilisation. It
is one in the eye for Descartes.
Yet those facts are all around us.
Rice is more calorific than wheat per
hectare. How much of world history —
the vast populations that Asia has
sustained, for instance — turns on just
that? Why didn’t China do
transoceanic conquest when it had the
power to? A lack of Christian zeal or
all that bounteous land of its own?
Even where ideas themselves seem
paramount, there might be an
element of geographic accident
involved. Would Germany have been
less conflicted over the
Enlightenment, more like Britain and
the Netherlands, if more of it were
coastal? Did the relative lack of

A sour note for human-generated ideas but to

immutable facts of nature. Some
countries have accessible deposits of
opera funding fossil fuels. Some have the metals that
go into chips. Some have long borders
to be paranoid about. Some have more
than others to lose from a heating
globe. Some lack and crave warm
water ports. Some vote for
Jan Dalley detachment from their continent but
find the geographic logic of trade hard
as to cross over into quackery. Russia
“must” attack its western neighbours,
such is its vulnerability to the
maritime contact with other countries
slow its absorption of ideas?
You can vanish into a rabbit hole of
flatlands. Xinjiang, at the hinge of
east-west traffic through the
conjecture. But that is healthier than
not thinking in natural-physical terms
millennia, will “always” be a trouble at all. Francis Fukuyama still gets it in
spot. The denial of human agency here the neck for The End of History. The
has more of religion than of science end of geography was a rasher call.
about it.
But it is also a useful corrective for
elites who too often err on the other
janan.ganesh@ft.com. Read more
columns at ft.com/janan-ganesh

Trending

W
ho pays for the arts? It’s
a question that,
arguably, no one has
quite solved. On the
spectrum from
completely privatised, philanthropy-
based support (loosely, the US model)
right through to full public funding
(say, Germany), with all the myriad
hybrid models in between, each has its
drawbacks. And however it’s done,
there is never quite enough money.
The problems in every system
almost always focus not on that
mythical total sum, though, but on who
decides how the cake gets sliced, and
where funds are allocated. The Arts
Council was set up in 1946 to make
decisions about dishing out public
money to culture at arm’s length from
the government of the day. And that’s
what has caused a furore, since the
latest funding announcements in
November.
The bite-back, after it was
announced that English National
Opera would have its annual Arts
Council of England grant of £12.6mn
completely axed, was way beyond
expectations. More than 83,000 people
signed a petition. Leading figures in the
arts wrote, spoke, protested. Some 65
opera companies across the world sent
messages of support.
Certainly, I’m guessing, this was way
beyond ACE’s expectations. There
followed two months of furious behind-
the-scenes horse-trading, and plenty of
public hot air — debates in the House of
Lords and the House of Commons — as
well as a meeting between ENO’s chief
executive Stuart Murphy and the
recently appointed secretary of state in
charge of culture, Michelle Donelan.
And sure enough, news came of
what sounds like a reprieve — not so
much a U-turn, on ACE’s part, as a
face-saving compromise. ENO will
receive £11.46mn for the coming year
and continue to put on a full
programme of work at its home base in
the London Coliseum — rather than
immediately accede to ACE’s demand
that it re-establish itself outside the
capital, as a nod to the government’s
“levelling-up” agenda.
But the funds now awarded for the
coming year are part of the £17mn
special restructuring grant (to be
spread over three years) that was
contained in the original offer.
Which leaves, even by my rudimentary
maths, just £2.77mn for each of the
following two years.
Isn’t that just a stay of execution —
leaving an even more insecure
prospect a year from now? Yes,
there is talk of further funding,
subject to application, and Murphy
feels that “the mood-music has
changed a bit”. But such vague
indicators are hardly a way to run
any sizeable organisation, especially
one that, as Murphy pointed out to me
this week, works on very long lead-
The view that shortfalls
in public funds will be
made up by philanthropy
is crude thinking
times. And especially again, for a
company set up to challenge opera’s
elitist reputation and provide access
for all, cheap tickets and education
and development work. He talks
feelingly about “facing the cliff edge”.
All pretty chaotic, you might say, as a
way to run a cultural policy. A joint
statement from Britain’s opera houses
this week calls the ACE’s lack of a
coherent policy for opera “reckless”.
And in an interview for BBC Radio’s
Front Row, ACE’s chief executive
Darren Henley — while calling ENO an
“excellent organisation which does
excellent work” — talked of receiving
an “instruction from government”, in
the person of the then secretary of state
Nadine Dorries, to move substantial
amounts of cultural investment outside
the capital, and hinting strongly that
otherwise the ACE’s own funding was
on the line. So much for an arm’s-
length principle
So I asked Murphy whether he
thought ACE itself was now in
question. Sniping at the Arts Council
has always been a sort of national
sport — but now ACE seems to be
caught between a bullying
government with a rapidly changing
ministerial line-up and the
expectations of a vocal public. His
reply was suitably diplomatic, of
course, but “a three-year funding
cycle simply doesn’t work”, he
believes, citing the fact that Britain’s
leading art galleries and museums
have a different, much more
predictable direct funding
arrangement than the precarity that
faces the performing arts.
In his vision of perfect private-public
balance — what he calls “the sweet
spot, a bit of philanthropy and some
public funding” — there’s a dance
between the two parts.
Have the recent funding ructions,
with their inevitable implications
about the status and validity of ENO,
shaken the confidence of its private
sponsors? “100 per cent, yes. No
question,” comes the reply. While
some are loyal, he says, some are
“really angry”.
The privatising view that shortfalls
in public funds can and will be made
up by sponsorship and philanthropy is
crude thinking.
And the “levelling-up” agenda also
“needs nuance”, Murphy claims.
Coming from Leeds, he’s in a good
position to observe that “there’s a
sophisticated relationship between
London and non-London”. To
encourage better access to the arts by
simply banishing certain organisations
from the capital is, again, a pretty
blunt instrument.
So the overall questions about
arts funding across the world, as well
as the future of this particular
organisation, seem no closer to a
resolution. But perhaps the recent
heated airing of the issues will lead to
some creative thinking.
Jan Dalley is the FT’s arts editor

Are you listening to the FT Weekend podcast?

The Oscar nominations have
been announced, and this
weekend we bring you
interviews with two of the most
nominated. Last year, we spoke
with Daniels, aka Daniel Kwan
and Daniel Scheinert, the
directors of Everything
Everywhere All at Once, and with
Ruben Östlund, director of
Triangle of Sadness. Both films
have been nominated in the best
director and best picture
categories, and both are total
curveballs. The interviews are
also a wild ride. Listen wherever
you get your podcasts, or at
ft.com/ftweekendpodcast

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follows. An immediate 1 Rf4?? fails to exf4 2 gxf4 dxc3 when 3 Rg1+ allows Bxg1 or 1 Rf4?? exf4 2 Na4 f3+! and the g file stays closed.
Money
FINANCIAL TIMES | Saturday January 28 / Sunday January 29 2023

Is this
the start
of the great
buy-to-let
sell-off?
Landlords have their
hands full as pressures
on property grow
PAGES 6–7

Andy Carter

Skin in the Game Tax probes Deep dive Shopping around

Stuart Kirk: corporate Worried about an David Stevenson on Why have investors
tax rises needn’t HMRC penalty? how to research your spurned UK retailers,
worry investors Here’s what to expect next investment asks Jonathan Eley
BACK PAGE PAGE 3 PAGE 5 PAGE 4
2 | Money
TAX DEADLINE
Self-assessment:
3.4mn still to file
Millions of taxpayers have left it until
the last moment to file self-assessment
tax returns for the 2021-22 tax year
before the deadline next Tuesday —
with HM Revenue & Customs reporting
this week that 3.4mn people were still
to file and pay any tax due.
Those requiring assistance from
HMRC face serious delays. The tax
authority this week told MPs that the
average waiting time for its self-
assessment helpline in January has
been 27 minutes.
Taxpayers who cannot afford the bill
can set up a Time to Pay arrangement,
which allows payments to be spread
over 12 months after the deadline,
without paying late payment penalties.
Mary McDougall
TRAVEL
Cruise bookings
boost for Saga
The return of older people “cooped up
in the pandemic” is behind a recovery
in demand for cruises and other
holidays, Saga’s chief executive said,
after a rise in bookings boosted the
company’s struggling share price.
A trading update on Tuesday
showed higher passenger numbers on
Saga’s cruise ships, which were on
track to double their revenue for the
year to January. Bookings at its travel
business are also rising.
The company said it was on track to
deliver underlying pre-tax profit of
£20mn to £30mn for the year to
January, in line with guidance issued
after a profit warning in September.
Its shares have fallen nearly 40 per
cent fall over the past year but were
up about 10 per cent this week.
Ian Smith and Oliver Barnes
INVESTMENT BANKING
Banks poised to
make huge job cuts
Banks are gearing up for the biggest
round of job cuts since the global
financial crisis, with executives under
pressure to cut costs following a
collapse in investment banking
revenues.
The lay-offs — expected to be in the
tens of thousands across the sector —
reverse the mass hirings made over the
past few years. Banks including Credit
Suisse, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley
and Bank of New York Mellon have cut
more than 15,000 jobs in recent months.
Owen Walker and Katie Martin
@FTMoney Email alerts
WEEKEND CATCH-UP
FTSE 100 COMPANIES
Staff suffer pay cuts
in real terms in 2022
FTSE 100 companies handed staff
average pay increases of about 6 per
cent last year, failing to match the surge
in inflation, according to an analysis by
the Financial Times into how the UK’s
largest businesses helped employees
through the cost of living crisis.
Telecoms companies BT and
Vodafone and DIY group Kingfisher
were among the only companies to
hand rises to their lowest-paid staff
that outpaced soaring costs.
Of the 71 top-100 companies that
responded to the FT’s questions on
pay, 30 said they had offered pay
rises that averaged around 6 per
cent, roughly in line with wage growth
across the UK private sector.
FT reporters
FT Money Clinic podcast
Jonathan Hollow and Robin Powell
join presenter Claer Barrett to explain
why they believe investing in broad-
based index funds is the cheapest way
to increase long-term wealth. They
describe their six-step plan for
investment beginners.
FT.com/money-clinic
Sign up for free email alerts at
ft.com/newsletters and scroll
down to Personal Finance
FINANCIAL TIMES Saturday 28 January 2023
UK ECONOMY
BoE expected to
raise interest rates
Financial markets expect the Bank of
England to raise interest rates by 0.5
percentage points next month owing to
high inflation, strong wage growth and
unexpected resilience in the economy.
Analysts said official data over the
past two weeks was largely supportive
of further monetary tightening. The
economy grew in November, with gross
domestic product increasing 0.1 per
cent compared with October. It NS&I’s junior Isa now pays 3.4 per cent — Roman Lacheev/Alamy
suggested the UK did not fall into
recession in the final quarter of the
year, as had been widely anticipated.
In the three months to November,
NS&I raises rates
27,000 jobs were added, compared with
the previous three months, and nominal
wage growth rose to a near-record high.
on junior Isas and
Valentina Romei
adult accounts
SAVINGS
State-backed fund
heads the market
for online Jisas
RAFE UDDIN
Parents are being encouraged
to save more for their chil-
dren’s future, with National
Savings & Investments
increasing rates on junior cash
Saga Isas (Jisas) above pre-pan-
Share price (£) demic levels.
20 The state-backed savings
fund said on Tuesday that it
15 had increased the rate for the
tax-free children’s savings
10 product from 2.7 per cent to
3.4 per cent. This puts NS&I at
5 the top of the market for
online Jisa accounts, beaten
0 only by rates offered on rivals’
2018 20 21 22 23 in-branch or postal Jisas.
Source: Refinitiv NS&I also announced the
rate offered on its adult Isas
would rise from 1.75 per cent to
Stuart C. Wilson/Saga/Getty Images
2.15 per cent and it will also
MEDIA improve the prize fund rate for
premium bonds to 3.15 per
Murdoch scraps Fox- cent, representing its fourth
increase in a year.
News Corp merger “Today’s changes will
provide a welcome boost for
Rupert Murdoch has scrapped a savers of all ages across the
proposal to combine Fox and News country, with more premium
Corp after his attempt to reunite the bonds prizes and some of the
two halves of his media empire was highest interest rates we’ve
resisted by shareholders. seen in over a decade,” said
Murdoch’s companies announced on NS&I’s chief executive Ian
Tuesday that the “special committees” Ackerley.
established to explore the terms of Amid a general increase in
the putative merger would be interest rates, NS&I has moved
disbanded with immediate effect on to market itself more competi-
the grounds that the proposal did not tively, with an improved offer
serve the interests of shareholders of for Jisa holders that could
Fox and News Corp “at this time”. appeal to rivals’ customers
FT reporters looking to switch to a better
rate.
Jisas were launched in 2011
as a replacement for child trust
funds, offering parents the
ability to build a tax-free nest
egg for their children before
they turned 18, at which point
accounts would convert to
adult Isas.
Anyone can contribute to a
Jisa, though an account must
be opened by a parent or
guardian and contributions
cannot exceed a £9,000 tax-
free limit each year. Children
can hold one cash and one
stocks and shares Jisa at a
given time.
In 2019, NS&I increased
returns on its cash Jisas to 3.25
per cent in an effort to encour-
age savings among young peo-
ple, but cut rates to 1.5 per cent
the following year, before lift-
ing rates twice last year to 2.7
per cent at the close of 2022.
Rachel Springall of compari-
son site Moneyfacts said that
NS&I’s cash Jisa would appeal
to individuals looking to open
an account online. However,
parents prepared to apply in a
branch, by post or over the
phone could access 3.8 per
cent on an equivalent
account with Coventry Build-
ing Society.
Savers wanting greater flex-
iblity on withdrawals may pre-
fer non-Jisa children’s
accounts, though they lose the
tax advantages. Leeds building
society offers 3.65 per cent on
its easy-access child savings
account.
Little over half of the £7bn
held in Jisas between 2020 and
2021 was in cash, according to
HM Revenue & Customs. This
figure has slowly fallen as a
proportion over time as more
people invest in stocks and
shares Isas.
“There are lots of people
whose junior Isas or child trust
funds are sitting at worse
rates,” said Sarah Coles, per-
sonal finance analyst at Har-
greaves Lansdown, noting that
balances could be transferred.
FINAN
FIN ANCIA
CIALL TIM
TIMES
ES Sat
Saturd
urday
ay 28 Jan
Januar
uaryy 202
20233
fter weeks of con-
t r o v e r s y, To r y
party chair
N a d h i m Z a h aw i
has admitted
m a k i n g “c a re l e s s a n d n o t
deliberate” errors in a tax dis-
pute settlement with HM Rev-
enue & Customs.
The government’s ethics
adviser, Sir Laurie Magnus, is
investigating. But tax advisers
h ave b e e n i n t e re s t e d by
reports that the penalty paid
by Zahawi was 30 per cent of
the tax owed; a total payment
estimated at £5mn in a dispute
re l a t i n g t o s h a re s a l l e g e d ly
h e l d i n a n o f f s h o re t r u s t i n
Gibraltar.
Zahawi has not confirmed
the sum paid or commente d
on the reported penalty, and
HMRC will not talk about indi-
vidual taxpayers. But how are
taxpayers generally treated in
high- end disputes with
HMRC?
I’ve got my taxes wrong —
what will the penalty be?
It depends on several factors,
but generally “the more seri-
o u s t h e e r ro r a n d t h e m o re
serious the behaviour, the
higher the penalty will be”,
says Margaret Curran, a tech-
nical officer at the Chartered
Institute of Taxation.
There are four thresholds
based on level of intent, com-
bined with a view of whether
the taxpayer volunteers a dis-
closure, or is prompted to act
by HMRC. Generally, the more
you co-operate with HMRC,
the lower the penalty.
1. If you made a genuine mis-
take and took reasonable steps
to ensure that tax pay aymments
w e re c o r re c t , n o p e n a l t y i s
charged.
2. If a mistake is deemed care-
less, defined by law as a failure
to take “reasonable care”, tak-
ing into account the sophisti-
cation of the taxpayer, the
maximum p enalty is 30 p er
cent of the tax due. The mini-
mum is zero if you disclose to
HMRC first, or 15 per cent if
you act after they appro roaach
you.
3. If the error is deliberate but
How does your bonus measure up?
CLAER BARRETT
Following record-breaking
p a y o u t s l a s t y e a r, m a n y
investment bankers will be
g l a d j u s t to h a n g o n to t h e i r
jobs this bonus season as
incentive pay takes a nose-
dive.
The prospect of recession
a n d a s h a r p d ro p i n g l o b a l
Nadhim Zahawi is reported to have paid a substantial tax penalty Jordan Pettitt/PA
When does HMRC
charge a 30 per cent
tax penalty?
NEED TO KNOW
With tax penalties hitting the
headlines, Mary McDougall
looks at how these are calculated
not co
not concncea
eale
led,
d, th
thee ma
maxi
ximu
mumm
pen
pe nalty is 70 pe
perr cent and the
minimum p enalty is 20 p er
cent , rising to 35 p er cent for
disclosure prompte d by
HMRC.
If it is de eme d delib erate
and conceale d, p erhaps if a
taxpayer falsified an invoice or
provided misleading informa-
tion, the maximum p enalty
would b e 100 p er cent and
the minimum penalty 30
per cent, rising to 50 per cent
dealmaking has caused banks
to take the knife to bonus pools
as well as staff numbers, but
nevertheless, some traders
still expect to be well
rewarded.
Following the success of
our annual bonus survey last
ye a r , F T M o n e y w o u l d l i k e
t o a s k re a d e r s wo r k i n g i n
finance to complete an
INSIGHT
for prompted disclosures.
Taxpayers penalised for
deliberate bad behaviour who
h av e n o t f u l l y c o - o p e r a t e d
with HMRC are named pub-
licly. Ab
Aboout 480 taxpayers
have been named as deliberate
tax defaulters since March last
year.
Advisers warn that HMRC is
pushing to define more cases
as deliberate, and agents will
often try to negotiate a case
branded deliberate to be
a n o n y m o u s, t h re e - m i n u t e
o n l i n e s u r vey a b o u t t h e i r
2 0 2 3 b o n u s ro u n d e x p e c t a -
tions.
As well as the likely size of
your bonus in relation to last
year, we would like to know
how you intend to invest, save
or spend the money.
To access the survey, visit
FT.com/bonus
Y Frozen asset? Should I sell my alpine ski
apartment, asks James Max PAGE 9
recategorised as careless.
What if it relates to matters
offshore?
Penalties can be higher if the
dispute involves funds parked
offshore, for instance in a tax
haven. HMRC has split over-
seas countries into three cate-
gories according to their
deemed level of risk.
3 C a t e g o r y 1 t e r r i t o r i e s,
including the US and most
European countries, have the
same penalties as the UK.
3 Category 2 territories, cover-
ing most other locations —
including Gibraltar — have a
top penalty of 45 per cent for
carelessness and 150 per cent
for deliberate and concealed
error.
3 Category 3 territories, which
i n c l u d e Mo n a c o a n d o t h e r s
listed here, have a maximum
penalty of 60 per cent for care-
lessness and 200 per cent for
deliberate and concealed
error.
Higher penalties generally
apply to countries that aren’t
signed up to information
e xc h a n g e a g r e e m e n t s w i t h
HMRC.
Where a taxpayer failed to
c o m p ly w i t h o f f s h o re t a x
f o r t h e y e a r s t o 2 0 1 6 -1 7 b y
Money | 3
September 30 2018, the maxi-
mum p enalty rate is 200 p er
cent, though this can be
reduced by disclosure co-
o-ooper-
ation to a minimum of 100 per
cent. Curran added that a pen-
alty will not be charged if you
have a “reasonable excuse”.
How far back can HMRC go?
H M RC c a n p ro b e m i s s i n g
taxes over four years where a
mistake was genuine, six years
where it was careless, and 20
years where action was delib-
erate.
The offshore time limits are
a little longer, where investiga-
tions can stretch back 12 years
for carelessness, but HMRC is
precluded from acting if it had
the information from other tax
authorities but failed to use it
within six years.
What about interest?
As well as a penalty, interest
w i l l b e c h a r g e d o n d e l a ye d
payments, applied from when
the tax was originally owed to
when it was eventually paid.
The late payment rate has
r i s e n s h a r p ly re c e n t ly i n
response to market rates and is
n ow c h a r g e d a t t h e B a n k o f
England base rate plus 2.5 per
cent, or 6 per cent.
4 | Money FINANCIAL TIMES Saturday 28 January 2023

