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  • Obituary: Martin Amis 1949-2023

    Christopher Jackson remembers the diminutive battler of cliché, and asks what morals his famous style pointed towards

    I have started to dread a random Apple news flash on my iPhone: this sudden beeping sidebar seems to exist partly to alert me to the unexpected death of someone I mind about. If I knew how to turn off these updates I probably would, and take my chances on the websites.

    As it is, the need to own a phone has so far trumped the annoyance of being plugged into a cycle of morbidity and crisis. Last year it was Shane Warne, dead of a heart attack at some absurdly young age, as if the Grim Reaper had no understanding whatsoever of the virtue of a good leg break.

    This weekend it was Martin Amis, who died in Fort Worth, Florida at the age of 73 – the same age as his father Sir Kingsley Amis – of a disease I hadn’t known he had, in a house I wasn’t aware he had owned.

    Why should the death of our heroes be so shocking, being as it is the surest fact about the world? Partly, it is because we’re deprived of the context of decline. Death has its logic lived one moment at a time: Warne’s yo-yo diets and jager bombs, and Amis’ smoking and drinking are explanations we look for amid the fact of coming to terms with it all. We have to play catch up mid-grief – we scrabble for information as we mourn.

    I can still remember Amis sitting to one side of Christopher Hitchens during one of the latter’s last TV interviews, swigging a bottled beer while his friend, bald from chemotherapy, talked so brilliantly in the face of death. Hitchens looked vulnerable, but Amis appeared separate from his friend’s situation. Now we must assimilate that these past years Amis had been silently dealing with the same illness which killed his friend.

    Separated from cause like this, Amis’ departure leaves us with the shock of an unsubstantiated absence. In the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, we have come to expect immortality from our literary greats. It was John Updike who expressed his surprise at Nabokov’s death by saying he had ‘imagined him exempt’.

    I don’t think our regard for Amis ever quite partook of the awe which he – and others – felt for the author of Lolita. It was Amis’ fate to be obviously brilliant, but also to be widely disparaged and belittled.

    There were many reasons for this. One was his physical stature: always, in his own words, ‘a short arse’ he was also characterised by Christopher Hitchens as ‘little Keith’. Given who his father was, it was possible to miss the scale of his achievement by thinking him a smart child. “Daddy does it better,” was a bright friend of mine’s verdict, and one I doubt he would consider revisiting.

    Yet now, in his obituaries, Martin is a ‘literary giant’, amid all the other newspaper banalities: the ‘Mick Jagger of literature’, the ‘enfant terrible’ and so forth. “Why don’t people ever refer to Mick Jagger as the Martin Amis of rock and roll?” he once opined.

    But we now experience the sudden sweeping away of all the nonsense that was written about him. The somewhat overblown controversies recede – things Amis said here and there in interview about Islam, about how he’d have to be brain dead to write children’s books, or silliness surrounding his teeth. All this exaggeration and ad hoc explaining rushes aside to be replaced by the work he did at the desk: Money, London Fields, Experience, The Zone of Interest (a film of which was showing at Cannes in the week of his death), The House of Meetings, Success, to name only a few.

    These are what matter but one wonders if they will matter enough. On the BBC News, Amis’ death came second throughout Saturday to the departure of Phillip Schofield from ITV’s This Morning – a pretty vivid example of the insanity which Amis had spent his life railing against. But as Auden put it: “Poetry makes nothing happen.”

    Writers will look at the death of a fellow writer – especially one so eminent as Amis – and pause in their next day’s work, wondering if it’s necessarily worth it. Amis himself knew this feeling, and articulated it definitively in his 2009 tribute to John Updike: “Several times a day you turn to him, as you will now to his ghost, and say to yourself ‘How would Updike have done it?’ This is a very cold day for literature”. So it goes today.

    But already at his death, Martin Amis was read less than at any time in the last 50 years. There wasn’t a great fanfare around 2020’s Inside Story – presumably his last novel unless something comes to us posthumously. This may have been because in retrospect he was too ill to conduct too many interviews. But undeniably, he had begun to run out of steam. That last book – in many respects a rewrite of 2000’s memoir Experience – felt bloated, the sign of a writer returning to material – his father, his friendships with the American novelist Saul Bellow and Christopher Hitchens – which he’d already satisfactorily dispatched.

    In a sense then, his death comes with this compensation: Martin Amis got himself expressed. Well then, what did he say?

    As numerous obituarists have pointed out, he said first of all that what he was saying was of less importance than how he said it – or more, what he was saying was how he said it. Sometimes, as in his great collection of journalism The War Against Cliché, he pointed this out very precisely – but all along it was the subtext of every sentence he wrote.

    Can this commitment to style be taken too far? Christopher Hitchens recounts how Amis refused to go on past the first page of Orwell’s 1984 because of the early line describing the Stalin figure as ‘ruggedly handsome’. It could be argued that to miss out on 1984 because of this was a step too far: he sometimes acted as though writing was only style. “Style isn’t neutral; it gives moral directions,” he once said.

    So in what direction did Amis – or rather Amis’ style – point morally? One sentence which is rightly celebrated from Experience is this lordly dismissal of a minor critic: “By calling him humourless I mean to impugn his seriousness, categorically: such a man must rig up his probity ex nihilo.” It is worth pointing out firstly that this superb line occurs in a footnote, a reminder in itself that a true work ethic will make sure it prospers even at the margins. To commit to a path in life is tantamount to a blanket refusal to relax.

    But the sentence has far more in it to impart than the mere importance of Amis having written it when he might have got way with something lesser.

    For instance, note the comma before the word ‘categorically’: if a comma is a pause then Amis here takes a moment to tauten his bow before slinging his arrow. But there is also a patience here – a marshalling of care, which might be taken as containing pity for the target of the ensuing barb. It isn’t a sneer, but a tender corrective. It is also worth noting the marvellous switch to Latin with ‘ex nihilo’, which holds – and is held – in marvellous balance by the run of one-syllable words, and especially the Anglo-Saxon sounds of ‘rig up’. The overwhelming impression is of serenity – a calm contentment at his own gifts.

