EU alarm at Pfizer vaccine delay

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Alex Barker — London

James Murdoch has castigated the US media for the “toxic politics” threaten-ing American democracy, saying pro-prietors are as culpable as politicians who “propagate lies”.

The remarks by Rupert Murdoch’s youngest son, made in an interview with the Financial Times and a further joint statement with his wife Kathryn, are his strongest public rebuke of America’s news industry since he parted ways with the family business built by his father.

Asked about the role the US’s domi-nant conservative news network Fox News played in the riot that rocked Washington last week, James Murdoch said media groups had amplified elec-tion disinformation, leaving “a substan-tial portion” of the public believing “a

falsehood”. James Murdoch said: “The damage is profound. The sacking of the Capitol is proof positive that what we thought was dangerous is indeed very very much so. Those outlets that propa-gate lies to their audience have unleashed insidious and uncontrollable forces that will be with us for years.”

He added: “I hope that those people who didn’t think it was that dangerous now understand, and that they stop.”

James Murdoch did not directly men-tion Fox News, his father who founded it, nor his brother Lachlan, chief executive of the Fox Corporation.

James Murdoch, who was chief execu-tive of 21st Century Fox from 2015-2019, and his wife Kathryn — with whom he has charted an independent path from the conservative politics of the Murdoch empire — were big donors to Joe Biden’s presidential campaign.

In August he withdrew completely from the family’s news operations.

In a statement following the FT inter-view, the couple said media owners bore as much responsibility for spreading disinformation “as the elected officials who know the truth but choose instead to propagate lies”. They added: “We hope the awful scenes we have all been seeing will finally convince those ena-blers to repudiate the toxic politics they have promoted once and forever.”

Fox News did not respond to a request for comment. The network has long stressed the divide between its opinion programmes and news coverage. While many Fox News hosts have championed the agenda of Donald Trump, the net-work’s journalists have often broken stories critical of the outgoing president.Editorial Comment page 6 Opinion page 7

James Murdoch blasts ‘toxic’ US media and news outlets that ‘propagate lies’

© THE FINANCIAL TIMES LTD 2021 No: 40,607 ★

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Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo have released more than $5bn of loan reserves, reflecting their optimism for the future of the economy, driven in part by the rollout of vaccines and signs that stimulus efforts are having a positive effect. The move helped three of the US’s biggest banks end the year on a high and is a sign of growing confidence that their clients will pay down debts despite the continuing fallout from the pandemic. Report i PAGE 8

Upbeat US banks release billions from reserves

SATURDAY 16 JANUARY / SUNDAY 17 JANUARY 2021

Michael Peel — BrusselsRichard Milne — OsloGuy Chazan — Berlin

EU governments struggling to roll out Covid-19 vaccines have criticised plans by Pfizer to delay supplies to European countries from next week.

Germany’s health ministry said yes-terday that it regretted the “unexpected and . . . very short notice” announce-ment, especially as the US pharmaceuti-cals company had promised “binding delivery dates” until mid-February.

Health ministers from six Nordic and Baltic states also expressed “severe con-cern about the sustainability andcredibility of the Covid-19 vaccination

process” after the US group’s decision. The reaction to the delay highlights ris-ing tensions in EU capitals and the Euro-pean Commission, which are facing criti-cism over the bloc’s lagging immunisa-tion rates compared with the UK and US. The global death toll from coronavirus yesterday hit 2m people.

The wave of EU concern came after Geir Bukholm, director of infection con-trol at the Norwegian public health institute, said Pfizer told his country it would receive 18 per cent fewer doses of the vaccine it had developed with BioN-Tech than expected next week.

He said the temporary reduction would affect all European countries

including the UK as Pfizer reorganised its production to increase capacity this year from 1.3bn doses to 2bn. Two doses are needed to achieve immunisation.

Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, Denmark and Sweden wrote to the com-mission saying the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine collaboration had told them deliveries would be “substantially reduced”. They did not disclose the degree of cuts but said some had been told normal service would resume from February 8 while others had been given no date. Sweden separately said it had been told to expect a 25 per cent cut.

“This situation is unacceptable,” the ministers wrote in the letter, seen by the

Financial Times. Ursula von der Leyen, European commission president, said she had “immediately” called Albert Bourla, Pfizer chief executive, about the “urgently” needed supplies. She told reporters: “He explained that there is a production delay in the next weeks, but he reassured me that all guaranteed doses of the first quarter will be deliv-ered in the first quarter.”

Pfizer confirmed that vaccine deliver-ies “may need to be adjusted” because the increase in manufacturing meant extra regulatory approvals were required. As a result, shipping sched-ules at its Belgian facility in Puurs could fluctuate in the immediate future.

EU alarm at Pfizer vaccine delay3 Extra regulatory approvals required3 Entire bloc and UK affected 3 Death toll tops 2m

Ground zeroUntangling the start of CovidA vendor plies wares on the streets of Wuhan, China, where a World Health Organization team landed this week, six months after launching a probe into how the virus jumped from animals to humans.

The team hope the city will offer fur-ther clues to the roots of the pandemic. Away from the Communist party’s offi-cial line of how it acted decisively to quell the initial outbreak, local residents have their own theories on how the spread began. Their stories reveal last-ing trauma and sadness, as well as resentment from those who challenge the state’s sanitised narrative.Conflicting versions of Covid page 4

Nicolas Asfouri/AFP/Getty

Pfizer has scrambled to increase its production capacity from 1.3bn doses to 2bn this year

The crisis facing social media

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WORLD| WEEK IN REVIEW|

Pompeo announcements viewed as effort to hinder Biden foreign policy

The final days of the Trump administration saw US secretary of state Mike Pompeo launch a series of moves viewed as seeking to constrain president-elect Joe Biden’s foreign policy.

Citing newly declassified intelligence, he alleged Iran was host to al-Qaeda’s “new operational head-quarters”, a claim experts greeted with scepticism.

Mr Pompeo also designated Cuba as a state spon-sor of terrorism, and said the Yemeni Houthis were a terrorist organisation, a move observers fear will complicate efforts to resolve the conflict in the Middle East.

The secretary of state, who at the last minute aban-doned a trip to Europe, also ended restrictions on US diplomatic contacts with Taiwan.

Italian prime minister Giuseppe Conte is scrambling to find enough lawmakers to prop up his government after a junior partner quit his coalition.

Former prime minister Matteo Renzi’s small Italia Viva party resigned from the government, saying it was bungling the spending plans for almost €200bn of EU recovery money to support the pandemic-hit economy.

Italy’s death toll from Covid-19 climbed to more than 80,000 — the second-highest in Europe afterthe UK — as the government battles a recession. The ruling coalition still commands a majority in the lower house, but needs to win over a sufficient number of senators from small parties to replace the 18 lost when Mr Renzi’s party withdrew its support.

US records lowest increase in emissions since second world war

Arrested expat likens Hong Kong movement to Irish fight for self-rule

The first expatriate to be arrested under Hong Kong’s new national security law appealed to local democ-racy activists not to give up hope, comparing their movement to Ireland’s struggle for self-rule.

John Clancey, a 79-year-old American lawyer and former Roman Catholic priest, was arrested last week alongside 52 other activists, sparking concerns China is deepening a purge of Hong Kong’s pro-de-mocracy movement.

“Look at Irish history . . . They were completely hopeless for so long, but eventually they got part of Ireland, they got a republic,” Mr Clancey said.

“In a difficult situation we shouldn’t just give up and have no hope for the future.”

US net greenhouse gas emissions (m tonnes ofCO2 equivalent)

Source: Rhodium Group

5,000

5,500

6,000

6,500

7,000

1990 2000 10 20

US greenhouse gas emissions rose less in 2020 than in any year since the second world war as the pandemic caused much of the US economy to grind to a halt.

Emissions were 10.3 per cent lower than the previous year across all sectors, said researcher Rhodium Group.

Italy’s Conte hunts for support after Renzi party leaves ruling coalition

the European Union. The EU will only have a future if the nation states remain [its] key pillars. I don’t want to see an EU in which our identity dissolves and we’re all just Europeans.”

In an earlier debate, he also took a potshot at the European Central Bank, bemoaning the effect of its low-interest rate policy on “private savings” in Ger-many and the “property market”.

“Merz plays to that section of the CDU who constantly fear Germany is being ripped off by other EU member states,” said Lucas Guttenberg, deputy director of the Jacques Delors Institute, a think-tank. “There is a large constituency who think every deal the EU makes is detri-mental to German interests.”

On some issues, however, Mr Merz advocates much closer co-ordination between EU states. In EU foreign policy, for example, he wants to see unanimity replaced by qualified majority voting, to allow the EU to project its power in the world more effectively.

It is an idea backed by Mr Röttgen, who has said the EU risks being “pulver-ised” between the US and China in their new great power rivalry. Both he and Mr

Party leadership. Election

EU braced for Germany without Merkel

Guy Chazan — Berlin

When Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron unveiled their groundbreaking plan for a €500bn pandemic recovery fund in May last year, one leading Ger-man politician expressed deep misgiv-ings. This weekend, he might be elected leader of Ms Merkel’s party.

Friedrich Merz said the idea of the EU raising money on financial markets and distributing it as grants to member states was “bumping against the limits of the [EU] treaties”.

As an MP, he had promised voters the eurozone would not become a “transfer union”, a system where rich nations such as Germany bailed out their poorer neighbours. “I feel myself to be bound by this promise,” he said.

Mr Merz, a millionaire lawyer and former chairman of BlackRock Ger-many, is one of three candidates stand-ing in a digital election today for leader of the Christian Democratic Union, Ger-many’s most popular party.

A victory for Mr Merz, whose views on the EU have more in common with the “frugal” nations such as Austria and the Netherlands than with Ms Merkel, could have profound implications for Germany’s role in Europe.

Vowing to make the CDU more con-servative, Mr Merz is polling slightly ahead of his rivals, Armin Laschet, prime minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, and Norbert Röttgen, chair-man of the Bundestag foreign affairs committee.

The winner will be in pole position to run as the CDU’s candidate for chancel-lor in September’s Bundestag election and succeed Ms Merkel, who is quitting the political stage after 16 years as chan-cellor. The change at the top will create waves across the EU.

Ms Merkel has earned the reputation of the bloc’s most experienced crisis-manager, a role she has reprised during the coronavirus pandemic.

“The way Germany brings its weight to bear in the EU will change, and that

Frontrunner to be CDU head

rails against bloc’s recovery

fund and greater integration

will have far-reaching consequences,” said Herfried Münkler, a political scien-tist at the Humboldt University in Ber-lin. “This [Merkel] role of honest bro-ker, of mediator — it’s coming to an end.” The shift would be most marked if Mr Merz became chancellor.

“It would be a different style, much rougher and bossier,” he added.

The three candidates have shown remarkable unanimity on issues such as Europe. All are fervent supporters of the EU, committed to the Franco-German partnership. But Mr Laschet stands for continuity with Ms Merkel’s course in Europe, whereas Mr Merz occasionally strikes his more conservative tone.

In his book New Times, New Responsi-bility, published last year, he says Ger-many must “learn the language of power”, adding: “More than ever before, we have to defend our interests within the European Union.”

In a candidates debate this month, Mr Merz, who served as a member of the European Parliament for five years, expressed reservations about more steps towards EU integration. “I’m scep-tical about transferring more powers to

Table talk:candidates for the CDU party leadership at a debate this month. From left, Norbert Röttgen, Armin Laschet and Friedrich MerzMichael Kappeler/DPA Picture Alliance/Avalon

Merz advocate the creation of an avant-garde of EU member states to better assert a “European voice”.

“Do we want to keep playing in the lower leagues, every man for himself, or . . . in the Champions League, to play a role in the world?” Mr Merz asked.

His other positions on Europe are in the CDU mainstream and he is generally supportive of the coronavirus pandemic recovery fund, saying in May it was good that Germany and France had seized the initiative. But he has reservations. In his book, he notes EU treaties forbid the bloc from taking on debt. He also raises questions about the fund’s deployment.

But even if he wins, Mr Merz may struggle to fundamentally shift the CDU’s policies on Europe, which are largely the preserve of its powerful par-liamentary caucus — a group that is gen-erally hawkish on eurozone integration.

“A Merz victory will not change the CDU’s approach on Europe overnight — the party is much too heterogenous for that,” said Mr Guttenberg. “Fundamen-tally, the CDU does not know what it wants the EU to become, and in that respect, Merz seems to fit the part.”

Mehreen Khan — EU correspondent

The Dutch government has resigned two months before elections over a child benefits scandal that has rocked the political establishment.

Mark Rutte, prime minister, announced his four-party coalition would be stepping down after an emer-gency cabinet meeting yesterday.

The move was expected after the gov-ernment had been pressed to take responsibility for a scandal in which thousands of families were falsely accused of defrauding the state, forcing them to repay money owed to them and having benefits stopped.

The cabinet resignation is a largely symbolic move ahead of national elec-tions on March 17. Mr Rutte is vying to lead his fourth government after 11 years in office.

It will mean the Netherlands will have a caretaker government led by Mr Rutte, with the tacit support of opposi-tion parties, to continue steering the country during the pandemic.

“The rule of law must protect the citi-zens against an almighty government and that has gone horribly wrong here,” Mr Rutte said after the cabinet meeting. He criticised mistakes “throughout the police, administrative and legal system”.

A parliamentary report in December issued scathing findings on how govern-ment tax officials hunted down thou-sands of parents wrongly accused of defrauding the child welfare system

over the past seven years. The tax minis-try has also been accused of racial profil-ing after it was found that officials tar-geted families who held dual national-ity, forcing many into financial ruin.

The ministry last year apologised for the errors and set up a €500m fund to help compensate about 10,000 families who lost payments, often for minor administrative errors such as missing signatures on forms.

A government resignation was all but inevitable after Lodewijk Asscher, leader of the Dutch opposition Labour party and former social affairs minister in the last government, resigned this week.

That paved the way for the cabinet to take collective responsibility to prevent further ministerial resignations.

Finance minister Wopke Hoekstra, tax minister Eric Weibes and medical

affairs minister Tamara van Ark are also the subject of court action from 20 fami-lies who have started legal proceedings against the government. Mr Weibes yes-terday said he would not return to serve in the caretaker government.

Jesse Klaver, leader of the Dutch Green party, said the resignation was a “moment of justice” and should mark a turning point “so we can rebuild our welfare state again”.

Mr Rutte, a veteran prime minister and consummate political survivor, is expected to weather the crisis and lead his centre-right Freedom party to victory in March, according to the polls.

The government’s fall is unlikely to derail the Netherlands’ ratification of the EU recovery fund, which will need to be passed by both houses of parliament in the coming weeks.

INTERNATIONAL

Welfare system

Dutch government quits over scandalThousands of families wrongly accused of child benefit fraud

‘The rule of law must protect the citizens against an almighty government and that has gone horribly wrong here’

Daniel Dombey — Madrid

Some 14km from Madrid lies one of Europe’s biggest shanty towns, where this week as many as 3,000 people endured the coldest temperatures since the second world war without heat or light.

The inhabitants of sector six of the illegal settlement, known as La Cañada Real Galiana, have been without elec-tricity since October — about 100 days.

In a week when conditions dived below minus 13C — the lowest for the region since 1945 — their plight is stark.

“Being in our houses is like being on the street. I daren’t look at the tempera-ture, but when my feet are frozen I know it is very cold,” said Sara Benayad, a 26-year-old of Moroccan origin who has lived in the neighbourhood since she was 10. “We have no heat, the water has frozen up, and the fridge has not been on for four months.”

She and her husband have been una-ble to work at a local waste recycling facility for weeks, and their two-year-old was briefly admitted to hospital for respiratory problems. “I can’t go to work thinking of my child freezing at home,” she said. “We are in the middle

of a pandemic and the middle of winter. This is what we are going through, in Europe, in the 21st century, in the heart of Spain.”

Cañada Real is unfinished business for 21st-century Spain, a problem that authorities have been incapable of resolving. For many, it is a place synony-mous with drug dealing and addiction, where dealers and junkies coexist in squalid streets that police fear to tread.

For others, it is testament to social injustice and the huge gaps in Spain’s economic model and welfare state.

The problems have come to a head with this winter’s power outage, which the regional government and the elec-tricity provider blame on huge and growing demand by illicit indoor mari-juana plantations, but which residents see as an attempt to force them out.

“The usage is so huge that they don’t even want to pay the bills,” said Isabel Díaz Ayuso, head of Madrid’s regional government, last month. “They are fine with parking their Porsches there, but not with paying their bills, which is what is provoking these power cuts.”

But residents such as Ms Benayad maintain they are unable to get electric-ity contracts. “We want to pay for the

electricity,” she said. “But they won’t even put in a meter.”

For many, the problem resides in the unresolved status of Cañada Real, a land without property rights where much of the paperwork of day to day life is sim-ply impossible.

According to official data, widely thought to be an underestimate, 7,300 people live in Cañada Real, an old cattle herding road that became populated with economic migrants from the impoverished countryside of Andalucía and Extremadura in the 1960s. There are about 3,000 in sector six, the poorest and most populous area, where many inhabitants are of Moroccan, Roma or Romanian origin.

Even before the electricity dispute, conditions there had caused interna-tional outcry. Philip Alston, then UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, wrote a year ago of his “shock . . . at the extent to which the relevant governments appear to have abandoned the people living there”.

On December 22, nine UN human rights rapporteurs called on the govern-ment to immediately restore electricity. “Children . . . are truly suffering and their health is at risk.”

Pablo Iglesias, Spain’s radical left dep-uty prime minister, has demanded that Naturgy, the utility for the area, restore electricity. But the group says it has had to contend with a huge number of illegal and often highly unsafe connections.

This week, it and the regional govern-ment tried to distribute butane canis-ters and heaters to the area, but resi-dents erected barricades and threw stones. “We decided to refuse these heaters, even though we need them, because what we want is electricity for our homes,” Ms Benayad said. “If they think this isn’t a fit place to live, then take us somewhere else, but leaving us and our families unprotected and with-out electricity just isn’t the solution.”

Spain Freeze lays bare desperate conditions in Madrid shanty town

Out in the cold: people queue to collect food in Cañada Real

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World Markets

STOCK MARKETS

Mar 30 prev %chg

S&P 500 2365.93 2361.13 0.20

Nasdaq Composite 5902.74 5897.55 0.09

Dow Jones Ind 20703.38 20659.32 0.21

FTSEuro�rst 300 1500.72 1493.75 0.47

Euro Stoxx 50 3481.67 3475.27 0.18

FTSE 100 7369.52 7373.72 -0.06

FTSE All-Share 4011.01 4011.80 -0.02

CAC 40 5089.64 5069.04 0.41

Xetra Dax 12256.43 12203.00 0.44

Nikkei 19063.22 19217.48 -0.80

Hang Seng 24301.09 24392.05 -0.37

FTSE All World $ 297.99 297.73 0.09

CURRENCIES

Mar 30 prev

$ per € 1.074 1.075

$ per £ 1.249 1.241

£ per € 0.859 0.866

¥ per $ 111.295 111.035

¥ per £ 139.035 137.822

€ index 89.046 89.372

SFr per € 1.069 1.072

Mar 30 prev

€ per $ 0.932 0.930

£ per $ 0.801 0.806

€ per £ 1.164 1.155

¥ per € 119.476 119.363

£ index 76.705 76.951

$ index 104.636 103.930

SFr per £ 1.244 1.238COMMODITIES

Mar 30 prev %chg

Oil WTI $ 50.22 49.51 1.43

Oil Brent $ 52.98 52.54 0.84

Gold $ 1248.80 1251.10 -0.18

INTEREST RATES

price yield chg

US Gov 10 yr 98.87 2.38 0.00

UK Gov 10 yr 100.46 1.21 -0.03

Ger Gov 10 yr 98.68 0.39 -0.01

Jpn Gov 10 yr 100.45 0.06 0.00

US Gov 30 yr 100.14 2.99 0.01

Ger Gov 2 yr 102.58 -0.75 0.00

price prev chg

Fed Funds E� 0.66 0.66 0.00

US 3m Bills 0.78 0.78 0.00

Euro Libor 3m -0.36 -0.36 0.00


LAURA NOONAN — DUBLINJENNIFER THOMPSON — LONDON

AboastfulWhatsAppmessagehas costa London investment banker his joband a £37,000 fine in the first case ofregulators cracking down on commu-nications over Facebook’s popularchatapp.

The fine by the Financial ConductAuthority highlights the increasingproblem new media pose for companiesthat need to monitor and archive theirstaff’scommunication.

Several large investment banks havebanned employees from sending clientinformation over messaging servicesincluding WhatsApp, which uses anencryption system that cannot beaccessed without permission from theuser. Deutsche Bank last year bannedWhatsApp from work-issued Black-

Berrys after discussions with regulators.Christopher Niehaus, a former Jeffer-

ies banker, passed confidential clientinformation to a “personal acquaint-ance and a friend” using WhatsApp,according to the FCA. The regulator saidMr Niehaus had turned over his devicetohisemployervoluntarily.

The FCA said Mr Niehaus had sharedconfidential informationonthemessag-ing system “on a number of occasions”lastyearto“impress”people.

Several banks have banned the use ofnew media from work-issued devices,but the situation has become trickier asbanks move towards a “bring your owndevice” policy. Goldman Sachs hasclamped down on its staff’s phone billsas iPhone-loving staff spurn their work-issuedBlackBerrys.

Bankers at two institutions said staffare typically trained in how to use new

media at work, but banks are unable toban people from installing apps on theirprivatephones.

Andrew Bodnar, a barrister at MatrixChambers, saidthecaseset“aprecedentin that it shows the FCA sees these mes-saging apps as the same as everythingelse”.

Information shared by Mr Niehausincluded the identity and details of aclient and information about a rival ofJefferies. In one instance the bankerboasted how he might be able to pay offhismortgage ifadealwassuccessful.

Mr Niehaus was suspended from Jef-feries and resigned before the comple-tionofadisciplinaryprocess.

Jefferies declined to comment whileFacebook did not respond to a requestforcomment.Additional reportingbyChloeCornishLombard page 20

Citywatchdog sends a clearmessage asbanker loses joboverWhatsAppboast

Congressional Republicans seeking toavert a US government shutdown afterApril 28 have resisted Donald Trump’sattempt to tack funds to pay for a wallon the US-Mexico border on tostopgap spending plans. They fearthat his planned $33bn increase indefence and border spending couldforce a federal shutdown for the firsttime since 2013, as Democrats refuseto accept the proposals.US budget Q&A andTrump attack over health bill i PAGE 8

Shutdown risk as borderwall bid goes over the top

FRIDAY 31 MARCH 2017

Briefing

iUSbargain-hunters fuel EuropeM&AEurope has become the big target for cross-borderdealmaking, as US companies ride a Trump-fuelledequity market rally to hunt for bargains across theAtlantic.— PAGE 15; CHINA CURBS HIT DEALS, PAGE 17

iReport outlines longerNHSwaiting timesA report on how the health service can survivemore austerity has said patients will wait longer fornon-urgent operations and for A&E treatment whilesome surgical procedures will be scrapped.— PAGE 4

iEmerging nations in record debt salesDeveloping countries have sold record levels ofgovernment debt in the first quarter of this year,taking advantage of a surge in optimism towardemerging markets as trade booms.— PAGE 15

i London tower plans break recordsA survey has revealed that arecord 455 tall buildings areplanned or under constructionin London. Work began onalmost one tower a weekduring 2016.— PAGE 4

iTillerson fails to ease Turkey tensionsThe US secretary of state has failed to reconciletensions after talks in Ankara with President RecepTayyip Erdogan on issues including Syria and theextradition of cleric Fethullah Gulen.— PAGE 9

iToshiba investors doubt revival planIn a stormy three-hour meeting, investors accusedmanagers o�aving an entrenched secrecy cultureand cast doubt on a revival plan after Westinghousefiled for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.— PAGE 16

iHSBCwoos transgender customersThe bank has unveiled a range of gender-neutraltitles such as “Mx”, in addition to Mr, Mrs, Miss orMs, in a move to embrace diversity and cater to theneeds of transgender customers.— PAGE 20

Datawatch

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Recent attacks —notably the 2011massacre byAnders Breivik inNorway, theattacks in Parisand Nice, and theBrussels suicidebombings — havebucked the trendof generally lowfatalities fromterror incidents inwestern Europe

Sources: Jane’s Terrorism and Insurgency Centre

Terror attacks in western Europe

Highlighted attack Others

NorwayParis Nice

Brussels

A Five Star plan?Italy’s populists are trying to woothe poor — BIG READ, PAGE 11

WORLDBUSINESSNEWSPAPER

Trump vs the ValleyTech titans need to minimisepolitical risk — GILLIAN TETT, PAGE 13

Dear Don...May’s first stab at the break-upletter — ROBERT SHRIMSLEY, PAGE 12

Lloyd’s of London chose Brus-sels over “five or six” othercities in its decision to set up anEU base to help deal with the expected loss of passportingrightsafterBrexit.

John Nelson, chairman of thecenturies-old insurance mar-ket, said he expected other

insurers to follow. Most of thebusiness written in Brusselswill be reinsured back to thesyndicates at its City of Londonheadquarters,picturedabove.

The Belgian capital had notbeen seen as the first choice forLondon’s specialist insurancegroups after the UK leaves the

EU, with Dublin and Luxem-bourg thought to be more likelyhomes for the industry. ButMr Nelson said the city won onits transport links, talent pooland “extremely good regula-toryreputation”.Lex page 14Insurers set to follow page 18

Lloyd’s of Brussels Insurancemarketto tapnew talent poolwithEUbase

AFP

JAMES BLITZ — WHITEHALL EDITOR

A computer system acquired to collectduties and clear imports into the UKmay not be able to handle the hugesurge inworkloadexpectedonceBritainleaves the EU, customs authorities haveadmittedtoMPs.

HM Revenue & Customs told a parlia-mentary inquiry that the new systemneeded urgent action to be ready byMarch 2019, when Brexit is due to becompleted, and the chair of the probesaid confidence it would be operationalintime“hascollapsed”.

Setting up a digital customs systemhas been at the heart of Whitehall’sBrexit planning because of the fivefoldincrease in declarations expected atBritishportswhentheUKleavestheEU.

About 53 per cent of British importscome from the EU, and do not requirechecks because they arrive through thesingle market and customs union. ButTheresa May announced in January thatBrexit would include departure fromboth trading blocs. HMRC handles 60mdeclarations a year but, once outside thecustoms union, the number is expectedtohit300m.

The revelations about the system,called Customs Declaration Service, arelikely to throw a sharper spotlight onwhether Whitehall can implement ahost of regulatory regimes — in areasranging from customs and immigrationto agriculture and fisheries — by thetimeBritain leavestheEU.

Problems with CDS and other projectsessential toBrexit could force London to

adjust its negotiation position with theEU, a Whitehall official said. “If runningour own customs system is provingmuch harder than we anticipated, thatought to have an impact on how wepress forcertainoptions inBrussels.”

In a letter to Andrew Tyrie, chairmanof the Commons treasury select com-mittee, HMRC said the timetable fordelivering CDS was “challenging butachievable”. But, it added, CDS was “acomplex programme” that needed to belinked to dozens of other computer sys-tems to work properly. In November,HMRC assigned a “green traffic light” toCDS, indicating it would be deliveredontime. But last month, it wrote to thecommittee saying the programme hadbeen relegated to “amber/red,” whichmeans there are “major risks or issuesapparent inanumbero£eyareas”.

HMRC said last night: “[CDS] is ontrack to be delivered by January 2019,and it will be able to support frictionlessinternational trade once the UK leavesthe EU . . . Internal ratings are designedto make sure that each project gets thefocus and resource it requires for suc-cessfuldelivery.”

HMRC’s letters to the select commit-tee, which will be published today, pro-vide no explanation for the ratingchange, but some MPs believe it wascaused by Mrs May’s unexpected deci-sionto leavetheEUcustomsunion.Timetable & Great Repeal Bill page 2Scheme to import EU laws page 3Editorial Comment & Notebook page 12Philip Stephens & Chris Giles page 13JPMorgan eye options page 18

HMRCwarnscustoms risksbeing swampedbyBrexit surge3Confidence in IT plans ‘has collapsed’3Fivefold rise in declarations expected

World Markets

STOCK MARKETS

Mar 31 prev %chg

S&P 500 2367.10 2368.06 -0.04

Nasdaq Composite 5918.69 5914.34 0.07

Dow Jones Ind 20689.64 20728.49 -0.19

FTSEuro�rst 300 1503.03 1500.72 0.15

Euro Stoxx 50 3495.59 3481.58 0.40

FTSE 100 7322.92 7369.52 -0.63

FTSE All-Share 3990.00 4011.01 -0.52

CAC 40 5122.51 5089.64 0.65

Xetra Dax 12312.87 12256.43 0.46

Nikkei 18909.26 19063.22 -0.81

Hang Seng 24111.59 24301.09 -0.78

FTSE All World $ 297.38 298.11 -0.24

CURRENCIES

Mar 31 prev

$ per € 1.070 1.074

$ per £ 1.251 1.249

£ per € 0.855 0.859

¥ per $ 111.430 111.295

¥ per £ 139.338 139.035

€ index 88.767 89.046

SFr per € 1.071 1.069

Mar 31 prev

€ per $ 0.935 0.932

£ per $ 0.800 0.801

€ per £ 1.169 1.164

¥ per € 119.180 119.476

£ index 77.226 76.705

$ index 104.536 104.636

SFr per £ 1.252 1.244COMMODITIES

Mar 31 prev %chg

Oil WTI $ 50.46 50.35 0.22

Oil Brent $ 53.35 53.13 0.41

Gold $ 1244.85 1248.80 -0.32

INTEREST RATES

price yield chg

US Gov 10 yr 98.63 2.41 -0.01

UK Gov 10 yr 100.35 1.22 0.02

Ger Gov 10 yr 99.27 0.33 -0.01

Jpn Gov 10 yr 100.36 0.07 0.00

US Gov 30 yr 99.27 3.04 0.01

Ger Gov 2 yr 102.57 -0.75 0.00

price prev chg

Fed Funds E� 0.66 0.66 0.00

US 3m Bills 0.78 0.78 0.00

Euro Libor 3m -0.36 -0.36 0.00


ALEX BARKER — BRUSSELSGEORGE PARKER — LONDONSTEFAN WAGSTYL — BERLIN

TheEUyesterdaytookatoughopeningstance in Brexit negotiations, rejectingBritain’s plea for early trade talks andexplicitly giving Spain a veto over anyarrangementsthatapplytoGibraltar.

European Council president DonaldTusk’s first draft of the guidelines,which are an important milestone onthe road to Brexit, sought to damp Brit-ain’s expectations by setting out a“phased approach” to the divorce proc-ess that prioritises progress on with-drawal terms.

The decision to add the clause givingSpain the right to veto any EU-UK tradedeals covering Gibraltar could make the300-year territorial dispute betweenMadrid and London an obstacle to

ambitioustradeandairlineaccessdeals.Gibraltar yesterday hit back at the

clause, saying the territory had “shame-fully been singled out for unfavourabletreatment by the council at the behest ofSpain”. Madrid defended the draftclause,pointingoutthat itonlyreflected“thetraditionalSpanishposition”.

Senior EU diplomats noted thatMr Tusk’s text left room for negotiatorsto work with in coming months. Primeminister Theresa May’s allies insistedthat the EU negotiating stance waslargely “constructive”, with one saying itwas “within the parameters of what wewere expecting, perhaps more on theupside”.

British officialsadmittedthat theEU’sinsistence on a continuing role for theEuropean Court of Justice in any transi-tiondealcouldbeproblematic.

Brussels sees little room for compro-

mise. If Britain wants to prolong itsstatus within the single market afterBrexit, the guidelines state it wouldrequire “existing regulatory, budgetary,supervisory and enforcement instru-mentsandstructures toapply”.

Mr Tusk wants talks on future tradeto begin only once “sufficient progress”has been made on Britain’s exit bill andcitizen rights, which Whitehall officialsbelieve means simultaneous talks arepossible if certainconditionsaremet.

Boris Johnson, the foreign secretary,reassured European colleagues at aNato summit in Brussels that Mrs Mayhad not intended to “threaten” the EUwhen she linked security co-operationafterBrexitwithatradedeal.Reports & analysis page 3Jonathan Powell, Tim Harford &Man in the News: David Davis page 11Henry Mance page 12

Brussels takes tough stance onBrexitwith Spainhandedveto overGibraltar

About 2.3m people will benefit fromtoday’s increase in the national livingwage to £7.50 per hour. But the risewill pile pressure on English councils,which will have to pay care workers alot more. Some 43 per cent of caresta� — amounting to 341,000 peopleaged 25 and over — earn less than thenew living wage and the increase isexpected to cost councils’ care services£360m in the coming financial year.Analysis i PAGE 4

Living wage rise to pilepressure on care services

SATURDAY 1 APRIL / SUNDAY 2 APRIL 2017UK £3.80; Channel Islands £3.80; Republic of Ireland €3.80

© THE FINANCIAL TIMES LTD 2017No: 39,436 ★

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Censors and sensitivityWarning: this article may be upsetting — LIFE & ARTS

HOW DRIVERLESS TECHNOLOGY IS CHANGING AN AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE

THE END OF THE ROAD FT WEEKEND MAGAZINE

Escape the taper trapHow high earners can evade a pension headache — FT MONEY

The lure of the exoticRobin Lane Fox on the flair of foreign flora — HOUSE & HOME

How To Spend It

Chic new lodgings in ScotlandMAGAZINE

Art of persuasionMystery deepensover disputed painting of JaneAusten

Austen’s descendants insist the Rice portrait depicts her as a girl — seemagazine Bridgeman Art Library

RALPH ATKINS — ZURICHDUNCAN ROBINSON — BRUSSELS

Credit Suisse has been targeted bysweeping tax investigations in the UK,France and the Netherlands, settingback Switzerland’s attempts to clean upits imageasataxhaven.

The Swiss bank said yesterday it wasco-operating with authorities after itsoffices inLondon,ParisandAmsterdamwere contacted by local officials“concerningclient taxmatters”.

Dutch authorities said their counter-parts in Germany were also involved,while Australia’s revenue departmentsaid itwas investigatingaSwissbank.

The inquiries threaten to undermineefforts by the country’s banking sectorto overhaul business models and ensurecustomers meet international taxrequirements following a US-led clamp-down on evaders, which resulted inbillionsofdollars infines.

The probes risk sparking an interna-tional dispute after the Swiss attorney-general’s office expressed “astonish-ment” that it had been left out of theactions co-ordinated by Eurojust, theEU’s judicial liaisonbody.

Credit Suisse, whose shares fell 1.2 percent yesterday, identified itself as thesubject ofinvestigations in the Nether-lands, France and the UK. The bank said

it followed “a strategy offull client taxcompliance” but was still trying togather informationabouttheprobes.

HM Revenue & Customs said it hadlaunched a criminal investigation intosuspected tax evasion and money laun-dering by “a global financial institutionand certain ofits employees”. The UKtax authority added: “The internationalreach of this investigation sends a clearmessage that there is no hiding place forthoseseekingtoevadetax.”

Dutch prosecutors, who initiated theaction, said they seized jewellery, paint-ings and gold ingots as part of theirprobe; while French officials said theirinvestigation had revealed “severalthousand” bank accounts opened inSwitzerland and not declared to Frenchtaxauthorities.

The Swiss attorney-general’s officesaid it was “astonished at the way thisoperation has been organised with thedeliberate exclusion of Switzerland”. Itdemanded a written explanation fromDutchauthorities.

In 2014, Credit Suisse pleaded guiltyin the US to an “extensive and wide-ranging conspiracy” to help clientsevadetax. Itagreedtofinesof$2.6bn.Additional reportingbyLauraNoonan inDublin, Caroline Binham and VanessaHoulder in London, andMichael StothardinParis

Credit Suisseengulfed infresh taxprobe3UK, France and Netherlands swoop3Blow for bid to clean up Swiss image

FEBR

UARY

4 2017

THE RISE OF ECO-GLAM

390_Cover_PRESS.indd 1 19/01/2017 13:57

JANUARY 16 2021 Section:World Time: 15/1/2021 - 18:33 User: john.conlon Page Name: WORLD1 USA, Part,Page,Edition: USA, 2, 1

16 January/17 January 2021 ★ FTWeekend 3

The promise is central not only to his hopes of unifying the country after the divisive Trump years, but also to his chances of passing legislation.

“The history of partisan comity dur-ing Senate consideration of impeach-ment resolutions is not a long, happy one,” said Mr Galston.

“The risks are obvious, the opportuni-ties few to be seen. The president-elect is doing everything he can to tamp this down.”

Mr Biden has suggested the Senate could “bifurcate” the impeachment trial from normal Senate proceedings, allow-ing the upper chamber to begin confir-mation hearings and debating his early legislative agenda as it weighs whether to convict Mr Trump.

As Mr Biden said this week, this would mean the Senate spending “a half day with the impeachment and a half day getting my people nominated and con-firmed in the Senate as well as moving on the [stimulus] package”.

Some lawmakers said they believed such a bifurcation would be possible.

Bernie Sanders, the Vermont Senator who caucuses with the Democrats, said the party “must show that we can walk and chew bubblegum at the same time”.

“We must impeach Trump. Yes. We must process Biden’s nominees. Yes. We must pass legislation that addresses the enormous crises facing working fami-lies,” he wrote on Twitter.

But others are sceptical that the Sen-ate will be able to multitask. “It has enough trouble doing one thing at once,” Mr Heye said.See FT Big Read/Editorial Comment/Opinion

Courtney Weaver — Washington

As the US Senate prepares for the impeachment trial of Donald Trump, few are as wary of the unintended con-sequences as the president’s successor.

Joe Biden, president-elect, will take office next week with an ambitious leg-islative agenda including the quick pas-sage through Congress of a $1.9tn stimu-lus for the pandemic-battered economy.

But a combative impeachment trial would be an obstacle to those goals, said William Galston of the Brookings Insti-tution, who was a domestic policy aide for President Bill Clinton.

“I think that it’s very clear based on what the president-elect has said, and not said, that this is about the last thing he wanted, especially now,” Mr Galston said. “It presents a practical prob-lem, and it presents a political problem.”

Now that Mr Trump has been charged with “incitement of insurrection” in the House of Representatives for whipping up the mob that stormed the Capitol, the article of impeachment must be “walked over” to the Senate, where a trial will take place.

Mr Biden has openly fretted about how Congress will handle the impeach-ment process. After Mr Trump was charged on Wednesday, he released a statement that called on the Senate to hold the trial “while also working on the urgent business of this nation”, includ-ing “getting our vaccine programme on track . . . and our economy going”.

An impeachment trial would also mean a slowdown in the confirmation process of cabinet appointees who require Senate approval.

This week, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell rejected Democratic demands to reconvene the Senate early for immediate trial, meaning the upper chamber will return next Tuesday, Mr Trump’s final day in office. The trial is likely to start the following afternoon, immediately after Mr Biden’s inaugura-tion, although some Democrats have suggested engineering a delay.

There are already signs of possible hold-ups. US media reported on Thurs-day that Mr Biden had tapped current deputy defence secretary David Norquist to run the department on an acting basis. He would hold the fort until the president-elect’s nominee, retired four-star general Lloyd Austin, receives a waiver from the House and Senate that he needs because the job is normally occupied by a civilian.

Doug Heye, a Republican strategist, said: “We’re going to need a secretary of state, we’re going to need an attorney-general, we’re going to need a CIA direc-tor. And we’re going to need them as soon as possible, especially given the vulnerabilities we have,” he added, referring to the attack on the US Capitol. “We don’t want to be in a situation where our adversaries can take advan-tage of that.”

Matt Bennett, a founder of centrist Democratic think-tank Third Way, said filling out the administration posts was especially important given many agen-cies had been hollowed out in the wan-ing days of the Trump administration.

“[Biden] needs his team in place, not

say the changes have simply pushed some extremists towards messaging apps such as Telegram and Signal, which are harder to monitor, and niche “free speech” sites such as Gab.

Freed of the moderation constraints of the major platforms, some pro-Trump groups are now using these serv-ices to stoke further unrest in the run-up to president-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration on January 20.

“There’s so much kinetic energy in the space that the noise is off the charts,” said Angelo Carusone, president of non-profit Media Matters, citing numerous “threats” and “outrageous statements”.

Marc Rogers, a disinformation expert and vice-president of cyber security at Okta, an identity management com-pany, said: “Most of [the extremist and conspiracy theory groups] have scat-tered, but they are trying to reassem-ble . . . They are setting up groups on end-to-end encrypted messaging plat-forms.”

Experts say that many on the far-right have shifted their efforts in particular to Telegram, the Dubai-headquartered encrypted messaging app.

The service allows users to message each other privately, but also to have public discussion groups of up to

Gab, a niche social media platform launched in 2016, has also absorbed Parler refugees, to the point that its servers struggled to keep up with demand. The site had 80m page views this week, according to chief executive Andrew Torba, though he stressed that the platform did not accommodate vio-lent narratives.

Meanwhile, others have moved to smaller apps such as MeWe and CloutHub, both of which have surged in the App Store charts — their infrastruc-ture has also struggled to cope with the surge in traffic. MeWe said it was deter-mined to be the “best and safest social network” for its users. Signal, Telegram and CloutHub did not respond to requests for comment.

The major social platforms remain on high alert for incitement to violence in the coming week. A spokesperson for Facebook said they were particularly concerned about several marches planned between now and inauguration day. One event next week has been dubbed the “Million Martyr March”, in honour of the QAnon supporter Ashli Babbitt, who was shot during last week’s insurrection. “Whenever a movement finds martyrs, activity and action is not far behind,” warned ADL’s Mr Segal.

Social media. Messaging apps

Far-right goes underground to stoke further unrest

Aime Williams and Katrina Manson Washington

US prosecutors said there was “strong evidence” that the rioters who swarmed the Capitol building in Wash-ington last week targeted government officials for capture and assassination.

The detail came in a court filing against one of the defendants arrested in the aftermath of the attack, Jacob Anthony Chansley, the so-called Qanon Shaman who was pictured wearing a furry horned hat and face paint during the assault.

“Strong evidence, including Chans-ley’s own words and actions at the Capi-tol, supports that the intent of the Capi-tol rioters was to capture and assassi-nate elected officials in the United States government,” prosecutors said in the filing in Arizona federal court.

“Chansley left a note on the Senate chamber dais, where vice-president Mike Pence had been presiding over the session just minutes before, warning ‘it’s only a matter of time, justice is coming’,” the filing said.

Prosecutors said that while Mr Chans-ley said the note was not meant as a

threat, “the government strongly disa-grees”.

The filing underscores the serious nature of the allegations that prosecu-tors are pursuing in what they have described as an “unprecedented” inves-tigation into the attack, which has already led to dozens of charges.

Internal watchdogs overseeing sev-eral government agencies have launched reviews into the events lead-ing up to last week’s deadly assault, as security measures around Washington and other cities were tightened ahead of Joe Biden’s inauguration next week.

The departments of justice, home-land security, defence and interior yes-terday announced co-ordinated probes into their respective agencies.

Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, said she had asked Russel Honoré — a retired lieu-tenant-general in the army — to conduct “an immediate review of the Capitol’s security infrastructure, inter-agency processes and procedures, and com-mand and control”.

The FBI has warned of the risk of “potential armed protests” surrounding the inauguration.

Capitol assault

Rioters intended to ‘capture and assassinate’ officials

Trump impeachment threatens to cast shadow over Biden agenda Senate trial likely to act as drag on president-elect’s legislative priorities for pandemic-hit economy

INTERNATIONAL

Henry Foy — MoscowMichael Peel — Brussels

Russia is to withdraw from a defence treaty that allows signatories to make unarmed surveillance flights over each other’s territory, following the US deci-sion to exit the pact last year.

Moscow’s decision in effect cripples the 2002 Open Skies treaty, which was drawn up as a confidence-building measure following the cold war, and allowed Russia and Nato members to use observation flights to monitor each others’ military facilities and troop deployments.

The announcement, just a few days before Joe Biden is sworn in as US presi-dent, means there is only one remaining big defence pact between Russia and the west, which is set to expire next month. Mr Biden has criticised the US with-drawal from Open Skies and said it increases the risk of conflict.

The collapse of bilateral defence pacts, including a treaty that banned intermediate-range cruise missiles, has become emblematic of souring relations between Russia and the west, and the US in particular, in the past decade.

The US withdrawal last November “destroyed the balance of interests [the signatories] reached when the treaty was signed, inflicted severe damage to its functioning and undermined the role of the Open Skies treaty as a confidence- and security-building measure,” Rus-sia’s foreign ministry said in a statement announcing that it would begin the for-mal process to withdraw from the pact.

When the US announced its plans to pull out in May last year, the Trump administration blamed Moscow, claim-ing it had barred US flights over sensi-tive areas of Russian territory. The for-eign ministry yesterday said that was “an artificial pretext”.

Russia had entered into talks with the other 33 members following the US withdrawal with “specific proposals” to safeguard its continued participation — referring to demands that other Nato members would not share information gained on Russian surveillance flights with the US — but found no support for them, the ministry added.

Nato said it had “taken note” of Rus-sia’s intention to withdraw. It said Mos-cow’s “selective implementation” of its Open Skies obligations had undermined “the contribution of this important treaty to security and stability in the Euro-Atlantic region”.

The US has previously alleged Russia violated the agreement by refusing to allow flights over its heavily militarised Baltic Sea exclave of Kaliningrad, as well as along Russia’s border with Georgia and over military exercises. Russia says the US restricts flights over Alaska.

The pact’s demise is a particular blow to EU countries as they prized the access it gave to Russian military movements, particularly at the bloc’s borders. The EU said it was “analysing” the Russian statement and would respond later.

The collapse of the Open Skies treaty means the bilateral New Start agree-ment, which caps the number of nuclear warheads held by the US and Russia, is the sole remaining major defence pact between Moscow and the west. That is set to expire on February 5.

Observation flights

Russia follows US and leaves Open Skies defence treaty

Power transfer: workers hang a sign in Washington in preparation for Wednesday’s inauguration Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA/Bloomberg

Hannah Murphy — San Francisco Siddharth Venkataramakrishnan London

Far-right groups emboldened by last week’s riot in the US Capitol are using alternative platforms to rally support for further unrest, after mainstream social networks cracked down on vio-lent narratives.

Facebook and Twitter have ramped up their moderation of fringe groups and conspiracy theories since the pro-Trump uprising in Washington DC, which left five people dead and sowed chaos in the capital.

This has included removing some of the most influential supporters of the pro-Trump conspiracy movement QAnon and banning Mr Trump himself from posting. Meanwhile, the popular rightwing social network Parler was shut down after web service provider Amazon cut ties with it over its alleged role in facilitating the violence.

But far from stamping out violent far-right rhetoric from the internet, experts

Crackdown by mainstream

networks forces fringe groups

on to encrypted platforms

200,000 members, or create a “chan-nel” where one person can broadcast to an unlimited number of subscribers.

Telegram reached 11.9m downloads during the week of the riots, up from 6.5m the week before, according to data from Sensor Tower, a jump that was also fuelled by unrelated privacy concerns over Facebook-owned WhatsApp.

Signal, meanwhile, was downloaded 8.8m times versus 246,000 times the previous week.

The rising popularity of encrypted messaging apps — where message data cannot ever be accessed by authorities — has made tracking dangerous groups harder for law enforcement and researchers.

“The more that they go underground, the more effort needs to be put into identifying their discussions, their plans,” said Oren Segal, vice-president of the Center on Extremism at the Anti-Defamation League.

‘Most of [the extremist and conspiracy theory groups] have scattered, but they are trying to reassemble’

was a matter for Congress, but that if they proceeded with charging Mr Trump they would also “have to be ready to hit the ground running”.

Mr Bennett suggested there could be a silver lining for Mr Biden. “If the focus is not on Biden for a while, I think that is probably all to the good,” he said.

But Mr Galston countered that the trial could make it harder for Mr Biden to fulfil his oft-repeated pledge to restore some bipartisanship to Wash-ington.

only because of the normal reasons that you want your team in place, but also because the agencies are barely func-tioning,” Mr Bennett said.

A drawn-out Senate trial, Mr Galston noted, would also mean “a slowdown of the legislative agenda that he and people around him have clearly been trying to put on a fast track”.

Following the assault on the Capitol, Mr Biden has tried to stay above the fray of the bitter impeachment debate. Two days after the riot, he made it clear it

For the citizen-soldiers and airmen of the National Guard, who dropped their day jobs to answer for duty, the experience of being called on in the wake of the deadly attack on the US Capitol by pro-Trump mobs has been surreal.

It has meant dozing on the marbled floors of the Capitol during rest stops, with their weapons propped against the wall.

Specialist Christopher Kelly, a Virginia National Guard soldier, told the Financial Times he was awestruck by its beautiful interior and “a little bit” tired.

The 27-year-old paralegal is more used to occasionally helping manage hurricane responses, but said morale was high and troops were prepared.

“We’ve had our training to handle riot control and security so if we need to

. . . so be it,” said Mr Kelly, who was armed, like others, with an assault rifle.

Security in Washington, which has been dramatically increased since the pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol, is still being tightened.

More fencing is going up this weekend while a zigzag of sand-coloured vehicles have blocked the roads leading to congress.

The army has authorised 21,000 troops to protect the inauguration of Joe Biden, easily outstripping the total number of US troops deployed in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Somalia combined.

Specialist Nicholas Braden, a 33-year-old police officer and member of the Virginia National Guard, had never even visited Washington DC before.