OPINION

Why wise
T
hey are defensive, they 43 per cent over two decades — is times your money — even after its started trading from a van or a
generate stacks of cash, worth roughly the same now as it was recent troubles. market stall — Boohoo’s Mahmud

investors
are highly consolidated as a sprawling retail conglomerate Its dowdy high street shops might Kamani, Hargreaves, carpet king
and much better run two decades ago. Two businesses be the butt of jokes on social media, Lord Harris, The Range founder Chris
than they used to be. So offloaded as part of that journey, but WHSmith’s share price Dawson, pound shop pioneers Steve

leave retail why do investors not want to own UK

supermarkets, which have
underperformed the wider market
Woolworths and Comet, went bust.
At electricals retailer Currys it is as
if the Carphone Warehouse merger
performance is smarter — its returns
are almost 1.5 times the market.
Then there is Games Workshop.
Smith and Chris Edwards to name a
few — provide a clue.
Barriers to entry were always low,

shares on for more than a decade?

I have pondered this question for
never happened. Dixons and
Carphone were worth a combined
You may not be familiar with the
grimdark or the eternal struggle
and the internet lowered them
further. As a result, competition is

the shelf
many years and studied it more £3bn in 2014. The successor between Chaos and the Imperium of ferocious and turnover of businesses
forensically in the past three as FT’s company is currently capitalised at Mankind, but beating the index more high.
retail correspondent. The answer around a quarter of that sum. than tenfold over two decades is Retail expanded as disposable

involves margins, misplaced
investments and low barriers to
entry. I can add to that a gut feeling,
one shared with fund manager Terry
Smith, who in 2014 wrote a column
expounding at length why he would
not buy shares in Tesco.
At the time, the supermarket group
was reeling from accounting errors,
the discovery of horse meat in
beefburgers and the rather careless
loss of thousands of customers to
discounters Aldi and Lidl. Its shares
had fallen by almost two-fifths in a
year, and looked superficially cheap.
Smith’s article said: “There are
Jonathan Eley many reasons why I am unlikely to
ever own a retailer in the Fundsmith
On Investing Equity Fund”. He didn’t go into
further detail. But it looks a good call.
Over the past 20 years, on a total
return basis, neither supermarkets
nor the larger general retailers have
beaten the FTSE All-Share index.
It is hard to find individual major
Sports Direct’s market value is 50
per cent higher than its initial public
offering price in 2007 — but that is a
relatively meagre compound annual
gain of 3.65 per cent.
Marks and Spencer, a turnround
story that has been running for most
of this millennium, is one of only two
retail stocks to have underperformed
the index by more than 50 per cent
over five, 10 and 20 years.
The (short) list of 20-year winners
contains two obvious success stories:
Next, run by cerebral chief executive
Lord Simon Wolfson throughout the
period; and JD Sports, which rode the
athleisure wave. It too was run by one
individual — Peter Cowgill — for
almost all that time.
There are a few surprises. Asos was
more famous in 2003 for selling
celebrity kitsch like Robbie
Williams’s underpants or the chairs
from the Big Brother house than Gen Z
fashion. But if you’d bought the penny
I
straight out of the realms of fantasy.
t is much easier to stumble over the
corpses of fallen titans. Take
Matalan, a stock market darling in
the early 2000s. Last week it was
recapitalised in a deal that
resulted in John Hargreaves losing
control of the business he founded in
the 1980s.
Fashion retailer French Connection
— remember fcuk? — was once all the
rage. It was taken private in 2021 for
just £29mn. Superdry, worth over
£1bn in the relatively recent past, is
now worth £125mn. A takeover last
year probably saved Ted Baker from a
similar trajectory.
And there was Debenhams, the
plaything of private equity. It
collapsed in late 2020, around the
same time as Sir Philip Green’s
Arcadia empire.
Why have so many retailers been
such bad investments?
incomes and access to credit
increased, but the pursuit of growth
at home and empire building
overseas led to bouts of over-
investment, first in store estates and
now arguably in ecommerce.
If big strategic errors or the
occasional operational snafu could be
cushioned by ample profit margins,
they might not have mattered so
much. But they cannot. Margins in
retail were never fat and have got
thinner. Supermarkets typically have
operating margins of between 3 and 5
per cent — far less than the Unilevers
and Procter and Gambles that
dominate Smith’s flagship fund.
Fashion does a bit better, with a
well-run retailer such as Next or
Primark creeping into double digits.
Market leadership does not
necessarily enhance profitability.
Currys, which dominates the UK
electricals market, aims to inch back
up to 3 per cent by 2025. Nor does

‘
retailers that have outperformed the
index over a long period, let alone the
kind of “cash compounders” that
value investors like Smith seek out.
Tesco’s market value today is not
much different from what it was
when some of Smith’s investors were
urging him to buy the “bargain” stock
nine years ago. Over 20 years it has
returned less than half what the All-
Margins in retail Share index has (including
were never fat and dividends). Sainsbury‘s performance
has been almost identical.
have got thinner. It is the same across other parts of
Supermarkets the industry. Names that are part of
the fabric of Britain’s high streets and
typically have retail parks have been deeply
margins of 3 to uninspiring investments.
B&Q owner Kingfisher — whose
5 per cent total returns lag behind the index by
stock then you’d have made over 150
The number of retail barons who
FT montage/Getty Images
scale. Mighty Amazon typically
makes between 2.5 and 4 per cent in
its North American retail operations.
The meteoric rises and stunning
collapses of companies, the colourful
characters and the constant capacity
to surprise were all things that made
the sector hugely entertaining to
write about. But as an investor, they
are the sorts of things that would keep
me awake at night.
This is a sector where consumers,
not shareholders, have profited the
most. Retail does produce some
investment winners, but not many —
and they are often not the companies
you would expect.
The author is the former FT retail
correspondent

READERS WRITE
Employers confronted over
missing pension contributions
The people who own
everything want us working
into our seventies for peanuts.
That’s why the pensions
lifetime allowance is frozen at
the same time as inflation is
running over 10 per cent.
They don’t want most
still deduct contributions
from employees’ salaries
sounds like fraud to me . . .
— Mr Coletti, via FT.com
Pension contributions are
bills a business needs to pay,
if it can’t afford to then it’s
failed and should be
restructured or wound up.
are still in the FTSE 250.
I guess they have been
squeezed into the Numis
index because a lot of the
megacaps (oil, miners) have
increased a lot, rather than the
amount they have fallen
themselves.
Spirent, for example is about
place 185 in the All-Share, or
portfolio may have reduced
your inheritance tax liability
— just not in the way you
envisaged. — wasabi whizz,
via FT.com
There is huge opportunity
in this gang. Bad news means
low prices, which leads to
higher returns.
just beginning. There is no
point trying to “save the
planet” by creating yet more
packaged, heavily marketed
long-life foods and drinks
which lead to increased
chronic disease. — Mod
Magus, via FT.com
Hargreaves Lansdown
voting agencies. — DavidP27,
via FT.com
It’s strange that I haven’t
received an email or
communication from
Hargreaves Lansdown on this.
You’d think it would want to
publicise this to its clients. —
Shrimp90, via FT.com

people to have the funds to
finance a comfortable
retirement. They want us to
sweat! — RonaldoMcDonaldo,
via FT.com
Companies that don’t pay
pension contributions, but
You can’t just ignore
obligations to make your
business profitable. —
Matthew C, via FT.com
Time to buy UK small-caps?
A lot of the companies
listed in Claer Barrett’s column
85th in the 250.
There’s a big difference
between the Numis and FT
indices in what constitutes a
“small-cap”. — ColdFeet, via
FT.com
Holding Aim stocks in your
Dividend recovery will be a
useful add on. — ByteTree, via
FT.com
An investment in self-denial
this Veganuary
Beware the ultra-
processed food backlash that’s
Y
launches digital voting
service You can comment on
About time too. Individual FT Money articles
shareholders are much more via email at
likely to hold boards to money@ft.com or on Twitter
account than cosy relationship at @ftmoney. Comments may
Institutions mostly hiding be edited for length and
behind the skirts of proxy clarity.
FINANCIAL TIMES Saturday 28 January 2023 Money | 5

ANALYSIS

How to research your next investment

ADVENTUROUS dozens of managers, alongside
excellent articles on what is
INVESTOR
happening in listed funds.
The independent website
David QuotedData.com also has a
Stevenson great screener, plus loads of
mine, which is suitably adven-
turous (and free).
The pricing on these news-
letters is fairly competitive
(most are around £5 to £10 a
month) and the choice is mas-
If the world of dividend
investing is your thing there’s
the Hindesight Letters, while
Liberum strategist Joachim
Klement offers a free catch-up
on the latest economic and
I h ave o n e l a s t h i g h ly
recommended website.
Theideafarm.com is set up by
US adviser Meb Faber, which
pulls together latest research
from Wall Street and beyond.
treasure trove of stock market
data, including his closely
watched stock market funda-
mentals data sets. That is also
invaluable and free. Happy
reading!