    Was this enough? This equilibrium in the Amis style loops back to his fundamental delight at his choices in life. He loved his job and his work, and never seriously deviated from it, unless one counts his foray into screen-writing with Saturn III, which abortive experience was immediately scooped up in the terrific gift of his masterpiece Money.

    What did writing mean to him as a career? Amis once described writing as “a sort of sedentary, carpet slippers, self-inspecting, nose-picking, arse-scratching kind of job, just you in your study and there is absolutely no way round that. So, anyone who is in it for worldly gains and razzmatazz, I don’t think will get very far at all.”

    In fact, Amis was so famous so young that he could have spent his life at parties. Zachary Leader has recalled that Amis, always kind to his friends, never mastered the art of saying no politely to invitations.

    But if there were hurt feelings, I think we can let those lapse now: the most important word in a writer’s vocabulary is ‘no’ – and had Amis not used it to so much we might not have London Fields. As Amis once said in relation to the emotional response of one of Bellow’s friends who didn’t like the way he’d been depicted in one of the master’s novels: “Well, that’s just tough.”

    What else does the Amis style point towards? There were the piled-up lists of horrified noticing, which are often allied to disgust at modernity: Amis was really a romantic at heart, appalled at this post-lapsarian world. This rhythmic rage was identified by John Updike in his review of Night Train (1997) – the critical mauling which hurt Amis most – as a ‘typical burst of Amis lyricism’. This trope was there from the beginning in this depiction of a street in 1973’s The Rachel Papers, which is seen as containing: “demonically mechanical cars; potent solid living trees; unreal distant-seeming buildings; blotchy extra-terrestrial wayfarers”. This brash listiness repeats throughout the oeuvre and is Amis’ way of showing how the ugliness of the world appears to be piling up exponentially, and can only be mitigated by being named – only when you do that do you begin to bring things back under control.

    This, then, is the Amis disgust, and in his worst novels this emotion could seem synonymous with a dislike of the working classes. There will always be those who think that he was dismissive about people with whom he could claim at best a slender acquaintance. On the other hand, he was creating a fictional universe not writing government policy, and those who read him as if they don’t know the difference will probably never enjoy a comic novel.

    Amis wrote much about the importance of a writer being generous to readers – by which, he appears to have meant being intelligible. For him Ulysses was too difficult, and Finnegan’s Wake an absurdity; even his own beloved Nabokov strayed into error with his late book Ada. My least favourite of Amis’ books for similar reasons is Time’s Arrow, a Holocaust story told backwards, and which gave me a migraine. But it was a brilliant idea even if it could never have been a readable book.

    I’d say that by the midpoint of his career, Time’s Arrow tells you all you need to know about Amis and the future – he didn’t welcome it, and wanted time itself to flow not forwards, but backwards. Again, he had his reasons. Most people who truly love writing know that the future can’t be everything it’s cracked up to be: Shakespeare died 407 years ago.

    Amis gives us a Britain – and then an America – in decline. Some have said that especially in Money, Amis depicts the excesses of late capitalism, which is true in so far as it goes, except that we don’t know how near its death capitalism really is. For all we know, it might be that he is the chronicler of its stodgy middle period.

    At any rate, Amis seems to be sitting too comfortably to one side of societal decay, regarding it. It’s always possible that someone may have some vast private George Michael-esque habit of philanthropy, but I find it hard to imagine Amis rolling his sleeves up to fix a problem; the idea of him ever running for office like Gore Vidal or Norman Mailer is palpably absurd. But perhaps there’s never been anyone better at describing the problems themselves.

    Even so, this sane opting out made politics a difficult subject for Amis. Something about history – though it fascinated him – didn’t sit easily with him creatively. This might be because he was a very sensory writer, and the past is out of reach. Gore Vidal – who Amis wrote brilliantly about – understood the past instinctively, but Amis can’t write about the past without straining after significance. The repetitions which Craig Brown satirised brilliantly in The Mail increase considerably in any book when Amis is grappling with the past. This is Brown pretending to be Amis:

    I am a serious. It is novels that I usually write: what I usually write is novels. And you know why I write? I write to fill the chiliastic lacuna of the aberrant psychotheatre in my headipops. And it all adds up to one thing. I am a serious.

    Hilarious as this is, you can only parody a style which is absolutely recognisable in the first place.

    Nevertheless, something like self-parody increases in frequency in Koba the Dread, The House of Meetings, The Zone of Interest, and The Second Plane – basically any book when Amis is taking on serious subject matter. It is the self-consciousness of taking on big topics which appears to get in the way of what he elsewhere regards as the crucial business of perception, which then leads necessarily, because the world is funny, to comedy. He once said that he continued to write about the Holocaust because he hadn’t come to understand it yet. This need to assimilate the unthinkable is really a sort of refusal of mysticism, and therefore a dead end. There has to be mystery in writing; it is the unseen energy which harnesses the instinct to do it at all. Amis couldn’t leave evil alone as a thing which just is and requires no special or new explanation. There has always been a strand of Judaeo-Christian thinking which regards the devil as essentially boring. Amis wasn’t at all of that tradition. In his best books he floated free of it in the comic mode. But when he sought to take on the Nazis or Stalin, he was rudderless.

    Similarly, he had no particular interest in goodness either. In this, as in much else, he is similar to Dickens, whose villains are vivid, but whose heroines – think Esther Summerson in Bleak House –  simper, as if goodness can’t ever have convincing embodiment. Updike wrote in that same review of Night Train that Amis’ fiction ‘lacks positives’. Though Amis always stopped short of Hitchens-style atheism arguing that it sounded like a ‘proof of something’ there may have been something ultimately a bit watery about his worldview which led to a somewhat unmoored intellectual life. This is what ultimately weakens the work undertaken outside the genre of comedy.