He plans to tell his future grandchildren about his role

in the mission. It has been “awesome” to be a part of history, he said, although he admitted to some nerves and said it was “sad” that it had come to this.

“I think this is one of the safest places in the nation now,” he added.

Outside the heavily guarded complex, Washington’s residents described their disbelief.

For them, it is a lockdown on top of a lockdown in a city already reeling from the coronavirus pandemic.

“It’s a war zone, they basically turned this into a de facto military

base,” said Gerson Murillo, 23.Nayad Nunez, a 40-year-old airport worker, said

this was “something you watch in third-world countries”, as she looked at the guards lined up in front of the

Capitol.

Katrina Manson, Washington

National GuardCitizen reservists play part in defending US democracy

‘[Biden] needs his team in place . . . because the agencies are barely functioning’



tion from authorities, given the sensitiv-ity of the issue. She believes the priority should be recording and preserving evi-dence of how mismanagement led to unnecessary deaths.

Ms Ai is gathering stories from those whose plight has been airbrushed out of official narratives. “Citizens don’t get to decide for themselves whether they talk about what happened. It’s something that officialdom decides,” she said.

Beijing prefers to emphasise how it had largely smothered the contagion by spring and has since imposed Wuhan-style lockdowns for other outbreaks.

China’s success has not gone unno-ticed in Wuhan, where the speedy recovery — the city of 11m was hosting raves in water parks by August — com-pared favourably with the floundering responses in many other countries.

China’s official story about the party’s response is on display at a slick installa-tion set up in an exhibition hall that was previously used as a temporary quaran-tine ward. Young professionals bussed in by their employers are greeted by an exhibit that begins and ends with Mr Xi, leaving little doubt who was responsible for Wuhan’s success.

Party leadership is cast as essential for the mass lockdowns and the rapid con-

struction of temporary hospital wards. For some visitors, this official version is a fair portrayal. Meimei, an employee of a state-owned enterprise, talks with pride of the work she did to help local communities during the lockdown to order and deliver groceries and took part in the construction of hospitals built from scratch in just weeks.

“Now that everywhere in the world has infections and many places can’t control them, I feel that the response at that time wasn’t bad,” she said.

Meimei is keen to move on. But that is not so easy for the bereaved families, who remain aggrieved with official fail-ures. Zhong Hanneng has been seeking restitution after her 39-year-old son died of Covid-19.

Peng Yi, a primary school teacher, was told to go into mass quarantine after contracting the virus. Instead of receiv-ing care, he was sent to different hospi-tals, Ms Zhong said, providing videos and messages from her son’s phone to detail the confused situation.

“The government keeps singing its own praises and grinning as if they have won a great victory,” she said. “It isn’t like that at all.”Additional reporting by Emma Zhou in Wuhan and Robin Yu in Hong Kong

Coronavirus. Narratives

Conflicting versions of Covid roots divide Wuhan

Christian Shepherd — Wuhan

Boxes of imported steaks arriving at the Baishazhou wholesale market in Wuhan go through an elaborate ritual before being placed in a freezer.

Behind a high red fence, men in haz-mat suits test the packages for coronavi-rus, spray them with clouds of disinfect-ant and add a tracking code before they can be carried away on a forklift.

But a stall owner selling Argentine beef rejects a theory proposed by Beijing that imported frozen food may have seeded the city’s coronavirus outbreak last year, marking the start of the pan-demic. Instead, he points to a different hypothesis, that has not been backed by credible evidence.

“It definitively was the military games that brought the virus in,” he said, refer-ring to a sporting event in October 2019.

The frozen foods — and the fringe the-ories believed by some of the market’s stallholders — are at the centre of a fight to define the narrative of the pandemic’s origins and handling of its fallout.

Many of the inconsistencies that pre-vent the Communist party from broad-casting a wholly triumphant tale are found in Wuhan. The city offers clues to the roots of the virus, as well as revealing lasting trauma, sadness and resentment from those who challenge the sanitised narrative propagated by Xi Jinping, China’s president.

A World Health Organization team landed on Thursday, six months after launching a probe into how the virus jumped from animals to humans. The virologists will have to consider the fro-zen goods theory. They will also be pressed to rule out the possibility that the virus leaked from the Wuhan Insti-tute of Virology, a hypothesis popular among China hawks in the US.

Most Wuhan residents who spoke to the Financial Times voiced a deep ambivalence about remaining at the centre of a politically charged debate over how the pandemic started. Some support theories for which little evi-dence has been publicly disclosed. Oth-ers believe wildlife sold at the Huanan seafood wholesale market, the location of the city’s first superspreader event that is now closed and surrounded by a metal barrier, was the source.

Communist party line on

pandemic origins challenged

by many ordinary residents

City’s struggle: Xi Jinping, Chinese president, looms large at an exhibition on the fight against coronavirus in Wuhan. Below, Zhong Hanneng holds a picture of her son, 39, who died from Covid Tingshu Wang/Reuters; Hector Retamal /AFP/Getty

‘Citizens don’t get to decide for themselves whether they talk about what happened’

INTERNATIONAL

Bryan Harris and Michael Pooler SAo Paulo

Authorities in Brazil have begun airlift-ing oxygen supplies to the Amazonian city of Manaus, where a new strain of coronavirus appears to be ripping through the community, sparking a jump in deaths by asphyxiation.

The Brazilian air force began shipping cylinders early yesterday morning after scenes emerged from the city in the middle of the rainforest showing the

apparent collapse of its health service, with patients struggling to breathe and doctors manually pumping oxygen because of a lack of supplies.

“There are people who are dying in the corner of the hospital as if they were drowning. The issues need to be resolved immediately,” said President Jair Bolsonaro.

Cemeteries in the city of 2m on Thurs-day buried 186 citizens, while the state of Amazonas — where Manaus is located — is at full hospital capacity with more than 2,000 patients admitted with the disease. At the height of its first wave of Covid-19 cases in April last year, the city buried at most 142 citizens each day — a record that has now been broken every

day since Jan 10. In response to the latest crisis, Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro — no ally of Mr Bolsonaro — offered to send oxygen supplies. Brazil has also requested the use of a US mili-tary aircraft to transport oxygen cylin-ders, Marcelo Ramos, a federal deputy for Amazonas, told local media.

Health experts suspect the cases are probably a new variant of coronavirus, which was detected by authorities in Japan last week. The variant spreading in Manaus prompted the UK govern-ment to ban flights from Latin America, including Brazil, on Thursday.

However, doctors said there was still no evidence whether the new variant is more dangerous.

“The new strain is probably responsi-ble for the increase in cases, but we still don’t know if it is more aggressive or more dangerous, and it is not an easy question to be answered in the short term,” said Ester Sabino, director at the Institute of Tropical Medicine at Univer-sity of São Paulo.

Robson Amorim, a doctor in the city, said the problem with Manaus — a city encircled by rainforest — is that it is “like an island where you can only arrive by boat or plane”.

Brazil’s health regulator is expected to rule tomorrow on the approval of two coronavirus vaccines, the Oxford/AstraZeneca and the Chinese-made CoronaVac jabs.

The country’s vaccine rollout has been fraught with delays and concerns are still high that the nation does not have adequate levels of ancillary sup-plies, such as needles, for the pro-gramme to be launched nationwide.

“The truth is that the state of Amazo-nas today is living a drama,” Mr Ramos said yesterday.

“If the [health] ministry manages to put on six Hercules aircraft flying daily and moving 30,000 cubic metres [of oxygen], we will get out of this chaos and stabilise the system. If the government doesn’t manage to do this, we are going to have a catastrophe in the next 48, 72 hours.”Additional reporting by Carolina Pulice

Sam Fleming — Brussels

The president of the eurogroup urged Brussels and EU member states to mobilise the new recovery fund as quickly as possible so that the cash starts to boost economies before the year is out.

Paschal Donohoe, who is also Ireland’s finance minister, said he believed the €750bn recovery fund would be suffi-cient in combination with national fiscal responses to combat the EU’s worst eco-nomic crisis, but he warned that speed would be of the essence.

“It is really important that the recov-ery and resilience funds [do] begin to support an economic recovery within this year,” said Mr Donohoe in an inter-view with a group of reporters, calling for a particular focus on boosting the employment prospects of younger Europeans.

“There is a shared appreciation from all of us that we have to do what we can to get the foundations ready for recov-ery within this year, when health condi-tions allow it.”

His words came as the EU scrambled to accelerate the rollout of its vaccina-tion drive in order to permit the loosen-ing of lockdowns and lay the ground for recoveries this year.

The EU late last year cleared the final major hurdles to the implementation of its €1.8tn seven-year budget, which will include an unprecedented European Commission borrowing programme aimed at helping member states restore their economies after the damage wreaked by Covid-19.

The challenge facing EU countries is submitting detailed reform plans to Brussels by April, laying out how they plan to use the recovery fund’s loans and grants, which are designed to boost innovation and digitalisation and facili-tate the green transition. The commis-sion will then scrutinise the reforms with the goal of beginning disburse-ments from the second half of 2021.

In addition, member states’ parlia-ments all need to ratify the decision per-mitting the commission to borrow the unprecedented sums involved in the recovery fund.

Drawing up detailed recovery plans is proving a complex process, and the pro-grammes will ultimately need to be waved through by EU member states after receiving the commission’s approval.

Mr Donohoe said there was a “shared responsibility” between the commis-sion and member states to ensure the plans are developed and signed off. “I do believe it is very important that we see the impact of that important agreement in economic prospects in 2021,” he said.

Mr Donohoe added he expected the loans element of the recovery fund to be “very broadly used” on top of the grants.

The EU’s recovery and resilience facil-ity, when combined with national budget decisions, “will be of the right scale for dealing with the challenges 2021 is going to bring. Speed is particu-larly important.”

Among the challenges within mem-ber states will be overcoming domestic bureaucratic obstacles to the quick implementation of the fund. Italy and Spain, which are two of the largest recip-ients of the recovery fund, have a poor record in absorbing EU money rapidly.

Latin America

Brazil airlifts oxygen to Amazonian cityDeaths increase sharply as new strain takes toll on rainforest community

Crisis cash

Eurogroup chief urges rapid use of EU recovery funding

But many were less concerned with how the pandemic started and instead focused on dealing with its legacy.

“At the time, there were all sorts of rumours, with people saying it was poi-son or came from the lab,” said a young professional surnamed Tang. “I can’t believe that a government would have developed the disease and let it loose.”

Even so, anger remains high among those who believe the Communist party should do more to admit early mistakes.

Ai Xiaoming, a documentary film-maker and writer, said publicly raising questions about the origins of coronavi-rus would probably elicit a harsh reac-

Jamie Smyth — Sydney

Australia wants to cash in on its adept handling of Covid-19 by inviting inter-national rugby union teams to play in a “mini world cup” during the southern hemisphere winter.

Hamish McLennan, Rugby Australia chairman, said the French team was due to tour Australia in July and he planned to ask other nations if they would play in a competition that could run in parallel with the Rugby Championship — a tour-nament featuring New Zealand, Argen-tina and South Africa, the reigning world champions.

He also disclosed that Rugby Aus-tralia had held exploratory talks with private equity groups to attract more capital into the cash-strapped sport, which has endured a “nightmare” year because of the pandemic.

“We are still expecting the Rugby Championship to go ahead this year but perhaps we can add to it and create a ‘mini world cup’,” Mr McLennan told the Financial Times.

“We have the French [arriving] in July but if anyone else wants to come out,

great. We have a significant British and Irish population here and South Afri-cans. We are open to creating a new tournament and keeping the interna-tional calendar going.”

Mr McLennan said the European and South African rugby calendars looked “very sketchy” owing to Covid-19 and Australia was an ideal location where

teams could play in front of crowds. He said it was “a fluid situation” but if the British and Irish Lions tour to South Africa was cancelled in July because of the pandemic, Australia could host the teams in a safe environment.

Australia is one of a select group of countries that has suppressed the virus by rapidly shutting its international borders, imposing lockdowns and pur-suing contact tracing. This has enabled life to return to a semblance of normal-

ity and international sporting events with spectators to resume.

Despite border restrictions, the Wal-labies hosted Argentina and New Zea-land for a rugby tournament, India and Australia are playing a cricket series and the Australian Open tennis will begin next month.

However, Mr McLennan’s proposal to host a mini world cup would probably face opposition from rival rugby unions, which are hoping vaccines will allow the resumption of spectator sports, accord-ing to rugby analysts.

Mr McLennan, a former media execu-tive, is exploring ways to boost Rugby Australia’s finances and grow the sport following a cash crisis precipitated by Covid-19 and tough competition from rival sports. Rugby Australia reported a deficit of A$9.4m in 2019.

“It [Covid-19] was a complete night-mare. We’ve reduced our headcount by about half and taken nearly A$40m [$31m], about a third of the cost, out of the organisation,” said Mr McLennan.

He said the virus had accelerated rugby’s need to look at alternative fund-ing mechanisms.

Virus success

Rugby Australia offers to stage ‘mini world cup’

‘We are open to creating a new tournament and keeping the international calendar going’

Benjamin Parkin — New Delhi

Indian authorities are discovering masses of dead birds as avian influenza sweeps across the country, alarming a public already rattled by coronavirus.

Since late last month, thousands of geese, ducks, crows and other birds have been found dead in nine states, from Kerala on India’s southern tip to the Himalayan state of Himachal Pradesh in the north. There are no reported human infections.

Officials working to quash the new epidemic have detected two different strains of bird flu: H5N1 and H5N8. They believe the virus was carried into India by birds migrating from central Asia before spreading to poultry, prompting officials to cull hundreds of thousands of birds in states such as Har-yana and Kerala.

In Europe, France is culling 600,000 poultry birds to contain its own out-break of H5N8, with the UK and Bel-gium also recently uncovering cases. Officials in Japan and South Korea have reported cases of bird flu.

“We never know when it will become

a pandemic. That is why you have got to be extremely watchful,” said Bivash Pandav of the Wildlife Institute of India, a government-affiliated research insti-tution. “We are much better prepared than 10 years back, and the credit goes to Covid.”

Local and central government authorities in India have increased test-

ing of dead birds for the presence of bird flu, although scientists said the true extent of the outbreak was unclear.

Some ecologists said insufficient sur-veillance of birds in the wild, including live birds, made such outbreaks harder to prevent. Abi Vanak, who studies zoonotic diseases at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Envi-ronment, said the coronavirus pan-demic underscored the urgency of such work.

“Human health is closely intercon-nected with animal health and environ-mental health. And therefore human health should not be viewed in isola-tion,” he said. “If the pandemic teaches us one thing, it should teach us this.”

India has recorded more than 10m coronavirus cases, the second-highest in the world, and more than 150,000 deaths.

Asad Rahmani, a former director of the Bombay Natural History Society, a conservation research organisation, said the destruction of habitats such as wetlands exacerbated outbreaks by forcing more birds to concentrate in fewer places. For example, thousands of carcasses have been found around the Pong Dam lake in the Himalayan foot-hills, a popular birdwatching spot.

India had multiple severe avian flu outbreaks in 2006 and 2008, which led to millions of birds being culled.

The recent scare has hammered India’s fast-growing poultry industry. Prices have tumbled as anxious con-sumers avoid chicken and eggs, although officials have sought to assure the public that cooked poultry is safe.

Avian disease

India scrambles to quash bird flu epidemic

A dead goose is retrieved from a lake in New Delhi. Bird carcasses have been found in nine states



I first met Michael Apted in St Peters-burg in 1989, where he was making a documentary about a Russian rock star. Granada wanted to internationalise his Up documentaries that tracked a cohort of seven-year-old British children through their lives, which critics have described as among the best films ever made. I was living in Moscow, working with the Russian director to find Soviet seven-year-olds. So we went to Michael for tips.

The baronial mansion where Michael, who has died aged 79, was staying seemed especially glamorous during those spartan Russian days. It was my first TV job, and our first meeting with an A-list Hollywood director, but his message was down to earth: never lose the formal interview that gives the Up series its backbone.

It was fashionable to interview people while they did something else, but Michael urged us to keep to the princi-ple of the head shot; the interviewee’s eyes were critical. This was true to Up’s spirit, which was based on the Jesuit dic-tum “Give me a child until he is seven, and I will show you the man”. It was typi-cal of Michael’s authentic, unfussy style which, strange as it may seem, is what

also attracted him to the James Bond producers of The World is Not Enough.

Born in 1941, he grew up in Essex, the shy son of an insurance broker. After the City of London school, he read history at Cambridge and on graduation joined Granada as a researcher for its current affairs programme World In Action. “My parents were mortified,” he once said. “They wanted me to be a solicitor.” The show became Michael’s launch pad.

Tasked to make a film of Britain’s gap-ing class chasms, the resulting fast-turn-round project became a longitudinal series only after a chance meeting in the Granada canteen. A senior executive mused it would be nice to see how the children were doing. Michael agreed. As casually as that, he re-embarked on a project that engaged his whole life.

Surprisingly Michael was never pre-cious about the Russian or South Afri-can versions that I helped produce. His role was never formalised. Instead, he was a godfather, I suppose, always send-ing on the praise television bigwigs sent to him, which I then used as leverage to get the next instalment commissioned. He was unfailingly generous — not a common industry trait.

We once gave an Up masterclass at a

UK film festival. Moderated by Dick Fontaine, head of documentaries at the National Film and Television school, it had a prime slot in the largest venue. I was terribly nervous of letting Michael down. He was used to the attention, of course, and was then president of the Director’s Guild of America, a post he held for six years. Even so, we went through what we were going to say with copious prompts on index cards. Michael, always a true gent, also placed me mid-stage between him and Dick, although it was clearly his masterclass.

There has been some criticism that of the 14 original British kids only four were girls. Michael regretted this in hindsight. Yet his subsequent main-stream films may have been a way of compensating, as it was their female leads that garnered Oscar attention, be that Gorillas in the Mist or Coal Miner’s Daughter. He relished drama and said a woman’s emotional life was more dra-matic than a man’s.

I saw Michael whenever there was the chance, so the occasions may seem out-landish listed here: on a Los Angeles beach, where he was playing with the third of his four children, John; over lunch with Paige, his widowed third

wife, on a sunny Moscow rooftop; and with my three-month-old daughter Eva, at his Soho Square office when he was editing The Chronicles of Narnia. Michael had just learnt that the film, shot in 2D, was to be launched in 3D. Panic! He had picked Eva up when the call came in from Los Angeles. To my astonishment, he spoke at length but didn’t put Eva down.

Michael was so clever, talented and interesting; also so generous and kind. Everyone who knew him will miss him. Although some say that Up launched reality television, I believe that is wrong. Unlike most reality TV, which is manip-ulated, there were no frills or tricks, nor even commissioned music. Instead, it was a simple dish of interview and actu-alité. Of course, it was skilfully crafted and paced, and the cumulative effect of each seven-year instalment was mes-merising. But it was documentary at its best. Michael once said: “It will be some-thing that I gave to television — no one will ever take that away.” Fittingly, the last film he made was the latest UK instalment 63 Up, screened in 2019. Michael, ever curious and engaged, would have loved to do the next one.Jemma Jupp

His authentic, unfussy style is what attracted him to the producers of James Bond

Michael Apted shooting the Oscar-nominated ‘Coal Miner’s Daughter’

T he decision to bar the US president from the most powerful communication platforms of the age hasall the ingredients of a

singularly American brawl.There is Donald Trump’s exploitation

of a powerful strand of nativist pop-ulism to try to stay in power and the highly partisan rightwing media that have helped fan the election-rigging conspiracy theory that led to last week’s insurrection in the Capitol.

In the background, a long-running aversion to internet regulation has left a regulatory vacuum. And, this being the US, everyone involved claims an undy-ing dedication to free speech and the First Amendment.

But the other defining theme has been the technocratic self-confidence and thinly veiled self-interest of a powerful group of tech executives, who all run American companies but whose deci-sions have global implications.

As Mr Trump’s indefinite ban took effect on Facebook, Twitter and other sites this week, the decision to “de-platform” the president has exposed as never before the contradictions at the heart of social media.

The platforms “are having a crisis of legitimacy”, says one tech industry insider of their attempts to justify their decisions. “As long as Mark [Zucker-berg, Facebook CEO], Jack [Dorsey, Twitter CEO], Sundar [Pichai, Google CEO] or Susan [Wojcicki, YouTube CEO] can arbitrarily decide who can appear on their company’s services and what they are permitted to say, people will not be satisfied that these decisions are in the public interest, rather than corporate commercial interests.”

The backlash from both Mr Trump’s supporters and opponents of the tech companies’ power has forced even some executives to sound regretful. Mr Dor-sey opined on his company’s site that blocking powerful politicians “sets a precedent I feel is dangerous: the power an individual or corporation has over a part of the global public conversation”.

Such public soul-searching, however, comes alongside signs that some execu-tives still reject the role their companies’ services have played in the US political drama. Sheryl Sandberg, chief operat-ing officer of Facebook, declared in an interview this week that the social net-work had been scarcely used to help organise the riot at the Capitol — a state-ment that flew in the face of many docu-mented cases of co-ordination carried out on the service.

“The assault on the Capitol was a hor-rible week for Big Tech because it raised their prominence, it raised their visibil-ity — not simply as commercial institu-tions, but as political institutions,” says William Kovacic, a former FTC chair-man and a current law professor at George Washington University.

“It has put the spotlight on the sector in the most unwelcome way and dem-onstrated for both left and right reasons to be concerned . . . with over-reach and power.”

Scrutinising Big Tech

Just over two months ago, as American voters went to the polls, things seemed very different. Despite the continued spread of misinformation and conspir-acy theories on their networks, the social media companies looked to have tiptoed successfully through the mine-field of the presidential campaign, avoiding the charges of foreign interfer-ence that blighted the 2016 election.

But the post-election period — and Mr Trump’s full-on denial of the results — has been another matter. For much of

place on the internet — as Parler discov-ered when Amazon Web Services refused to host its site.

Policing better

In the absence of more competition, the debate has come to focus on what steps the tech companies could take to engen-der public confidence in their content policies — and what level of regulatory arm-twisting is required to make them live up their promises.

One improvement, according to many observers, would be a clearer delineation of the rules that the plat-forms apply to policing speech, along with more consistent enforcement.

“These platforms, if they’re going to retain the size and power, have to have a regular way in which they are accounta-ble, and be open and public about the decisions they made,” says Emily Bell, a professor at Columbia University jour-nalism school.

Consistency will never be easy. Regu-lation of language is inherently subjec-tive. Having turned a blind eye to the repeated use of exactly the same lan-guage for weeks, it was only when elec-tion denial turned to violence at the heart of US government that the tech companies acted.

A second step would be to bring more transparency to the effects of the tech companies’ content decisions. After the 2016 election, Facebook promised to release more data to academic research-ers to allow a wider understanding of the effects of its actions. But the pro-gramme has been slow to take hold.

Europe’s proposed digital services act, meanwhile, attempts to impose similar checks on internet companies judged to have the power of gatekeepers. They would have to audit their algorithms

and content moderation decisions to show whether they risked bias.

Another idea would involve external oversight of the companies’ most con-troversial decisions. Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny took up the idea this week, calling on Twitter to “create some sort of a committee that can make such decisions”. He added: “We need to . . . understand how it works, how its members vote and how we can appeal against their decisions.”

Facebook has already moved in this direction, setting up an independent Oversight Board last year to review a limited number of appeals against the company’s decisions to censor content. However, it would not disclose whether the board would consider an appeal on Mr Trump’s ban, saying “we are not commenting further to avoid prejudic-ing the review process”.

Government action to force the com-panies to act may already be on the cards. The EU’s proposed digital services act would require companies to do more to combat hate speech. In the US, politi-cians from both parties have argued for limiting legal protections online compa-nies enjoy under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

There is no guarantee that more regu-lation will stem the tide of hate speech and conspiracies. It may also entrench big platforms with the resources to operate in a more regulated world. But after last week’s stark demonstration of tech company power over political speech, it just got one step closer.

“Twitter’s in a no-win situation,” says Eric Goldman, a professor at Santa Clara University law school. “They’ll never be able to earn the trust of the entire world, because the world is going to wantdifferent things.”

The messy fight over free speech

FT BIG READ. TECHNOLOGY

The decision to ban Donald Trump has created a moment of reckoning for social media companies. By taking action against perceived hate speech, they have demonstrated the arbitrary power they hold.

By Richard Waters and Hannah Murphy

the tech industry the moment of reck-oning came last week, when false claims about a stolen election, seeded and stoked by Mr Trump, led a mob to take over the US Capitol. Facebook shut down the president’s accounts indefi-nitely to prevent what it claimed was further incitement to violence; Twitter did so permanently.

The actions spread much more widely through the tech world, as Google’s YouTube, Snap and payment company Stripe were among those to act against the Trump campaign. Amazon, Apple and Google also took steps to force right-wing network Parler off the internet over fears it was fomenting violence.

The impression this has left of co-ordinated action across the tech sector has added to the scrutiny. “The fact that they ‘broke the glass’ by blocking Trump’s ability to communicate on their services has, if anything, placed greater pressure on these companies to demonstrate the legitimacy of their decisions,” says the insider.

The showdown with the White House comes at a politically charged moment, given that lawmakers in Washington were already working on ways to chal-lenge tech’s power. Inevitably, this has fed simmering debates on everything from tougher laws on speech to ending the tech platforms’ legal protections and whether they should be broken up.

To critics outside the US, the riot in Washington and curtailing of Mr Trump’s tweets are a sign that the coun-try’s civic discourse has gone off the rails — as well as evidence that the tech com-panies have grown too powerful. Ger-man chancellor Angela Merkel said this week that the US should take a lesson from Germany and pass stricter laws against hate speech.

‘The assault on the Capitol was a horrible week for Big Tech because it raised their prominence, it raised their visibility — not simply as commercial institutions, but as political institutions’William Kovacic, law professor and former FTC chair

Donald Trump’s conspiratorial talk of a rigged election was blamed for last week’s failed insurrection in the Capitol — and his eventual ‘de-platforming’ from a host of social media sites — FT montage

ObituaryCelebrated maker of ‘Up’ documentary TV series

Michael AptedFilm director1941-2021

Such ideas are widely dismissed in the US, where First Amendment rights are jealously guarded.

Anupam Chander, a professor in glo-bal internet regulation at Georgetown University, adds: “It is problematic to have Jack Dorsey decide whether Don-ald Trump stays or goes, but it may be more problematic to have federal judges do so.”

Yet the Trump ban has still added to the urgency of calls in the US to limit the power of the tech companies to make what can often seem like arbitrary judg-ments about digital speech, with sweep-ing effects on millions of users.

One focus is on antitrust. Greater competition in social media would give

people more choices over the kind of online conversation they want to join, while also reducing the impact of being “de-platformed” by them. The federal government has already taken the first steps to challenge Big Tech in courts in areas such as Facebook’s ownership of Instagram and WhatsApp.

Applying the blunt instrument of antitrust policy to the marketplace of ideas might not result in better civic dis-course, however. Splitting the online discussion between partisan platforms might lead to a fracturing of public debate and reinforce the tribal nature of today’s partisan politics.

Fringe sites that hope to put fewer restrictions on the kind of speech they host may also find it hard to establish a

Jack Dorsey, Twitter chief executive, admitted that Trump’s social media ban set a dangerous precedent

‘We need to . . . understand how a [Twitter oversight committee would] work, how its members vote and how we can appeal against their decisions’Alexei Navalny, Russian opposition leader

JANUARY 16 2021 Section:Features Time: 15/1/2021 - 18:53 User: alistair.hayes Page Name: BIGPAGE, Part,Page,Edition: USA, 5, 1


SATURDAY 16 JANUARY 2021

Correction

c Jon Ossoff will be the US’s first Jewish senator from the Deep South since the 1880s — and the first from Georgia — but not the first ever from the Deep South as incorrectly stated in a column on January 9.

Because most presidents leave the White House graciously, there is time and space to appraise their legacy. The chaos of Donald Trump’s exit has crowded out such reflection. Ensuring a handover to Joe Biden without inci-dent next week is enough work to busy the nation.

The judgment should not be post-poned indefinitely. This has been a presidency of vast consequence, and mostly for the wrong reasons. Mr Trump hands on a US that is less together at home and less credible abroad than at any point since the nadir of the Vietnam war.

The domestic and the international are hard to separate. The flattery of strongmen over liberal allies, the brute protectionism, the scorning of climate change accords and multilateral bod-ies: these foreign policies have left the west without a leader. But then so has the turmoil inside the US. What makes a great power is more than its aggregate tonnage of armaments. It must also have a stable and attractive society. Thus are allies won without duress, and the state freed from constantfirefighting at home.

Mr Trump did not invent America’s social fractures, least of all the racial ones that are as old as the republic. But no recent president has done more to widen them. The mob that stormed the Capitol at his incitement was not just all-white, it contained Confederate flags and Nazi slogans. Underneath the rioters’ specific (and nonsensical) grievance with the presidential elec-tion was an inchoate sense of racial dis-possession.

The speed with which whites are los-ing their majority status in the US can be overstated, but it is a profound change. Even a well-meaning president would struggle to neutralise anxieties about it. What this one has done is stoke them for his own ends. He did it

by equivocating over the deadly Char-lottesville march in 2017. He did it with extreme words and deeds about Latin American immigration. Weeks before the election, he told the far-right Proud Boys to “stand by”.

This is not a dog whistle. It is just a whistle. The moral case against such explicit divisiveness hardly needs stat-ing. What is odd is that Republicans cannot even see the geopolitical one. America’s internal schisms are not lost on Moscow or Beijing. Each riot, each racial crisis, serves their view of the west as brittle, and democracy as a for-mula for chaos. Throw in his botched handling of the coronavirus pandemic, and Mr Trump has given China propa-ganda win after propaganda win. If he is a nationalist, he is a bad one.

To see his presidency as a wasted opportunity is to assume that he ever had the skill or character to govern well. Two impeachments and the pan-demic fiasco suggest otherwise. What is true, however, is that he detected real faults in the status quo of 2016. Amer-ica’s deindustrialised towns had been left to rust for decades. Globalisation had millions of unacknowledged los-ers. Their material plight was com-pounded by cultural condescension.

All the more sad, then, that he did so little for them. He cut taxes for high-earners instead, and burnt regulations for business. The infrastructure splurge never came. Having pledged to undermine Obamacare and replace it with something better, he only did the first. Had he governed as the economic populist he once posed as, he might have won that second term.

The lingering worry is that he came close anyway. As Mr Biden prepares for his dire inheritance, the US has a huge minority of citizens who swear by his predecessor, even now. Do not mistake the exit of a rogue president for the end of America’s troubles.

US is less united at home and less credible abroad than for decades

For all its prestige, Davos has its down-sides. You trek up to the World Economic Forum meeting, queue in the snow for airport-style security checks, sit through panels featuring the self-appointed great and not-so-good, and return, exhausted, to be lambasted as an elitist or enabler of the same. Jaded regulars may not mind skipping the Alpine circus.

Instead of staging a summit next week, the Forum has invited a similar cast to attend a virtual “Davos Agenda”. G20 leaders, chief executives and others will discuss global chal-lenges. The WEF ran 300 online meet-ings last year, with a focus on action rather than talk. Online debate may even turn out to be more productive than the in-person annual meeting, which the WEF has rescheduled to May and relocated to Singapore.

One meta-challenge that will hang over both meetings is how elite confer-ences and trade fairs, their more down-to-earth cousins, will evolve and survive after the pandemic. Everyone on the Davos guest list, and beyond, has at least an indirect stake in the future of networking events, because face-to-face encounters are an important lubricant for deals, innovation, and policymaking. (The Financial Times, which regularly sends an editorial delegation to Davos and stages its own conferences has a direct interest.)

Chief executives always claimed one advantage of going to Davos was that they could hole up in a spa hotel and meet customers, suppliers and share-holders from around the world in a couple of intensive days. The same executives have learnt such meetings can now take place as videocalls, with Zoom fatigue the only real downside.

The resulting toll on business travel, and on exhibition and event organisers has been heavy. In an October trading update, Relx, which owns Reed Exhibi-

tions, reported a 70 per cent drop in revenues for that division in the year to date. Earlier this month, Informa, another events organiser, forecast a 70 per cent fall in adjusted operating prof-its for 2020. Online events have lower overheads, but also lower barriers to entry for upstart competitors.

Trade shows have suffered, too. This week, the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), which usually brings some 180,000 visitors to Las Vegas to sample the latest tech wizardry, went virtual. It is hard to assess from a distance the potential of a rollable-screen phone, let alone a vertical take-off drone. Forging new relationships is even harder when what happens in Vegas does not hap-pen in Vegas. The city itself has had to renounce some $300m in positive eco-nomic impact, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

For these reasons, a return to in-per-son events and exhibitions should be welcomed when the time is right, alongside the emergence of new mod-els of virtual and hybrid conferencing.

There are obstacles. Cash-conscious companies are bound to reassess the utility, cost, and safety of sending staff to press potentially viral flesh abroad. But Informa, like its competitors, has been running large events in China since last summer and expects nine-tenths of its non-Chinese physical events to run from June.

Against the drawbacks should be set the human desire to exchange views face to face, and the evidence that peo-ple yearn to spring back after disaster — sometimes to excess. Writing 100 years ago, historian James Westfall Thompson compared the aftermath of the 14th century Black Death and the Great War. Both unleashed “frenetic gaiety, wild expenditure, luxury, [and] debauchery”. On that basis alone, next year’s gatherings in Davos and Las Vegas should be worth the entry price.

In-person events will be back and that is — mostly — good news

Trump leaves behinda woeful legacy

The fate of conferences is not all Zoom and gloom

honourable exile. The material amounted to little, but it allowed Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party to discredit a unity government in which Tsvangirai was prime minister, and to justify political violence and poll rigging at the next general election in 2013, which Mugabe predictably won.Markus HaefligerLondon SE5, UK

Squirrels and otherbird table menacesSquirrels are a torment for those of us who love the company of our birds in winter but they can be vanquished (House & Home, January 9). Our tray feeder hangs from a shepherd’s crook, halfway up which my husband, who refused to be defeated by a squirrel, has positioned an aluminium garbage can cover that flops down when a squirrel leaps on it. Squirrels can crawl around anything that is fixed but they can’t climb on to something that won’t stay still. As for the bossy blue jays, at the advice of the Audubon Society, I have replaced sunflower seeds with safflower. It may as well be sold as blue jay repellent. They haven’t been back.

There is something deeply reassuring about observing birds. They set us an example of carrying on through the cold, in the faith that spring will arrive. Margaret McGirrGreenwich CT, US

A New Zealand woman holds that Everest record Alison Hargreaves, who died on K2, was indeed a highly talented mountaineer who climbed Everest solo without oxygen in 1995 (“The Final Summit”, Life & Arts, FT Weekend, January 9).

However contrary to the picture caption accompanying your piece, the British climber almost certainly wasn’t the first woman to do so. New Zealander Lydia Bradey achieved the feat in 1988, but her ascent was shrouded in bitter dispute, with teammates who had failed on a different route refusing to believe that she had succeeded.

She had climbed without a permit for her South Col route, and initially retracted her claim for fear of being banned from the mountain for 10 years. Other climbers later backed up her story, however, and her groundbreaking achievement is now generally accepted. Beth NoakesLondon NW3, UK

Reclaiming lost items can be as good as a clear-out Sam Leith’s piece (“The joys of a wardrobe clear-out”, Life & Arts, FT Weekend, January 9) made me cry with laughter. If I’ve done anything

during this period of forced reflection it’s tidy the house. It’s been great to rediscover the things under the beds. There were lots of things we’d forgotten we had. It’s nice to see them again. Alex MckenzieLondon E5, UK

Remembering the London Dr Johnson never tired of Simon Kuper’s death notice warning for cosmopolitan London (“The triple threat to London’s city top spot”, Spectrum, FT Weekend, January 9) may be premature, recalling the 18th century social diarist Samuel Johnson’s comment that “when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life”.

I prefer the unattributed dictum in defence of the city that “a bad day in London is still better than a good day anywhere else”. London is still much loved!Cormac Meehan Bundoran, County Donegal, Ireland

LettersEmail: [email protected]

Include daytime telephone number and full addressCorrections: [email protected]

If you are not satisfied with the FT’s response to your complaint, you can appealto the FT Editorial Complaints Commissioner: [email protected]

It’s just two months since former US president Barack Obama told The Atlantic magazine that his country was “entering into an epistemological crisis”. “If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false, then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work,” he declared. “And by definition our democracy doesn’t work.”

How true those words now seem. America, and the world, is still reeling in horror at the political chasm exposed by the violence in the Capitol last week. But this is not just an ideological fight. As Obama suggested, this is also a battle around knowledge and thought that has been escalating since Donald Trump hit the campaign trail. The national reaction to the Washington attacks is just the latest example. Democrats and America’s educated elites have generally portrayed the assault in terms of an abuse of the constitution, which needs to be countered by logic and law.

“We have to use faith and reason to confront this,” historian Jon Meacham told MSNBC. Trump supporters think differently. They are seething about the symbolism of their leader being kicked off social media and the perceived arrogance of such elites.

Opinion polls are another indicator of this epistemological gap. A YouGov survey suggested that only a quarter of Republicans viewed the attack as a threat to democracy — and almost half approved the storming of

Congress. A poll last month by Quinnipiac University showed three-quarters of Republicans thought there was widespread voter fraud during the November election (while 97 per cent of Democrats did not believe this).

This might shock some, given that US journalists and courts have repeatedly found no evidence of electoral fraud. But another survey, from the PR company Edelman, shows why this pushback is not working. It reveals that only 18 per cent of Trump voters trust the media and just 30 per cent the government, versus 57 per cent and 45 per cent of Biden voters. Strikingly, the level of trust expressed in institutions by the “mass population” is far lower than that shown by the “informed public”.

Indeed, the Edelman survey suggests that many Americans today only have faith in people and institutions that are familiar to them — their neighbourhood, company or social group. Tribalism is rife.

The knee-jerk reaction of most Democrats is to blame Trump. But a potentially more constructive view can be found in a book by the Harvard evolutionary biologist and anthropologist Joseph Henrich. In The Weirdest People in the World, he outlines the mentality of Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic (“Weird”) people, versus non-Weird groups. For Henrich, Weird modes of thought are based around individualism, moral consistency and

sequential logic. Western elites tend to assume it is the only valid mode of thought. But, Henrich notes, most societies throughout history have used different mental approaches: they see morality as context-based, presume identity is set by family and favour “holistic reasoning” not “analytical reasoning”. “Analytic thinkers see in straight lines,” Henrich writes. “Holistic thinkers focus not on the parts but the whole.”

This last point is hard to appreciate if you have been educated in a system predicated on Weird logic. But the key point about non-Weird thinking is gut reactions to patterns in an ecosystem matter more than reasoning, and performative symbols more than words. While America is mostly Weird, there has always been non-Weird thinking. What Trump has done is invoke it on an epic scale. For many educated elites, however, it is so hard to comprehend that they have either ignored it or scorned it.

Here lies the epistemological split and futility of elites invoking “reason” to persuade Trump voters to rethink their convictions. Words will not heal America. Neither will the law, nor logical analysis of the constitution. What is required is empathy and a new approach that might tap into Weird and non-Weird thought. You can only counter Trump’s legacy if you grasp why he was so potent to start with.

[email protected]

America’s political crisis runs deeperthan ideology

Notebookby Gillian Tett

WikiLeaks avalanche was a godsend for dictators There is “no evidence anyone was harmed” by the hundreds of thousands of secret documents indiscriminately published by WikiLeaks, says Jennifer Robinson, lawyer of the whistleblowing website’s founder Julian Assange.

Ms Robinson is referring to alleged victims among US security personnel (“‘Assange had information. That made him dangerous’”, Lunch with the FT, Life & Arts, FT Weekend, January 9). But the WikiLeaks cables had avid readers well beyond America’s enemies in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In one example in Zimbabwe in 2010, then president Robert Mugabe ordered his attorney-general to set up a commission in order to sift through 3,000 WikiLeaks cables sent over the previous decade from the US embassy in Harare to the state department. The embattled old ruler recognised a godsend in the avalanche of unfiltered wires. His henchmen jumped on minutes of meetings in which American diplomats and Morgan Tsvangirai, Zimbabwe’s opposition leader, had discussed how Mugabe’s authoritarian regime might be weakened. Tsvangirai recommended for example that sanctions on Mugabe’s entourage be upheld.

In one cable, the idea was floated to get Mugabe to resign in exchange for an

John Gapper’s recent experience driving a car with “pilot assist” succinctly illustrated the current confusion over which situations semi-automated systems can handle and which they cannot (Opinion, FT Weekend, January 9).

It is not clear what effect these new technologies are having on road death and injury numbers because crash investigations almost never take into account if such systems were

functional at the time of a collision. However, forensic investigations of

a handful of such crashes by the US National Transportation Safety Board and the Dutch Safety Board have raised fundamental concerns about driver overreliance, distraction and misunderstanding of the systems’ capabilities and limitations.

It is therefore very worrying that some automotive manufacturers are pressuring EU regulators to allow such

systems to be operated hands-off, even though drivers would still need to pay constant attention and be ready to take over at any moment. Such a move would only increase the potential for driver confusion between assisted and automated driving, and thereby their understanding of what is expected of them when sitting in the driving seat.

The EU should prohibit hands-off assistance systems, and only allow drivers to take their hands off the

steering wheel in vehicles with truly automated driving systems, where constant supervision by the driver is no longer necessary.

The EU therefore needs an agency with the resources to investigate crashes and gather crash data on existing systems before even more unproven technologies are approved.Frank MützeEuropean Transport Safety CouncilBrussels, Belgium

Brussels must get behind the wheel in the self-driving debate

JANUARY 16 2021 Section:Features Time: 15/1/2021 - 18:38 User: alistair.hayes Page Name: LEADER USA, Part,Page,Edition: USA, 6, 1


3 Workplace surveillance may hurt us more than it helpsMany employers are deciding ‘who’s a star and who’s slacking’, writes Sarah O’Connor

Top reads at FT.com/opinion

3 Events in America sound a warning for British democracyA cavalier approach to truth has fomented a similar rot, writes Robert Shrimsley

sity, Uganda’s oldest, with a degree in music, dance and drama.

From an early age, he played music, later changing his name to Bobi after Bob Marley, the Jamaican reggae singer. Wine, he says, was because he was improving with age. Supplementing his income with jobs from bricklaying to collecting edible grasshoppers, by the age of 20 he had scored his first hit with a dance track.

In 2000, he met Barbie Itungo, a young woman from a better-off family then finishing boarding school. “I was an errant young man, but when I met my wife, hey, it was so much transfor-mation,” he says. The couple went on to have four children, two boys and two girls, now aged five to 15.

His songs became more political, excoriating everything from bad sanita-tion to bad government. Earlier efforts had included anti-homosexual jibes for which he later apologised, calling them the product of youthful ignorance. Mr Museveni, a virulent homophobe, has

W hatever you do, Robert Kyagulanyi’s mother told him when he was a young boy growing up in a rough Kampala

neighbourhood, stay away from politics. Mr Kyagulanyi, a Ugandan pop idol bet-ter known as Bobi Wine, has roundly ignored that advice. This week he con-tested presidential elections, voting for which took place on Thursday.

At 38, Mr Wine is the main challenger to President Yoweri Museveni, 76, who has used every organ of state and trick in the book to prolong his 35 years in power. During the campaign, Mr Wine has been shot at, beaten and thrown in jail more times than he can recall. Scores of his supporters were killed in November, and his campaign events have been stormed by police. Even his trademark red beret has been outlawed. In the run-up to polling day, much of the internet was disabled and his campaign team arrested.

With almost half of the votes counted yesterday, the official tally showed Mr Museveni winning comfortably, with 63 per cent of the vote. But Mr Wine, on 29 per cent, called those results a “joke” and declared himself president-elect.

“I have been targeted with bullets and tear-gas canisters, and wounded by the police and soldiers on a daily basis,” Mr Wine told the Financial Times last week. He has taken up boxing the better to sustain regular beatings. Two years ago, police pummelled him unconscious with an iron bar and, he says, used pliers on his testicles.

In his black Cadillac Escalade with a “Ghetto” vanity plate, Mr Wine can appear all hip-hop bling. In person, he is softly spoken, articulate and deadly ear-nest about toppling one of Africa’s long-est-reigning autocrats.

Whatever the final result, his impact goes well beyond Uganda, a country of 44m people where the median age is just 16. In much of Africa, he represents a new force in politics — a disenfran-chised urban youth, ambitious and con-nected, but frustrated by a lack of job opportunities and by the governance of mostly elderly leaders. “Bobi strikes me as an individual with remarkable cour-age and tenacity of conviction,” says Wole Soyinka, a Nigerian Nobel laure-ate. “The age of gerontocracy should be formally declared over.”

Mr Wine was born in 1982, four years before Mr Museveni seized power after fighting a bush war against dictator Mil-ton Obote. His grandfather died in that conflict and his father, a staunch Musev-eni supporter, fled to Tanzania. Mr Wine’s mother, a former midwife, was left alone to bring up nine children in Kamwokya, a Kampala slum, where she worked as a market trader. It was quite a comedown. Mr Wine’s great-grandfa-ther had been a Saaza chief and his grandfather “a gentleman”.

“My mother always reminded me that we are in the ghetto because of politics,” he says. She encouraged hard work, instilling in him a belief in what he calls his “uptown character”. She scrimped to send him to a fee-paying school and he later graduated from Makerere Univer-

The presidential candidate was beaten and jailed numerous times during his campaign, write David Pilling and Andres Schipani

seized on that to brand him an agent of foreign homosexuals. In 2017, Mr Wine ran for parliament — protest songs could achieve only so much. Styling himself the “ghetto president”, he won by a landslide. In 2019, he declared his intention to run for president.

Khatondi Soita, a 26-year-old journal-

ist, says she isn’t exactly a supporter. “But my God, he’s such a force.”

In candid moments, Mr Wine admits he is unqualified to be president. His political platform is long on idealism and short on policies. “I never believed that I’m the person cut out for this,” he says. In Kampala, especially in poorer areas, he is greeted with raised fists and

‘My mother always reminded me that we

are in the ghetto because of politics’

rebelliousness and independence from authority. “The wearers gave them their identity, which was beyond the com-pany’s control,” says Cath Davies, a lec-turer in visual culture at Cardiff School of Art & Design.

Dr Martens was one of the first brands to be customised by users — from skin-heads who bought cherry red leather boots and smeared black polish into creases, to the punks who graffitied them. Women bought DMs and the trend of painting the boots in floral pat-terns soon emerged.

The boots were a blank slate, which their owners could transform. Dick Hebdige, now a professor at the Univer-sity of California, called the suits, collars and ties worn by mods “a symbolic ensemble, which served to erase or sub-vert their original straight meanings” in his influential 1979 book Subculture: The Meaning of Style.

It helped that DMs were cheap. Buy-ing a new pair was not like saving up for the latest Supreme flannel shirt design and lining up outside one of its stores; the boots were lifted down from the shelves of local shoe shops in cardboard boxes. Even now, most of its range sells for between £110 and £190 — more than in the past but not in the luxury combat boot stratosphere.

The formula still seems to work. Dr Martens sold 11m pairs in 60 countries in its financial year to last March, and revenues and profits have risen sharply in recent years (they have even been resilient in the pandemic). Potential

investors in its IPO were this week promised that the “canvas for rebellious self-expression across generations” has plenty of room to grow.

Dr Martens was ahead of its time — many fashion brands crave the ethos that it unintentionally invented. Per-mira acquired Golden Goose, an Italian company that makes deliberately scruffy-looking trainers, for just under €1.3bn last year: a pair of Golden Goose Super-Star leather sneakers with “For Dreamers Use Only” handwritten on the side of the sole sells for £370.

But Dr Martens has lost its innocence. Half of its charm in the 1970s was that it was not really in charge: it sold work shoes, but I was buying something else. Today the company is much more knowing about the brand, which leaves less room for customers to find their own meaning in its boots.

“We just stay true to who we are, and respect the past,” says Darren Campbell, Dr Martens’ chief marketing officer. If only it were that simple. Its 1461 shoes look the same and their spirit enduresin my mind, but selling self-expression is a fragile business.

[email protected]

Today there is less roomfor customers to find

their own meaning in the air-cushioned boots

D onald Trump has become the first American presi-dent to be impeached twice. He now faces a Senate trial on charges of inciting

insurrection. But impeachment is a clumsy

weapon. It confuses the juridical with the political. It is also ill-suited to the problem posed by a divisive and danger-ous president who is anyway on his way out of the door. Tying up the first days of Joe Biden’s presidency with this process would be a mistake.

Like so much in the US constitution, impeachment’s roots lie in medieval England. Parliament used it in the 17th century when there seemed no other way to bring someone holding office under the Crown to book.

Britain last used impeachment in 1806, although Adam Price, a Plaid Cymru MP, sought to revive it in 2004. His plan to impeach then prime minister Tony Blair, over allegations of misleading parliament on the Iraq war, was supported by a small number of backbenchers — including Boris Johnson, the current prime minister. But the resolution was never debated in the Commons.

Impeachment is rarely used in parliamentary systems for an obvious reason. It derives from a period before the development of modern political parties, when MPs were regarded as a collection of disparate individuals brought together to adjudicate on the public good, including matters of justice.

Today in the UK and other parliamen-tary systems, juridical issues are kept separate from partisan politics. The UK prime minister is accountable politically to voters and to the House of Commons, which can force him out with a vote of no confidence. Juridically, he is

accountable like all citizens to the law of the land, and can be prosecuted for misconduct in public office.