I
f you don’t work for an
investment business, the
most challenging aspect of
investing is accessing the
right information. The
good news is there are many
online resources, many of
them free, to provide you with
great data and, even better,
actionable ideas.
Let’s start with the fast-
growing area of index-tracking
exchange traded funds
(ETFs). In my view the best
source of information is a Ger-
man website called just-
etf.com. If you go to its
homepage and tap “ETF
screener”, this allows you to
search funds according to dif-
ferent criteria.
Trackinsight.com also has a
cool ETF screener, but with an
additional feature: you can see
There are many online
resources, many free, to
provide you with great
data and actionable ideas
the tracking error of a fund.
Tracking error is the differ-
ence between the fund’s return
and the return from the index
— and if it’s positive it means
you have made more from
your fund than the index.
Morningstar’s screener —
which extends to unit trusts —
gives you more choice about
the exact investment areas you
want to focus on — say, US divi-
dend-focused equities.
In the land of investment
trusts — actively managed
listed funds — I recommend
the screener offered by the
industry association, the AIC
at theaic.co.uk. This allows you
to search by sector, charges,
yield, market cap, gearing and,
crucially, for me, discount.
One last website worth dig-
ging into for investment trusts
is Doceo.tv (a company in
which I have invested). It
provides video updates from
content — the screener is in its sive. For macro market stuff investment research. com. For It’s free, world class and every
data section, where you can and stock analysis I’d recom- a broader take on macroeco- week features an absolute David Stevenson is an active
choose the subgroup of funds mend Stephen Clapham, while nomics, geopolitics and mar- gem. It is almost as good as the private investor. Email:
you want to research. Much of if you are into the energy sec- kets, one of the best is Bloomb- famed Ed Yardeni Research adventurous@ft.com. Twitter:
the written content is useful tor Doomberg is good reading. erg columnist Noah Smith. website which features a @advinvestor
but is paid for or sponsored,
but it’s still useful for context
and background detail. I also
like the fund and company
research reports put out by a
rival firm called Edison-
Group.com, which works on a
sponsorship or paid-for
model. Its reports are compre-
hensive and useful and extend
way beyond funds.
What about digging out data
on individual companies and
stocks? Sharepad and Stocko-
pedia, which both charge, pro-
vide a huge volume of data
from screeners to portfolio
management (I write some
content for Sharepad).
The key selling point for
both services is your ability to
take a huge amount of funda-
mental data (say dividend
yield or price-to-earnings
ratio), crunch it down via a
screen and end up with a
shortlist of stocks to research.
A low-cost alternative worth
exploring is AuroraDIYinvest-
ing, a European-based plat-
form that lets you screen glo-
bal stocks and funds and
gauges the risk of your portfo-
lio. It costs $70 a year, much
cheaper than its better-known
peers.
That leads me to the chal-
lenge of where to find good
investing ideas. Nothing beats
the US website SeekingAlpha,
where analysts and stockpick-
ers ply their trade.
The newsletter platform
Substack has also moved into
investing with a score of news-
letters and blogs — including
Useful newsletters
Adventurous Investor:
davidstevenson.substack.
com
Stephen Clapham:
behindthebalancesheet.
substack.com
Joachim Klement:
klementoninvesting.
substack.com
Doomberg
doomberg.substack.com
Noah Smith:
noahpinion.substack.com
Hindesight Letters:
hindesight.substack.com
6 | Money FINANCIAL TIMES Saturday 28 January 2023

COVER STORY

BUY-TO-LET
With landlords facing high mortgage rate costs,
softening house prices and looming legislation,
James Pickford looks at the rental sector outlook

R
ichard Klin is fed up with
the buy-to-let business.
The 43-year-old entrepre-
neur and investor is no
accidental landlord: he
Is this the start
of the great
began buying homes for rent over two
decades ago as a student and amassed
a portfolio of 200 properties across
London, Liverpool and Devon.
Based in London, he owns most of
these homes through a limited com-
pany, but a number are held in his

buy-to-let
own name. The burden of tax and reg-
ulatory compliance on individually-
owned properties has made him
determined to put up For Sale signs.
“Over the coming years I intend to
sell all the properties I own in my own
name,” he says. “I’ll gradually move

my capital to other sectors. Regula-
tion and tax changes have fundamen-
tally changed the economics of
investing in the sector. I know many
other landlords doing the same.”
There are many reasons why land-
lords are choosing to scale down their
activities in the private rented sector,
ranging from higher taxes and red
tape to costlier mortgages and a
house price slowdown. As more legis-
lation looms, a further toughening of
the rules and higher implied costs
appear inevitable. Analysis of HM
Revenue & Customs data for FT
Money suggests the pace of buy-to-let
sales has picked up over the past year.
Others believe the current adver-
sity will create opportunities. They
contend the nimble investor will be
able to pick up bargains from over-
stretched, frustrated landlords; that
careful selection of location and prop-
erties will bring sustainable profits;
that rental demand and rent levels
look strong; and stability will return
to interest rates and house prices over
the next two to three years.
“The reality is there’s only a certain
number of property investors who
have the funds available and are will-
ing to invest. That makes my life eas-
ier,” says one London-based landlord
looking to expand in the north of Eng-
land. “You know there’s going to be
more deals out there.”
As the cost of living crisis bites and
workforces look vulnerable to cuts,
however, the sustainability of higher
rents has come into question — as well
as the willingness of landlords to take
on the risks and administrative bur-
dens. Speaking to investors, lenders
and housing experts, FT Money
explores the uncertain outlook for
Britain’s buy-to-let sector.
The case against
In the three months to the end of
November 2022, the estimated
number of buy-to-let or second
sell-off?
homes sold hit a record 47,000, up
21 per cent on the same period in
2021, according to estate agent
Savills, which analysed capital gains
tax (CGT) receipts from HMRC.
In the five years to 2013-14, there
were an average 61,100 property
sales a year incurring CGT. That dou-
bled to 123,600 a year in the five years
to 2021-22 — and peaked at 141,000 in
2021-22, the data show.
Lucian Cook, residential research
director at Savills, points to the “dou-
ble whammy” of higher mortgage
rates and the end of mortgage interest
relief in 2020, as well as expected
Richard Klin: ‘I intend to sell the
properties I own in my own name’
government rule changes on energy
efficiency and rental rules. In addi-
tion, many landlords who have been
active since buy-to-let took off in the
early 2000s are nearing or in retire-
ment and looking to liquidate assets.
“It’s a reflection of the increased
financial pressures on landlords,”
Cook says. “You’ll be left with a core
of committed landlords who run it as
a professional business. But a lot of
people for whom the investment has
become more marginal will be taking
a second look at it.”
Howard Davis, founder of Bristol’s
Howard Independent Estate Agents,
says many long-term landlords in the
city are looking to sell. As he speaks to
the FT, he has on his desk three valua-
tion requests from landlords. They
are “squeezed from all sides,” he says.
“It’s almost an everyday conversation
for me at the moment.”
Those who increased their mort-
gage debt face higher interest rates on
fixed rate loans, despite them easing
back in recent weeks. The average
rate on a five-year buy-to-let fix
across all loan-to-value ratios was
3.16 per cent in February 2022, says
finance site Moneyfacts. Today it
stands at 6.12 per cent, down slightly
from 6.72 per cent in November.
Rachel Springall, a financial expert
at Moneyfacts, says there are signs of
a recovery in the number of deals
available to landlords. However, she
adds: “Both the average two- and five-
year fixed buy-to-let rates have come
down in recent months, but both
stand above 6 per cent.”
Lenders restrict the debt buy-to-let
borrowers can take out as a propor-
tion of the home’s value, typically to
75 per cent, and insist on a minimum
headroom between expected rents
and interest payments of 145 per
cent. Most landlords take out inter-
est-only loans, which amplify the
effect of mortgage rate changes on
monthly payments.
Simon Gammon, managing part-
ner of mortgage broker Knight Frank
Finance, says the “full shock” of the
mortgage rise has yet to hit landlords,
but will intensify this year as more
fixed rate terms come to an end. He
says he is seeing more landlords fac-
ing a restricted choice when refinanc-
ing, because rental income — even
with rent rises — no longer meets the
lender’s required interest coverage.
“The only way they could make it
work would be to significantly reduce
the loan or put the rent up. People are
increasing rent, but not enough to
cover the mortgage as it is.”
Calculations by Aneisha Beveridge,
research director at estate agent
Hamptons International, show how
an average landlord’s profit dwindles
when they remortgage. The research
takes the example of a landlord who
bought a £200,000 buy-to-let in Jan-
uary 2021, with a 75 per cent loan-to-
value mortgage fixed for two years
and running costs (excluding mort-
gage payments) of 31 per cent of their
rental income.
At an average yield in England and
Wales of 6 per cent, the average land-
lord — owning in their own name and
‘The average higher-rate
taxpaying landlord will now
need to yield 7 per cent to turn
a profit at today’s rates’
paying the higher rate of income tax
— would be likely to see their mort-
gage payments rise by 117 per cent
when they refinance — turning a
£2,500 annual profit into a £365 loss.
“The average higher-rate taxpay-
ing landlord will now need to yield 7
per cent or more to turn a profit at
today’s rates, compared with 3 per
cent in 2021 when interest rates were
lower,” says Beveridge. “So it’s likely
they will be forced to sell or inject
additional equity.”
Opportunity knocks
Many property investors believe such
prognostications are unnecessarily
doom-laden, pointing to fierce
FINAN
FIN ANCIA
CIAL
L TIM
TIMES
ES Sat
Saturd
urday
ay 28 Jan
Januar
uaryy 2023
2023
demand for rental housing. Novem-
ber figures from property website
Zoopla found rental inquiry levels at
lettings agencie s running at 46 p er
cent above the five- e-yyear average.
Davis says a two bedroom flat in
Bristol’s Clifton area rents for £1,200
a month. Three years ago it would
have fetched £950. Yet a shortage of
stock means intense demand. “We
could rent it 100 times over.”
According to property site Zoopla,
UK rents rose 12 per cent in the year
to October. Klin said rents had held
up well in his Liverpool and Devon
pro
rop perties, and had come ro roaaring
back in central London after implod-
ing during the pandemic. “Liverpool
and Devon rents continue to increase
roughly in line with inflation. London
rents are outperforming inflation by
some margin, often in ex exccess of 20
per cent as competing landlords have
s o l d u p o r a t t h e ve r y l e a s t n o t
invested in new supply.”
Some question the extent to which
landlords will face widespread refi-
nancing problems. Richard Rown-
tree, managing director of mortgages
at buy-to-let lender Paragon, says:
“We have seen scaremongering with
regards to pay aymment sho ck, but the
reality is different . . . The underly-
ing fundamentals in terms of supply
and demand are still very strong.”
He disputes warnings that all
COVER STORY
Andy Carter
landlo
land lord
rdss wi
will
ll fa
face
ce a tr
trip
ipli
ling
ng of th
thei
eirr g ove r n m e n t b r i n g s i n n e w e n e r gy
interest burden when they refinance. performance rules. Originally sched-
“We’re seeing landlords coming off uled for 2025 for new tenancies, but
five-year deals that were around 3.5 still to be confirmed, these could cost
per cent, and they can secure rates at landlords up to £10,000 to rectify less
close to, or even below, 5 per cent.” efficient homes. That’s where Vellam
sees his chance: “I’ll then buy the dip
‘Buy the dip’ when there is more supply.”
As a long-term inv nveestor, he sees
One optimistic landlord is Ollie Vel- himself holding his Liverpool home —
lam, a London financial services pro- and
an d mo
morre to cocome
me — fo forr per
erha
hapsps 30
fessional, who owns two buy-to-lets
in Abbey Wood, south-east London,
years, to build what he describes as “a
decent additional p peension oon n ttoop ooff
and in Liverpool. The 33-year-old what I’ll get from my regular employ-
expects landlords to sell up after the ment”. But he won’t look for more
homes in London, where high prices
Buy-to-let mortgages mean lower yields. “My target areas
are going to be Liverpool, Manches-
Total of UK products offered (’000)
ter, Leeds, Sheffield. You just get so
2.5 much more for your money.”
Zoopla’s data underlining rental
demand also contain less welcome
2.0 news for landlords hoping to offset
their higher mortgage costs with
steeper rents. Rents are less afforda-
1.5 ble for single tenants than at any time
in th
thee pa
past
st 10 yeaears rs — 35 per ce centnt of
the average income of a single earner.
1.0 The London-based landlord look-
ing to buy in northern England, who
asked not to be named, acknowledges
0.5 the perils of taking on mortgage risk
Aug 2022 Jan at a time of uncertainty. But he adds:
2023 “You wouldn’t be in this property
Source: Moneyfacts
investment game if you weren’t open
to at least some risk, would you?”
Buy-to-let average
mortgage rates
Fixed rates, all LTVs (%)
7 50
6 40
5 30
5-year
4 0.2
3
2-year
2 2020 21
2021 22 23
Source: Moneyfacts
Tax benefits Advantages of
corporate vs individual ownership
Ollie Ve
V llam, who works in the City of
London, is well placed to judge the
merits of corporate versus individual
ownership.
He owns a buy-to-let property in
Abbey Wood, south-east London,
with a relative — both as individual
owners — and a Liverpool one
through a limited company. y And he
believes only corporate ownership —
at least for mortgaged owners — has a
bright future.
Until 2017,
7 landlords were able to
offset the costs of mortgage
borrowing against their rental income
when calculating their taxable profit,t if
they held a property in their own
name. But the relief was withdrawn
over the four years to 2020.
This has scythed into returns for
many,y particularly higher-rate
taxpayers.
Those owning in a limited
company can still gain relief on
interest payments, which explains
the structure’s growing popularity
Multiple occupation Landlords’
opportunity for higher yields
Houses in multiple occupation
(HMOs) — an official definition given
to properties shared between
households with common areas such
as a kitchen — is one option for
landlords looking to increase their
rental yields.
One landlord-investor,r who asked
not to be named, is looking to add a
student HMO in north-west England
to his portfolio over the next 12
months. “I could go out and buy four
or five single homes. But for the
money, y the cash flow would be
nowhere near as healthy as with an
HMO.”
It is fair to say that HMOs typically
generate higher yields, particularly
on a gross basis, says Aneisha
Beveridge, research director at agent
Hamptons International. But they also
Money | 7
Capital gains tax disposals
Sales in the Corresponding
past three receipts
months (’000) (£mn)
0.6
0.5
0.4
0.3
20
10 0.1
0 0
22
Data isolates CGT receipts on residential
property sales
Source: Savills
for landlords. But switching
ownership of an existing home into a
limited company will usually incur a
tax charge, including capital gains on
the transfer.r
“I don’t think there’s much scope
to invest on an individual basis,” he
says. “There’s only going to be profits
to be made through a limited
company. y”
Buy-to-let experts believe the loss
of the relief is leading to more
professional landlords running
portfolios as their main source of
income.
Richard Rowntree, managing
director of mortgage at lender
Paragon, says the few examples of
selling seen recently have been by
“amateur landlords”, who typically own
in their own name.
“Smaller-scale landlords oftf en get
into buy-to-let accidentally and, in any
event,t they have been gradually
exiting the market in recent years — a
trend that may well continue.”
come with expectations that
landlords will foot the bill for lots of
running costs.
“Given that most of these landlords
will pay for bills such as heating,
electricity and council tax, I suspect
their net yield is being squeezed quite
tight,t” she says.
Landlord Richard Klin has invested
in HMOs for 20 years and says there is
a clear yield benefit. “But there are
increased costs of compliance,
maintenance and wear and tear,r and
some councils are restricting the
number of new HMOs allowed, for
example in student areas . . .
“ lot of passive landlords will
“A
probably continue to prefer more
standard rental stock while the more
ambitious and active will be driven
to HMOs.”
8 | Money
Lex populi
Financial commentary and investment insight
Tullow Oil: the end of an exploration era
T
hose who built the oil
industry had to be good
at two things: finding the
black stuff and getting it
out of the ground.
BP, Shell and ExxonMobil are a few
of the integrated oil majors that
pioneered and dominate the industry
today. As well as doing the
production, they refine, transport,
sell and trade oil, natural gas and
their products.
Climate change and the need to
decarbonise is changing that. Oil
majors are investing in renewables
and diversifying from fossil fuels.
But the transition is proving painful
for smaller groups that specialise in
finding and developing new resources
— known as exploration and
production companies. London-
listed Tullow Oil, Capricorn and
Harbour Energy are some of the E&Ps
having a particularly tough time.
Tullow’s story — from £15bn
market darling to £550mn small-cap
stock — illustrates the changes the
sector has undergone. An update this
week highlighted its focus on
repairing holes in its overleveraged
balance sheet rather than digging
new ones in the ground for oil.
Exploration success used to be
feted by the market because it
gave canny companies access to
cheap oil and gas that they could
either develop or sell on to the
majors at vast profits.
Tullow made knockout discoveries
in the 2000s in Ghana and Uganda.
But then things turned sour after a
number of unsuccessful attempts.
That left Tullow struggling to pay
back a huge debt load — $1.9bn net of
cash last year — with little to bet on
the exploration roulette.
Net zero put the final nail in
Tullow’s exploration-led strategy.
As the International Energy Agency
noted, a 1.5C trajectory requires no
new investment in oil and gas. And
even those who believe the world will
transition more slowly have been
unwilling to fund long-term bets,
amid fears that discovered barrels
will stay underground.
Share prices for Tullow and other
E&Ps have grown less sensitive to
rising oil prices over the past decade.
Relatively small oil and gas finds
simply attract very little attention
from the market.
As a result, oil and gas majors have
concentrated their exploration
capital expenditure on really big new
plays — such as TotalEnergies’ and
Shell’s finds in offshore Namibia —
Tumbling Tullow Changing times for the oil producer
UK exploration and production companies
have decoupled from oil prices
Tullow Oil share price*
UK oil & gas exploration
& production index*
120
100
80
60
40
20
0 0
2013 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23
Source: Refinitiv
and rerouting most of their gushing
cash flows to shareholders as
dividends and buybacks.
European oil majors will return 11
per cent of their worth to
shareholders in cash this year, thinks
Goldman Sachs.
Instead of exploration, Tullow will
focus on getting as much cash out of
its working wells as efficiently as
possible. Hopes of further big finds
have been abandoned. Tullow
forecasts its exploration capex at just
$30mn in 2023 or less than a tenth of
its total investment this year.
Once debts have been reduced
Tullow hopes to start returning cash
Tullow says it will focus on its
legacy assets
INSIGHT
Tullow will reduce debts before paying
dividends in 2026
Brent crude oil $mn
$ per barrel
140
120
100
80
60
40
20
2019 20
* Rebased Source: Visible Alpha consensus estimates
to shareholders too. Growth will
come not from new wells, but by
becoming better at managing its
legacy assets — a useful skill in a
sector which the world needs to wind
down.
US CDs and T-bills take the
shine off cash
No US personal investment strategy
has transformed quite in the way
certificates of deposit (CDs) and
short-dated Treasury bonds have in
recent months.
For the past decade, CDs — which
banks offer to savers with a fixed
return for a defined period — have not
been a big part of private portfolios
because they paid such low rates. But
aggressive rate rises by the Federal
Reserve mean US banks are having to
fight harder for savers’ cash.
At Citigroup, customers can get a
4.15 per cent annual percentage yield
(APY) on a 12-month CD. Marcus,
Goldman Sachs’s consumer banking
business, offers CDs with a 4.4 per
cent APY. This compares to the start
of 2022 when average national CD
rates were less than 0.5 per cent.
Even JPMorgan — one of the
biggest beneficiaries of the surge in
new deposits during the pandemic —
has launched a three-month
certificate of deposit that offers a 4
per cent APY.
The biggest US bank by assets
warned this month that it might be
forced to pay more for deposits this
Twitter: @FTLex
3,000
Net Debt Payment of dividends
2,500
2,000
1,500
1,000
500
0 projects vulnerable to environmental
21 22 23 24 25 26
Estimates
FT graphic
year. Its outlook for $73bn in net
interest income in 2023 — what it
makes from loans less what it pays on
deposits — was still higher than the
$67bn recorded for 2022.
Private investors have also
crowded into auctions for newly
issued short-dated Treasuries, called
T-bills. In each of the Treasury
department’s four-week T-bill
auctions since November, individuals
consistently snapped up more than 2
per cent of the notes. That compares
with about 0.7 per cent at the start of
2022.
All of this may offer little
consolation when both inflation and
30-year mortgage rates are running
above 6 per cent. But with stocks still
subject to earnings shocks and bond
prices expected to remain under
pressure from further Fed rate rises,
investors need to be patient. A CD
with a 4 per cent return is a sensible,
safe place to park your cash while you
ponder whether the US equities bear
market is really over.
Lex Populi is an FT Money column from
Lex, the FT’s daily commentary service
on global capital. Lex Populi aims to
offer fresh insights to seasoned private
investors while demystifying financial
analysis for newcomers.
Lexfeedback@ft.com
Lex online
For notes on today’s
stories go to FT.com/lex
FINANCIAL TIMES Saturday 28 January 2023
EU banks face
the prospect
of tighter
climate change
risk rules
This article is from
Moral Money, an
FT newsletter.
FT.com/moral-
money
EU banks could be required to take
climate change risks into account
when calculating their capital reserve
ratios, under proposed rules approved
this week in the European
parliament’s economics committee.
The move, if implemented, would
increase regulatory pressure on banks
including BNP, Deutsche Bank and
UniCredit, to reduce lending to
companies investing in fossil fuels and
other activities linked to climate
change — or face increased balance
sheet costs.
While the move must still be
approved by member states and the
EU commission, it comes amid other
actions in the EU to make financing
risks less attractive: including the
first climate stress tests for the
biggest banks by the European
Central Bank last year, which warned
of fines for banks failing to address
climate risk.
Global regulators, including the US
Federal Reserve, are considering how
far climate change could cause serious
liquidity and credit risk, and how soon
to redraw prudential rule books to
account for this.
If the most polluting energy sources
become stranded assets due to
climate regulation or risk, banks with
the highest exposure will have to be
bailed out by governments, Thierry
Philipponnat, chief economist at the
non-profit group Finance Watch said.
Regulators should act now to
counter this risk, he argued. “Banks
who choose to take this risk [of
financing new oil and gas] should
finance loans from their own funds,”
Philipponnat said. “We feel profoundly
that prudential regulation should be
used as a risk management tool, and
that the risks of fossil fuels to financial
stability are evident.”
Tuesday’s compromise text, which
the FT has seen extracts of, called on
the European Banking Authority, the
EU regulator, to assess by the end of
next year whether and how capital
reserve requirements should take
climate risk into account.
This gives regulators time to
prepare. The parliament threw out a
proposal from leftwing lawmakers that
loans for new oil, gas and coal should
be immediately subject to a
prohibitively high “one-to-one”
capital reserves ratio, under which
banks should hold one euro in
reserves for every euro loaned.
Kenza Bryan
FINANCIAL TIMES Saturday 28 January 2023 Money | 9