    But how wonderful he was when he was doing what he was best at. I think of the uproarious descriptions of Marmaduke in London Fields; of his description of Updike as a ‘psychotic Santa of volubility’; of the ‘nylon rain’ in Success; of the filmed sex scene in Money (‘You’re a tremendously ugly man, John’); his description of accompanying Blair during the end of his premiership, and finding himself becoming ‘mildly flirtatious’ with the PM; the idea in Experience, of Kingsley Amis’ last fall being a thing of ‘colossal administration’; and his great eulogy to Christopher Hitchens, to my mind the greatest speech by far of the post-War period in an admittedly poor period for orations generally.

    We go to Amis not to meditate on the complexity of the world, but for joyous laughter. And in this serious world there is sufficient dearth of that to make his passing an event very far from neutral: it’s time to go with delight and love back to the books. But as we do so, let’s ask ourself what the style pointed towards.

     

  • Dinesh Dhamija: Why Modi is Big in Japan

    Dinesh Dhamija

    It was just a casual encounter, but it told a bigger story.

    When Joe Biden and Anthony Albanese stopped for a chat with Narendra Modi at the G7 Summit in Japan, the US and Australian leaders remarked that they were getting thousands of requests to attend meetings with him. Albanese then recalled how, on a visit to Gujarat, a crowd of more than 90,000 people cheered wildly for the Indian Prime Minister.

    “I should take your autograph,” said Biden.

    He could certainly do with some of Modi’s magic. As he approaches next year’s elections, Biden’s approval rating languishes at 42 per cent and has only a small polling lead over his prospective Republican opponent Donald Trump. Anthony Albanese is up for re-election in 2025 and currently enjoys a 53 per cent approval rating.

    Not bad, but not Modi, who can count on the support of 79 per cent of the Indian population, an approval rating unseen in American politics since George W Bush invaded Iraq. How he has built and maintained this level of popular acclaim, in a diverse democracy of 1.4 billion people, is an enduring mystery to other politicians.

    The heads of the seven democracies assembled in Tokyo – Japan, UK, US, Italy, France, Canada and Germany – were all keen to shake Modi’s hand and engage him for a basket full of reasons.

    Some are looking for business, keen to hitch their wagons to India’s ascendant economy. Others urged him to condemn Russia and support Ukraine (President Zelensky was also present). A side meeting of the Quad, made up of India, Japan, Australia and the US, debated security issues in the Asia-Pacific region, including China’s threats to Taiwanese independence.

    So apart from his ratings, what is making Modi so popular among his fellow leaders?

    For one thing, India currently chairs the G20 group and will host a summit in New Delhi in September. Bringing together Russia, China and the US for the first time this year, it will be a stern test of global diplomacy and participants’ negotiating skills. It always pays to be nice to someone who has invited you into their home.

    Second, Modi has somehow forged a relationship with international partners where they are the ones looking for favours. As former US ambassador to India Robert Blackwill put it: “It is the diplomat’s dream to always be asked and never to ask, and India has managed that. One could call it a triumph of Indian diplomacy.”

    Far from ostracising India over its neutrality over the Ukraine war, or for buying Russian oil, the G7 regards Modi as an honest broker in global affairs, the leader of a fast-modernising democracy and their best hope for a consensus of like-minded nations in the face of Chinese and Russian aggression.

    And with any luck, a little bit of his personal popularity might rub off too.


    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.

     

  • Review of Spielberg’s The Fabelmans: ‘a film which tells us our best can be more than enough’

    Photo credit: By Screenshot from the film’s trailer., Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=71734123

     

    Christopher Jackson

     

    The Fabelmans is plainly the capstone in Steven Spielberg’s remarkable career. It is many things: a cautionary warning about the effects of divorce; a celebration of family; a memoir of what life used to be like in 1950s suburbia. But above all it is a film about vocation and what it means to know what it is you want to do in life from an early age.

    That’s because Sammy Fabelman, who we trace in this film from early adolescence to early maturity is to all intents and purposes Spielberg himself – it is as close to an autobiography as we’ll get from him, to the extent that we don’t need one now.

    The film shows quite clearly that cinema hit Spielberg early on with unusual force – as it must have done almost everyone who encountered this new art form which would so come to alter the world. We first meet Fabelman, played by Gabriel LaBelle, in 1952 about to attend a performance of The Greatest Show on Earth by Cecil B. De Mille. He is nervous about entering the cinema, and then watching in astonishment as the film unfolds. Actually at this time, the film industry was already being impacted negatively by the invention of television: the U.S. Census Bureau, shows that weekly attendance dropped from 80 million in 1940 and 90 million in 1946 to 60 million in 1950 and 40 million in 1960.

    Yet something happens of lasting significance to Spielberg/Fabelman at the performance; the scene with the train accident takes hold of him, and later on, he tries to replicate it at home using his father’s 8mm camera. A film director is born. One of the insights in the film is that the first steps required an interest in the technology: the young Fabelman isn’t shown reading books about story-telling, but fiddling with film, and learning to operate the equipment. It’s a reminder that some form of technical knowledge often precedes true creativity.

    Fabelman is growing up in a talented home. His mother Mitzi, played by Michelle Williams, is a brilliant concert pianist who has failed to pursue her dreams due to the 1950s norm of staying at home to raise a family. Meanwhile, Fabelman’s father Burt is a high-flying electrical engineer in the world of computers, and a genius. It feels as though Spielberg himself is composed of a mixture of his mother’s musical sensibility and his father’s natural aptitude for technology.

    Like so many parents faced with creative children,  Burt views Sammy’s film-making as a hobby, no doubt worried – as a parents usually are with good reason – about Steven Spielberg’s financial future. A brief glance at Spielberg’s current net worth shows he needn’t have worried – but then he couldn’t have known that his son was destined to be the most successful filmmaker of all time.

