A young woman discovers the real world in this erotic legal procedural from French director Victoria Musiedlak.
Premiere Affaire is one of the juiciest films to hit the Piazza Grande at this year’s Locarno’s 76th edition.
Sex is variably at centre of any drama where the French are involved and Premiere Affaire has a clever title that cuts both ways: as a first love affair and a debut criminal case in the life of budding lawyer Nora, a mesmerising Noée Abita, who soon discovers that life is not as simple as it first appears. And Musiedlak, in her first feature, doesn’t give her main character a smooth ride in this classically styled ‘school of hard knocks’ outing.
Fresh out of law school, naive Nora, 26, is working in the Paris cabinet of a suave but sharp as nails commercial advocate when she opts to take on a pro-bono style criminal case, that of a gauche young man Jordan Blesy (Alexis Neises) accused of murdering his sister’s friend. Here, she will learn her first lesson: being a legal practitioner is not about championing right or wrong, but applying the Law in the context of the client’s plea.
The second lesson here is not to get emotionally involved with your client or your colleagues, for that matter. And Nora makes a faux pas on both accounts. She desperately believes Jordan to be innocent and brings her own feelings into the case instead of remaining detached. She also fails on the second count when she meets the police officer assigned to the case, Alexis (Danielsen Lie). The two eye each other up warily during the police procedural client examination where sparks fly. But while gamine and vulnerable, Nora is not one to be trifled with.
A feisty onscreen chemistry between Anita and Danielson Lie give these scenes a raunchy, provocative kick. Nora also discusses Jordan’s case privately with Alexis contrary to their professional remit, accepting an ill-considered ride in Alexis’ car which will invariably bring them closer. All credit to Musiedlak puts the accent on flirtation in the subsequent love scenes making them intense and titillating rather than uncomfortable to watch.
Clearly this is a story fraught with ethical and moral issues – not to mention racial tensions: Nora is of Maghrebi heritage and her mother is sceptical of her daughter’s career, encouraging her to settle down and marry. This family stress piles on the pressure for the young lawyer, adding negative undertones to her domestic life. At work too Nora is struggling to cope, burning the candle at both ends in taking on a case that runs contrary to her official remit in the commercial cabinet, so there’s never a dull moment, and certainly no easy answers when embarking on a legal career.
LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL | PIAZZA GRANDE 2023 |
Dir/Wri: Victoria Musiedlak | Cast: Noée Abita, Anders Danielsen Lie, Alexis Neises, François Morel, Saadia Bentaïeb | France, Drama
Evidence that Britain will – post-Brexit – become an outward-facing, confident, international trading nation is in short supply.
The news that the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) is to close three of its overseas offices, in Washington DC, Beijing and Delhi, in order to save costs made me wonder who on earth will deliver this brave new world.
The CBI was hit by a sexual harassment and drugs scandal in April this year, leading to the sacking of its Chief Executive and a mass desertion of members.
Doubtless, money must be saved. But closing the Delhi office seems exceptionally short-sighted. What does this decision tell current and future members about the aspirations of the CBI, turning its back on the world’s fastest-growing major economy, one with a huge wealth of historic economic connections to the UK?
Britain is potentially on the verge of a game-changing trade agreement with India, through which the UK will gain hundreds of thousands of new jobs and India as many as a million. Are the CBI’s members not interested in these rewards? Do its UK-based Indian members feel adequately represented by its London office?
After rebuffing the EU – its largest and closest market – Britain is now supposedly free to venture further afield, like a Victorian adventurer scything through virgin jungle to reach untold treasures.
In the real world, the Indian government and its booming corporations may be more interested in concluding deals in the United States, in Australia or with fellow Asian tigers than with their former colonial master, despite the many cultural links. Closing the CBI’s office will only confirm how uninterested British businesses are in engaging with Indian counterparts.
There has been a sea change in Indian economic fortunes, which British businesspeople are perhaps insufficiently aware of. While researching my latest book The Indian Century, it struck me again and again that India is no longer a supplicant in international trade, it is a pioneer and a leader.
The Indian space mission, which sent a craft to the moon this week, is one symbol of this new confidence, as is its role in the BRICS conference taking place in South Africa.
There are a hundred more such examples, from India’s transformative online payment systems to the plethora of international CEOs and political leaders of Indian heritage.