OPINION

Should I
I
t’s been the worst European
season opening since 2011. Little
snow, higher than usual
sell my temperatures resulting in the
closure of resorts at lower
altitude. If you’re thinking of buying
alpine ski an apartment or a chalet in the Alps,
it’s a daft investment. Right? And if
writing, it’s probably risen another 20
per cent in value.
Some things have changed for the
better. I have lost three stone. My new
size helps considerably when
squeezing into an airline seat. Even a
middle one.
But what’s changed for the worse is
and there for an essential ski and
tasty mountain lunch.
Some buyers want to buy a
property to rent out. But many want
it for their sole use. Personally, I don’t
want people rifling through my
drawers, soiling my carpet or
snaffling chocolate that’s left in
at Pic Blanc at over 3,360 metres
above sea level. If there’s no snow
here, there’s unlikely to be any
anywhere else. The restaurants are
varied and affordable. The outdoor
swimming pool is amazing. There’s a
wide range of winter and summer
sports and festivals. Oh and the shops

apartment? you already own one is it time to sell?

So I’ve taken a trip to my French bolt-
hole to make a decision.
First things first, the sun is out and
some practical fact finding is
required. “Don’t bee layzee,” my ski
instructor barked. My approach to
skiing has lazy written all over it, but I
still love it. I ski fast as it involves
fewer turns.
I chose an apartment rather than a
the availability of cash. Not because I
am earning less, but the government
seems happy to take more, mortgage
rates have doubled and energy prices
have tripled.
However, this is my alpine home.
I’ve owned my apartment for 23
years. Laziness keeps me here. I can’t
be bothered to sell because of the
huge amounts of paperwork
involved. And I’d have to clear the
position for my next visit. Perhaps
that’s where the market bifurcates?
Head of Savills Ski (what a job!),
Jeremy Rollason, concludes that at
the top end of the market, where cash
is generally more prevalent and
suitable properties rare, price
increases are likely to continue into
2023. The report also sees a
“flattening of the curve” in lower- to
middle-priced sectors. Not because of
have plenty more stuff I don’t need,
available to buy.
Surely after 40-plus years of
coming back to the same resort, I’m
bored with the place? I’m fortunate
enough to have been to all the big
resorts and some of the smaller ones
too. And while I like to visit, those
trips only reinforce that I like
returning to the same place.
Laziness, again? I know which runs

chalet: it’s more convenient to lock up
and leave. I don’t let it out, that’s a
hassle. There’s no de-skiing, it’s ski
out and ski in. And there’s a car park,
handy for the rental car. I don’t want
to take a bus up the mountain or use
my legs to fetch the shopping.
Perhaps laziness underlines our
planet’s problems too?
James Max Will people stop using their cars?
Curtail travel for holidays? Refuse to
Rich People’s buy unseasonal food in supermarkets
that’s wrapped in more plastic than
Problems there are contents? Or resist any of
the other things that literally fuel
climate change?
place of years of accumulated stuff.
Even the prospect of tidying a
cupboard sends me into a tailspin.
Climate concern doesn’t tally with
the findings of Knight Frank’s Ski
Property Report 2023. Not only have
markets been resilient, but overall
their price index has increased by 5.8
per cent in the year to June 2022 with
a range of resorts showing stronger
growth. Is this really the end of a
boom?
With increased opportunities for
hybrid working, it really is possible to
relocate to an alpine retreat while
continuing to work. I’m here now, for
M
climate change, but the cost of debt.
any reports focus on
international resorts, such
as St Moritz (St High Glitz)
in Switzerland or Val
d’Isère (Val de Sloane Square) in
France. But I’m not a fan of such
places, or Courchevel. The influx of
Russian money distorted the market.
I prefer a domestically focused resort
with altitude, not attitude.
This is why my family and
subsequently I settled on the French
resort of Alpe d’Huez, one of the
country’s oldest and highest. The
I like. I understand the mountains to
set an itinerary that ends up at the
perfect spot for lunch, while picking
up the best snow for an epic ski. Yes,
it’s fun rocking up to a new resort,
staying in a fancy hotel and so on. But
I’m getting too old for that. I want
familiarity.
If the warnings are right, there will
be no mountain glaciers in Europe by
2070. I’ll be 100 by then and probably
won’t want to ski. But if I do make it
that long, I’ll be relying on that
familiarity. As I put the finishing
touches to this piece, I’m looking out
of the window at an uninterrupted

‘
Probably not. If we continue to
abuse our planet, will global
temperatures rise further, making
snow less abundant? I’m not a
scientist or meteorologist, but if the
beginning of this European season
was anything to go by, it could be the
future.
Four years ago in this column I
questioned whether I should sell my
The influx of alpine investment. Covid hadn’t
Russian money happened and the cost of living crisis
was a figment of no one’s imagination.
distorted the My concerns centred around running
market. I prefer costs and my increasing girth causing
issues squeezing into a seat on a low-
a resort cost airline. Despite the costs, I
with altitude, concluded that my apartment in the
French Alps was a worthwhile cash
not attitude outlay and a decent investment. Since
example. Taking a few hours off here
town is at 1,800 metres and its peak is
FT montage/Getty Images
range of mountains. They’re covered
in snow. The sun is shining but it’s -1C
degree outside.
And the snow is squeaky under ski
at lower levels and crisp and powdery
at altitude. In fact, the conditions are
so good, I am going to cast off my
laziness and wake up early to get the
first lift up in the morning.
Perhaps I won’t experience such
amazing conditions in the future.
However, I like to take a risk and bet
there will be more good years of snow
and sun ahead. As long as others
agree, it should continue to be a great
investment.
James Max is a property expert, TV and
radio presenter. The views expressed are
personal. Twitter @thejamesmax

Your Questions Will my live-in partner have rights to my home?