In September 2019, Lord Macdonald, a former director of public prosecu-tions, declared that Mr Johnson could face prison were he to defy parliamen-tary legislation, which did not in the end pass, requiring him to delay Brexit. That stand-off was avoided.

In presidential systems, where the head of government is elected separately from the legislature, impeachment is more frequent, partic-ularly in Latin America. In Brazil, Presi-dent Dilma Rousseff was impeached in 2016 on grounds of budgetary misman-agement. She claimed that it was a polit-ical coup, a substitute for the vote of no confidence that is not possible in separa-tion of power systems. Heated recrimi-nations persisted for years.

If history is any guide, the current attempt to hold Mr Trump accountable for the violent mob that stormed theUS Capitol last week would become mired in the same claims.

Senate did not vote to convict. In 2020, one Republican senator, Mitt Romney voted to convict, and Republican Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell openly admitted, “I’m not an impartial juror. This is a political process”.

By contrast, in 1974, when it became clear that sufficient Republican senators were likely to vote to convict Richard Nixon, he pre-empted the process by resigning.

This week, 10 Republicans broke ranks and voted for impeachment and Mr McConnell has left open the possibil-ity of voting for conviction.

But that does not necessarily mean a Senate trial is the right course of action. The constitution is silent on whether a sitting president can be indicted in the courts for a criminal offence. The gen-eral consensus is that he cannot as that would violate the constitutional separa-tion of powers: the courts are the third branch of government.

There is no doubt a former president can be indicted for crimes committed while in office. Ford, who replaced

VernonBogdanor

The US constitution allows impeach-ment for “misdemeanours” as well as “high crimes”, but does not say what that means.

A partisan Congress is hardly in a position to supply a neutral definition. In 1970, Gerald Ford, then the Republi-can leader in the House, suggested it was “whatever a majority of the House of

Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history”.

In the absence of agreed rules of evi-dence and clear standards of proof, there is real danger Mr Trump’s fate would be decided on a partisan basis. In the three prior presidential trials — Andrew Johnson in 1868, Bill Clintonin 1999 and Mr Trump last year — the

Impeachment is ill-suited to the problem posed

by a divisive anddangerous leader

Nixon as president in 1974, pardoned his predecessor to avoid such criminal prosecution. Ford was excoriated for this decision, but it was the right one as it enabled a much needed process of healing to begin.

America desperately needs a similar process of healing today. Mr Biden has pledged to bring the nation together. Allowing him and Congress to concen-trate on reviving the flagging economy and addressing the pandemic would help make that promise real.

Were Mr Trump to be convicted by the Senate, many of the 70m Americans who voted for him would be convinced the outcome was a political vendetta. It would make him appear a martyr.

The alleged wrongdoing should instead be dealt with by the courts, not politicians. Perhaps, however, it would be better to pardon him, allowing him to sink into disgraceful oblivion.

The writer, a professor of government at King’s College, London, is author of ‘Britain and Europe in a Troubled World’

Opinion

A Senate trial is not the right answer to Trump

chants of “people power”. Supporters hoist him on their shoulders and occa-sionally prostrate at his feet. He worries they expect too much. In the country-side, where Mr Museveni’s political machinery is most entrenched, Mr Wine’s popularity is harder to gauge. He points to large rallies — when he has managed to evade the police — and to polls that he says shows strong support.

Mr Wine’s intention was to win so overwhelmingly that Mr Museveni had no option but to go. Political analysts judged that unlikely, particularly given the president’s control over the electoral process. If Mr Museveni declares vic-tory, mass protests could follow, though Mr Wine says he eschews violence.

Win or lose, he will stay in Uganda, he says. “If I die, I want to die here.” Asked last week how he was doing, he replied: “I’m alive.” In an election year in Uganda, that is no small achievement.

[email protected]@ft.com

Person in the News | Bobi Wine

A tenacious challenger set on power in Uganda

F orty-four years later, I can still remember unboxing my first pair of Dr Martens — the 1461 black shoes with air-cush-ioned soles. Worn with the

narrow-lapelled postal worker’s suit that I acquired in a vintage clothes shop, those DMs made my teenage self feel quite the business.

It was the age of punk and two-tone, and bands such as The Clash, The Who and The Specials wore lace-up boots with yellow stitching from Dr Martens, a German orthopaedic brand accidentally turned into British street style by a Northamptonshire family firm of shoe-makers. “Wear your braces round your seat/Dr Martens on your feet,” wrote Pete Townshend of The Who.

My DMs came to mind this week when Dr Martens, which has been owned by Permira, the private equity group, since 2014, announced that it will float on the London Stock Exchange. It still sells vintage 1461s, made in England in similar leather, although most of its shoes are made in Asia. They cost £159 — quite a mark-up from 1977 prices.

Fashion is an unforgiving industry, with new collections every season and constant drops of new streetwear. Few footwear brands have lasted so long and grown so much, while changing so little, as Dr Martens. What is its secret?

One strength is that Dr Martens or Docs or DMs — the brand has several venerable nicknames — are instantly recognisable without having to doanything to attract attention. Nike and Adidas put logos on the side of sneakers to identify the brands, but Dr Martens are inimitable.

The eight lace-holes on the 1460 boot and side ridges on the air-cushioned soles — created in 1945 by Dr KlausMaertens, a Bavarian soldier, to easehis injured foot — are as distinctive as Adidas stripes or the in-your-face logo of Supreme, the luxury streetwear com-pany. But they are there for a purpose, not as a fashion tag.

Dr Martens’ second strength is being ordinary. The cushioned soles were licensed in the UK in 1959 by the shoe-makers R Griggs, which created first the 1460 boot and then the 1461 shoe as cheap, comfortable workwear — they sold for £2 a pair in the early sixties, equivalent to about £42 now.

Griggs was not a fashion company and had no great marketing budget or fol-lowing of social media influencers. Its AirWair shoes were meant to be simple and functional and were worn by police and postal workers. If nothing had changed, my 1977 ensemble would have made me look like a trainee postman.

What changed was that a succession of youth tribes, from mods to skinheads to punks, adopted Docs as symbols of

Dr Martens have lost their rebellious innocence

JANUARY 16 2021 Section:Features Time: 15/1/2021 - 18:10 User: alistair.hayes Page Name: COMMENT USA, Part,Page,Edition: USA, 7, 1


Laura Noonan — New York

JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Wells Fargo have released more than $5bn of pandemic-era loan-loss reserves in a sign of their optimism for the economic outlook.

The move helped three of the biggest US banks end the year on a high and reflects confidence that clients will make good on debts despite fallout from the virus crisis.

“It’s not like we’re bragging, we’re not,” said Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan, which reported a 42 per cent rise in fourth-quarter earnings after releasing almost $3bn it reserved for loan losses at the height of the crisis.

The three banks took more than $31bn in loan-loss charges in the first nine months of last year amid fears that the pandemic and related shutdowns would prompt mass defaults among borrowers. New accounting standards also inflated loan-loss charges.

Mr Dimon, seen as the most conserva-tive risk manager on Wall Street, said the decision was driven in part by “posi-tive vaccine and stimulus develop-ments. There’s no whipsaw . . . that’s

just the economy. The fourth quarter was better [than expected], that’s good news. You’re going to have a mixed first quarter, second quarter, there’s going to be unemployment, you’re going to see some problems . . . hopefully it will get better after that.”

JPMorgan still had more than$30bn in its war chest to cover potential loan losses, which, Mr Dimon said, reflected “significant near-term eco-nomic uncertainty”.

Citigroup released $1.5bn from its reserves in the fourth quarter but posted a 7 per cent fall in net profits year on year, while Wells released $757m from its reserves, helping the bank to a4 per cent increase in net income.

“Even since we put pencils down . . . to close out the quarter, we see further improvement on GDP and unemployment outlook,” said Mark Mason, Citi’s chief financial officer. Increased certainty on vaccines and stimulus meant there was a “more posi-tive outlook in 2021”.

The bumper reserve release and a strong performance from its investment bank left JPMorgan with net income of $12.1bn for the quarter, ahead of analyst

expectations of about $9bn. Revenue of $29.2bn was up 3 per cent year on year and better than the $28.6bn forecast.

“This was a strong quarter but the outlook is mitigated by . . . a pull for-ward of the reserve release,” said Mike Mayo, analyst at Wells Fargo.

All three banks reported a drop in net interest income from the previous year, as low interest rates compressed the gap between what banks are paid for lend-

Peggy Hollinger — London

SoftBank has invested a further $350m into OneWeb, the satellite internet company it forced into bankruptcy last year after refusing to take part in an urgent funding round.

The Japanese technology investor will also secure a seat on the board of the company, rescued from a Chapter 11 bankruptcy by a $1bn investmentfrom the UK government and Indiantelecoms tycoon Sunil Bharti Mittal.

The investment will give SoftBank roughly 30 per cent of OneWeb, and dilute the 42.2 per cent stakes held respectively by the UK and Mr Mittal to about the same level.

SoftBank already held a stake of about 9 per cent after converting $90m of debt into equity as part of the rescue. The UK will retain its golden share, which allows it to control access to the system.

Alongside SoftBank, billionaire Char-lie Ergen’s Hughes Network Systems, an original investor in OneWeb and a sub-sidiary of EchoStar, is also investing a further $50m as indicated last year when it took its initial $50m stake.

“The UK government, SoftBank and Bharti [Mr Mittal] will have very similar percentages in a company that is worth considerably more,” OneWeb said, pointing to the increase in equity from $1bn to $1.4bn as a result of the buyout and the latest financing. “They havecreated value for the UK taxpayer.”

OneWeb is still in need of a further $1bn — to be raised either from new investors or through debt, according to Mr Mittal — to complete a constellation of 648 low Earth orbit satellites that will deliver global broadband services to the most remote areas of the planet.

OneWeb is facing competition from Elon Musk’s Starlink internet constella-tion, which has applied for operating licences in Europe, including the UK. Mr Musk has regulators’ permission to launch more than 40,000 satellites into low Earth orbit.

Starlink already has more than 600 satellites in orbit against OneWeb’s 110.

OneWeb, a pioneer in satellite inter-net, has fallen behind during its year of bankruptcy, but insiders are confident it can deliver on its business model despite Mr Musk’s vast resources.

Technology

SoftBank stake in OneWeb nears 30% after fresh injection

ing and the cost of their funding. Citi also disappointed with higher than expected costs.

Shares in JPMorgan were down about 2.5 per cent in early trading, Wells Fargo was down 7.5 per cent and Citigroup was down 4.5 per cent.

JPMorgan’s trading revenue grew 20 per cent year on year to $5.9bn, while investment bank revenue was up 53 per cent to $971m amid a dealmaking and fundraising boom. Citi enjoyed spoils of a trading and investment banking boom, with equities revenues up almost 60 per cent versus a year earlier and fixed income revenues up 7 per cent.

The better than expected results clear the way for the banks to spend more on shares repurchases, since the US Fed-eral Reserve has capped payouts based on recent quarterly earnings. JPMor-gan’s board authorised a $30bn buyback programme after the Fed in December gave it approval to do so. The bank said it would spend up to $4.5bn on buy-backs in the first quarter, the maximum allowed under the Fed’s guidance.

Wells Fargo said it could do $600m in share buy backs in the first quarter.See Lex

US lenders release billions in pandemic loan-loss reserves3 Bullish outlook on economy signalled 3 JPMorgan quarterly earnings up 42%

Leila Abboud — Paris

France has reiterated its opposition to the €16.2bn takeover of supermarket group Carrefour by Canada’s Alimenta-tion Couche-Tard, dealing a major set-back to the groups’ hopes that they could overcome government concerns over food security and jobs.

“My answer is extremely clear: we are not in favour of the deal,” said Bruno Le Maire, French finance minister, in an interview with BFM TV yesterday. “The no is polite but it’s a clear and final no.”

The companies had continued negoti-ations on a deal, according to people familiar with the matter, even though the government had already signalled its concerns on Wednesday about how the tie-up would threaten France’s “food sovereignty”.

They were discussing pledges on jobs, suppliers, governance and manage-ment, in addition to the €20 per share price of the initial offer. Couche-Tard was prepared to commit €3bn worth of investment in Carrefour over five years, as well as no job cuts for two years, said one person. It would also maintain a market listing in Paris, and keep Carre-four’s headquarters in France.

Alain Bouchard, Couche-Tard’s co-founder and chairman, had flown to Paris on Thursday in an effort to secure a meeting with Mr Le Maire to present him with the proposal, the people said.

But Mr Le Maire’s latest intervention seemed aimed at scuppering the deal before it got to his desk.

Under French law, the government can review takeovers of domestic com-panies by foreign buyers in sectors it deems strategic, such as energy, water and telecoms. Paris has gradually expanded the list of areas covered by the regulation and last year added “food security”.

“We have the legal tool available to us [to block the deal], even if I would pre-

fer not to have to use it,” Mr Le Maire told BFM TV. “What’s at stake is the food security of our country . . . especially after the [Covid-19] health crisis has taught us how no price can be put on it.”

Carrefour declined to comment, and Couche-Tard could not immediately be reached to comment. Carrefour’s shares were down about 4 per cent in early trading.

The proposed tie-up is aimed at com-bining two companies with very differ-ent formats and geographical footprints into a retailing giant worth more than $50bn.

France ‘no’ to Canadian group’s bid for Carrefour

Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan, says the move was driven in part by favourable vaccine and stimulus developments — Misha Friedman/Bloomberg

Finance minister Bruno Le Maire said the tie-up would put the country’s ‘food security’ at stake

Inspect our gadgets Health and wellness technology to the fore at CES 2021 — ANALYSIS

Fragile edifice Corporate debt tower wobbles as Fed starts to remove blocks — ON WALL STREET

Judith Evans — London

When Ruari Fairbairns co-founded One Year No Beer, a drinking moderation start-up, five years ago the range of alco-hol-free alternatives was meagre. Now, he says, it is “totally transformed”.

Low and no-alcohol drinks were gain-ing ground before the pandemic and, despite the stresses of a turbulent year, drinkers have kept buying. Resilient sales have spurred big-name spirits and aperitif brands, such as Gordon’s and Martini, to launch sober alternatives.

These have added to a raft of low and no-alcohol beers created over the past five years, as start-ups and multination-als invest in a category of “grown up” alcoholic alternatives that they believe has staying power.

“The next generation of drinkers is very interested in this area. It’ll be a very important part of our industry in the future,” said Marine Rozenfeld,

innovation and development lead for western Europe at Bacardi. The pri-vately owned group makes Dewar’s whisky, Grey Goose vodka and Martini.

Ms Rozenfeld was hired two years ago to focus on low and no-alcohol products in a significant departure for a company whose flagship drink is 40 per cent ABV.

Drinks analytics group IWSR esti-mates global alcohol sales fell 9.4 per cent in 2020 to 24.8bn nine-litre cases, as bar and restaurant closures cut social drinking. Yet, sales of low and no-alco-hol alternatives, excluding soft drinks, grew slightly by 0.95 per cent to 292.1m cases, according to IWSR data covering about 75 per cent of consumption.

That still leaves the low and no-alcohol market at less than 2 per cent of that for intoxicating drinks, raising the question of whether this can become more than just a niche.

Market researchers say the trend has benefited from a focus on “wellness”, which has also aided sales of vitamins, herbal teas and “healthy” snacks.

Ben Branson, founder of upmarket gin alternative Seedlip, said social media plays a role: “People want to curate how they appear to the outside

world, and it’s cooler to be seen drinking green juice after the gym versus falling out of a nightclub at 4am.”

Brewers and distillers have also com-mitted more resources. “Historically no one had really cracked the code on how to make beer that tasted half decent, but now they are really good. Heineken 0.0 tastes like a beer, looks and smells like a beer,” said Edward Mundy, analyst at Jefferies.

Emboldened by technologies to cre-ate better non-alcoholic drinks, compa-nies created versions of their “mother

brands” such as Heineken and Carlsberg, said Trevor Stirling, analyst at Bernstein.

In the UK, low and no-alcohol wines, including sparkling varieties such asthe Nosecco brand, also have a well-established market, with drinkers spending more than £100m on low and no-alcohol wines in the year to Novem-ber 2020, according to Kantar.

However, spirits and aperitifs have been the focus in recent high-profile launches. A milestone came in 2019 with the acquisition of a majority stake

in Seedlip by the world’s largest distiller, Diageo. Seedlip’s key audience is “mod-erators”, who drink alcohol but also want other options, said Mr Branson.

Seedlip now has dozens of peers, including Gordon’s 0.0 by Diageo and South African brand Ceder’s, in which France’s Pernod Ricard bought a major-ity stake this month.

Analysts differentiate makers that distil ingredients to bring out flavours then subtract the alcohol, such as Seed-lip, from those involving no alcohol, such as CeroCero by supermarket Lidl.

The aromatic botanicals in gin make it an obvious candidate for alternatives. Gordon’s 0.0 has a “very junipery, cit-rusy flavour. It does enhance a G&T. But that’s not necessarily replicable in other spirits categories,” said Mr Mundy.

Yet, Bacardi is preparing to launch two spirit alternatives for cocktail mak-ing under its new brand Palette — a “white” drink with nutmeg and juniper called Roots and a “dark” option with vanilla and oakwood named Bold.

Ms Rozenfeld said low and no-alcohol drinks were an “incremental opportu-nity”, adding to rather than cannibalis-ing from brands’ existing sales.

It is a potentially profitable direction, since alcohol-free drinks do not incur excise duty — a tax that in the UK amounts to £28.74 per litre of pure alco-hol. For example, incurring an £11.50 fee for a litre of 40 per cent ABV vodka.

Retail prices for recent alcohol-free launches have been set at or just below alcoholic equivalents despite the tax dif-ference. But a focus on expensive prod-ucts may prove misguided, said Spiros Malandrakis, head of research for alco-holic drinks at Euromonitor. “I have concerns about this infinite bullishness narrative in which we can have 100 new brands and all can be luxury and all can grow,” he added.

“The holy grail,” Bernstein’s Mr Stir-ling said, “is if non-alcoholic drinks can be perceived as adult soft drinks rather than distressed purchases.”

Mr Malandrakis is sceptical that liber-ated consumers will raise an alcohol-free glass when socialising resumes, but Mr Fairbairns of One Year No Beer feels differently. He plans to start selling alco-hol-free drinks through his app, which has more than 80,000 users. “This is a paradigm shift and we are at the fore-front,” he said.

Food & beverage. Low-alcohol ranges

‘Adult soft drink’ makers crack code for growth in lockdownTempting wine, beer and

spirit alternatives help niche

segment defy sales gloom

Marine Rozenfeld of Bacardi says low-alcohol lines are gaining in importance

US banks’ loan-loss reserves

* Wells said its reserves release was almost entirelydue to the sale of its student loan portfolioSource: Company reports

JPMorganChase

Citigroup WellsFargo*

JANUARY 16 2021 Section:Companies Time: 15/1/2021 - 18:53 User: jeremy.wright Page Name: CONEWS1, Part,Page,Edition: USA, 8, 1

16 January/17 January 2021 ★ † FTWeekend 9

UniCredit job hunt3 UniCredit has approached some of Europe’s top available bankers including Andrea Orcel, the former head of UBS’s investment bank, Tidjane Thiam, the former Credit Suisse chief executive, and Martin Blessing, former Commerzbank chief execu-tive, as it seeks to appoint a new chief following the resignation of Jean Pierre Mustier over the Italian lender’s future direction.

3 BMW, Daimler and Volkswagen tripled their sales of electrified vehicles to almost 600,000 last year, the compa-nies said, outpacing Tesla in Europe as they raced to meet new CO2 reduction targets.

3 Hyundai Motor shares surged after the carmaker con-firmed early-stage talks with Apple about building an electric vehicle in what could mark the US tech group’s eagerly awaited move into the industry.

3 EU regulators approved London Stock Exchange Group’s $27bn purchase of data and trading group Refinitiv, removing the last big obstacle to a deal that will create a new powerhouse in financial markets.

3 Royal Dutch Shell resumed shipping gas cargoes from its huge Prelude facility off Australia’s west coast, the largest floating structure ever built, follow-ing a year-long technical disruption that has hit industry appetite for floating LNG technology.

Hyundai Motor shares surged after the carmaker confirmed early-stage talks with Apple about building an electric vehicle

3 Renaissance Technologies founder Jim Simons named the $60bn hedge fund’s chief executive Peter Brown as sole chairman, a position many expected to go to his son Nathaniel. Father and son will stand down as co-chairs but remain on the board.

3 The social network Parler sued Amazon, arguing that the ecommerce group’s decision to cut off web hosting services to the platform after the assault on the US Capitol by a mob supporting Donald Trump was illegal and violated antitrust laws.

3 Dr Martens, the classic British boot brand majority owned by private equity group Permira, plans to float on the London Stock Exchange in what would be one of the first big initial public offerings of 2021.

3 David Barclay, the British billionaire who built a business empire with his identical twin brother that included ownership of The Daily Telegraph newspa-per, died after a short illness aged 86.

3 Norwegian Air Shuttle abandoned its attempt to crack the long-haul market as the indebted low-cost carrier laid out plans to exit bankruptcy protection and focus on short-haul flights in Europe. About 2,000 employees will lose their jobs — 1,100 at Lon-don’s Gatwick.

3 Former Credit Suisse chief executive Tidjane Thiam is raising a $250m special purpose acquisition vehicle with the help of JPMorgan to list in New York and invest in financial services businesses in the developed and developing world.

3 British Airways faces the largest group claim over a data breach in UK legal history following a 2018 inci-dent that exposed details of more than 400,000 of its customers. More than 16,000 customers have joined the case ahead of a March deadline.

BEST OF

BUSINESS

Under the hood Flight to UK suburbs and exurbs knocks inner-city rentsDemand from foreign workers, tourists and students dries up while homeworking enhances appeal of outskirts and beyond

Rents are falling fast in major urban areas across the UK. The virus has caused demand for properties from overseas workers, students, tourists and business travellers to plummet.

The falls are pronounced in London, the city most exposed to the demand shock. But rents in Manchester, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Leeds and Reading have also tumbled, and are unlikely to rebound quickly, according to data from property portal Zoopla.

In the 12 months to October, average rents in London fell 6.9 per cent, in Birmingham 3.2 per cent, in Reading 2.2 per cent and in Edinburgh 1.7 per cent. All fell below the surrounding region.

Rents had continued to grow in Leeds and Manchester through much of the pandemic, but both dipped into negative territory in the year to October.

That is a reversal: in the year to March rents in Leeds increased by more than 4 per cent, in Edinburgh 2.5 per cent.

The pandemic has shifted demographics, working patterns and the financial status of many residents. With foreign travel banned or limited, foreign students, workers and tourists have been unable to come to the UK.

Homeworking has frayed bonds to the office and allowed renters to relocate. Rather than living in expensive city centres, to save on travel costs many have moved to the fringes of cities or beyond. George Hammond; additional reporting by Patrick Mathurinand Chris Campbell Sources: Zoopla; ONS

Rental growth in many big urbanareas fell short of regional averageslast yearYear-on-year change in residential rental prices,three-month rolling average (%)

ReadingSouth East

LondonUK (ex London)

Manchester

North West

Edinburgh

Scotland

Birmingham

West Midlands

−5

0

5

−5

0

5

10

10

2015 2020

2015 2020

2015 2020

2015 2020

2015 2020

First lockdownbegins end of Mar

−5

0

5

−5

0

5

10

10

−5

0

5

10

Oct2019

Jan2020

Apr Jul Oct Oct2019

Jan2020

Apr Jul Oct−15

−6

−3

−12

−9

0

6

3

Decline of inner London rental prices in second half

Inner London boroughs Outer London boroughs

CITY OF LONDON

ISLINGTON

KEN & CHELSEA

First lockdownbegins end of Mar

ISLINGTON(-9.4%)WESTMINSTER

(-8.9%)

KEN &CHELSEA(-10.2%)

HAVERING(3.8%)

BEXLEY(3.0%)

Change in residential rental prices by London borough, year on year (%)

BEXLEY

HAVERING

−15

−6

−3

−12

−9

0

6

3

6

3

0

-3

-6

-9

-12

-15

Change in rentalprices in Londonin October 2020,year on year (%)

increase

decrease

600,000Sales of BMW, Daimler and VW electric vehicles in 2020

$27bnLSE’s purchaseof Refinitiv,which has won EU approval

Bill Hornbuckle was born in Japan and grew up in Connecticut, but he has ended up a Las Vegas man through and through.

The boss of MGM Resorts moved there at 23 in 1981 to study for a degree in hotel administration, and has never left. After stints working for Steve Wynn and at Caesars Palace, his MGM career began in 1998. When Jim Murren announced his departure in February last year, Mr Hornbuckle moved into the top job, at a time of maximum difficulty.

Just as he took over as acting chief, the pandemic hit. MGM shut its casinos and furloughed most of its 68,000 staff. It has cut its workforce by about a quarter and, though all of its resorts are open, it is restricted by occupancy limits of 25 per cent for casinos in Nevada state, the home of most of its 29 properties.

As well as the virus crisis, Mr Hornbuckle, who took the top job permanently in July, must adapt the group to long-term structural changes. MGM’s pursuit of the UK’s Entain, its partner in a US online sports betting venture, is part of that.

Casino customers are an ageing demographic, while the challenge to the traditional resort model from online gambling has been greatly amplified by the pandemic. Added to this, casino concessions in the group’s other hub, Macau, are due to expire in 2022, with no indication from the Chinese or Macanese governments about whether they will be renewed.

MGM has two strategies that it hopes will work in mitigation: to

increase its share of the booming US online gambling and sport betting market, and to win a licence to build one of the first big casinos in Japan.

“That is a company that is undergoing some change,” said David Katz, an analyst at Jefferies, who has followed MGM since 2001. “The Las Vegas strip will find some new normal . . . [but] the advent of digital gaming has become so profoundly important.”

With the Japanese venture — a project to win one of three licences to operate a mega casino in a country where most forms of gambling are banned — stalled by the pandemic, MGM is focusing its efforts on the US.

MGM launched its bid to buy Entain, with which it runs BetMGM, towards the end of 2020. The £8bn all-stock proposal was greeted frostily by Entain. But an unexpected change of chief executive at Entain may alter the dynamic, while Mr Hornbuckle has until February 1 to make a firm offer.

MGM’s largest shareholder, Barry Diller’s IAC investment group, has said it will back the bid, despite Mr Diller admitting he was “sceptical” about its success.

“Now that [Mr Hornbuckle] is chief executive, he’s responsible for driving the share price,” said Adam Greenblatt, chief executive of BetMGM. “Look what perceived success in sports betting has done for Penn.”

Casino operator Penn National bought a controlling stake in sports media group Barstool Sports last January. Since then, its share price has tripled to around $104, more than three times MGM’s current value.

On the evidence of one gambling executive who has worked with both Mr Hornbuckle and his predecessor, MGM’s CEO should be a match for a difficult job. The two men were “chalk and cheese” the executive said. “Murren was very emotional and towards the end of his time got very

defensive, whereas Bill is someone who is much more measured.”

Another long-serving Vegas executive compared Mr Hornbuckle with one of the big industry names he used to work for: Steve Wynn. He said Mr Hornbuckle’s personality was “180 degrees opposite” to Mr Wynn’s, but the MGM boss was “no less strategic, no less clear”.

Before he came to MGM, Mr Hornbuckle had worked for Mr Wynn’s Golden Nugget casino and on the opening of The Mirage hotel in 1989, then the world’s largest with 3,044 rooms. He oversaw the $625m refurbishment of Caesars Palace, still one of the best-known resorts on the Las Vegas strip.

He is a sports car enthusiast and collects Porsches but has also been known to arrive at work in a Ferrari. “He loves quality things,” said Alan Feldman, a fellow at University of Nevada Las Vegas, who has known him for more than 30 years. “He wears beautiful watches and clothing, and his home in Vegas is incredibly beautiful, but he doesn’t show it off.”

He was a popular choice to succeed Mr Murren. “Bill’s experienced, steady leadership is a huge asset, not just for MGM, but for the whole gaming industry as we continue to recover from this most turbulent year,” said Bill Miller, president of the American Gaming Association.

A steady hand will be crucial as Mr Hornbuckle guides the company to meet the expectations of Mr Diller, who told the FT this month that if MGM did not achieve a leading position in the US market “with all the opportunities that we have, we should be taken out and shot”. Alice Hancock

Vegas veteran must adapt MGM to deep changes in sector

‘The advent of digital gaming has become profoundly important’

Bill Hornbuckle aims to lift MGM Resorts’ share of the US online gambling and sport betting market while pushing for a licence to build a Japanese casino — Brandon Magnus/Getty

Bill Hornbuckle Chief executive, MGM Resorts

Corporate person in the news

Mercedes Ruehl — SingaporePrimrose Riordan and Tabby Kinder Hong Kong

Investors including BlackRock, GIC and Silver Lake have been left holding illiq-uid stakes in Ant Group after pouring billions of dollars into the Chinese pay-ments company before its $37bn initial public offering was scuttled.

People directly familiar with the mat-ter said the sovereign wealth funds, pri-

vate equity and asset managers had been left in limbo after investing $10.3bn into Ant International, a sub-sidiary of the group owned by Jack Ma, in a highly selective, offshore pre-IPO fundraising round in 2018.

But since the blockbuster offering was halted at the last minute by Beijing in November, the people said, these inves-tors had not been given any clarity on when the IPO might be revived, or what its valuation and business would look like after a restructuring demanded by Chinese regulators.

Under an arrangement between Ant and its so-called international Class C

investors, the cash was put into an off-shore subsidiary that owns nothing. Aside from not having voting rights, there is little detail of the commercial terms of the agreement in Ant’s heavily redacted IPO prospectus.

Some of the investors were conduct-ing a review that included considering litigation, according to a person close to Ant. However, they said that a number of investors had expressed hesitance over the prospect of litigation while the reasons for the Ant IPO being pulled remained unclear.

The result was that investors in Ant International were “screwed”, said a

lawyer with direct knowledge of thesituation. “There are some agreements of what happens when things go badly. But back-up options are never that good. For international investors the way the deal was structured was a real leap of faith.”

The creation of the offshore entity was not unusual in itself as a way to address China’s foreign ownership laws ahead of the IPO, said one Asia-based fund manager. What was unusual was the lack of clarity on the arrangement in the event of the cancelled IPO and the limited rights of the shareholders.

“It is a future claim to owner-

ship . . . but they now have to trust that Beijing is not crazy,” the fund manager said.

China suspended Ant’s dual listing in Hong Kong and Shanghai, which had been set to become the largest share offering, days before its launch. Beijing also announced that it would draw up regulatory changes for financial tech-nology companies.

The halt came shortly after Mr Ma, Ant’s founder and biggest shareholder, criticised China’s regulators and state-owned banks in a public speech. Ant dominates mobile payments in China through its Alipay app. Beijing sum-

moned Mr Ma for questioning, and he has not been seen in public since.

While institutional and retail inves-tors that received allocations to the IPO were refunded, those who backed Ant International’s offshore round face uncertainty.

Others that took part includedUS private equity participants Carlyle and Warburg Pincus, investment bank Credit Suisse, asset manager T. Rowe Price, and Asian state-backed funds Temasek and Khazanah NasionalBerhad.

Ant and the investors named in this story declined to comment.

Technology

Beijing’s Ant float veto leaves investors in lurch BlackRock, Silver Lake and GIC among those holding illiquid stakes

COMPANIES & MARKETS

JANUARY 16 2021 Section:Companies Time: 15/1/2021 - 18:34 User: jeremy.wright Page Name: CONEWS2, Part,Page,Edition: USA, 9, 1


inflection point for electric cars, offering specifics on its forthcoming line-up of vehicles in a five-year $27bn plan to take on the likes of Tesla.

Other big companies disappointed. Some used their limited keynote time for little more than advertisements, while others took advantage of the vir-tual nature of the event to reveal digital renderings of concept products.

LG and China electronics brand TCL, for example, showed what a “rollable” screen might look like, in a step-up from the folding phones that created a buzz at CES in 2019. But it was unclear whether the rollable displays, currently just dig-ital renderings, will become a reality this decade.

“It feels like the electronics providers are focused on this next screen innova-tion, but we are many years away from mass-market adoption,” said Paolo Pes-catore, an analyst at PP Foresight.

Meanwhile, the organisers of the Indy Autonomous Challenge, a 20-lap race at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, showed off a driverless race car they called “the fastest autonomous vehicle

ever developed”. The race is scheduled for October, with the hope that it will lead to real-world safety improvements.

“If we can go 240 miles an hour and keep cars from colliding, then surely we can make highway traffic safer,” said Mark Miles, chief executive of Penske Entertainment, owner of the Indianapo-lis Motor Speedway.

The CTA tried its best to recreate the buzz of CES online, creating a Linked-In-style website for the 200,000 attend-ees to network with each other and hir-ing influencers such as Justine Ezarik, better known as YouTube star iJustine, as a host.

But the dizzying experience of stum-bling upon hundreds of start-ups in a Las Vegas convention centre proved impossible to replicate with the clicks of a mouse. “From an event perspective, I just did not think they were able to get anywhere close to the live event,” said Carolina Milanesi, analyst at Creative Strategies.

Still, more than 1,800 exhibitors showed up with pre-filmed presenta-tions, live Q&A sessions and virtual

booths. Many were keen to show that anything electronic was just waiting for a “smart” upgrade.

Bridget Karlin, global managing director of CTA and vice-president of IBM, cited projections that AI would add “almost $16tn to the global economy by 2030, and it’s being fuelled by our access to vast amounts of data, advancements in software and more powerful com-pute.” Elon Musk responded to the claim with: “Much more than this & increasingly rapidly.”

Long term, the underwhelming nature of the virtual event might be a boon as it highlighted the importance of the real thing, said Geoff Blaber, analyst at CCS Insight.

“We may endlessly debate the future of the working office, but CES 2021suggests that the immediate future of such conferences will pick up exactly where they left off, as large, physical events. As much as the tech industry complains about the January timing, this year has shone a light on why we begrudgingly pack our suitcases early in the new year”.

Razer’s mask is touted as ‘the most intelligent ever’ withneon lights and, a microphone. Right, the WowCube gaming device and a GM concept electric shuttle and drone — Razer/GM/Reuters

‘There is pent-up demand for splurge spend now, to bringa bit ofjoy and happiness’

Olaf Storbeck — Berlin

A Deutsche Bank supervisory board member urged Wirecard’s former chief executive Markus Braun to “do [the Financial Times] in!!” over its coverage of the payments group.

Austrian financier Alexander Schütz, a member of Deutsche Bank’s supervi-sory board since 2017, sent an email to Mr Braun in February 2019 in which he called on Wirecard’s boss to show “more dedication” in rebutting the FT’s report-ing on the group.

At the time, Wirecard was already pushing back strongly against the cover-age. The email, seen by the FT, was sent a few weeks following an FT report into whistleblower allegations of accounting manipulation at Wirecard’s Asian unit.

“I read in the FT what a naughty boy you are ;-)”, Mr Schütz wrote to Mr Braun. He added that he had bought shares in Wirecard the previous week. In the email, which mainly discussed a potential joint holiday, Mr Schütz urged Mr Braun to “do this newspaper in!! :-)”.

Mr Braun replied that he had can-celled his subscription to the newspaper but was confident the discussion over potential misconduct at Wirecard “will quickly move in a different direction”.

The email emerged in the early hours of yesterday at the latest hearing of Ger-many’s parliamentary inquiry into Wirecard, which imploded last June in an accounting fraud.

As well as questioning Wirecard’s auditors, lenders and management, MPs have been examining thousands of documents handed over by the group’s administrator, government agencies and other institutions.

The group sought to intimidate crit-ics, spying on some and subjecting them to hacking attacks. In March 2019, Wirecard filed suit against the FT, seek-ing compensation over alleged use and misrepresentation of business secrets.

Mr Schütz, who joined the supervi-sory board when China conglomerate HNA took a stake in Deutsche, said he apologised for the comments in the email. “I believed Mr Braun in early 2019 that Wirecard was an honourable company which was wrongfully defamed,” Mr Schütz said. At the time he believed short-sellers had started a press campaign against the company.

“In the meantime, it has become clear that I was wrong. Hence I formally apol-ogise to the FT and its reporters for this emotional and inappropriate state-ment.” The newspaper made a signifi-cant contribution to the uncovering of the scandal, said Mr Schütz, adding that “the team around Dan McCrum deserves credit for this”.

Deutsche said that the bank had only learnt about the email early yesterday, when chief executive Christian Sewing was asked about it by MPs as he testified to the inquiry. Mr Sewing declined to comment to MPs.

In a statement later yesterday, Deut-sche Bank said that “as a matter of prin-ciple, we do not comment on private statements made by members of the supervisory board.” But “irrespective of this, both the content and the attitude of the quoted statement are unacceptable — regardless of who it comes from”.With additional reporting by Robert Smith in London

COMPANIES & MARKETS

Patrick McGee — san francisco

The Covid-19 pandemic staged a takeo-ver of the largest electronics trade show this week, forcing the event online and dominating the line-up of gadgets on display.

The 2021 edition of the Consumer Electronics Show, which traditionally draws tens of thousands of buyers to Las Vegas to see and touch the latest televi-sions, smartphones and gizmos, still had a few cutting-edge concepts on display. There was a smartphone whose screen rolled bigger or smaller, a transparent TV and a driverless 240mph racing car.

But the dominant theme at this year’s event was tech to keep people healthy, well and comfortable as the pandemic grinds on. There were disinfecting robots, myriad tools to help with hand-washing, and augmented reality appli-cations to entertain and recreate pre-Covid social lives.

Razer, which makes gaming comput-ers, unveiled “the most intelligent mask ever created” with built-in neon lights, a microphone to amplify muffled speech, and a wireless charger that cleanses it with UV light between uses.

Mohit Kumar, chief executive of Ult-raHuman, a wellness app, pointed to the array of health tech on display, and highlighted a blood glucose monitor from Japanese start-up Quantum Oper-ation that sits on a wrist and does not require needles.

“If we start logging data from these sources, it can give us massive insight — or a way to crunch this data and present this to the consumer in the most usable fashion,” Mr Kumar said.

Steve Koenig, vice-president of research at the Consumer Technology Association, which organises CES, said the US market for connected health monitoring devices grew 73 per cent last year to $632m, and was projected to grow another 34 per cent this year.

New laptops, headphones and com-puter displays were in abundance at the show, though it was hard to judge, for example, which 75-inch 8K screen looked best through the medium of a dim computer monitor.

Some products managed to impress despite the distance. The WowCube, a gaming device resembling a digital Rubik’s Cube that was first introduced in 2018, said it would begin taking orders next quarter. The $249 cube, comprised of 24 screens, can be used to play puzzles and other games, or display apps and widgets.

Cheryl Guerin, a marketing executive at Mastercard, said consumers were itching to spend money on this sort of novelty. When Covid-19 hit, she said, consumers reacted by spending more on small indulgences.

But now, with savings rates hitting historic highs, we were seeing “the rise of revenge spending”, she said. “There is pent-up demand for splurge spend now, to bring a bit of joy and happiness into people’s lives.”

GM used the platform to declare an

Health and wellness tech takes centre stage at electronics showDisinfecting robots and handwashing aids vie with gadgets that recreate pre-Covid life

73% 2020 growth in US market for connected health monitor devices

$16tn Sum that AI is projected to add to the global economy by 2030

Financials

Member of Deutsche board urged Wirecard boss to ‘do in’ FT

Mark Vandevelde and Billy Nauman New York

Public pension funds that invest bil-lions of dollars with Blackstone are resisting activists’ calls to distance themselves from a firm led by one of President Donald Trump’s most important backers.

Stephen Schwarzman, the billionaire financier who founded Blackstone, has lent rhetorical support to the president and donated $30m to Republican politi-cal causes last year, including $3m to a super-political action committee aligned with Mr Trump.

Activists argue that Mr Schwarzman’s Trump ties could become a liability, if not for Blackstone itself, then for the public pension funds that contribute a large chunk of Blackstone’s $584bn asset pile.

“Investors should question the judg-ment of a man who gave millions of dol-lars to support Donald Trump despite his growing hate speech, calls for vio-lence and authoritarianism,” said Jim Baker, who leads the Private Equity Stakeholder Project activist group.

Pension funds’ reluctance to allow politics to influence investment deci-sions contrasts with the stance of dozens of high-profile American businesses that severed ties to Mr Trump and cut off funding from his Republican sup-porters in the days after the president allegedly incited a violent insurrection in Washington.

One non-profit group, the Chicago-based Action Center on Race and the Economy (Acre), on Thursday wrote to 30 pension schemes to demand they stop investing with Blackstone.

New York state, which has one of the largest public pension funds, will not be heeding that call, according to a spokes-person for Thomas DiNapoli, a Demo-cratic official who oversees the $200bn New York State Common Retirement Fund. “Comptroller DiNapoli strongly disagrees with Mr Schwarzman’s views on President Trump,” the spokesperson said. “But the fund does not, and will not, make investment decisions based on political viewpoints.”

Officials at another three public pen-sion systems expressed concerns about political violence, but none said they

would alter their investment plans. One of them, the California teachers’

pension fund Calstrs, responded to a question about Blackstone without mentioning the firm by name, stating that it “fervently condemns recent vio-lence against our country’s longstanding democratic processes” and urging investors to use their funds responsibly.

Calpers, which pays the pensions of other public workers in the state, also condemned the “violence and destruc-tion in Washington DC”.

The New York City government pen-sion funds “will monitor investments with Blackstone, as [with] any risks” to its portfolio, according to a spokesper-son for comptroller Scott Stringer’s office.

Officials at several other largest pub-lic pension funds did not respond to questions from the Financial Times.

In a statement, Blackstone called Acre a “fringe anti-capitalist group” and said its letter to pension funds contained “completely false” claims and “outra-geous distortions”. It added that Mr Schwarzman had expressed “horror and disgust at the appalling insurrection

that followed President Trump’s remarks on January 6”, and had long ago “made it crystal clear . . . that Presi-dent-elect Joe Biden won the election”.

Inside Blackstone, there has long been a division between business and politics, according to people who work at the company, which counts prominent Democrats among its senior ranks. Mr

Schwarzman’s top lieutenant is Jon Gray, who gave millions of dollars to Democratic causes last year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

“Steve might joke that ‘you Demo-crats’ are going to tax yourselves into oblivion, he might have those occa-sional digs,” said one investor who has worked at Blackstone. “But it’s a diverse firm flooded with talented people who are encouraged to have their own views.”

Mr Schwarzman did not donate to Mr Trump in 2016, but emerged as a key supporter on Wall Street shortly after the president’s surprise victory.

The Blackstone founder briefly chaired a White House “strategic and policy forum”. The group was disbanded in August 2017, after Mr Trump said there was violence on “both sides” in Charlottesville in 2017, where torch-bearing marchers chanted against blacks and Jews. Mr Schwarzman said at the time that he “wasn’t outraged” by the president’s remarks.

In November, as other prominent chief executives met to extend congrat-ulations to Mr Biden, Mr Schwarzman

told a closed-door meeting that the president was within his rights to chal-lenge election results.

On November 23, however, Mr Schwarzman said he was “ready to help President-elect Biden” rebuild a pan-demic-hit economy. He has not spoken to Mr Trump for more than six months, according to a spokesperson.

When a pro-Trump mob stormed Congress on January 6, Mr Schwarzman declared that “the insurrection that fol-lowed the president’s remarks today is appalling”.

Advocacy groups have in the past scored victories against private equity groups and other investment firms by applying pressure on the public pension funds that provide much of their capital.

In 2018, Bain Capital and KKR paid $20m to former employees of Toys R Us, a retail chain they bought in 2005. The move came after Mr Baker attended dozens of pension fund board meetings arguing that the firms should receive no more pension fund investment unless they made up for severance payments that workers lost out on when the chain was liquidated in 2018.

Financials

Pension funds stick by Blackstone despite pressure from anti-Trump activists

Stephen Schwarzman donated $30m to Republican causes last year

JANUARY 16 2021 Section:Companies Time: 15/1/2021 - 18:18 User: timothy.digby Page Name: CONEWS3, Part,Page,Edition: USA, 10, 1


COMPANIES & MARKETS

Michael Mackenzie — NEW YORK

Private debt investors face a shakeout, fund managers have warned, after a decade-long boom propelled thesector’s assets to about $900bn.

The market flourished in the wake of the financial crisis as banks, underregulatory pressure, have retreated from making loans to smallercompanies that are unable to secure funding in public debt markets.

But credit managers warn that less stringent lending standards before the pandemic will mean a reckoning in the next couple of years.

“It is too early to tell how managers will fare in terms of performance andwe will see who has been playinga dangerous game,” said FrédéricNadal, chief executive at MV Credit, which has two decades of privatelending experience to companies in Europe.

“Investors have been taking things on faith,” said Mr Nadal. “The real test is yet to come”, he added, saying it is“difficult to tell” which managers made the right bets in a market that is more opaque than its public counterparts.

Smaller, bespoke deals in the private debt market arranged by specialist managers and private equity firms since 2008 have increasingly attractedestablished investors including pension funds and insurance companies.

Private debt provides higher fixed rate returns than public deals asinvestors are parking their money for a long time in debt that is not as easily tradable.

This “illiquidity premium” for private debt has gained appeal in a world of low

executive of ETC Group, the issuer of BTCE, said he thought institutional investors were starting to buy the cryptocurrency as a haven.

“Bitcoin has always had a retail groundswell, people who have an inter-est in technology, and it was seen as a ‘wild west’ investment. That has really changed in the last six months,” he added. “Coronavirus has played a part in that. It’s starting to look like anattractive alternative to currencies that may be devalued by the stimuluspackages. The packages are needed but there are real concerns they may set inflationary forces in play.”

But the cryptocurrency market has remained dominated by retail traders and more speculative firms including hedge funds, as opposed to traditional money managers such as pension funds.

The UK’s Financial ConductAuthority has banned the sale ofcryptocurrency-related derivatives, including exchange traded notes, to retail investors. It also this week renewed its warning that anyone invest-ing in crypto assets “should be prepared to lose all their money”. See Lex

interest rates. Fund managers saidthere was a loosening in lendingstandards in the years before thepandemic, which helped propel theprivate credit market to $887bn byJune 2020 from $575bn at the end of 2016.

The number of funds raising money from 2017 through to the end of 2019 increased sharply and they amassed nearly $300bn of so-called dry powder ready to be deployed during that period, according to Prequin.

“It was a borrower-friendly market before the pandemic and these are deals that managers end up holding for a long time,” said Candy Shaw, deputy CIO at Sun Life Capital Management, a long-standing investor in private markets through direct lending and long term infrastructure projects.

Losses are forecast for loans made in recent years to companies in retailing, leisure and hospitality that havebeen hit hard by pandemic-related restrictions.

The UK high street, for example, has been under intense pressure, withseveral direct lending funds expected to take losses on their loans.

Fixed income

Private debt investors face day of reckoning, warn fund managers

Steve Johnson

Investors have raced to buy and sell bitcoin-linked securities on both sides of the Atlantic with one German exchange traded product garnering trading volumes matching Europe’s most popular funds.

BTCetc Bitcoin Exchange Traded Crypto (BTCE) has recorded average daily trading amounting to €57m in the first 11 days of January, according to data from Deutsche Börse.

A similar trend has taken hold on Wall Street. Grayscale’s Bitcoin Trust, which like its German counterpart tracks the price of the digital currency, has posted average daily turnover of almost $1bn in the first two weeks of this year, amount-ing to more than nine times the average in 2020, Bloomberg data show.

Its assets under management have boomed to $23bn from $17bn at the end of December and $2bn at the start of 2020. The sharp rise in trading in the securities highlights how investors are increasingly looking to gain exposure to or bet against cryptocurrencies on tradi-tional markets rather than buying the digital currencies outright. The trading

Crypto

Traders seeking bitcoin exposuretrigger surge for linked securities

surge in BTCE this year — a sharp pick-up on the €15.5m daily average in December, the previous record — came after a tenfold rise in the price of bitcoin since March to a peak of $42,000 this month, before it gave back some gains.

Stephan Kraus, head of Deutsche Börse’s ETF segment, said the structure of the BTCE exchange traded note, which eased the regulatory concerns

and counterparty risk involved in trad-ing bitcoin, had “increased the appeal of cryptocurrency investments for institu-tional investors”, which can trade with-out needing to set up specialised digital infrastructure or use an “unregulated crypto platform”.

Deutsche Börse’s trading data show a number of trades above €30,000, which the group said were unlikely to be from day traders or other retail investors.

Bradley Duke, co-founder and chief

‘It’s starting to look like an alternative to currencies that may be devalued by the stimulus packages’

Hospitality sector companies have been hit hard by virus restrictions

“A lot of assets have been built on the prospects of extremely low interest rates for the foreseeable future,” said Mike Stritch, chief investment officer at BMO Wealth Management. “In terms of financial risks, we think that is one of the big ones.”

The promise of extra spending — which comes on the heels of a $900bn spending bill passed by Congress last month — was “setting the stage fora rise in inflation”, Morgan Stanleyeconomists said earlier this month.

The so-called 10-year “break-even” rate, a measure of market expectations for price rises which is derived from the price of inflation-protected government bonds, has climbed above 2 per cent. That is up from less than 0.5 per cent at the depths of the crisis last year.

Meanwhile, the leader board in US stocks has switched. Long-favoured tech stocks like Apple, Microsoft and Salesforce have lagged behind the broad market since the elections on January 5.