If the CBI thinks that the marginal savings from closing its Delhi office are justified, against this backdrop of the world’s most vibrant economy, then its leaders really have been taking the wrong drugs.
Dinesh Dhamija founded, built and sold online travel agency ebookers, before serving as a Member of the European Parliament. His latest book, The Indian Century, will be published later this year.
In his thought-provoking book Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, New York Times best-selling author Kurt Andersen connects the dots from America’s Puritan past to today’s fantasyland of fake news, conspiracy theories and alternative facts that gave rise to the Trump presidency. Reading Andersen’s 500-year history crystallises the reasons why we’ve become a country with a partially developed frontal lobe, incapable of fully functional reasoning and rationality, prone to the fantastical.
While Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 election shocked America – Andersen suggests it even took Trump by surprise – his rise in politics is proof of America’s ultimate embrace of Fantasyland. Trump’s triumph hinged on his ability to play an impresario who leveraged the fantasy-industrial complex to his advantage like no one had ever done before. He played to conspiracy theories, exploited myths of white racial victimhood, and rode a far-right extremist counterculture that had taken over the American right before his rise to power.
Founded on an excitable thirst for independence from their European past, Americans always harbored a tendency towards ultra-individualism. The American Revolution and Constitution coincided with the Age of Enlightenment, igniting a national movement that “guaranteed personal liberty above all, where citizens were officially freer than ever before to invent and promote and believe anything”. Americans’ right to bear arms gave rise to a deeply engrained gun culture and religious freedoms evolved into an exceptionally literal and fantastical religiosity. But the nation’s unraveling didn’t just happen overnight. Rather, the route Andersen takes us on traces the common threads of religious zeal, pseudoscience, and conspiracy theories, from the Salem witch trials and occult Freemasonry of the Enlightenment to the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, New Age theology and apocalyptic paranoia.
As Andersen maps the journey through fantasyland, religion – particularly Christianity – plays a pivotal role in feeding the frenzy. The Puritanical ideology of discipline, austerity and hyperliteracy morphed into The Great Awakening of the 18th century, the formation of Scientology and the Mormon Church, and eventually the contemporary evangelical movement. Charismatic religious leaders like Pat Robertson, Billy Graham, Oral Roberts and Jerry Falwell became charismatic entertainers made famous through television and the Internet.
The freedom to reinvent oneself within an anything-goes personal belief system gave rise to a collection, writes Andersen, of “fantasists, some religious and some out to get rich quick, all with a freakish appetite for the amazing”. Impresarios and hucksters such as P.T. Barnum and Buffalo Bill preceded Walt Disney, Hollywood and an industrial entertainment industry that blurred the lines between reality and fantasy. Oprah Winfrey brought magical thinking to twelve or thirteen million viewers every day, promoting New Age beliefs, alternative medicine (famously, Dr. Oz), anti-vaccine conspiracies, and imaginary energies. Andersen points to the 1980s as a tipping point for the convergence of entertainment and politics. Ronald Reagan’s rise from Hollywood actor to President of the United States seemed like a perfectly natural progression. Talk radio and TV news shows morphed into “politicised show business”.
The digital era that began in the 1990s arrived just in time to amplify what Andersen calls the Kids “R” Us Syndrome where American adults began “playing videogames and fantasy sports, dressing like kids … and even getting surgery to look more like kids”. Gaming boomed into a multibillion-dollar industry creating imaginary worlds that felt realistic and offered an immersive experience for adults who wanted to play like children. Andersen points to Trump as having the ultimate case of Kids “R” Us Syndrome: “spoiled, impulsive, moody, a seventy-year-old brat”.
It didn’t end there. Digital platforms allowed for “even greater immersion in the unreal”. Conspiracy theories and rampant falsehoods that were once on the fringe became mainstream. The mostly unregulated internet and social media platforms became vehicles for spreading fake news and fantastical stories to an audience which had little ability to distinguish between reality and fantasy.
While Andersen admits that “flecks of fantasy are charming condiments in everyday existence,” he wonders if “it’s only America’s destiny, exceptional as ever, to unravel in the Fantasyland fashion”. His final call to action for Americans is to fight for facts and objective truth, find new protocols for information media hygiene, and regain national balance and composure. America’s ability to accomplish this is yet to be seen.
Melanie Trudeau is an English major turned digital strategist. As a dual Canadian/American citizen, she splits her time between rural Vermont and Toronto.