    But this tees up the best scene in the film when Fabelman’s uncle Boris comes to stay. Sammy’s mother is ultimately too depressed – and caught up in an extramarital affair with Seth Rogen’s Bobby, an employee of her husband – to really have enough mental space to understand what ambitions are burning in Sammy. His father meanwhile doesn’t understand that play is really the ultimate seriousness if it can be made to alter hearts.

    But Boris, fresh from the circus, turns out to have Sammy’s number rightaway. He sees the situation clear. For instance, he observes the similarity between Sammy’s nascent gifts, and Mitzi’s thwarted potential: “He could have been that concert piano player. What’s she got in her heart is what you got.” Marching around the room in a stringy vest looking remarkably elastic and even powerful for an octogenarian, Uncle Boris also speaks the movie’s most memorable lines: “Art will give you crowns in heaven and laurels on Earth, but also, it will tear your heart out and leave you lonely. You’ll be a shanda for your loved ones. An exile in the desert. A gypsy. Art is no game! Art is dangerous as a lion’s mouth. It’ll bite your head off.”

    Art is indeed a game played at high stakes, but work generally is too – it is especially so for Burt whose computing genius cuts him off from humanity just as much as Sammy’s skills as a filmmaker. It’s this which ultimately distances him from his wife: it’s not easy to love geniuses since their thought patterns tend to land everywhere except their marriage.

    Watching the film, you are conscious that Spielberg all along had a great sadness in his life, but for the majority of his career – really until this film – he hasn’t tended to make art of high seriousness. His films, as Terry Gilliam has pointed out, tend towards the schmaltzy and the straightforward: he isn’t an auteur in the line of Stanley Kubrick. He is slicker than that – to the benefit of his bank account but probably to the detriment of art. This film shows that all along there was a serious filmmaker waiting to get out. But he chose to entertain instead, and this has given people much joy. Spielberg is an escapist, and we now see what it was he was escaping from.

    The film culminates in a marvellous scene where the young Spielberg writes to filmmakers looking for a job as a runner. His letter lands with Bernard Fein. Job-seekers will often find that life is changed by the generosity unique to people who actually reply to letters: many a career is begun by the fluke of finding them, and stymied by the lack of them.

    Fein mentions that the greatest living filmmaker is working across the corridor and this turns out to be John Ford. What follows is a marvellously cantankerous mentor-mentee scene, where Fabelman is asked to discuss some pictures on the wall.

    The takeaway is that pictures will be interesting if the horizon is slow, or if it’s high – but never interesting in between. It’s as good a piece of advice as any, but I think is offered with more than a small dose of: “You’re on your own.”

    We all are to some extent, but we take what advice we can and we do the best we can. This is a film which tells us that sometimes our best turns out to be much more than enough – and insodoing makes us optimistic about beginning again.

     

     

     

     

  • Legendary jeweller Elizabeth Gage on her education, work ethic and friendship with Lauren Bacall

    Christopher Jackson

     

    Even for people such as myself who wouldn’t necessarily count themselves as knowledgeable about jewellery can see that the creations of Elizabeth Gage possess an unusual degree of intricacy and beauty. Gage strikes me as a little like those high achievers whose endeavours cross over easily to the layman: non-tennis fans used to tune into Federer; non-readers got through Harry Potter; and even I, who has only ever worn a wedding-ring, can still find myself pausing at an Elizabeth Gage creation, wondering about the dedication behind such outstanding creations.

    So what kind of an upbringing did she have? “I did have a creative family,” she tells us. “My mother painted and my grandmother was a painter. I therefore did not want to be a painter but rather wanted to find my own creative calling. I had always been creative as a child, making clothes for my paper dolls. I started out writing but realised that writing wasn’t for me.”

    But her life was about to change “One day I went to the British Museum and that is when everything changed for me,” she recalls. “The sun was shining, and I distinctly remember the sun flooding one big square case, I looked over and saw a set of Roman rings, and the rest is history. From that moment onwards, my heart was set on making jewellery which was imbued with history, to bring the past into the present and make it wearable.”

    That’s part of what sets Elizabeth Gage apart – her commitment to meaning in her work. Perhaps it’s partly this which makes me pause always at her work; I’m being asked not just to look and take delight in her works, but to think as well.

    Another aspect is attention to detail, and Gage is humorous about the demands of that: “I am a patient person when it comes to achieving the piece that I have designed as I never cut corners and want to make sure that each piece is a work of art in its own right. However, once the piece is being made I am impatient to see it finished!”

    Gage describes her early education: “I went to Chelsea School of Art but my experience there swiftly transitioned to Sir John Cass College, which shaped me and my career. I had been advised time and time again to pursue a career as an artist but I had other ideas.” Like many successful people, Gage picked her battles, and she knew what she had to do: “One day, at 12 ‘clock whilst everyone was out at lunch, I went into a classroom at The Sir John Cass College to find Mr Oliver. I had been told that there was no more admission of students for the Goldsmiths course but I would not take no for an answer. I told Mr Oliver that I wanted to learn how to make jewellery and asked if he could fit me into his busy class, to which he responded by making a space for me. He then taught me for eight years, a wonderful experience culminating in me asking to make something in gold, to which Mr Oliver responded “absolutely, but you must buy your own gold.”

    Despite Mr Oliver’s obvious influence, Gage adds: “I never had a mentor. What guided me was my love of making things and learning about how to master the art of jewellery.” There is wisdom here: quite often, we think the responsibility for our success might lie with some third party, but it always lies within.

    Gage is seems to be expert at letting the world come to her, and teach her to decide what to do next. Her first commission came from Cartier was, she says, ‘very unexpected’ and she is refreshingly matter-of-fact about the genesis of her business which will this year see its 60th anniversary.  “It just happened,” she tells us. “Freshly out of school I received a commission from a friend’s father who had asked me to make rings for his daughter and his girlfriends. He had been very shrewd as, being a designer fresh out of school, I was much cheaper than an established jeweller.” So what were the joys and challenges of starting out? The joys were knowing that what I was creating, people loved. There were always challenges that cropped up but I just knew that I needed to get on and continue doing what I loved and not letting any obstacles get in my way.”

