There’s a famous quote by Zhou Enlai, who was asked in conversation with Henry Kissinger in the 1970s, what he thought of the French Revolution: “Too soon to say,” was his reply.
That’s the case with Covid-19 too. We are only just beginning to understand how it may have affected us in a multitude of ways – and most particularly in education. The only way to find out is to talk to people on the front lines. One of those is Ji Li, the likeable and articulate CEO of Plum Innovations, which has been busy throughout the pandemic enhancing its tech offer to its primary school clients.
In conversation, Li is knowledgeable and relaxed, and I can see immediately why schools would find him a helpful support in their busy lives. So what trends is he seeing? Li explains the shift towards flipped learning. “Flipped learning isn’t a new concept,” he says, “it began back in the 1990s. It’s to be contrasted with traditional learning where you go to classrooms; teachers tell you what you need to know, and you memorise that input. Flipped learning makes for a more collegiate approach”
Li’s own education back in China followed this approach: “When I was studying secondary school in China we were writing notes, and memorising everything,” he recalls.
With the increasing prominence of flipped learning, we’ve begun to alter the role of the teacher: the solitary sage at the front of the class has now become a kind of trouble-shooter.
Is there a danger of going too far and having teachers with too little influence? Li is philosophical: “I think there’s a sweet spot. There’s a role for the teacher to lead and to guide – but each pupil should have their own freedom to find the right way too. There are two extremes and we need to be in the middle.”
That might be said to echo Aristotle’s famous notion of the ‘golden mean’ where wisdom is found somewhere in the centre. This common sense approach turns out to be crucial to Li’s philosophy of how technology should be approached in the school setting. “Technology shouldn’t dictate to teachers; instead technology must evolve according to user experience,” he explains. “As a sector, we can’t define how teachers should teach; we need teachers to come up with that. Once that happens, then the tech sector needs to facilitate their approach and make life easier for teachers.”
One leitmotif of our conversation is Ji Li’s love of the sector he works in – and he clearly instinctively understands teachers, and is extremely eager to help.
“We make sure software and technology are being used, and working for teachers,” he says, passionately. “In my role, I see first hand how technology stops working, and how sometimes it works really well.” So how do you introduce new technology to a school and effect change? “A new system will often engender different workflow and have a different user interface. The school staff might find that difficult to get used to – or perhaps they’ll be too busy to obtain the right familiarity with it. If they struggle, they’re perhaps more likely to fall back on how things were before, because they know how to use it,” he adds.
That, of course, is where Plum comes in. Li explains that his work has become more complex since the pandemic with the shift to remote-working. “Before the pandemic everything took place within the building where the school was located. Since the pandemic, with teachers not fully back to school, and with the continued relevance of flexible working, that’s shifted the landscape of IT support –and of edtech in general. So we’re no longer looking at hundreds of computers inside one building, but at diverse settings. That’s a challenge for the sector, and it’s a challenge for Plum.”
Traditionally, of course, flipped learning has been used in higher education and doesn’t apply so much to the primary schools which form the majority of Li’s clients. However, there’s an interesting development at the primary level too. “With the lockdown, we’ve definitely seen an increased involvement from parents,” he tells me. “Teachers want to teach most of the contents of their classes, but at home parents can be very helpful to reinforce learning, and help with certain projects – especially with DT and science projects.”
Home-working means that the sector now needs to deal directly with third parties on behalf of schools. Li explains how this plays out: “You use your home connectivity for work now, and that includes teachers. So far we don’t need to contact the home broadband services not yet, but if there’s an issue with one of our clients we’ll always help them to troubleshoot it if it’s a wifi issue. If they say at home, “Nothing’s working” then that usually tells us it’s a fundamental issue, but we want the best for our clients so we’ll talk to third party vendors – we know the technical terms and so we’re happy to do that.”
There’s another area in which Li is prepared to go the extra mile – in talking to parents on behalf of schools. That issue arose, he says, time again during the pandemic: “We never say, ‘That’s not our issue’. We talked to parents a lot when we implemented Google classrooms. The parents had their accounts; the schools had theirs, and so we helped schools to train parents, in order to smooth that transition.”
Talking to Li, I have sense that he’s good at his job precisely because he respects his clients. He also takes a lively interest in education techniques. He tells me also of the parallel shift towards blended learning – a mix of online and offline – which is also set to have a big impact on the sector. “Before the pandemic, schools did almost everything offline. When lockdown came, we entered the most extreme version of online learning. Blended learning seeks a return to balance. The technologies of the future will evolve based on user requirements. Schools will adjust to what pupils need and we’re able to create a balance.”
Of course, the most important aspect of Li’s work is communicating. Without listening in the first place he wouldn’t be so well-placed to implement relevant technologies, and if he weren’t able to communicate, he wouldn’t be able to fix problems. “Communication is a massive part of it,” he agrees. “We are lucky to work in the education sector, where staff and teachers are eager to learn. In terms of technical language, some staff are tech-savvy and others are less confident are less confident in technology.”
Again, Li reverts naturally to his love of the sector. But beyond his natural empathy with teachers and other education staff, I also detect a passion for education. He takes a keen interest in educational trends, and speaks with real knowledge and insight about them. Further, his knowledge takes on an international dimension, which stems to some extent from his Chinese upbringing.
“The UK is always at the forefront of education technologies,” he says. “The UK has a history of leading the way.”
The transition has also been propelled by the increase in multi-academy trusts these past years, which has created a necessity for cloud-based learning platforms. “When everybody was working at one school that was one thing,” Li recalls. “Now, with many teachers working across many sites, that introduces the importance of the cloud, as it’s the most effective way to work.”
So flipped learning and blended learning turn out to be profoundly interlinked. As Li puts it: “In the future students will have paperwork to complete – handwriting and artworks and so forth. That’s important. But certain work they can produce online, as part of flipped learning. They can use online platforms to do research and then in class the teachers continue the learning journey with them.”
We’re full of buzzwords for the future: AI, drones, all manner of tech. But the future often happens more subtly than that. Talking to Li, you realise that the future is made not by big headlines, but quietly, almost imperceptibly by intelligent, thoughtful people – people, in fact, just like him.
Christopher Jackson is News Director of Finito World
‘Tis the season of goodwill and sumptuous gift goody bags. In mine, following a Winter Wonders Christmas Party at Taj Hotels, there was an invitation to afternoon tea. This was to be no ordinary tea but a festive production of Baubles and Ballerinas!
We arrived at Taj Hotels and began to take off our coats, until we were ushered to our seats which were specially reserved in the centre of the grand conservatory. My guest elected to keep on her coat as it was still cold, and the sleet and snow outside hadn’t fully melted. It was a pretty scene outside with the twinkling lights contrasting with the daylight fast turning to dusk.
There were a few diners occupying other tables after late lunches. Our thoughts turned to tea. The place setting was beautifully embroidered and the napkin holder the size of a giant ring. After a pause, the waiter brought us the menu and offered us a glass a water. A few minutes later, we were invited to select our tea leaves, English breakfast and Earl Grey were the order of the day. Two pots arrived. I requested milk. We noticed that there were no teaspoons and elected not to make a fuss.
It reminded me of Ted Gladdish, a former client and old friend of mine who used to collect teaspoons wherever he went. I didn’t know about his habit, until after he died. I visited his home to pay my respects to his fiancé only to find picture frames with teaspoons all over his walls. I recognised some from my own office and always wondered why we were running short. My guest surreptitiously stirred with her fork. No-one but me noticed.
Taj Hotels provided us a selection of themed teas, including The Indian Jamsine, Festive Vegetarian and Festive Afternoon Tea. We decided not to be adventurous. The two tea stands arrived consecutively. I had gestured to my guest that we should only begin devouring once each item could be tasted in unison.
The presentation was stunning, favourites included festive egg mayonnaise and mustard cress pinwheel; rosemary roasted beef roulade turnover; honey glazed turkey and cranberry sandwich; thyme roasted chicken mousse, open face pie and smoked salmon, cream cheese and caviar open sandwich.
Suddenly there was a crescendo in the music which had morphed from Asian beat to The Nutcracker and two ballet dancers appeared En Pointe in pastel shades of blue. A few pirouettes later, we applauded. They were working while we were munching spiced mixed fruit scones with cranberry jam and clotted cream.
After the entertainment, it seemed like a good moment to have a mini break before turning to the beautifully decorated and delicate patisseries, each one more tempting than the other. Santa’s parcel was a chocolate mousse, cherry with chocolate sponge. The pistachio roulade was made with Armagnac and milk chocolate crémeux. Gingerbread cheesecake hastily followed before the Christmas ornament, which was a strawberry bakewell tart and eggnog mousse. The final cake was a beautiful dark hot chocolate shaped, rocky road brownie with marshmallows and candies.
Our waiter returned to enquire whether we would like a repeat cake stand. I politely declined and then remarked: you cannot be serious. Apparently other guests before us had requested further supplies.
So there you have it, Tajness. Taj is legendary. They go out of their way to make you feel welcome. Everybody smiles. Service is important. They want you to remember the Taj experience. We really did. On the way out, I had forgotten about the teaspoons.
The first casualties of wars are often the young soldiers who have been sent to fight them. Next, the civilians who can’t or refuse to leave the conflict zone and get caught up in the fighting, or who, in the case of Russia’s utterly senseless assault on Ukraine, are deliberately and callously targeted with horrifying brutality. These tragic losses are vividly and heartbreakingly visible, and displayed in daily media for all to see, but as ordinary civilians swap work-clothes and laptops for fatigues and weapons, there is another casualty that rarely comes into view until long after the smoke and dust has cleared, the diplomacy done and armistice agreements are signed.
In Ukraine, with the vast proportion of the remaining population focusing all of its efforts on repelling the invasion, this casualty is nothing other than all the things they were doing and all the progress they were making before they were invaded.
When the fighting eventually stops, there will be obvious and immediate priorities for the government of Ukraine: the resumption of vital supply chains to deliver food and potable water to the population; re-establishing essential services such as power and sanitation; supplying medical aid to those in desperate need; and shelter for those without it. Essentially, the most urgent objective will be the relief of immediate suffering and with most of the world on its side, we can reasonably expect that many nations will help to deliver the aid and assistance that Ukraine will need.
Next comes an assessment of the damage, and the beginning of a lengthy journey of post-conflict repair and reconstruction, starting with vital infrastructure that has been purposely and cynically targeted by Russian military commanders, such as hospitals, schools and emergency services. Then important cultural institutions such as government buildings, museums, libraries, and churches. At the same time, people’s homes must be rebuilt, hopefully, but not necessarily in the same place that they were before, and so the list goes on. All this will take place throughout a period of unimaginable grieving.
If the Ukrainian people take on this enormous and daunting task with the same heroic determination that they have now become famous and admired for, and that has inspired the world during the past months, then we can be sure that this process will not stall, but it will still take time. To understand the level of destruction in parts of Ukraine that has been savagely meted out by Russia we could compare with Hamburg in WWII which was also badly damaged by extensive bombardment. Hamburg took more than 40 years to rebuild.
With so much that has been turned to rubble as a direct consequence of Vladimir Putin’s vicious shelling of civilian infrastructure, rebuilding Ukraine will likely take decades. National treasures such as the Mariupol theatre which has been completely destroyed, and is likely the site of an unthinkable civilian massacre, are works of architecture that take many years to complete at the best of times. But it won’t be the best of times, because there will be so many wounds to heal, and so many lost to mourn.
As I boarded a flight from Bucharest to Paris today, there were many Ukrainian passports in the queue. Special announcements were being made to inform them of arrangements to meet them at Charles de Gaulle airport, and I wondered how long it would be before they would be able to return to their homes, or if they ever would. I noticed that there were few adults amongst the groups and many children: presumably many of their parents had stayed to fight. Then I wondered, what were they all doing before all this? What is it that won’t happen anymore because of this?
It is astonishing to think that an advanced and civilised nation, that was peacefully pursuing its interests in areas of science, medicine, technology, art and business, has now been reduced to the task of primary construction. Many important projects and initiatives will now stall and be delayed, perhaps indefinitely. For example, in 2020 a national poll showed overwhelming support for the legalisation of medical cannabis to relieve a range of conditions from chronic pain to post traumatic stress disorder. 2022 was the year that legalisation was set to take place, and this was firmly prioritised in President Zelensky’s government agenda. Medical cannabis has also proven life-saving for children suffering with rare forms of intractable epilepsy for which existing treatments are ineffective.