In early trading on Wall Streetyesterday, tech stocks on the Russell 3000 index were slightly down for the year, trailing the 4 per cent gain for basic materials groups, a 4.6 per cent rise for

financials and a 14.6 per cent advance by energy companies.

The tech sector has outperformed since the financial crisis against the backdrop of lacklustre global economic activity — a trend that was exacerbated during the pandemic.

Rock-bottom interest rates bolstered the appeal of businesses whosevaluations were dependent on profits in the distant future, while dragging on sectors such as banks.

A rotation away from tech intoeconomically sensitive sectors such as small-caps and unloved “value” stocks, including financials, began to take hold last year as prospects grew for a “blue wave” in US elections.

But the Democrats’ initial failure to secure a majority in the Senate in November left many investors position-ing instead for gridlock in Washington.

The Georgia run-offs reignited this trade. The results were “the straw that broke the camel’s back”, said Bob Doll, a senior portfolio manager with asset manager Nuveen. “After years when you wanted to brag about how many big growth stocks you owned . . . you’re now at the point where you need to have

small, value and international stocks in your portfolio.”

Consumers and businesses are likely to remain reliant on the technology companies that filled gaps during the crisis but the rollout of coronavirusvaccinations and the extra government spending should lift those sectorshardest hit by the pandemic.

In anticipation of an economicrecovery filtering across the American heartland, investors have ploughed roughly $27bn into small-cap stock funds since the start of November, more than reversing the entirety of outflows the funds had tallied in the first 10 months of the year.

Small businesses are expected to flourish as Americans plot a pathback to normal life. Emerging market exporters are also predicted to benefit as demand rebounds.

Demand for hedges against rising prices has also been strong with US funds that buy Treasury inflation-linked securities, or Tips, attracting nearly $1.5bn of net inflows in the week ending Wednesday, according to data from EPFR.

That marked the 15th consecutive week where more money entered these funds than left them.

The question now is just how much fuel the Democrats will add to the world’s biggest economy at a time where monetary policy remains ultra-loose.

“The global economy and USeconomy are experiencing early-cycle dynamics characterised by rising growth, rising corporate earnings, rising prices,” said Erik Knutzen, Neuberger Berman’s chief investment officer of multi-asset strategy.

“But [that is] still in a very accommo-dative monetary policy environment and . . . with a fair bit of fiscal stimulus coming through,” he added.

Eric Platt and Colby Smith New York

The “blue wave” hit later than expected but with enough strength to force areordering of global markets.

Victories in Senate run-offs heldon January 5, which handed theDemocratic party control of Congress to add to the presidency, jolted investors into overhauling their portfolios in anticipation of the beefed-up fiscal stimulus promised by President-elect Joe Biden — who detailed his $1.9tn plan on Thursday.

The effects have been far-reaching — tech stocks have struggled while prices of commodities used in infrastructure projects, such as copper, and shares in machinery manufacturers, such as John Deere and Caterpillar, have advanced.

Global crude oil prices reached above $55 a barrel for the first time since the pandemic rattled financial markets. And lower rated state and local debt has rallied on the promise of extra federal support.

But perhaps the most important impact is in the government bondmarkets that form the basis for other asset prices around the world.

Analysts now expect a splurge of extra debt issuance and higher inflation, putting pressure on the US Federal Reserve to wind down its bond-buying programme and potentially even increase interest rates earlier than expected.

Ten-year and 30-year government bond prices have dropped since the start of the year, pushing yields to around their highest level in nearly 10 months.

Democratic party wins boost

everything from copper to

small-caps but Treasuries slide

‘A lot of assets have been built on the prospects of extremely low interest rates’

The New York Stock Exchange’s leaderboard has switched from tech to energy and financials Justin Lane/EPA-EFE

Cross asset. Fiscal bonanza

Biden’s blue wave stimulus shakes up global investing

Investors braced for higher inflationUS 10-year break-even rate (%)

Source: Bloomberg

1.2

1.4

1.6

1.8

2.0

2.2

Jul 2020 Jan2021

Fed embraces higher inflation

Joe Biden wins presidency

Vaccine breakthrough announced

Democratic party gains Senate control

Ryan McMorrow — Beijing

Shares in China’s Xiaomi sank after the US government added the smartphone group to an investment blacklist in a move that is likely to thin its ranks of American shareholders.

The Beijing-based company’s stock dropped 10.3 per cent in Hong Kong trading yesterday, hours after the Penta-gon added it to a list of companies with suspected ties to the Chinese military. That, in conjunction with a separate executive order, will block US investors from buying its shares 60 days from now and will require Americans to eventu-ally sell their holdings.

The move marks a significant blow for Xiaomi, which had been a big benefici-ary of Washington’s campaign of sanc-tions against Chinese competitor Hua-wei. That had helped Xiaomi’s sales to surpass US group Apple’s, making it the world’s number three phonemaker by units sold in the third quarter.

Its shares soared 227 per cent last year, pumping up its market value at the end of 2020 to $108bn.

Large Xiaomi shareholders include US fund managers BlackRock, Van-guard, Fidelity and State Street, accord-ing to Bloomberg data. Yesterday’s share price fall cut Xiaomi’s market cap-italisation by more than $10bn.

State Street declined to comment on

its Xiaomi holdings. Vanguard, Fidelity and BlackRock did not respond to requests for comment.

An executive order from US President Donald Trump in November targeted US investments in Chinese businesses alleged to have ties to the country’s mili-tary. The Pentagon’s list included China’s three big state-owned telecom carriers, prompting the New York Stock Exchange to delist the companies.

S&P Dow Jones Indices, MSCI and FTSE Russell all removed China Tele-com, China Mobile and China Unicom from their global equity indices. How-ever, State Street decided that its $13.4bn fund that tracks Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index, which contains two of the telecom groups, could continue trading in securities of the sanctioned companies.

The US defence department said the move against Xiaomi and eight other newly listed Chinese companies aimed to counter the country’s “military-civil fusion development strategy”.

Xiaomi said yesterday that it was not controlled by, or affiliated to, theChinese military and that it was “reviewing the potential consequences of this to develop a fuller understanding of its impact on the [company]”.

China’s foreign ministry said the US was abusing its state power, adding that it would “take necessary measures to protect the legitimate interests ofChinese companies”. Nian Liu contributed from Beijing

Equities

Xiaomi sinks as US adds it to China military blacklist

Yesterday’s share price fall cut Xiaomi’s market capitalisation by more than $10bn

Our globalteam gives you market-moving news and views, 24 hours a dayft.com/markets

JANUARY 16 2021 Section:Markets Time: 15/1/2021 - 18:46 User: stephen.smith Page Name: MARKETS1, Part,Page,Edition: USA, 11, 1


T he Trump Show made the point that the US never really settled the war with the Confederacy. During the Biden administration,

the conflict between large dealer banks and the populist left will be more bitter than ever.

To the dealer banks, the Dodd-Frank Act and the Basel Accords on bank regulation were heavy-handed over-reach. To US financial reform activists, the banks and their traders are still getting away with too much money and freedom of action.

Unfortunately, the squabbles between the dealer banks and activists could interfere with financing the ambitious Biden administration and Congressional spending plans, which come on top of Trump’s $7.8tn borrowing spree.

Central bankers outside the US have their doubts about whether the US dealer banks have sufficient balance sheet capacity to maintain an orderly market for Treasury securities.

As one of them says: “There was already a lot to be done in the plumbing of the Treasury market, and those requirements get more pronounced with the bigger budgets. If we cannot get reliable Treasury prices, other markets become even more unstable.”

Disruptions in the Treasury market and repo market (for lending against securities) such as those in March of last year, and September 2019, now seem to occur every few months rather

than every couple of decades. To reduce the systemic risk of market dysfunction, the dealer banks argue they need fewer Dodd-Frank and Basel constraints and charges on the size of their trading books.

The activists take the opposite view, saying there should be more rules, enforced more strictly.

The moderate reformers fiddle with their bow ties and murmur that Treasuries and repo need a better and more heavily reinforced plumbing system for the Treasury and repo market flows.

Specifically, there is increasing support in the academic and bureaucratic wings of the financial system for putting all Treasury trading

and repo transactions through a central clearinghouse, or CCP.

Many people on dealer bank trading desks are unenthusiastic about a giant Treasury-repo-CCP construction.

What they really want is to have the constraints and costs on balance sheet growth lifted, at least for Treasury securities and repo.

As one of them said: “When Trump and [Federal Reserve governor Randy] Quarles came in, we thought we would see some real easing of regulation of the dealers. Instead, the Treasury and Fed went along with all the Basel- influenced limits on our ability to warehouse Treasuries and do repo.”

Sadly, from the point of view of the dealer-desk people, Trump-promised deregulation did not happen.

In March of last year, the Fed announced a temporary change in the

big dealer bank’s SLRs (supplementary lending ratios) to exclude Treasury positions from the limiting rules for bank holding companies.

As our dealer person said, though: “They did not carve out repo (positions from leverage limits). So the carve-outs they did were ineffective.”

Even the temporary carve out of Treasury positions from the regulators’ calculations of the banks’ leverage limits expires at the end of March. Financial reform activists have already said they will oppose an extension of the Fed’s temporary rule-loosening, although they will probably not be successful — this time. But stricter regulation of dealers’ behaviour and balance sheets is coming soon.

The US dealer banks appear to have enough room on their balance sheets to accommodate sedate, day-to-day trading in the Treasury market, for now. There is, however, greater risk of discontinuous or disorderly markets with even a moderate piece of bad news.

Would putting all Treasury trades through a CCP reduce the risk of market instability and outright dysfunction? Darrell Duffie, a Stanford finance professor and Treasury clearing house advocate, says yes.

“It would take these trades off the dealers’ balance sheets and you would have an opportunity for exchanges to allow investors to trade directly with each other. It would at least initially be more expensive but it would prevent market failures. And there is no way the dealer balance sheets can grow as fast as Treasury issuance. We need bigger pipes.”

A Treasury CCP would take a couple of hundred billion in capital and years in set-up time. Congress will have to act — soon — on funding and enabling legislation.

[email protected]

Squabbles between dealer banks and activists pose risk of trouble for Biden

Moderate reformers fiddle with their bow ties and murmur Treasuries need a better plumbing system

COMPANIES & MARKETS

3 Wall Street stocks slip after gloomy retail sales data3 Bank shares take a hit after trio of earnings results3 Shift in investor sentiment sends yield on US government debt lower

Wall Street stocks and oil prices dropped yesterday in a gloomy end to the week after disappointing US retail sales data underscored the severe strains faced by the world’s biggest economy.

US equities were broadly lower at lunchtime in New York with the benchmark S&P 500 slipping 0.6 per cent.

Oil prices were also under pressure while investors shifted into haven assets such as government debt and the dollar.

The wobble in market sentiment came after data showed US retail sales dropped 0.7 per cent in December from November. Economists had expected the metric to hold steady last month.

“The retail sales report indicates lower consumption growth in the fourth quarter than we had previously assumed,” said Jan Hatzius, chief economist at Goldman Sachs, who added the data were “well below consensus expectations”.

Bank shares also took a hit, denting a recent rally, as three of America’s biggest lenders reported quarterly results yesterday.

JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Wells Fargo released a total of more than $5bn of pandemic-era loan loss reserves, in an early sign of optimism.

But Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan’s chief executive, highlighted the risks to the world economy posed by coronavirus, noting that “our credit reserves of over

$30bn continue to reflect significant near-term economic uncertainty.”

The downbeat economic data came as investors examined the early detail of Joe Biden’s economic rescue plan, in which the US president-elect pledged an additional $1.9tn in fiscal stimulus.

In his speech on Thursday, Mr Biden outlined his incoming administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic and called on wealthy individuals and corporations to pay their “fair share”.

“The market always believed that a tax rise would come, but we didn’t expect to hear about it so early,” said Justin

Onuekwusi, fund manager at Legal & General Investment Management

Oil prices came under pressure with global benchmark Brent crude down 3 per cent at $54.72 a barrel.

The dollar rose 0.5 per cent against a basket of peers. Meanwhile, the yield on 10-year US government debt slipped 4 basis points to 1.09 per cent, halting a sell-off that began early this month when yields were about 0.93 per cent.

Across the Atlantic, the region-wide Stoxx Europe 600 and London’s FTSE 100 both fell 1 per cent while Frankfurt’s Xetra Dax fell 1.4 per cent. Leke Oso Alabi

What you need to know

Gloomy market turn halts Treasury sell-o�

Source: Refinitiv

10-year US government bond yields (%)

0.85

0.90

0.95

1.00

1.05

1.10

1.15

1.20

Dec 2020 Jan2021

The day in the markets

Markets update

US Eurozone Japan UK China BrazilStocks S&P 500 Eurofirst 300 Nikkei 225 FTSE100 Shanghai Comp BovespaLevel 3773.99 1573.90 28519.18 6735.71 3566.38 120884.96% change on day -0.57 -0.96 -0.62 -0.97 0.01 -2.10Currency $ index (DXY) $ per € Yen per $ $ per £ Rmb per $ Real per $Level 90.476 1.209 103.875 1.358 6.474 5.271% change on day 0.263 -0.412 0.048 -0.731 0.099 0.811Govt. bonds 10-year Treasury 10-year Bund 10-year JGB 10-year Gilt 10-year bond 10-year bondYield 1.089 -0.544 0.031 0.287 3.125 7.117Basis point change on day -0.830 0.700 0.310 -0.300 1.700 -14.600World index, Commods FTSE All-World Oil - Brent Oil - WTI Gold Silver Metals (LMEX)Level 432.81 54.93 52.16 1841.75 25.25 3527.30% change on day -0.72 -2.62 -2.78 -0.92 -0.34 0.44Yesterday's close apart from: Currencies = 16:00 GMT; S&P, Bovespa, All World, Oil = 17:00 GMT; Gold, Silver = London pm fix. Bond data supplied by Tullett Prebon.

Main equity markets

S&P 500 index Eurofirst 300 index FTSE 100 index

| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |

Nov 2021 Jan3520

3680

3840

| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |

Nov 2021 Jan1480

1520

1560

1600

| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |

Nov 2021 Jan6080

6400

6720

7040

Biggest movers% US Eurozone UK

Ups

Nisource 4.64Akamai 3.47Marketaxess Holdings 3.00Facebook 2.96Abiomed 2.94

Aegon 3.30Natixis 2.44Publicise 1.51Danone 1.32Novo Nordisk 1.23

Aveva 6.97Glaxosmithkline 1.45Pennon 1.30Unilever 0.92Persimmon 0.75

%

Dow

ns

Wells Fargo & Co -6.71Citigroup -6.55Alliance Data Systems -6.06Occidental Petroleum -5.61Nordstrom -5.34

Prices taken at 17:00 GMT

B. Sabadell -5.43Caixabank -4.80Galp Energia -4.67Tenaris -4.19Alstom -4.07Based on the constituents of the FTSE Eurofirst 300 Eurozone

Anglo American -5.31Just Eat Takeaway.com N.v. -4.93Smith (ds) -4.69Antofagasta -3.66Kingfisher -3.65

All data provided by Morningstar unless otherwise noted.

Applied DNA Sciences, which provides Covid-19 tests, rallied after reporting that average daily testing in January 2021 to date was up 158 per cent compared to December. “The increase is chiefly the result of the scale-up of certain testing contracts and from the acquisition of new clients,” said the group.

An offer to buy Atlantic Power sent the energy company soaring. The Massachusetts generator agreed to be bought by private equity firm I Squared Capital for $3.03 a share in cash, representing a 44 per cent premium on Thursday’s closing price. Atlantic Power’s board of directors unanimously approved the deal, which gave the company a total enterprise value of $961m.

Ski operator Vail Resorts slid after Robert Katz, chief executive officer, said in a trading update that “Covid-19 has had a significant negative impact on our 2020-21 North American ski season-to-date results”. For the season-to-date period ending January 3, skier visits were down 16.6 per cent compared with the same bloc a year earlier. Ski school revenue was 52.6 per cent lower while dining revenue was 66.2 per cent down.

A slide in oil prices dragged energy groups lower, with Halliburton, ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips and Chevron all down. Ray Douglas

Wall Street LondonEurozone

Swiss investment manager Partners Group climbed after reporting that it attracted $16bn in new commitments from clients last year, taking the firm’s total assets under management to $109.1bn, representing a net underlying growth of 11 per cent in 2020.

“We are confident about our . . . outlook in the medium to long term,” said André Frei, co-chief executive, who expects gross client demand of $16bn to $20bn in 2021.

Better than expected preliminary results helped to lift Valeo. The French automotive supplier said earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation margin would represent more than 13.5 per cent of sales for the second half of last year — higher than 12 per cent forecast in October.

Clas Ohlson, the Swedish home improvement chain, slid after reporting a 14 per cent fall in sales in December from a year earlier. “Sharpened restrictions in close connection to the year’s most important sales period caused further reduction of customer traffic to our Swedish stores,” said Pär Christiansen, acting president, although online sales rose 45 per cent in the month, meaning the group was on track to hit its ecommerce growth target for the fiscal year. Ray Douglas

Babcock International plummeted after the aerospace and defence group warned of potential “negative impacts on the balance sheet” that came to light during a review. Underlying operating profit sank 34 per cent to £202m in the nine months to the end of December, with revenue falling 3 per cent to £3.4bn.

Shore Capital said it was “unable to sustain a ‘buy’ rating on the stock”, downgrading it to “hold”, which would allow the broker to assess Babcock’s prospects with guidance and await the outcome of the outsourcer’s accounting review.

Indivior, the London-listed pharma group, rallied after it raised total net revenue for the full year to $645m-$650m, up from $595m-$620m. The beat was mostly driven by stocking and market share retention of Suboxone, its opioid addiction treatment, said analysts at Citi, who reiterated their “buy” rating and £1.65 a share price target.

A strong quarter of contract renewals helped lift Aveva higher. The software group reported organic revenue growth in the three months to December 31 of more than 26 per cent. “This was driven by a significant number of scheduled subscription renewals, including a large three-year contract renewal in the food sector,” it said. Ray Douglas

Joe Rennison

On Wall Street

F or one influential watcher of the credit world, conditions in the corporate bond market are starting to look unnerving.

Matt Mish, who heads up UBS’s credit strategy team, likens the current state of the market to a tower of Jenga blocks. At the moment, crucial support is being provided by central bank buying across the globe, holding borrowing costs low and providing a backstop if investor demand falls. As that support is removed, piece by piece, the tower could begin to wobble.

“At some point, investors are going to realise that the Jenga puzzle is losing more and more pieces,” said Mr Mish. “It doesn’t mean the tower will defi-nitely collapse but it has the potential to create more volatility.”

Bankers say that, while the topic may not pose an immediate risk, it is begin-ning to crop up in talks with clients. How do central banks gently pare their com-mitment to support credit markets, and what happens if they fall short of it?

“The optimism priced into the mar-ket is substantial,” said Mark Lynagh, co-head of European debt markets at BNP Paribas. “It is very much driven by central bank support and an assump-tion that it will continue in parallel to a successful vaccine rollout. If there is an underwhelming aspect to any of that, it poses a risk to the credit market.”

In the US, the first Jenga block to be taken out came at the end of the year, with the wind-down of the corporate credit facilities that had come to the market’s rescue during the worst of the coronavirus-induced sell-off in March. The US Federal Reserve’s historic deci-sion to begin buying corporate bonds bolstered investor confidence and opened the floodgates to new lending,

appetite to buy corporate debt. Ending the corporate credit facilities is of little consequence in the current environ-ment, so long as the Fed is willing to reintroduce them if needed. Rising real yields are less of a threat if the Fed loos-ens policy again, should it come to that.

By moving so swiftly and decisively in March, the Fed has created the assump-tion that it will do so again. This week, in response to signs that investors might be pricing in tapering this year, Mr Pow-ell assured the market: “Now is not the time to be talking about exit.”

The situation is akin to the challenge faced by Fed chair Ben Bernanke after the 2008 financial crisis. In 2013, after multiple rounds of quantitative easing, the suggestion that the central bank might begin to reduce support caused a sharp move higher in Treasury yields.

In the background, the Fed’s ability to repeat the actions it took last year is already being curtailed. As part of December’s relief package, the central bank is prevented from reinstating the corporate credit facilities without Con-gress’s approval. It means that even if the Fed maintains that it will do what-ever it takes to support market func-tioning, the reality may be harder to implement without the support of law-makers.

“Most investors think that the pro-grammes could be reintroduced,” said Mr Mish. “But it’s not clear they will have the same punch.”

In turn, if the view that the Fed is less able to provide a backstop to credit mar-kets becomes more widespread, then a reassessment of the risk of lending to companies without it will quickly fol-low.

[email protected]

Jenga towers of credit world rely on Fed support

allowing companies to plug the holes left by the downturn with fresh debt.

Despite the facilities’ withdrawal, the tower remains standing, with average yields on both investment-grade and high-yield bonds still at or around record lows.

The second support to be removed is expected to be a tapering of the Fed’s purchases of government bonds, to begin as early as this year, according to some predictions. Fed chair Jay Powell said this week that the central bank must be “very careful in communicat-ing about asset purchases” because of the sensitivity among investors about

the removal of support for the econ-omy. Whatever the Fed does not buy will need to be bought by others and more supply, all else being equal, tends to mean lower prices and higher yields.

When rising Treasury yields are tied to inflation, it is typically no bad thing for corporate bonds. Higher inflation erodes the value of outstanding debt and often indicates higher growth, sup-porting companies’ ability to repay it. However, rising real yields, which account for any inflationary effects, are an indication of higher borrowing costs for corporates. There have been glimpses of this already this year.

Still, corporate bond markets have largely not flinched. Many investors remain assured that the Fed will step in should markets falter again, bolstering

At some point, investors are going to realise thatthe puzzle is losing more and more pieces

Businesses For Sale

Business for Sale, Business Opportunities, Business Services, Business Wanted, Franchises

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JANUARY 16 2021 Section:Markets Time: 15/1/2021 - 18:55 User: stephen.smith Page Name: MARKETS2, Part,Page,Edition: USA, 12, 1


WORLD MARKETS AT A GLANCE FT.COM/MARKETSDATA

Change during previous day’s trading (%)S&P 500

-0.57%

Nasdaq Composite

-0.58%

Dow Jones Ind

-0.45%

FTSE 100

-0.97%

FTSE Eurofirst 300

-0.96%

Nikkei

-0.62%

Hang Seng

0.27%

FTSE All World $

-0.72%

$ per €

-0.412%

$ per £

-0.731%

¥ per $

0.048%

£ per €

0.338%

Oil Brent $ Sep

-1.10%

Gold $

-0.92%

Stock Market movements over last 30 days, with the FTSE All-World in the same currency as a comparisonAMERICAS EUROPE ASIADec 16 - - Index All World Dec 16 - Jan 15 Index All World Dec 16 - Jan 15 Index All World Dec 16 - Jan 15 Index All World Dec 16 - Jan 15 Index All World Dec 16 - Jan 15 Index All World

S&P 500 New York

3,701.173,773.99

Day -0.57% Month 2.16% Year 14.75%

Nasdaq Composite New York

12,595.06

13,036.90

Day -0.58% Month 3.56% Year 40.88%

Dow Jones Industrial New York

30,199.31

30,852.40

Day -0.45% Month 2.18% Year 6.30%

S&P/TSX COMP Toronto

17,506.4817,898.59

Day -0.33% Month 2.25% Year 2.78%

IPC Mexico City

43,543.35

45,801.70

Day -0.58% Month 5.17% Year 3.01%

Bovespa São Paulo

118,400.57120,884.96

Day -2.10% Month 4.05% Year 3.81%

FTSE 100 London

6,531.836,735.71

Day -0.97% Month 3.32% Year -11.95%

FTSE Eurofirst 300 Europe

1,517.26

1,573.90

Day -0.96% Month 3.69% Year -4.13%

CAC 40 Paris

5,530.315,611.69

Day -1.22% Month 1.47% Year -6.98%

Xetra Dax Frankfurt

13,114.30

13,787.73

Day -1.44% Month -1.86% Year NaN%

Ibex 35 Madrid

8,152.40 8,230.70

Day -1.69% Month 0.96% Year -13.47%

FTSE MIB Milan

21,702.16

22,381.35

Day -1.13% Month 2.07% Year -5.78%

Nikkei 225 Tokyo

26,732.44

28,519.18

Day -0.62% Month 6.68% Year 18.71%

Hang Seng Hong Kong

26,678.38

28,573.86

Day 0.27% Month 8.45% Year -0.92%

Shanghai Composite Shanghai

3,366.98

3,566.38

Day 0.01% Month 5.85% Year 14.79%

Kospi Seoul

2,770.43

3,085.90

Day -2.03% Month 11.72% Year 37.83%

FTSE Straits Times Singapore

2,856.72

3,004.87

Day 0.16% Month 5.07% Year -8.18%

BSE Sensex Mumbai

46,666.46

49,034.67

Day -1.11% Month 6.01% Year 16.88%

Country Index Latest Previous Country Index Latest Previous Country Index Latest Previous Country Index Latest Previous Country Index Latest Previous Country Index Latest Previous

Argentina Merval 50546.65 51084.99Australia All Ordinaries 6986.80 6982.70

S&P/ASX 200 6715.40 6715.30S&P/ASX 200 Res 5495.80 5456.80

Austria ATX 2947.96 2993.42Belgium BEL 20 3715.69 3740.26

BEL Mid 8670.34 8679.43Brazil IBovespa 120884.96 123480.52Canada S&P/TSX 60 1065.52 1067.62

S&P/TSX Comp 17898.59 17958.09S&P/TSX Div Met & Min 738.14 715.04

Chile S&P/CLX IGPA Gen 23084.73 23260.44China FTSE A200 14522.40 14534.24

FTSE B35 9000.71 8988.96Shanghai A 3738.25 3737.76Shanghai B 250.66 250.50Shanghai Comp 3566.38 3565.90Shenzhen A 2476.89 2470.09Shenzhen B 1080.77 1087.53

Colombia COLCAP 1368.49 1383.59Croatia CROBEX 2013.05 2011.29

Cyprus CSE M&P Gen 68.46 68.68Czech Republic PX 1073.53 1075.61Denmark OMXC Copenahgen 20 1459.77 1469.58Egypt EGX 30 11453.43 11388.90Estonia OMX Tallinn 1419.60 1419.24Finland OMX Helsinki General 11144.64 11252.71France CAC 40 5611.69 5681.14

SBF 120 4456.08 4505.98Germany M-DAX 31035.92 31572.08

TecDAX 3262.41 3291.92XETRA Dax 13787.73 13988.70

Greece Athens Gen 790.14 794.03FTSE/ASE 20 1884.34 1893.36

Hong Kong Hang Seng 28573.86 28496.86HS China Enterprise 11320.53 11299.17HSCC Red Chip 3994.09 4020.90

Hungary Bux 44204.45 44876.42India BSE Sensex 49034.67 49584.16

Nifty 500 11931.20 12069.50Indonesia Jakarta Comp 6373.41 6428.32Ireland ISEQ Overall 7523.41 7571.08Israel Tel Aviv 125 1648.90 1641.77

Italy FTSE Italia All-Share 24395.73 24663.85FTSE Italia Mid Cap 37927.99 38452.84FTSE MIB 22381.35 22637.72

Japan 2nd Section 6726.21 6756.23Nikkei 225 28519.18 28698.26S&P Topix 150 1575.55 1589.39Topix 1856.61 1873.28

Jordan Amman SE 1722.34 1717.66Kenya NSE 20 1921.06 1910.64Kuwait KSX Market Index 6633.44 6603.51Latvia OMX Riga 1165.24 1179.26Lithuania OMX Vilnius 868.05 867.75Luxembourg LuxX 1361.06 1386.68Malaysia FTSE Bursa KLCI 1627.01 1635.71Mexico IPC 45801.70 46070.91Morocco MASI 11326.79 11262.09Netherlands AEX 651.73 656.66

AEX All Share 940.45 948.51New Zealand NZX 50 13024.69 13115.87Nigeria SE All Share 40963.14 40341.05Norway Oslo All Share 1017.37 1006.88Pakistan KSE 100 45931.00 45989.35

Philippines Manila Comp 7238.46 7273.15Poland Wig 57850.65 58945.17Portugal PSI 20 5038.24 5115.55

PSI General 3910.11 3965.47Romania BET Index 10210.81 10309.15Russia Micex Index 3450.95 3490.85

RTX 1474.28 1500.58Saudi-Arabia TADAWUL All Share Index 8898.68 8914.29Singapore FTSE Straits Times 3004.87 3000.00Slovakia SAX 356.83 356.83Slovenia SBI TOP - -South Africa FTSE/JSE All Share 63549.75 63884.77

FTSE/JSE Res 20 63855.25 64800.38FTSE/JSE Top 40 58446.35 58735.95

South Korea Kospi 3085.90 3149.93Kospi 200 420.43 429.85

Spain IBEX 35 8230.70 8372.40Sri Lanka CSE All Share 7734.57 7443.23Sweden OMX Stockholm 30 1954.71 1972.22

OMX Stockholm AS 790.13 798.78Switzerland SMI Index 10877.06 10850.81

Taiwan Weighted Pr 15616.39 15707.19Thailand Bangkok SET 1519.13 1535.98Turkey BIST 100 1524.49 1546.60UAE Abu Dhabi General Index 5266.71 5290.72UK FT 30 2576.00 2595.50

FTSE 100 6735.71 6801.96FTSE 4Good UK 6286.59 6342.63FTSE All Share 3803.75 3839.42FTSE techMARK 100 6356.55 6350.47

USA DJ Composite 10221.47 10290.21DJ Industrial 30852.40 30991.52DJ Transport 12865.76 13113.11DJ Utilities 857.78 851.26Nasdaq 100 12849.38 12898.69Nasdaq Cmp 13036.90 13112.64NYSE Comp 14903.63 15044.38S&P 500 3773.99 3795.54Wilshire 5000 40035.66 40297.31

Venezuela IBC 1818485.60 1745892.00Vietnam VNI 1194.20 1187.40

Cross-Border DJ Global Titans ($) 441.57 442.88Euro Stoxx 50 (Eur) 3596.85 3641.37Euronext 100 ID 1121.80 1133.20FTSE 4Good Global ($) 9287.39 9329.49FTSE All World ($) 432.81 435.93FTSE E300 1573.90 1589.10FTSE Eurotop 100 2959.81 2985.06FTSE Global 100 ($) 2483.70 2495.72FTSE Gold Min ($) 2376.03 2378.13FTSE Latibex Top (Eur) 4440.00 4432.20FTSE Multinationals ($) 2751.86 2757.26FTSE World ($) 766.52 772.25FTSEurofirst 100 (Eur) 4034.28 4082.65FTSEurofirst 80 (Eur) 4936.59 4996.78MSCI ACWI Fr ($) 661.56 661.49MSCI All World ($) 2738.09 2739.87MSCI Europe (Eur) 1663.86 1654.25MSCI Pacific ($) 3207.49 3188.02S&P Euro (Eur) 1675.64 1696.07S&P Europe 350 (Eur) 1624.23 1639.53S&P Global 1200 ($) 3013.35 3036.74Stoxx 50 (Eur) 3184.95 3207.62

(c) Closed. (u) Unavaliable. † Correction. ♥ Subject to official recalculation. For more index coverage please see www.ft.com/worldindices. A fuller version of this table is available on the ft.com research data archive.

STOCK MARKET: BIGGEST MOVERS UK MARKET WINNERS AND LOSERSAMERICA LONDON EURO MARKETS TOKYOACTIVE STOCKS stock close Day's

traded m's price changeApple 70.8 128.75 -0.16Amazon.com 57.0 3108.52 -18.95Facebook 36.1 252.92 7.28Microsoft 28.8 213.77 0.75Advanced Micro Devices 23.5 89.16 -1.63Jpmorgan Chase & Co 20.2 138.51 -2.66Nvidia 17.9 519.72 -8.29Wells Fargo & Co 16.3 32.42 -2.33Boeing 12.1 205.61 -4.30Intel 11.7 58.89 -0.36

BIGGEST MOVERS Close Day's Day'sprice change chng%

UpsNisource 22.88 1.02 4.64Akamai 106.42 3.57 3.47Marketaxess Holdings 527.42 15.34 3.00Facebook 252.92 7.28 2.96Abiomed 327.66 9.35 2.94

DownsWells Fargo & Co 32.42 -2.33 -6.71Citigroup 64.49 -4.52 -6.55Alliance Data Systems 70.25 -4.53 -6.06Occidental Petroleum 22.88 -1.36 -5.61Nordstrom 35.99 -2.03 -5.34

ACTIVE STOCKS stock close Day'straded m's price change

Astrazeneca 158.9 7592.00 33.00Glencore 135.7 279.90 -5.10Rio Tinto 135.3 5946.00 -186.00Bp 127.4 302.45 -6.80Unilever 123.5 4394.00 40.00Glaxosmithkline 107.5 1413.60 20.20Bhp 97.0 2135.00 -73.00Anglo American 95.0 2663.50 -149.50Reckitt Benckiser 91.8 6274.00 -52.00Vodafone 82.2 127.22 -1.72


UpsIndivior 115.30 10.30 9.81Aveva 3805.00 248.00 6.97Tui Ag 403.20 19.70 5.14Watches Of Switzerland 631.00 23.00 3.78Hiscox Ltd 998.00 31.40 3.25

DownsPetrofac 120.75 -45.85 -27.52Babcock Int 220.30 -43.20 -16.39Hilton Food 1000.00 -164.00 -14.09Synthomer 421.00 -24.80 -5.56Anglo American 2663.50 -149.50 -5.31


Sap Se O.n. 593.6 103.52 -0.68Asml Holding 562.7 435.85 -11.50Lvmh 342.0 493.95 -14.05Total 336.0 37.10 -0.71Volkswagen Ag Vzo O.n. 296.5 151.88 -0.10Siemens Ag Na O.n. 290.6 119.78 -2.56Santander 278.9 2.72 -0.08Linde Eo 0,001 270.6 213.70 -5.10Royal Dutch Shella 269.4 16.79 -0.29Basf Se Na O.n. 261.6 67.29 -0.81


UpsAegon 3.64 0.12 3.30Natixis 3.15 0.08 2.44Publicise Sa 44.27 0.66 1.51Danone 53.62 0.70 1.32Novo Nordisk B A/s 59.50 0.73 1.23

DownsB. Sabadell 0.38 -0.02 -5.43Caixabank 2.22 -0.11 -4.80Galp Energia-nom 8.95 -0.44 -4.67Tenaris 6.82 -0.30 -4.19Alstom 44.98 -1.91 -4.07


Softbank . 1451.1 8518.00 -51.00Fast Retailing Co., 772.0 90990.00 -2670.00Tokyo Electron 763.8 43900.00 1650.00Toyota Motor 470.6 7733.00 -130.00Sony 431.0 10560.00 -190.00Sumco 367.2 2415.00 9.00Takeda Pharmaceutical 367.1 3601.00 -89.00Canon . 354.4 2248.50 174.00Mitsubishi Ufj Fin,. 327.8 497.90 -3.20Advantest 292.6 8940.00 240.00


UpsCanon . 2248.50 174.00 8.39Seiko Epson 1729.00 118.00 7.32J.front Retailing Co., 890.00 43.00 5.08Ricoh , 768.00 36.00 4.92Sharp 1922.00 87.00 4.74

DownsIsuzu Motors 981.00 -39.00 -3.82Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal 1389.00 -52.50 -3.64Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, 3218.00 -113.00 -3.39Hino Motors, 885.00 -31.00 -3.38Hitachi Zosen 643.00 -22.00 -3.31

Based on the constituents of the S&P500 Based on the constituents of the FTSE 350 index Based on the constituents of the FTSEurofirst 300 Eurozone index Based on the constituents of the Nikkei 225 index

Jan 15 %Chg %ChgFTSE 100 price(p) week ytdWinnersAveva 3805.00 7.8 -Next 8018.00 4.3 -Int Consolidated Airlines S.a. 162.25 3.5 -Dcc 5714.00 3.4 -Whitbread 3169.00 2.7 -Johnson Matthey 2748.00 2.3 -Astrazeneca 7592.00 1.6 -Associated British Foods 2249.00 1.4 -Ocado 2513.00 1.3 -Bp 302.45 1.3 -Glencore 279.90 1.2 -Royal Dutch Shell 1483.00 1.0 -

LosersJust Eat Takeaway.com N.v. 7872.00 -12.5 -Fresnillo 1087.50 -9.7 -B&m Eur Value Retail S.a. 504.20 -7.4 -Experian 2682.00 -6.8 -Burberry 1716.00 -6.5 -Polymetal Int 1658.50 -6.3 -Persimmon 2690.00 -6.3 -Kingfisher 269.40 -5.8 -Reckitt Benckiser 6274.00 -5.8 -Rio Tinto 5946.00 -5.8 -Sse 1519.50 -5.7 -Berkeley Holdings (the) 4467.00 -5.7 -

Jan 15 %Chg %ChgFTSE 250 price(p) week ytdWinnersJust 80.00 14.6 -Indivior 115.30 9.7 -Vietnam Enterprise Investments 622.00 7.4 11.3Royal Mail 386.50 7.3 -Tui Ag 403.20 6.1 -Easyjet 832.00 5.8 -Signature Aviation 429.20 5.7 -Tritax Big Box Reit 176.20 4.3 -Gamesys 1322.00 4.3 13.5Premier Foods 110.80 3.9 -Aj Bell 449.00 3.7 -Playtech 473.40 3.5 -

LosersPetrofac 120.75 -27.2 -Babcock Int 220.30 -18.9 -Hochschild Mining 192.30 -11.8 -Provident Fin 277.80 -11.4 -Dunelm 1197.00 -10.5 -Centamin 116.40 -9.9 -Marshalls 681.00 -9.6 -Aston Martin Lagonda Global Holdings 1615.20 -9.5 -Ao World 389.00 -9.3 -Sanne 560.00 -9.1 -Polypipe 530.00 -8.9 -Fdm (holdings) 1022.00 -8.7 -8.4

Jan 15 %Chg %ChgFTSE SmallCap price(p) week ytdWinnersSchroder Uk Public Private Trust 34.25 21.2 -Aptitude Software 540.00 15.9 20.7Robert Walters 528.00 14.8 -Stv 330.00 12.8 -Ricardo 381.00 12.4 10.7Kenmare Resources 410.00 11.7 -Saga 270.00 11.1 5.1Carr's 136.00 9.9 5.0Bakkavor 91.70 9.8 -Zotefoams 415.00 8.1 10.4U And I 67.00 7.7 6.7Stobart Ld 33.00 7.7 29.4

LosersHunting 215.40 -11.2 -Restaurant 61.00 -11.1 -7.7Hollywood Bowl 188.00 -10.9 -Clipper Logistics 573.00 -9.2 -De La Rue 160.20 -9.0 -4.9Photo-me Int 46.85 -8.0 -Jpmorgan Japan Small Cap Growth & ome 553.00 -7.8 -8.4Card Factory 38.65 -7.3 -4.2Bank Of Georgia 1196.00 -7.1 -4.9Capital & Regional 69.80 -6.9 -5.7Palace Capital 190.00 -6.9 -5.0Kin And Carta 150.00 -6.8 7.3

Jan 15 %Chg %ChgIndustry Sectors price(p) week ytdWinnersIndustrial Transportation 3197.97 5.6 11.7Index - Technology Hardware & Equipment 2070.39 1.5 -0.2Oil & Gas Producers 5206.02 0.8 15.1Pharmaceuticals & Biotech. 16423.08 0.6 3.9Food Producers 6979.26 -0.4 -1.1Software & Computer Services 1963.31 -0.5 2.6Gas Water & Multiutilities 4869.27 -0.5 2.1Life Insurance 7576.40 -0.5 5.1Industrial Metals 5312.49 -0.9 7.5Food & Drug Retailers 4564.22 -0.9 5.7Tobacco 29667.58 -1.0 2.9Nonlife Insurance 3287.20 -1.1 0.5

LosersOil Equipment & Services 5921.77 -9.1 6.0Automobiles & Parts 3914.61 -7.1 -Household Goods 17018.82 -5.5 -3.3Electricity 8986.99 -5.5 1.2Construction & Materials 7209.06 -4.9 4.8Beverages 22828.57 -4.5 0.5Mining 23924.01 -4.2 10.3General Retailers 2571.45 -4.0 1.7Media 8008.11 -3.5 0.0General Industrials 6784.54 -3.5 2.1Support Services 10067.09 -3.4 1.4Real Estate & Investment Servic 2498.98 -2.9 -3.4

Based on last week's performance. †Price at suspension.

CURRENCIES

DOLLAR EURO POUNDClosing Day's Closing Day's Closing Day's

Jan 15 Currency Mid Change Mid Change Mid Change






Jan 15 Currency Mid Change Mid Change Mid ChangeArgentina Argentine Peso 85.7357 0.3559 103.6758 0.0670 116.4382 -0.3525Australia Australian Dollar 1.2984 0.0114 1.5700 0.0084 1.7633 0.0029Bahrain Bahrainin Dinar 0.3770 - 0.4559 -0.0016 0.5120 -0.0037Bolivia Bolivian Boliviano 6.9100 - 8.3559 -0.0294 9.3845 -0.0677Brazil Brazilian Real 5.2710 0.0424 6.3739 0.0290 7.1585 0.0064Canada Canadian Dollar 1.2759 0.0104 1.5429 0.0072 1.7328 0.0017Chile Chilean Peso 735.6050 4.5150 889.5292 2.3486 999.0290 -1.0258China Chinese Yuan 6.4744 0.0064 7.8292 -0.0198 8.7929 -0.0546Colombia Colombian Peso 3473.4700 -0.0700 4200.2882 -14.8668 4717.3394 -34.1009Costa Rica Costa Rican Colon 608.0750 -1.7300 735.3137 -4.6871 825.8298 -8.3197Czech Republic Czech Koruna 21.6680 0.1081 26.2020 0.0389 29.4274 -0.0643Denmark Danish Krone 6.1519 0.0222 7.4391 0.0008 8.3549 -0.0298Egypt Egyptian Pound 15.6628 0.0308 18.9402 -0.0293 21.2717 -0.1112Hong Kong Hong Kong Dollar 7.7538 0.0002 9.3763 -0.0327 10.5305 -0.0756Hungary Hungarian Forint 298.3048 2.1201 360.7245 1.3034 405.1292 -0.0204India Indian Rupee 73.0688 0.0243 88.3583 -0.2814 99.2350 -0.6821

Indonesia Indonesian Rupiah 14020.0000 -35.0000 16953.6639 -102.1598 19040.6556 -185.1223Israel Israeli Shekel 3.2691 0.0818 3.9531 0.0854 4.4397 0.0799Japan Japanese Yen 103.8750 0.0500 125.6107 -0.3814 141.0732 -0.9486..One Month 103.8750 0.0499 125.6107 -0.3813 141.0732 -0.9486..Three Month 103.8749 0.0498 125.6108 -0.3811 141.0731 -0.9487..One Year 103.8745 0.0490 125.6111 -0.3805 141.0732 -0.9489Kenya Kenyan Shilling 110.1000 0.1500 133.1382 -0.2865 149.5274 -0.8727Kuwait Kuwaiti Dinar 0.3033 0.0001 0.3667 -0.0012 0.4118 -0.0029Malaysia Malaysian Ringgit 4.0365 0.0005 4.8811 -0.0166 5.4820 -0.0388Mexico Mexican Peso 19.7988 0.0048 23.9416 -0.0785 26.8888 -0.1873New Zealand New Zealand Dollar 1.4012 0.0129 1.6943 0.0097 1.9029 0.0040Nigeria Nigerian Naira 394.7500 - 477.3508 -1.6799 536.1120 -3.8647Norway Norwegian Krone 8.5559 0.0776 10.3462 0.0577 11.6198 0.0223Pakistan Pakistani Rupee 160.3000 0.5500 193.8425 -0.0147 217.7043 -0.8170Peru Peruvian Nuevo Sol 3.6135 0.0046 4.3696 -0.0098 4.9075 -0.0291Philippines Philippine Peso 48.0625 0.0075 58.1195 -0.1954 65.2739 -0.4603

Poland Polish Zloty 3.7539 0.0086 4.5394 -0.0055 5.0982 -0.0249Romania Romanian Leu 4.0314 0.0155 4.8750 0.0017 5.4751 -0.0182Russia Russian Ruble 73.6888 0.4463 89.1081 0.2280 100.0771 -0.1109Saudi Arabia Saudi Riyal 3.7518 - 4.5369 -0.0160 5.0953 -0.0367Singapore Singapore Dollar 1.3303 0.0044 1.6086 -0.0003 1.8066 -0.0070South Africa South African Rand 15.2288 0.1137 18.4153 0.0732 20.6822 0.0065South Korea South Korean Won 1099.4500 1.4000 1329.5082 -2.9798 1493.1689 -8.8488Sweden Swedish Krona 8.3820 0.0564 10.1360 0.0328 11.3837 -0.0049Switzerland Swiss Franc 0.8902 0.0013 1.0765 -0.0023 1.2090 -0.0070Taiwan New Taiwan Dollar 27.9820 0.0165 33.8372 -0.0991 38.0025 -0.2514Thailand Thai Baht 30.0425 0.0450 36.3288 -0.0732 40.8009 -0.2326Tunisia Tunisian Dinar 2.7140 0.0051 3.2818 -0.0054 3.6858 -0.0196Turkey Turkish Lira 7.4557 0.0919 9.0157 0.0798 10.1256 0.0527United Arab Emirates UAE Dirham 3.6732 - 4.4418 -0.0156 4.9885 -0.0360United Kingdom Pound Sterling 0.7363 0.0053 0.8904 0.0033 - -..One Month 0.7363 0.0053 0.8903 0.0033 - -

..Three Month 0.7364 0.0053 0.8903 0.0033 - -

..One Year 0.7367 0.0053 0.8899 0.0033 - -United States United States Dollar - - 1.2092 -0.0043 1.3581 -0.0098..One Month - - 1.2092 -0.1586 1.3581 -0.0098..Three Month - - 1.2090 -0.1586 1.3582 -0.0098..One Year - - 1.2082 -0.1586 1.3585 -0.0098Venezuela Venezuelan Bolivar Fuerte - - - - - -Vietnam Vietnamese Dong 23066.0000 1.5000 27892.5245 -96.3359 31326.0636 -223.8578European Union Euro 0.8270 0.0029 - - 1.1231 -0.0041..One Month 0.8269 0.0029 - - 1.1231 -0.0041..Three Month 0.8267 0.0029 - - 1.1230 -0.0041..One Year 0.8259 0.0029 - - 1.1226 -0.0041

Rates are derived from WM Reuters Spot Rates and MorningStar (latest rates at time of production). Some values are rounded. Currency redenominated by 1000. The exchange rates printed in this table are also available at www.FT.com/marketsdata

FTSE ACTUARIES SHARE INDICES UK SERIESwww.ft.com/equities

Produced in conjunction with the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries£ Strlg Day's Euro £ Strlg £ Strlg Year Div P/E X/D TotalJan 15 chge% Index Jan 14 Jan 13 ago yield% Cover ratio adj Return

FTSE 100 (100) 6735.71 -0.97 5900.50 6801.96 6745.52 7609.81 3.51 1.56 18.27 2.24 6439.93FTSE 250 (250) 20615.59 -0.77 18059.31 20775.75 20616.31 21721.23 2.25 1.37 32.57 9.38 16371.24FTSE 250 ex Inv Co (183) 21162.15 -0.76 18538.10 21324.34 21127.66 23023.35 2.22 1.27 35.44 10.26 17141.75FTSE 350 (350) 3830.92 -0.94 3355.90 3867.22 3835.55 4275.36 3.29 1.53 19.80 1.36 7299.49FTSE 350 ex Investment Trusts (281) 3733.65 -0.95 3270.69 3769.50 3737.85 4219.51 3.37 1.41 21.03 1.34 3671.30FTSE 350 Higher Yield (145) 3069.75 -1.24 2689.11 3108.14 3066.92 3703.43 4.66 1.45 14.80 1.12 6432.71FTSE 350 Lower Yield (205) 4344.00 -0.64 3805.36 4371.98 4358.50 4504.72 1.92 1.74 29.87 1.49 5141.94FTSE SmallCap (256) 6327.53 -0.66 5542.94 6369.46 6339.51 6021.07 2.79 -0.70 -51.15 4.27 10068.52FTSE SmallCap ex Inv Co (140) 4993.04 -0.49 4373.92 5017.60 4992.23 4931.44 2.60 -0.51 -75.97 1.25 8302.52FTSE All-Share (606) 3803.75 -0.93 3332.10 3839.42 3808.43 4222.79 3.27 1.47 20.76 1.39 7321.60FTSE All-Share ex Inv Co (421) 3669.61 -0.94 3214.59 3704.53 3673.65 4137.20 3.35 1.39 21.53 1.31 3664.77FTSE All-Share ex Multinationals (537) 1208.88 -1.05 877.70 1221.73 1215.59 1270.15 2.65 1.44 26.14 0.81 2424.40FTSE Fledgling (90) 10921.67 -0.35 9567.42 10959.59 10913.94 9933.48 2.17 0.95 48.70 8.16 22505.22FTSE Fledgling ex Inv Co (43) 13161.64 -0.23 11529.64 13192.11 13111.07 11819.58 1.83 5.81 9.41 6.07 26474.97FTSE All-Small (346) 4394.14 -0.64 3849.28 4422.49 4401.82 4171.22 2.75 -0.63 -57.71 2.98 8970.56FTSE All-Small ex Inv Co (183) 3736.63 -0.48 3273.30 3754.61 3735.46 3675.87 2.57 -0.32 -121.04 0.96 7870.56FTSE AIM All-Share (723) 1173.12 -0.89 1027.66 1183.62 1185.56 970.05 0.74 0.34 397.12 0.26 1347.54FTSE 100 (100) 6735.71 -0.97 5900.50 6801.96 6745.52 7609.81 3.51 1.56 18.27 2.24 6439.93