    Of course, over time things have changed – not least Gage’s business has straddled the Internet revolution, a development she views very positively. “It has been wonderful in that people from every corner of the world can now see my work online and even buy online if they so wish,” she explains. “We only have our one exclusive store in Belgravia, London so having that virtual vitrine into our world and jewels is terrific.”

    Gage’s success can in part be measured by the famous clients she has amassed, most famously Lauren Bacall. About Bacall, Gage says: “We worked very well together. She loved what I do and I always involved her in whatever I was doing for her. It was very easy. She once brought me a beautiful bejewelled camel which I set into a brooch.”

    So what would be Gage’s advice to a young designer starting out? “Find what you love doing and that will give you direction of what you must do. It is no good just liking it, you need to really love it.”

    Gage has now been decorated with an MBE (“I never thought I would ever receive something as wonderful as that”) and her goal, even at the age of 85 is “to charge onwards and constantly to be inspired”. Of course, in taking that attitude, she’s also inspired us in return. We are all the beneficiaries of the work of Elizabeth Gage.

     

     

  • Dinesh Dhamija on the ‘diaspora dividend’ of Indians living and working abroad

    Dinesh Dhamija

    At a time when India is breaking records for the growth of its population and economy – here’s another. There are more than 18 million people of Indian origin living outside the country, way higher than any other nation. (Russia and Mexico have 11 million each, China has 10 million.)

    But so what if millions of us live elsewhere? Doesn’t it mean that conditions were so poor that we had to leave?

    At a black-tie dinner in central London last week, I listened to the Industry Minister for the Indian state of Telangana, K T Rama Rao, explain how India’s economy can catch up with China’s in the next 15 years, if the country follows Telangana’s shining example as a ‘startup state’.

    To an audience of 500 members of the Indian diaspora, Rao said: “If any UK entrepreneur wants to set up in India, go to Gujarat or Karnataka and then tell us what they’re offering you and we’ll meet or beat that offer.” Telangana has reaped $47 billion worth of investments across 23,000 new business approvals since 2013, including Amazon, which has its largest global campus in the capital Hyderabad, alongside Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Uber, Google and Qualcomm.

    What impressed me, as much as all of these statistics, was the mob of British Indians that surrounded Rao when he’d finished speaking and then pursued him out of the hall. The balance of power has switched, from India desperately seeking inward investment, to Western investors – mainly from the diaspora – eager to get in on the act.

    If you look at a list of the world’s largest and wealthiest companies, an incredible number of them in recent years have had CEOs of Indian heritage. Google, Microsoft, Pepsi, Mastercard, Diageo, Nokia, Adobe… the list goes on. It’s a 21st century phenomenon, and it’s symptomatic of a global rise in the status of Indian technocrats. In the United States, Indians’ average income is $120,000 a year, compared with $65,000 overall. They’re more often college educated, they work hard and contribute to society.

    In the UK, we now have Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of Indian descent; the United States has Kamala Harris, a Vice President of Indian descent. Today, 74 per cent of British Indians own their own home, compared with 68 per cent of white British people. In education, 62 per cent of British Indian High School students get grade 5 and above in English and Maths, compared with 42 per cent of white British pupils, and 96 per cent of Indian students continue on to further education, compared with 85 per cent of white British students.

    In India, people no longer talk about a ‘brain drain’ of skilled and talented people leaving the country. They talk about a ‘brain circulation’ and about the rich rewards that India now reaps from its extraordinary diaspora, with $107 billion in remittances coming back to the country in 2022, compared with $84 billion from foreign direct investment.

    Uniquely in world history, a country which has lost more of its population than any other is now gladly welcoming them home.

    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.

  • Siobhan Baillie MP on her new Employability APPG

    Siobhan Baillie MP

     

    I have spent over a decade talking to the fabulous founder of Finito about education and whether our various education systems get people work ready.

     

    Since the pandemic, the country is also facing an urgent need to have a work ready population leaving school, college and university to boost the economy.  And with over 1m job vacancies, businesses I visit often place recruitment and retention issues at the top of their concerns.

    As part of their mission to grow the country, the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer are focused on ensuring people have every opportunity to train and retrain at all times of life.

    But many young people still do not leave education prepared for work or the multiple job changes they are likely to have as technology forces us to adapt.  Many families do not have the contacts to set up work experiences.

    This is why, together with Ronel Lehmann of Finito Education, I have recently launched an All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for the Future of Employability.

    As an MP, I sometimes think back on the circumstances which led me to Westminster. I left home at 15, I left school at 17 and my prospects were frankly not great.  I got a job as a legal secretary and then worked my way up to become a family law solicitor.  It was hard graft to study while working full time, but worth it.

    Throughout all of that I also took Saturday jobs, had a paper round, I waitressed in a pub and led dancing classes amongst other things.  I taught aerobics and spinning to pay for law school.  Every interaction with the public and endlessly getting things wrong in the full glare of real life was useful training.  I learned a lot from the people I worked with too.

    Yet this country still views on the job training, further education colleges and apprenticeships as inferior to university degrees.  Many employers do not invest in training staff.  In some areas work experience and careers guidance is poor or non-existent.  Young people no longer work at the weekends or in school holidays.

    How do we shift our thinking? The first thing might seem cosmetic but it would put rocket fuel under the issue. The Secretary of State for Education – currently the brilliant Gillian Keegan MP – could become the Secretary of State for Education and Employability.

    Secondly, we need to really land the benefits of lifelong learning and remove barriers to retraining, including with fees for employers and employees.  Making it easy for mothers, people who have been out of work due to illness and recently retired people to return to work at some level could be transformational for them and the country.

    Thirdly, we need to value work experience. Employers are often faced with red tape when it comes to offering young people work placements. The confidence, learning and contacts you get from a real life day at work cannot be replicated online.