As part of our special on the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, we asked leading thinker Dennis Stevenson to give his view on what is really under discussion
Mental health has come into the open over the last ten years aided among other forces by some strong royal support.
But what are we really talking about? If you get up from wherever you’re reading this and stop the first person you meet in the street and say “How’s your mental health?”, 10-1 that person will think you’re talking about an illness! If you say “how’s your physical health” they will answer the question as it should be answered. All of which is to say that we all have mental health. It can go up and down – and, as with physical health, we need to work out ways of dealing with any problems.
It is not an exaggeration to say that I didn’t realise properly that I along with every other member of the human race had mental health until I was in my 50s. It took me some time – and the injection of some mental ill health – to realise that it would be a good idea to learn how to manage my mental health for the better. And I’m still at it.
Unfortunately, by then my children had gone out in the world so they, poor things, were not brought up to believe they have mental health as well as physical health. But my grandchildren are being properly brought up. I very much hope and believe that every single one of them is aware that they have mental health and is learning tricks of the trade to deal with it.
I was given a cruel awakening on this at around my 50th birthday at a time when everything in my life was wonderful. I went away to our cottage in the country in the summer and woke up one morning with what I can only describe as a “pain in my tummy”. That pain became something worse and without boring the reader with the detail I descended into something which would be described as clinical depression for which there was no obvious cause.
I came out of it after some months having – wrongly – rejected any help from pills and indeed any other source. I have been “hit” by it happily not very often but several times over the 25 years since then and on each occasion there has been no obvious reason for it. And I believe I’ve learnt one or two tricks of the trade of how to deal with it.
That’s my story. What else have I learnt apart from the fact that I have mental health and I need to pay attention to it?
First and foremost, the human race is at an early stage of understanding mental health. You might compare it with our understanding of cancer 50 years ago.
An eminent psychiatrist told me 20 or 30 years ago: “So, Mr Stevenson, you are somewhere on the bipolar spectrum”. The use of “spectrum” is widespread and in most cases a rather dodgy use of English!
As it happens I have discovered that I am almost certainly not on the bipolar spectrum whatever that is. I am an extrovert in-your-face sort of human being but not manic. I do, however, have what my excellent GP at the time described as “dips” in mood. Is that depression? I don’t know – but then neither does anyone else.
Even so, I am very clear that we are getting nearer to being able to define depression, schizophrenia, ADHD, bipolar and all illnesses attributed to mental ill health. A professor at Cambridge, Ed Bullmore, wrote a book a few years ago arguing that depression is a physical illness and related to internal inflammation. The book is very compelling. We’re getting closer to being able to define these illnesses. A lot of research is going on but we’re still some way off.
How does one cope with mental ill health? The first thing that I have learnt is that as with many illnesses there are ways of dealing with depression that work and we don’t need to understand why they work. Too many of us despair that nothing can be done and suffer needlessly. What is true of many physical illnesses is also true of mental illness: drugs and therapies have developed without a clear understanding of why they work – but if they work, they work. So don’t ever let anyone persuade you that antidepressants don’t work. It’s just not true.
It is, however, a good idea to be in the hands of a psychiatrist who has a deep knowledge of antidepressants since there are horses for courses, as in most things. In the same vein “talking therapies” have been one of the major breakthroughs over the last 20 years. For every good therapist, there are several who are well-meaning but hopeless. However, it doesn’t alter the fact that they work.
In this context, there’s an absurd fault line in education in the UK. Psychiatrists who are medically trained, tend to be sceptical of talking therapies – although less so than they used to be. Equally, psychologists and psychotherapists are inclined to be sceptical of drugs, and are not allowed to prescribe them.
This division is ridiculous. If you go to a cardiologist he or she might have a different diagnosis than another one but they will work from the same toolkit. So a word of advice: if you have mental health problems and you can find a physician who encompasses both medical and psychological approaches, that is the ideal. Happily, there seems to be an increasing number of them.
The approach to “caring” is also important. If I walk out of my house today and break a leg, I will be in pain and be miserable. With a bit of luck my wife and children will want to make a fuss of me and soothe me! They won’t diminish the pain but I will feel good about what they say.
But the terrible reality is that if I move into what I will call “depression”, their sympathy will mean nothing to me. This is a big subject hardly ever dealt with, but it’s hugely important that carers understand this and are not demotivated by being rejected.