FTSE Sector IndicesOil & Gas (12) 5400.64 -1.82 4730.98 5500.72 5407.54 8569.68 5.73 1.19 14.61 0.00 6075.55Oil & Gas Producers (9) 5230.08 -1.73 4581.56 5322.31 5229.69 8311.13 5.82 1.19 14.49 0.00 6100.91Oil Equipment Services & Distribution (3) 5878.76 -6.87 5149.81 6312.73 6377.29 8489.18 0.19 17.16 30.40 0.00 5067.85Basic Materials (23) 7839.91 -3.12 6867.78 8092.52 7895.12 6365.72 3.22 2.68 11.59 0.41 9418.69Chemicals (8) 15272.46 -1.87 13378.72 15563.81 15404.94 13696.14 1.51 2.03 32.68 0.00 14682.29Industrial Metals & Mining (4) 5722.40 -2.06 5012.84 5842.90 5754.27 3982.42 5.25 2.12 8.98 9.37 7710.95Mining (11) 22906.02 -3.29 20065.73 23684.61 23064.68 18423.08 3.32 2.74 10.97 0.00 14530.55Industrials (97) 6111.03 -1.06 5353.28 6176.47 6160.95 6022.22 1.69 0.84 70.72 3.66 6802.85Construction & Materials (16) 7575.79 -0.41 6636.41 7606.82 7605.49 7175.59 1.77 0.14 412.17 0.00 8752.35Aerospace & Defense (9) 3746.33 -1.48 3281.80 3802.76 3749.25 5433.55 3.09 -2.01 -16.10 1.37 4373.33General Industrials (9) 5454.57 -2.43 4778.22 5590.16 5579.06 4998.22 1.94 1.32 39.19 0.00 6832.71Electronic & Electrical Equipment (8) 12277.09 -0.14 10754.77 12294.42 12149.68 10196.41 0.94 2.21 47.82 0.00 11794.95Industrial Engineering (9) 16620.96 -1.19 14560.01 16820.32 16697.43 14644.00 1.16 2.58 33.31 0.00 21730.98Industrial Transportation (7) 4810.68 0.81 4214.17 4772.04 4744.44 3874.52 2.90 0.50 68.42 1.73 4888.63Support Services (39) 9620.03 -0.84 8427.17 9701.11 9724.45 9206.38 1.30 2.33 33.04 12.42 10707.32Consumer Goods (42) 18322.12 -0.19 16050.23 18357.82 18261.59 20829.30 3.95 1.49 16.99 0.00 15570.60Automobiles & Parts (2) 3934.67 -0.63 3446.78 3959.62 4017.51 5030.79 0.43 -7.08 -33.15 0.00 4026.03Beverages (6) 22924.99 -0.77 20082.36 23103.89 23137.00 25806.64 2.46 1.62 25.07 0.00 17614.78Food Producers (10) 7077.80 -0.93 6200.17 7144.22 7053.35 8186.99 2.58 1.79 21.58 0.00 6583.24Household Goods & Home Construction (14)14280.52 -0.59 12509.77 14365.75 14230.90 15529.44 2.82 2.01 17.60 0.00 11507.88Leisure Goods (2) 26891.57 -5.19 23557.09 28364.12 27264.07 17982.39 1.67 1.62 36.82 0.00 28265.08Personal Goods (6) 32190.46 0.82 28198.93 31929.89 31905.00 33345.01 3.23 1.38 22.42 0.00 24111.87Tobacco (2) 29667.63 -0.38 25988.93 29781.17 29436.37 37065.64 8.05 1.32 9.41 0.00 24359.08Health Care (15) 11739.20 0.61 10283.57 11667.76 11566.53 13026.76 3.58 1.12 24.88 1.34 10218.43Health Care Equipment & Services (6) 6861.52 -0.64 6010.71 6905.45 6851.99 8530.62 1.91 0.98 53.17 7.73 6329.43Pharmaceuticals & Biotechnology (9) 16364.96 0.75 14335.75 16242.33 16099.68 17914.19 3.77 1.13 23.47 0.00 12797.64Consumer Services (79) 5197.30 -0.73 4552.85 5235.76 5208.12 5632.31 1.78 1.43 39.47 0.03 5317.74Food & Drug Retailers (5) 4741.33 -0.96 4153.41 4787.43 4781.75 4237.24 2.78 1.33 26.94 0.00 6034.52General Retailers (26) 2427.38 -1.56 2126.39 2465.81 2497.11 2337.74 1.12 2.05 43.50 0.00 3037.21Media (13) 8198.73 -0.45 7182.11 8235.80 8175.72 9304.62 1.69 2.94 20.15 0.18 5525.83Travel & Leisure (35) 8277.88 -0.37 7251.44 8308.57 8177.98 10097.86 1.76 0.28 205.59 0.00 8495.57Telecommunications (6) 1885.76 -1.11 1651.93 1906.99 1896.68 2329.89 7.25 0.57 24.06 0.00 2608.35Fixed Line Telecommunications (3) 1760.02 -0.32 1541.78 1765.67 1784.78 2258.56 10.10 1.04 9.52 0.00 1931.24Mobile Telecommunications (3) 2897.24 -1.42 2537.99 2938.86 2904.77 3523.32 6.15 0.28 58.52 0.00 3642.10Utilities (8) 7264.17 0.08 6363.43 7258.70 7325.43 7887.76 4.98 1.15 17.50 27.34 10190.83Electricity (3) 8966.58 -0.54 7854.75 9015.33 9258.43 8530.96 5.21 1.03 18.56 128.41 16679.72Gas Water & Multiutilities (5) 6435.24 0.30 5637.29 6416.20 6434.18 7296.02 4.90 1.19 17.15 0.00 8899.73Financials (307) 4528.18 -1.04 3966.70 4575.64 4542.39 5070.60 3.01 1.76 18.84 1.75 4728.09Banks (11) 2553.41 -1.55 2236.80 2593.55 2571.17 3650.59 3.68 2.22 12.28 0.00 2104.60Nonlife Insurance (7) 3762.84 -0.04 3296.26 3764.18 3766.39 3677.18 2.92 1.86 18.35 0.00 7463.00Life Insurance/Assurance (6) 7704.44 -0.85 6749.11 7770.74 7683.10 7959.42 3.49 1.98 14.49 0.00 8758.60Real Estate Investment & Services (18) 2440.28 0.06 2137.69 2438.89 2452.09 2953.74 1.02 3.24 30.29 0.00 7031.16Real Estate Investment Trusts (40) 2431.58 -0.76 2130.07 2450.30 2415.19 2948.75 2.88 -2.45 -14.18 4.73 3467.41General Financial (40) 10425.32 -1.33 9132.61 10566.20 10498.05 10715.42 3.18 1.10 28.56 4.73 13505.17Equity Investment Instruments (185) 12957.45 -0.74 11350.77 13054.43 12996.33 11390.98 2.22 3.24 13.88 6.37 7761.59Non Financials (299) 4564.79 -0.89 3998.77 4605.87 4567.41 5052.76 3.36 1.38 21.51 1.63 7724.07Technology (17) 2092.81 1.15 1833.30 2069.06 2064.66 2310.12 1.82 0.09 612.04 11.65 2937.06Software & Computer Services (14) 2242.88 1.22 1964.77 2215.78 2209.21 2545.62 1.90 -0.14 -363.91 13.93 3332.52Technology Hardware & Equipment (3) 5193.20 0.50 4549.26 5167.24 5193.41 4005.75 1.14 3.47 25.38 0.00 6446.52

Hourly movements 8.00 9.00 10.00 11.00 12.00 13.00 14.00 15.00 16.00 High/day Low/dayFTSE 100 6771.44 6763.10 6783.18 6751.94 6751.07 6738.42 6741.27 6731.84 6718.18 6783.34 6677.74FTSE 250 20742.55 20599.79 20631.07 20585.61 20558.98 20579.03 20619.62 20574.75 20588.93 20746.45 20495.56FTSE SmallCap 6381.51 6365.20 6361.75 6358.22 6352.88 6348.16 6346.22 6343.46 6329.84 6382.23 6320.71FTSE All-Share 3824.88 3816.34 3826.29 3810.73 3809.40 3804.24 3806.75 3801.05 3795.07 3828.67 3773.98Time of FTSE 100 Day's high:09:59:45 Day's Low15:25:00 FTSE 100 2010/11 High: 6873.26(08/01/2021) Low: 6571.88(04/01/2021)Time of FTSE All-Share Day's high:08:09:00 Day's Low15:25:00 FTSE 100 2010/11 High: 3880.43(08/01/2021) Low: 3724.50(04/01/2021)Further information is available on http://www.ftse.com © FTSE International Limited. 2013. All Rights reserved. ”FTSE®” is a trade mark of theLondon Stock Exchange Group companies and is used by FTSE International Limited under licence. † Sector P/E ratios greater than 80 are not shown.For changes to FTSE Fledgling Index constituents please refer to www.ftse.com/indexchanges. ‡ Values are negative.

FT 30 INDEX

Jan 15 Jan 14 Jan 13 Jan 12 Jan 11 Yr Ago High LowFT 30 2576.00 2595.50 2569.20 2574.50 2585.50 0.00 3314.70 1337.80FT 30 Div Yield - - - - - 0.00 3.93 2.74P/E Ratio net - - - - - 0.00 19.44 14.26FT 30 since compilation: 4198.4 high: 19/07/1999; low49.4 18/02/1900Base Date: 1/7/35FT 30 hourly changes

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 High Low2595.5 2585.5 2597.7 2493.1 2399.1 2395.8 2394.3 2414 2426.7 2439.2 2366.1

FT30 constituents and recent additions/deletions can be found at www.ft.com/ft30

FX: EFFECTIVE INDICES

Jan 14 Jan 13 Mnth Ago Jan 15 Jan 14 Mnth Ago

Australia - - -Canada - - -Denmark - - -Japan - - -New Zealand - - -Norway - - -

Sweden - - -Switzerland - - -UK 79.47 79.11 77.10USA - - -Euro - - -

Source: Bank of England. New Sterling ERI base Jan 2005 = 100. Other indices base average 1990 = 100.Index rebased 1/2/95. for further information about ERIs see www.bankofengland.co.uk

FTSE SECTORS: LEADERS & LAGGARDS

Year to date percentage changesOil Equipment & Serv 15.68Mining 15.18Oil & Gas 14.19Oil & Gas Producers 14.16Basic Materials 13.80Construct & Material 9.62Industrial Metals & 8.54Fixed Line Telecomms 7.25Electricity 7.08Food & Drug Retailer 6.68FTSE 100 Index 6.39NON FINANCIALS Index 6.34Telecommunications 6.32Electronic & Elec Eq 6.26Banks 6.06Mobile Telecomms 5.97Travel & Leisure 5.95

Health Care Eq & Srv 5.84General Retailers 5.83Industrial Transport 5.79FTSE All{HY-}Share Index 5.63Life Insurance 5.62Consumer Services 5.47Industrial Eng 5.43Beverages 5.17Industrials 5.17Support Services 4.92Leisure Goods 4.29Tobacco 4.02Utilities 3.82Media 3.77Financials 3.60Health Care 3.50Chemicals 3.38Financial Services 3.25

Pharmace & Biotech 3.24Software & Comp Serv 3.11Technology 2.89FTSE 250 Index 2.81Consumer Goods 2.79Gas Water & Multi 2.65FTSE SmallCap Index 2.39Equity Invest Instr 2.30Household Goods & Ho 2.29Nonlife Insurance 1.63Personal Goods 1.42Tech Hardware & Eq 1.08Real Est Invest & Tr 0.16Aerospace & Defense 0.09Real Est Invest & Se -0.17Food Producers -0.50Automobiles & Parts -8.27Oil & Gas Producers -40.36

FTSE GLOBAL EQUITY INDEX SERIES

Jan 14 No of US $ Day Mth YTD Total YTD Gr DivRegions & countries stocks indices % % % retn % Yield

Jan 14 No of US $ Day Mth YTD Total YTD Gr DivSectors stocks indices % % % retn % Yield

FTSE Global All Cap 8954 747.27 0.1 5.6 2.7 1152.34 2.7 1.8FTSE Global All Cap 8954 742.59 -0.8 4.8 2.0 1145.03 2.1 1.8FTSE Global Large Cap 1726 665.35 -0.1 5.0 2.2 1056.76 2.2 1.9FTSE Global Mid Cap 2229 946.83 0.3 5.7 3.3 1373.72 3.3 1.8FTSE Global Small Cap 4999 1059.21 1.0 8.9 5.3 1477.05 5.3 1.5FTSE All-World 3955 435.93 0.0 5.2 2.4 711.46 2.4 1.9FTSE World 2566 772.25 -0.1 4.9 2.1 1691.76 2.1 1.9FTSE Global All Cap ex UNITED KINGDOM In 8663 789.62 0.1 5.5 2.6 1195.73 2.6 1.8FTSE Global All Cap ex USA 7206 585.09 0.5 6.4 3.8 984.59 3.8 2.3FTSE Global All Cap ex JAPAN 7561 771.03 0.1 5.6 2.6 1200.15 2.7 1.8FTSE Global All Cap ex Eurozone 8315 787.14 0.1 5.6 2.7 1188.87 2.8 1.8FTSE Developed 2135 705.41 -0.1 4.7 1.9 1096.89 2.0 1.8FTSE Developed All Cap 5612 742.83 0.1 5.2 2.3 1138.76 2.4 1.8FTSE Developed Large Cap 831 658.71 -0.2 4.5 1.6 1042.41 1.7 1.9FTSE Developed Europe Large Cap 225 402.99 0.5 5.0 2.6 753.62 2.6 2.5FTSE Developed Europe Mid Cap 344 714.13 0.6 6.1 2.3 1168.57 2.3 2.0FTSE Dev Europe Small Cap 690 986.93 0.8 7.9 2.4 1555.48 2.4 1.8FTSE North America Large Cap 224 836.15 -0.5 3.7 0.7 1221.61 0.8 1.6FTSE North America Mid Cap 412 1097.35 0.3 5.7 3.5 1478.29 3.5 1.6FTSE North America Small Cap 1292 1220.67 1.2 10.3 6.7 1585.84 6.7 1.3FTSE North America 636 548.07 -0.3 4.1 1.2 818.18 1.3 1.6FTSE Developed ex North America 1499 302.55 0.5 5.8 3.3 548.39 3.3 2.3FTSE Japan Large Cap 178 468.38 0.6 5.6 3.3 657.92 3.3 2.0FTSE Japan Mid Cap 335 668.27 0.6 4.0 3.7 889.88 3.7 2.0FTSE Global wi JAPAN Small Cap 880 724.61 0.0 2.5 1.6 999.51 1.6 2.1FTSE Japan 513 193.39 0.6 5.3 3.4 304.06 3.4 2.0FTSE Asia Pacific Large Cap ex Japan 923 927.30 0.4 9.4 6.0 1606.22 6.0 1.9FTSE Asia Pacific Mid Cap ex Japan 893 1070.13 -0.1 6.8 4.2 1780.16 4.2 2.4FTSE Asia Pacific Small Cap ex Japan 1842 668.09 0.5 5.6 2.8 1086.25 2.8 2.2FTSE Asia Pacific Ex Japan 1816 723.11 0.3 9.1 5.9 1330.64 5.9 2.0FTSE Emerging All Cap 3342 938.60 0.6 8.5 5.5 1544.44 5.5 2.1FTSE Emerging Large Cap 895 909.01 0.7 9.1 6.0 1505.24 6.0 2.0FTSE Emerging Mid Cap 925 1082.05 0.1 6.1 3.3 1780.38 3.4 2.7FTSE Emerging Small Cap 1522 883.18 0.6 6.6 3.6 1393.44 3.6 2.4FTSE Emerging Europe 76 397.41 0.9 9.1 7.3 754.85 7.4 4.7FTSE Latin America All Cap 244 852.38 1.8 6.3 3.7 1462.08 3.8 2.4FTSE Middle East and Africa All Cap 321 673.27 0.3 4.4 3.1 1163.90 3.1 3.0FTSE Global wi UNITED KINGDOM All Cap In 291 332.56 1.1 7.2 4.9 635.69 5.0 3.3FTSE Global wi USA All Cap 1748 956.52 -0.2 4.9 1.8 1348.54 1.9 1.5FTSE Europe All Cap 1410 483.54 0.5 5.6 2.6 869.49 2.7 2.4FTSE Eurozone All Cap 639 472.83 0.4 4.7 2.0 846.78 2.1 2.0FTSE EDHEC-Risk Efficient All-World 3955 485.00 0.2 5.4 2.7 731.40 2.8 2.1FTSE EDHEC-Risk Efficient Developed Europe 569 381.87 0.5 5.8 2.3 637.33 2.3 2.1Oil & Gas 128 289.48 1.7 10.8 12.2 541.85 12.3 4.5Oil & Gas Producers 92 272.56 2.0 11.0 12.8 521.34 13.0 4.6

Oil Equipment & Services 25 211.80 2.0 2.0 11.9 359.34 11.9 5.2Basic Materials 353 645.64 0.2 0.2 5.8 1097.08 5.8 2.5Chemicals 163 905.56 -0.4 -0.4 4.1 1523.63 4.1 2.2Forestry & Paper 20 327.24 -0.9 -0.9 3.5 622.72 3.5 2.4Industrial Metals & Mining 92 509.78 0.9 0.9 8.8 875.50 8.8 2.6Mining 78 947.37 0.9 0.9 7.6 1644.18 7.6 2.8Industrials 737 539.69 0.1 0.1 3.0 831.76 3.0 1.5Construction & Materials 142 641.53 -0.1 -0.1 4.1 1037.96 4.1 1.7Aerospace & Defense 36 733.02 1.3 1.3 0.0 1112.67 0.0 2.0General Industrials 71 261.01 0.2 0.2 3.1 441.08 3.1 2.2Electronic & Electrical Equipment 139 717.31 0.2 0.2 7.2 1002.61 7.2 1.2Industrial Engineering 145 1090.54 0.4 0.4 6.4 1672.81 6.4 1.4Industrial Transportation 122 935.27 0.2 0.2 2.0 1450.52 2.0 1.6Support Services 82 636.11 -0.7 -0.7 -1.1 924.90 -1.0 1.1Consumer Goods 532 621.75 -0.1 -0.1 1.7 1004.77 1.8 2.0Automobiles & Parts 130 676.97 -0.2 -0.2 10.5 1065.19 10.5 1.3Beverages 67 716.63 -0.5 -0.5 -3.0 1168.54 -3.0 2.4Food Producers 132 708.37 0.0 0.0 -1.3 1167.61 -1.3 2.4Household Goods & Home Construction 61 571.32 -0.3 -0.3 -0.8 916.72 -0.8 2.1Leisure Goods 44 336.48 0.5 0.5 1.9 464.39 1.9 1.0Personal Goods 84 1036.13 -0.3 -0.3 -1.7 1545.80 -1.7 1.4Tobacco 14 916.91 0.7 0.7 1.0 2331.65 1.0 6.7Health Care 309 700.47 -0.1 -0.1 2.1 1080.11 2.1 1.7Health Care Equipment & Services 113 1414.07 -0.9 -0.9 1.6 1704.87 1.6 0.7Pharmaceuticals & Biotechnology 196 455.18 0.5 0.5 2.4 746.31 2.4 2.3Consumer Services 440 691.22 0.0 0.0 0.2 968.68 0.2 1.0Food & Drug Retailers 69 314.03 0.4 0.4 5.1 476.98 5.2 2.4General Retailers 148 1274.52 -0.1 -0.1 0.6 1716.34 0.7 0.6Media 84 458.15 -0.4 -0.4 -2.4 646.46 -2.3 1.0Travel & Leisure 139 494.53 0.4 0.4 -0.7 708.57 -0.7 1.6Telecommunication 91 156.06 0.5 0.5 1.4 341.80 1.8 4.5Fixed Line Telecommuniations 40 117.51 0.6 0.6 1.0 290.01 1.9 5.7Mobile Telecommunications 51 187.31 0.3 0.3 1.7 357.32 1.7 3.0Utilities 190 324.57 -0.3 -0.3 1.2 712.77 1.2 3.2Electricity 130 366.33 -0.3 -0.3 1.5 793.34 1.5 3.2Gas Water & Multiutilities 60 322.67 -0.1 -0.1 0.6 730.86 0.6 3.1Financials 866 260.34 0.1 0.1 3.2 473.44 3.3 2.7Banks 271 197.53 0.9 0.9 7.1 394.36 7.2 3.1Nonlife Insurance 74 301.36 0.0 0.0 0.7 474.40 0.9 2.8Life Insurance 53 245.88 0.1 0.1 5.8 441.41 5.8 3.1Financial Services 209 424.04 -1.1 -1.1 1.0 624.66 1.0 1.6Technology 309 526.45 -0.3 -0.3 1.2 675.54 1.2 0.9Software & Computer Services 166 829.26 -0.4 -0.4 -1.3 993.04 -1.3 0.5Technology Hardware & Equipment 143 443.79 -0.2 -0.2 4.1 607.90 4.1 1.2Alternative Energy 11 277.80 -2.4 -2.4 3.4 394.83 3.4 0.6Real Estate Investment & Services 162 359.26 -0.1 -0.1 0.2 662.79 0.2 2.7Real Estate Investment Trusts 97 445.07 0.8 0.8 -2.1 981.65 -2.1 3.7FTSE Global Large Cap 1726 662.70 -0.8 -0.8 1.7 1052.45 1.8 1.9

The FTSE Global Equity Series, launched in 2003, contains the FTSE Global Small Cap Indices and broader FTSE Global All Cap Indices (large/mid/small cap) as well as the enhanced FTSE All-World index Series (large/mid cap) - please see https://research.ftserussell.com/Products/indices/Home/indexfiltergeis?indexName=GEISAC&currency=USD&rtn=CAP&segment=global-developed–emerging. The trade names Fundamental Index®and RAFI® are registered trademarks and the patented and patent-pending proprietary intellectual property of Research Affiliates, LLC (US Patent Nos. 7,620,577; 7,747,502; 7,778,905; 7,792,719; Patent Pending Publ.Nos. US-2006-0149645-A1, US-2007-0055598-A1, US-2008-0288416-A1, US-2010- 0063942-A1, WO 2005/076812, WO 2007/078399 A2, WO 2008/118372, EPN 1733352, and HK1099110). ”EDHEC™” is a trade markof EDHEC Business School As of January 2nd 2006, FTSE is basing its sector indices on the Industrial Classification Benchmark - please see www.ftse.com/icb. For constituent changes and other information about FTSE,please see www.ftse.com. © FTSE International Limited. 2013. All Rights reserved. ”FTSE®” is a trade mark of the London Stock Exchange Group companies and is used by FTSE International Limited under licence.

FTSE 100 SUMMARY

Closing Day'sFTSE 100 Price Change

Closing Day'sFTSE 100 Price Change

3I Group PLC 1142 -19.50Admiral Group PLC 2923 -28.00Anglo American PLC 2663.5 -149.50Antofagasta PLC 1514.5 -57.50Ashtead Group PLC 3652 -19.00Associated British Foods PLC 2249 -6.00Astrazeneca PLC 7592 33.00Auto Trader Group PLC 566.00 -11.80Avast PLC 533.50 3.50Aveva Group PLC 3805 248.00Aviva PLC 348.50 -2.00B&M European Value Retail S.A. 504.20 -14.40Bae Systems PLC 495.60 -6.00Barclays PLC 148.80 -4.06Barratt Developments PLC 695.60 -0.20Berkeley Group Holdings (The) PLC 4467 -11.00Bhp Group PLC 2135 -73.00BP PLC 302.45 -6.80British American Tobacco PLC 2770 -10.50British Land Company PLC 449.80 -5.30Bt Group PLC 140.85 -0.40Bunzl PLC 2438 -19.00Burberry Group PLC 1716 -16.00Coca-Cola Hbc AG 2305 -29.00Compass Group PLC 1401 -27.00Crh PLC 3264 -10.00Croda International PLC 6366 -76.00Dcc PLC 5714 -4.00Diageo PLC 2903 -22.50Entain PLC 1401.5 -4.00Evraz PLC 500.80 -9.20Experian PLC 2682 -29.00Ferguson PLC 9266 -62.00Flutter Entertainment PLC 15025 65.00Fresnillo PLC 1087.5 -32.50Glaxosmithkline PLC 1413.6 20.20Glencore PLC 279.90 -5.10Halma PLC 2557 -6.00Hargreaves Lansdown PLC 1569 -21.00Hikma Pharmaceuticals PLC 2540 -53.00HSBC Holdings PLC 403.25 -4.95Imperial Brands PLC 1634.5 -6.50Informa PLC 537.00 -6.40Intercontinental Hotels Group PLC 4848 -42.00Intermediate Capital Group PLC 1699 -20.00International Consolidated Airlines Group S.A. 162.25 0.05Intertek Group PLC 5574 -26.00Jd Sports Fashion PLC 829.80 -21.60Johnson Matthey PLC 2748 -39.00Just Eat Takeaway.Com N.V. 7872 -408.00Kingfisher PLC 269.40 -10.20

Land Securities Group PLC 657.70 -7.70Legal & General Group PLC 273.00 -7.00Lloyds Banking Group PLC 35.94 -0.52London Stock Exchange Group PLC 9134 -190.00M&G PLC 196.30 -3.10Melrose Industries PLC 181.95 -3.55Mondi PLC 1809.5 -53.50Morrison (Wm) Supermarkets PLC 182.55 -2.75National Grid PLC 875.40 3.00Natwest Group PLC 158.55 -2.50Next PLC 8018 58.00Ocado Group PLC 2513 -71.00Pearson PLC 678.00 -1.60Pennon Group PLC 964.80 12.40Pershing Square Holdings LTD 2675 -20.00Persimmon PLC 2690 20.00Phoenix Group Holdings PLC 693.20 -13.20Polymetal International PLC 1658.5 -35.50Prudential PLC 1430.5 -1.50Reckitt Benckiser Group PLC 6274 -52.00Relx PLC 1825.5 -3.00Rentokil Initial PLC 520.80 -6.40Rightmove PLC 610.80 -3.20Rio Tinto PLC 5946 -186.00Rolls-Royce Holdings PLC 105.90 -0.75Royal Dutch Shell PLC 1420 -22.60Royal Dutch Shell PLC 1483 -20.80Rsa Insurance Group PLC 677.80 -0.80Sage Group PLC 565.00 -Sainsbury (J) PLC 238.00 -4.40Schroders PLC 3446 -38.00Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust PLC 1234 -3.00Segro PLC 961.00 -5.20Severn Trent PLC 2343 3.00Smith & Nephew PLC 1577 -10.50Smith (Ds) PLC 386.50 -19.00Smiths Group PLC 1495 -32.00Smurfit Kappa Group PLC 3594 -108.00Spirax-Sarco Engineering PLC 11435 -95.00Sse PLC 1519.5 -9.50St. James's Place PLC 1171.5 -25.50Standard Chartered PLC 489.70 -8.50Standard Life Aberdeen PLC 304.30 -3.60Taylor Wimpey PLC 163.60 -1.40Tesco PLC 241.60 0.20Unilever PLC 4394 40.00United Utilities Group PLC 936.80 2.40Vodafone Group PLC 127.22 -1.72Whitbread PLC 3169 -23.00Wpp PLC 814.20 -1.00

UK STOCK MARKET TRADING DATA

Jan 15 Jan 14 Jan 13 Jan 12 Jan 11 Yr Ago- - - - - -

Order Book Turnover (m) 683.20 113.19 109.66 237.79 45.95 45.95Order Book Bargains 987046.00 914537.00 921276.00 979759.00 999315.00 999315.00Order Book Shares Traded (m) 1484.00 1243.00 1334.00 1512.00 1639.00 1639.00Total Equity Turnover (£m) 6778.13 5502.13 6075.89 6224.22 5131.31 5131.31Total Mkt Bargains 1271124.00 1173503.00 1193453.00 1326607.00 1352001.00 1352001.00Total Shares Traded (m) 9471.00 7405.00 8393.00 9621.00 12407.00 12407.00† Excluding intra-market and overseas turnover. *UK only total at 6pm. ‡ UK plus intra-market turnover. (u) Unavaliable.(c) Market closed.

All data provided by Morningstar unless otherwise noted. All elements listed are indicative and believedaccurate at the time of publication. No offer is made by Morningstar or the FT. The FT does not warrant norguarantee that the information is reliable or complete. The FT does not accept responsibility and will not beliable for any loss arising from the reliance on or use of the listed information.For all queries e-mail [email protected]

Data provided by Morningstar | www.morningstar.co.uk

UK RIGHTS OFFERS

Amount LatestIssue paid renun. closingprice up date High Low Stock Price p +or-There are currently no rights offers by any companies listed on the LSE.

UK COMPANY RESULTS

Company Turnover Pre-tax EPS(p) Div(p) Pay day TotalGunsynd Pre 0.000 0.000 0.991L 0.558L 1.064L 0.931L 0.00000 0.00000 - 0.000 0.000Independent Investment Trust (The) Pre 7.022L 24.772 12.890L 44.930 0.00000 10.00000 - 3.000 13.000Leeds Group Int 19.956 18.600 0.735 0.880L 2.600 4.100L 0.00000 0.00000 - 0.000 0.000

Figures in £m. Earnings shown basic. Figures in light text are for corresponding period year earlier.For more information on dividend payments visit www.ft.com/marketsdata

UK RECENT EQUITY ISSUES

Issue Issue Stock Close Mktdate price(p) Sector code Stock price(p) +/- High Low Cap (£m)01/13 10.00 AIM NGHT Nightcap PLC 13.50 0.49 15.00 10.90 1826.012/30 0.10 WCAT Wildcat Petroleum PLC 1.19 0.06 1.57 0.20 2844.012/29 38.00 AIM VCAP Vector Capital PLC 38.50 -0.36 41.95 38.00 1619.012/24 3.00 PNPL Pineapple Power Corp PLC 5.00 -0.27 6.15 3.35 286.812/23 10.00 OHG One Heritage Group PLC 15.50 2.75 16.00 11.43 465.012/22 1.00 RNEW Ecofin US Renewables Infrastructure Trust PLC 1.02 0.00 1.03 1.00 127.812/22 100.00 SBSI Schroder BSC Social Impact Trust PLC 103.50 -1.47 105.00 100.00 7762.512/15 96.00 AIM ABDX Abingdon Health PLC 94.50 -0.30 109.93 91.00 9043.612/14 20.00 AIM IIG Intuitive Investments Group PLC 23.00 -0.49 23.70 21.00 929.612/11 45.00 TGR Tirupati Graphite PLC 83.50 -1.62 90.00 45.00 6242.0

§Placing price. *Intoduction. ‡When issued. Annual report/prospectus available at www.ft.com/irFor a full explanation of all the other symbols please refer to London Share Service notes.

MARKET DATA

JANUARY 16 2021 Section:Stats Time: 15/1/2021 - 18:25 User: peter.bailey Page Name: MARKET DATA 1, Part,Page,Edition: USA, 13, 1


MARKET DATA

FT500: THE WORLD'S LARGEST COMPANIES52 Week

Stock Price Day Chg High Low Yld P/E MCap m52 Week





Stock Price Day Chg High Low Yld P/E MCap m

Australia (A$)ANZ 24.66 0.06 27.29 14.10 4.16 20.81 54045.92BHPBilltn 46.82 0.76 47.55 24.05 4.30 20.90 106229.99CmwBkAu 85.38 -0.95 91.05 53.44 4.96 21.46 116664.37CSL 267.26 -3.74 342.75 242.67 1.08 40.45 93653.88NatAusBk 24.14 0.36 27.49 13.20 4.58 22.37 61302.5Telstra 3.12 0.03 3.94 2.66 3.15 20.76 28579.95Wesfarmers 50.23 -0.55 52.20 29.75 2.99 35.68 43865.18Westpc 21.35 0.32 25.96 13.47 3.66 34.28 60325.66Woolworths 39.53 -0.17 43.96 32.12 2.56 43.64 38525.37Belgium (€)AnBshInBv 56.74 -0.22 72.70 29.03 2.31-113.50 116178KBC Grp 60.20 -1.36 73.56 33.44 1.69 15.82 30334.01Brazil (R$)Ambev 16.05 -0.21 19.08 10.36 3.00 29.85 47913.28Bradesco 23.72 -0.68 30.58 14.05 1.04 7.80 19958.6Cielo 3.86 -0.07 7.68 3.23 0.76 23.93 1989.58ItauHldFin 27.92 -0.79 31.64 19.46 2.94 15.04 26263.87Petrobras 28.87 -0.99 33.00 10.50 1.79 -8.15 40763.74Vale 93.66 -4.14 103.35 32.45 4.60 33.83 93900.31Canada (C$)BCE 55.57 0.62 65.28 46.03 5.94 21.98 39388.74BkMontrl 100.04 0.54 104.75 55.76 4.26 13.18 50692.99BkNvaS♦ 70.23 0.27 74.92 46.38 5.15 13.18 66683Brookfield 49.00 0.16 60.48 31.35 1.28-997.10 60486.87CanadPcR♦ 452.59 1.15 482.74 252.00 0.76 26.75 47643.3CanImp♦ 113.80 -0.06 114.21 67.52 5.14 13.77 39863.25CanNatRs 31.83 -1.18 42.08 9.80 5.20 -64.74 29463.98CanNatRy 141.59 -0.42 149.11 92.01 1.60 29.58 78970.8Enbridge 44.86 -0.16 57.32 33.06 7.09 46.57 71205.73GtWesLif 30.89 0.18 35.60 18.88 5.61 11.22 22456.96ImpOil 27.06 -0.82 35.80 10.27 3.26 -44.95 15568.71Manulife 24.19 -0.36 27.78 12.58 4.52 9.10 36777.55Nutrien 68.33 0.10 70.21 34.80 3.53 299.87 30480.24RylBkC 108.22 0.04 109.42 72.00 3.98 13.77 120769.86Suncor En 23.61 -0.93 45.12 14.02 5.55 -5.60 28222.27ThmReut 101.48 2.24 115.66 75.91 1.98 20.19 39538.74TntoDom♦ 75.36 -0.24 76.10 49.01 4.15 11.66 107271.01TrnCan♦ 55.94 -0.03 76.58 47.05 5.70 11.79 41215.75ValeantPh 30.80 -1.06 36.02 14.01 - -4.20 8158.48China (HK$)AgricBkCh 3.00 0.04 3.37 2.38 7.26 4.73 11893.16Bk China 2.73 0.02 3.32 2.33 8.39 4.15 29442.57BkofComm 4.36 0.05 5.52 3.66 8.66 4.14 19687.17BOE Tech 0.83 0.04 0.90 0.47 - -5.47 21.30Ch Coms Cons 3.84 -0.05 6.40 3.21 7.26 3.38 2188.21Ch Evrbrght 3.25 0.10 3.97 2.40 7.85 4.69 5314.29Ch Rail Cons 4.90 -0.12 9.99 4.07 5.08 3.13 1312.12Ch Rail Gp 3.80 -0.10 4.94 3.33 5.27 3.09 2061.96ChConstBk 6.18 0.11 6.77 4.93 6.19 5.33 191619.82China Vanke 29.25 -0.75 32.70 21.65 4.13 6.83 7143.06ChinaCitic 3.50 0.08 4.60 2.93 8.22 3.61 6717.66ChinaLife 17.64 0.08 22.85 11.64 5.00 8.13 16928.75ChinaMBank 60.90 3.75 62.05 29.80 2.36 14.18 36057.9ChinaMob 47.10 -0.05 70.00 39.00 7.62 7.58 124377.09ChinaPcIns 37.15 1.65 37.75 17.90 3.90 11.72 13297.02ChMinsheng 4.76 0.14 6.06 3.85 9.31 4.10 5107.75ChMrchSecs 24.68 -0.16 28.18 13.10 - 22.37 28292.24Chna Utd Coms 4.63 -0.04 6.17 4.19 1.30 26.34 21837.81ChShenEgy 15.74 -0.12 16.16 11.94 9.66 6.59 6899.02ChShpbldng 4.41 -0.06 5.44 3.98 - -116.10 12453.9ChStConEng 5.03 -0.11 6.02 4.76 3.67 4.99 32050.34ChUncHK 5.01 -0.04 7.37 3.84 3.56 10.40 19770.37CNNC Intl 5.20 -0.21 5.68 4.02 2.34 15.50 12501.56CSR 3.70 -0.23 5.88 2.53 4.85 9.10 2085.83Daqin 6.65 0.04 8.02 6.32 7.21 9.38 15269.98Gree Elec Apl 0.13 0.00 0.21 0.07 - -0.04 5.54GuosenSec 13.27 0.13 16.14 10.38 1.50 17.96 16806.8HaitongSecs 7.32 -0.03 9.42 5.79 - 6.65 3218.8Hngzh HikVDT 58.90 1.66 61.55 27.00 1.19 42.37 73646.78Hunng Pwr 2.95 -0.01 4.15 2.24 5.63 22.27 1788.31IM Baotou Stl 1.15 - 1.33 1.04 - -110.84 5626.51In&CmBkCh 5.16 0.13 5.92 3.96 6.10 5.46 57759.7IndstrlBk 22.71 1.36 23.34 14.93 3.35 7.84 68803.63Kweichow 2082 -52.00 2173.33 960.10 0.82 58.74 403960.87Midea 0.73 0.03 1.02 0.52 - -1.85 20.25New Ch Life Ins 31.20 0.25 37.30 20.45 5.35 6.43 4161.07PetroChina 2.58 -0.01 3.98 2.16 5.97 21.36 7020.45PingAnIns 103.10 3.50 103.40 69.00 2.44 12.48 99028.27PngAnBnk 21.00 0.83 21.95 11.91 - 16.96 62943.34Pwr Cons Corp 4.05 -0.09 4.88 3.40 0.98 8.80 6971.27SaicMtr 25.70 0.58 28.80 16.90 3.42 14.01 46377.26ShenwanHong 0.07 0.00 0.10 0.03 - -0.22 73.40ShgPdgBk 9.92 0.05 12.69 9.22 6.04 6.09 44973.05Sinopec Corp 3.98 0.03 4.75 2.95 5.75 10.50 13096.05Sinopec Oil 2.00 -0.03 2.49 1.67 - 90.98 3720.1Denmark (kr)DanskeBk 109.90 -2.20 123.60 68.04 - 11.36 15402.53MollerMrsk 14845 -230.00 15400 4976 0.96 30.22 22761.63NovoB 442.65 5.40 467.90 331.70 1.98 24.56 130421.18

Finland (€)Nokia 3.35 -0.03 4.35 2.08 - 24.84 22920.91SampoA 35.00 -0.10 42.46 21.34 4.37 15.83 23453.75France (€)Airbus Grpe 92.55 -0.70 139.40 48.12 - -11.37 87758.79AirLiquide 132.40 -1.95 144.45 94.86 2.08 27.19 75835.2AXA 19.92 -0.13 25.62 11.84 3.74 16.84 58243.02BNP Parib 44.44 -0.70 54.22 24.51 - 7.84 67155.36ChristianDior 436.00 -9.80 479.80 252.40 1.12 42.29 95169.39Cred Agr 10.18 -0.25 13.80 5.70 - 7.32 35887.23Danone 53.62 0.70 74.50 46.03 - 18.05 44520.99EDF 12.38 -0.08 13.61 5.98 1.24 22.87 46388.65Engie SA 13.62 -0.23 16.80 8.63 - -29.64 40094.34EssilorLuxottica 124.05 -2.45 145.00 86.76 - -4050.36 65854.07Hermes Intl 881.00 -16.00 898.20 516.00 0.53 81.72 112468.14LOreal 298.40 0.40 321.40 196.00 1.32 50.57 202020.28LVMH 493.95 -14.05 525.30 278.70 0.99 55.04 301495.7Orange 9.75 -0.21 13.55 8.63 5.24 9.75 31362.52PernodRic 155.55 -0.45 171.10 112.25 2.05 120.93 49258.61Renault 34.07 -1.36 40.78 12.77 - -1.08 12183.49Safran 114.75 -2.20 152.30 51.10 - 72.05 59283.79Sanofi 81.53 0.56 95.82 67.65 3.94 9.02 124122.05Sant Gbn 43.12 -0.40 43.99 16.41 2.94 17.56 27775.61Schneider 124.35 -0.15 128.15 61.72 2.09 30.83 85270.12SFR Group 34.50 - 34.56 21.87 - -23.02 17905.81SocGen 17.33 -0.43 32.11 10.77 - -20.75 17887.61Total 37.10 -0.71 49.15 21.12 7.09 -18.98 119011.37UnibailR 190.00 0.35 236.45 177.35 2.94 -7.05 22215.04Vinci 84.72 -1.80 107.35 54.76 2.46 29.02 60292.33Vivendi 26.11 -0.14 26.85 16.60 2.35 16.85 37444.19Germany (€)Allianz 202.15 -1.05 232.60 117.10 4.85 12.36 100784.87BASF 67.29 -0.81 69.24 37.36 5.00 -30.72 74736.91Bayer 52.25 -0.44 78.34 39.91 5.46 -3.15 62072.73BMW 69.41 -0.37 77.31 36.60 3.67 12.86 50527.82Continental 118.20 -3.00 126.50 51.45 2.59 -15.81 28587.49Daimler 56.26 -1.55 59.93 21.02 1.631841.00 72783.51Deut Bank 9.63 -0.37 10.37 4.45 - -12.77 24060.19Deut Tlkm 15.05 -0.16 16.75 10.41 4.06 22.38 86654.69DeutsPost 42.70 -0.90 43.64 19.11 2.74 20.85 63846.9E.ON 8.81 -0.09 11.56 7.60 5.32 18.79 28126.45Fresenius Med 68.78 -0.20 81.10 53.50 1.78 15.04 25320.65Fresenius SE 38.39 -0.51 51.54 24.25 2.23 11.60 20987.45HenkelKgaA 77.85 -0.30 87.75 54.65 2.40 18.74 24457.18Linde 213.70 -5.10 226.40 130.45 1.53 58.85 135631.56MuenchRkv 237.70 -1.20 284.20 141.10 4.20 26.76 40269.8SAP 103.52 -0.68 143.32 82.13 1.55 24.85 153785.87Siemens 119.78 -2.56 125.54 53.02 3.32 24.19 123117.2Volkswgn 167.90 -1.20 183.80 99.16 2.91 20.40 59912.91Hong Kong (HK$)AIA 104.40 3.70 105.80 60.05 1.33 27.18 162850.73BOC Hold 24.50 -0.25 28.90 20.05 6.90 7.82 33407.24Ch OSLnd&Inv 17.04 0.22 30.35 14.92 6.58 3.80 24073.03ChngKng 40.70 -0.10 57.00 33.40 5.67 6.72 19386.81Citic Ltd 5.98 -0.06 10.30 5.20 8.55 3.34 22435.28Citic Secs 18.90 0.10 21.45 12.60 3.17 13.98 5553.45CK Hutchison 56.85 -0.55 76.00 45.05 6.13 5.78 28273.53CNOOC 8.09 -0.09 13.60 6.24 10.64 7.30 46583.37HangSeng 145.70 -0.30 173.80 110.00 5.96 12.70 35925.04HK Exc&Clr 458.40 0.40 471.60 206.00 1.61 55.88 74953.76MTR 44.75 -0.65 47.80 36.20 3.02 41.11 35672.36SandsCh 30.65 -0.60 45.45 25.15 3.54 116.38 31979.43SHK Props 108.60 0.60 124.00 87.60 5.01 12.16 40586.42Tencent 645.00 15.50 646.00 325.20 0.21 49.94 798069.84India (Rs)Bhartiartl 602.65 22.10 612.00 361.75 0.35 -14.13 44995.85HDFC Bk 1466.65 -2.10 1496.9 738.75 - 27.44 110550.74Hind Unilevr 2351.15 -47.40 2614.3 1757.3 1.53 72.83 75602.21HsngDevFin 2632.75 -51.30 2777.15 1473.45 0.83 27.39 64863.14ICICI Bk 543.00 -10.30 561.00 268.30 - 24.84 51303.37Infosys 1344.95 -25.55 1392.8 509.25 1.36 30.21 78404.7ITC 217.85 3.70 243.90 134.60 4.85 18.76 36686.96L&T 1354.15 -22.45 1389.7 661.00 1.38 63.21 26022.55OilNatGas 101.40 -3.65 126.75 50.00 5.13 37.78 17458.03RelianceIn 1937.45 -23.15 2369.35 867.40 0.35 29.62 179299.2SBI NewA 303.85 -3.40 331.90 149.45 - 11.11 37112.19SunPhrmInds 604.30 -2.75 628.00 312.00 0.69 94.60 19843.2Tata Cons 3233.35 -17.35 3274 1506.05 1.06 38.04 163685.95Indonesia (Rp)Bk Cent Asia 22300 200.00 24700 16800 - - 38879.26Israel (ILS)TevaPha 36.55 0.55 46.45 24.30 - -2.95 12568.13Italy (€)Enel 8.86 0.03 9.05 5.15 3.77 20.71 108912.9ENI 8.83 -0.17 13.98 5.73 6.34 -3.19 38503.68Generali 14.37 -0.04 18.89 10.20 3.55 12.13 27377.36IntSPaolo 1.90 -0.01 2.63 1.31 - 5.42 44689.87Unicred 7.70 -0.14 14.44 6.01 - -6.68 20834.32

Japan (¥)AstellasPh 1662 7.50 1987 0.00 2.55 21.38 29788.59Bridgestne 3965 65.00 4031 2861.5 3.39 34.39 27242.49Canon 2248.5 174.00 3099 0.00 5.52 36.83 28870.92CntJpRwy 14555 -95.00 22570 0.00 0.99 102.98 28864.79Denso 5739 -193.00 6219 0.00 2.52 -40.10 43533.25EastJpRwy 6736 32.00 10040 0.00 2.03 -9.67 24507.85Fanuc 27525 -150.00 27815 0.00 0.72 83.31 53505.71FastRetail 90990-2670.00 95310 0.00 0.52 103.64 92915.93Fuji Hvy Ind 2067.5 -44.50 2945 1671.5 2.80 14.20 15309.47Hitachi 4344 4.00 4616 0.00 2.38 26.96 40476.47HondaMtr 2835 -84.00 3167 0.00 3.14 19.15 49438.27JapanTob 2059 4.00 2430 0.00 7.73 12.18 39643.8KDDI 3278 40.00 3451 2604 3.79 10.97 72713.36Keyence 57040 -660.00 59090 28905 0.36 72.77 133550.58MitsbCp 2690 -1.00 2948 0.00 5.19 10.34 38475.05MitsubEst 1667 -3.50 2283 0.00 1.86 14.41 22328.22MitsubishiEle 1640 -42.00 1693.5 0.00 2.27 19.03 33900.47MitsuiFud 2063 -19.00 3035 1538 2.21 15.37 19170.89MitUFJFin 497.90 -3.20 585.70 380.00 5.29 20.13 65102.03Mizuho Fin 1428 -9.50 1667 1084 2.99 44.90 34907.8Murata Mfg 10040 -215.00 10660 0.00 1.08 32.33 65318.31NipponTT 2750 -15.00 2908 2127 3.67 11.49 103269.99Nissan Mt 532.70 -6.10 641.20 311.20 - -1.89 21645.01Nomura 590.40 0.30 599.00 367.40 4.38 7.55 18378.76Nppn Stl 1389 -52.50 1747.5 0.00 5.81 4.49 12707.55NTTDCMo 3880 - 3928 2678 3.25 19.99 120882.79Panasonic 1285.5 -3.50 1305 691.70 2.01 16.71 30363.95Seven & I 3986 34.00 4419 2937.5 2.46 19.67 34015.47ShnEtsuCh 18950 -130.00 19675 8751 1.20 26.35 76012.13Softbank 8518 -51.00 8900 2609.5 0.53 -59.82 171369.81Sony 10560 -190.00 10860 0.00 0.49 13.65 128200.06SumitomoF 3524 -20.00 3991 2507.5 5.68 21.66 46614.84Takeda Ph 3601 -89.00 4526 2894.5 5.17 98.07 54648.12TokioMarine 5586 -57.00 6317 4167 3.61 18.41 37750.87Toyota 7733 -130.00 8045 0.00 2.94 13.60 242914.66Mexico (Mex$)AmerMvl 14.24 0.01 16.82 12.33 2.38 14.15 32890.46FEMSA UBD 149.90 -1.56 181.89 112.72 1.89 309.37 16362.69WalMrtMex 64.85 0.34 65.40 47.76 0.80 37.61 57194.13Netherlands (€)Altice 5.34 0.00 6.86 2.26 - -4.06 7060.74ASML Hld 435.85 -11.50 447.90 177.52 0.56 53.82 221096.52Heineken 89.56 -0.80 105.00 68.82 1.92 54.49 62381.24ING 7.85 -0.01 10.91 4.23 - 17.12 37008.61Unilever 49.36 0.34 55.39 38.42 - 24.13 176236.32Norway (Kr)DNB 163.55 1.05 178.10 94.26 - 13.60 28732.42Equinor 146.85 3.10 187.20 95.20 5.47 -15.96 54024.17Telenor 153.40 1.55 171.90 130.75 5.33 20.23 24326.12Qatar (QR)QatarNtBk 18.62 -0.24 21.00 15.71 3.41 13.85 47226.51Russia (RUB)Gzprm neft 185.71 -3.02 272.68 158.17 - -71.33 58976.64Lukoil 4745.5 -157.00 6810 3663 10.47 32.79 44107.51MmcNrlskNckl♦ 20150 -66.00 23656 13352 11.57 14.96 42774.79Novatek 973.20 -3.20 1382.2 682.80 3.05 46.54 39639.58Rosneft 324.00 -11.00 489.90 229.80 9.45-126.68 46063.6Sberbank 188.91 -2.03 270.80 172.15 9.07 5.92 54705Surgutneftegas 35.13 -0.76 54.89 24.06 1.93 2.10 16833.73Saudi Arabia (SR)AlRajhiBnk 74.70 -0.30 75.60 51.00 2.13 18.05 49776.1Natnlcombnk 44.75 -0.20 47.75 30.50 2.84 11.49 35782.83SaudiBasic 105.80 -0.20 106.40 61.90 3.70-109.86 84599.4SaudiTelec 110.00 - 111.00 72.30 3.85 19.39 58638.52Singapore (S$)DBS 26.85 -0.14 27.47 16.65 4.35 14.25 51294.56JardnMt US$ 56.99 0.79 58.95 37.37 3.32 -99.71 41046.34JardnStr US$ 27.04 0.79 33.50 17.81 1.44 -31.14 29971.36OCBC 10.67 -0.06 11.23 7.80 4.21 14.89 35880.08SingTel 2.49 -0.02 3.42 2.00 5.04 23.87 30565.41UOB 23.97 0.09 26.99 17.28 4.81 10.67 30142.73South Africa (R)Firstrand 49.40 0.06 62.91 31.13 5.81 16.90 18196.39MTN Grp 64.57 -0.43 89.78 26.25 8.21 7.35 7989.32Naspers N 3364.92 32.25 3499.45 1843.8 - 30.93 96229.82South Korea (KRW)HyundMobis 321500-5500.00 405000 126000 0.92 19.54 27795.79KoreaElePwr 25300 -650.00 30050 15550 - -17.55 14772.56SK Hynix 127500-3000.00 140000 65800 0.77 30.78 84424.3SmsungEl 88000-1700.00 96800 42300 1.59 24.33 477821.51Spain (€)BBVA 4.09 -0.09 5.34 2.13 6.48 -44.59 32962.1BcoSantdr 2.72 -0.08 3.96 1.50 3.59 -6.81 54669.61CaixaBnk 2.22 -0.11 2.94 1.50 3.21 12.86 16079.06Iberdrola♦ 11.92 -0.09 12.57 7.76 3.42 21.16 91492.89Inditex 26.06 -0.26 32.28 18.51 0.85 44.05 98215.09Repsol 8.65 -0.21 14.27 5.04 10.79 -1.67 15980.26Telefonica 3.75 -0.09 6.57 2.71 10.68 73.63 24162.76