    There will always be a place for education for its own sake, but I believe it would benefit millions of young lives if studies are undertaken with a sense of ultimate direction.

    We will use the APPG to explore with businesses, organisations and think tanks what is making the UK underinvest in job related training and work experience opportunities.  We need to interrogate brand new government initiatives like the lifelong learning loan entitlement and old problems like how the apprenticeship levy works for small and medium companies.

    I am excited about the challenge.

     

    The writer is the MP for Stroud

     

     

  • Class Dismissed: Dame Mary Richardson

    Photo credit: BBC News

     

    The legendary educator discusses HMS Dasher, teaching and finding a meaningful career

     

    We’re at the 80th anniversary of the sinking of HMS Dasher. What’s next in the quest for answers?

     

    Dasher went down on 27th March 1943. The funeral was 3 days later and 23 bodies were buried, 13 in Ardrossan cemetery. Officially no further bodies or body parts ever came ashore. However a week later on 6 April 1943 Admiral Eccles sent a signal, a copy of which we have, saying that ‘bodies are being washed ashore, identified and buried along the coast.’ We have many testimonies from survivors who say that they helped to identify up to 40 bodies laid out in rows. So we know beyond doubt that more than 23 bodies came ashore.

     

    The hunt for these sailors’ unmarked resting places will go on. But LIDAR and geophysical surveys are needed. I have funded these so far but cannot afford any more. So the next step is to get enough money to fund surveys of the areas which we have been told are possible unmarked graves.


    What were your parents like and how did their work and example affect your own life choices?

    I hardly remember my father and the work on Dasher is not for him alone.  When they were brought ashore the 149 survivors pitifully asked ‘Where are the boys?’ It is The Boys, all 359, we seek.

    My mother was left with 2 small children and had to find her first ever job, which she did at the UKAEA. Her resilience, lack of self-pity and her ambitions for her daughters have always inspired me.


    Tell us about your first job – what was the interview like and can you remember your first day?

    I took my degree and teaching qualification but I wanted to be an officer in the Women’s Royal Army Corps which necessitated 3 days of psychological and practical testing, and interviews. I was amazed to learn that I had passed. On my first day, and many subsequent ones, I was terrified that I would not reach the expected high standards.

    What’s the best day’s work you’ve ever had?

     

    The birth of my children. That is an enduring achievement and blessing.

     

    We all have our heroes in life and work – who are yours?

    I have had some iconic bosses and learned so much from them: the Commandant in the army; the Chairman at HSBC and the Chaplain when I was a Head. EQ and integrity are keystones.

    What is your single greatest achievement and how did it come about?

    I have been lucky and throughout my life people have been very generous giving me their advice and guidance.


    If there’s one piece of advice you’d give the younger generation what would it be?

     

    All actions have consequences.

    What book has most changed your view of education?

    ‘The Persistence of Faith’ by Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sachs. It brought home to me the fundamental importance of making a school a community in which all feel they belong. In that security, they can thrive.


    What would you say to parents whose children are struggling to find a meaningful career?

    Reach out for expert help. The workplace has changed and parents and grandparents may not be able to guide and provide opportunities as they once did. I find the online applications in which you have to pass increasing difficult tests, to be unhelpful, particularly when no feedback for either success or failure is given. Get help!

  • Meet Design Centre Chelsea CEO Claire German

     

    Christopher Jackson is impressed by the talented and dynamic star of the design industry

    The space strikes you so forcibly that you’re already planning your next visit as you arrive. The Design Centre Chelsea has a cathedral-like entrance, opening up onto 125,000 square feet of space. It’s remarkably well-lit – the light flooding in from above the riverside at Imperial Wharf – and feels, above all, like a place to explore. The feeling is like Bond Street on an epic scale, but you sense rightaway from the signage and the layout that it’s navigable: you’re going to have a good time here.

    Upstairs, I meet the delightful Claire German in her impressive walnut-panelled executive boardroom. My sense is of someone infectiously kind, and highly impressive. “You have to get up in the morning and feel great, and not dread your work,” she says. “It’s not about money; it’s about enjoyment and getting full satisfaction.”

    She seems so absolutely suited to her position that it’s hard to imagine her anywhere else, which in itself makes me curious to know how she got to where she is. Initially, German worked in publishing, which she obviously loved. “ I graduated in history and politics, and then worked at various publications at The Independent and The Evening Standard, and then I went to Condé Nast, and worked at House and Garden. I found I loved the magazine and the industry: it was that whole aesthetic.”

    After a spell at Brides magazine, German returned to edit House and Garden (“that was like coming home”) and you get the impression talking to her that she could happily have stayed there for the rest of her career.

    But life often has a way of intruding on our peace, and sometimes in good ways. “After ten years, this role came up,” she recalls. “I had met Mark Steinberg and Terence Cole, and had begun producing their biannual magazine. When the MD left, they asked me to take over. I loved where I was, but I decided to consider it. It’s a world I know, and I realised a lot of the things I loved doing with the magazine I’d still get to do here.”

    It’s a tale of how journalism can often lead you to other things. Today she presides over the only design collective of its kind in Europe. “There are 120 permanent showrooms, and within those showrooms there are 600 of the top international brands,” she explains.

    The centre also needs to be distinguished from its equivalents in the US. “What I like to nurture here is a sense of community,” she continues. “For the UK, and even the European industry, we’re seen as the mother ship. If there’s a product launch, or something exciting – an event which brings everyone together – it happens here.”

    You get the sense that German has succeeded due to astonishing attention to detail. “When we have a contemporary craft fair like Artefact in May, when 19 galleries will be exhibiting, they’re still very curated. Everything has to be the best, and sit together well, without any jarring – and that expectation rolls out to everything.”

    But what really sets the place apart is the community ethos. “Most design centres have an ordinary landlord and tenant relationship,” German continues. “They arrive, and they‘re given the keys. The design centres in America will do one or two events a year, maybe. This is different; it’s a labyrinth of support.”