YOUR QUESTIONS
Lucy
Warwick-
Ching
I own a house with a mortgage
and my girlfriend wants to
move in with me. We both work
and have no children. Having
been burnt financially by
divorce, I need to know I am
Ursula Danagher, a partner
and head of the London family
team at RWK Goodman, says
your girlfriend does not have
an automatic right to a share of
your property, if you are not
married or in a civil partner-
ship. Merely living together in
a “common law” partnership
will not give her protection.
It is estimated that one in
five families live together as
cohabitees. Yet in England and
Wales there is still no law that
gives cohabitees the same pro-
couples, is still far from being
adopted by the government.
The law in Scotland is slightly
different, with some financial
rights for cohabitants.
While this is good news for
you, matters could become
complicated if your girlfriend
contributes to your mortgage
payments or increases the
value of the property by way of
substantial building works
such as a loft conversion or an
extension. In these circum-
stances, she could make a
girlfriend draw up a cohabita-
tion agreement, also known as
a living together agreement
with the assistance of a solici-
tor. Both parties should secure
independent expert advice.
This agreement would for-
malise aspects of your rela-
tionship to afford you both
better legal protections. The
agreement may be used to
specify how the property is
owned. It can also cover how
income contributions should
be treated and determine what
agreement is reviewed if cir-
cumstances change, for exam-
ple if you move to a new house
or on the birth of a child. You
may also wish to vary the doc-
ument by agreement.
In the event of separation,
an agreement considered to be
out of date may not be relied
upon.
It’s usual for these agree-
ments to be reviewed every
few years, so it remains rele-
vant and current. In the event
of a relationship breakdown,
determine what should hap-
pen in the event of your death.
The opinions in this column are
intended for general information
purposes only and should not be
used as a substitute for profes-
sional advice. The Financial
Times Ltd and the authors are
not responsible for any direct or
indirect result arising from any
reliance placed on replies, includ-
ing any loss, and exclude liability
to the full extent.

protected if the relationship
fails. How do I cover myself
legally so I do not lose the house
or other assets? What rights
will she have?
tective rights as couples who
are married or in civil partner-
ships. The cohabitation rights
bill, which seeks to protect the
rights of unmarried same sex
claim for a proportion of your
house should your relation-
ship fail to go the distance.
To protect yourself, I would
recommend that you and your
the financial arrangements
will be. The agreement can be
very flexible and include as
much detail as you both wish.
It is advisable that the
Y
you can still protect your
assets and manage your Find answers to more
financial affairs. Finally, you reader questions at
should also consider having a FT.com/your-questions
will prepared to specifically
10 | Money FINA
INANCI
NCIAL
AL TIM
TIMES
ES Sat
Saturd
urday
ay 28 Jan
Januar
uaryy 202
20233

Highlights from this week’s issue

Travel & leisure
BUY
EasyJet (EZJ))
Stronger winter trading means
full-year profit should beat
expectations at the budget
airline
Ryanair’s daily flight numbers
last week were at 114 per cent of
pre-pandemic levels, but EasyJet
has been slower off the mark. Its
daily flight numbers last week
were only at 63 per cent of 2019
levels, according to Eurocontrol.
The airline has been unlucky
in that two of its main hubs —
London Gatwick and
Amsterdam — imposed capacity
restrictions last summer to cope
with the ramp up in activity.
Amsterdam’s limits are still in
place until April.
The airline’s trading update
for the final three months of
2022 shows clear progress.
Although it recorded another
headline loss of £133mn, this was
a £100mn improvement on the
Covid-disrupted perioda year
earlier. Passenger numbers grew
by 47 per cent on the year, and
revenue per seat was up by 36
per cent.
The average load factor (the
ratio of passengers to available
seats) rose by 10 per cent and
ticket yield grew by 21 per cent.
On top of this, the company
made more from add-ons —
airline ancillary revenue also
grew by 36 per cent, to £20.12
per seat.
EasyJet’s holidays arm (which
launched at the end of 2019 but
only really began operating in
earnest last year) generated a
£13mn profit, up from a loss of
£1mn a year earlier.
Demand from UK
holidaymakers is strong, with
60 per cent of the summer
holidays it had planned to sell
already booked. This was based
on the company increasing
customer numbers by 30 per
cent this year, but given the
response it has now lifted this
target to 50 per cent.
Michael Fahy
Personal care
SELL
Accrol (ACRL)
L)
A strategic review has
prioritised shareholder
returns, yet earnings remain in
negative territory
Accrol prides itself on being the
UK’s leading independent tissue
converter, as a producer of toilet
tissue, kitchen towel and
biodegradable wet wipes.
You would imagine that
market trends have been in its
favour, particularly as consumers
ditch named brands in favour of
value options. It’s true that
the top line has risen appreciably
since 2019, but a positive
transition from gross profits
through to net earnings has
proved elusive.
The group’s interim sales
surged through to the end of
October, but the gross margin —
at 18 per cent — is down by 6.7
percentage points year on year,
continuing the slide evident at
the group’s April year-end.
Accrol’s chief executive
Gareth Jenkins said the group
“successfully leveraged [its]
supply position with customers
to recover all additional costs
incurred in the period”. But there
were no apparent scale benefits
flowing through to net earnings.
To counter rising costs and
supply chain disruption, the
group has increased inventories
by 77 per cent since the 2021
half year. Net borrowing has also
swollen through the period.
The outcome of a strategic
review, undertaken in 2022 with
the support of Deloitte, was
published alongside the half-
year figures. It prioritises the
construction of a sustainable
paper mill and the return of cash
to shareholders through
dividends or share buybacks.
Unfortunately, these ambitions
seem at odds with the group’s
finances. The shares were
marked up on results day, but
the 23 per cent premium to net
asset value is difficult to justify.
Mark Robinson
Beverages
SELL
Fever-Tree
(FEVR)
The cost outlook for the drinks
company looks challenging
this year, which has hurt profit
forecasts
Fever-Tree shares were marked
down by 10 per cent after the
premium tonics and mixers
supplier undershot consensus
revenue growth forecasts and
warned about the “material”
impact of higher energy costs on
glass manufacturing.
Total revenues rose by 11 per
cent to £344mn in the year to
December 31 2022, below analyst
hopes of £357mn according to
FactSet. Sales contracted by 2
per cent in the group’s biggest
market, the UK, but rose by
double digits elsewhere. The
best showing — 23 per cent —
was in the US.
Chunky cost inflation
continues to cause difficulties for
the business. Management
expects “further double-digit
percentage increases” in key
costs this year and said that
volatile energy prices will add
£20mn to its glass costs in 2023
compared to pricing in the first
quarter of last year.
While Fever-Tree expects to
deliver adjusted cash profits in
line with expectations for 2022,
forecasts for this year suggest a
further softening of margins.
Management set out guidance
ranges of £390mn-£405mn for
revenue and £36mn-£42mn for
Ebitda for 2023.
RBC Capital Markets analysts
said this guidance “is very
disappointing given previous
comments about further
profitability improvement”.
They added that the update
“does not reassure” over
Fever-Tree’s profitability
trajectory.
We are not reassured. And the
valuation is at unjustifiably lofty
levels — the shares trade at 43
times forward earnings,
according to FactSet.
Christopher Akers

DIRECTORS’ DEALS Price Aggregate

Director Date (p) Value (£)
BUY
Digitalbox David Joseph (cfo) 13 Jan 23 8 44,000
DSW Capital James Dow (ce) 20 Jan 23 92 81,880
Induction Healthcare Christopher Samler (ch) 13 Jan 23 23 60,000
Journeo Russ Singleton (ce)** 16 Jan 23 105 105,000
N Brown Lord Alliance* 12-20 Jan 23 29 3,710,708
Ncondezi Energy Scott Fletcher 13-17 Jan 23 0.8 80,347
Primorus Investments Rupert Labrum (ch) 19 Jan 23 3 60,480
Seeing Machines Martin Ive (cfo)* 13 Jan 23 7 76,128
Yourgene Health Dr Bill Chang 13-17 Jan 23 0.4 59,304
SELL
Berkeley Richard Stearn (cfo) 16 Jan 23 4,472 614,932
Berkeley Paul Vallone 16 Jan 23 4,472 894,446
Berkeley Justin Tibaldi 16 Jan 23 4,472 894,446
Berkeley Karl Whiteman 16 Jan 23 4,472 670,835
Calnex Solutions Ger Kirk 16 Jan 23 193 96,325
Calnex Solutions Anand Ram 18 Jan 23 192 883,200
Focusrite Tim Carroll (ce) 16 Jan 23 774 116,050
Investec Mark Currie* 16-17 Jan 23 519† 933,935†
Sirius Real Estate Alistair Marks (cfo) 16 Jan 23 85 848,504
* Spouse/family/close associate ** Placing /open offer † Converted from ZAR
Source: Investors’ Chronicle

New data from the Office for National Statistics
showed that retail sales fell unexpectedly in
December, following a small contraction the month
before.
But the wife of N Brown’s biggest shareholder
seems to feel some optimism, having just bought
more than £3.7mn of shares in the online clothing
company. Lady Homa Alliance — who is married
to Lord Alliance, the Iranian-born entrepreneur
who chaired N Brown between 1968 and 2012 —
bought almost 13mn shares over seven days,
paying between 25.9p and 30p a share.
N Brown’s share price has rallied since the
retailer issued a profit warning in October but a
further trading update this month was also far
from glowing. The group’s management said
that quarterly revenue had fallen by 8 per cent
year-on-year, in what it described as a “soft and
highly promotional market”. Jemma Slingo,
Investors’ Chronicle

Investors’ Chronicle is the
authoritative source of
share and fund tips and
comprehensive companies
coverage for the private
investor and has been
published since 1860.
For in-depth analysis and
independent commentary to
help you make money, y visit
investorschronicle.co.uk Yo
Y u’ll
have access to:
3 In-depth company analysis
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with latest news and ideas
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FINANCIAL TIMES Saturday 28 January 2023 Money | 11

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MANAGED FUNDS SERVICE

Guide to data
The fund prices quoted on these pages are supplied by change, if shown, is the change on the previously quoted units in a unit trust are sold by investors. latest available before publication and may not be the
the operator of the relevant fund. figure (not all funds update prices daily). Those Single price: Based on a mid-market valuation of the current dealing levels because of an intervening portfolio
Details of funds published on these pages, including designated $ with no prefix refer to US dollars. Yield underlying investments. The buying and selling price for revaluation or a switch to a forward pricing basis.
prices, are for the purpose of information only and should percentage figures (in Tuesday to Saturday papers) allow shares of an OEIC and units of a single priced unit trust The managers/operators must deal at a forward price
only be used as a guide. The Financial Times Limited for buying expenses. Prices of certain older insurance are the same. on request, and may move to forward pricing at any time.
makes no representation as to their accuracy or linked plans might be subject to capital gains tax on sales. Exit Charges: The letter E denotes that an exit charge Forward pricing: The letter F denotes that that
completeness and they should not be relied upon when Guide to pricing of Authorised Investment Funds may be made when you sell units, contact the manager/ managers/operators deal at the price to be set at the next
making an investment decision. (compiled with the assistance of the IMA. The Investment operator for full details. valuation.
The sale of interests in the funds listed on these pages Management Association, 65 Kingsway, London WC2B Time: Some funds give information about the timing of Investors can be given no definite price in advance of
may, in certain jurisdictions, be restricted by law and the 6TD. Tel: +44 (0)20 7831 0898.) price quotes. The time shown alongside the fund the purchase or sale being carried out. The prices
funds will not necessarily be available to persons in all OEIC: Open-Ended Investment Company. Similar to a manager’s/operator’s name is the valuation point for their appearing in the newspaper are the most recent provided
jurisdictions in which the publication circulates. Persons unit trust but using a company rather than a trust unit trusts/OEICs, unless another time is indicated by the by the managers/operators.
in any doubt should take appropriate professional advice. structure. symbol alongside the individual unit trust/OEIC name. Scheme particulars, prospectus, key features and
Data collated by Morningstar. Telephone + 44 (0)20 Share Classes: Separate classes of share are denoted The symbols are as follows:  0001 to 1100 hours; ♦ reports: The most recent particulars and documents may
3194 1455. For other queries reader.enquiries@ft.com. by a letter or number after the name of the fund. 1101 to 1400 hours; ▲1401 to 1700 hours; # 1701 to be obtained free of charge from fund managers/
The fund prices published in this edition along with Different classes are issued to reflect a different currency, midnight. Daily dealing prices are set on the basis of the operators.
additional information are also available on the Financial charging structure or type of holder. valuation point, a short period of time may elapse before * Indicates funds which do not price on Fridays.
Times website, www.ft.com/funds. Buying price: Also called offer price. The price at which prices become available. Charges for this advertising service are based on the
The funds published on these pages are grouped units in a unit trust are bought by investors. Includes Historic pricing: The letter H denotes that the number of lines published and the classification of the fund.
together by fund management company. manager’s initial charge. managers/operators will normally deal on the price set at Please contact data@ft.com or call
Prices are in pence unless otherwise indicated. The Selling price: Also called bid price. The price at which the most recent valuation. The prices shown are the +44 (0)20 7873 3132 for further information.