In the worst cases this condition can be fatal, although this is rare but that is exactly the point: the social agenda of Ukraine has progressed so far since gaining independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, that by 2022, the business of politics and government was even able to help tiny minorities of the Ukrainian population who would otherwise suffer. When the many are able and determined to look after the needs of the few, that is when a nation has reached the higher apex of progress and civilisation. We might also ponder that medical cannabis is still illegal in Russia.
So, the question is how long will it be before Ukraine can reach that point again? Russia’s barbaric invasion has caused obvious damage and unforgivable casualties that are all too glaringly obvious to see, but the enduring damage of Putin’s crimes will run deep for years, and probably decades to come. By the time the houses are rebuilt, cinemas are open and actors once more tread the boards of Mariupol theatre, children who were about to be saved in 2022 may no longer be here to see it.
Jonathan Cathey is a marketing and branding consultant
A creative working environment should recognise the abilities and contribution of everyone. Sadly, despite what they may say, not all organisations live up to the high standards they claim to live by. But don’t give up on them. Instead, think about how to encourage change.
Starting a new job is always accompanied by a high level of excitement and expectation. For those entering the world of work for the first time, there is trepidation but enthusiasm as well and, for most, a real willingness to get involved.
Most organisations appreciate that input and drive, but some seem less willing to make the most of the opportunities. Certainly, there can be structures and hierarchies that prevent voices being listened to but, more often than not, it is about the people.
Having such a closed mind goes against every leadership book you read or podcast you listen to, but it still happens. The closed mind might be a result of a fear of being made to look bad, a poor personal relationship or, more simply, intransigence on their part. An undying belief in ‘the way we’ve always done things’ should not be underestimated. So those with a closed mind either don’t listen or don’t recognise the contributions that come their way. They simply end up being dismissive.
If you are faced with such a situation then do not downgrade your expectations.
The initial knee-jerk reaction is to look for a new job. That is certainly one option but not one that guarantees success. It is a cliché to say that the grass is not always greener but that definitely applies to the work environment. All roles and employers have their challenges.
Instead, your best option, and one that may help you in the longer-term, is to stay and fight to be heard. If you can be successful, then opening up the organisation will not only be hugely rewarding personally but will enable you to make an impression which can only help in your career. Whatever the challenge is, consider your strategy and what it should include:
Are there any champions you can look to work with? You don’t have to do this alone.
Try to work with and not against people, so recognise their opposition but try to address it.
Always be clear on the benefits and try to use real life examples or information rather than relying on instinct.
Are there internal teams that can help, such as HR?
Do you understand the structure of the organisation so that you know who to talk to?
Remember, there is nothing wrong with applying some pressure and many will thank you for it. Many employers often know when there are closed minds and are looking for ways to change. You are providing the constructive encouragement they need.
Communication is critical. Issues often arise and closed minds take root when the communication is poor. Instead of organisations being able to deal with problems they don’t because the right people are not made aware.
The input could be for a piece of client work, internal practices or focused on something more structural. The same lessons and thought processes should apply, regardless.
So do not give up and simply look to move on. Rather, make every effort to help open the closed minds.
New research from the financial tech company Tide shows that art universities produce more start-up businesses than other institutions.
By using data from the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA), they were able to see that the top start-up producing university in the UK is the Royal College of Art. 1,665 graduates have started their own businesses since the 2014/2015 academic year.
While having a high number of start-ups tends to be associated with the tech industry, arts-focused universities actually produce more start-ups, due to artists frequently being self-employed. The trend towards the creative industries continues, with Kingston University coming in second on the list. Their focus on business, engineering, and many types of art including fashion and design makes graduates from Kingston more likely to start their own businesses than those from other institutions.
Third on the list, Falmouth University has fostered creativity and helped their students translate their ideas to the real world of business through their Launchpad programme, which focuses on giving entrepreneurial students access to the market through mentorship and networking opportunities.
Having a high number of start-ups coming out of a university is a good sign, and due to the freelance nature of many creative careers, this seemingly unlikely pattern is actually not that unusual. However, although arts-focused universities produce the most start-ups, these are not always the most financially successful.
Aside from the number of start-ups a university produces, Tide also looked at the value of a university’s intellectual property. They found that Oxford University tops that list, having produced intellectual property valued at £213 million since 2015. Oxford also has the highest number of patents, with 3,086 granted over the five-year period. Most of these innovations came from the prestigious university’s tech and healthcare developments.
The Institute of Cancer Research has seen graduates produce £208 million in intellectual property over the last five years. This remarkable number can be explained by the high value of developments in the fight against cancer.
At £64 million, the University of Sheffield has proved that accelerator programmes can directly lead to increased student success. Their Pre-accelerator programme helps students generate, develop, and sell their start-up ideas with a focus on getting products through to the investment stage.
Tide’s research shows not only that the creative industries are large producers of start-ups, but also the value that can be created when creative instruction is coupled with mentorship and networking programmes which allow students to get their ideas onto the market. While the highest-value start-ups are still based in tech and healthcare, design, fashion, and other creative courses can create lucrative start-ups when students are given the opportunity to take their ideas to the next level.
Christopher Jackson interviews the legendary Virgin founder as he navigates the choppy waters of the pandemic
Fame will sometimes have a blurring effect. Public presence sustained over a long period of time can create a confusing image. During a long and varied career, so much is attempted and commented on, it is as if longstanding celebrity contains geological layers. To get to the truth of what made someone famous in the first place is a form of excavation.
At 70, Sir Richard Branson has reached this level of fame. We think we know him, but he has come to mean different things to different people. The range of his businesses interests makes his precise contribution to the world difficult to pin down: from trains, music, journalism, space travel, healthcare and – what has given him many headaches during the pandemic – aviation, there is little he hasn’t attempted.
Indeed the three words ‘Sir Richard Branson’ are themselves a sort of paradox, the first word suggestive of establishment accommodation, and the latter two synonymous with daredevilry, rebellion and harmless fun.
Branson was born in Blackheath, London to soldier and barrister James Branson, and Eve, an entrepreneur. Eve sadly died of Covid-19 in January 2021, aged 96. When we caught up with Branson shortly afterwards, he was happy to engage extensively, and submitted to our questions always in good humour, making sure we had what we wanted.
Virgin Mother
When I offer my condolences, he replies that it’s his mother’s spirit he prefers to recall: “I don’t believe in mourning, I believe in celebrating incredible lives – and my mum really did lead quite a remarkable life,” he explains. “She had such a zest for life – and even at 96-years-old, she had the same energy and wit she had when I was a boy. When I was growing up she was always working on a project; she was inventive, fearless, relentless – an entrepreneur before the word existed.”
Eve’s example gave the young Branson an ingredient the entrepreneur cannot do without: gumption. Educated at Scaitcliffe School in Egham, and then at Stowe in Buckinghamshire, Branson would give the UK educational system short shrift, famously leaving school at 16. Partly due to his dyslexia, and partly because of inherent restlessness, one gets the sense that he never felt comfortable in educational institutions. With a can-do spirit the world would later come to associate with his companies, he simply set about creating structures better suited to his gifts.
The values that my mum and dad instilled in my siblings and I are lessons that have lasted a lifetime
SIR RICHARD BRANSON ON HIS PARENTS
Parental support empowered him in that decision: “The values that my mum and dad instilled in my siblings and I are lessons that have lasted a lifetime,” he recalls. “They taught us the importance of hard work, of not taking yourself too seriously, of treating people how you wish to be treated, of entrepreneurship, and so much more. They showed us how family is the most important thing in the world and surrounded us with love and encouragement.”
Of course, it was never plain-sailing. Not long before James’s death, Branson mèreand pèregave an interesting interview to the Wall Street Journal where Eve in particular eschews diplomatic language: “Let’s say he [Richard] was unusual at school. We didn’t know whether he was 99 per cent stupid and one per cent rather exceptional. We hung onto that one per cent.”
Eve Branson in 2013. Sir Richard tells us: “I was inspired by how my mum used her entrepreneurial energy to help others.” Photo credit: Foreign and Commonwealth office
This is the sort of joke only an affectionate mother would make and there’s no doubting Branson as he recalls: “I was inspired by how my mum used her entrepreneurial energy to help others. I spend a lot of time now working with the Virgin Group’s foundation Virgin Unite to challenge the unacceptable and to try and find entrepreneurial solutions to some of the world’s biggest problems. My mum is always an inspiration, spurring me on and encouraging me to think bigger.”
School’s Out
At first, thinking big meant leaving school. Many who have been to Stowe school, with its spreading Capability Brown gardens, will feel they could happily walk there forever. It is telling that Branson was immediately restless: even at this distance, knowing what he went on to achieve, you can sense his itchiness to get on.
I’m only where I am today because I’ve failed along the way.
Sir Richard Branson
In 1967, Branson founded Student magazine – a magazine not dissimilar in intention and readership to the one you are reading. It still seems an odd choice of first venture for someone with professed dyslexia. At the time, he thought it would be the making of him. In reality, it turned out to be something as important: his first mistake. “I’m only where I am today because I’ve failed along the way,” he tells me. “That’s a failure which always stands out to me, failing to convince a major publishing house to invest in Studentmagazine. Even as a teenager, I had a huge vision for a whole host of new Student enterprises, from magazines to travel companies to banks. Unsurprisingly, they ran a mile.”
Stowe School which Branson famously left at 16. Photo credit: Kevin Gordon under Commons licence 2.0
Was that beneficial to him in the long run? “I didn’t know it back then, but this was the seed of an idea that grew into becoming the Virgin brand. I carried on building businesses I loved and believed in. Fast-forward half a century and Virgin spans even more sectors than I dreamed of as a teenager.”
You get the sense that these failures give him perspective now during the difficulties of the pandemic. When Branson founded the Virgin record store in Oxford Street in the early 1970s, there was a dicey episode when Branson’s parents had to re-mortgage the family home after Branson ran into difficulty with the tax authorities, having been caught selling discount records for export only. Eve would later tell the Wall Street Journal in her brisk way: “That was pretty horrifying.”
Over time Virgin Records – whose value had been increased by the signing of numerous artists, including Mike Oldfield and his Tubular Bells album – would go global and eventually sell for around £560 million. Even then, Branson wasn’t completely out of the woods. Libel litigation lay ahead between the newly founded Virgin Atlantic and British Airways. Branson won a record payment of $945,000 in damages, famously sharing the award with the employees.
Good Company
As significant as his financial success, Branson had created a style of doing business which caught the public imagination. In time, column inches accrued in a way not wholly dissimilar from the way in which on the other side of the Atlantic they accrued for Donald Trump. Different in numerous other respects, both were perfect magazine fodder for the excesses of the 1980s.
While it’s been the most challenging year for all businesses, what has kept me going is the spirit and resilience from our people across the Virgin Group
Sir Richard Branson
However allegedly shy, Branson was a natural front man for his businesses. Keen to find out more about his business ethos, I ask him how he keeps his staff happy and motivated. “I’ve always said, take care of your employees and they’ll take care of your business,” Branson replies.
And that’s a principle still true in the age of Covid-19? “While it’s been the most challenging year for all businesses, what has kept me going is the spirit and resilience from our people across the Virgin Group. Our people really are the thing that makes our brand different and special, we are lucky to have a brilliant group of people who believe in what they’re trying to do, which is to change business for good.”
Photo credit: Owen Billcliffe
Of course, most businesses will parrot that line. With Branson you sense his sincerity – partly because he was among the first to talk like this. “Over the years we have always tried to give our people the freedom to be themselves and to treat them like adults,” Branson elaborates. What does this mean in day-to-day? “One example is our unlimited holiday policy at Virgin Management. We introduced this a few years ago and the response has been very positive. The assumption behind it is that people will only take leave when they feel comfortable that they and their team are up to date on every project and that their absence won’t damage the business.”
What does he think of keeping regular office hours? “We should focus on what people get done, not on how many hours or days they work. We don’t need a vacation policy,” he says.
The reality of Virgin is pretty close to what you’re seeing or reading. It’s a progressive company that is looking to change the way people work so it becomes more human and less corporate – and at the same time trying to do corporate things.
Oliver Osgood, CEO of Masterplant, and formerly CEO of Virgin Pure
I’m keen to find out if this is corroborated by people who have worked for Branson. Oliver Osgood, formerly CEO of Virgin Pure, and now the CEO of Masterplant, a fast-growing portfolio of cannabis brands and assets, tells me: “The reality of Virgin is pretty close to what you’re seeing or reading. It’s a progressive company that is looking to change the way people work so it becomes more human and less corporate – and at the same time trying to do corporate things. There are companies where the outside is a reflection of the inside and I’d say that’s a fair comment here.”
Osgood is one of many who feel a loyalty towards Branson, having seen his operation from the inside.