Sweden (SKr)AtlasCpcoB 397.40 -4.80 416.20 223.20 1.65 32.97 18500.61Ericsson 99.06 0.36 110.15 59.54 1.49 23.20 36309.91H & M 180.05 0.40 214.35 98.13 2.66 102.04 31375.86Investor 619.20 -1.80 625.80 370.10 2.07 6.11 33647.59Nordea Bk 70.76 -0.52 86.73 48.00 - 12.24 34189.09SEB 89.10 0.30 104.90 59.80 - 11.98 23067SvnskaHn 86.56 -0.72 113.80 71.70 - 11.17 20083.38Swedbank 152.54 -0.74 162.70 99.14 - 13.55 20600.7Telia Co 34.91 0.24 42.41 30.29 5.86 47.31 17032.7Volvo 210.60 -3.90 218.50 95.00 - 25.95 39831.83Switzerland (SFr)ABB 26.24 -0.91 27.20 14.11 2.97 122.00 63909.47CredSuisse 12.35 -0.06 13.75 6.18 1.14 7.93 33958.31Nestle 100.88 0.44 112.62 83.37 2.76 20.92 326483.13Novartis 85.30 1.78 96.38 65.09 3.34 29.52 236396.64Richemont 82.30 -1.04 85.48 44.64 1.23 190.48 48259.49Roche 316.65 4.60 357.85 265.75 2.93 20.51 249906.18Swiss Re 84.50 -0.36 117.05 52.68 7.01 -18.57 30137.63Swisscom 477.50 4.80 577.80 446.70 4.69 14.66 27786.37Syngent 453.40 0.90 471.20 402.50 - 28.99 43035.76UBS 13.47 -0.06 13.81 7.00 2.51 9.47 58371.34Zurich Fin 375.10 -3.10 439.90 248.70 5.43 17.49 63398.8Taiwan (NT$)Chunghwa Telecom 111.00 -1.00 120.00 103.00 3.86 25.67 30772.55Formosa PetChem 99.10 -2.40 104.00 66.10 2.97 217.49 33736.76HonHaiPrc 115.50 -2.50 119.00 65.70 3.69 15.36 57221.57MediaTek 850.00 -28.00 899.00 273.00 1.25 40.81 48302.49TaiwanSem 601.00 -20.00 625.00 235.50 1.69 30.71 556935.06Thailand (THB)PTT Explor 43.25 -0.75 47.00 23.60 5.02 29.94 41120.15United Arab Emirates (Dhs)Emirtestele 17.56 -0.10 17.66 11.04 4.82 16.11 41576.05United Kingdom (p)AscBrFd 2249 -6.00 2730 1554 1.53 39.05 24180.73AstraZen 7592 33.00 10120 5871 2.86 51.66 130580.17Aviva 348.50 -2.00 417.60 205.70 2.73 6.35 18994.67Barclays 148.80 -4.06 184.00 73.04 - 12.95 34483.48BP 302.45 -6.80 508.70 188.52 9.30 -3.65 81866.96BrAmTob 2770 -10.50 3507 2362.5 5.56 10.00 70139.71BSkyB 1727.5 1.50 1740 893.50 0.76 36.60 38843.72BT 140.85 -0.40 186.96 94.68 3.28 9.27 18979.5Compass 1401 -27.00 1995.5 865.80 2.86 21.59 31291.69Diageo 2903 -22.50 3297 2050.6 2.41 48.46 99252.27GlaxoSmh 1413.6 20.20 1857 1284 5.66 11.18 94413.83Glencore 279.90 -5.10 287.10 109.76 2.85 -13.83 54833.34HSBC 403.25 -4.95 599.00 281.50 1.93 -47.39 109805.75Imperial Brands 1634.5 -6.50 2072 1142 12.64 18.10 21171.27LlydsBkg 35.94 -0.52 59.94 23.59 - 21.14 35173.14Natl Grid 875.40 3.00 1073.8 789.13 5.55 20.65 39905.73Natwest Group 158.55 -2.50 173.70 90.54 - 24.77 25766.13Prudential 1430.5 -1.50 1509 682.80 2.59 35.21 50264.95ReckittB 6274 -52.00 8191.3 5130 2.78 -16.22 60003.55RELX 1825.5 -3.00 2109 1382.86 2.50 27.83 47903.8RioTinto 5946 -186.00 6378 2954 5.14 16.67 108307.22RollsRoyce 105.90 -0.75 243.99 34.59 1.49 -1.02 2674.88RylDShlA 1483 -20.80 2319 878.10 6.50 -8.92 92589.54Shire# 4690 111.00 4780 2944 0.58 11.63 56567.13StandCh 489.70 -8.50 718.60 334.25 - 24.44 21925.71Tesco 241.60 0.20 260.00 202.00 3.79 22.84 26865.37Vodafone 127.22 -1.72 158.50 92.76 6.42 16.40 46086.47WPP 814.20 -1.00 1049 450.00 2.79 -4.38 14000.26United States of America ($)21stC Fox A 30.94 -0.33 39.74 19.81 1.56 11.11 104823M 164.07 -2.34 182.15 114.04 3.75 18.31 94639.17AbbottLb 110.48 0.44 115.14 61.61 1.33 55.94 195801.65Abbvie♦ 110.39 -1.24 113.41 62.55 4.39 22.65 194898.26Accenture 254.25 -0.75 271.18 137.15 1.28 31.77 168091.62Adobe 460.23 -3.04 536.88 255.13 - 57.15 220779.87AEP 79.53 0.70 104.97 65.14 3.70 19.61 39477.69Aetna - - - - - - -Aflac 46.40 -0.47 53.46 23.07 2.51 6.93 32593.46AirProd♦ 284.92 -1.33 327.89 167.43 1.91 31.72 62981.3Alexion 157.08 0.43 160.03 72.67 - 34.94 34376.24Allergan 193.02 0.03 202.22 114.27 1.54 -25.19 63659.11Allstate 108.88 -0.18 125.92 64.13 2.05 7.30 33106.93Alphabet 1729.79 -1.14 1843.83 1008.87 - 31.84 520049.19Altria 41.23 0.12 51.78 30.95 8.61 100.63 76622.62Amazon 3108.52 -18.95 3552.25 1626.03 - 86.521559703.59AmerAir 15.93 -0.51 30.78 8.25 1.32 -1.10 9637.03AmerExpr♦ 122.08 -1.70 138.13 67.00 1.11 28.76 98299.05AmerIntGrp 41.21 -0.09 56.42 16.07 3.26 -6.74 35502.44AmerTower♦ 219.00 4.01 272.20 174.32 2.08 49.28 97282.73Amgen 244.93 3.27 264.97 177.05 2.68 18.79 142590.56Anadarko 72.77 0.56 76.23 40.40 1.50 -63.37 36563.54Anthem 324.80 2.28 340.98 171.03 1.18 15.95 80779.16Aon Cp 208.34 1.72 238.19 143.93 0.89 25.56 47629.93Apple 128.75 -0.16 138.79 53.15 0.65 37.372165995.11ArcherDan 51.88 -0.99 53.57 28.92 2.90 17.51 28865.46

AT&T♦ 29.20 -0.09 39.14 26.08 7.48 18.41 208079.2AutomData 159.73 -2.18 182.32 103.11 2.39 26.40 68494.46Avago Tech 444.26 -7.82 458.50 155.67 2.89 80.35 180684.34BakerHu 22.08 0.09 31.26 20.09 3.24 -1.40 11412.93BankAm 32.85 -1.15 35.45 17.95 2.30 15.48 284135.19Baxter 79.59 -0.46 95.19 69.10 1.23 42.80 40656.04BectonDick 261.07 3.30 286.72 197.75 1.27 91.70 75932.63BerkshHat 350245-2556.00353697.53 239440 - 15.12 227373.45Biogen 278.65 -1.64 374.99 223.25 - 8.75 42879.11BkNYMeln 45.62 -0.91 50.89 26.40 2.86 9.57 40425.52BlackRock 736.83 -6.67 788.00 323.98 2.02 23.30 112374.46Boeing 205.61 -4.30 349.95 89.00 2.10 -24.84 116072.95Booking Holdings 2129.9 -52.69 2290.04 1107.29 - 61.07 87229.87BrisMySq♦ 66.76 0.74 68.34 45.76 2.83-211.83 151053.77CapOne 111.69 -2.72 115.48 38.00 1.22 51.61 51084.39CardinalHlth 54.92 -0.47 60.69 39.05 3.70 16.44 16114.66Carnival 20.87 -0.05 51.94 7.80 4.86 -1.97 15036.53Caterpillar 193.16 -4.24 200.17 87.50 2.24 30.44 104935.77Celgene 108.24 0.11 110.70 58.59 - 12.71 77035.98CharlesSch 58.25 -1.08 62.04 28.00 1.28 25.67 104687.61Charter Comms 632.65 9.56 681.71 345.67 - 47.91 126451Chevron Corp 93.10 -2.39 117.29 51.60 5.71 -14.43 173847.81Chubb 154.68 -1.14 167.74 87.35 2.08 29.21 69817.99Cigna 218.34 -2.44 227.25 118.50 0.02 14.56 78879.1Cisco♦ 45.34 0.19 50.28 32.40 3.31 17.48 191584.82Citigroup 64.49 -4.52 82.13 32.00 3.32 11.99 134265.58CME Grp 192.34 -1.80 225.36 131.80 1.80 30.52 69047.65Coca-Cola 48.85 -0.38 60.13 36.27 3.51 24.09 209929.68Cognizant 79.80 -0.25 82.73 40.01 1.13 28.13 42664.35ColgtPlm 82.32 0.38 86.41 58.49 2.22 25.04 70562.14Comcast♦ 48.55 -1.03 52.49 31.71 1.95 20.72 221673.41ConocPhil 46.21 -1.66 65.62 20.84 3.82 -39.63 49571.39Corning 37.92 -0.11 38.75 17.44 2.38 138.84 28971.26Costco 363.09 0.74 393.15 271.28 0.75 39.69 160832.61CrownCstl 156.34 1.58 180.00 114.18 3.23 93.01 67429.11CSX 92.28 -1.21 97.54 46.81 1.16 24.40 70573.43CVS 75.92 0.87 77.23 52.04 2.77 11.95 99372.71Danaher♦ 235.86 -0.84 248.32 119.60 0.32 52.46 167550.69Deere♦ 293.50 -9.36 306.35 106.14 1.07 33.06 92281.09Delphi 17.02 0.31 18.51 5.39 - -7.42 1469.67Delta 40.41 -1.06 62.48 17.51 2.09 -2.32 25770.84Devon Energy 19.44 -0.84 26.98 4.70 2.16 -2.82 7436.34DiscFinServ 96.08 -2.35 98.88 23.25 1.92 28.06 29448.2Disney 170.84 -2.59 183.40 79.07 0.54-103.58 309296.93DominRes 71.76 0.74 90.89 57.79 5.47 25.58 58543.18DowDupont 30.52 -0.65 48.38 30.06 3.83 -7.69 68559.76DukeEner 91.95 0.29 103.79 62.13 4.34 31.94 67667.71Eaton 122.69 -1.93 130.00 56.42 2.48 34.35 48904.23eBay 55.11 -0.16 61.06 26.02 1.18 15.75 37989.45Ecolab 211.15 -1.28 231.36 124.60 0.94 49.03 60271.75Emerson 82.66 -0.68 84.44 37.75 2.54 24.29 49396.95EOG Res 59.61 -2.63 88.09 27.00 2.34-107.06 34775.19EquityResTP 61.44 1.05 87.53 45.43 4.06 22.94 22871.24Exelon 43.01 0.43 50.54 29.28 3.69 16.85 41959.37ExpScripts 92.33 -3.47 101.73 66.93 - 11.10 52061.19ExxonMb 48.28 -2.04 69.59 30.11 7.57 58.92 204118Facebook 252.92 7.28 304.67 137.10 - 27.42 608011.83Fedex 252.12 -4.15 305.66 88.69 1.13 46.84 66829.6FordMtr 9.87 -0.30 10.20 3.96 3.19-234.94 38576.36Franklin 26.72 -0.40 27.60 14.91 4.25 16.00 13517.55GenDyn♦ 153.26 -0.83 190.08 100.55 2.91 13.23 43981.35GenElectric♦ 11.50 -0.16 13.26 5.48 0.37 28.07 100738.54GenMills♦ 56.41 0.66 66.14 46.59 3.52 14.87 34488.08GenMotors 49.80 -1.74 51.87 14.33 1.60 21.26 71271.96GileadSci 63.35 0.95 85.97 56.56 4.43 61.53 79404.74GoldmSchs 300.50 -7.37 309.41 130.85 1.75 16.48 103392.37Halliburton 20.78 -0.98 24.52 4.25 2.27 -3.98 18369.67HCA Hold 167.32 -0.95 174.55 58.38 0.52 16.12 56616.85Hew-Pack 25.25 -0.37 26.15 12.54 2.93 12.02 32563.32HiltonWwde 109.10 -3.01 116.73 44.30 0.29 -90.31 30269.39HomeDep 274.86 6.52 292.95 140.63 2.24 22.62 295914.49Honywell 207.09 -1.52 216.70 101.08 1.83 28.28 145312.11HumanaInc♦ 402.62 -2.38 474.70 208.25 0.63 12.27 53283.32IBM 128.48 -0.50 158.75 90.56 5.31 13.85 114478.56IllinoisTool 201.77 -3.64 224.69 115.94 2.26 29.15 63864.29Illumina 377.81 6.77 404.20 196.78 - 83.44 55160.26Intcntl Exch 114.89 -0.73 119.02 63.51 1.07 30.13 64485.89Intel 58.89 -0.36 69.29 43.61 2.33 11.01 241331.22Intuit♦ 367.29 1.78 387.94 187.68 0.62 46.94 96502.6John&John 161.29 0.64 161.95 109.16 2.55 24.14 424589.64JohnsonCn 51.59 -0.86 52.92 22.78 2.12 58.46 37346.4JPMrgnCh♦ 138.51 -2.66 142.75 76.91 2.73 17.21 422206.61Kimb-Clark 131.69 0.12 160.16 110.66 3.38 18.19 44792.6KinderM 15.53 -0.11 22.58 9.42 6.93 295.63 35156.49Kraft Heinz 31.95 -0.14 36.37 19.99 5.26 -76.02 39056.77Kroger 34.11 0.97 37.22 26.72 1.94 10.05 25969.55L Brands 44.85 -0.13 48.30 8.00 1.41 -56.18 12473.17LasVegasSd 54.49 -1.19 74.29 33.30 3.01 -52.39 41620.99LibertyGbl 24.69 -0.24 26.63 15.24 - -7.94 4476.61Lilly (E) 190.14 3.45 190.22 117.06 1.58 29.67 181884.43Lockheed 348.74 1.30 442.53 266.11 2.89 14.18 97571.78

Lowes 171.17 0.78 180.67 60.00 1.38 22.95 125420.17Lyondell 95.46 -3.41 99.86 33.71 4.62 25.60 31875.91Marathon Ptl 44.01 -1.51 60.35 15.26 5.42 -2.74 28635.14Marsh&M 111.64 -0.35 120.97 74.34 1.72 26.70 56622.55MasterCard♦ 324.95 -1.98 367.25 199.99 0.49 46.45 321203.47McDonald's 209.55 1.05 231.91 124.23 2.51 30.45 156138.01McKesson 182.26 -0.56 187.67 112.60 0.95 13.48 29264.47Medtronic 117.79 0.02 122.15 72.13 2.00 42.97 158547.69Merck 83.02 0.85 92.06 65.25 3.09 17.45 210043.46Metlife 50.95 -0.63 53.28 22.85 3.71 7.90 45847.88Microsoft 213.77 0.75 232.86 132.52 1.00 32.821616214.78Mnstr Bvrg 90.71 -0.65 95.11 50.06 - 38.90 47887.33MondelezInt 57.41 0.10 60.00 41.19 2.14 25.78 82098.49Monsanto - - - - - - -MorganStly 74.65 -1.82 77.17 27.20 1.97 12.00 135056.65MylanNV 15.86 0.31 23.11 12.75 - 29.73 8586.21Netflix 499.40 -1.46 575.37 290.25 - 76.80 220632.43NextEraE 82.78 0.25 83.34 43.70 1.73 39.80 40543.04Nike 141.53 0.23 147.95 60.00 0.70 82.56 179952.39NorfolkS 249.91 -2.55 258.17 112.62 1.58 30.66 68551.84Northrop 302.30 -0.72 385.01 263.31 1.93 19.62 50398.24NXP 170.82 -9.18 182.55 58.41 0.92-312.70 47786.83Occid Pet 22.88 -1.36 47.58 8.52 7.35 -1.37 21306.07Oracle♦ 61.73 0.13 66.20 39.71 1.58 19.20 181720.5Pepsico 141.58 -0.18 148.77 101.42 2.93 26.69 195661.55Perrigo 44.32 -0.34 63.86 40.01 2.10-843.59 6048.61Pfizer 36.66 -0.09 43.08 26.41 4.30 22.51 203770.82Phillips66 72.65 -1.49 105.71 40.04 5.21 -11.17 31733.53PhilMorris 80.97 -0.22 90.17 56.01 6.11 15.60 126088.08PNCFin 155.87 -4.48 162.74 79.41 3.10 20.13 66042.28PPG Inds 147.36 -4.39 153.81 69.77 1.48 30.90 34807.08Praxair 164.50 -0.99 169.75 140.00 2.29 39.25 47306.22ProctGmbl 136.06 0.26 146.92 94.34 2.37 24.76 337375.18Prudntl 83.10 -0.81 97.24 38.62 5.44-263.68 32907.2PublStor 223.86 2.63 240.75 155.37 3.75 32.83 39135.68Qualcomm 158.57 -2.28 163.18 58.00 1.68 33.40 179345.72Raytheon 116.96 -5.47 233.48 103.00 2.98 10.60 32566.46Regen Pharm 514.20 -3.71 664.64 328.13 - 17.94 53917.62S&P Global 304.52 -1.66 379.87 186.06 0.89 29.05 73267.51Salesforce 214.96 -0.65 284.50 115.29 - 53.71 196683.83Schlmbrg 25.04 -0.92 39.97 11.87 5.24 -3.14 34852.67Sempra Energy 124.24 1.71 161.87 88.00 3.47 18.22 35839.54Shrwin-Will 713.99 -4.79 758.00 325.43 0.76 33.04 64847.79SimonProp 93.28 -1.67 149.89 42.25 6.19 20.18 30607.77SouthCpr 69.40 -1.60 71.98 23.43 2.12 39.80 53651.28Starbucks 102.10 0.28 107.75 50.02 1.69 123.03 119354.9StateSt 76.90 -2.68 85.89 42.10 2.84 11.66 27130.14Stryker♦ 240.48 -1.66 247.44 124.54 1.00 49.66 90368.26Sychrony Fin 38.16 -0.75 39.18 12.15 2.42 16.51 22277.51T-MobileUS 126.91 2.22 135.54 63.50 - 45.59 157512.81Target 195.69 -2.32 199.96 90.17 1.43 24.71 97996.3TE Connect 128.28 -1.92 131.97 48.62 1.54-156.55 42427.66Tesla Mtrs 839.70 -5.31 884.49 70.10 - 1519.61 795947.51TexasInstr 169.37 -2.34 173.66 93.09 2.23 30.48 155471.86TheTrvelers 142.98 0.66 143.21 76.99 2.45 15.57 36218.09ThrmoFshr 504.07 7.16 532.57 250.21 0.18 39.33 199778.82TimeWrnr 98.77 0.82 103.89 85.88 1.54 15.09 77269.69TJX Cos 67.89 -0.13 70.96 32.72 0.71 105.96 81510.85Truist Financial Corp 51.76 -1.38 56.53 24.01 3.65 17.05 69778.6UnionPac 215.07 -1.09 221.28 105.08 1.90 26.08 144928.98UPS B 159.40 -4.08 178.01 82.00 2.63 28.79 114001.94USBancorp 48.31 -0.98 55.82 28.36 3.65 15.23 72768.5UtdHlthcre 349.47 -1.07 367.95 187.72 1.40 19.11 331579.63UtdTech 86.01 -5.36 158.44 69.02 2.69 144.88 74498.84ValeroEngy 58.64 -1.63 94.85 31.00 6.88-930.36 23912.76Verizon♦ 57.21 0.17 61.95 48.84 4.54 12.32 236736.24VertexPharm 226.20 0.08 306.08 197.47 - 21.09 58820.57VF Cp 84.85 -0.54 96.89 45.07 2.38-336.55 33091.86ViacomCBS 45.25 -0.75 46.86 10.10 2.23 20.03 25565.33Visa Inc 201.92 0.06 220.39 133.93 0.62 39.31 342391.05Walgreen 48.96 -0.36 54.79 33.36 3.81 92.83 42303.48WalMartSto 145.87 -1.10 153.66 102.00 1.55 20.04 412707.94WellsFargo 32.42 -2.33 49.88 20.76 5.28 79.13 134040.15Williams Cos 22.36 -0.34 24.17 8.41 7.42 112.00 27129.71Yum!Brnds 106.23 -1.55 110.66 54.95 1.81 29.48 32046.21Venezuela (VEF)Bco de Vnzla 68000 -10.00 71990 1300 491.26 - 166.02Bco Provncl 2797900 403900 2797900 127000 - -18.43 201.98Mrcntl Srvcs 2300000-10000.00 2600000 120000 0.02 -2.75 93.74

Closing prices and highs & lows are in traded currency (with variations for thatcountry indicated by stock), market capitalisation is in USD. Highs & lows arebased on intraday trading over a rolling 52 week period.♦ ex-dividend■ ex-capital redistribution# price at time of suspension

FT 500: TOP 20

Close Prev Day Week Monthprice price change change % change change % change %

BOE Tech 0.83 0.79 0.04 5.06 0.17 25.8 38.33Gree Elec Apl 0.13 0.12 0.00 1.61 0.02 21.2 19.05ChinaMBank 60.90 57.15 3.75 6.56 8.70 16.7 25.44GenMotors 49.80 51.53 -1.74 -3.37 6.74 15.6 19.61CSR 3.70 3.93 -0.23 -5.85 0.50 15.6 28.37Bridgestne 3965.00 3900.00 65.00 1.67 533.00 15.5 8.11Canon 2248.50 2074.50 174.00 8.39 281.50 14.3 8.24Lilly (E) 190.14 186.69 3.45 1.85 23.73 14.3 13.53Intel 58.89 59.25 -0.36 -0.61 7.24 14.0 16.28Occid Pet 22.88 24.24 -1.36 -5.61 2.80 13.9 15.52Tencent 645.00 629.50 15.50 2.46 76.50 13.5 12.26IndstrlBk 22.71 21.35 1.36 6.37 2.61 13.0 10.62ViacomCBS 45.25 46.00 -0.75 -1.63 5.19 13.0 28.69ChUncHK 5.01 5.05 -0.04 -0.79 0.56 12.6 16.36ChinaPcIns 37.15 35.50 1.65 4.65 4.15 12.6 24.21CNOOC 8.09 8.18 -0.09 -1.10 0.84 11.6 13.07China Vanke 29.25 30.00 -0.75 -2.50 2.95 11.2 10.61Ch OSLnd&Inv 17.04 16.82 0.22 1.31 1.66 10.8 -4.58SaicMtr 25.70 25.12 0.58 2.31 2.47 10.6 5.46Bhartiartl 602.65 580.55 22.10 3.81 57.40 10.5 19.80Based on the FT Global 500 companies in local currency

FT 500: BOTTOM 20

Close Prev Day Week Monthprice price change change % change change % change %

Midea 0.73 0.70 0.03 4.29 -0.15 -17.0 -8.75SandsCh 30.65 31.25 -0.60 -1.92 -2.95 -8.8 -11.18Petrobras 28.87 29.86 -0.99 -3.32 -2.72 -8.6 2.05EDF 12.38 12.45 -0.08 -0.60 -1.13 -8.4 -1.00Vale 93.66 97.80 -4.14 -4.23 -8.34 -8.2 10.86MasterCard 324.95 326.93 -1.98 -0.61 -28.90 -8.2 -2.65HumanaInc 402.62 405.00 -2.38 -0.59 -34.15 -7.8 2.63ShenwanHong 0.07 0.07 0.00 -1.52 -0.01 -7.1 -1.52Renault 34.07 35.43 -1.36 -3.84 -2.57 -7.0 -7.41S&P Global 304.52 306.18 -1.66 -0.54 -22.33 -6.8 -5.94CanNatRs 31.83 33.01 -1.18 -3.57 -2.31 -6.8 -0.56Booking Holdings 2129.90 2182.59 -52.69 -2.41 -151.64 -6.6 1.54AutomData 159.73 161.91 -2.18 -1.35 -11.32 -6.6 -9.08Denso 5739.00 5932.00 -193.00 -3.25 -400.00 -6.5 -0.09KoreaElePwr 25300.00 25950.00 -650.00 -2.50 -1750.00 -6.5 5.86Visa Inc 201.92 201.86 0.06 0.03 -13.53 -6.3 -3.12ChristianDior 436.00 445.80 -9.80 -2.20 -29.20 -6.3 -3.15T-MobileUS 126.91 124.69 2.22 1.78 -8.16 -6.0 -2.35LVMH 493.95 508.00 -14.05 -2.77 -31.35 -6.0 -2.61LasVegasSd 54.49 55.68 -1.19 -2.14 -3.43 -5.9 -5.91Based on the FT Global 500 companies in local currency

BONDS: HIGH YIELD & EMERGING MARKET

Day's Mth's SpreadRed Ratings Bid Bid chge chge vs

Jan 15 date Coupon S* M* F* price yield yield yield USHigh Yield US$HCA Inc. 04/24 8.36 BB- Ba2 BB 113.75 4.24 0.00 0.12 -

High Yield EuroAldesa Financial Services S.A. 04/21 7.25 - - B 71.10 28.23 0.00 0.64 25.98

Emerging US$Peru 03/19 7.13 BBB+ A3 BBB+ 104.40 2.60 - - 0.34Colombia 01/26 4.50 - Baa2 BBB- 112.75 1.71 -0.03 0.03 1.33Brazil 04/26 6.00 - Ba2 BB- 118.75 2.18 0.00 0.03 1.80Poland 04/26 3.25 - A2 A- 112.19 0.86 -0.01 0.06 0.48Mexico 05/26 11.50 - Baa1 BBB- 149.50 1.72 -0.25 -0.35 1.34Turkey 10/26 4.88 - B2 BB- 100.15 4.84 -0.01 -0.43 4.46Turkey 03/27 6.00 - Ba2 BB+ 101.26 5.82 0.00 0.17 3.07Peru 08/27 4.13 BBB+ A3 BBB+ 103.50 3.66 0.01 -0.02 0.80Russia 06/28 12.75 - Baa3 BBB 170.30 2.38 -0.02 0.03 -Brazil 02/47 5.63 - Ba2 BB- 113.13 4.74 0.05 0.32 -

Emerging EuroBrazil 04/21 2.88 BB- Ba2 BB- 103.09 0.05 0.01 -0.09 -1.19Mexico 04/23 2.75 BBB+ A3 BBB+ 107.76 0.76 0.00 -0.07 -1.56Mexico 04/23 2.75 - Baa1 BBB- 106.52 -0.13 0.03 -0.32 -0.27Bulgaria 03/28 3.00 BBB- Baa2 BBB 117.04 1.00 0.02 -0.15 -1.42Interactive Data Pricing and Reference Data LLC, an ICE Data Services company. US $ denominated bonds NY close; allother London close. *S - Standard & Poor’s, M - Moody’s, F - Fitch.

BONDS: GLOBAL INVESTMENT GRADE

Day's Mth's SpreadRed Ratings Bid Bid chge chge vs

Jan 15 date Coupon S* M* F* price yield yield yield USUS$FleetBoston Financial Corp. 01/28 6.88 BBB+ Baa1 A- 129.00 2.54 -0.01 -0.05 -The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. 02/28 5.00 BBB+ A3 A 117.21 2.47 0.00 0.32 -NationsBank Corp. 03/28 6.80 BBB+ Baa1 A- 127.69 2.72 -0.01 0.06 -GTE LLC 04/28 6.94 BBB+ Baa2 A- 128.27 2.80 0.00 -0.11 -United Utilities PLC 08/28 6.88 BBB Baa1 A- 130.43 2.62 -0.07 -0.22 -Barclays Bank plc 01/29 4.50 A A1 A+ 96.46 5.02 0.00 0.02 -EuroElectricite de France (EDF) 04/30 4.63 A- A3 A- 137.45 0.82 -0.01 0.10 -The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. 02/31 3.00 BBB+ A3 A 124.42 0.68 0.00 -0.11 -The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. 02/31 3.00 BBB+ A3 A 121.70 0.93 0.00 0.02 -Finland 04/31 0.75 AA+ Aa1 AA+ 111.08 -0.27 0.00 -0.05 -0.87YenMexico 06/26 1.09 - Baa1 BBB- 97.57 1.56 0.00 -0.09 1.18£ Sterlinginnogy Fin B.V. 06/30 6.25 BBB Baa2 A- 128.68 3.20 0.00 -0.01 0.40innogy Fin B.V. 06/30 6.25 BBB Baa2 A- 137.45 2.19 -0.03 0.02 -Interactive Data Pricing and Reference Data LLC, an ICE Data Services company. US $ denominated bonds NY close; all other Londonclose. *S - Standard & Poor’s, M - Moody’s, F - Fitch.

INTEREST RATES: OFFICIAL

Jan 15 Rate Current Since Last Mnth Ago Year AgoUS Fed Funds 0.00-0.25 15-03-2020 1.00-1.25 1.50-1.75 1.25-1.50US Prime 4.75 30-10-2019 5.25 5.25 4.25US Discount 2.65 30-09-2019 2.75 2.75 1.75Euro Repo 0.00 16-03-2016 0.00 0.00 0.00UK Repo 0.10 19-03-2020 0.25 0.75 0.25Japan O'night Call 0.00-0.10 01-02-2016 0.00 0.00--0.10 0.00--0.10Switzerland Libor Target -1.25-0.25 15-01-2015 -0.75--0.25 -1.25--0.25 -1.25--0.25

INTEREST RATES: MARKET

Over Change One Three Six OneJan 15 (Libor: Jan 14) night Day Week Month month month month yearUS$ Libor 0.08675 0.001 0.000 0.002 0.12888 0.22563 0.25125 0.32575Euro Libor -0.58843 -0.004 -0.001 0.000 -0.59486 -0.55314 -0.53457 -0.49614£ Libor 0.03563 0.000 -0.002 -0.001 0.02838 0.03113 0.03950 0.07713Swiss Fr Libor 0.000 -0.81280 -0.76120 -0.72100 -0.60760Yen Libor -0.001 -0.06083 -0.07567 -0.05400 0.03950Euro Euribor -0.001 -0.56400 -0.55000 -0.53300 -0.50500Sterling CDs - - - -US$ CDs - - - -Euro CDs - - - -

Short 7 Days One Three Six OneJan 15 term notice month month month yearEuro -0.74 -0.44 -0.71 -0.41 -0.70 -0.40 -0.65 -0.35 -0.67 -0.37 -0.67 -0.37Sterling 0.45 0.55 0.70 0.80 0.78 0.88 0.82 0.97 0.89 1.04Swiss Franc - - - - - - - - - - - -Canadian Dollar - - - - - - - - - - - -US Dollar 0.18 0.38 0.03 0.23 0.06 0.26 0.14 0.34 0.16 0.36 0.22 0.42Japanese Yen -0.20 0.00 -0.20 0.00 -0.30 0.00 -0.20 0.10 -0.20 0.10 -0.15 0.15Libor rates come from ICE (see www.theice.com) and are fixed at 11am UK time. Other data sources: US $, Euro & CDs:Tullett Prebon; SDR, US Discount: IMF; EONIA: ECB; Swiss Libor: SNB; EURONIA, RONIA & SONIA: WMBA.

BOND INDICES

Day's Month's Year Return ReturnIndex change change change 1 month 1 year

Markit IBoxxABF Pan-Asia unhedged 226.91 -0.10 -0.20 -0.20 0.72 8.55Corporates( £) 405.91 0.16 -0.71 -0.71 -0.15 6.48Corporates($) 338.42 0.57 -0.91 -0.91 -0.91 -0.91Corporates(€) 244.61 0.12 0.18 0.18 -0.02 2.86Eurozone Sov(€) 262.96 0.00 -0.21 -0.21 -0.52 4.63Gilts( £) 374.34 0.22 -1.29 -1.29 -1.07 5.98Global Inflation-Lkd 310.66 0.40 -1.22 -1.22 0.00 11.10Markit iBoxx £ Non-Gilts 392.40 0.14 -0.64 -0.64 -0.19 5.85Overall ($) 281.91 0.42 -0.96 -0.96 -0.96 -0.96Overall( £) 375.33 0.20 -1.11 -1.11 -0.83 5.68Overall(€) 253.74 0.04 -0.09 -0.09 -0.37 3.83Treasuries ($) 259.63 0.34 -1.04 -1.04 -1.04 -1.04

FTSESterling Corporate (£) - - - - - -Euro Corporate (€) 104.47 -0.05 - - 0.54 -1.73Euro Emerging Mkts (€) 677.15 -1.08 - - 6.95 19.01Eurozone Govt Bond 110.04 -0.19 - - -0.34 -0.64

CREDIT INDICES Day's Week's Month's Series SeriesIndex change change change high low

Markit iTraxxCrossover 5Y 258.48 8.70 - - 261.48 243.40Europe 5Y 50.86 1.67 3.26 2.75 66.97 45.31Japan 5Y 51.13 0.18 0.47 -0.38 70.43 50.66Senior Financials 5Y 62.30 1.48 4.14 5.17 86.20 54.75

Markit CDXEmerging Markets 5Y 167.40 4.55 12.95 12.32 245.71 150.45Nth Amer High Yld 5Y 295.98 -0.28 2.14 -1.43 421.26 290.61Nth Amer Inv Grade 5Y 50.16 0.33 0.05 -2.34 65.62 49.59Websites: markit.com, ftse.com. All indices shown are unhedged. Currencies are shown in brackets after the index names.

COMMODITIES www.ft.com/commodities

Energy Price* ChangeCrude Oil† Jan 53.03 -0.59Brent Crude Oil‡ 54.93 -1.48RBOB Gasoline† Jan 1.55 -0.01Heating Oil† - -Natural Gas† Jan 2.76 0.09Ethanol♦ - -Uranium† - -Carbon Emissions‡ - -Diesel† - -Base Metals (♠ LME 3 Months)Aluminium 1986.00 -22.00Aluminium Alloy 1860.00 0.00Copper 7942.50 -141.50Lead 1990.50 -29.50Nickel 18045.00 -270.00Tin 21120.00 35.00Zinc 2688.00 -66.50Precious Metals (PM London Fix)Gold 1841.75 -17.10Silver (US cents) 2525.00 -8.50Platinum 1108.00 25.00Palladium 2394.00 8.00Bulk CommoditiesIron Ore 172.80 1.35GlobalCOAL RB Index 99.00 0.00Baltic Dry Index 1754.00 -38.00

Agricultural & Cattle Futures Price* ChangeCorn♦ Mar 532.25 -2.00Wheat♦ Mar 681.75 11.25Soybeans♦ Mar 1422.25 -7.75Soybeans Meal♦ Mar 463.00 -2.00Cocoa (ICE Liffe)X Mar 1736.00 36.00Cocoa (ICE US)♥ Mar 2537.00 22.00Coffee(Robusta)X Mar 1308.00 0.00Coffee (Arabica)♥ Mar 129.65 1.90White SugarX 461.40 -4.70Sugar 11♥ 16.37 -0.36Cotton♥ Mar 81.20 0.08Orange Juice♥ Mar 123.80 0.10Palm Oil♣ - -Live Cattle♣ Feb 112.18 -0.10Feeder Cattle♣ Jan 134.88 -Lean Hogs♣ Feb 66.43 -0.33

% Chg % ChgJan 14 Month Year

S&P GSCI Spt 431.87 8.41 1.50DJ UBS Spot 80.55 6.43 0.68TR/CC CRB TR 186.46 7.68 -3.61M Lynch MLCX Ex. Rtn 231.14 -9.84 -33.05UBS Bberg CMCI TR 13.20 4.85 -4.74LEBA EUA Carbon 34.23 9.54 38.81LEBA CER Carbon 0.29 0.00 52.63LEBA UK Power 2375.00 339.81 79.25

Sources: † NYMEX, ‡ ECX/ICE, ♦ CBOT, X ICE Liffe, ♥ ICE Futures, ♣ CME, ♠ LME/London Metal Exchange.* Latest prices, $unless otherwise stated.

BONDS: INDEX-LINKED

Price Yield Month Value No ofJan 14 Jan 14 Prev return stock Market stocks

Can 4.25%' 21 132.64 -1.114 -1.059 0.42 5.08 79956.85 7Fr 0.10%' 21 105.89 -1.283 -1.262 0.61 11.35 252474.68 15Swe 0.25%' 22 109.62 -0.659 -0.651 0.08 26.51 203489.94 7UK 1.875%' 22 109.47 -3.060 -3.045 -0.09 15.74 790962.34 28UK 2.5%' 24 356.44 -2.985 -2.978 -0.09 6.82 790962.34 28UK 2%' 35 299.51 -2.664 -2.650 -1.64 9.08 790962.34 28US 0.625%' 23 105.63 -1.819 -1.807 0.32 47.03 1672773.60 43US 3.625%' 28 136.73 -1.209 -1.217 -0.47 16.78 1672773.60 43Representative stocks from each major market Source: Merill Lynch Global Bond Indices † Local currencies. ‡ Total marketvalue. In line with market convention, for UK Gilts inflation factor is applied to price, for other markets it is applied to paramount.

BONDS: TEN YEAR GOVT SPREADS

Spread SpreadBid vs vs

Yield Bund T-Bonds

Spread SpreadBid vs vs

Yield Bund T-Bonds

Australia 1.19 - 0.14Austria - - -Canada 0.80 - -0.25Denmark -1.53 - -2.58Finland -0.41 - -1.46Germany - - -Ireland -0.36 - -1.41Italy -0.25 - -1.30Japan 0.16 - -0.89

Netherlands -0.70 - -New Zealand 1.07 - 0.02Norway 1.01 - -0.04Portugal -0.35 - -Spain -1.02 - -2.07Sweden -1.53 - -2.58Switzerland -0.52 - -1.57United Kingdom - - -United States 1.05 - 0.00

Interactive Data Pricing and Reference Data LLC, an ICE Data Services company.

VOLATILITY INDICES

Jan 15 Day Chng Prev 52 wk high 52 wk lowVIX 23.83 0.58 23.25 85.42 11.75VXD 22.27 0.62 21.65 71.05 2.47VXN 28.69 0.14 28.55 84.67 14.70VDAX 23.69 2.22 21.47 93.30 -† CBOE. VIX: S&P 500 index Options Volatility, VXD: DJIA Index Options Volatility, VXN: NASDAQ Index Options Volatility.‡ Deutsche Borse. VDAX: DAX Index Options Volatility.

BONDS: BENCHMARK GOVERNMENT

Red Bid Bid Day chg Wk chg Month YearDate Coupon Price Yield yield yield chg yld chg yld

Australia 11/22 2.25 104.00 0.07 0.00 0.00 -0.02 -0.7305/32 1.25 100.64 1.19 -0.01 0.02 0.11 -

Austria - - - - - - -02/47 1.50 137.93 0.04 -0.02 -0.03 0.05 -0.58

Belgium 09/22 1.00 102.64 -0.61 -0.02 0.00 0.08 -0.10Canada 11/22 2.00 103.30 0.19 0.00 0.02 0.00 -1.45

06/30 1.25 104.04 0.80 -0.01 0.01 0.08 -0.80Denmark 11/22 0.25 101.58 -0.61 -0.01 0.00 0.03 -0.03

11/30 0.10 117.40 -1.53 -0.03 -0.09 -0.09 -0.07Finland 04/23 1.50 105.00 -0.71 -0.01 0.00 0.04 -0.21

04/31 0.75 112.13 -0.41 -0.03 -0.03 0.02 -0.52France 05/23 1.75 105.81 -0.70 -0.03 0.00 0.05 -0.20

11/26 0.25 105.04 -0.59 -0.02 -0.01 0.04 -0.42Germany - - - - - - -

05/23 1.50 105.33 -0.77 -0.03 -0.03 0.05 -0.2002/26 0.50 106.56 -0.76 -0.03 -0.03 0.04 -0.3408/50 0.00 104.61 -0.15 -0.03 -0.03 0.06 -0.50

Greece 02/26 3.65 118.19 0.65 0.00 0.04 0.11 -0.72Ireland 10/22 0.00 101.18 -0.67 -0.02 0.00 0.03 -0.20

05/30 2.40 126.22 -0.36 -0.02 -0.02 0.00 -0.5205/30 2.40 126.22 -0.36 -0.02 -0.02 0.00 -0.52

Italy 08/22 0.90 101.89 -0.32 0.06 0.10 0.15 -0.4602/25 0.35 101.61 -0.05 0.07 0.11 0.15 -0.7405/30 0.40 106.11 -0.25 0.08 0.06 -0.02 -0.7903/48 3.45 145.15 1.43 0.05 0.07 0.07 -0.94

Japan 04/23 0.05 99.94 0.08 0.00 0.00 0.02 -04/25 0.05 99.93 0.07 0.00 -0.01 0.03 -12/33 1.60 118.48 0.16 0.00 -0.01 0.00 0.0112/49 0.40 93.82 0.63 0.01 0.00 0.02 0.18

Netherlands 07/23 1.75 106.29 -0.74 -0.02 -0.02 0.02 -0.2207/26 0.50 106.71 -0.70 -0.03 -0.02 0.02 -0.38

New Zealand 04/25 2.75 109.76 0.42 -0.01 0.01 0.12 -0.8205/31 1.50 104.16 1.07 -0.02 0.05 0.21 -0.6105/31 1.50 104.16 1.07 -0.02 0.05 0.21 -0.61

Norway 08/30 1.38 103.34 1.01 -0.03 0.08 0.13 -08/30 1.38 103.34 1.01 -0.03 0.08 0.13 -

Portugal 10/22 2.20 104.99 -0.63 0.01 0.06 0.09 -0.3002/26 3.30 118.81 -0.35 0.00 0.00 0.06 -0.52

Spain 10/22 0.45 101.79 -0.55 0.00 0.01 0.04 -0.2511/30 1.00 121.13 -1.02 0.00 -0.04 -0.06 -0.40

Sweden 06/22 0.25 109.62 -0.66 -0.01 -0.07 0.00 0.9506/26 0.13 117.04 -1.47 -0.03 -0.02 0.02 0.1606/30 0.13 117.03 -1.53 -0.05 -0.04 -0.03 -

Switzerland 05/22 2.00 103.75 -0.75 0.00 0.02 0.07 0.0105/30 0.50 109.80 -0.52 -0.01 0.02 0.06 -0.03

United Kingdom - - - - - - -07/23 0.75 102.13 -0.09 -0.02 0.01 0.00 -0.5807/26 1.50 108.19 0.02 -0.02 0.02 0.05 -0.5107/47 1.50 115.59 0.84 -0.02 -0.03 0.08 -0.38

United States 03/22 0.38 100.29 0.14 0.02 0.01 0.03 -03/25 0.50 100.48 0.38 0.00 0.02 0.09 -02/30 1.50 103.85 1.05 0.03 0.06 0.22 -02/50 0.25 115.15 - - - - -

Interactive Data Pricing and Reference Data LLC, an ICE Data Services company.

GILTS: UK CASH MARKET

Red Change in Yield 52 Week AmntJan 15 Price £ Yield Day Week Month Year High Low £m

- - - - - - - - -- - - - - - - - -- - - - - - - - -- - - - - - - - -

Tr 1.5pc '21 100.21 -0.04 -20.00 -20.00 33.33 -105.97 101.22 100.21 32.84Tr 4pc '22 105.06 0.00 -100.00 -100.00 -100.00 -100.00 107.91 105.06 38.77Tr 5pc '25 121.22 0.02 -300.00 -300.00 -128.57 -96.00 124.55 121.22 35.84Tr 1.25pc '27 107.17 0.16 33.33 23.08 166.67 -70.37 109.23 103.96 39.34Tr 4.25pc '32 142.32 0.47 11.90 6.82 27.03 -43.37 148.26 137.84 38.71Tr 4.25pc '36 151.90 0.67 9.84 4.69 17.54 -33.66 160.46 145.12 30.41Tr 4.5pc '42 173.01 0.85 6.25 2.41 11.84 -26.72 186.37 162.55 27.21Tr 3.75pc '52 178.71 0.89 7.23 2.30 12.66 -22.61 198.36 164.59 24.10Tr 4pc '60 204.17 0.86 8.86 3.61 14.67 -21.82 231.12 186.33 24.12Gilts benchmarks & non-rump undated stocks. Closing mid-price in pounds per £100 nominal of stock.

GILTS: UK FTSE ACTUARIES INDICES

Price Indices Day's Total Return ReturnFixed Coupon Jan 15 chg % Return 1 month 1 year Yield1 Up to 5 Years 89.38 0.03 2490.21 0.07 1.12 -0.082 5 - 10 Years 186.23 0.01 3814.67 -0.11 2.95 0.173 10 - 15 Years 224.42 -0.05 4899.00 -0.28 4.59 0.484 5 - 15 Years 194.69 0.00 4079.32 -0.15 3.48 0.285 Over 15 Years 392.32 -0.22 6474.38 -0.78 7.45 0.797 All stocks 191.70 -0.09 4118.29 -0.38 4.73 0.66

Day's Month Year's Total Return ReturnIndex Linked Jan 15 chg % chg % chg % Return 1 month 1 year1 Up to 5 Years 301.50 0.02 -1.13 -1.71 2499.89 -0.77 -0.052 Over 5 years 820.23 -0.34 -2.25 4.39 6205.05 -2.20 4.783 5-15 years 510.86 -0.11 -1.88 0.92 4076.78 -1.69 1.664 Over 15 years 1079.91 -0.43 -2.40 5.64 7950.49 -2.40 5.905 All stocks 729.46 -0.31 -2.16 3.69 5621.70 -2.08 4.22

Yield Indices Jan 15 Jan 14 Yr ago Jan 15 Jan 14 Yr ago5 Yrs -0.04 -0.03 0.33 20 Yrs 0.82 0.82 1.1510 Yrs 0.35 0.34 0.68 45 Yrs 0.76 0.74 1.0615 Yrs 0.66 0.66 1.01

inflation 0% inflation 5%Real yield Jan 15 Dur yrs Previous Yr ago Jan 15 Dur yrs Previous Yr agoUp to 5 yrs -2.82 2.77 -2.81 -2.19 -3.17 2.76 -3.16 -2.79Over 5 yrs -2.24 23.89 -2.25 -1.98 -2.25 23.93 -2.26 -2.015-15 yrs -2.75 9.41 -2.76 -2.42 -2.83 9.40 -2.84 -2.51Over 15 yrs -2.17 29.04 -2.19 -1.93 -2.18 29.05 -2.20 -1.96All stocks -2.24 22.07 -2.26 -1.98 -2.26 22.13 -2.27 -2.02See FTSE website for more details www.ftse.com/products/indices/gilts©2018 Tradeweb Markets LLC. All rights reserved. The Tradeweb FTSEGilt Closing Prices information contained herein is proprietary toTradeweb; may not be copied or re-distributed; is not warranted to beaccurate, complete or timely; and does not constitute investment advice.Tradeweb is not responsible for any loss or damage that might result from the use of this information.