The last time I had a major “depression”, the symptom was that I felt that my wife was only staying with me because she was a decent person but she didn’t love me. I can remember being in bed and her saying “doesn’t 40 years (our marriage) mean anything to you?” And then at another time saying: “You’re like an extra arm on my body”. These are very wonderful things to say, but she got no reaction out of me at all –
and I know it was horrid for her. Yet they have stuck with me.
If you’re a carer for someone who has got mental health please do not be put off if they appear to reject you or take no notice.
I’ve one other tip that works for me. Particularly if you are an over-achieving type as I am, a natural reaction to a mental health problem is to try to get on top of it, solve it and cure it. My wife said to me years ago: “You should be more accepting.” It took me about ten years to realise what she meant: I must face up to the fact that as with many physical illnesses, it will never go away entirely but I must learn how to deal with it and expect it to return.
That is my current position. As it happens, my really bad “depression” has not reoccurred since 2007. I’m clear that it will reappear at some point before I meet my Maker. I am equally clear that the fact that I’ve got a much more accepting relaxed attitude to it is a major reason why it does not reappear more.
The former Speaker of the House of Lords explains the current deluge of legislation facing a somewhat recalcitrant House of Lords
I don’t think the next election will be a slam dunk for Sir Keir Starmer. The main reason for that is that I don’t think Starmer is a leader. Of course, Rishi isn’t either, but the Tories won’t do anything about that until the next election, after which they’ll likely get rid of him.
Having said that, I met Sunak recently, and I found him very nice: he comes across as someone who listens, and he is very smart. He said something which I thought was wonderful: “I believe in doing less but doing it well.” This led onto another conversation about the sheer volume of legislation tumbling down on us. He said: “It was on the books when I came into position.” He was basically saying, “Not my fault, mate.” But it does mean that if Sunak continues – which I doubt he will – he’ll bring in less legislation, which would be a very good thing.
All in all, it’s been this cataract of legislation. There have been three bills. The Online Safety Legislation Bill has been in the making for about six years, and deals with the uncontroversial idea that there should be some online protection regarding content harmful for children. Molly Russell’s father has been campaigning on this; and Beeban Kidron, a fantastic cross-bencher, has been leading on that, and done a fantastic job.
I’m always in principle opposed to any legislation which interferes with free speech, because once it’s on the statute books it’s a hostage for fortune. You never know, we might have a fascist government one day; it’s not impossible. It’s a very technical bill, which only a very few people understand. Ultimately, the large companies are going to have to abide by advertising standards, but to get them to do that may require legislation.
The second bill is the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill whereby the government is seeking to wipe off the statute books around 6000 executive orders which have come from the EU. The minister dealing with that happens to be dealing with that Martin Callanan is quite abrupt and there have been some testy exchanges. That makes life quite interesting – people at least wake up!
But I’m particularly concerned about the third bill, the Illegal Immigration Bill. This goes against our treaty obligations – as was pointed out in the second reading in the House of Lords.
As the Bill stands, we have the government-sanctioned entry points, which have special status – essentially if you’re an Afghan or Ukrainian refugee, or if you’re from Hong Kong. But let’s say, for example, that you come from Eritrea: if an asylum application is refused, then you can never return in your lifetime. Furthermore, if you’re an unaccompanied child, you can stay until you’re 18, then you’re sent to Rwanda. It rides roughshod over 1951 Refugee Convention.
The point the government makes – and it’s clever of them to make it – is that nobody is coming up with an alternate system. What we argue is that if the UK is serious about immigrants and asylum seekers in genuine fear of persecution, then they’ve got to create more safe routes into this country.
In actual fact, the numbers that comes here are quite low pro rata as compared with Germany, France, Italy, Greece and other European countries. Of course, there is undoubtedly a problem with economic migrants who come here, but there is a mechanism in place to determine people’s claims.
The question is why does the government not go after the criminal gangs? They’ll never succeed in starving them of revenue with the current proposed legislation. Really they need to infiltrate the criminal gangs. Intelligence ought to know who they are – and if they don’t, they should. It’s certainly worthy of a question in the House. Are the intelligence services on this?
Incidentally, the current processing of the special programmes is a shambles. The Ukrainian situation has more or less obliterated the work on Afghanistan, due to the melancholy fact that the Foreign Office can’t do two things at the same time. To be registered as a genuine asylum seeker, the offices which issue refugee passes are few and far between, and hugely overburdened with around 350,000 people currently awaiting recognition that their application is bona fide.