    German gives me an example. “Osborne and Little have been on the King’s Road for 50 years and have decided to uproot and come here. That speaks volumes. They’ve always had their independence there, but now they want to be here, as they want to be in the hub of it.”

    The fact that the place is a hub means that collaboration often happens.  “We’re good at playing Cupid. For example, we’ve got a wonderful outdoor furniture company called Summit, and also Jennifer Manners who’s a great rug designer. Jennifer arrived a couple of years ago and she’s now doing a bespoke range for Summit. The great thing about being here is there’s this opportunity to create, converse and connect on a daily basis. You’re not on a High Street on your own, maybe feeling a bit isolated. There’s a network.”

    This opens up onto another important point: the essential generosity of the creative industries. German explains: “Creative people celebrate other creative people and respect their work. It’s a close-knit, professional and friendly industry – although of course, like all industries, it can also be competitive.”

    This ethos has led to perhaps her greatest achievement to date, the creation of WOW!house. This was something which German had long wanted to do and which she produced, to exceptional industry feedback, for the first time in 2022. The idea was to give interior designers a blank canvas to create the most beautiful room possible “and not have to react to a client’s brief.”

    German recalls the scale of the challenge: “I announced it and didn’t realise I’d taken on such a huge job! I have the most fantastic team so we all worked together and pulled it off. We also produced the occasion together with Centrepoint, and made sure homeless youths could come along and learn about what career opportunities the industry can offer them. I’ve been thrilled with the reception it’s had.”

    So what’s next for The Chelsea Design Centre? “Artefact is coming up on 9th May, and then beyond that we have Wow!House again, which lasts for a month. Formed with Future Heritage is also a very important event for us later in the year where we seek to give young people the platform to launch their careers.”

    But German’s ambitions are far greater than simply fulfilling her demanding calendar year. “Art is an area which we want to develop and expand,” she says, pointing to a potential gap with the demise of Masterpiece London. “I think we can then look at other topics. We could be doing something on kitchens, and something on bathrooms. When we did supplements on these things for the magazine it was always a good circulation driver. We also want to look at the superyacht industry and private aviation.”

    Would she consider expanding internationally? “The idea of Wow!house is to take it to new markets. But I wouldn’t do a Design Centre Paris as it’s too close and it would cannibalise. If the French designers want to do a good comprehensive sourcing, it’s easier to come on the Eurostar than to navigate Paris. They put their staff up at the Chelsea Harbour Hotel and they run around like locusts. I’d also be interested to take Wow!house to Dubai. There’d be a lot of interest there and I think it would be very well received.”

    As you listen to her say those words, you’re left in no doubt that she will: she clearly has the appetite and ability for the task. Her advice to young people is straightforward: “What’s great about this job is the world is your oyster and if you’ve got the strategy and enthusiasm, then just give it a go.”

    She’s right about that – and about a lot of other things. I leave inspired, plotting my return.

     

    Artefact is at Design Centre Chelsea from 9th May 2023.

    Wow!House runs from 5th June-6th July 2023.

     

     

     

  • Introducing the Finito World survey of the Top Royal Warrant Holders

    Ever wondered how to get a Royal Warrant? Finito World provides an exclusive survey of those businesses who have won the coveted seal of approval

    Like many people, I’ve managed to get through life without holding any strong opinions regarding Henry II, but there are signs he knew a good textile when he saw one. We know this because in 1155 – that otherwise unstudied year in history – he granted the first Royal Charter to the Worshipful Company of Weavers.

    It was a stamp of approval; but it was also a precursor. The history of royal patronage has continued from that time to this, and has never been more relevant than in this Coronation year. Royalty blessed the career of William Shakespeare, who we certainly wouldn’t think of so much had he not been a member of the King’s Men. Over time, the charter was replaced by the Royal Warrant.

    Over time, businesses came to realise the value not just of supplying the Royal Household, but of being seen to do so. The Royal Warrant therefore has a prime place in the history of public relations in this country. The number of Royal Warrant holders expanded exponentially during the reign of Queen Victoria, and continues to this day, with most holders of the Warrant being members of the Royal Warrant Holders Association. Today around 800 companies can claim the accolade.

    So what does it give you? In its essence, it’s extremely simple. Holding the Warrant can be applied for after five years of doing business with the Royal Household. Once granted, a business is entitled to use the Royal Arms in its business for a period of five years. It must then reapply.

    So why has it always been such a sought after thing, and why does it continue to be, in spite of the occasionally sour mood towards the Royal Family? When I speak to Nicky Philipps, the society portrait painter, she explains: “When you’re at the Palace, everything – and I mean everything – works like clockwork, and so whenever you’re in that orbit you just feel very privileged to be there.” It’s this atmosphere of excellence with which many of the businesses in our exclusive survey of leading Royal Warrant Holders wish to associate themselves.

    Robert Ettinger, the CEO of Ettinger, the luxury goods manufacturer founded in 1934, puts the matter simply: “Having a Royal Warrant is a seal of trust, quality and reliability.”
    The possibility of using the Royal crest is also of considerable practical value. “It was, and remains, a very great honour,” explains Royal Warrant Holder Wendy Keith, the proprietor of Wendy Keith Designs which makes shooting stockings and kilt hosiery. “I am entitled to put the Royal Warrant emblem on my letterhead, advertising and packaging. It gives the quality of our unique craft garments great prestige throughout the world.”

    Many of the Royal Warrant Holders we feature have been in business for hundreds of years. Queen Victoria would have heard of many of them, such as Truefitt and Hill (founded in 1805). Meanwhile, her grandfather George III would have regarded Lock & Co, also on our list, as well established even at the start of his life, also on our list: it was founded

    Others are remarkably new, and even unexpectedly quirky businesses. Wendy Keith has been in business for 40 years; Barker’s the marvellous dry-cleaning business which we also feature, and which supplies linen to Highgrove, is also relatively new. To achieve the Warrant then is to be connected to a history of achievement stretching far back, but it is also a sign of contemporary excellence.