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16 | Money
Investors
U
pon absorbing our
financial news in a
yoctosecond, what
should would most baffle a
highly evolved investor
from planet Zog? Certainly the taxing
not fear of companies. Why do it, the alien
would immediately ask? Doesn’t
corporate make sense.
Too right, green fella — the only
logical corporate tax rate is zero.
tax rates Wages and thus income tax receipts
would adjust upward. So too money
flowing into government coffers from
bigger dividends and capital gains.
People would spend more with
consumption taxes yielding higher
revenues. Myriad distortions and
inefficiencies vanish.
Good luck convincing us this year,
however. The UK government is
raising the tax rate in April from 19 to
25 per cent for companies with
annual profits of more than
£250,000. Over in the US, companies
are about to pay a new tax on
buybacks, while lawmakers have
signed off a minimum rate of 15 per
cent for large firms.
Stuart Kirk Should earthlings care? Sir James
Dyson certainly does. The maker of
Skin in the game space-age home appliances flew into
orbit over corporate taxes last week,
‘
fuming that businesses were
“targeted to pay ever higher tax bills”.
Advertising supremo Sir Martin
Sorrell said the next day that cuts
were needed.
Most company bosses tend to be
more terrestrial on the matter. Some
chief executives in Britain say they
are just happy for some stability
around corporate taxes, after four
I will cheer and different policy announcements in
invest in sectors the past 12 months.
One reason for a reluctance to
that minimise speak out is that companies are
what they pay in generally seen as fair game on taxes.
It looks better on television to target
corporation taxes the global headquarters of a faceless
without an iota mega-firm than a hard-up family
with bills to pay.
of guilt And therein lies the problem.
OPINION
Dyson was correct when he said
politicians seem to think “penalising
the private sector is a free win at the
ballot box”. Except it isn’t. Companies
are not faceless at all. Their staff have
faces. Their customers have faces. So
do employees of their suppliers.
And investors have faces too. What
politicians around the world fail to
understand is that companies do not
exist as such — they are nothing but a
series of trade-offs between four
groups of humans: staff, customers,
F
suppliers and investors.
Companies do not generate tax.
Only people can do that. So when
governments raise the burden on
firms, what happens? Either the
return to investors is reduced in the
form of lower dividends or capital
appreciation. That hurts the millions
of retirees and readers of this column.
A company could raise the prices
customers pay for its goods or
services. Or it pays less to suppliers —
merely shifting pain to employees,
investors and suppliers. Or wages can
be cut or employees laid off.
Not much fun. And yet it is popular
to hit companies with taxes.
Everyone should read a 2020
working paper from the National
Stuart Kirk’s holdings, Jan 28 2023
Vanguard FTSE 100 ETF
BlackRock Sterling Liquidity Fund
BlackRock World ex UK Equity index
iShares MSCI EM Asia ETF
Vanguard FTSE Japan ETF
Cash
Any trades by Stuart Kirk will not take place within 30 days of being discussed in this column
Bureau of Economic Research, which
estimates that almost one-third of
any rise falls on consumers via higher
prices, roughly the same “tax
incidence” suffered by investors.
Employees cop almost 40 per cent of
any increase.
Which is why our alien friend
wouldn’t understand why politicians
are raising corporate taxes while
expressing shock at the thousands of
job cuts being announced — from big
tech and retailers to Wall Street
banks. Don’t homo sapiens do irony?
or investors, meanwhile,
corporation taxes should also
hurt in theory. As I’ve
mentioned, equity and bond
holders shoulder some of the
burden, along with workers and
customers. In practice, however, a
higher rate is nothing to worry about.
For example, equity strategists at
BMO Capital Markets have looked at
the past five US tax increases. The
average return of the S&P 500 in the
calendar year of each rise was 13 per
cent, with no negative readings. On
the seven occasions corporate taxes
were lowered, the average return was
5 per cent.
Assets under
management (£)
103,392
Weighting (%)
23
113,515
112,678
25
25
54,001 12
51,169 11
20,969 5
FINANCIAL TIMES Saturday 28 January 2023
Likewise, longer periods are
unaffected. The average annual
return of 10 per cent when corporate
tax rates were below 35 per cent is the
same as in regimes when they were
above 50 per cent (mostly in the
1950s and 1960s). Profitability
metrics and earnings growth rates are
oblivious to tax changes too.
Why don’t corporate taxes seem to
matter for investors? Partly because
employees and customers share the
pain. We also know that companies
are adept at dodging tax. General
Electric filed a 57,000-page return in
2011 and concluded it owed the
Inland Revenue nothing. The
effective rate of tax in the US (what is
actually paid) is about half the official
21 per cent rate — in the UK it is about
a fifth lower than the official rate. A
third of Australian large companies
paid no tax in 2021, according to Tax
Office data.
Most importantly, however, there
are bigger drivers of returns for
companies than tax. Economic
growth, competition, technological
change, strategy, input prices and so
on simply matter more.
Therefore I’m not going to sell my
UK equity fund ahead of the
corporate tax rise this year. Nor will I
reduce my exposure to US stocks —
which did amazingly over the
decades when America had the
highest rate in the world. Good equity
analysts keep the effective tax rate in
their long-run valuation models
constant. It’s just not important.
But my alien friend and I will cheer
and invest in sectors that manage to
minimise what they pay in
corporation taxes — without an iota of
guilt. We both know any savings flow
to the government in other ways, via
people, and hope that politicians
spend the cash wisely. But that’s a
topic for another day.
The author is a former banker. Email:
stuart.kirk@ft.com; Twitter:
@stuartkirk__
Saturday 28 January / Sunday 29 January 2023
Not as we know it Marco Campardo’s prizewinning experimental furniture — DESIGN PAGE 6
A
s a professor at the London
School of Economics, one of
the world’s top universities,
Paul Cheshire earns well
above the average Lon-
doner’s salary. And yet his home, in
Islington, has made even more.
“We’ve generated housing equity
that’s more than my salary throughout
my life,” says Cheshire, whose special-
ism is economic geography. His daugh-
ter, who attended Oxford university and
is now a practising lawyer, “lives in
something the size of a couple of our
bedrooms. And that’s with parental
help,” he adds.
In the time between Cheshire buying
his home in 1996 and helping his daugh-
ter buy hers in 2010, average local prices
roughly quadrupled, according to the
Land Registry, and have continued to
rise since. Prices have shot up as real
wages have stuttered; the supply of new
homes has not kept pace as demand has
steadily risen and regulations governing
mortgage lending have tightened, limit-
ing access to finance. Without a leg-up
from parents, first-time buyers on aver-
age earnings are stuck looking up at the
bottom rung of the housing ladder.
’On balance it’s not worth
it . . . I can get on the ladder
but not somewhere I’d want
to raise a family’
Forecasts of falling property values
have given some would-be buyers hope
that an era in which wages have decou-
pled from prices might be drawing to a
close. But the higher interest rates that
are a drag on prices are also pushing up
mortgage rates, a scenario that tends to
hit first-time buyers particularly hard.
The cold reality is that life has rarely
been so hard for a first-time buyer in
London as it is today.
Cheshire describes this state of affairs
as a “distortion” with grave conse-
quences for the UK capital — damaging
London’s competitiveness by driving
talent further afield.
Would-be buyers interviewed for
this article describe a choice between
accepting much lower living standards
than they currently enjoy in order to
get a toehold on the ladder, enduring
the precarity of a rental market in
which prices are rising fast or turning
their backs on the city they would like
to call home.
Their experiences are backed up by
How London
data that emphasise how profound the
shift in London’s housing market has
been over the past 30 years. Together,
they paint a stark picture of a city that
has become more inhospitable for the
became an
young, talented and aspirational, where
equity-rich parents have increasingly
become lenders of last resort.
There is little argument that life has
become harder for first-time buyers
inheritocracy
over the course of a generation. This is
not exclusively a London phenomenon,
but the jump in prices has been far more
pronounced in the capital than else-
where in the country. Thirty years ago,
the average property bought by a first-
time buyer in London was worth
£122,000, roughly 1.5 times the UK
average price, according to Nationwide
building society. Last year, the average
first-time buyer in London spent
Property | Without inherited wealth or a leg-up
from the Bank of Mum and Dad, the door has
slammed shut for many prospective first-time
buyers in the capital. George Hammond reports
£462,070, double the average price
around the rest of the country.
That has been good news for anyone
who bought a London home in the
early 1990s, but ruinous for many
young people who harbour aspirations
of owning today.
Michael Seal, a 28-year-old vice-prin-
cipal at an east London school, is one of
those people. “I studied hard, went to
LSE, then went straight to teacher train-
ing. I don’t really know what society
wants from me if not to be a hard-work-
ing teacher in a deprived school. But I’m
still eating hummus sandwiches in a
leaking flat. I’m angry about it.”
Seal is in one of the highest earnings
brackets for teachers across the UK and
has saved since he started work so that
he could achieve his “dream” of home
ownership. Now, he feels, “on balance
it’s not worth it . . . I can get on there
[the housing ladder] but not some-
where I’d want to raise a family.”
He grew up on the north-eastern
fringe of London but Seal and his part-
ner are now thinking of moving to
Follow us on Instagram @ft_houseandhome
Stephen Collins
Germany in pursuit of a better founda-
tion from which to build a life together.
“The solution for me personally is to get
out of London,” he says.
The ratio of house prices to earnings
in London hit a record level in 2021, at
just under 14 times, according to the lat-
est official figures. “You’re totally oblit-
erating the possibility of owning in Lon-
don for most people. It’s why we see peo-
ple leaving London — they can’t move
there or can’t afford to be there in the
first place,” says Anya Martin, a housing
expert and campaigner for more homes
to be built.
Prices in London have in fact fallen
almost 9 per cent over the past seven
years, according to Nationwide figures.
But that is of limited help to buyers,
because Londoners’ inflation-adjusted
earnings are 8 per cent lower than they
were when the financial crisis struck in
2008, according to official figures.
High prices represent the most obvi-
ous hurdle for first-time buyers, though
one which would be surmountable if
finance were readily accessible. But
having been pushed to the brink during
the financial crisis, banks are more
heavily regulated and reluctant to take
on more risk than is necessary, lending
at relatively low loan-to-value ratios.
That means mortgages are the preserve
of those with big deposits and high
incomes — the second reason why Lon-
don’s housing market has become acces-
sible to a narrower pool of buyers, a ris-
ing proportion of whom are tapping
their families for support.
According to an analysis of official
data by estate agents Savills, the average
first-time buyer in London last year had
a deposit of just under £150,000 and a
household income of £92,000.
“The great financial crisis did two
things: it lessened the availability of
high loan-to-value mortgages which
then substantially increased the deposit
requirement. Then, when mortgage reg-
ulations were introduced, that became
First-time buyer deposit
growth continues to outpace
the rest of the UK
Average deposit (£’000 inflation-
adjusted)
200
London
150
100
50
UK
0
1992 2000 10 22
Source: Savills using Regulated Mortgage Survey
and CPI
entrenched. It was no longer about
whether the banks were willing and able
to make the lending available, it was
whether borrowers could meet the
stress tests,” says Lucian Cook, head of
residential research at Savills.
Tighter regulation was understanda-
ble in the aftermath of a financial crisis
triggered in part by reckless lending,
says Cook, but “regulation to avoid a
debt bubble has reduced accessibility
to housing”.
Lenders are uncomfortable loaning
first-time buyers high multiples of their
incomes, wherever they are in the coun-
try. But in London, where homes cost
twice the national average, that is a
more serious impediment.
That is in part why the government’s
flagship Help to Buy scheme came with
more generous terms for those borrow-
ing to buy in London. The initiative was
launched by the Conservative-led coali-
tion government in 2013 and intended
to support buyers of newly built homes
by providing a government equity loan
of 20 per cent of a property’s total value,
or 40 per cent in London. That meant
purchasers required a deposit of as little
as 5 per cent.
The scheme, which ends in March,
has been used by well over 300,000 peo-
ple, most of them first-time buyers, to
clamber on to or up the housing ladder.
“Those who were unable to fall back on
the Bank of Mum and Dad at least had
an option to raise a deposit or bridge the
deposit gap,” says Cook.
But the £29bn scheme’s legacy is also
higher house prices, according to a
House of Lords report published last
year which says Help to Buy has failed to
“provide good value for money”. In
some boroughs of the capital where new
Continued on page 2
2 ★ FTWeekend 28 January/29 January 2023

House Home
The freedom of What do I do if I don’t
like fitted kitchens?
Do you have any
which must provide a good
volume of storage.
After something similar?
are three original shelves. It’s a very
eccentric piece of furniture and proves
how kitchen storage doesn’t have to be
freestanding ideas for freestanding
kitchen storage?
As Found Original Antiques
in Worcester is selling a very
limited to regular cupboards.
There are classic freestanding

kitchen units When I imagine designing

my dream kitchen, I see a
lot of freestanding furniture.
It’s not that I completely
dislike fitted kitchens —
they are all I have ever
known — but I know that
eventually I will love creating a kitchen
that feels a little less uniform, more
individual in nature.
There is something very freeing
about moving away from the regular
set-up of an imposing wall or two of
cupboards and drawers all painted the
same colour, with the same handles,
topped with a regular slab of wood or
marble. This look can be fantastic if
done well, but it can also feel rather
slick and monotonous. Let’s up the
excitement levels.
For inspiration, look to London’s
Retrouvius. Founded in 1993 by Adam
Hills and Maria Speake, the company is
driven by the belief that good materials
and well made things are precious.
In a farmhouse kitchen in the
Chilterns, Retrouvius installed a giant
piece of Victorian shelving, salvaged
from the UK Patent Office, in the
Luke Edward Hall middle of the room. It’s a gloriously
eccentric thing and beautiful not only
in a utilitarian way, but sculpturally. It
Questions of taste has been filled with glassware,
ceramics and books and because it is
charming early Victorian
dresser with its original
primrose yellow paintwork.
I particularly love its
simulated woodgrain effect
and painted chocolate
brown decoration.
When it comes to taller
double-sided, light can filter through. pieces of furniture, there are many
Check websites such as English options. Arcadia Antiques has a
Salvage for all kinds of old shelving wonderful and very large glazed
units. I noticed online a green-painted cabinet in stock. It features an unusual
pine set of shelves that I can imagine chunky cornice and corner cabinets
looking beautiful filled with glassware. that open from the sides as well as
For inspiration, look also to Lamb’s the front.
House in Leith, Scotland. Built in 1610, I have also fallen head over heels for
it is one of the finest surviving an 18th-century English pine corner
examples of a merchant’s house in cupboard at Miles Griffiths (I was
Scotland and lies within the medieval devastated to learn it recently sold).
core of the Leith Conservation Area, This utterly fabulous Georgian
close to the old harbour. In 2010 cupboard made
it was bought by the conservation in the
architects Kristin Hannesdottir and Merseyside
Nick Groves-Raines. The couple have area is
brought this historic house back to life, thought to
giving it the love and attention it so be rare.
desperately needed. The top
I’ve been particularly taken with section
images I have seen of the kitchen at resembles
Lamb’s House. It’s a great example of stonework
classic country house style, but with an
what I am drawn to is the mix of arched
furniture and fittings. There is an Aga, top and
of course, and a butler’s sink, but there keystones.
are also two low freestanding dressers Inside there
stalwarts to consider: a Welsh dresser
is always a wonderful thing: one of
A fitted kitchen can these is on my wish list for a future
kitchen, hard to resist when jam-
be fantastic if done packed with pottery, postcards and
well, but can also potted pelargoniums. (The four Ps
every home in the country needs,
feel rather slick surely?) A salvaged butcher’s block can
and monotonous. also stand in very nicely for a fitted
kitchen island.
Let’s up the Last but not least, I am all for
excitement levels shelving at a high level, instead of
cupboards fitted to walls. This look
I find more relaxed and less, well,
“kitcheny”. We all spend so much time
in our kitchens — as the old saying
goes, the kitchen is the heart of the
home — and I generally prefer them to
feel more comfortable and cosy than
utilitarian. Plus, open shelves allow me
to happily snoop at people’s pots and
pans and cookbooks.
It’s also worth remembering that
(Main) The freestanding units can be taken with
kitchen at you if and when you leave your current
historic Lamb’s home. The same cannot be said for
House, in built-in kitchens, which often get
Leith, Scotland; ripped out and replaced by new
(left) an early owners. So moveable storage is often a
Victorian much more sustainable choice.
dresser from
As Found If you have a question for Luke about
Original design and stylish living, email him at
Antiques
Murdo McDermid for GRAS
lukeedward.hall@ft.com. Follow him on
Instagram @lukeedwardhall

Inside London
property
Continued from page 1

building has been relatively high, such

as Barking and Dagenham and New-
ham, prices paid by first-time buyers
have doubled over the past decade,
according to official figures.
Now Help to Buy is in its twilight,
and private-sector alternatives are
The Boston buzz unlikely to pick up the slack in the
Five properties available to buy now in short term. “The aspiration for home
the elegant US city ownership remains very strong, it’s just
Page 4 become that much further out of
reach,” says Cook.