All of which, as Sunak knows, is a lot for the Houe to process. The trouble is we only have about 50 or 60 hard-working peers; they do a fantastic job, but that number is very small – but the question of House of Lords reform is a topic for another article altogether.
Illegal immigration is an important issue for me. I think there’s a lot of misreporting about Rwanda, and it’s outrageous. How would I describe Kigali, the capital? It’s very tidy – extraordinarily clean city. It has high rates of economic growth, and gives the impression of being a well-run country. In my life, as the longest-serving foreign secretary of Australia, I must have been to over a 100 countries.
I also like to point out that these asylum seekers are also coming from a country called France, so there’s a choice of France or Rwanda. That’s not inhumane. Gary Lineker is a football ex-player and pundit. I don’t regard him as an expert on immigration issues; he’s reading about people scoring goals and being offside. Of course, it would be inhumane if the policy were to send genuine refugees back to their country, but that’s not the policy. The reality is that people smugglers have found a way to make huge amounts of money, and it’s a racket. It’s also hugely expensive for the government to pick these people up, process and house them.
Difficult interviews never bothered me. The media’s job is to hold you to account. If you’re powerful and decided on a particular path, you’ve got to be prepared to defend it. The Andrew Neil Show wasn’t a problem for me. I did an interview with Kay Burley on Sky, and she was incredibly against the government’s policy, but that was okay. If you’re so worried about being attacked by journalists, why not put them in charge of the country and see how it goes? Usually, whatever you do is sub-optimal.
I remember the day I was sworn in in Australia by the Governor-General as a Cabinet Minister. One of my colleagues who’d previously been premier of New South Wales, he was being sworn in as finance minister, and I remember him turning him to me: “This is the best day you’ll have as a minister. I said: Why’s that? And he said because nobody I left politics in 2008, and still on social media I get attacked for things we did in government and that’s fine.
Over the years, I’ve met many world leaders. The more conviction they have the better. When John Howard was Prime Minister, we were subject to endless attacks. We used to describe ourselves as the Howard Fascist Dictatorship because they hated us so much. But we knew what we were doing, and felt that what we were doing was for the best. It hurts more when you’re attacked for a slip of the tongue or a gaffe. If you want to be popular, it’s not the job for you. You become famous in your country but at the same time for many people become infamous.
Twenty years on from Iraq, I wonder whether we were right, and I think we were. We didn’t make a huge contribution to the invasion of Iraq, but getting rid of Saddam Hussein was a good thing. However, the Americans handled the post-invasion incredibly badly. We argued with the Americans about that, but it wouldn’t have made any difference if we’d refused to participate. You can’t ask the Americans to underwrite the security of the Indo-Pacific region at huge expense to the American taxpayer, and be a fairweather ally.
Both Blair and Bush were leaders of conviction. You’d have to say you were impressed by the forcefulness of each. They’re different sorts of people – both very personable. Bush was very funny, full of jokes. The funniest moment relates to my wife, Nicky. It was September 2007, were at the Australian PM’s Sydney residence and at this time he was incredibly unpopular worldwide. Condi Rice was there, and she said to my wife: “Would you like to meet the President?” My wife said: “He’s a bit out of my league. Condi insisted and I don’t know what came over my wife nut my wife said: “Mr. President, what’s it like being the most popular person in the world.” I’m Australia’s leading diplomat and he just laughed and said: “That’s politics. You have to do what you think I’d right. She spoke to him for 15 minutes and came away thinking he was delightful, much underrated by people. He made politically incorrect jokes and at one which I won’t repeat I said: “You mustn’t say that publicly. “No,” he said. “I never would.”
It all started when I went on Sky’s Portrait Artist of the Year. They said: “What would you like? What pronouns?” So I was there, wearing a dress and makeup and I said: “Well, she/ her.” It was a bit like: ‘Would you like a cup of tea? Coffee? Latte?” It wasn’t set up in a big way. I wasn’t there saying: “Look, it’s in the contract, you’ve got to do this.” So they decided to do that – and when it came out there was quite a firestorm. In Britain and America, in two days everything had changed. Now I’m very happy I’ve been promoted to “she”: it’s a great honour. Some people are grumpy about this but I have given 35 years notice.