All data provided by Morningstar unless otherwise noted. All elements listed are indicative and believed accurateat the time of publication. No offer is made by Morningstar, its suppliers, or the FT. Neither the FT, norMorningstar’s suppliers, warrant or guarantee that the information is reliable or complete. Neither the FT norMorningstar’s suppliers accept responsibility and will not be liable for any loss arising from the reliance on theuse of the listed information. For all queries e-mail [email protected]

Data provided by Morningstar | www.morningstar.co.uk

JANUARY 16 2021 Section:Stats Time: 15/1/2021 - 18:25 User: peter.bailey Page Name: MARKET DATA 2, Part,Page,Edition: USA, 14, 1


Main Market52 Week Vol

Price +/-Chg High Low Yld P/E 000s52 Week Vol





Price +/-Chg High Low Yld P/E 000s

Aerospace & DefenceAvon Rubber 3555 5.00 4650 1788.1 0.59 85.44 63.4BAE Sys 495.60 -6.00 672.80 395.90 1.90 13.11 7581.0Chemring 300.00 -2.50 319.50 145.80 1.20 23.81 224.6Meggitt 430.10 2.40 701.00 196.15 1.29 -18.54 4930.7RollsRoyceX 105.90 -0.75 243.99 34.59 1.49 -1.02 34155.1

Automobiles & PartsFordMtr $X 9.87 -0.30 10.20 3.96 3.19 -234.94 45032.6

BanksANZ A$X 24.66 0.06 27.29 14.10 4.16 20.81 5135.2BcoSant 242.80 -5.45 335.50 137.80 3.58 -6.83 1443.9BnkGeorgia 1196 -64.00 1845 690.00 - 7.35 29.7BankIre Grp € 3.41 - 4.78 1.28 - -6.34 5024.9BkNvaS C$X♦ 69.90 -0.06 74.92 46.38 5.18 13.12 109.3BarclaysX 148.80 -4.06 184.00 73.04 - 12.95 44311.3CanImp C$X♦ 113.75 -0.11 114.21 67.52 5.14 13.77 84.1HSBCX 403.25 -4.95 599.00 281.50 1.93 -47.39 18889.9LlydsBkgX 35.94 -0.52 59.94 23.59 - 21.14 173192.0NWGX 158.55 -2.50 173.70 90.54 - 24.77 11330.1PermTSB € 0.84 0.00 1.06 0.40 - -6.67 29.7RylBkC C$X 107.93 -0.25 109.42 72.00 4.00 13.73 179.3Secure Trus 904.00 4.00 1700 524.93 2.21 8.30 2.5StandChX 489.70 -8.50 718.60 334.25 - 24.44 5438.7..7.375%Pf 125.00 2.55 129.00 93.50 5.90 - 20.8..8.25%Pf 140.65 13.45 138.95 105.00 5.87 - 200.0TntoDom C$X♦ 75.33 -0.27 76.10 49.01 4.15 11.66 226.1Westpc A$X 21.35 0.32 25.96 13.47 3.66 34.28 9397.0

Basic Resource (Ex Mining)Ferrexpo 330.60 -10.40 352.68 94.88 4.04 6.28 2043.5Mondi 1809.5 -53.50 1902.5 1156.5 1.37 13.84 1351.0

ChemicalsCarclo 18.63 0.10 26.50 3.05 - -7.16 151.7Croda 6366 -76.00 6884 3814 1.41 39.52 250.9Elemntis 114.10 -3.50 149.30 18.07 1.93 -18.31 1149.9Johnsn Mtth♦ 2748 -39.00 2955 1614 2.02 52.05 540.1Victrex 2404 -48.00 2498 1645 2.48 23.32 155.8

Construction & MaterialsAlumasc 111.00 - 133.45 56.54 3.96 20.56 7.6Boot(H) 253.00 -2.00 351.00 180.00 1.98 13.98 18.6CRH 3264 -10.00 3560 1500 2.27 19.40 754.3GalfrdT 128.00 0.10 201.40 70.00 27.34 -4.35 254.5KierGp 75.20 - 154.60 42.06 - -0.71 359.3Kingsp € 63.20 -1.45 107.30 37.30 0.21 32.79 203.1MorgSdl 1554 -8.00 1980 990.01 1.35 13.42 30.3Norcros 212.50 -0.50 305.00 119.00 1.46 53.13 13.2Tyman 348.00 -9.00 370.00 133.00 1.11 30.63 253.3

Electronic & Electrical EquipDialight 250.50 -9.50 340.00 157.50 - -5.09 0.8Discoverie 730.00 6.00 750.00 330.29 0.41 55.30 389.8Halma♦ 2557 -6.00 2637 1660 0.65 54.84 500.6Morgan Ad 318.00 -2.00 325.80 168.80 1.26 113.57 333.7OxfordIn 1940 -10.00 2175 724.00 - 34.09 29.4Renishaw 5760 - 6255 2234.51 0.80 14400.00 50.3Spectris 3060 12.00 3154 2058 0.72 16.44 320.8TT Elect 210.00 5.00 285.00 135.75 1.00 84.00 532.8XP Power 5060 -40.00 5240 2062.05 0.75 54.18 41.7

Financial General3i 1142 -19.50 1215 529.80 3.06 15.47 1087.3BrewDlph♦ 302.50 -3.50 372.00 130.00 5.42 19.39 1439.6CtyLonInv 438.00 -3.00 479.52 264.00 6.39 14.85 9.4CloseBrs 1405 -17.00 1633 849.00 3.13 19.38 196.0

DBAG € 35.35 -1.85 42.50 22.20 4.33 60.75 7.1Hargr Lans 1569 -21.00 1923 1147 2.21 23.81 652.0Indvardn SKr 271.80 -5.70 278.50 167.70 - 10.53 370.7ICG 1699 -20.00 1896 452.00 2.99 31.35 390.0Investec 203.50 -0.90 354.03 122.55 5.41 22.46 2951.5Jupiter 297.00 -0.60 437.80 161.65 5.76 16.14 903.4Liontrust 1315 10.00 1495 678.45 2.51 71.62 183.0LSE Gp 9134 -190.00 9358 5300 0.77 81.26 358.9M&G Plc 196.30 -3.10 252.56 86.40 6.07 4.66 4669.1Paragon 482.00 4.20 544.00 217.00 4.40 11.08 286.4Providnt 277.80 -3.20 492.70 126.87 3.24 19.43 696.6RathbnBr 1586 -30.00 2095 1194 4.41 27.16 52.4Record 46.50 0.10 50.98 25.00 4.95 15.15 71.9S & U 2220 -10.00 2500 1420 5.41 13.45 0.5Schroder 3446 -38.00 3641 1711 3.31 21.22 136.5..N/V 2310 -55.00 2635 1424 4.94 14.22 9.6Shires Inco♦ 245.50 -4.50 292.95 157.85 5.38 -8.27 18.4Strd Life A 304.30 -3.60 330.37 170.30 7.10 -7.59 4865.0TP ICAP 227.40 -0.20 407.10 160.25 7.41 23.20 622.9WlkrCrip 26.50 - 30.00 18.00 2.26 -75.71 8.7

Food & BeveragesAngloEst 631.00 3.00 710.00 336.00 0.06 11.03 0.5AscBrFdX 2249 -6.00 2730 1554 1.53 39.05 1125.6Barr(AG) 508.00 5.00 641.00 369.00 0.79 27.25 50.9Britvic♦ 800.00 - 959.00 536.00 2.71 22.60 443.8CarrsGroup 136.00 0.75 161.00 83.53 3.49 13.33 105.7Coca-Cola H 2305 -29.00 2933 1393.1 2.44 22.24 495.6Cranswk♦ 3484 -4.00 4126 2688 1.73 20.85 170.0Devro 155.00 -2.00 195.40 116.76 1.74 -6.28 218.0DiageoX 2903 -22.50 3297 2050.6 2.41 48.46 2716.0Grncore 111.50 1.30 254.00 83.40 3.36 -42.88 2373.4HiltonFd 1000.00 -164.00 1352 711.00 2.14 22.22 446.5Kerry € 114.60 0.30 126.50 88.55 0.70 36.83 18.1PremFds 110.80 1.20 112.60 17.86 - 12.31 1762.1REA 58.00 -0.50 182.00 25.00 - -5.23 50.3StckSpirit 282.50 1.50 285.00 119.80 2.80 17.22 405.8Tate&Lyl 665.40 -6.20 811.40 493.83 4.45 12.63 832.2Unilever 4394 40.00 4944 3583.5 3.36 21.48 2810.8..NV € 53.40 -0.20 55.40 45.30 3.12 23.46 7.9

Health Care Equip & ServicesConvaTec 199.20 -2.40 224.80 142.40 2.25 164.49 2017.8GNStre kr 464.30 -4.60 525.00 217.40 0.32 46.49 163.1Mediclinic 291.00 -3.20 417.00 232.40 1.10 -5.18 304.0Smith & Nep 1577 -10.50 2023 1055.01 1.91 43.69 1256.3UDGHlthC♦ 774.00 0.50 836.50 423.40 1.75 26.90 465.6

House, Leisure & Pers GoodsBarrttDev 695.60 -0.20 889.20 349.40 2.80 17.88 2889.9Bellway 2890 -17.00 4336 1735.5 3.46 18.51 238.1Berkeley 4467 -11.00 5709.54 3041 4.62 15.45 227.7Burberry Gp 1716 -16.00 2340 1017 0.66 317.78 1215.6Cairn Homes 92.00 -2.10 96.52 0.60 2.47 23.59 85.7CtrySide 419.00 -6.40 544.00 248.80 3.89 12.85 944.5Crest Nicho 304.80 -3.20 524.00 159.85 3.67 -78.15 458.3GamesWk♦ 10710 -590.00 12159.5 3564 1.35 49.17 244.6Gleeson 748.00 -28.00 1005 2.84 3.07 87.49 34.5Headlam 377.00 -13.00 553.00 235.00 2.00 -33.96 10.7McBride 82.80 -4.00 89.60 55.10 - 22.38 449.7McCarthy&S 119.80 - 160.20 36.51 4.51 15.76 251.6Persimn 2690 20.00 3328 1367.5 - 12.71 597.9Philips € 44.78 0.09 46.38 26.92 - 40.14 1636.2PZCusns 225.00 -10.00 265.24 149.00 3.68 40.25 383.8ReckittBX 6274 -52.00 8191.3 5130 2.78 -16.22 1462.9Redrow 531.00 - 850.76 293.00 3.86 16.19 2535.7Superdry Pl 236.00 6.60 430.00 60.10 1.78 -1.35 827.8

TaylorWm 163.60 -1.40 237.70 98.12 2.35 13.41 15477.7TedBaker 114.00 -0.10 305.37 59.57 5.57 -0.78 274.1Vistry Grou 923.50 -18.00 1491.8 503.50 2.16 17.07 600.6

Industrial EngineeringBodycote♦ 729.50 -38.50 938.50 378.40 0.82 31.44 317.3Castings 368.00 -9.00 443.76 274.00 4.04 44.50 14.1Goodwin 2980 125.00 3650 1730 3.23 28.85 1.9Hill&Sm 1396 6.00 1503 844.00 0.76 29.83 57.3IMI 1278 -13.00 1313 619.80 1.17 22.62 472.7MelroseInd 181.95 -3.55 309.40 72.00 0.93 -23.33 7018.8Renold 14.50 -0.10 18.15 4.00 - 10.36 589.3RHIM 3670 -122.00 3816 1419 1.24 26.74 47.1Rotork 340.00 -7.40 355.10 177.05 0.68 32.08 928.8Severfd 71.00 -0.20 96.00 51.20 4.08 11.70 50.6Trifast 149.00 1.00 193.00 89.00 0.81 -41.05 27.1Vitec 976.00 - 1085 485.98 1.26 -325.33 7.7Weir 1988 -23.00 2130 608.60 0.83 -13.38 1078.0

Industrial GeneralCalisen 258.70 -0.20 275.00 95.00 - -0.03 237.5Coats Group 63.70 -2.00 80.90 35.90 0.70 30.05 1134.0JardnMt $X 56.99 0.79 58.95 37.37 3.32 -99.71 234.5Jard Str $X 27.04 0.79 33.50 17.81 1.44 -31.14 359.1Macfrlne 87.30 -1.60 116.50 61.00 0.79 14.57 144.3Smith DS 386.50 -19.00 411.20 244.80 - 26.66 6212.3Smiths 1495 -32.00 1778.5 790.00 2.13 91.72 607.2SmurfKap 3594 -108.00 3768 1831 0.71 22.39 233.7Vesuvius 509.00 -23.00 562.39 284.00 1.22 27.37 182.8

Industrial TransportationBraemar 175.00 -4.50 225.00 92.00 2.86 6.89 84.7Clarkson 2760 -60.00 3135 1936 0.91 -72.63 126.1Eurotunnl € 13.64 -0.19 17.04 8.62 - 267.22 295.9Fisher J 980.00 -4.00 2105 735.00 1.15 20.00 126.3OceanWil 885.00 - 1040 509.90 2.77 390.56 19.1RoyalMail 386.50 8.20 392.00 118.86 1.94 175.68 4853.4Signature A 429.20 0.60 445.14 129.40 1.00 -128.58 4391.2

InsuranceAdmiral 2923 -28.00 3054 1858.5 3.36 17.41 431.1AvivaX 348.50 -2.00 417.60 205.70 2.73 6.35 7239.5Beazley 349.40 -0.40 611.50 242.20 3.59 27.32 2184.4Chesnar 288.50 4.00 350.50 200.00 7.38 24.12 55.3Direct Line 329.50 -2.20 355.00 225.40 2.19 11.81 3182.1Eccles prf 156.00 -1.50 167.00 111.00 5.53 - 65.2Hansard 46.20 -0.40 49.00 23.40 9.63 14.44 65.0Hiscox 998.00 31.40 1376 305.80 1.11 -14.65 1917.0Lancashire 722.00 -3.50 852.50 481.00 1.66 34.31 295.0Leg&Gen 273.00 -7.00 320.50 138.00 6.44 13.33 10506.7Old Mut 58.50 0.50 106.60 42.76 10.21 -25.90 709.0PhoenixGrp 693.20 -13.20 824.40 459.05 6.75 9.44 1841.2PrudntlX 1430.5 -1.50 1509 682.80 2.59 35.21 4176.7RSA Ins 677.80 -0.80 736.84 321.20 1.11 22.08 3794.4SagicFin 117.50 - 135.00 87.00 1.72 241.77 0.0StJmsPl 1171.5 -25.50 1206 614.00 3.29 22.53 791.4

LEISUREPhotoMe Int 46.85 -2.10 97.00 32.50 18.01 5.28 112.3

Media4imprint 2350 -30.00 3450 1067.31 0.86 29.83 23.1Auto Trader 566.00 -11.80 747.00 308.60 0.42 34.20 1603.9DlyMailA♦ 780.00 -8.00 960.00 538.00 3.09 34.06 87.6Hyve Group 110.20 -0.50 317.88 33.58 22.69 -0.51 1069.1Informa 537.00 -6.40 870.80 326.70 1.41 -10.06 2096.1ITV 109.65 1.00 147.05 50.06 2.37 14.62 9820.4

Pearson 678.00 -1.60 710.00 412.08 2.88 19.82 1619.2RELX PLCX 1825.5 -3.00 2109 1382.86 2.50 27.83 3631.6Rightmove P 610.80 -3.20 710.60 373.10 0.46 39.66 1635.2STV Grp 330.00 -2.00 450.33 207.84 1.91 26.40 2.7ThmReut C$X 101.11 1.87 115.66 75.91 1.99 20.12 53.3WPPX 814.20 -1.00 1049 450.00 2.79 -4.38 2659.3

MiningAngloAmer 2663.5 -149.50 2846.5 1018.2 3.32 19.59 3566.5AngloPacif♦ 137.40 1.40 187.00 97.10 6.64 -19.77 497.9AnGoldA R 348.98 1.86 887.51 209.79 0.44 14.18 1455.7Antofagasta 1514.5 -57.50 1616.5 575.00 0.94 55.20 1200.0BHP Group 2135 -73.00 2235.5 939.80 3.87 16.80 4543.1BisichMg 60.00 - 128.00 40.00 1.67 -2.17 0.5EVRAZ 500.80 -9.20 530.80 200.60 12.04 17.19 1721.2Fresnillo 1087.5 -32.50 1379.5 456.51 1.08 49.77 1234.5GlencoreX 279.90 -5.10 287.10 109.76 2.85 -13.83 48475.4Harmony R 67.70 0.99 126.76 31.06 - -42.33 3841.1KAZ Mineral 731.40 5.20 731.80 256.20 1.30 8.22 2451.6Petropvlsk 31.20 -0.50 41.60 12.30 - -273.68 5712.1PolymtIntl 1658.5 -35.50 2085 990.20 3.05 13.87 1491.7Rio TintoX 5946 -186.00 6378 2954 5.14 16.67 2275.5Troy Res A$ 0.09 0.00 0.20 0.06 - -1.27 221.3

Oil & GasBPX 302.45 -6.80 508.70 188.52 9.30 -3.65 42099.0CairnEng 191.20 -3.70 283.64 67.78 - -5.76 762.2ExxonMb $X 48.28 -2.04 69.59 30.11 7.57 58.92 22435.9Gazprom PJS $ 6.12 -0.10 8.32 2.55 6.70 -79.59 6099.2GeoPark $ 12.85 -0.27 20.57 5.44 0.67 -6.46 104.4HellenPet € 5.52 -0.05 8.57 4.07 9.23 -4.30 127.8Hunting 215.40 -7.00 384.80 120.10 3.01 -2.22 226.9ImpOil C$X 27.44 -0.44 35.80 10.27 3.22 -45.58 35.8Pharos Ener 20.75 -0.25 55.00 10.00 - -0.35 513.4PJSC Lukoil $ 80.77 -0.04 108.45 46.86 3.22 37.79 1.0PremOil 21.32 -1.19 119.90 10.02 - -0.36 7386.1RylDShlAX 1483 -20.80 2319 878.10 6.50 -8.92 5376.8..B 1420 -22.60 2309 845.10 6.79 -8.54 4597.1Seplat 70.40 -2.00 124.50 37.30 13.91 -30.33 155.6TrnCan C$X♦ 55.79 -0.18 76.58 47.05 5.72 11.75 60.9Tullow Oil 33.24 -1.26 62.82 0.29 5.60 -0.18 10600.3Wood Group 338.30 -12.50 426.40 100.90 2.73 66.35 2628.2

Pharmaceuticals & BiotechAstraZenecaX 7592 33.00 10120 5871 2.86 51.66 2092.9Dechra 3570 -32.00 3652 2030 0.91 108.97 285.0Genus 4312 12.00 4530 2464.6 0.65 69.66 78.1GlaxoSmhX 1413.6 20.20 1857 1284 5.66 11.18 7603.3HikmaPhm 2540 -53.00 2768 1596 1.50 14.87 398.6Oxfd Bio 922.00 1.00 1090.13 356.73 - -57.77 169.9RichterG $ 26.60 -0.20 27.20 16.50 0.82 21.31 0.0VecturGp 121.20 -0.80 131.60 59.10 - -110.18 604.3

Real EstateREITsAssura 75.70 -1.80 88.00 46.80 3.72 21.63 4817.0BigYellw 1130 8.00 1245.3 630.00 2.99 34.77 210.5BritLand♦ 449.80 -5.30 596.20 309.40 1.77 -3.09 2260.6Cap&Reg 69.80 -0.80 249.20 32.30 30.09 -0.35 30.4Civitas SH 103.00 -1.80 115.40 74.20 5.17 16.97 802.6Countrywd 391.20 -0.40 395.00 35.74 - -3.44 91.5DrwntLdn 3268 56.00 4362 2334 2.22 25.77 254.9Great Portl 639.60 -3.60 971.80 518.60 1.97 -11.05 442.6Green Reit € 1.84 -0.05 1.93 1.30 3.12 13.44 1922.5Hammersn 22.70 -0.59 289.70 14.05 22.33 -0.28 23299.1Hibernia €♦ 1.17 0.01 1.43 0.75 4.14 1142.84 2110.0LandSecs 657.70 -7.70 997.20 474.75 1.76 -3.20 949.6

LondonMtrc 231.40 -1.20 245.20 132.90 3.63 22.87 1224.7McKaySec 198.25 -0.75 286.00 136.00 3.63 -10.91 45.2Palace Cap 190.00 -9.50 347.34 158.37 5.13 -5.78 51.3PrimyHth 148.80 -3.00 167.60 114.70 4.86 20.11 3825.0RDI REIT 88.20 0.90 137.60 41.55 11.34 -3.75 281.6SEGRO 961.00 -5.20 996.60 641.80 2.15 15.65 1353.6Shaftbry 547.50 -8.00 915.67 407.00 3.16 -5.73 1006.5Town Ctr 118.00 3.00 234.00 80.50 9.96 -2.59 5.4TritaxBBOX 176.20 -1.80 178.70 79.00 3.80 17.09 5147.4Wkspace 735.50 -7.50 1317 420.88 4.92 -9.68 134.7Real Estate Inv & ServicesCap&Count 139.90 -5.50 265.80 97.05 1.07 -2.43 2141.5CLS 221.00 -1.00 290.50 153.00 3.35 10.18 86.5Grainger♦ 278.40 0.80 341.80 189.76 1.90 19.61 892.0Harworth Gr 107.50 3.00 160.22 83.66 0.28 67.19 116.8Helical 385.50 5.50 540.00 200.43 2.26 34.42 49.9HK Land $ 4.61 - 5.85 3.46 5.25 -4.80 10540.4Lon&Assc 9.50 - 21.25 5.60 1.89 -1.34 25.0MacauPrp 67.25 - 120.00 51.00 - -1.63 29.8Mntview 12250 300.00 12850 8600 3.27 18.99 0.2Raven Prope 28.25 -0.05 51.60 23.50 - -9.48 638.8RavenR CNV 85.50 - 110.00 63.00 - - 1.6RavenR Prf 108.50 - 137.00 75.00 - 121.50 410.7Safestre 827.00 -4.00 886.89 501.00 2.12 9.33 309.4Savills 1039 24.00 1268 620.00 0.48 20.74 204.4SiriusRE 87.90 -2.30 98.90 44.35 3.67 12.07 1005.1Smart(J)♦ 120.00 - 126.00 107.50 2.66 8.63 10.0StModwen 378.50 1.00 539.00 294.46 0.95 -7.84 166.3U+I 67.00 2.80 189.00 50.97 8.81 -1.51 191.2Unite Gp 976.50 -16.00 1351 577.00 1.05 -9.28 907.6Urban&C 343.50 -1.50 375.00 183.00 1.14 11.19 466.2

RetailersAA 34.80 0.05 60.05 13.32 1.72 3.00 15860.3AO World 389.00 -8.50 444.50 46.67 - 1051.35 654.6Caffyns 385.00 - 445.00 200.00 1.95 9.19 0.6Dairy Fm $ 4.54 - 5.74 3.48 5.08 21.41 1204.9Dignity 593.00 -2.00 759.00 210.50 - -12.95 45.4Dunelm 1197 8.00 1601.48 596.50 1.71 27.90 355.7Halfords 299.00 -0.50 303.50 49.42 2.07 14.95 1623.1Inchcape 652.00 -2.50 710.00 383.85 1.37 260.80 428.8JDSportsF 829.80 -21.60 923.20 274.70 0.03 42.62 1136.1Kingfisher 269.40 -10.20 326.20 101.00 1.24 36.90 5889.5Marks&Sp 139.60 1.50 195.00 73.90 2.79 -16.05 10202.7Morrison (W 182.55 -2.75 210.00 157.55 3.71 16.78 5893.0Next 8018 58.00 8076 3311 0.72 31.26 726.4Ocado 2513 -71.00 2914 994.01 - -146.53 1544.8Saga 270.00 12.40 2400 118.50 6.58 -0.53 1695.1Sainsbury ( 238.00 -4.40 250.70 171.19 1.39 -793.33 6603.2Studio Reta 290.00 -1.50 304.00 140.00 - 16.76 4.9TescoX 241.60 0.20 260.00 202.00 3.79 22.84 15858.5

Support ServicesAggreko 638.00 -22.00 881.00 285.90 1.47 -28.51 419.1AshtdGp♦ 3652 -19.00 3752 1010 1.11 26.41 820.1Bunzl 2438 -19.00 2710 1242 0.64 21.44 471.3Capita 37.05 -0.28 176.55 19.84 - -7.18 4668.3DCC 5714 -4.00 7204 3463 2.54 19.66 280.4DeLaRue 160.20 -3.40 187.00 36.86 - 3.91 218.2Diploma♦ 2122 50.00 2442 1191 0.97 48.78 213.1DWF Group P 82.10 1.10 143.00 45.00 3.96 -58.64 2.3Elctrcmp♦ 913.00 -16.00 959.00 397.30 0.65 31.59 1031.4Essentra PL 315.40 -12.20 445.49 206.80 2.00 59.51 154.7Experian♦ 2682 -29.00 3192 1823.5 1.35 48.02 1748.7Ferguson 9266 -62.00 9516 3700 1.19 28.93 482.5G4S 260.50 0.30 262.70 69.92 1.38 236.82 2768.4

Hays 143.30 -2.50 174.50 85.25 2.00 46.23 1936.0Homesve 1074 -4.00 1371 755.81 2.20 37.68 467.3HowdenJny 690.00 -3.80 736.80 394.00 0.57 30.26 1068.4Intertek 5574 -26.00 6492 3786 1.90 34.18 219.0Kin and Car 150.00 - 168.50 46.00 0.87 -7.76 224.7MearsGp 158.00 - 323.00 74.25 2.31 143.64 29.1MenziesJ 237.00 1.50 482.00 66.90 2.53 -2.69 380.5Mitie 42.20 0.20 75.77 26.60 1.63 10.77 1115.6Renewi 42.60 -0.30 45.90 17.66 1.12 -9.78 817.3Rentokil 520.80 -6.40 578.60 289.20 0.29 39.97 2445.7Ricardo 381.00 -22.00 846.00 286.93 5.65 -31.23 60.1RbrtWlts 528.00 -2.00 614.00 214.00 0.85 18.40 8.8RPS 78.80 -0.20 185.60 29.86 3.07 -4.12 74.0SIG 33.02 -0.18 95.28 14.38 3.65 -0.80 3149.5Vp♦ 760.00 -10.00 1040 499.00 1.11 -41.69 29.8

Tech - HardwareSpirentCM 262.50 3.50 311.09 146.81 1.63 21.38 561.0

Tech - Software & ServicesComputcnt 2346 -24.00 2594 900.00 0.43 23.20 72.6MicroFoc 426.60 6.20 1148 205.80 10.57 -1.83 1042.0NCC Grp 258.00 2.50 275.00 125.40 1.80 61.43 213.2RM 215.00 - 296.00 110.00 0.93 12.95 143.4Sage♦ 565.00 - 794.60 515.60 3.02 20.07 2097.2TriadGp 74.00 -3.00 169.00 22.60 1.35 -36.82 146.1

TelecommunicationsBTX 140.85 -0.40 186.96 94.68 3.28 9.27 17031.9TalkTalk 98.30 0.10 124.84 67.20 2.54 7.45 1773.2TelePlus 1382 -16.00 1585 907.00 4.12 29.34 83.7Vodafone GpX 127.22 -1.72 158.50 92.76 6.42 16.40 64619.1

TobaccoBrAmTobX 2770 -10.50 3507 2362.5 5.56 10.00 2654.7Imperial BrX 1634.5 -6.50 2072 1142 12.64 18.10 1641.0

Travel & Leisure888 Hldg 305.00 6.00 325.00 68.40 1.60 20.82 1906.8Carnival 1312 -22.00 3728 581.00 5.70 -1.69 1258.2CompassX 1401 -27.00 1995.5 865.80 2.86 21.59 1862.6Dalata Hote 313.75 1.50 471.50 147.37 1.01 -35.96 16.0easyJet 832.00 7.40 1570 410.00 5.28 -3.14 3354.1FirstGrp 74.80 -2.40 134.20 25.00 - -3.56 3094.1Flutter Ent 15025 65.00 16290 4921.54 0.44 148.47 516.4Fuller A 762.00 32.00 990.00 486.00 1.02 -13.17 53.0Go-Ahead 1085 - 2242 390.20 6.63 -16.32 87.9IntCon Htel 4848 -42.00 5182 2161 0.65 -82.62 377.6Intl Cons A 162.25 0.05 275.54 0.94 8.11 -0.62 39918.6MandarO $ 1.80 0.01 1.99 1.06 0.92 -12.31 67.8Marstons 78.45 -0.30 128.00 18.40 9.56 -8.35 2002.3Natl Exp 264.20 0.40 485.00 66.30 1.95 -91.10 1724.0PPHE Htl 1355 -25.00 2160 700.00 1.25 -169.38 3.4Restaurt 61.00 -3.95 152.40 20.26 3.44 -1.97 2440.4Ryanair Hol 315.40 -12.20 445.49 206.80 2.00 59.51 154.7TUI 403.20 19.70 971.80 4.91 12.17 -1.66 7537.5Whitbrd 3169 -23.00 4163.31 1551.15 0.89 -9.27 857.7Willim H 269.90 0.10 313.00 28.63 0.99 15.78 3578.7

UtilitiesCentrica 50.62 -0.58 94.09 29.10 2.96 -4.40 17947.8Drax 387.00 0.40 401.80 118.90 4.11 -25.97 455.7Natl GridX 875.40 3.00 1073.8 789.13 5.55 20.65 6040.5Pennon 964.80 12.40 1210.5 912.79 4.54 50.78 847.8Severn Tren 2343 3.00 2716 1994.5 4.27 49.53 489.9SSE♦ 1519.5 -9.50 1703 1057.5 5.26 14.90 2118.1UtdUtils♦ 936.80 2.40 1104 625.00 4.55 58.19 1034.7

AIM52 Week Vol






Price +/-Chg High Low Yld P/E 000s

Aerospace & DefenceCohort♦ 625.00 - 730.00 416.85 1.62 27.79 8.3Velocity Co 23.40 2.40 44.96 12.00 - -9.36 16.3

BanksCaribbean I 38.00 -1.50 64.45 24.00 15.00 5.24 0.2

Basic Resource (Ex Mining)CropperJ 1110 - 1390 580.00 0.23 33.23 7.3

ChemicalsDirecta Plu 92.50 1.50 95.00 46.25 - -12.72 155.6Scapa 177.00 -6.60 295.00 82.50 - -5.62 295.1Versarien P 66.70 -2.70 85.80 21.20 - -24.80 889.9

Construction & MaterialsAbbey 1600 - 1700 1060 - 12.32 0.3AccsysTch 140.50 -3.50 167.55 59.80 - 38.73 25.3Aukett 1.60 - 3.16 0.75 - 3.48 50.0

Electronic & Electrical EquipCeresPow 1400 -32.00 1490 231.00 - -304.35 2667.8Checkit 52.00 - 55.00 22.00 - -4.60 1.4LPA 89.50 -3.00 117.00 56.00 1.23 32.19 7.3ThorpeFW 325.00 -2.00 358.00 225.00 1.71 28.51 9.8

Zytronic 150.00 5.00 249.00 70.00 15.20 12.61 32.4

Financial GeneralAppreciate 41.10 -0.40 66.46 24.00 - 50.74 298.5Arbuthnot 857.50 -12.50 1374 600.00 1.87 33.63 1.2BP Marsh 265.00 -10.00 278.00 133.00 0.84 7.09 15.3Burford Cap 641.50 -0.50 800.79 250.43 0.53 12.19 402.0Gresham Hou 810.00 - 820.00 450.00 0.56 -95.90 54.6Leeds 25.50 7.00 28.00 7.50 - -3.45 66.0MattioliWds 742.50 - 865.00 520.00 2.82 19.82 11.4Numis♦ 335.00 9.50 359.50 165.00 3.58 38.95 56.4PolarCap 686.00 -8.00 770.00 282.00 4.81 15.66 235.7Premier Mit♦ 159.50 -0.50 184.50 65.00 6.52 15.28 71.8STM Group 30.50 -0.50 42.00 18.00 4.92 18.82 60.1

Food & BeveragesCamellia 7375 100.00 9000 6250 0.57 -35.73 0.0Fevertree D 2334 -2.00 2587 888.40 0.65 57.00 190.0FinsbryFd 80.50 1.50 105.00 50.00 2.91 -134.17 332.1Nichols 1285 42.50 1490 858.00 0.96 26.92 10.1

Health Care Equip & ServicesAVO 44.00 0.50 50.00 20.00 - -5.37 117.7CareTech 508.00 -2.00 532.00 285.00 2.30 23.06 71.5

Tristel 575.00 -5.00 798.00 271.00 1.02 52.85 61.7

House, Leisure & Pers GoodsAirea 29.00 -1.00 45.49 18.11 2.76 18.13 24.1Churchll 1290 - 2060 605.00 0.80 26.93 5.0Frontier De 3300 -25.00 3440 952.00 - 83.76 96.6Portmern 557.50 -5.00 828.53 229.59 1.43 17.66 19.5Sanderson D 96.00 - 98.00 22.00 0.54 228.57 22.1

Industrial Engineering600 Grp 8.65 - 15.90 6.75 8.72 2.86 147.0MS Intl 116.00 1.00 200.00 95.00 7.11 -7.68 27.6Pres Tech 96.00 -3.00 147.00 50.10 - -10.00 94.1

ITKeywords St 2594 -76.00 2958 1159.28 0.02 147.55 458.5Learning Te 164.70 -2.70 190.00 106.20 0.15 128.27 956.0

LEISURECodemasters 600.00 - 670.00 204.50 - 43.17 3357.8Sumo Group 315.00 -7.00 364.00 121.54 - 47.66 130.9

MediaMission Gro 64.00 0.50 110.00 33.25 3.39 19.94 23.3YouGov 1085 -15.00 1125 393.00 0.37 127.65 48.9

MiningAMC 1.79 -0.01 3.50 0.85 - -7.37 6615.1Arkle Resou 1.80 0.15 2.20 0.40 - -8.26 5010.5BotswanaD 0.80 -0.03 1.17 0.40 - -6.15 111.3CentAsiaM 243.00 -6.00 279.00 100.20 2.66 12.71 548.7

Oil & GasBorSthnPet 1.33 -0.03 2.39 0.10 - -6.31 7727.8ClontarfEn 0.46 - 1.23 0.28 - -11.38 5191.9Egdon Res 2.10 - 6.95 1.13 - -1.47 319.4Hurricane E 2.58 -0.15 28.46 2.15 - -0.25 23018.8PetrelRes 3.40 -0.15 17.90 2.51 - -2.41 612.4Phoenix Glo 5.13 - 19.00 4.50 - -1.27 49.1Rockhop 9.90 -0.48 20.40 4.00 - -0.24 4735.9Sound Energ 1.51 0.08 4.72 0.74 - -3.08 807.4UnJackOil 0.18 -0.01 0.32 0.08 - -9.15 58045.9United O&G 3.00 - 4.10 1.00 - -52.63 836.2

Pharmaceuticals & BiotechAbcam 1704 11.00 1731 943.00 0.71 284.00 381.6AllcePharm 86.30 - 91.00 52.17 0.62 41.29 448.7Clinigen Gr 710.00 -10.50 1000.00 350.40 0.97 69.61 161.5e-Thera 20.00 0.30 23.00 3.00 - -21.05 719.4Reneuron 130.00 16.00 174.29 69.13 - -2.91 765.6

Sareum 2.35 0.10 3.09 0.22 - -78.33 12259.1

Real EstateInlandHms 58.60 0.10 94.40 32.00 3.75 7.92 863.2Lok'nStor 645.00 - 735.00 335.00 1.91 63.99 250.9PnthrSec 205.00 - 370.00 145.00 5.85 -2.83 0.1SIR 305.50 0.50 476.00 104.20 5.50 -27.04 407.7

RetailersASOS 4836 -350.00 5548 975.20 - 38.50 373.1Boohoo Grou 338.20 -13.00 433.50 133.10 - 51.71 15277.2CVS Group P 1446 -19.00 1542 670.00 0.38 178.52 240.7

Support ServicesBegbies 98.20 -2.80 117.00 57.33 2.85 -140.29 343.0Christie 90.00 -1.50 132.00 54.00 1.39 -14.17 7.8Empres 47.00 - 60.50 28.00 - -8.10 14.5Gattaca 80.00 - 117.70 29.40 - 44.44 7.0Impellam 255.00 - 365.00 210.00 - -4.53 0.5JhnsnSrv 138.20 5.20 226.00 76.50 0.83 172.75 1922.5LonSec 2320 - 2400 1800 2.59 19.69 0.0NWF 185.00 - 218.00 113.00 3.57 10.22 24.3Petards 16.25 -0.25 20.00 3.75 - -12.80 35.0Renew 530.00 - 570.00 304.00 2.17 18.07 119.6

Restore 385.00 -5.00 535.00 280.00 0.62 256.67 115.6Smart Meter 704.00 -3.00 770.00 436.60 0.98 4.03 101.9

Tech - HardwareAminoTech 133.00 -2.00 153.02 105.00 1.25 85.20 87.6IQE 76.65 -1.75 82.10 18.86 - -20.22 2792.2Telit Commu 202.50 4.50 210.00 64.76 - 32.92 650.0

Tech - Software & ServicesBoBlue Pris 1504 -20.00 1900 795.00 - -14.10 1473.0Eckoh 63.50 1.50 72.00 40.00 - 53.36 372.1IDE Group H 1.93 -0.15 4.40 0.60 - -0.84 806.7Ingenta 84.00 -1.00 89.00 40.00 - -20.55 50.2Iomart♦ 331.50 6.50 409.00 219.50 1.97 32.50 84.9Oxford Metr♦ 90.00 0.50 127.40 70.00 2.00 71.43 91.3WANdisco 500.00 - 834.00 360.00 - -11.44 51.6

Travel & LeisureCeltic 95.50 - 151.00 85.00 - -244.87 3.8..6%CvPf 122.00 - 158.00 117.00 - - 0.2..Cv Pf 220.00 - 319.50 210.00 - - 0.1gamingrealm 31.00 - 37.60 4.40 - -30.69 1713.9Jet2 1334 17.00 1950 182.50 0.22 -7.97 426.0MinoanGp 1.10 - 2.10 0.68 - -2.75 545.2

Investment CompaniesConventional (Ex Private Equity) 52 Week Dis(-)

Price +/-Chg High Low Yld NAV or Pm3i Infra 303.50 0.50 320.00 184.96 3.03 254.5 19.3AbnAsianIn 231.00 -2.00 243.00 140.59 4.00 260.2 -11.2Abrdn Div I 98.00 0.40 116.00 66.20 5.49 114.4 -14.3AbnEmgMkts 707.50 -7.50 731.10 420.05 3.00 824.1 -14.1AbnJapInv 792.50 -17.50 825.00 456.00 1.89 867.4 -8.6AbnLatAmIn♦ 59.80 0.70 75.00 38.00 5.85 68.7 -13.0AbnNewDn 329.00 -6.50 339.00 179.59 1.31 376.5 -12.6AbnNewIndia 546.00 -10.00 570.00 296.00 0.18 631.8 -13.6AbnNewThai 454.00 - 555.00 322.00 4.19 530.8 -14.5AbnSmlInCo 318.00 -1.00 350.00 175.00 2.66 350.6 -9.3AbnStdAsia 1200 -40.00 1255 696.00 1.17 1344.8 -10.8AStd Eqt In 319.50 -3.50 416.00 194.36 6.70 360.1 -11.3Abf Sml 1200 -16.00 1514 608.25 2.67 1354.8 -11.4Abf Spl Inc 69.10 0.10 94.50 34.50 6.11 75.1 -8.0Alliance 897.00 -9.00 932.00 536.00 1.57 956.7 -6.2AllianzTech 3000 -65.00 3093.31 1176 - 3039.7 -1.3Art Alpha♦ 397.50 8.00 428.00 205.00 1.31 432.2 -8.0Asia Dragon 542.00 -14.00 572.71 302.50 0.88 607.5 -10.8Aurora Inv 215.00 3.00 242.00 130.00 2.09 211.5 1.7AVI Global 865.00 -16.00 895.00 493.00 2.37 970.8 -10.9AVI JapOpp 110.75 - 120.63 73.40 - 111.5 -0.7Axiom 90.00 - 95.00 68.00 6.67 95.3 -5.6BG Euro♦ 1430 -15.00 1490 594.00 2.17 1382.0 3.5BG Japan 1068 -22.00 1120 514.00 0.33 1036.4 3.0BG Shin 251.00 -3.00 274.50 105.06 - 242.0 3.7Baillie Gif 225.00 -3.00 232.64 111.00 1.38 222.9 0.9Bankers 1110 -8.00 1146 689.00 1.91 1103.3 0.6BB Healthca 184.50 1.00 187.00 98.68 2.63 183.2 0.7BH Global 2005 -15.00 2034.8 1490 - 1980.0 1.3..USD $ 20.90 0.65 21.00 15.30 - 20.4 2.5BH Macro 3680 - 3730 2550 - 3381.0 8.8..USD $ 37.80 0.10 42.17 25.40 - 35.2 7.4BiotechGth 1650 - 1675.9 648.00 - 1665.3 -0.9BlckRCom 85.30 -2.80 88.80 36.20 4.69 94.5 -9.7BlckRFrnt 122.75 -0.25 134.00 77.44 4.68 125.4 -2.1BlckRGtEur 528.00 -6.00 538.00 271.14 1.11 545.9 -3.3BlckR I&G 180.00 - 214.00 117.00 4.00 197.2 -8.7BlckRckLat 405.00 -8.00 509.20 250.00 6.19 450.3 -10.1BlckRckNrAm 168.75 -1.00 196.50 106.53 4.74 183.4 -8.0BlckRSmlr 1654 2.00 1806 770.00 1.96 1743.3 -5.1BlckRThrmt 754.00 -12.00 790.00 315.60 1.35 758.5 -0.6BlckRWld 548.00 -18.00 601.74 208.50 4.01 580.7 -5.6BMO Cp&I 288.00 -5.50 358.00 181.50 3.99 299.7 -3.9BMOGblSmlr 144.20 -2.60 149.80 76.65 1.18 160.4 -10.1BMOMgdT 271.00 - 275.00 150.05 - 270.2 0.3BMOMgdT 134.00 - 146.00 85.00 4.55 133.9 0.1BMO UK HIT ♦ 92.00 - 103.00 57.00 5.66 100.8 -8.7

BMO UK HIT 92.00 - 102.00 56.00 4.26 100.8 -8.7BMO UK HIT 361.00 -2.00 406.00 224.00 - 403.1 -10.4Brunner 852.00 -12.00 926.00 550.00 2.35 1028.3 -17.1Caledonia I 2850 30.00 3163 1920 2.14 3575.4 -20.3CanGen C$ 35.50 0.70 35.89 16.22 2.38 52.3 -32.1City Merch 195.25 0.25 203.00 118.00 5.12 194.7 0.3City Lon 372.50 -3.50 446.00 269.00 5.10 364.3 2.3CQSNatRs 125.00 -3.50 138.50 49.00 4.48 150.3 -16.8Dun Inc 293.00 -2.00 315.00 180.12 4.33 310.8 -5.7EcofinGloba 195.75 -2.25 209.00 102.63 3.27 196.0 -0.1Edin Inv 554.00 -4.00 636.00 335.50 5.17 621.5 -10.9Edin WWd 380.50 -2.50 388.00 124.60 - 376.5 1.1EP Global 282.00 -2.00 314.00 214.00 2.13 316.7 -11.0EuroAsset 117.00 -3.00 124.00 62.40 5.84 132.0 -11.4F&C Inv Tru♦ 783.00 -13.00 822.67 463.00 1.11 847.0 -7.6FidAsian 449.00 3.50 455.00 243.00 1.96 451.9 -0.6FidChiSpS 404.00 -2.00 407.50 180.20 1.05 414.5 -2.5Fid Euro 281.50 -2.00 291.58 177.40 2.30 299.6 -6.0Fid Jap 223.50 -1.50 231.00 104.25 - 244.3 -8.5Fid Spec 245.00 -1.50 279.50 128.16 2.35 246.2 -0.5FinsG&I 864.00 -8.00 927.00 595.00 1.92 869.9 -0.7FstPacfic H HK$ 2.61 -0.07 2.84 1.10 5.66 - -GenEmer 901.00 -8.00 928.00 540.00 1.71 1007.8 -10.6GRIT# 2.75 - 5.50 0.65 - 1.4 96.4GoldenPros 54.50 -1.50 75.00 20.00 - 63.5 -14.2Gulf Invest $ 1.47 - 1.49 0.85 2.24 1.6 -8.1HAN 214.00 - 218.00 123.77 1.87 310.2 -31.0HANA 214.00 - 220.00 125.00 1.87 310.2 -31.0Hen Div Inc 91.40 -0.60 96.00 55.47 4.81 92.9 -1.6HenEuroF♦ 1432.5 -17.50 1488 860.72 2.18 1598.6 -10.4HenEuro 1445 -12.50 1520 804.00 2.15 1576.0 -8.3HenFarEs 336.50 -4.50 374.00 236.30 6.81 332.0 1.4HenHigh♦ 152.00 -0.25 193.50 100.03 6.51 162.7 -6.6HenInt Inc 153.75 -2.75 178.00 99.30 3.90 167.5 -8.2Hen Opp 1262.5 -45.00 1334.61 499.93 2.06 1436.7 -12.1HenSmlr 1018 -12.00 1142.68 470.00 2.31 1121.8 -9.3Herald 2160 -15.00 2307.77 877.00 - 2398.5 -9.9HICL Infra 168.00 - 183.00 133.80 4.91 149.8 12.1Highbridge 242.00 3.00 242.00 154.00 - 255.2 -5.2Impax Env. 454.50 -3.50 460.00 226.00 0.66 437.9 3.8Ind IT 520.00 -3.00 600.00 264.00 2.50 587.8 -11.5IGC 87.40 -0.10 89.00 32.20 - 103.9 -15.9IntBiotech 828.00 -2.00 860.00 451.00 3.00 827.3 0.1Intl PP 170.60 -1.40 176.80 122.80 4.21 145.5 17.3Inv AsiaTr 383.50 2.00 386.71 198.00 2.58 423.3 -9.4Inv IncGro 273.50 - 308.00 180.59 4.30 296.5 -7.8IP EnInc♦ 71.70 0.40 77.94 38.50 6.97 75.0 -4.4IPST BalR 154.50 0.50 153.20 124.00 - 162.5 -4.9IPST Gbl Eq 213.00 - 218.00 140.00 3.31 220.0 -3.2IPST Mngd 102.00 - 103.60 100.50 1.57 105.7 -3.5

IPST UK Eq 167.50 - 190.25 104.00 3.94 172.5 -2.9IP UKSmall 493.00 -8.50 640.00 285.17 3.77 561.9 -12.3JPM Amer 590.00 -3.00 603.00 328.50 1.10 626.5 -5.8JPM Asia 510.00 -4.00 524.44 272.00 3.16 502.1 1.6JPM China 720.00 -18.00 754.00 284.50 0.35 707.3 1.8JPMElct MC 102.50 - 105.00 99.00 0.39 103.6 -1.1..MG 957.50 - 973.19 565.20 1.74 998.4 -4.1..MI 95.50 - 114.00 64.00 4.92 99.6 -4.1JPM Emrg 137.70 - 138.30 72.68 1.03 - -JPM EurGth 316.00 -2.50 320.68 170.89 1.66 356.0 -11.2JPM EurInc 137.00 -0.50 166.00 78.80 4.89 153.2 -10.6JPM EuSm♦ 468.00 -3.00 492.00 209.00 1.43 544.3 -14.0JPM Clavr 656.00 6.00 798.00 446.00 4.46 685.7 -4.3JPMGblCoreR 94.50 -1.10 112.50 70.00 0.79 91.4 3.4JPM GEI♦ 152.00 -0.50 156.00 82.00 3.36 162.0 -6.2JPM Gl Gr&I 392.50 -4.00 403.00 218.00 3.32 386.0 1.7JPM Ind 718.00 -9.00 766.00 398.00 - 841.1 -14.6JPM JpCapSm 553.00 -27.00 616.00 275.00 3.25 592.7 -6.7JPM Jap♦ 719.00 -14.00 744.04 323.00 0.70 739.1 -2.7JPM Mid 1107.5 -15.00 1430 598.00 2.66 1237.5 -10.5JPM Mlti-As 89.90 0.20 107.00 63.00 4.45 103.7 -13.3JPMRussian 676.00 -3.00 804.00 404.00 5.18 770.6 -12.3JPM Smlr 337.50 -4.00 376.00 126.00 1.63 354.6 -4.8JPM US Sml 423.00 -4.50 430.00 191.31 0.59 421.8 0.3KeystoneInv 336.00 -5.00 364.00 161.00 3.33 356.3 -5.7Law Deb 668.00 -7.00 771.00 366.00 4.87 681.6 -2.0LinTrain £ 1400 -45.00 1718.45 400.00 2.96 1209.0 15.8Lowland♦ 1200 2.50 1489.65 696.00 5.00 1262.3 -4.9Majedie 231.00 1.00 256.00 134.00 4.94 273.1 -15.4Man&Lon 584.00 -13.00 704.00 420.00 2.57 613.8 -4.9Marwyn Val 107.00 0.50 119.75 71.00 - 155.5 -31.2MercantIT♦ 232.50 -6.50 279.10 116.68 2.84 249.2 -6.7MrchTst 460.50 -5.50 569.00 293.00 5.91 468.5 -1.7Mid Wynd 732.00 -2.00 750.00 420.00 0.94 722.6 1.3Miton Globa 307.50 2.50 310.00 180.00 - 313.7 -2.0Monks 1364 -10.00 1394 618.00 0.18 1339.6 1.8MontanSm 1627.5 -17.50 1710 645.00 0.57 1612.8 0.9Mur Inc 824.00 -10.00 945.34 552.00 4.22 878.8 -6.2Mur Int♦ 1126 -12.00 1270 760.08 4.75 1179.1 -4.5NewCityHY 52.50 - 61.80 22.90 8.48 49.6 5.8New Star IT 124.00 -1.00 128.00 88.00 1.13 172.9 -28.3NorthAmer 240.00 -3.00 314.00 187.50 4.00 274.0 -12.4NthAtSml 3815 -65.00 3917.5 2190 0.79 4743.9 -19.6Oryx Int 1355 - 1379 550.00 - 1384.0 -2.1PacAsset 339.50 -6.50 349.92 198.09 0.88 360.9 -5.9PacHorzn 789.00 -11.00 806.00 232.50 - 721.4 9.4PerpInc&Gr 244.50 1.50 342.00 157.20 6.11 - -PerAsset 44950 -100.00 47000 37650 1.25 44582.