Buyers in London must pull together

huge deposits if they want to get on to
the ladder. But how?
Thirty years ago, the average first-
time buyer in London needed a deposit
of less than £24,000. That has increased
six-fold since, to more than £147,000,
adjusting for inflation. Nationally, aver-
age deposits have fallen almost £16,000
since 2009, but in London they have
increased by close to £12,000.
That has made owning a home harder.
Fewer than a quarter of Londoners
Temples to creativity
In the first of a new series, a visit to ‘We could manage a studio
Gainsborough’s House museum
Page 5 in Zone 8 but would rather
stay renting than scrabble
on to the bottom rung’

Ralph Saltzman Prize
Marco Campardo has won the design
award for his inventive furniture
Page 6
The shape of a garden
Robin Lane Fox on how to structure
with spacing, height and colour
Page 8
House & Home Unlocked
FT subscribers can sign up for our weekly email
newsletter containing guides to the global
property market, distinctive architecture, interior
design and gardens.
Go to ft.com/newsletters
owned a home with a mortgage in 2021,
a drop of 10 per cent from a decade ear-
lier, according to data from the census
published last month. More and more
would-be buyers are instead being
pushed into a rental market in which
prices have risen sharply over the past
year, hampering their ability to save for
a deposit.
“For a lot of people the only way to
buy is inheritance or the Bank of Mum
and Dad,” says Cook. More than two-
fifths of buyers in London received help
from parents in 2020, according to a
report by Legal & General financial serv-
ices — a far higher proportion than any-
where else in the UK. “Those figures
really drill home the extent to which
London remains dislocated with the rest
of the country, with real issues in access
to property,” says Cook.
Mark, who chose not to use his real
name, is facing these problems first
hand. He and his partner want to buy,
but are struggling to see how. “We’ve
been living together since the start
of Covid, renting privately for some
time, and it’s knackering not knowing
how long you plan to be somewhere,”
he says.
A combination of inheritance, the
windfall from his partner’s grand-
mother’s house sale, savings and some
parental help should give the couple a
deposit of £140,000. On top of that they
hope their salaries — both work for
charities — will allow them to tap a
lender for a mortgage of £210,000.
Fearful of the impact of rising rents,
they would rather take the plunge. “If
we were unable to buy now that might
put it out of reach until our parents die.
They are not mega-rich, but they have
property they have paid the mortgage
off on,” says Mark, who acknowledges
how macabre that consideration is.
After doing the sums, Mark and his
partner feel that trying to buy is the least
worst option. Despite the contortions
involved, he is quick to emphasise the
privilege of circumstances that enable
them to even consider buying. “Without
supply of space in London. So you have a
London house prices have long run of rising demand for housing
outstripped wages for and an incredibly inflexible supply.”
decades Anya Martin, the housing cam-
Ratio of house prices to earnings paigner, is also highly critical of the
inflexibility of the greenbelt, which was
14
introduced in 1955 to prevent London
12 from subsuming nearby towns, and
other planning rules.
10 “The greenbelt stops London from
London growing out into areas we wouldn’t con-
8
sider green. Then you have height
6 restrictions. Then more informal restric-
England tions; local authorities have restrictions
4 to maintain local character or reject stuff
2005 10 15 21 above a certain [height] level,” she says.
All of that prevents London from build-
London property prices ing its way out of the problem.
are double those of the UK Long term, if house prices flatline and
Ratio of average first-time buyer wages catch up, or if housing supply in
house price (London vs UK) London increases, affordability issues
might be addressed. But none of those
2.4 interviewed for this article are confident
of that outcome. Instead of waiting for
2.2
an improved market, they are weighing
2.0 their options.
Martha, who chose not to give her real
1.8 name, works in public relations and
rents with her boyfriend. “Our com-
1.6 bined salary is £110,000, enough to get a
mortgage and we have some savings. We
1.4 feel the pressure to [buy] but wonder if
1992 2000 10 22 it will be worth the effort. What can you
buy in London if you want a family and
Deposit barrier has pushed support we could maybe manage shared (From top) have to pay childcare?” she says. “I don’t
up the number of rented ownership or a studio in Zone 8 [but] Terraced houses think we’ll be in London in five years if
households in London we’d rather stay renting than scrabble in London, with we want kids — it’s just so expensive.”
Private rented households (’000)
on to the bottom rung for the sake of the Nine Elms Michael Seal, the teacher, goes fur-
it . . . We’re not looking to have kids. If development in ther, saying the inaccessibility of hous-
1,000 we had to make this sort of compromise the background; ing is one part of “the social contract
it would be horrible.” Michael Seal, a breaking down”. He can’t tap the Bank
800 vice-principal at of Mum and Dad and sees little prospect
Paul Cheshire, the LSE professor, a school in east of the ratio of wages to house prices fall-
600 describes the parlous state of London’s London: ‘I’m ing dramatically soon, so is unlikely to
housing market as “a self-inflicted still eating buy in the city where he grew up, stud-
400
injury”: a strain that has been exacer- hummus ied and works.
200 bated by a failure to release more land sandwiches in a “People say I’m trying to get too much
and build more homes. He highlights leaking flat. I’m but for the past 30 years we have had
0 the greenbelt — a ring of land circling angry’ — Richard Baker/ our cake and eaten it [with house prices
In Pictures via Getty Images;
2005 10 15 20 22 London that is protected from develop- Charlie Bibby for the FT
rising fast from a relatively low base].
ment — as the main cause of the city’s It’s a fairness issue. I just want to be
Sources: ONS; Nationwide; English Housing Survey
particular housing crisis. “We froze the playing a fair game,” he says.
28 January/29 January 2023
Rising mortgage rates are
driving up house prices and
increasing demand for
rentals in the Danish city,
writes Hugo Cox
I
n August, after her landlord said he
would increase her monthly rent by
nearly 20 per cent to DKr14,000
(£1,655/$2,047), Maria Andrian-
ova started looking for a new home
to rent.
She moved with her husband from
Moscow to Lyngby-Taarbæk, 10km
north of the centre of Copenhagen,
five years ago. For the past three years,
the family — now joined by two young
children — have been on the waiting list
for a local housing association home,
with subsidised rent, but nothing has
come up.
‘We didn’t want to move
from the district because it
would mean taking our
children out of their school’
(Above) Crossing the Cykelslangen, a bridge for cyclists; (below) the city’s elegant architecture — Luke MacGregor/Bloomberg; Robin Utrecht/ABACA
Copenhagen’s rental jam
The cheapest suitable local home she
could find in the private market cost
DKr17,000 per month.
“We didn’t want to move from the dis-
trict because it would mean taking our
children out of their school,” she says.
“But it just felt like there were literally
no available places to live. We were so
nervous.”
Those moving to Copenhagen will
almost certainly be seeking a home
in the private sector, which comprises
roughly one in five rental homes, with
the remainder a range of social and rent-
controlled housing — all of which typi-
cally carry long waiting lists. Private
rental sector supply has fallen from
4,100 in January 2020 to 1,600 in Octo-
ber 2022, according to the Danish Prop-
erty Federation. So those seeking a
rental home now often face a long
search and increasing prices.
“With all the uncertainty in the econ-
omy and rising mortgage rates making
it more expensive for people to buy
homes, demand for rentals is particu-
larly high,” says Las Olsen, chief econo-
mist at Danske Bank in Copenhagen.
“Rising property prices have driven pri-
vate market rents up, too.”
★ FTWeekend
Emma, 37, who didn’t want to give her
real name, had spent several years on
the waiting list for a subsidised home
before one came up over the summer. It
was roughly half the price of her current
private rental home, but she was unable
to visit the home in time, and it went
to another candidate. “There were three
people who were prepared to take it
on the day, and moving to somewhere I
hadn’t seen felt like too much of a
gamble,” she says.
The challenges of obtaining a home in
the private market mean renters are
i / AT A G LANC E
1.7 per cent of private rental homes in
Copenhagen were vacant in October
2022, down from 4.4 per cent in January
2020 (Danish Property Federation).
The average price of a 100 sq m private
rental home leased in October 2022
was DKr14,792 ($2,159) per month.
Flights connect Copenhagen to London in
1hr 40m and to Frankfurt in 1hr 25m.
reluctant to give them up, even if they
leave the area. “If we needed to move I
would [sublet] because it would be so
hard to find another home like this,”
says Pablo, 39, who didn’t want to give
his real name. He rents a one-bedroom
flat, with his wife and daughter, on the
water near Fisketorvet, a large shopping
centre in the meatpacking district.
We are talking in Enghave Kaffe, a
popular coffee shop located a short walk
from his home. It is elegantly decorated:
framed landscape photographs hang on
dark blue walls; a rusted vintage scram-
bler motorbike is attached to the far
wall. There are small notices on each
table limiting laptop use to between
12pm and 3pm.
Outside, despite the rain and near-
freezing temperatures, resilient
cyclists crowd the cycle lanes, wearing
helmets and casual clothes on classi-
3
House Home
i / REN TAL GU IDE
DKr12,000 per month: A one-bedroom,
68 sq m apartment with a balcony,
in Ørestad South, a short bike or metro
ride to the south of the city centre
and close to the Field’s shopping centre.
DKr25,395 per month: A four-bedroom,
143 sq m apartment, with a balcony,
overlooking the water in Havneholmen,
near the meatpacking district and a short
walk from the Fisketorvet shopping mall.
cally designed upright bicycles, mak-
ing their way along Dybbølsgade, a
popular street leading towards Fiske-
torvet, past a new plant-based burger
restaurant, a small independent wine
merchant and a cycle shop selling
mainly vintage frames.
“I love this area, it is full of cool young
people and has a great vibe,” says Pablo.
“My home is just a few metres from the
water; in the summer when it’s warm I
just jump in the sea.”
Large advance payments required at
the beginning of a lease — typically a
home deposit equivalent to several
months’ rent, plus several months
in advance for rent and sometimes
utilities, too — are another reason not
to move.
For Andrianova, who eventually
found a home in November, the total
came to DKr97,000. “It was a shocking
amount to pay, but we just felt if we
didn’t agree we would have to move to
the south of the city and take the kids
out of school,” she says.
Copenhagen’s high sale prices mean
she has little prospect of purchasing a
home. Despite recent price falls, the
average price of a Copenhagen apart-
ment sold in November was DKr48,248
(£5,704) per sq metre, according to
Boligsiden, the Danish property website
(the London average is £7,880 per sq m,
according to Hamptons).
Rising mortgage rates are making it
harder for buyers, too: the average 30-
year fixed rate mortgage in October was
5.98 per cent, according to Denmark’s
central bank.
“It was expensive to move so we have
been unable to save [for a deposit],” she
says. “Now I work as an administrative
assistant in a language school and do
guided tours in my free time, and my
husband is a researcher at a public insti-
tute. There is no way we can afford buy-
ing an apartment.”
4 ★ FTWeekend 28 January/29 January 2023

House Home

Hot property K House, Charlestown, $3.695mn units, each with a direct entrance.

Boston, US
Where On Bunker Hill Street in
Boston’s historic Charlestown
neighbourhood. The drive to
Boston Logan international airport
takes 10 to 20 minutes, depending
on traffic.
What Built in 1849, this 5,447 sq ft
By Madeleine Pollard south-facing property consists of a
four-bedroom town house, a studio
apartment and two one-bedroom
There are six bathrooms in total,
spiral staircases and pine floors.
Why The great room on the top
floor leads to a roof deck with
wide-ranging city views. There is
an additional deck to the rear of
the property.
Who Sotheby’s International Realty

I Apartment, Davis Square,

Somerville, $1.355mn

Where On Tannery Brook Row in

Davis Square in Somerville, a city
to the north-west of Boston. The
drive to Boston Logan
international airport typically takes
15 to 30 minutes.
What A triple-aspect, one-
bedroom loft apartment with two
bathrooms, a balcony and off-
street parking. It has exposed
brickwork, wooden beams,
oversized windows and an open-
plan design.
Why Connected to Boston via the
Red Line subway route, Davis
Square is known for its restaurants,
bars and its independent cinema,
the Somerville Theatre.
B Condominium, Back Bay, to 1900, with three bedrooms, two
$4.4mn full bathrooms and two half
Who Compass
bathrooms. Highlights include river
Where In the Back Bay views, direct lift access, parking
neighbourhood, overlooking the and concierge service.
Charles River. It’s about 10 minutes Why The lift takes you to a shared
by car to Boston Logan roof terrace with a BBQ and views
international airport. of the Boston skyline.
What A 3,240 sq ft condominium in Who Douglas Elliman
a Georgian Revival building dating