With that in mind, I ask Branson about the new trend for flexible working. In fact, Branson was running Virgin like a pandemic-conscious company before anyone had heard of Wuhan or the South African variant: “We’ve offered flexible working at Virgin Management for many years, long before the pandemic,” he explains. “I’ve never worked in an office, or ‘nine to five’ for that matter. Obviously, this doesn’t work for every single role across our businesses, for example a pilot, but we try and encourage it where it’s possible.”
Poolside Tales
With Branson, I keep finding myself reminded of the Noel Coward dictum: ‘The thing about work is, it’s so much more fun than fun.” Branson is sufficiently retiring not to be too garrulous about his lifestyle; on the other hand he’s gregarious enough to own a private island and invite celebrities to it.
Never go round a swimming pool when Richard’s there, you’ll end up in the pool whether you’ve got clothes on or not
Travel consultant, Fred Finn
If you want to know the real stories about Necker, the private island he has owned since 1978, you have to talk to those around him.
In person, Branson is light-hearted, even goofy. Fred Finn, travel consultant and old friend of Branson, warns me: “Never go round a swimming pool when Richard’s there, you’ll end up in the pool whether you’ve got your clothes on or not.”
If you were imagining there’s a hierarchy as to who ends up in the pool and who doesn’t, you’d be mistaken. Liz Brewer, the noted impresario, recalls:“I had to heal a rift between Ivana Trump and Richard after he cheekily performed his ‘party trick’ at the Business Traveller of the Year Awards at the Hilton Park Lane, turning her upside-down.” This appears not to have gone down well with Trump wife no.1. To fix the matter, Brewer resorted to shuttle diplomacy conducted through cunning table placement: “I placed him at Ivana’s end of the 120-guest table at the engagement party I arranged at Syon Park before her marriage to her then future husband Riccardo Mazzuchelli. All was healed from then on and Ivana returned to flying Upper Class Virgin.”
Branson has an impish streak. Here reconciled with Ivana Trump after throwing her in the pool. Photo credit: Liz Brewer
I cannot help asking whether the 45thPresident of the United States was there at any of those occasions? “I seem to recollect that Richard had lunch with the Donald once, having been invited by him to his home, when one of Trump’s ventures had gone under,” Brewer replies, adding: “These two in personality were poles apart, both in motive and manner.”
It is difficult even so, not to conjure an image of Trump rotating through the air, an orange whirl of confusion turning into resentment, as a sniggering Branson scutters away. More seriously, it is worth noting that while Trump has his name on many things – sometimes, it seems, on everything– Branson’s publicity is undertaken for Virgin as a brand.
Presidents and Lions
Presidential friendships turn out to be a leitmotif of Branson’s life. In particular, he became friends with former South African President Nelson Mandela.
Branson tells me: “Nelson Mandela remains one of my biggest heroes and a global symbol of liberation, hope and equality.” What memories does he have of the great statesman? “I have many lovely memories of spending time together. From working on human rights issues together to forming The Elders [a group of global leaders working independently for peace], his humour and humility always stood out to me. He redefined what it means to be a great leader and taught us all how powerful forgiveness can be.”
Branson with his great friend Nelson Mandela. “His humour and humility always stood out to me.”
Another figure he got to know well is the 44thPresident of the United States Barack Obama: “I have had the privilege of spending some time with Barack, too,” Branson tells me. “It was a huge honour to be able to invite him and Michelle down to the British Virgin Islands for a break after Barack finished his second term as President and the family left the White House.” So what’s he like? “Barack has an insatiable curiosity for information and is always keen to learn. He also approaches every situation with a natural optimism, humour and warmth. All of these things makes him a great listener and a great leader.”
President Donald J. Trump shakes hands with the 44th President of the United States, Barack H. Obama during the 58th Presidential Inauguration at the U.S. Capitol Building, Washington, D.C., Jan. 20, 2017. Shortly after this photo was taken Obama would head to Necker Island to be with Branson (DoD photo by U.S. Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Cristian L. Ricardo)
In addition to this sociable side, there is also Branson’s much chronicled fearless streak. Fred Finn recalls: “I took him on safari with his kids for two weeks at Ol Pegeta ranch, then owned by Tiny Rowland. There were 18 lions in a three-acre chicken-wire cage. We turned up just as they were about to throw meat towards this rugby lineout of lions. Richard crouched near the fence and took a photograph of one lion. Then another jumped at Richard through the fence, and Richard reeled back, ending on top of the Land Rover. Instead of being frightened, he said, “Put my son on my shoulders, let’s do that again.”
So fearless then? Finn replies: “Either that or publicity! After that he asked Tiny Rowland to buy the place and Tiny said: ‘When you’re good enough in business you can talk to me’.”
Rowland died in 1998, but if he were alive today would he think Branson ‘good enough in business’? The figures don’t look too bad. Branson’s net worth is estimated by Forbes at $6.5 billion. Inevitably for someone of his stature he has had his detractors. In 2019, he attracted criticism for suing the government over Chris Grayling’s decision to disqualify Virgin Trains from tendering for the West Coast route. At issue was the question of whether Branson would take on a significant share of liability for paying out pensions to some 346,000 staff while running the services. The High Court took the government’s side.
Turbulent Skies
When I approached Grayling for a comment, he kindly declined, but added that he is spending his time on the back benches working with the aviation sector to keep it alive during the tribulations of the pandemic. One would assume that Grayling backs the £1.2 billion rescue deal Branson secured on behalf of Virgin Atlantic with the government in June 2020.
Resilience comes from failing and learning from those failures – and learning to still move forward. We all fail. Making mistakes is part of being human.
Sir Richard Branson
That, too, was a difficult time PR-wise. As part of the negotiations, Branson offered to put Necker Island forward as security. At a time when many were struggling with lockdown in small flats, it was irritating for some to be reminded that he had a private island at all.
The resulting deal is a reminder too that the Virgin empire is by no means owned entirely by Branson. 49 per cent of Virgin Atlantic is owned by Delta; Forbes recently reported that Virgin owes the minority shareholder £200 million.
But the fact remains that Branson has done what entrepreneurs do: survived. How has he managed during such a difficult time? “Resilience is a lesson we can all learn every day,” Branson tells me. “Resilience comes from failing and learning from those failures – and learning to still move forward. We all fail. Making mistakes is part of being human. If you can pair your failures with an openness to learn, curiosity and a sense of humour, you’re on your way to discovering resilience.”
This feels like earned wisdom and it’s something he’s keen to pass on. What would he say to the younger generation of entrepreneurs? “I always encourage them to try and find opportunities in challenges and if you get knocked down, to get back up. Over and over again.” There is quite a lot packed into that ‘over and over again’. Branson, I’m reminded, is very seasoned now; his youthful approach almost makes you forget that he has reached his three score and ten.
He continues: “It’s also important to learn to rest when you need to, rather than quit. In the face of great challenges, sometimes you just need some downtime to reassess and look at the problem from a different angle. I often have my best thinking time when I’m doing some exercise that I enjoy, like kitesurfing or cycling. Resilience isn’t a constant show of strength, it’s lots of little steps in the right direction that all eventually add up.”
Social Network
Branson is also enlightening on the question of social media. “It’s changed everything,” he says. “When I first started out in business, things were a lot different – I used to reply to letters and if it was urgent, I’d be on the phone. I enjoy checking on my social media feeds and find it really interesting to see everyone’s views on what’s going on in the world. I often blog and post about the issues I care about, from celebrating achievements in the Virgin family to trying to end the death penalty or working to encourage drug policy reform.”
Resilience isn’t a constant show of strength, it’s lots of little steps in the right direction that all eventually add up.
Sir richard branson
Is there anyone whose social media use he particularly admires? “One of the biggest benefits of social media is brands now have a direct link to their customers and communities. Look at brands like Gymshark; the founder, Ben Francis, has used social media to build the brand from the very beginning. They have a truly digital-first approach, and were ahead of the curve.” Does he feel kinship with Francis? “Ben started the business in 2012, and thanks in part to its rapid growth on social media, it’s recently been valued at £1 billion. Ben started the business when he was 19 from his parents’ garage in Birmingham, while juggling studying at university in Birmingham, and evening shifts delivering pizzas.” That certainly reminds me of a young Branson.
Virgin Limited Edition, Richard Branson, The Great House, Necker Island, 2018
Branson gives no signs of slowing down. How does he see technology fitting into Virgin’s path forward? “We’ve always used technology to elevate the experience for our customers wherever we can. From Virgin Atlantic being the first to offer seatback entertainment in all classes back in the early 90s, to Virgin Money recently launching a digital bank in Australia, or personalising your stay at a Virgin Hotel through its Lucy app, to earning and spending rewards across the Virgin Group with our loyalty programme Virgin Red. The opportunities are endless.”
In the Penalty Box
Of late Branson has become particularly interested in the death penalty. “It’s inhumane and barbaric, fails to deter or reduce crime and is disproportionately used against minorities and other vulnerable and marginalised groups,” he explains. When did he become interested in the issue?” “It was after hearing powerful personal stories of miscarriage of justice, such as Anthony Ray Hinton, who spent 28 years on Alabama’s death row for crimes he couldn’t have committed. Unfortunately, there are many harrowing stories similar to his.”
Branson believes that business doesn’t do enough to rally round on these key issues. What sets his latest endeavour apart is precisely this sense of the powerful joining forces on behalf of the public good. “I’m proud to have joined a global group of executives, supported by the Responsible Business Initiative for Justice, in launching the Business Leaders’ Declaration Against the Death Penalty. Together, we are highlighting the case for abolition and calling on governments to end the practice. If you are a business leader reading this – I would urge you to join our movement.”
So what is Branson’s legacy likely to be? Osgood is particularly insightful on what the group has achieved: “Virgin Galactic is the first time he’s tried to start a new industry. Usually the group targets overweight, inefficient industries.” Osgood starts to list them: “Doing trains better, doing phones better, doing broadband better, doing flights, doing banking better, creating Virgin Money lounges, rather than those horrible branches with people behind glass.” Then he hits on it: “Creating an environment where the customer feels happy. It’s the stewardess who makes you sure you have a comfortable flight and doesn’t bug you about your baggage allowance.”
That seems an impressive contribution in its own right, and you can feel Osgood’s enthusiasm – one of many aspiring CEOs who has learned much from Branson’s approach.
Meanwhile, Liz Brewer recalls a magnetic friend: “Richard is a truly refreshing ‘ideas man’, entrepreneur, humanitarian and someone who always impressed me with his positive attitude and the ability to stay firmly focused.”
So having dug beneath the geological layers of his fame, what is Branson really like? Uniqueness is never far from a discussion of him.
To interview a billionaire can be a mixed experience. I recall the unhappy obsequious acolytes around a certain aviation entrepreneur I once spent several days with, but all of Branson’s people seem happy. I recall the shifty banality of a media mogul of my acquaintance, but the Virgin Group feels transparent, and fundamentally benevolent. Above all, there is sometimes the sense that wealthy individuals aren’t enjoying life in some fundamental way; the opposite must be said about Branson. The only way for a rich man to be saved from the corruption of wealth is for money to be tethered to purpose. Branson’s life isn’t in the end primarily a story about the acquisition of money: it is about doing good, attempting the difficult or even the impossible, and doing it in the sunshine. It is this which makes him a hero to many.
Osgood recalls: “When he’s in the room, everyone’s excited. He claims to be a shy guy but I don’t believe that for a minute. He does get nervous. It’s more the aura, and the way he conducts himself. Lots of people see him cynically. He takes risks, and his intentions are good. But the businesses have a purpose: they’re good for people, and good for planet.”
Good for people, good for planet. That’s not a bad epitaph – and it’s certainly one he’s earned.
Consider this. The background at Kensington Palace looks no different to a luxury hotel. A fern behind Prince William’s blue-blazered right shoulder cedes to another plant over his right. Between The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, there is a picture which might be Prince George although the photograph blurs slightly – a suggestion of the room’s scale. Normally, in Zoom calls, in our smaller homes, you don’t have this kind of receding perspective. In the distance a mirror reflects back the high window which must be sitting ahead of the couple: it is a room full of light.
The Duke of Cambridge says: “Something I noticed from my brief spell flying the Air Ambulance is when you see so much death and so much bereavement – it does impact how you see the world. That is what worries me about the frontline staff at the moment – you’re so under the cosh and seeing such high levels of trauma and death, that it impacts your own family life.”
I have seen the two of them many times – as we all have. Their prominence in our lives makes them paradoxically difficult to comprehend. But I’ve never looked at them like I’m looking at them now.