None of this formed any part of Six Minutes to Midnight, which I filmed with Judi Dench and released earlier this year. That was some time before the pronoun thing kicked off. I feel it’s a tripping hurdle for us, for anyone who’s trans. People get quite militant, maybe on my behalf and I say: “Look, everyone should calm down. People call me ‘he’, people call me ‘she’. It doesn’t really matter because I am gender fluid.” What’s more important is to ask whether my comedy’s good enough? Is my drama good enough? With my marathon running, am I raising enough money? Doing things in French and German, is that inspiring enough?
Judi Dench had a sweepstake on set about whether her wobbly tooth would fall out. I did the mathematics involved, but I never gamble because I know what the odds are! Judi doesn’t do ceremony – she’s just another person, chatting with the other girls. She said we treated her well, and it was a wonderful experience.
With the whole pronouns thing, at first I thought it might change my acting career. But I’ve just done something for a Netflix show up in Manchester, and there were no problems: some people were calling me ‘he’ on set, others ‘she’. I think if I were a hunk or something like that, it would be a problem, but because I’m hopefully a more versatile, quirky actor I have to create my own area.
Going forwards, I want to do as many films as I can. I want to set up my own films, as I did with Six Minutes to Midnight, and keep giving myself a good role, as Clint Eastwood did. I’ve got to pull more stories out of me and direct them as well. But if a by-election comes up that’s a good fit for me – or, failing that, the next election if I get chosen and win it.
London has made it very hard for street performers. I came from that – and it’s the reason I can do what I do – and play the Hollywood Bowl and Madison Square Gardens and the other big places. We set up the Street Performers Association in the mid-eighties in order to fight against the rules preventing people from performing. Sadly, organisations tend to look down on street performers. I think they see us as riff-raff but street performers have been doing it for years, way back to Punch and Judy and the time of Samuel Pepys, and beyond that.
Westminster Council, in particular, is making it very tough. They did this thing where they said, ‘Let’s hear your views’. So we put forward our views and then they just ignored them all and carried on doing what they’re doing.
It’s also a question of language. Buskers tend to be musicians with a passing audience – and we’re street performers who actually get an audience, do a show and then the audience dissipates which is a slightly different thing. But really we’re all working together. If something goes slightly wrong, the council seems to be saying: “Well, everyone’s banned from playing here”. Police often end up having to marshal street performers: it’s just the wrong way of doing things.
What I find tricky with the Labour Party is when, as people who are like-minded and really on the same team, we all spend a lot of time arguing. It becomes very tiring because we keep going round the houses. Do I want to be prime minister? What I want to do is to get Keir Starmer to be prime minister, or help whoever is the leader of the Labour Party – and I am a good fighter.
Six Minutes to Midnight starring Eddie Izzard, Judi Dench, Carla Juri, James D’Arcy and Jim Broadbent is out now
Photo credit: By Giuseppe Sollazzo – https://www.flickr.com/photos/puntofisso/17123311876/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=40679228
I spent most of my career in business and am a bit of a Johnny-come-Lately to politics; I got elected at the age 49. I am the first former apprentice to be Education Secretary – and I’m also the only degree level apprentice in the House of Commons.
25 years ago, growing up on the outskirts of Liverpool in Knowsley, there weren’t that many opportunities. For me, an apprenticeship was a golden ticket; I was so delighted at the time. But it’s been quite a shock at the Department for Education when everyone looks down on you as if you’ve come up with soot on your face.
I’m sometimes asked who was the person who most destroyed the education system and I’d say Shirley Williams. I was on a trip with a Lib Dem MP, going to St Mungos to visit a homeless shelter; we were on a Public Accounts Committee together. She spent the entire train ride telling me how fantastic Shirley Williams was, and all about the comprehensive system. Having been a beneficiary of this system, where 92 per cent of students were without any qualifications, I was confused by her enthusiasm. Then I found out on the return journey that her education consisted of the International School of Brussels and Roedean; she’d never been anywhere near a comprehensive school.
That’s the whole point: theory and practice are very different. Rishi Sunak understands that and it’s one of things which makes him a fantastic prime minister. He has the most extraordinary talent; he’s very detailed and strategic and kind. I look at him and think that he’s got that stardust, and a lot of space to grow: I think he will be a world statesman.
Rishi is very encouraging but also gets things done. Look at the Windsor Framework: when you consider the column inches which were devoted to this, and the question of whether it was any good or not, and whether it was practicable: he got it through. Look at the way he’s handled the health unions and the teaching unions.