    It is a pleasure to look at the ‘history’ tab on the Royal Warrant Holders Association website, and to see images of Queen Elizabeth down the years bestowing her presence on those businesses who had achieved the Warrant.

    But this isn’t to say that the Royal Warrant has failed to move with the times. In 2007, the Royal Warrant Holders Associations launched The Green Warrant which encourages its members to take part in sustainable practices, and the onus to do so has only increased since that time. The ascension of King Charles III to the throne with his own commitment to the environment shall likely only increase this aspect of the Warrant.

    Sometimes, this process alone can have its benefits. As Robert Ettinger explains: “Every five years we are asked to prove and complete a corporate and social sustainability document which looks at every aspect of our business which has helped us move closer towards zero emissions.”

    Matthew Barker, the founder of Barker’s agrees: “It was Charles who drove that: the sustainability piece is a large part of getting a warrant. Fortunately we are of that mind anyway and do what we can to reduce our plastic use and introduce energy initiatives. But the whole warrant process is actually very helpful and to any company it does get you thinking. It’s a permanent prompt, and very, very helpful.”

    And of course, Coronation year finds many of these businesses in a transitional period as regards the Warrant. Upon the death of the monarch, all Warrants are reviewed, and there is a two-year grace period while that process is undertaken. It’s also worth noting the sometimes Darwinian nature of the Warrant: according to the Royal Warrant Holders Association website, between 20 and 40 businesses lose the Warrant each year, and a similar number achieve it. So there’s no question of resting on one’s royal laurels.

    So our survey was undertaken both during a period of unprecedented excitement as the country – and these businesses – were building towards the Coronation. But it is also a time of uncertainty. Nobody is immune, Royal Warrant or not, from the economy of the day.

    But for many it’s a very exciting time. Robert Ettinger explains that in 2023 he’s been inspired to think about the overseas market: “The Coronation. The Coronation year is looking more stable than the last few years and it is highlighting Britain to the whole world which will help our company grow our exports even more than at present.”

    Wendy Keith also strikes a positive note: “We are very excited about the forthcoming Coronation, and are making plans to celebrate in style down here in Cornwall.”

    And perhaps that’s what it comes down to – it’s all a question of style. The Royal Family remains an important part of the United Kingdom’s so-called ‘soft power’. It is based on the idea that the appearance of power often amounts to power itself. And certainly the businesses we now feature have all achieved great things, and come into their own as a result of their association with the Royal Household.

    Photo credit: Royal warrant awarded by Queen Elizabeth II to Jenners, a department store in Edinburgh.

  • Diary: Sir Anthony Seldon on on Liz Truss, AI and why the unions are in the wrong

    Diary: Sir Anthony Seldon on on Liz Truss, AI and why the unions are in the wrong

    Sir Anthony Seldon

    The short tenures of recent prime ministers is becoming as unmissable as it is noteworthy. If you look back we’ve had Gordon Brown (three years), David Cameron (six), Theresa May and Boris Johnson (again with three years apiece) and then Liz Truss, who lasted barely a month. But I would say all this has nothing to do with social media; it’s because they have no inkling how to be Prime Minister. The office itself isn’t impossible, it’s just the way they operate makes it seem so.

    I was asked recently if I’d write a book about the Truss administration or whether it would be too short; the person in question told me they thought it might be novella-length. I explained that the opposite is the case; in fact there’s so much to say I doubt it could be contained in a short book at all!

    When I think back on how I became a teacher, I remember how growing up I was struck by the thought that education had lost its enchantment. It had been stripped of joy, stripped of discovery and self-reflection. And obviously, that’s what lead to problems. When I was younger, I was often in trouble. I didn’t want to cause hurt; but I couldn’t be myself in school since it seemed to be trying to make me what I wasn’t. When advising pupils and students and parents about the big moments which come about: choices at GCSE, A-Levels, and work, I say to them that you must let the child decide and let them be driven by what they love not what you think they need.

    There’s been a lot of talk about Chat GPT recently. I began writing The Fourth Education Revolution in 2017 before it was a topic, and I still think AI has the potential to make the plight of the teacher far better if it’s harnessed early and in the right way. In many respects we still have a 19th century system where the teacher’s at the front of the class, students sit passively and everyone moves at the same pace at the same time of day. That means teacher workload gets worse with the effects we all see today. AI can change that and free up teachers for their role: to teach children how to live and be happy.

    I am sympathetic to teachers, but it’s wrong for the unions to be striking, because it harms young people. It’s not just that they miss out on their exams but it’s also showing young people that if you don’t like what you’ve got you’ve got to make innocent people suffer; that’s what young people are internalising. That said, the government is utterly at fault. If you have 10 education secretaries in 13 years, many of whom don’t understand schools and listen to the wrong people, it’s not very surprising that we have this situation. Usually it shows the contempt of prime ministers for education. The role is used as a berth to help solve a political problem of patronage by the PM of the day, and rarely given to anyone who might do something good with it.

     

    Amanda Spielman is highly intelligent, but Ofsted can’t continue in its current form as a judgmental external body. At the moment, it’s more than 20th century – it’s 19th century. But frankly it’s not a question of whether it will change, but of when. This isn’t a question of whether we have inspections or not, it’s about the nature of the those inspections. The process needs to be supportive and lead to improvement – it’s as simple as that.

     

    I’ve just finished my latest book on Boris Johnson and it makes me think back to founding the Institute of Contemporary British History with Peter Hennessy in 1986. It’s important you don’t abandon the recent past to partisan actors and partisan actors. You need to bring the skills of the academic historian to bear in analysing the past – and that’s more important than ever during a time of culture wars. What we need now is what we always need: understanding.

     

    Sir Anthony Seldon’s latest book Johnson at 10 is available from Biteback Publishing