The Duchess of Cambridge adds: “Mental health is so important. For people in the front line it’s needed more than ever. Often you forget to take care and look after yourself.”
To be seen and not to be looked at; to be considered morning, noon and night but never to be understood: this so far has been the fate of this couple.
For this cover story, Finito World engaged extensively with the mental health community. We spoke to those who have known the couple, to those who have worked with them, and – most importantly – those who have been involved in working on their central passion: mental health. Kensington Palace has also been extremely helpful with this piece, verifying facts where we had our doubts, and providing us with vital information which has helped us immeasurably. We would like to take this opportunity to thank them.
What emerges is, like all stories about the Royal Family, as much a tale about our collective identity as it is the story of these two people who everybody is meant to have some kind of opinion about.
On 23rd July 2020, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge announced that the Royal Foundation would give £1.8 million to various mental health charities as part of its Covid relief fund. The ten named organisations were: Mind, Hospice UK, the Ambulance Staff Charity, Campaign Against Living Miserably, Best Beginnings, The Anna Freud Centre, Place2Be, Shout 85258, The Mix, and YoungMinds. Finito World approached each for comment for this article, and received a range of replies which inform this piece.
In order to understand what is being achieved now, it is worth going back to the formation of the Heads Together campaign which was embarked upon at a time when Harry and William were still working closely together.
The Line of Duty
One former member of the Royal Household recalls that it was a ‘small tight-knit household’ which formed the original decision to focus on mental health. Led by Miguel Head, the then private secretary to the Duke of Cambridge, who is now a senior partner at communications advisory firm Milltown Partners, the household reportedly worked in a “highly collaborative” fashion. At that time, before the advent of Meghan Markle, the private secretary to the Duchess of Cambridge Rebecca Deacon (now Rebecca Priestley) and the private secretary to Prince Harry, Ed Lane Fox worked as a quartet, alongside the then Head of Communications Jason Knauf.
Another former member of the household recalls the sense of necessity which permeated Kensington Palace at that time. “The Royal Foundation was set up really with the wedding funds, the booty and the gifts which had come out of the wedding. What’s interesting is you have to do something with it and we kicked ideas around. There was a sense of ‘We’ve got this charitable vehicle – now what do we do with it?’”
The inner circle cast around for examples, and turned to William’s father for inspiration. “Everyone was saying: “The man on the street knows what Clarence House stands for. It’s the environment basically, and sheep farming. But what do we stand for?”
The answer came piecemeal but, once arrived at, would prove remarkably durable. “The first tranche was on wildlife conservation, and another was to do with sport and the community. And Harry had his inner city kids up in Nottingham. But it was a bit tentative – everybody was looking around for a good idea.”
The Wedding Fund was administered by The Royal Foundation and distributed grants to a number of charities. These were selected by The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge.
The first major grants awarded by The Royal Foundation were to ARK (an education initiative) and Fields in Trust (protecting green spaces for young people to play). The first major initiatives of The Royal Foundation of The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and Prince Harry were Coach Core – (2012) launched at the time of the Olympics, Endeavour Fund (2011) and United for Wildlife (2013).
It was mental health which ended up joining up the dots. Another former member of the Household remembers: “Mental health was bubbling in the arena at that time. But I think it was William’s work with the air ambulances which made the crucial difference. It chimed also with Harry’s work with Invictus.”
Important insight came from the private secretaries. “It was Miguel Head who said, ‘Yes, we’ve got these communities like wounded servicemen who have mental health issues, but actually there’s a broader message here.’ One statistic I remember being trotted out was that the biggest cause of death in men under 30 was suicide.” It chimed with everyone: with William and Harry because of their experiences in the military, and with Miguel – or “Mig” as he was known – and Jason Knauf who also took a keen interest in the issue.
J20K7Y The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge with runners representing the charity ‘Heads Together’ before officially starting the Virgin Money London Marathon in Blackheath.
But whatever the contribution of the staff, all are agreed that the Duchess of Cambridge played a critical role. The issue chimed with her. “She soon got to know those issues, with things like post-natal depression – all that side of it she could relate to – and her morning sickness too.”
In fact, it was The Duchess of Cambridge who proposed mental health as the common thread that united all their work. The Duchess had previously worked extensively on mental health through her work with patronages Place2Be, The Art Room, Anna Freud Centre, and in her work with Action on Addiction’s MPACT Programme. A naturally empathic individual, it was the Duchess who recognised the common theme running between each of Their Royal Highnesses’ work. She seized the initiative and today is rightly credited by all the principals as a vital driver of a campaign which has had remarkable success.
At the launch of Heads Together, William would give his wife appropriate credit: “It was Catherine who first realised that all three of us were working on mental health in our individual areas of focus. She had seen that at the core of adult issues like addiction and family breakdown, unresolved childhood mental health issues were often part of the problem.”
Of course, contingency also played its part. When the opportunity presented itself through The Royal Foundation of being charity of the year for the London Marathon, it was time to act. Their Royal Highnesses instructed their Private Secretary Team to work on mental health. A campaign had been born.
Cause Célèbre
This time the room is non-descript and the pair seem to be staring down from an odd angle. They’re more casually dressed – Kate in a zebra-striped top, and William in a turquoise sweater and blue shirt.
William says in relation to the pandemic: “A lot of people won’t have thought about their mental health – maybe ever before. Suddenly this environment we’re in catches up quick. The most important thing is talking – it’s been underestimated how much that can do.”
It is the day of the pledge on mental health and it’s notable that one of the least palatial rooms in the palace has been chosen. With William, whenever he talks of trauma it is with real authenticity. We all know what he has suffered.
He continues: “Trauma comes in all shapes and forms and we can never know or be prepared for when it’s going to happen to us. People will be angry, confused and scared and those are all normal feelings, and unfortunately all part of the grieving process.”
When Kate is asked about how she handles childcare there is also an air of authenticity about her: “You don’t want to scare them or make it too overwhelming. I think it is appropriate to acknowledge it in simple and age-appropriate ways.”
Of course, the way in which we hear these straightforward remarks has been altered by media coverage, with some sections of the media taking a perverse pleasure in trying to twist their lives into a tale with greater jeopardy in it than it can likely bear.
That’s not to say everybody is completely sold on mental health – and some of those we spoke with raised legitimate questions around royal involvement in charitable causes. When I speak to Lord Stevenson, one of the leading thinkers in this area, who submitted the Thriving at Work report alongside Mind CEO Paul Farmer to May administration, he initially laughs that he doesn’t like to get too involved in anything the royals are doing, feeling that it is a case of “good intentions.” He continues: “I remember Prince Harry giving money to charities involved with the army. Presumably it was based on the presumption that serving soldiers have worse than average mental health. Curiously enough, the evidence is that they don’t.”
And yet these misgivings are expressed lightly, and with a certain humour: they are not intended to cut very deep. They are instead a cheerful warning which might be levelled at anyone thinking about wading in to this area without deep understanding. Stevenson also explains in his exclusive essay in this issue that the area has benefited from some “strong royal patronage”.
Meanwhile, the journalist Toby Young argues that the mental health crisis is ‘complete balls’ but will not say more than that because he considers it “a good stick with which to beat governments over lockdown”. But another lockdown sceptic, Emily Hill, who writes regularly for the Mail and whose novel Love and Late Capitalism publishes next year, says: “I can’t quite believe that Toby Young – of all people – thinks there is no mental health crisis due to Covid and lockdown. People are still so terrified they are wandering about in the open air wearing facemasks as if the virus exists in the air. If that isn’t evidence of a mental health crisis I don’t know what is.”
This shows that the couple has found a cause which resonates across every section of society. They have been successful in alighting on the cause célèbre of our time.
The Inner Circle
So what has been the reaction? It’s remarkable how popular and durable the campaign has already proven, and across the political spectrum. Paul Farmer, the CEO of Mind, and co-author with Stevenson of ‘Thriving at Work’ tells us that “The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge do an incredible amount of charity work, raising awareness for important social and health issues, and we are delighted that they have chosen mental health as an area to which to lend their considerable profile.”
Victoria Hornby, the founder of Mental Health Innovations which powers Shout 85258 told us: “The support we have received from the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge has been phenomenal. Not only are they both passionate advocates for mental health, their continued dedication to Shout has helped to raise awareness of the service as a vital lifeline for anyone in the UK who is struggling to cope.”
Tom Madders, Director of Communications at YoungMinds wrote to us: “As a children and young people’s mental health charity, it is really important for their voices to be heard and the Duke and Duchess have spent time with us as a charity to really understand the issues that young people and their families face. Stigma around mental health can prevent young people from getting support or recognising when they are struggling. The profile of the Duke and Duchess means we can reach more young people and parents and make a real difference.”
R1586P The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge attend the first Global Ministerial Mental Health Summit. The summit is being co-hosted by the UK Government and the OECD. Featuring: Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, Catherine Duchess of Cambridge, Catherine Middleton, Kate Middleton Where: London, United Kingdom When: 09 Oct 2018 Credit: John Rainford/WENN
Alistair Campbell and Fiona Millar meanwhile, who worked on Heads Together, tell us: “The younger royals’ focus on mental health is a good thing. We were involved in Heads Together and know, from the reaction that we got, that it gave people a lot of confidence to speak out about their own mental health issues when they hear others in the public eye (royal or not) doing likewise. Mental health issues can touch people from all backgrounds.”
Millar continues: “I particularly respect the Duchess of Cambridge’s work on the early years as the impact early childhood has on later mental health is too often overlooked. I believe she got criticised by some for getting involved in an area where there is already a lot of expertise, but if she can raise the profile of that vital phase, then we should only be pleased.”
Finally, there are those who have been in government who praise the royal commitment. Baroness Nicky Morgan, who has served as both Education and Culture Secretary, and now chairs the mental health charity The Wellbeing Café Project in Loughborough, tells us: “Their patronage, particularly of an issue like mental health which we really didn’t hear anyone talking about just a few years ago, is a real game changer and very welcome.”
Marlborough Light
Of course, in another sense, the campaign dates further back to the creation of two highly empathic individuals who might choose mental health as their chief charitable cause. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are the same as the rest of us: they cannot be separated from their past, which means that their story is impossible to divorce from their education.
This isn’t just the case because they met in an educational setting, but because both individuals were shaped in similar educational environments – William at Eton College and Catherine at Marlborough College.
There is, of course, a marked difference in their two educations. At Marlborough, which Kate Middleton attended in the mid-1990s, nobody who knew her then particularly thought to notice her, for the obvious reason that nobody imagined they were going to school with the future Duchess of Cambridge. Whereas from birth, William has never known anonymity – and he will not know it. As Miguel Head told The Harvard Gazette in 2019: “The princes took the view that they were going to be in the public eye from the moment they were born to the moment they died and with that level of interest in them, the only way of coping with that would be to detach themselves from much of what is said about them.”
But among the old Marlburians we spoke to for this piece, some found it hard to remember Kate at all – and you get the sense that they’d been racking their brains ever since. Those who did, remembered a kind and unshowy girl, who fitted what Marlborough was turning into more than what it had been.
Oliver Osgood, 41, now an entrepreneur, explains that when Kate Middleton attended the place it was in transition: “At that time, the school had moved away from its spiritual philosophy of fun, freedom of expression and individuality. It had begun its shift from a sex, drugs and rock-and-roll approach in the 1970s to a ‘we’ve-got-to-get-great-grades approach’.”
Rosemary Cochrane, 40, who is now successful in healthcare recruitment at Oyster Partnership, feels that the shift took a little longer to come about: “There was nothing about mental health in those days. It was still a very druggy school, and wasn’t particularly academic. It was about building an all-rounder.” And how did Middleton fit into this? “She was definitely in the sporty gang. She was perfectly nice, and pretty – as was her sister, Pippa, and it makes them perfect for what they do today. She was just a very nice girl who played lacrosse, and who you didn’t come across at nightclubs. She was very lovely. She was never going to be loud and never put herself out there too much and would never be too in your face, or too loud – and never drunk. She’s not outspoken; she just does everything subtly.”
Sport remains an important aspect of the couple’s bond. Middleton was well-known for her athleticism. One former colleague recalls long car journeys with William where football was the predominant topic of discussion. “It wouldn’t occur to him to ask if you’re interested in the topic; his background makes him assume you are.”
Interestingly, sport plays an important part in any vision of a mentally healthier society. Mental expert Dr. Paul Hokemeyer, the author of Fragile Power: Why Having Everything is Never Enough, explains its relevance: “Leisure is critically important to our emotional and physical well-being. This is especially important for people who live in the intense heat of the public spotlight. Leisure, and sports in particular, provides us with an opportunity to get out of ourselves and to connect with a community of other human beings around a common interest and goal. This is because mental illnesses thrive in isolation, but retreat when we find meaningful relationships with other people and our natural environment.”