Education will be a big part of the story we tell to the electorate next year, when it comes to our achievements over 13 years. In 2010, we inherited a lot of problems in our education system. The attainment of children wasn’t up compared with other countries; for instance, in the PISA rankings the country had fallen back nine points over the 13 years of the Labour government. That’s quite a lot. We had fewer schools deemed ‘Outstanding’.
We also did a lot in childcare in our budget earlier this year. In 13 years of Labour government, all Labour introduced was 12 and a half hours for three and four year olds. That was it. Since then we’ve introduced 30 free hours, and now we’re doing nine months to five years, which leaves Labour nowhere to go.
You’ve also got to look at what Michael Gove and Nick Gibb did in setting up academies; they’ve transformed academic outcomes and opportunities for kids. Having grown up in Knowsley, I know there are large numbers of very bright children who don’t get the chance to go to an outstanding school or to university. Social mobility is not a slogan with me.
We’ve also done a lot to be proud of when it comes to universities, and in relation to skills. That’s a nice thing about my current role: it’s where I started as a skills and apprenticeships minister. I can now get stuff through which I wanted to do then and which everyone overruled me on at the time.
One such thing is medical apprenticeships. I started to think: “How do we get parents to want their children to do apprenticeships?” I thought about what parents want for their children: they want their kids to have a good profession and a stellar career. When it comes to medical apprenticeships for 18 year olds, the courses are five years long. That means you can come at 18 and be a doctor in five years. It’s the sort of thing which shows you that this is a government focused on delivery.
From my seat on the front bench I have a good view of the Leader of the Opposition. The only time Sir Keir Starmer has ever energised a room is by leaving it. It’s quite a good vantage point on the front bench. I think: “You’re making a massive miscalculation. What are you going to say when we deliver all this!” Margaret Thatcher always used to say, if you’re not ten points behind then you’re not doing enough. This is going to be a historic fifth term.
For anyone looking to be famous, one possible route seems to be to truncate your name into a snappy word: the strategy has worked for Beyoncé, Banksy, Madonna and plenty of others. Perhaps in a busy world we don’t have time for multiple syllables anymore. Were Warhol alive today he might just be Andy.
The photographer Rankin is shorthand for John Rankin Waddell: as the founder of Dazed and Confused the globally distributed magazine, photographer of Kate Moss and Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, and with long ties to the music industry, the 54-year-old photographer is now at the summit of his profession.
So how did he get started? His early education looks at first inauspicious: Rankin studied accounting at Brighton Polytechnic, before dropping out in order to study photography at Barnfield college in Luton. He subsequently relocated to the London College of Printing. In time, his reputation as a fashion and music photographer grew.
But he really owes his start, he tells us to Icelandic pop star Bjork: ‘Bjork was brilliant. It was literally my first ever shoot for a record label. She’s one of the most era-defining musicians because aesthetically she’s so unique and original, and she’s very in control of her image.”
What did he learn from her? “What I loved about her was that she just let me do my thing. I have to be honest; there was a moment in the shoot where I was trying to do something that was a bit derivative of another photographer, and she gave me the confidence to just not do it. She was like, ‘You don’t need that shot, stick to what you’re doing’.”
So did that make a difference in terms of his subsequent career? “She kind of set me up in a way, because very few people have ever surpassed her collaborative approach.” Collaboration is a leitmotif in Rankin’s career. It was only upon meeting Jefferson Hack at London College of Printing that he felt able to launch Dazed and Confusedin 1992.
Fast forward to 2021, and Rankin is still productive – and still collaborating. His latest book How to Die Wellis produced in partnership with Royal London, the UK’s largest pensions company. So how does he think this book will help people in these death-conscious times? “Death scares people, and that discomfort is the main barrier to talking about it,” he says. “The hardest part is getting started, but once you push through the fear – those conversations become a lot easier.”
This tracks with my own encounters with those who’ve been around death a lot – from nurses and doctors to undertakers and funeral directors, they seem not to have the expected heaviness, but instead a certain lightness of being.
So has compiling the book helped Rankin face his own mortality, and the mortality of his loved ones? “Making this book has definitely helped me to deal with my own grief, as well as confront the idea of dying,” he admits. “And it’s so important that we do, because having these kinds of discussions means that when the time comes, our loved ones are prepared.”