K House, Wellesley, $6.25mn K Condominium, Beacon Hill,

$6.495mn
Where On Cliff Road in the town of
Wellesley, 15 miles west of Boston. Where On Beacon Street, next to
Boston Logan airport takes 20-30 Boston Public Garden in the
minutes to drive to in good traffic. Beacon Hill neighbourhood.
What At over 7,000 sq ft, this What A two-bedroom, three-
seven-bedroom house built in 1938 bathroom condominium with 2,552
is set in an acre of private grounds. sq ft of living space. It has original
Highlights include the chef’s fireplaces, direct lift access, a
kitchen, mahogany-panelled study, garage parking space and views of
sun room, games room, wine cellar the Public Garden.
and heated three-car garage. Why The great room features
Why The garden features lawns floor-to-ceiling panelling with
with stone wall borders, a built-in cornice mouldings, built-in
BBQ and seating areas. bookcases, a period fireplace, wet
Who Compass bar and bay windows with views of
the Charles River.
Who Sotheby’s International Realty
28 January/29 January 2023 ★ FTWeekend
A temple to
a space to make contemporary art
approachable. Others, such as Sir John
Soane (1753-1837), used their houses to
weave elaborate historic fictions and as
creativity
shop windows for their abilities.
The disconnect, however, is that
many creative figures worked at a grand
scale intended to impose and impress in
mansions and public buildings, while
their own dwellings remained modest.
That was the issue confronting the
house museum of one of Britain’s most
In the first of a new series on house museums, perennially popular artists, Sir Thomas
Gainsborough (1727-88).
Edwin Heathcote visits the newly reopened Gainsborough’s Gainsborough’s house in the Suffolk
House, where the painter spent his formative years town of Sudbury is an accretion of ele-
E
ments, continuously altered to suit
changes in use and taste. He was born
very house is a museum. prising that an artist’s or writer’s house and grew up here, the son of a weaver. As
Through its fittings, furniture might become a kind of temple, a con- a successful artist he lived in Ipswich,
and style, a visitor can read a duit to creativity and the closest we can then fashionable Bath and, finally, Lon-
life. Even the most apparently come to a spatial rendering of a life. don. But as a child he would have looked
banal house can become, after The most moving displays in contem- over the fields and hills beyond the town.
a couple of centuries have passed, a char- porary culture rarely occur at the grand It was this landscape that formed the
ismatic capsule of a moment in time. scale of the gallery but, rather, in the background to arguably his finest paint-
The domestic interior is a remarkably intimate confines of the domestic. Ket- ing, “Mr and Mrs Andrews” (1750).
direct medium, communicating so tle’s Yard in Cambridge, for instance, That unusual double portrait (hang-
much about a person. So it is not sur- was intended by Jim Ede (1895-1990) as ing at the National Gallery in London)
with its landscape (rather than portrait)
format, encapsulates the bond between
people and place, wealth and heredity,
the ownership of the earth. And it
embodies Gainsborough’s own conflict
between the landscapes he so desired to
paint and the portraits through which he
made his (substantial) living.
Because it was increasingly con-
stricted as a museum, it was decided to
expand the building. Architects ZMMA
have built a handsome extension in local
red brick that treads carefully between
the domestic and the public, between
interiority and the embrace of pano-
ramic views in Gainsborough’s work.
That the delicate brickwork appears
to be woven as much as laid is no acci-
dent. In the luxurious sheen of Mr and
Mrs Andrews’ clothes, you’ll find a clue
to Sudbury’s wealth. The town was the
centre of Britain’s silk-weaving industry.
One floor in this house attests to that his-
tory, its large windows and industrial
austerity suggesting its workshop past.
The new gallery next door (which also
hosts temporary exhibitions of works
The extension allows the
museum to become a
cultural institution rather
than ‘just’ a house
by other artists) has allowed the house
itself to breathe easier, lifting the
responsibility of displaying the entire
collection of Gainsborough’s works in its
modest rooms. It can relax into being
something more like a house again.
And, stretching back to the early 16th
century, it is a millefeuille of layers
embodying half a millennium of domes-
tic taste. The old half-timbered house
was, as many were, dressed up in brick
to make it more modern, becoming a
Georgian house with a fashionably
Gothick garden facade but retaining
timber beams that reveal its roots. Dur-
ing the 20th century, it served as a tea-
room, as a guest house and as an antique
shop. A more exquisitely English history
would be difficult to imagine.
Since 1961, though, the house has
been dedicated to its most famous resi-
dent. With an array of elegant 18th-
century furniture (some on loan from
the V&A), books, fittings and works by
Gainsborough and his contemporaries,
the rooms exude a quiet domesticity.
A recreation of an 18th-century artist’s
studio complete with desk and paints
5
House Home
(Clockwise from
main) A
recreation of an
18th-century
artist’s studio;
the new
extension; the
exterior of
Gainsborough’s
House museum
in Sudbury,
Suffolk — Hufton
+Crow; Jack Hobhouse
could have been recently vacated,
haunted by a large lay figure missing a
leg and a hand sprawled in a wooden
chair. The room features Gainsborough’s
own copies of a Rubens and a Van Dyck.
But this part of the house was built a
few decades after the artist had died.
The new extension, where a wider
range of works can be displayed in more
conventional and climate-controlled
conditions, is pivotal in allowing the
museum to become a cultural institu-
tion rather than “just” a house. This
conundrum is at the heart of all house
museums. How do you keep visitors
coming back? The small house museum
can tend towards the mausoleum, cap-
turing a moment in domesticity and a
connection to genius that inevitably
must otherwise remain unchanged.
Even those with the densest and most
illustrious of collections (which could
keep a visitor occupied for a lifetime),
such as Sir John Soane’s Museum, have
felt the need to expand and open galler-
ies for temporary exhibitions to keep
them vital as public institutions.
Intriguingly, this is no time capsule. It
is a house that kept evolving well after
Gainsborough had gone. Yet, perhaps
most remarkable of all is that in the gar-
den stands a mulberry tree — planted to
accommodate silkworms, though
apparently it turned out to be the wrong
kind of mulberry — that Gainsborough
would have looked at as he grew up.
There are threads of place here that
connect us deep into history, just as the
art gives us a glimpse of an age when
England was rising from a provincial to
a global force, driven by revolutions in
agriculture and industry, and its artists
were called on to capture an image of
place, personality and power.
gainsborough.org
Edwin Heathcote is the FT’s architecture
and design critic
6 ★
House Home
A
s a child growing up in a
small town outside Venice,
Marco Campardo would
regularly help his father, a
carpenter, in his workshop.
But it would take years for Campardo to
appreciate the value of that craft and
return to it in his own practice, after an
interlude as a graphic designer. Fast for-
ward to 2023, and Campardo has just
been awarded the Ralph Saltzman Prize
for his inventive furniture, which will be
exhibited at the Design Museum in Lon-
don (February 2 to April 3).
“Nowadays I can really enjoy and
understand how important that rela-
tionship was in the workshop with my
dad during my childhood,” he says.
Campardo, who now lives in London,
even collaborated with his father on
one project, George (2019, ongoing),
comprising furniture made by gluing
together layers of discarded materials
from wood veneer production.
George is one of the projects that will
be on show at the Design Museum. The
‘The world is looking for
answers that are less classic,
less canonic, more
experimental’
prize celebrates emerging product
designers and was established in 2021 in
honour of Ralph Saltzman — the late co-
founder of textile company Designtex.
Campardo was nominated alongside
four other designers.
As well as furniture pieces for public
and private clients, Campardo designs
exhibitions and site-specific installa-
tions, including at the Macro Museum in
Rome, Tate Modern in London and vari-
ous national pavilions at the Venice Art
‘Not just another
Eames table’
Design | Marco Campardo has won
the Ralph Saltzman Prize for his
radical furniture. By Francesca Perry
FTWeekend
and Architecture Biennales. This April
his work will be exhibited at Milan
Design Week.
Campardo is driven by process and
experimentation. “Most of the time,
ideas come from experimenting with
my hands, instead of drawing,” he says.
“Otherwise I don’t get excited. It’s so
different starting from finding a proc-
ess and seeing what you can do, rather
than drawing something and then find-
ing the right system to create that
shape. Because for me, one is design,
and one is decoration.”
The work he feels best expresses this
approach is Jello (2022, ongoing). Shap-
ing polyurethane resin with a rotational
moulding technique, Campardo makes
Tetris-like, colourful furniture. He uses
timber frames and cardboard to cast the
playful, chunky objects; the curves and
wrinkles from the card are imprinted on
the surface of every item.
“For me it’s important that the object
remains functional,” says Campardo.
Even when he makes a seat held
together by sugar, you can still sit on it.
For a shop window display at Selfridges
in London he created demountable
block-based tables and shelves, called
Reversible, binding granular expanded
clay with melted sugar.
While Campardo’s pieces reflect his
tendency for experimentation, they also
fit into his ideas about the evolving role
of furniture design. “I think we are liv-
ing in a moment in which identity is
very important, especially for the cus-
tomers,” he says. “Having pieces at
home that are unique helps reflect the
fact that they are unique as a person.”
“I think these clients are not just look-
ing for art you can hang on the wall
and admire, they are looking for art
that is spread out throughout the
house,” he says. “Filling this gap
with pieces that can be considered
art but are still functional is very
important in my practice.”
His approach aims to combat the
Instagram-driven, global shipping-
enabled homogenisation of interi-
ors. “Instead of having another
Eames table that is identical to the
rest of the world, you get something
that is unique but can still be used.”
This requires investment — no
cheap mass-produced pieces here —
28 January/29 January 2023
i / SHOR TLISTED DESIGNER S
Rio Kobayashi Kobayashi creates playful
wooden furniture and domestic objects.
Joseph Y Ewusie Product designer
Ewusie makes objects that tell stories,
drawing on his British-Ghanaian heritage.
Simón Ballen Botero Ballen Botero
works with artisans around the world,
using local materials to create
decorative objects.
Timi Oyedeji Oyedeji looks at how
humans and computers interact.
(Clockwise from but Campardo knows there are buyers
main) Marco willing to take the leap. “There are
Campardo with smart collectors that are very brave
some of his and invest in young designers and
Jello pieces product makers,” he says. “They can
(2022, ongoing); feel the potential of building a collection
Reversible, that is not based only on established
displayed in or past designers — but also contempo-
Selfridges’ shop rary designers.”
window (2022); This generation of young designers
the Elle chair also addresses sustainability more
(2019, ongoing); explicitly, and shies away from “green-
the George washing”. Campardo is passionate when
coffee table explaining that for a product to be truly
(2019, ongoing) sustainable, it should be recyclable, not
Matteo Bianchessi
just recycled. Using recycled materials,
he says, is not good enough.
“Most of the time, recycling is down-
cycling,” he adds. “Downcycling means
you are using a material that poten-
tially can be recycled but then you mix
it with other materials that are not
recyclable. You are not solving the
problem, you are adding new problems
for the future.”
Though craft, the future of the home
and sustainability are all clearly impor-
tant for Campardo, his obsession lies in
material experimentation, and this will
be evident at the Design Museum
exhibit through samples, photographs
and moulds showing his work proc-
esses. As part of the prize, he will receive
a £5,000 bursary to support his work.
Campardo was nominated by Edward
Barber of the London-based industrial
design studio Barber Osgerby — a prac-
tice he admires. “I started by specu-
lating with design, and now I am get-
ting a prize for industrial designers,”
Campardo says. “It’s confirming the
fact we need to rethink the way we
perceive industrial design. The
world is looking for answers that
are less classic, less canonic,
more experimental.”
28 January/29 January 2023 ★ FTWeekend 7

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8 ★
House Home
Not born
but made
Gardens do not simply emerge, they must be
shaped in terms of spacing, soil, height and colour
G
ardens have to be shaped
and guided. What are the
main mistakes we make
with them? They cannot be
left to emerge. Space does
not become a garden if it is left alone.
During the lockdowns much was heard
about wilding, no-mowing and waiting
to see what would appear. Long-lost
orchids and violets were supposedly
longing to burst into flower beneath
our lawns. Most of us would have been
graced with nettles, ground-elder and
bindweed if we had given up gardening.
Here is some basic advice for shapers
and guiders. It is based on years of trial
and error. It will put you on a path
whose direction will then develop as
you go. Set off on it with these four
aspects in mind: spacing, soil, height
and colour.
The major mistake we all make
shows no signs of abating. We plant
plants too closely together. Planners
and designers have accustomed us to
trees in clusters, hedging plants
jammed up contiguously and borders
begun with far too many plants. Clients
and customers now expect the level of
density that they see around them. It
takes a nerve to lay out a border with
only three to five plants to a square
yard. The soaring cost of plants may
bring us back to reality.
Three to five was the rule of thumb
50 years ago. It is still valid. Hedging
plants should be spaced at one per
yard, minimum, unless you are
planting low edging. Taller, bigger
specimens may look more
encouraging, but after five years they
are no faster or thicker. They merely
cost more. *
Public plantings of trees are a
travesty. In go those birches and
“native” species, spaced about a yard
apart, a density which is unsustainable.
This mass planting used to be defended
as a way of deterring vandals. Single
trees were supposed to be more at
risk. Now, mass cramming satisfies
targets. A local authority can rest
assured that it has planted thousands
of trees, capturing carbon for Cumbria,
even though most of them will die and
many of the others will have to be
thinned out.
Gardeners are not governed by target
numbers. Always check out a tree or
shrub’s predicted width after 15 years
of life: then space them. If you pack in
lilacs at a spacing of one per yard
you are wasting time and money.
Pruning is not the answer. The lilacs
will respond to it with yet more green
growth and no flowers.
Internet searches under a shrub or
tree’s name are one guide to size and
spread, but I rely on The HillierManual
of Trees and Shrubs, updated in 2019 by
the expert Roy Lancaster. It began
as a catalogue of trees and shrubs
grown by our greatest nursery and its
guiding genius, Harold Hillier, in
Hampshire. The new edition has 1,500
more entries. It is an authoritative
guide to plants’ span.
Ceanothus, magnolias and witch
hazels are some of the many shrubs
which should not collide. Overplanting
is not easy to rectify. Removal of excess
shrubs is a bother and has a way of
leaving the remainers in the wrong
place. Size it, space it, sort it when you
first plant. The result is far cheaper. If a
shrub is listed in Hillier’s Manual as
FTWeekend
(Above) A variety of plant spreading 8ft across, it will not give you
heights gives lines and a quicker effect if it is planted only 3ft
contrasts; (right) from its neighbour. It will give you a
vegetables should be tangle and few, if any, flowers.
planted in raised beds Soil, meanwhile, teaches hard
MMGI/Marianne Majerus; Old Bladbean Stud
lessons. If you want to grow vegetables,
you are almost always better off if you
make raised beds, edged with timber,
at least a foot above your existing soil’s
level. Fork over the existing soil, break
it up and then smother it with rich
compost, probably bought in bags,
to raise the soil to the level of the
timber around it.
On favoured fertile soils you need not
raise and import but most of us have
soil that is unfavoured. If you visit Kew
Gardens, look for the raised beds in the
new vegetable garden and use them as
blueprints for your own. They are
living proof that much can be cropped
in small, concentrated spaces.
As for flowerbeds, I often wish I had
had all my stony poor soil removed by
a mechanical digger and replaced with
first-class top soil before I planted
anything. I have improved parts of it
and still dream of that digger, but
gardens made of imported topsoil
Robin Lane Fox become homogeneous, one just like
another. Challenged by stony soil, I
have not just learnt patience. I have
On gardens learnt to grow plants I would not
otherwise have chosen and grouped.
My advice, therefore, is to spend
time and money on improving and
enriching most of your flowerbeds
but to leave a bit of the post-Eden
torment in one or two beds to see what
you can do with it. Elsewhere,
whatever you plant will respond to the
time and money you first spend on
soil for it. A plant in a pot is only part of
the story: gardening begins when you
prepare a good home for it. It is
amazing how much quicker a plant will
28 January/29 January 2023
grow in really good soil. Do not assume
cruel Mother Nature has already given
you it.
I have warned about span and
spread. I must alert you to the upper
dimension, height. Properly planned, it
gives a garden fine lines, contrasts and
a sense of truly being a garden, not a
muddle. The vertical line is so
effective, especially in planned flower
borders. Delphiniums, foxgloves,
biennial Salvia turkestanica,
verbascums and not-so red hot pokers
vary the groundline of a border and
draw the eye upwards to them as
points of emphasis.
In wide borders, tall frames for
clematis, spaced at intervals, give
sudden canopies of greenery which
break up the flatter volume of
surrounding border plants. One place
Ceanothus, magnolias and
witch hazels should not
collide. Overplanting is not
easy to rectify
to see such frames at their best is the
wide double border in the Hillier
Gardens near Romsey in Hampshire.
The border is only a few years old, an
encouragement to us all.
What about colour? In borders I go
for clear colours, scarlet and blue, not
those poor substitutes, “purple red”
and “purple blue”. In places, I limit
beds not to one colour only but to two
or three dominant ones: blue and
yellow with silver leaves perhaps; or
pink, pale blue and white; or red and
white, what others nickname blood
and bandages. I avoid purple-rose, or
rose-magenta, frequent colours in
border plants. I also remember how the
impact varies from season to season:
who minds about a clashing profusion
of colour in springtime? It is a joy after
a drab winter.
Within these main colour limits I
have become more relaxed. The
changing climate is helping, more than
books on border planning realise. Those
subtle gradations from red to orange to
pale yellow were planned when May
was still May, not June in acceleration.
Carefully matched neighbours now
flower out of season and miss one
another. Do not be too exact in your
colour plans. The weather will frustrate
them. That is a lesson to learn before
you shape and guide anything.