What most strikes you about the reminiscences of Old Marlburians is that even those who had little natural affinity with her do not talk ill of her. One, who asks not to be named, says she attended parties with Kate but “never got to know her”. It is a note of unknowability which might be deemed, along with her kindness, the leitmotif of her life.
An instructive simplicity comes across. Later on, people would paint her and her family as ruthless for falling in love with William – but it feels significant that they never do when they knew her beforehand. If she ever had peculiar plans of a royal marriage in those days which meaner elements of the press would come to imagine, then she hid them very well at the time.
Eton Mess
Over at Eton, William had a similar experience. Eton, despite its apparent pre-eminence, is an ecosystem interlinked with the other great public schools – particularly Charterhouse, Harrow, Repton and Marlborough. We might say that when the couple met they would share a set of common assumptions.
The unanimous view of contemporaries is that the school changed fundamentally once William arrived. Xavier Ballester, a contemporary of William’s, who now works in angel investment, recalls the shift: “He had about 28 bodyguards on different rotations – but in spite of that, he was integrated. He would be in the classes but there would be guards standing outside. They were always checking the bins, checking for bombs, and all this kind of stuff.”
2G1B097 File photo dated 15/09/1989 of Prince Harry (left), five, joins his brother Prince William, seven, on his first day at the Wetherby School in Notting Hill, West London. The young princes are pictured with their mother, the Princess of Wales (left), and the school Headmistress, Frederika Blair-Turner. The Duchess of Sussex gave birth to a 7lb 11oz daughter, Lilibet Lili Diana Mountbatten-Windsor, on Friday in California and both mother and child are healthy and well, Meghan’s press secretary said. Issue date: Sunday June 6, 2021.
Mike Lebus, who now works with Ballester at the Angel Investment Network, agrees: “It sounds strange saying it now, considering that he was obviously going to be our future king, but we genuinely did just see him as one of our housemates – another guy to chat with, watch TV and play sports with.”
Ned Cazalet also recalls the shift in the school. “We had prayers one evening where the housemaster also reads notices out, and a kid had pulled out a water pistol while walking behind Prince William and almost got himself shot. And throughout the school at that time, there was police and CCTV. It was a big shift.”
But what kind of an effect did Eton have on William? “It had an effect on him – it had an effect on everyone,” Ballester says. “It gave him confidence. He was a protected kid – and to make your way there you have to develop some confidence no matter how protected you are.”
What most emerges from all this is that in environments against which young people are inclined to rebel, neither William nor Kate did. In William’s case, one might initially think that there’s no mystery as to why William didn’t do so; he felt he couldn’t. But of course the example of Prince Harry – and before him, the examples of Princess Diana, Princess Margaret and the Queen Mother – makes one realise that it is perfectly possible for people to possess a privileged position and develop character traits which might not fit the expected pattern.
EN980E Prince William arrives at a photocall before his first day at Eton College Public School. 6th September 1995.
Cazalet also perceptively notes how the experience of public school is often impacted by who your housemaster is. In this, William was particularly lucky. Cazalet recalls William’s mentor the author and historian Dr. Andrew Gailey. “I remember he was quietly spoken. He seemed to have affection for his students. Some of the housemasters were chaotic, others were drunk, or tired or bored, or had some chip on their shoulder. But he was one of the best ones.”
Another old Etonian describes Gailey: “He was an excellent housemaster, a wonderful man and someone who I will respect for the rest of my life. He ran the house with a fine balance of responsibility and accountability that allowed us boys to thrive. He gave us enough of a leash to develop ‘autonomy’ but if this was teetering out of control he was excellent at recognising this and reining in. He was supportive and passionate. Andrew also taught me history at A-Level, but it is the way he led us in Manor House that I will forever be grateful for. I am sure my experiences of Eton would have been very different had I been in another house.” William couldn’t have found a better mentor.
Today Marlborough College has become focused on mental health. There is a tab labelled ‘Pastoral’ on its website with a ‘mental health and well-being’ sub-heading in the dropdown. In this the text reads: “We…believe that the skills which young people learn in adolescence, in terms of sustaining good mental health AND in terms of taking appropriate action when things go wrong, are skills which can be taken forward into university and well beyond, into adult life.”
One notes the capitalised ‘and’ which perhaps conveys a certain desperation to be on the right side of an issue which nowadays – and partly due to the most famous Old Marlburian – you can’t afford to be on the wrong side of. In a sense the school today has been Middletonised.
One former pupil, who was asked to leave due to a drink and drugs problem, told us: “I definitely think if my case came round today they would have got me counselling, and sought to look at why I was behaving as I was, rather than punishing me.”
Similarly, many of the old Etonians we spoke with continue to be shadowed by the bullying they saw, or experienced. One Etonian recalls: “You are in a very class-obsessed place where you have to tread carefully to not be exposed as a pleb and then derided for it. I was lucky in that I got a small scholarship and was in the top sets with others who had money off their fees too. I was also good at sport which helped a lot but some people were sent to Eton and got mercilessly tormented (a northern guy in my year springs to mind).”
Cazalet gets to the heart of the chilliness of the place: “Years later, when I decided to leave university early, my father said: ‘I hope you didn’t do anything to reflect badly on Eton’.” Another bemoans the presence of “casual, classist bullying” – although, all added that they were talking about the Eton of William’s time and that things might be better today.
We can see how sensitive young people like the future Duke and Duchess of Cambridge wouldn’t forget what was lacking in their schooling – even if that schooling was the best that money could buy at that time.
Dog Days
On Catherine’s side, there are other possible areas of motivation. The Middleton family, though it has sometimes been unfairly portrayed as grasping, has a strong compassionate streak.
Emily Prescott has interviewed Kate’s brother James Middleton about his work as a mental health advocate and feels that having a brother with depression may be a source of Kate’s inspiration in tackling the issue. “It was very moving to talk to him,” she recalls. “I can imagine that having that passion for dogs [Middleton is an ambassador for the charity Pets as Therapy] across the family dinner table must have had an impact on her outlook.” Prescott remembers discussing a famous quote by Milan Kundera during their conversation: “Dogs are our link to Paradise. They don’t know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring – it was peace.” Prescott adds: “He sounded almost in tears as he spoke about his dogs. He was a very sensitive person. Once I told him I wasn’t asking about Kate he seemed relieved.”
This sensitivity is also to be found in the Windsor family. One former member of the household who worked closely with William for many years, when asked what makes the royals special, tells us: “You’ll see the Duke and Duchess at a function, let’s say for families of those who have fallen in Afghanistan or Iraq. You can see them do the line-up, or circle the room, and you know that each person will have only 45 seconds with them as it’s a crowded gathering. And you’ll know that they all need something from that encounter. What’s amazing is that they always get that something. Everybody comes away feeling better, and lighter somehow. It’s a gift, and I think William and Harry both have it from Diana.”
We have to remember that Diana was there at the beginning of William’s schooling – but tragically, not at its end. Lebus recalls: “I remember his first day at school when he moved into the house. My sister and I passed his mother on the staircase while she was carrying a plant up to his bedroom, and it was surprisingly (but refreshingly) normal. We just smiled at each other and said “Hi”, as you would with anyone else’s mum and dad.” It is a touching image, especially in light of what would happen subsequently.
Hungry Gaze
Two media appearances by Kate Middleton. In one she is standing on stage, and launching the Heads Together campaign. “We know mental health is an issue for us all, children and parents, young and old, men and women of all backgrounds and all circumstances. What we’ve seen first hand is that the simple fact of having a conversation – that breaking the silence – can make a real difference. But starting a conversation is just that, it’s a start.”
Starting a conversation. That is a difficult thing to do when everybody is gawping at you. In a famous – and much-misread – article, which also contained some discussion of Kate Middleton’s predicament – the novelist Hillary Mantel recalls seeing Queen Elizabeth at a function at Buckingham Palace: “…the queen passed close to me and I stared at her. I am ashamed now to say it but I passed my eyes over her as a cannibal views his dinner, my gaze sharp enough to pick the meat off her bones…and such was the hard power of my stare that Her Majesty turned and looked back at me…”
And how does Elizabeth look when she turns back to Mantel? Does she look regal? Does she look different to how we would look if we were being stared at? No, she looks human, or as Mantel says, “as if she had been jabbed in the shoulder; and for a split second her face expressed not anger but hurt bewilderment. She looked young: for a moment she had turned back from a figurehead into the young woman she was, before monarchy froze her and made her a thing, a thing which only had meaning when it was exposed, a thing that existed only to be looked at. And I felt sorry then. I wanted to apologise. I wanted to say: it’s nothing personal, it’s monarchy I’m staring at.”
It is a novelist’s insight – that the paraphernalia of monarchy may in the end, whatever the tenor of our national discourse, amount to far less than we might imagine. And the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are in the same predicament.
After that speech by the Duchess, there was some criticism that she had mumbled – and yet on the YouTube video she speaks perfectly clearly. Whatever she says or does, there will be criticism from some quarter or other.
Miguel Head continued to the Harvard Law Review: “It was actually quite liberating, because it meant that we as a team could concentrate on what we wanted to say about them. In essence, what we were trying to do was focus the interest in them on particular aspects of their public life, of their work in their early 20s as they were beginning to find their feet and experimenting with different topics, different careers.”
And yet it cannot only be liberating. This experience must also be suffocating. Furthermore, we cannot absolve ourselves from that since, as Mantel implies, it is us who are doing the suffocating.
The second appearance is on the podcast Happy Mum, Happy Baby, which aired in February 2020. The presenter Giovanna Fletcher says she is nervous after her introduction and the Duchess says: “Don’t worry -I’m nervous too.” For the listener, as for Fletcher, a gap is closed, a common humanity noted.
Later in the interview, the Duchess continues: “I had a very happy childhood, I was very lucky. I have a strong family. My parents were very dedicated. They’d come to every sports match and would be on the sidelines shouting.”
Some reminiscences ensue with Fletcher about her own childhood visits to Curry’s, and Kate interposes with a kind of agile empathy, “How about you? What was your childhood like?” This leads to a brief discussion of the bullying Fletcher experienced as a child. It is a very simple thing, you might think, when you’re being interviewed to mind at all about the life of your interviewer. Except to say that, in the experience of this interviewer, very few do – and many of them have far less profile than Catherine does.
Whenever you speak to anyone who knew Kate or William growing up the tone is different. It is matter-of-fact – above all, it is sane. The respondent almost seems to pity you for wanting to know – because if you have known them, there is no mystery. But for those who haven’t known them, there is the mystery of our looking so much to so little purpose. What we are peering at is our own frustration. Like Mantel at Buckingham Palace, we are somehow unable to accept that we are looking on human material, and that the answers to all the questions we might have about the couple do not lie outside us; they’re within, in our very need to know.
And the couple’s mental health campaigns seem to open up onto the idea that we could all do with a dose of sanity in our own lives, not just in relation to what we’re dealing with, our own strains and stresses – but in relation to them.
A Scotland Romance
This sense is brought home for me when I begin to look at the couple’s time at St Andrew’s University. I speak with Stephanie Jones, now a successful brand manager, who attended St Andrew’s at the same time as William and Kate – and in taking art history, did the same course as both, though William subsequently changed to geography.
“It was all discreetly done,” Jones recalls. “I remember walking down the street and tripping and then looking up and seeing Prince William quite near and thinking that this wasn’t the impression I wanted to make! But he had no bodyguards around him. I remember seeing him in the pub too and if he had a security detail it was entirely made up of hopeful girls!”
Of course, this isn’t the whole truth. If things seemed normal to contemporaries, they sometimes seemed to be spinning out of control. Around this time, once the relationship broke, Middleton became ‘Waity Katie’ in the media – a horrible moniker. And of course, there is nothing to make you think about the question of mental health quite like running into the reality of the tabloid press.
It is as if St Andrew’s, in its size and remoter location, were better able to accommodate William’s arrival than Eton had been. Jones says that the principal change she remembers with William’s arrival at St Andrew’s was that the year William joined, there was a marked increase of blonde American girls: “But whenever I saw him, he seemed normal. We all felt this responsibility to sort of let him get on with it, and enjoy the university and not feel hounded.” Once again, we near the suspicion that William may not only be projecting normality – that he may actually be “normal”.
The Diana Effect
But of course, there is one area in which William isn’t normal and this is in the terrible fate that his mother met on 31st August 1997 in the Paris car accident.