It’s been an extraordinary time. For over a year now, we look at our media and see the death toll writ large.
Have we become a morbid society? “I’m not sure the pandemic has made us, as a society, any better at having these conversations. The shock and size of the grief has been overwhelming,” Rankin says. “I think it’s going to take a long time for people to process what has happened. But it has certainly presented us with the undeniable reality of death.”
And yet How to Die Wellisn’t a serious book by any stretch of the imagination – it’s full of anecdotes, lightness of touch, and charm.
How did he go about compiling the book? “We interviewed a broad selection of people who shared their experiences of grief – and also told us what they’d like their funeral to look like. There were some absolute corkers. From unusual song choices, to outrageous outfits, to hilarious last words. Death is just like life: there are ups, downs, laughs, lots of crying – and more than a few funny bits.”
The former Commercial Secretary to the Treasury and Goldman Sachs chief economist on the 20thanniversary of coining the influential term the BRICs
In late summer 2001, when I was co-head of economic research at Goldman Sachs with Gavin Davies, it became clear there was a strong probability Gavin would be leaving to become Chairman of the BBC. In Goldman’s inimitable style, their immediate thought was to find another co-head for me.
And so I became involved in interviewing all sorts of incredibly illustrious economists from around the world – spectacularly well-known names. I had to explore the idea that I would have some credibility as their equal.
Then, crucially, September 11thhappened. I’d been at the annual Economics Association Conference in the Twin Towers. On the Tuesday, Gavin and I were hosting our monthly video conference with all our MDs around the world. Halfway through, the guys in New York left. We were wrapped up in our little world – we just carried on. Then, around 15 minutes later Gavin left for his final interview for the BBC. He popped back into the room and said: “I think you probably want to be aware that apparently some plane has hit one of the Twin Towers.” My first instinct was to say: “Okay, thanks Gavin. Now, you guys in Asia…”
But within two days of it happening, I came to the strange conclusion that the underlying message to take away from this tragedy – rightly or wrongly – is that this was the end of American-led globalisation. It was the terrorists lashing out and saying: “We’ve had enough of Americanization.”
Within six weeks, I published my first piece: ‘The world needs better economic BRICs”. Three things were at the core of it. Firstly, I’d already been mesmerised by China’s role in helping solve the Asian crisis in the late 90s so I was already aware of the relevance of China for the world. Then, of course, we were coming to the end of the first decade of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the supposed emergence of Russia as some kind of democratic state. The G7 would soon expand to the G8 to accommodate Russia.
Thirdly, we’d also seen the launch of the Euro as a single currency. So France, Germany and Italy now shared a single monetary policy, currency and the common framework for fiscal policy, which would still have the same equal representation as all these seeds of global economic governance.
It was only in 2003 that the acronym became well-known in business, when we published our outline as to what the world could look like by 2050. We deliberately called that ‘Dreaming with BRICs’. People forget that we wrote about what could happen if ever country fulfilled its potential. Of course, in reality the idea that every country in the world would reach its productivity potential is crazy. The idea that they’d all do it at the same time is completely absurd.
In reality, what has happened is that China has become so big that it’s twice the size of the other three put together. So when it comes to discussing the BRICs as an economic or political group, China completely dominates. Because of that, it still means that the various assumptions we made about the BRICS becoming bigger than the G6 in the future, actually could still happen – despite what has been a very disappointing decade for Brazil and Russia.
Overall, China and India look as though they’re going along the central path that we assumed. Meanwhile, Brazil and Russia have proved that they suffer from the so-called commodities curse. They can’t seemingly adjust their economies from being excessively dependent on commodity price swings. They keep having these violent economic cycles. In both countries, there’s also significant evidence of misallocation of resources and a lot of blatant corrupt practices that go with these dominant industries. Both countries need to reform and stimulate their private sectors.
Interestingly, the legal people at Goldman spent a brief amount of time exploring the case for acquiring the rights to the acronym. Whenever anyone mentioned the phrase BRICs, they wanted it to be Goldman Sachs BRICs. I argued against that because then other places wouldn’t have used it.
Today I worry that the American democratic system is struggling. The country is having to adjust to the fact that for the past 20 years, US economic growth has been so unequal. There’s been no rise in real wages during that time, which has caused this remarkable split politically. If we don’t see renewed economic growth post-COVID – and alongside it, shared economic growth – then the fragility will only grow more.