Jones continues: “We were protective about what happened with Diana. I would walk past charity shops and see books about her in the window and think how tacky that was and how hard it must have been to walk past if you were William. His pain was being commercialised.”
This is empathetic – and today, we still feel it. An observer of the palace who has known William for years says that it infuses coverage surrounding the boys. “They’ll always on some level be the boys traipsing behind the coffin.”
So grief enters the story – a wound so painful that we almost think it might be an impropriety to discuss it. But Dr. Paul Hokemeyer argues that we cannot avoid it when discussing William and Kate’s mental health campaigns. “Prince William is a brilliant example of the healing power of two key psychological traits known as resilience and grit,” he explains. “The first, resilience, refers to our capacity to make meaning out of tragic events and to move ourselves and the world around us in a repairative direction after the event.”
This feels relevant as it is something like this “repairative direction” in which William now seeks to steer us all with his mental health campaigns.
And the second trait? Hokemeyer is clear: “Grit enables us to tolerate short term discomfort to attain a long term goal. As this relates to Prince William, he had to sit not just with the crushing pain of losing his mother, but with also being an obsession of the public; and he had to do this without devolving into a tragedy himself. His capacity to do this with dignity and grace is exceptional. Not only has he navigated that terrain brilliantly, he’s gone on to create a family that reflects the class, dignity and nobility of decades of British royalty.
Hokemeyer continues: “The trauma of losing a mother at an early age sets a child up for a journey down the path of meaning and repair (resilience and grit) or of wandering through the brambles of life, lost and emotionally alone. The individuals who travel on the first path have what is known as a robust ‘internal locus of control’. They’ve internalized a healthy sense of self. As this relates to picking a life partner, people with a healthy internal locus of control pick mates who compliment them in their journey of healing and providing hope to the world around them.”
Another psychologist, Dr. Jonathan Garabette, a private consultant psychiatrist who also specialises in mental health, is less sure about the whole question: “Our choice of partner is a complex and enigmatic area. I think it’s important to consider that we are living in the internal world just as much as (or even more than) we are living in the external world and our internal worlds are populated by memories, relationships, people, infantile childhood, adolescent and different parts of us and all of this exerts a much greater effect on our psychology and our choices than we may consciously be aware of.”
And how may that have affected William? “Many people, especially after being affected by trauma, are searching for a relationship that provides meaning, and a sense of safety and connectedness and we will each find this in different ways in different aspects of others. It’s also important to remember that what we see on the surface, particularly on public figures, is just that – it’s a surface impression and we should remind ourselves that they and their partners are complex three dimensional human beings and the connection that people may have between them may not be easily apparent to those on the outside.”
So is there anything we can say about the choice of life partner someone might make who has been through trauma? “When I speak to people, especially those who have been traumatised, about how they came to end up with their partner, it’s often because that person has managed to touch upon a very deep and intimate part of that person that others might not even have had the opportunity to be aware of.”
Trauma and grief make William an immensely plausible campaigner for mental health. It is possible to imagine him in his current role without the awful loss of his mother, but hard to imagine him being so effective in it. Garabette’s remarks sensibly distance us from William and Kate, and indeed they remind us of the essentially unknowable nature of other people.
This fact, so simple and non-negotiable, is something about which contemporary commentators of the couple seem in denial: a typical Mail or Tatler article today is full of a bogus desire for an insider’s light bulb moment which will suddenly open everything up – hand them to us on a platter. This cannot happen; and shouldn’t happen.
But Garabette also reminds us that their internal worlds are similar to ours and that if we really want to know what they think, we need to know what we think. It isn’t too much to suppose that this is one aspect of the conversation the couple wants to start with their campaigns. Again we return to the notion that a really wide-ranging national conversation surrounding mental health would also necessitate a fundamental restart of our relationship with them.
Action Figures
But as the couple has pointed out, it isn’t just a conversation that needs to start; action has been pledged. The £1.8 million which the couple pledged to charities is already making a tangible difference to some of the charities under discussion. In the box opposite we highlight some of the work that has already been done with the money pledged by the Royal Foundation.
But how does the allocation of funds work in practice? One former colleague, who attended numerous meetings at the beginning of the process, explained the ethos surrounding the mental health campaign: “The Duke and Duchess are very private necessarily, but absolutely committed and passionate about their work. Their initiatives take a long time to evolve as they don’t want to put their name to anything that will fizzle out. It has to be long-term and sustainable across a large swathe of society, so they can get their teeth into it.”
This feels, then, like a new approach to royal patronage? “It is a bit of a departure,” the former household member continues. “Look at the Queen. She has 900 patronages, and it used to be that as long as you weren’t doing anything stupid you’d get a patronage. Now they’re careful about what they want to get behind: it’s there with you for life, and they’re very keen to make sure their causes are followed through on.”
So what happened? It’s important to note that in giving the monies, the Duke and Duchess haven’t become patrons of those charities. The £1.8 million was granted by the Royal Foundation through a bespoke fund set up as part of the organisation’s response to COVID-19: it included, but was not limited to, support for Heads Together partners. Decisions on allocation of funds was taken by The Royal Foundation, whose current CEO is Jason Knauf, in line with expectations of Their Royal Highnesses, donors and trustees.
The impression then is that this was a team effort, with Their Royal Highnesses demonstrating real leadership. Others Finito World spoke with also praised the wisdom of private secretaries past and present and the role of trusted people in the sector, such as Paul Farmer, now CEO of Mind, and Victoria Hornby, who runs Mental Health Innovations.
It has been an extremely fruitful and productive relationship: Hornby would be instrumental in establishing Shout 85258 in 2017 with the Royal Foundation’s largest ever grant of £3 million. Meanwhile Mental Health at Work was established in partnership with MIND. Other projects also came to fruition, most notably Mentally Health Schools in concert with The Anna Freud Centre, Place2Be and Young Minds. This is no casual dabbling in the sector, but a profound engagement with a societal problem.
All those we spoke with emphasised the personal commitment of the principals. Hornby explains that the Duke “went above and beyond when he became a Shout Volunteer. After undertaking rigorous training, he joined our army of 2,800 volunteers who provide anonymous, in the moment, mental health support to people in urgent need of support. Our volunteers were absolutely thrilled when Prince William revealed, via a video call, that he was on the Shout platform with them.”
Farmer also spoke to Finito World extensively for this piece. We asked him what impact the Duke and Duchess’ campaigns had had: “Heads Together has sparked millions of important conversations about mental health” – again the importance of starting conversations – “and the Royal Foundation has raised money to support innovative projects to tackle the challenges we can all face in talking about, and seeking support for, our mental health in the workplace,” he explains.
But Farmer also highlights areas for improvement. In particular, he argues that the country needs to think fundamentally about the nature of the workplace: “All employers – including government – should be reflecting on how work can be undertaken moving forwards. Within many workplaces, the sources of poor mental health at work are often cited as including unrealistic demands, excessive workloads and problematic relationships with colleagues and other stakeholders.”
And how has the pandemic altered these causes of stress? “They were prevalent even before the pandemic, but research suggests mental health among staff has worsened further. Data from 40,000 staff working across 114 organisations taking part in Mind’s Workplace Wellbeing Index (2020/21) found two in five (41 per cent) employees said their mental health worsened during the pandemic.”
Farmer is also disappointed that, after the Theresa May administration welcomed the Thriving at Work report, its recommendations haven’t been properly implemented by the Johnson administration: “They have failed to improve protections from discrimination in the workplace in the Equality Act 2010 for people with mental health problems. Although they consulted on making improvements to Statutory Sick Pay (SSP), including phased returns to work and expanding SSP to the lowest paid workers, last month the UK Government announced they would be making no changes to SSP.”
When we asked Farmer to describe the effect of this recalcitrance, he was blunt: “As a result, many people with mental health problems have been left without access to the protections they need, and risk being pushed out of the workplace. We believe that the UK Government can and should do more – in the case of SSP, this is a recommendation that four years on, has still not been actioned.”
A spokesperson for the Department for Work and Pensions said: “The pandemic was not the right time to introduce changes to the rate of Statutory Sick Pay (SSP) or its eligibility criteria. This would have placed an immediate and direct cost on employers at a time where most were struggling and could have put more jobs at risk. We instead prioritised changes to the wider welfare system which is the most efficient way of providing immediate financial support.”
The spokesperson added: “As part of our £500 million mental health recovery action plan we are also helping people with a variety of mental health conditions, including though the expansion of integrated primary and secondary care for adults with severe mental illness.”
Asked for positives, Farmer had this to say: “We’ve now seen over 1250 organisations – including most Government departments – sign the Mental Health at Work Commitment, demonstrating their commitment to better protecting, supporting and promoting the mental health of their employees.” This is a tangible achievement and shows the impact of which Kensington Palace is capable.
But the failures of the Johnson administration on this front open up onto the thorny question of Kensington Palace and its relationship to government.
Nicky Morgan, a former member of Finito’s advisory board, who has deep experience of government, explains how she never worked with the Royals while in office – and this turns out to be the norm, even among senior experienced politicians. Asked what government could do to help on mental health, Morgan said: “As the founder and now Chair of Trustees at a small mental health charity and social enterprise in Loughborough, I can say that keeping on top of all the paperwork is quite a task and we have really had to make sure it doesn’t distract us from the mental health support work we do and the activities we provide.”
The Turning of the Key
So is there a role for government in this area? “I definitely think it should be left to local communities and groups to identify where charitable support is needed and that this shouldn’t be coordinated by government,” Morgan continues. “The one area government could help is in encouraging the NHS to work in a more systemic way with local charities: too often at the moment it is purely down to whether local individuals happen to meet and can build good working relationships.”
Fiona Millar adds: “From my own time working in government, and subsequently as an activist, I would say that focussing on one specific issue and becoming “expert” in that issue is much more effective than dipping in and out of different causes.”
There is food for thought here. Dennis Stevenson tells me that ‘mental health doesn’t really need government at all anymore”. On the other hand, the likes of Farmer are clear that there is more to do.
The likelihood is that Kensington Palace will continue to work its own terrain. One former member of the Royal Household, who worked for the couple around the time of the London Olympics, recalls: “We might work with government a bit on the sport side of things, and have Hugh Robertson (the then Minister for Sport) to the Palace. But, in general, for big projects, if we wanted guidance on the NHS, say, in relation to mental health, we wouldn’t go to the Health Secretary but to the NHS itself. In general they prefer to keep politics out of it.”
Another source agrees with this and adds that this attitude is to do with “wariness about how the Prince of Wales was drawn over the coals for black spiders and so forth. Kensington Palace now wants to make it clear that what it’s doing is completely apolitical.” The source adds: “The role the Palace really plays is the power of convening. Everybody will take a meeting, and so they can get different people together in the room.” With their mental health campaigns, that’s exactly what the couple has done.
Band of Brothers
Government turns out not to be a thorny issue at all compared to two things which have turned out to be particularly headachey. The first is Harry, and the second is the press. But the more you look at that problem, the more they come to seem one and the same thing.
In the first instance, I speak to Nicky Philipps, the brilliant society portrait painter whose picture of William and Harry hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. Philipps recalls painting the commission with great fondness, although she admits that the picture was painted under considerable pressure. “It was very nerve-wracking – until I met them,” she tells me.
Again, the sense arises that these people we think about so much, turn out to be so much like ourselves up close. “Harry was so sweet. The person I knew is not the man in California whingeing about his setup. I don’t know what’s happened now. He was so lovely.”
Philipps explains some of the complexities of organising a royal portrait: “The light is all wrong at Clarence House,” she recalls. “I was determined to have proper north light, but the sun was pouring through and changing the colour and causing havoc so I asked if they could come to my house.”
And what was that like? “They organised it and the police came.” (Again, the police: harbingers of the royal presence). But when the principals arrived, everything changed. “They were just like everybody, very natural and fun together and they created their own pose. I didn’t have much to do – they arranged themselves.”
Today Philipps, who has also painted the Queen on three occasions, looks back on that 2008 sitting and says she’d have liked more time. “They were in uniform so I had to take photographs of the uniform and the medals and couldn’t get much down there. I had five sittings – which sounds a lot but it isn’t when you’ve got to do two heads.”
It’s worth looking at this painting closely. Over time, the picture has changed – one thinks of Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian of Gray, where a picture changes because the world around it cannot remain static. “What’s quite weirdly prophetic,” continues Philipps, “is that I couldn’t find a way to arrange them with William in a doorway and still have Harry to be looking at him. There’s this lintel going down the middle, and I have an awful feeling it’s slightly off centre. Now I look at it and it’s the Great Divide.”
If you look at the picture, it’s true – the two princes are looking at each other fondly, but they are also irrevocably separated, each inhabiting separate fields of energy, as they sadly do today in real life.
“Never in a million years would I have thought it would have ended like this,” Philipps continues. “Harry was more casual, and William was more on it – but they were one. They were lifelong friends so far as I was concerned.”
There seems little doubt that the press must bear some of the blame for the deterioration in their relationship. One person who used to work at Kensington Palace was worried at the time about the drip effect of negative stories about the princes: “They would definitely get hurt by what they read in the press about each other.”
Philipps has also painted the Duchess: “Kate’s absolutely sweet and extraordinarily graceful. I never met anyone who carries themselves so well and is so patient.”
Nicky Morgan is among those who understands the difficulty ranged against the couple when it comes to the media: “You have to learn to ignore much of the commentary directed at you, decide whose opinions really matter to you, and realise that social media is both a great way of communicating a message about your work but can also be a source of great abuse and distraction.”
Tattling Tales
None of this will be remotely news to William and Kate, who deal – and will deal forever – under a greater scrutiny than any Cabinet minister. But the dynamics are the same – and again they always work against narratives of simplicity and happiness, since it has been decided that such stories lack the ghoulish jeopardy which we apparently expect from our newspapers.
Once again, there is a simpler interpretation of their story. Philipps adds: “I think it’s been a fantastic revelation to see how a middle class family can be so cohesive. Although the Royal Family is a very solid block in a way, I think to be taken under their wing would be a lovely thing to experience.”
This brings us to the unpleasant story in Tatler which published earlier in the year under the headline ‘Catherine the Great’. This story, run under the editorship of the Duchess’ contemporary at St Andrew’s Richard Dennen is an example of the kind of journalism – full of insinuation and straightforward unkindness – which this publication opposes. Dennen appears to have befriended the Duchess of Cambridge while at St Andrew’s, and is remembered by Old Carthusians as a shy boy, whose subsequent transformation into a society gadfly has always caused considerable perplexity.
The story posits a Duchess who is tired of the stress, when her work ethic according to those we spoke with is impressive. Meanwhile Carole Middleton appears as a snob, when the reality is different. A source said: “Nobody reading that Tatler article who knows the family would recognise the description of Carole which it contains. In reality she is a straightforward decent person. In my experience successful business people do not have time to be snobbish – they’re too busy. And Carole is very successful and has been a great role model for the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. There was never any need to spin any of this negatively.”
The Throne of Reason
What should the Royal family do in relation to the media? Michael Cole, who formerly worked for the BBC as royal correspondent, tells us unequivocally: “The British media are not the enemy of the Royal Family. As I have said to more than one royal personage, the time for the Royal Family to worry about the media is when the media is no longer interested in the Royal Family because that will mean the game is up because the Great British Public is no longer interested either.”
It will indeed be a sad day when a belief in good journalism departs Kensington Palace, although Miguel Head is among those who attests to Prince William’s belief in the enduring importance of the Fourth Estate when it is doing its job properly.
But Cole’s remarks also overlook the possibility that the onus may lie with us to look differently, as I suggested at the beginning of this article.
Covering William and Kate, one begins to sense that too often we overcomplicate life. Their story is simple just as their mental health campaigns are admirably straightforward. They were born into well-to-do families, and fell in love, and one of them was set to be the King of England – and in our system someone always will be monarch. In time, the pair found that if they were to do good it must come out of the gift each had, and which each had seen in the other: empathy.
And so it went. “Too often, people feel afraid to admit that they are struggling with their mental health,” the Duchess of Cambridge has said. “This fear of judgment stops people from getting the help they need, which can destroy families and end lives. Heads Together wants to help everyone feel much more comfortable with their everyday mental wellbeing, and to have the practical tools to support their friends and family.” It is a perfectly simple message, and we might call it bland – but equally we might call it true.
Perhaps in the last analysis, the couple’s mental health campaigns ask us to correct our attitudes to class and to celebrity. If we were to do away with our obsession with the trivial, we might find we suddenly have room for what really matters: the creation of meaningful lives where we don’t seek to tear one another down, but to look out for one another.
Robert Halfon MP, the Chair of the Education Select Committee, has a long history of championing causes relating to inequality in our society. It’s therefore no surprise when I catch up with him to find him using strong language about the state of our education system during the pandemic. Halfon immediately calls this past year a “national disaster” for education, labelling those who’ve missed out on fundamental learning “the lost generation”.
Such strong terms are not used to exaggerate for effect. “The coronavirus has been really tough for children from disadvantaged backgrounds,” Halfon explains. “We know that during the last lockdown 2.3 million children did hardly any learning at all; many children just don’t have access to proper laptops, phones or tablets.”
Despite the government’s vaccination programme, the future hasn’t got brighter in the past week: free school meals have been put on hold during February half-term, and the government’s plan to execute 30-minute tests at schools has been blocked by the MHRA (Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency) meaning the date when schools may return to normal will be delayed even more.
For many, the Covid-19 pandemic has amplified inequalities inherent in a system which already benefits children from more privileged backgrounds and areas. The exams fiasco last year was an example of how schooling during the first lockdown had a disproportionate effect on those from lower socio-economic backgrounds, and also how unprepared the government was for such a situation.
But the most prevalent issue facings millions of remote schoolchildren during this second lockdown is the efficacy of remote learning in a home environment in which parents are either struggling to balance childcare with work, or are key workers having to travel to work every-day.
“Mental-health issues among young people are on the rise,” Halfon continues, “and part of the reason is because of social isolation and continued school closures.” The Royal College of Pediatrics recently warned that there’s been a rise in eating disorders amongst the young.
What’s more, organisations such as Safeguarding Alliance are warning that more kids are being coerced to join county line drug gangs, and are being exposed to online harm because of home schooling: the BBC reported in September that there has been a marked increase in images of child abuse on the internet.
“If parents aren’t there because they have to work, who is supervising the kids? There’s already problems of inequality in education, but this is making it so much worse,” says Halfon.
The moves the government is making to widen this gap in access is, in Halfon’s opinion, good, but a bit slow. “The government has supplied around 600-700,000 computers already, but it’s taken a very long time”. Part of the reason for this has been that they’ve had to buy thousands of laptops and get them made from scratch, which they say is a “really difficult thing to do”.
“Personally I would have just given teachers vouchers, or picked Google Chrome books instead of Microsoft computers, which cost less and don’t need special software.”
But it’s not all about the lack of internet or tech equipment, says Halfon. “You can have all the laptops in the world, but you have to get the pupil to open the laptop.”
The reality is that many children don’t have parental support when parents have to work, since blue-collar type jobs (such as being a bus driver, key worker or delivery person) sometimes require leaving the house and children unsupervised.
“I spoke to a nurse from my local constituency surgery this morning; her child has asthma and even though she was entitled to send her kid to school, the child was staying at home. She was really worried about her child not having an interactive education,” says Halfon.
Another government initiative to combat issues raised by homeschooling, which Boris Johnson mentioned in yesterday’s PM questions from Halfon, is the possibility of one-on-one tutoring. Halfon campaigned for the billion-pound Catch Up tutoring fund which the government announced last summer, part of which has gone to schools to hire catch-up tutors, who will also be able to teach online.
Will this kind of digital learning become more of a norm once schools return to normal? “I hope so,” says Halfon. “I don’t mean that I want kids to be learning at home, but I hope we start using tech products and look at how Artificial Intelligence can help influence learning.”
How so? “It may be that AI could act like an individual tutor to every child, so if a child’s in a classroom and, let’s say, they’re not great at maths, it could be that there’s AI software that can adapt to that individual’s learning ability and offer a way forward – like the tech version of set streaming. Or a teaching assistant on the desk of the students.”
A look back at Finito World’s mid-pandemic talk with Sir Martin Sorrell who offered advice for the days ahead in April of 2020
Prior to coronavirus, one would have said that Sir Martin Sorrell is a difficult man to imagine confined to his house. With the new normal of global pandemic, we do not have to imagine.
A Zoom interview is not quite the levelling experience one might imagine. True, instead of visiting the 75-year-old’s offices in Mayfair, whose shine and power I am now left to imagine, Sorrell logs on from his central London house. But his energy – which seems part Napoleonic, part East End smarts – is a not a thing to be dissipated on a Zoom call. ‘You look about three years old,’ he says, first up, laughing with typical bonhomie.
Sorrell has been in Covid-19 quarantine like the rest of us for the last few weeks. ‘The house is okay. There’s a bit of outside space which makes it tolerable,’ he says.
Sat in my two-bed flat in Camberwell, his house seems somewhat better than okay. Under a wall of cartoons (‘You can’t see the half of them’) Sorrell will oversee the work of S4 Capital, the digitally-focused firm he founded straight after leaving WPP in 2018, during the indefinite season of lockdown.
For Sorrell, the coronavirus situation comes across as just another problem that requires solving: he’s seen plenty of these since the early days of Saatchi & Saatchi, through the years of expansion of WPP, taking in the global financial crisis and numerous other shocks along the way.
His bearing is that of a man likely to prosper in this, as in any other era. ‘I actually find I’m doing more work, as there are no interruptions,’ he explains. ‘No breakfasts; no dinners; no surplus travelling. So, on balance I’m more effective and certainly learning more.’
For some, the idea of a more effective Martin Sorrell will be a fearsome notion. Perhaps one such group might be the leadership team at WPP, which Sorrell left under acrimonious circumstances in 2018. It was obviously an unhappy time, leaving the company he had built from scratch. What is perhaps more noteworthy is the swiftness with which he has moved on to the next thing. During our conversation, he refers occasionally to his time at WPP. But he usually does so as a point of reference regarding what he’s doing now at S4 Capital. And he does so far less frequently than he looks forward.
Sorrell founded S4 in 2018, with the mission ‘to create a new era, new media solution…for millennial-driven brands.’ In typical Sorrell fashion, the business has moved fast, acquiring MediaMonks for $350 million in July 2018; MightyHive for $150 million in December 2018; and the Melbourne-based BizTech in June 2019. Sorrell’s modus operandi favours almost hyperactive expansion until scale and geographical presence is established. It seems to work. The firm recently published its preliminary 2019 results showing revenues up 292 per cent from £54.8 million to £215.1 million, and gross profit up 361 per cent from £37.2 million to £171.3 million.
Sorrell cannot prevent noting with a certain glee the morning’s news: ‘I see WPP has suspended its dividend this morning. They were going in the wrong direction before the crisis. But now they have real uncertainty to hide behind.’ How does the present predicament of the firm he founded make him feel? He pauses a moment. ‘How does it make me feel? I think ‘sad’ would be the word.’
DIGITAL FIGHTBACK
But I don’t get the impression that Sorrell ever stays sad for long: he is too pragmatic and tough. Instead, throughout our conversation, Sorrell’s mind whirs about this historical plague moment – how best to navigate it, not just on his own behalf but on behalf of the 2,500 people S4 Capital employs. ‘If I’ve got 2,500 people in the business, and on average three in each family, that makes 7,500 dependents. At WPP it was 200,000 including associates – so that was 600,000, and a different scale – but you feel responsible for that.’
For years now, Sorrell’s mantra has been digitisation. You might say that in his mid-seventies he is an unlikely evangelist for the great tech firms both in the US and China – but then, like Oscar Wilde, Sorrell has never pretended to be ordinary.
And it’s the digital world which is impressing him during these coronavirus times. ‘The technology is very good,’ he says, bullishly, having been particularly impressed by an online seminar he participated in post-lockdown with Harvard Business School. Sorrell was swift to implement their recommendations. ‘We instituted our crisis group Wednesday last week [the first week of lockdown]. It’s very brief but it meets across the business. Every day we cover San Francisco to Sydney. It might have been more in the beginning but now it’s 15 minutes.’
Regarding the immediate economic future, Sorrell already has a clear sense of how the virus will play out: ‘I’m of the V-shaped school. You feel it in the markets already. It’s terrible, it’s shocking, it’s catatonic – a lot of companies will go down. We were dramatically underprepared.’ The sentence hangs there as if it might want to turn into an optimism, as indeed it does: ‘Q2 will be horrendous, Q3 will be tough but better, and Q4 will be a recovery,’ he says.
But it is in the nature of these uncertain times to be continually oscillating from hope to worry. Sorrell is no different, adding: ‘But a lot of companies will have gone to the wall by then. In our industry, a lot of highly-regarded production companies have gone. B-Reel, for instance – very good work, good people. Just gone. I think it’s going to be very difficult. This is a Darwinian culling.’
LIGHT RELIEF
I assume this refers to the business environment but it might also refer to the wider health story of which we’re all so acutely aware. A passionate Remainer in what we must now think of as the previous era, Sorrell has long since kept a businessman’s critical and bemused eye on politics.
This time around, he has observed with bafflement the zigzagging government strategy. ‘I do find the government policy a little bit strange,’ he explains. ‘Going into this, they knew the head count – if I can put it like that – could be 300,000. This wasn’t new information. I think at a certain point Dominic Cummings and Boris Johnson changed their minds from an approach which basically entailed culling the herd to create herd immunity, to one of lockdown. They suddenly reversed their approach; I’m not quite sure why.’
The CEO is also illuminating on the Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s rescue programmes for businesses. ‘They take time to implement,’ Sorrell says. ‘I spoke to someone who’s heading the UK Finance Initiative yesterday: on the loan schemes, you have to give personal guarantees. I have a friend who’s 75: he’s not going to give personal guarantees on a business that could go belly up. A lot of this stuff will be deployed where it is least needed – to large businesses and not to small businesses.’
And what about Donald Trump’s view that the cure is worse than the disease? ‘I’m not one of those who thinks we should have gone down the herd immunity route. But when you’re in a leadership position, you tend to overegg things. Boris Johnson overeggs it; Dominic Cummings overeggs it; and the media focus magnifies it to such a degree that mistakes are made. People who lead companies and government departments err on the side of caution.’
Sorrell adds: ‘And the enquiries into it will be everlasting and all the civil servants are terrified – and ministers are terrified – of investigative journalists who will be poring over the entrails. That makes people overcautious in the wrong way – as it stops them from making decisions when speed and agility is wanted. You see this in corporations – the lack of agility is huge.’
FACING THE STRANGE CHANGES
Beyond the immediate crisis, Sorrell discerns some changes which are likely to remain. ‘It will be an acceleration of what was already there. Consumers were moving online; now they’re going to move faster.’ Sorrell gives an example. ‘Harvard Business School has a virtual classroom. So now, with Zoom, you’re on a screen with me, I’m on a screen with you. Imagine 80 times that with three professors in the pit. You can email in, you can text in, you can raise your hand technologically.’
So the virus will make us think differently about gathering together publicly when we don’t absolutely have to? ‘Before all this happened, you’d have to go to Atlanta or New York for a call like the Harvard one. But we did it in an hour and a half without all the concomitant waste, the travel, climate change.’
Sorrell also expects there to be other profound structural changes to our leisure. ‘I am on the International Olympic Committee (IOC) commission, and I’ll probably go to Japan next year. But will I go to the Superbowl to see the Patriots with 100,000 people there? Because one thing’s for sure, Covid-19 will re-emerge. We may have a vaccine to deal with it – or it may come back in the cold weather of Q4 this year which will make the recovery more difficult.’
Again, our conversation keeps swapping cautious optimism for melancholy pessimism. Our current condition is to be continually subject to revelations about how the virus will affect some hitherto taken-for-granted aspect of our life. Sorrell, you feel, has done more thinking than most, but he still has some thinking aloud to do. ‘This summer, where will people go for holidays? Very few people can take private planes, and there will be attendant risks to flying. There was a newsreel of the Chinese travelling in China. Everyone’s dressed in these spacesuits. You turn up and you’ve got these face masks. You’re assigned a seat before you get on, distanced from everyone else. Behaviour will change.’
And the wider media landscape? Sorrell is more decided on that one. ‘It will accelerate media owners’ use of digital and also accelerate the decline of linear TV. I was on a call yesterday with a Morgan Stanley analyst. Of course, the tech giants will feel the short-term impact on SMEs, but in the long-term it will result in Google and Facebook having a more dominant position. Imagine the data that Amazon is buying on consumer buying patterns: it will give them a huge data advantage. The same will be true for Tencent, AliBaba and Tik Tok in the east.’ This in turn feeds into Sorrell’s business model at S4: ‘We will benefit as long as we get through the next few quarters’.
SCHEMES, STRATAGEMS AND SPOILS
At other times, one has a sense that the reckoning of Covid-19 has created in Sorrell, as in most of us, a desire to pause and reflect. This sends our conversation – perhaps to our joint relief – away from the present crisis to wider questions of business.
So how to be effective in business? First, he says, you have to learn how to manage teams. ‘Even at small scale, you have the same issues around siloes and fiefdoms and people looking with blinkers,’ he explains. ‘When you have two people in a company, you have a cooperation problem. To get 2500 people to think as one, or to leverage whatever knowledge the 2499 have – that’s the game. If you can get people to share knowledge and insight, you have a much more potent organisation.’
Sorrell is in full flow now: you have a sense that these are the issues he has turned over in his mind for 50 years, and he enjoys sharing his knowledge. ‘My favourite question to anyone I’m talking to is: ‘What’s your biggest problem? The answer in most cases is lack of agility.’
What does he mean by that? ‘The siloes, the empires, and the fiefdoms within big organisations’. Sorrell is often known as a legendarily hands-on CEO, and this is sometimes presented as a flaw. But it might also be an aspect of impatience with barrier and impediment coupled with a strong sense of responsibility towards the workforce and its dependents.
Sorrell also recognises that talented people can present problems of their own as much as those who aren’t performing. ‘Good people are by nature not cooperative,’ he explains. ‘There are very few good people who work well in teams – and understandably so. They have good track records, and tend to think they’re right and don’t take advice easily.’
The job of a CEO is to get everyone facing in the same direction. ‘Implementation is very difficult in large and complex organisations,’ he explains. ‘You’ve got functional matrix; geographical matrix; brand matrix. It’s very difficult.’
So how to conduct the orchestra? One part of the answer is incentivisation. ‘At S4, we all own big chunks of the company. The WPP employee ownership schemes probably amounted to about three or four per cent. At S4, we’re smaller obviously, but about 50 or 60 per cent of the company is owned by people who work in it.’ This is an area too, where Sorrell’s education – Sorrell studied economics at Cambridge – has been helpful to him in his career.
‘At Cambridge, there was a book by a left-wing economist called Robin Marris – a left-wing economist – called The Theory of Managerial Capitalism. In the capitalist system, there is a separation between management and control. Managers manage; shareholders control – but there is a split between the two. Out of that, you get the view that all you need is share ownership: if people own shares in the company then their mindset is different.’ Is that his view? ‘Well, it can produce too short-term an attitude but broadly I don’t disagree with that. In WPP, in the early days, I always insisted people put their money where their mouth is. Interestingly, after a couple of plans, the institutions preferred us either to pledge stock we already had or just waived the need to put cash in. That was a terrible mistake. It’s like Warren Buffett’s comment on share options many years ago. You wouldn’t give an institution a call on your stock for 10 years at zero cost so why do you give it to management?’
HIRING AND FIRING
The other way to keep a company in shape is to get the hiring right. To those who might be ruminating on a magic hire, Sorrell has this warning: ‘I used to call it the Jesus Christ syndrome.
The person running this area of the business is no good. We should get rid of him or her. And I’ve got this fantastic person I want to hire.” Then the person comes in and three months later, Jesus Christ didn’t walk on water!’
Sorrell also argues that talent departments can get it wrong at both ends of the spectrum. ‘The hiring process is often too cumbersome or else it’s too intuitive,’ he says. ‘You either put somebody through 20 interviews, which anyone who’s good will not tolerate, or you have one interview and that person becomes a hero or heroine – a salvation. Advertising businesses are notoriously bad at hiring.
Individual predilections or preferences overcome what you should or shouldn’t do.’ He adds: ‘Another problem is to segment human resources and talent from the rest of the organisation. You shouldn’t rely on your head of HR to hire good people. The head of HR might supplement the list, but you should know who you think would be good to do x, y or z from your knowledge of your industry.’
Somewhere in here is the key to Sorrell’s success – the need to be hands-on isn’t some bizarre need to micromanage but a sort of prudent due diligence, and a tacit acknowledgement of the complexity of the job. He draws the conclusion: ‘People are an investment not a cost – and we spend so little time maximising that investment. sixty per cent of our net revenues are invested in people. Our revenues are £400 million, and we represent £250 million. At WPP it was £20 billion, so £12 billion went on people. But most people think much more about how we should invest in computers.’
And this, incidentally, is why government often moves with such little – to deploy one of his favourite words – ‘agility’. ‘In government, you don’t have the commercial levers or incentives: what you get is a splintered mess,’ he says.
HANG-UPS
Our time is nearly up. Towards the end, Sorrell strikes another note of cautious optimism: ‘I’m sure there will be a relief rally in the sense that when people are released from all this purgatory, there will be excesses. But I was talking to a client last night and I said, “I’ll call you in Q4 and we’ll say we overegged this.”
He continues: ‘I look at in a historical context. HIV has killed 36 million people. The two big flus killed 1 to 2 million. I’ve got a lot of friends in Brazil who are terrified about what the impact of corona is on the ghettos. We’ve lost proportion. That sounds callous, every life is important.’
Such are the times we so suddenly live in: we wish to retain optimism but we have taken a collective decision to endure economic hurt in order to protect the vulnerable. It is the hardest time the nation has known since World War Two, and yet all our technologies remain intact giving – at least for the time being – an undeniable flavour of technological affluence even to this unprecedented stricture.
Deprivation is still allied in a certain sense to plenty: we are in our homes, but many of us still eat, drink and are entertained to standards which would be the envy of a Renaissance king. We retain a sense of our intelligence and scientific skill, and the power of the economy which the likes of Sir Martin Sorrell have been instrumental in building. But we also know all over again the scale of the obstacles – of disease and nature’s indifference – which we had to overcome to build it all in the first place. There are no guarantees of our success; it’s up to us.
Perhaps that’s why Sorrell – so self-reliant, and capable – is someone we should especially heed in these times. We need the likes of him as we have never done before. ‘Someone sent me a diary from the great plague,’ he tells me near the end of our call. ‘It was a world of self-isolation; there was the Peak District village of Eyam which cut itself off for a year. This is nothing new.’
So nothing new – and everyone keep calm. Wisdom, like crisis, can often have an antiquated flavour. And with that, instead of the handshake at the lift, we say our Zoom goodbyes, and Sir Martin disappears out of my computer back into his improbable life.
Stuart Johnson has led the careers team at Bristol since 2014. We asked him how his team helps students work towards employment after graduation.
“I don’t think there’s any kind of magic bullet for this. There are a few tricks you can do to try and turn things around quickly, but that doesn’t mean it would be sustainable,” Johnson explains. “We need to work with students’ ambitions and dreams – it’s not about crowbarring students into opportunities to make the numbers look better.”
Motivation to succeed is always a hurdle which must be overcome in university, but Stuart has seen the way that Covid-19 has compounded the issue.
“It’s clearly hit the younger generation disproportionately,” Johnson continues “They’re facing a tough job market and whether students have stayed in their university accommodation or returned to their families, they’re living in less-than-ideal situations. A lot of them haven’t had the vaccine yet, they’re faced with bad news about the labour market, and some of them can just give up.”
Johnson believes that motivation and opportunity both work hand-in-hand to help students get on track. He says that a major part of his work is “about raising ambitions and helping (students) see the breadth of opportunities available to them”. Many students come to university motivated, with a clear plan for their futures.
I ask Johnson how he helps students who aren’t quite there yet.
“One of the things we pride ourselves in is the support we offer to such students,” Johnson replies. “That could be because they come from a disadvantaged background, they could lack the social capital, or they could have just been slow off the mark to think of these things – so as a general principle we try to engage students very early in their university careers.”
According to Johnson motivating and preparing students for the world of work is only half of the job: “At least as important is creating the pull from the other side with employers who are interested in our students,” he explains. “That’s partly the big-name employers, which is why we’re so targeted by The Times’ Top 100, but importantly also with local small to medium sized enterprises. We play an important role in the civic infrastructure of the city and growing the local economy.”
The job market is complex and intimidating, especially now, so Johnson is trying to teach students to understand it and remain flexible in their ambitions.
“We help students understand where the jobs are, because if they think that there aren’t any, that’s where they can quickly give up hope.” And where are those jobs to be found? “They might need to look in a different place or sector than they were originally thinking, then it’s much better to do that than to wait around for the ‘perfect opportunity’.”
Johnson understands the issues which students are currently facing, and he’s worked in the careers service for seven and a half years. In closing, we asked him to give some general advice to a student or fresh graduate reading this now. “Use your networks if you have them and focus your applications,” Johnson says. “I’m always nervous of people saying they’ve applied for 100 jobs and not gotten them – it’s usually better to apply for five really well.”