50.8

PolarHealth 252.00 -1.00 258.00 163.00 0.83 286.2 -11.9

PolarFins 149.25 -0.25 153.00 77.20 2.95 148.3 0.6PolarTech 2265 -30.00 2553 1134.3 - 2460.7 -8.0RIT Cap 2010 -25.00 2125 1252 1.72 2159.0 -6.9Ruffer Inv 264.00 -2.00 271.05 202.00 0.70 266.6 -1.0Schroder To 510.00 -4.00 517.57 244.00 1.27 509.5 0.1SchdrAsiaP 650.00 -4.00 660.00 345.00 1.49 685.8 -5.2SchdrEurReE 103.50 1.50 118.00 56.60 4.09 133.3 -22.4Schdr Inc 280.00 -3.50 319.00 171.17 4.54 286.6 -2.3SchdrJap 203.50 -2.50 207.00 126.09 2.31 234.7 -13.3SchdrOrient 273.00 -2.00 280.00 151.50 3.77 288.8 -5.5SchdrRealEs 38.50 0.20 56.60 27.65 4.69 57.4 -32.9SchdrUKMd 584.00 -24.00 694.00 271.93 3.17 656.4 -11.0SchdrUKPubP 34.25 -1.50 39.95 18.89 - 43.8 -21.8ScotAmer 464.00 -4.00 477.00 243.80 2.58 456.8 1.6Scottish In 719.00 2.00 839.00 550.00 3.23 812.5 -11.5ScottMort 1234 -3.00 1284.44 451.80 0.26 1241.8 -0.6ScottOrtll 973.00 -28.50 1045 600.00 1.18 1161.7 -16.2Seneca I&G 168.50 -0.25 180.48 107.50 3.99 173.4 -2.8Smithson 1652 -14.00 1778 890.00 - 1625.2 1.6StrategicEq 232.00 -1.50 259.00 112.28 0.65 286.6 -19.1Temp Bar 960.00 -14.00 1438 563.00 5.35 1060.9 -9.5TempEmerg 990.00 -6.00 1010.54 570.00 1.92 1122.7 -11.8Tetragon $ 9.64 - 12.35 6.78 7.50 24.2 -60.2TRIG 125.60 -0.60 167.00 95.79 5.31 109.6 14.6TREurGth 1282.5 -37.50 1335 530.00 1.74 1479.5 -13.3TroyInc&G 71.80 -0.60 86.60 58.69 3.87 73.5 -2.3Utilico Eme 198.25 -4.25 252.00 135.00 3.88 229.5 -13.6UIL Inv 215.00 -1.00 248.44 109.75 3.60 356.4 -39.7VEIL 622.00 2.00 625.00 288.00 - 658.4 -5.5Witan 227.50 -3.00 235.35 130.00 2.42 243.5 -6.6WwideHlth 3840 10.00 3915 2159.52 0.65 3839.0 0.0

Conventional - Private Equity 52 Week Dis(-)Price +/-Chg High Low Yld NAV or Pm

BGUSGROWTH 326.00 -1.00 335.00 111.00 - 326.4 -0.1BMO PvtEq♦ 307.00 -7.50 415.36 219.00 5.14 380.7 -19.4Electra 269.00 2.00 384.00 121.81 - 353.4 -23.9HVPE 1900 -10.00 2030 857.00 - 2346.0 -19.0HgCapital 311.00 -1.50 325.07 148.40 1.54 299.5 3.8ICG Ent Tr 924.00 -16.00 1010 460.00 2.49 1117.0 -17.3Pantheon In 2430 25.00 2555 1268.53 - 3010.9 -19.3PrincssPE € 11.30 0.05 12.25 6.64 3.93 13.0 -13.1StdLfPv♦ 389.50 -0.50 405.00 186.00 3.31 487.3 -20.1

Discretionary Unit Fund Mngrs(1000)F

52 Week Dis(-)

Price +/-Chg High Low Yld NAV or PmRight &ISS 2045 -30.00 2341 1251 1.58 2263.5 -9.7

Conventional - Property ICs 52 Week Dis(-)Price +/-Chg High Low Yld NAV or Pm

Direct PropertyAEW UK REIT 78.40 -1.60 102.00 53.00 10.20 90.7 -13.6BMO ComPrp 75.60 -0.60 114.20 43.50 5.29 115.7 -34.7BMORealE 61.80 0.40 89.80 38.72 7.08 94.0 -34.3CustdnREIT 88.70 -0.60 116.55 76.00 6.69 94.2 -5.8GCP Student 140.60 1.20 212.50 90.00 4.47 171.5 -18.0Longbow 86.75 -0.75 99.50 64.19 6.92 93.8 -7.5SLIPropInc 59.20 -0.20 99.30 43.51 8.04 78.1 -24.2TR Prop 385.00 -7.00 497.83 217.50 3.64 430.7 -10.6Tritax Euro € 1.16 0.01 1.20 0.67 - 1.3 -10.8Tritax Euro 103.00 - 107.50 65.20 - - -UKComPrp 65.60 - 89.65 47.35 4.91 83.5 -21.4

VCTs 52 Week Dis(-)Price +/-Chg High Low Yld NAV or Pm

ArtemisVCT 15.00 - 51.79 14.25 26.67 - -Baronsmead 73.50 - 97.00 40.00 8.84 76.6 -4.0BSC VCT 64.50 - 73.67 46.00 6.20 70.3 -8.3..VCT2 48.00 - 52.50 40.00 7.29 50.6 -5.1Inc&GthVCT 66.50 - 72.00 52.00 9.02 70.1 -5.1Nthn 2 VCT♦ 59.00 - 62.50 42.00 5.93 64.3 -8.2Nthn 3 VCT♦ 86.50 - 91.00 63.00 4.62 93.6 -7.6NthnVent♦ 64.50 - 68.90 46.00 6.20 68.2 -5.4ProVenGI 51.00 - 57.75 44.00 6.37 53.8 -5.2ProVenVCT 62.00 - 70.00 55.00 6.45 65.8 -5.8UnicornAIM 175.00 - 177.00 104.00 3.71 210.8 -17.0

Zero Dividend Preference Shares 52 Week HRPrice +/-Chg High Low SP WO TAV 0%

Abf Spl Inc 108.00 - 111.00 97.50 -29.7 -64.3 127.3UIL ZDP 202 111.00 -1.00 112.25 80.00 -27.1 -32.5 151.5UIL Limited 115.50 - 119.94 73.00 -36.8 -45.2 138.4UIL Finance 135.00 -1.00 137.00 92.00 -54.3 -71.9 147.0

Investment Companies - AIM52 Week Dis(-)

Price +/-Chg High Low Yld NAV or PmBB Biotech SFr 73.40 - 73.90 39.55 3.9 - -CrysAmber 100.50 -1.00 135.39 50.87 5.0 131.5 -23.6Gresham Hou 1325 -25.00 1402 830.00 1.7 1429.6 -7.3Infra India 1.45 - 3.05 0.60 - 18.2 -92.0

Guide to FT Share Service

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X FT Global 500 company♦ trading ex-dividend■ trading ex-capital distribution# price at time of suspension from trading

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FINANCIAL TIMES SHARE SERVICE

JANUARY 16 2021 Section:Stats Time: 15/1/2021 - 18:16 User: peter.bailey Page Name: SHARE PRICES, Part,Page,Edition: USA, 15, 1

16 ★ 16 January/17 January 2021

For the FT’s latestclimate change stories

ft.com/climate

The Great Green Wall scales up

BURKINA

FASO

MAURITANIA

ETHIOPIA

SENEGALDJIBOUTI

ALGERIA

ERITREA

NIGERIA

SUDAN

EGYPT

NIGER

LIBYA

CHADMALI

S a h a r ad e s e r t

S a h e lr e g i o n

The Great Green Wallinitiative aims to growan 8,000km naturalwonder across theSahel region of Africa

500 km

At least $14bn in new funding from the African Development Bank, the French government and the World Bank has been pledged to advance the landmark initiative that aims to plant an 8,000 km long and 15 km wide mosaic of trees, grasslands, vegetation and plants across the Sahara and Sahel. The aim of the project first envisioned in 2005 is to restore the degraded lands and help the region’s inhabitants produce adequate food, create jobs and promote peace in the region.

Source: UNCCDCartography: Steven Bernard

Population of Sahel countriesis likely to triple by the endof the centuryPopulation (bn)

Source: UN Population Division

95% prediction interval

0

0.5

1.0

1.5

2.0

2.5

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1950 2000 2050 21002100

Med

ian

Observed

That would be premature. For starters, the three banks racked up $31bn in loan-loss provisions in the first nine months of 2020. Reversing a small proportion of this is an easy, low-risk way to prop up profits.

Vaccination efforts are under way. The KBW bank index has rallied 11 per cent since the start of the year, against the S&P 500’s 0.6 per cent gain.

Look past the reversal in loan-loss provisions and plenty of worries remain. At JPMorgan, the reserve release for the quarter was driven mainly by the wholesale lending book. It did not reduce money set aside for credit card losses, suggesting that consumer credit quality could still deteriorate in 2021.

Then there is net interest income. This fell year on year at the three banks during the quarter. Low interest rates continued to squeeze lending margins. At JPMorgan, the weakness in consumer lending was offset by another strong performance from trading and investment units. Revenue from Citi’s rival unit was weaker than expected. It is a reminder that the surge in dealing, underwriting and advisory activity seen in the second half of 2020 will not last for ever.

Regulatory challenges at Citi and Wells could also limit any upside the two banks get from economic recovery. This leaves JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley as better bets, with the two and standalone investment banks most affordably priced.

regain its reputation for earnings reliability. Poor trading because of the pandemic has compounded problems. The balance sheet is carrying hefty goodwill from past acquisitions.

Goodwill has fallen from a high £2.7bn in 2017 to £2.2bn. Further reductions will be needed. Accounting losses should not affect covenants that require net debt to stay below 3.5 times ebitda. These may still come under pressure with denominator and numerator both travelling in the wrong directions. Net debt ticked up to £1.2bn at the end of last year, or 2.3 times expected full-year ebitda.

Short interest is dissipating as critics crystallise gains, halving from the end of last year to 4 per cent at present. Confidence in the stock should return among braver investors after problem contracts are dealt with. But the troubled UK outsourcing sector needs a few years of steady performance to dispel the doubts surrounding it.

Bitcoin was built on the belief that no one should trust the financial establishment. Yet the ranks of cryptocurrency enthusiasts increasingly include mainstream investors seeking diversification rather than revolution. Bitcoin funds tap into the frenzy with a semblance of respectability.

This explains surging demand for shares in two funds. In the US, the value of the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust has increased fourfold over a year to $25bn, according to Bloomberg. In Germany, the BTCetc Bitcoin Exchange Traded Crypto (BTCE), a vehicle created by the ETC Group, has been a big hit, too. In the buying stampede, some investors will have overlooked the risks of such investments.

The underlying investment and its imitators are exceptionally volatile. In a broader market rout, prices for cryptos would probably plunge steeply. Traders who cover a fund’s liabilities might struggle to sell exposures before they bottomed.

Closed-end vehicles such as Grayscale Bitcoin Trust avoid this problem when investors sell the shares, no corresponding sale of underlying exposures is needed. Instead, a hefty discount may open up. At present the reverse applies: GBT trades on a 19 per cent premium. It would be cheaper to invest directly in cryptos.

One snag is that they could be stolen. Some of BTCE’s charges are for specialist insurance against theft. Equally, you might lose the keys to your holdings. Protecting keys — via a fiduciary — is one reason enthusiasts pay fees to a bitcoin fund manager.

Lex initially dismissed cryptos as no more than a medium for speculation and illicit transactions. We have been forced to concede they have a broader usefulness. For cynics, prices are a better barometer of the irrational exuberance of retail investors than the boring old Vix index favoured by institutions. As investments, however, they are still to be avoided.

Bitcoin funds: trust issues

Submariners receive hardship payments. There are no such incentives to stay on board for investors in Babcock, many of whom are equally under water. Best known for keeping Britain’s nuclear subs operational, the defence services outsourcer has warned of rough seas, sending the stock down by up to a fifth.

Babcock’s earnings and shares rose sharply until the start of 2014. They have fallen sharply ever since. The whole outsourcing sector has de-rated amid contract disasters and profits warnings. At Babcock, operating profits are already down a third this financial year. They will fall further in years to come as contracts are reviewed. The group’s snap announcement was otherwise light on detail. Call it range finding by skipper David Lockwood. He joined in September after selling venerable UK defence group Cobham — and some irreplaceable military technology — to US private equity.

Babcock shares are trading at levels last seen in 2006. That is where they should stay until the business can

Babcock: crash dive

When UK businesses fail spectacularly, politicians typically call for directors to be struck off. That prospect now faces eight former bosses of Carillion, a building and services group that collapsed in 2018. This week, business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng launched disqualification proceedings.

It would be wrong to prejudge these. But even when disqualification actions succeed, they look like a weak deterrent. Some critics blame the lack of accompanying financial penalties. For Lex, the real issue is the low incidence of successful proceedings.

There are about 4.6m companies in the UK, many with just a single director. Disqualifications peg along at about 1, 000 a year. They are inextricably linked to corporate insolvencies. Moreover, most

directors are struck off for the same thing: withholding tax payments in the dying days of their enterprise.

Suspected insolvent trading triggers popular fury under the colloquial banner “running the business into the ground”. But it is hard to prove. Accounting irregularities are a marginally easier target. Allegations concerning these are likely to feature in any case against former Carillion directors.

Even then, fewer than 200 directors were struck off for accounting issues in 2019-20. The data suggest that in a single year the chances of a British director being disqualified in court for anything other than non-payment of taxes is less than one in 70,000. As deterrents go, disqualification is singularly ineffective.

UK director strike-offsCarillion/directors: dysfunctional disqualifications

Source: Gov.UK

Why they were struck offUK directors

Source: Gov.UK

0

500

1,000

1,500

2009-10

2011-12

2013-14

2015-16

2017-18

2019-20 0 200 400 600 800

Withholding taxes

Accounting

Technical issues

Criminality

Mistreating creditors

Immigration offences

Misappropriation

Phoenix companies

Trading insolvently

Total OrdersUndertakings

Wall Street had more ups and downs in 2020 than the Coney Island big dipper. Corporate profits plunged during the first half, forcing America’s biggest banks to set aside billions for potential bad loans.

Fourth-quarter results from JPMorgan, Citigroup and Wells Fargo yesterday found them climbing back up the rails. The three collectively released more than $5bn of pandemic-related loan-loss reserves. It is tempting to view this as a sign of recovery for the broader US economy.

JPMorgan/Citi/Wells: a merciful release

Twitter: @FTLex

Tech stock boom has echoes of the dotcom bubble

Lex on the webFor notes on today’s stories go to www.ft.com/lex

Michael Mackenzie

The Long View

E choes of the past often rico-chet around markets to inform the present. For long-time market watchers, it is hard not to see parallels in

technology stocks with the dotcom boom as we head into 2021.

Conditions are still some way off the mania of 1999 when the tech-heavy Nas-daq Composite powered ahead nearly 90 per cent before the big bust in 2000.

But there are more than a few trends in markets that chime with those bubble times. In the past two years alone, the Nasdaq Composite has recorded back-to-back annual gains in the region of 40 per cent.

Retail investor buying of tech stocks may not be quite at dotcom mania. However, the dizzying ascent of compa-nies like Tesla is evidence that many investors are willing to put aside doubts on business models to bet on the prom-ise of innovation in energy, healthcare, robotics and artificial intelligence.

One manifestation of that fervour is the extraordinary rise of the exchange traded funds from ARK Investment that focus on companies promising disrup-tive innovation.

With big holdings in stocks like Tesla, the flagship Ark Innovation ETF man-aged by Cathie Wood delivered block-buster gains in 2020 of 150 per cent. The firm’s Genomic Revolution ETF was up 180 per cent in the year. Both ETFs have gained a further 17 per cent in 2021. After big inflows, Ark ranks in the top 10 issuers in the exchange-traded fund industry by size with $41bn under man-agement, according to Bloomberg data.

The inflows have drawn comparisons with the Janus 20 fund that was the trail-blazer of the dotcom boom. In early 2000, at the peak of the bubble, half the money pouring into mutual funds from investors went to the Janus group before it suffered badly in the dotcom bust. Scott Schoelzel, former manager

of the Janus 20 fund, recently told Bloomberg that Ark had a similar approach to his investment vehicle in the early 2000s.

However, current market valuations have raised scepticism. “Exchange traded funds focused on tech innova-tion and green energy are full of compa-nies that are losing money and have high [valuation] multiples,” said Andrew Slimmon, portfolio manager at Morgan Stanley Investment Manage-ment. The frothier areas of tech remind Mr Slimmon of the late 1990s. “Valua-tions got to an extreme and they couldn’t live up to expectations and the losses were painful,” he said.

In broad terms, Nasdaq valuations are less expensive today than back in 2000. But a harsh lesson from manias is that paying a premium price on the future promise of tech may well mean you are left nursing buyer’s remorse for a long time. After the dotcom bust, the Nasdaq Composite took 15 years before climb-ing past its 2000 peak.

But there are important differences between the current crop of tech stock leaders and those of the past. They are more focused on software, with steadier earnings from subscription models. Leading tech companies have also bene-fited from digital shifts in the pandemic.

The consistency and strength of earn-ings growth delivered by the likes of Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and Alphabet means such stocks are seen as quality investment plays. They have also prospered from a pronounced decline in long maturity interest rates in recent years. This has boosted the

relative value of their fast-growing, future cash flows.

Larry McDonald, a former bond trader and founder of the Bear Traps Report, says “tech stocks are more like long-dated bonds”, meaning their valu-ation will suffer should interest rates and inflation rise sharply. “Half of Nas-daq is like the speculative plays we saw in 1999, while the other half is more exposed to interest rate risk,” he said.

Investment manias powered by cheap money typically end when financial conditions become tighter via higher interest rates. In 1999, the US Federal Reserve was worried about Y2K, a com-puter programming shortcut that was seen creating havoc once 2000 dawned. After flooding the financial system with cash, the central bank began withdraw-ing that support and raised rates.

Two decades later, the focus among investors is once again on the timing of monetary support retreating. After lag-ging the broader market in the last quar-ter of 2020, tech stocks have seen share prices fall this year as the 10-year Treas-ury yield has risen above 1 per cent.

Investors such as Jeffery Gundlach at DoubleLine Capital highlight an early warning sign in how the Nasdaq 100, when measured against the S&P 500, is struggling to stay above its peak from 2000. The ideal rate scenario for tech is if the Fed tolerates a slow rise in 10-year yields as the economy rebounds. The aim would be to let the air out of the more speculative areas, while strong earnings for other tech companies lim-its selling pressure elsewhere.

“Bursting the mania in areas of tech while keeping the stock market largely intact would be a perfect scenario for the Fed,” said Dhaval Joshi, chief strate-gist at BCA Research. “But controlled outcomes are usually very difficult to achieve when markets are fragile.”

[email protected]

Investment manias powered by cheap money typically end when conditions become tighter

Saturday 16 January / Sunday 17 January 2021

T here was a chill in the air as Mona Seif walked to Cairo’s Tahrir Square from a pro-test outside the heavily guarded state television

office known as the “fortress of lies”. Eighteen days into Egypt’s “January 25” revolution in 2011, President Hosni Mubarak stubbornly clung to power and the mood, though defiant, was subdued.

As Seif reached the neoclassical Egyp-tian Museum on the edge of the square, crowds of people began to scream deliri-ously. It took the 24-year-old activist a split second to comprehend what was happening: after three weeks of extraor-dinary highs and deflating lows, punctu-ated by state-sponsored violence, Mubarak had finally bowed to popular pressure and ended his 30-year reign.

Hundreds of thousands of people exploded in a frenzy of celebration. Women leapt in the air and men pumped their fists. Others knelt and faced Mecca in prayer. “I just remember I cried,” says Seif. “I kept on screaming with people around me and some started hugging me. I wanted to reach my parents, but the phones were com-pletely down, there were so many peo-ple calling. So I started . . . to look for familiar faces — my brother, my father.”

In that giddy moment, it was easy to believe the Arab world had fundamen-tally changed. Never in modern times had the region been gripped by such expectation. In December 2010, 26-year-old Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi fatally set himself alight in an act of despair that resonated across nations. The subsequent mass protests forced the dictator Zine El Abi-dine Ben Ali into exile on January 15 2011 and triggered a wave of popular uprisings as the Arab spring unfolded.

If Bouazizi’s tragic act sparked the revolutions, it was Mubarak’s fall that truly emboldened protesters through-out the Middle East, breaking a decades-long veil of fear and reinforcing the belief people could make a difference. As the region’s most populous nation, Egypt was traditionally its trendsetter, and Mubarak was the doyen of Arab despots. If he could fall, who was safe?

For millions determined to shake up the old order, it was the moment the impos-sible seemed possible.

“We felt so empowered that we believed we would be able to deal with anything that came next,” says Seif, who spent the revolution shuttling between Tahrir Square and a “citizens’ journal-ism hub”, as activists used social media to mobilise and spread their message around the world. “We also knew that there’s something else to deal with,” she says. “But I don’t think we understood the magnitude of it.”

It was a prescient sentiment. A decade on, Seif has never felt more fearful for the future. Her older brother, Alaa, an icon of the revolution, and her younger sister, Sanaa, are among tens of thou-sands of people jailed since President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi seized power in a

popularly backed 2013 coup that ousted the democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood government. Egypt is more oppressive than ever. A withering crackdown that first targeted the Islam-ist movement has evolved into an assault against all forms of critical debate. “I don’t operate on hope any more. I’m mostly motivated by house-hold survival,” Seif says, her speech rac-ing with emotion. “The current state of things is too violent, too nightmarish.”

Her family’s experience epitomises a decade of shattered dreams. Rather than ushering in the freedoms many Arabs yearned for, the uprisings exposed the difficulty of fostering change in nations long ruled by despots who had hollowed out state institutions and built predatory patronage net-works.

The Arab spring also highlighted the struggles of popular movements in transforming people power into institu-tionalised political influence. Today, it is the strongmen who still dominate, while the grievances that inflamed millions of Arabs, from systemic unemployment to corruption and yawning inequalities, remain. In many cases, they have wors-ened. Young revolutionaries whose courage drove the uprisings have been persecuted, with many seeking exile, exhausted by waves of crackdowns.

Syria, Yemen and Libya are ripped apart by conflict, with hundreds of thousands dead and millions forced from their homes. Even in Tunisia, which has managed a successful transi-tion to democracy, there is an aching sense of unfulfilment. “The revolution raised the slogans of freedom, dignity and employment . . . It was carried out by the defeated, the excluded and the marginalised,” says Olfa Lamloum, a regime opponent who returned to Tuni-sia after Ben Ali was deposed and now runs an NGO. “Ten years after the revo-lution . . . they’re still marginalised. They’re still excluded. They’re still with-out dignity.”

She could be speaking about any of the countries where uprisings erupted. In 2011, there were about eight million people in the Middle East and North Africa living below a poverty line of $1.90 a day. By 2018, that number had swelled to 28m, according to the World Bank, in a region with the world’s high-est youth unemployment rate.

Ten years on from that hopeful day in Tahrir Square, a recent survey of young Arabs found that nearly half of 18- to 24-year-olds had considered leaving their countries. In Libya, Egypt and Tunisia, many predicted protests could erupt again, citing corruption and lack of job

prospects as the main causes of instabil-ity. Lamloum points to the thousands still making the perilous journey to Italy in boats as a sign of this despair. “This confirms they believe there is no hope left for them in Tunisia,” she says.

Taking on GaddafiOn February 17 2011, Libyans inspired by events in Cairo and Tunis used social media to call for a “Day of Rage” to pro-test Muammer Gaddafi’s despotic 42-

The Arab spring: a lost decadeTen years on from the unrest that toppled dictators and promised a new

start, activists, dissidents and revolutionaries reflect on their struggles

for reform in the countries they fought to free. Andrew England reports

From top: protesters in Tahrir Square in Cairo demand that President Hosni Mubarak step down in February 2011; a protester burns a poster of Libyan dictator Muammer Gaddafi in Benghazi in March 2011; the family of Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi, whose fatal self-immolation sparked mass protests, with his picture Kuni Takahashi/Getty Images; Roberto Schmidt/AFP; Fethi Belaid

year rule. The dictator responded with predictable ruthlessness, dispatching his feared security forces to demonstra-tions in the eastern city of Benghazi. But the protesters remained defiant.

Ahmed (not his real name) was a 22-year-old fresh out of university, deter-mined to join the crowds filling Beng-hazi’s streets. On February 18, he ven-tured out with his father. “I remember thousands and thousands all over and screaming and yelling against Gadd-afi . . . and looking at my father’s face,” Ahmed says. “He was in such awe, such disbelief, because he lived through the prime of Gaddafi’s authority in the 1970s and 1980s, when colleagues [in academia] were hanged.” As torched state buildings and police stations smouldered and the bodies of martyrs were laid to rest, the security forces began pulling back. “It was unimagina-ble,” Ahmed recalls.

I first met Ahmed a few days later,

when I crossed into Libya from Egypt after covering the fall of Mubarak. As Gaddafi’s grip loosened, Benghazi was a city high with expectation. The old courthouse, which looked out on the Mediterranean, was a cacophony of activity, a focal point for revolutionaries who set about establishing a “national council” and publishing the first edi-tions of the Libya Free newspaper.

Ahmed, who spoke perfect English, became my fixer. Over the coming weeks, we sped along behind trucks and cars crammed with rebel fighters towards “front-lines” that in the early days were often no more than barriers erected across the desert road to Tripoli. Most had never picked up a gun. Often, they would fire in the air in a show of bravado, then retreat after Gaddafi’s better-equipped forces lobbed mortars and rockets in their direction. But they were resolute, and the intervention of Nato fighter jets in March neutralised Gaddafi’s military superiority.

Ahmed watched from the sidelines.

Continued on page 14

‘We felt so empowered that we believed we would be able to deal with anything that came next’

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Dress yourself happy Patterns for a pandemic pick-me-up — PAGE 4

JANUARY 16 2021 Section:Weekend Time: 15/1/2021 - 16:34 User: andrew.higton Page Name: WIN1, Part,Page,Edition: WIN, 1, 1


Life

Note from the FTW editor

In her compelling Diary of her three weeks in isolation in a Hong Kong hotel room, Tabby Kinder coolly relates that if she left her room she could face six months in jail. That is certainly one way of ensuring compliance! That said, in London, despite all the headlines about lockdown rule-breakers and the need to tighten up, my impression is of a striking and commendable acquiescence to our new constrained way of living.

We do our best to inspire you in this seemingly umpteenth week of lockdown. My primary focus is the great issue of the week — the reckoning for Big Tech and social media over the balance between their responsibilities as publishers, and free speech. The Books Essay on page 7, Jo Ellison on page 17 and the Big Read in the main section all explore this.

Some of you have been in touch about my use of Nero last week as an analogy for Trump. As a reader pointed out to Martin Wolf, an even better parallel may be that the move from Obama to Trump is like that from Marcus Aurelius to Commodus! Thank you as ever

for reading us. Alec Russell

Simon Kuper

Opening shot

Joe Biden needs a new playbook for a new ageO n August 23 2008,

Barack Obama chose Joe Biden as his presidential running mate. That choice set Biden on the

path to being sworn in next Wednesday as the second most powerful man on earth. (China’s leader Xi Jinping ranks first, because he doesn’t have to worry much about separation of powers and may enjoy popular support for military adventures.) Biden’s administration will include many veterans of 2008. But the world and the US of 2008 no longer exist. Biden, 78, needs a playbook for a new age. Here are just a few of the dizzying, distressing, interconnected changes of the past 12 years:

National downward mobility. In August 2008, Americans still thought that incomes and life expectancy rose inexorably outside world wars. Despite brief recessions, the arc bent upwards. That has changed. American life expectancy began falling in 2014 and, given the pandemic, may now be lower than in 2008. Moreover, by last October, more than one in five American households didn’t reliably have enough money for food — a higher figure than at the worst point of the financial crisis, says Lauren Bauer of the Hamilton Project policy institute. Many Americans who once assumed they’d outdo their parents are now living off their inheritance.

Climate change is here now. For more than 200 years, economic growth has relied on emitting carbon. Biden hopes to break that link, at least by a little. He has to. Wildfires already make California periodically unlivable, while taking out a 30-year mortgage in flood-threatened Miami, New Orleans or even parts of New York has become a folly. Longer term, Americans may remigrate to the Upper Midwest, where there are no coasts to flood, natural supplies of drinking water and few heatwaves.

Antidemocratic candidates can win elections. In 2008, a President Donald Trump was unimaginable and Viktor Orbán was still a democrat. Now, Trump can while away the years till the next election

by encouraging far-right terrorism and perhaps sparking secessions in southern states. What happens if a Trumpist crowd takes the Alabama statehouse and declares independence from Biden’s US?

The US is no longer a superpower. It still has the world’s strongest military, but sending troops into action has become politically impossible as well as pointless. The US can detach from its old stomping ground of the Middle East anyway, given that the country became a net exporter of energy in 2019. Nor will any enemy ever attempt to invade America.

The US military therefore now serves three main purposes: a rationale for the state-funded defence industry; a need-blind

stimulus programme for places with military bases; and a jobs and welfare programme for military personnel.

Meanwhile, China and post-Soviet Russia, which had been docile abroad until Russia invaded Georgia in August 2008, have taken over the US’s role of aggressive interventionism: the Russians in Ukraine and Syria, China in Hong Kong.

The US is no longer the only economic superpower either. In another reversal since 2008, China’s economy is now bigger by some measures. And the US hasn’t been a values superpower since about 2003. Post-Trump, the country needs to

take rather than dispense lessons on democracy. Even on climate, where Biden has said the US “must lead the world”, it has in fact followed the EU and China in committing to reach net-zero emissions. The world, knowing that Trumpists might return in 2024, won’t follow Biden’s long-term lead on anything.

Social media is now the main source of information. In 2008, Facebook and Twitter combined had about 100m daily users, while WhatsApp and Instagram didn’t exist. Today 3.96bn people — over half the world — are on social media, said the Digital 2020 report by Hootsuite and We Are Social. This

shift has brought us the death of truth, the death of privacy and:

The dominance of tech giants. In August 2008, the US company with the largest market capitalisation was the oil major Exxon, worth $425bn. Amazon was worth $33bn, and Facebook about $15bn. At the time, the fossil-fuels lobby stalked Washington. Since then, the valuations of Amazon and Facebook have risen 50-fold. Today the six most valuable American companies are all tech businesses (counting Tesla as tech).

Healthcare has ceased to be an individual problem. Until 2020, healthcare worked perfectly well on its own terms: it was a money-spinner for the 18 per cent of the economy that lived off it, and it provided decent if exorbitantly priced services to well-off Americans. Most voters had health insurance, and didn’t worry much about people who didn’t.

The pandemic changes that. You can have the most expensive personal healthcare on Earth, but you can still die from a virus that you catch from your cleaner, driver or waiter. Even if you get vaccinated, if the coronavirus keeps proliferating among poor Americans, it will eventually probably produce a mutation that can defeat your vaccine. Suddenly healthcare becomes a collective problem. That’s just one of the unforeseen issues that the American political system isn’t set up to handle.

@KuperSimon; [email protected]

Harry Haysom

my laptop and put on Room, a film about a woman trapped in a room, and then Cast Away, a film about a man marooned on an island. The roses had wilted and turned brown. I texted a colleague a reference to a Sylvia Plath poem: “The vivid tulips eat my oxygen.”

I had timed my arrival in Hong Kong to get out of quarantine two days before Christmas. It was foolish in the face of the daunting legislative weight of the Hong Kong government. The same powers that had allowed Hong Kong to tackle the virus so effectively — and which were simultaneously being deployed to stamp out political uprisings — were easily equipped to imprison me indefinitely.

On the eve of my final day in quarantine, Hong Kong announced it would extend the 14-day measure for arrivals from outside China to 21 days, to try and stop the spread of the new, more infectious strain first identified in Britain a week after my flight departed Heathrow. Everyone on my flight had fallen on the cusp, just 24 hours from freedom, yet now guilty by our association with London.

People I knew who had quarantined at home in London presumed that I, too, could sneak out for a walk. “I am still in this room!” I wrote to friends who, it seemed to me, had experienced a lifetime of human interactions during my confinement. A friend who had done a stint in isolation in Britain said to me, not joking: “But going to the gym doesn’t count, right?”

The difference in attitudes between east and west towards coronavirus had never seemed more stark. While hundreds of travellers sat in Hong Kong hotels, Britain had not yet put any testing restrictions on inbound travellers — pre-departure testing requirements for visitors will only come into effect next week. It became clear to me that the price for the successful management of coronavirus is high, not least the legal powers needed to lock people in rooms unilaterally. For good or bad, as Britons, it is a price we find hard to comprehend.

When I was finally released from quarantine, the smells and noises of Hong Kong were a sensory overload. The next day, trying to find somewhere to live, I was taken to see an apartment next door to my quarantine hotel. I looked out at the same view of Victoria Harbour —and did not rent that room.

Tabby Kinder is the FT’s Asia financial correspondent

The first thing I noticed about my quarantine room was the view. The hotel on Hong Kong island had upgraded me to a room with a vista of Victoria Harbour — the city’s sprawling port, one of the busiest in the world, lined by skyscrapers and dotted with cargo ships and soaring black kites.

I’d arrived by taxi after waiting overnight at a holding centre near the airport. The previous 24 hours had been a glimpse into the regimented authority that had allowed the territory’s government to so effectively contain the pandemic, despite its dense population. The airport, once a shopping haven, had been transformed into a medical facility and bureaucratic labyrinth in which passengers were moved between curtained booths to spit into test tubes and Plexiglas windows to download tracing apps. Transferred to the centre, we waited to hear if we would be allowed to go to our hotels or sent to a quarantine camp.

By comparison with the holding centre, my 350 sq ft hotel room, looking out over the water to the Hong Kong mainland, was a palace. A bouquet of pale pink roses sat in the middle of a desk. The door closed and I thought of the wide open window of the taxi — it would be the last time I felt fresh air on my face for weeks.

In a city famous for luxury hotels, hotels have become more like prisons. Even the Mandarin Oriental — the original Hong Kong hotel — is not immune. For £65,000, a guest can spend their mandatory quarantine in the hotel’s “entertainment suite”, with a virtual reality gaming wall and eight-person dining area. It is fully booked until the end of March. A lesser quarantine at the Mandarin costs as much as £10,000; at other hotels, packages start at around £400.

The list of approved hotels exposes a truth about quarantine: no amount of money makes it tolerable. An executive suite you can’t leave is merely a splendid cell. A larger area to pace

helps, of course, but there is no room you won’t hate after weeks of solitary confinement. “I’d rather cry in a BMW than smile on a bicycle”, is a familiar phrase in China. Nowhere is anyone more sad and rich than in quarantine in a luxury hotel on Hong Kong island.

Since last summer, Hong Kong had imposed a mandatory two-week quarantine for all travellers to its borders. Arrivals, even those with permanent homes in the city, were to stay in their hotel rooms and take four negative Covid tests (one before flying, one on arrival and one on the 12th day after arrival) to be allowed into the territory. Travellers are tagged with a wristband containing GPS-tracking microchips and must consent by way of a legal contract to stay put for the duration of quarantine. Leaving our hotel rooms is punishable by six months in prison.

The measures, combined with other restrictions on restaurants and bars, have had clear success. There are now about 50 infections reported each day in a city with about a million fewer people than London, where infections now average around 12,000 a day.

By day seven, the solitude had become a heavy blanket. It swaddled me, keeping me in bed until midday. As a treat, I kept the blinds closed against the busy harbour, an irritating reminder of life outside this room. With all the time in the world, my daily routines had started to feel hollow. My mandolin — an ambitious plan for a quarantine hobby — sat untouched.

To celebrate the halfway point, I ordered a glass of wine — ending another ambitious plan for a dry quarantine. I gave myself a holiday from the YouTube fitness workout I had used to fill 45 minutes of each day. I ordered a pizza on Deliveroo. For company, I watched the back of the hotel porter who delivered it as he retreated down the corridor. I opened

Locked down in luxuryHONG KONG DIARY

TABBY KINDER

‘An executive suite you can’t leave is merely a splendid cell’ — a hotel in Causeway Bay, Hong Kong — SCMP



Life

ents: timeliness [and] authenticity. But even if you make something that’s very timely and authentic, it still might not go viral.” Even if it does, it’s hard to make a career out of virality. “Lilly Singh [a Canadian comedian] and Lele Pons [a Venezuelan-American social media star turned singer, presenter and entrepreneur] and a lot of these YouTube stars are able to make videos that get millions of views, but it takes a long time. I’m the type of person that I try something and then if it doesn’t work, I move on to something else.” She was on the verge of quitting lip-syncing just before posting the “How to medical” TikTok clip. “If that hadn’t gone viral, we wouldn’t even be talking right now.”

Attention is complicated for Cooper. The youngest of four, she moved with her family from Jamaica to Rockville, Maryland, when she was three. As a child, Cooper says she learnt to mini-mise herself because her two sisters had a greater need for her parents’ time (one had a learning disability, and the other was in and out of surgery). “It’s a daily struggle,” she says. “You want attention, but at the same time, you don’t want to say, ‘Look at me’. It’s this push and pull of being scared to put myself out there.” She calls herself a recovering people pleaser. “I just want everything to go smoothly. Even if that means that I’m not happy.”

I become acutely aware that she may be pretending to be OK about her food failing to arrive. We both check our phones for updates. Nothing. While she’s distracted, I nibble the pita bread.

C ooper was a keen actress at school, but both her mother (an HR executive) and father (an engineer) wanted her to pursue a sensible job.

She studied economics, and after a stint at an advertising agency she moved into user experience design at Yahoo in Sili-con Valley, and then in 2011 to Google in New York. “I spent a lot of time in the nap room. I loved the environment [and] that people are so smart. But I didn’t want to be doing the work.”

She held on to her childhood ambition to act despite the growing realisation that she did not actually enjoy acting. In 2010, she started doing stand-up. “When I tried comedy, that’s when I was like, ‘Oh, this is fun.’”

The workplace was rich in material: she would take notes on co-workers and office life. She set up The Cooper Review, a home for her satirical posts, and left Google in 2014. (She joked that she quit her job after she married her white husband, an engineer at Google, as a form of “reparations”.)

Later, she published books which expanded on her earlier blogposts. In 100 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings (2016), she advises creating presenta-tions with one large word in the centre of every slide. “Read the word aloud, then look at the audience and say, ‘I’m just going to let that sink in.’”

This was followed in 2018 by How to Be Successful Without Hurting Men’s Feel-ings, which made fun of the advice women are given that twists them out of shape, such as the right amount of smil-ing for a job interview — somewhere between flirty and bitchy that “makes

you look like you’re having a stroke”.Bullshit underpins Cooper’s career, I

suggest, tying Trump to her books skew-ering corporate life. “It’s absolutely true.” Though she prefers the word “per-formance” — as in, acting — to bullshit.

Immigrants are very good, she says, at figuring out what the “smart people are doing [and doing] that too.” Trump is different. “He wouldn’t try to appear smart, he would literally just say, ‘I’m smart’. It’s like hypnosis, you hear some-thing enough, you start to believe it. I wish we could all stop performing [and] could have more real conversations.”

Where does she stand on tech as a communication tool? “It’s the greatest thing ever. And also the worst. I couldn’t have got to where I [have] without social media and the internet. But at the same time, everything has become so extreme. The middle is disappearing. It’s just pixels and yet we wrap our whole lives up in it.”

Without social media she might never have ended up making a Netflix special. Sarah Cooper: Everything’s Fine is a dystopian news show, interweaving sketches and lip-syncing segments, cul-minating in the recreation of Trump’s “Grab ’em by the pussy” tape, with Cooper reprising her TikTok role and Helen Mirren as Billy Bush. The show got mixed reviews, but the combination of humour and disquiet is compelling.

Cooper wanted the viewer to feel like they were “losing [their] mind because the news is so overwhelming”.

Currently she is working on a TV script of How to Be Successful Without Hurting Men’s Feelings for CBS. Will she adapt her observations for the Zoom era? “There might be some additional working-from-home scenes but I’m hoping the pandemic will be a distant memory by the time the show is on TV.”

In the new year, I catch up with Cooper, who like millions of us watched events unfold at the Capitol. “I knew violence was possible,” she writes in an email. “But the scene inside the House chamber was so shocking. People were so excited about having an ‘outsider’ in politics but the problem with that is that they have no relationship to the institu-tions they’re supposed to be leading. When he was elected he had no regard or respect for our democracy and for some reason that was seen as a benefit. It’s not.”

Cooper is now looking forward to the end of the Trump era. And on the matter of our lunch, she has one trivial regret. She wishes the salad she ordered, which did eventually arrive, had been a pizza. “I thought ordering a salad would make me look health conscious.” Performance, it seems, can even get in the way of lunch.

Emma Jacobs is the FT’s work and careers feature writer

‘I spent a lot of time in the nap room at Google. I loved the environment [and] that people are so smart. But I didn’t want to be doing the work’

Lunch with the FT Sarah Cooper

Table 8787 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, NY

Fried calamari appetiser $15

Apple almond crunch salad (dressing on the side) $11with extra chicken $4

Total $30

N o one here is that excited about Sarah Cooper.” That was the verdict from one talent agent a few months before the pandemic hit, on

the comedian’s efforts to move into tele-vision. “It was so hurtful,” Cooper says of the feedback. Six years after quitting her tech job to concentrate on comedy, doing stand-up, online sketches, blog-posts and books, her future felt unclear.

Then Donald Trump changed her life. I meet Cooper for a transatlantic meal

(lunch for her, dinner for me) to discuss the Trump bump to her career. It’s a few weeks before rioters invade Capitol Hill, an event she sums up in a tweet as “Trump implores his supporters to vio-lently overthrow the government peacefully”.

Last year, in the early days of lock-down, confined to her Brooklyn flat by the pandemic and deprived of a stand-up audience, Cooper played with TikTok, the Chinese-owned short video app popular with teens. In the first few she filmed herself dancing and pulling expressions with a face mask. Then she tried something new: lip-syncing Don-ald Trump’s words.

“He was just on television so much. It was so frustrating to see the gaslight-ing,” she says. The early clips were rough but she warmed to the theme, revelling in Trump’s “masculine energy” and feeling “everything I say is amazing, and everything I say is right.”

Then, at the end of April, Trump spec-ulated whether citizens could use disin-fectant to kill coronavirus. “The disin-fectant . . . is there a way we can do something like that, by injection?”, won-dered the president. The medical pro-fession and disinfectant manufacturers were aghast; Cooper was inspired. She put on a navy jacket, lip-synced his words and posted the video, “How to medical,” on social media. It tore through the internet, becoming one of the defining cultural moments of the pandemic year, viewed more than 24m times on Twitter alone.

Overnight, everyone became excited about Sarah Cooper. Subsequent “how to” videos (including, “How to the black people”, “How to hydroxychloroquine” and “How to regret”) attracted fans across the world. Amid Trump’s pan-demic mismanagement and the Black Lives Matter protests, the 43-year-old provided a comedic balm.

I am keen to discuss her long journey to sudden stardom and after a few tech glitches, we finally have a stable con-nection. Her Brooklyn flat — the pic-tures, cream walls and charcoal sofa — are familiar, the backdrop to her Tik-Tok videos. Stella, her miniature cocka-poo, leaps up on to the sofa, a pink toy between her jaws, and Cooper’s stylist smooths her stray hairs before disap-pearing off-camera. After seeing so much of Cooper’s TikTok Trump, I am surprised by the softness of her voice, and her immaculate appearance: per-fectly waved hair and flawless make-up.

My starter — hummus with sliced egg, a tangy pickle and pita bread — smells appetising, though I long to enjoy it under the warm light of the stylish Sha-warma Bar, a short walk from my flat, rather than the glare of a screen. There is a larger problem than ambience: Cooper’s food has not turned up. We agree to proceed and hope a delivery arrives soon from Table 87, a local res-taurant that makes her favourite pizza.

Today, in the embers of Trump’s administration, it is hard to remember that the presidential ambitions of the brash reality TV star were once dis-missed by many political pundits. But, says Cooper, “it became something scary pretty fast”. During his presi-dency, she sometimes avoided mention-ing politics in her stand-up because, she reasoned, audiences on a night out needed a break. But not always. In one routine she riffed on hating him because they were so similar: both spend all day on Twitter, she would say, and show up

Her lip-sync TikToks skewered the president with his own words, and made her a star of the pandemic. Over salad in Brooklyn, the comedian tells Emma Jacobs about the power of satire, the madness of office life — and what Donald Trump really thinks of her videos

to meetings unprepared. Another joke skewered his privilege. “If I had Donald Trump’s confidence, I’d be the most suc-cessful woman in the world. Wait, I mean I’d be the most unlikeable woman in the world.”

T he problem with political comedy is that it can also make comedians’ targets palatable. Trump “should have been censured many

times for many things, not least when he told the country to inject bleach into their veins. He is the most dangerous man to ever hold the office,” says Cooper. “And yet we [kind of] laughed at it and moved on.” Had Trump won the 2020 election, she says she would have worried that her videos had some-how helped to humanise him.

It has become a cliché that satire died under the entertainer-in-chief. Armando Iannucci, creator of Veep and The Thick of It, put it bluntly: “Political comedy only works if there are a set of rules to follow so you can point out how certain politicians are bending them, but Trump is an anarchist.” Cooper believes satire had to “reinvent itself, but I don’t think it’s dead. Satire now has to work harder and be smarter, or go the other direction and get sillier.”

The success of her TikTok videos was thanks to their simplicity: Cooper dem-onstrated Trump’s words were prepos-terous. “[I’m] exposing the mansplain-ing. I couldn’t get away with speaking like this. Part of the reason I can’t get away [with it] is because I am a woman, I am a minority.” So much so that the rou-tines made her father anxious at first. “[We’re] immigrants from Jamaica. He was like, ‘Dude, this is a powerful guy. You shouldn’t poke the bear’.”

The simplicity of the videos conceals the effort. Cooper would repeatedly lis-ten to Trump’s words, finding new inflections until she got the rhythm of his speech just right. At the start of each one she would think: “I should stop doing this, this is stupid, I can’t do this.” Until she finessed it to the point of thinking, “OK, this is gonna be good.” The final hurdle was her husband. If he cracked a smile she knew it was “good enough” to share.

Some have quipped that Trump’s attempt to ban TikTok was triggered by her videos rather than security con-cerns. Recently she “got confirmation”, though she refuses to identify the source, that the outgoing president had watched the videos and they “really

hurt him”. How does she feel? “Good. I feel good. Maybe he really saw for a sec-ond, ‘Oh, well, I’m full of shit.’”

Professionally, Cooper is keen to move on from Trump, and hopes that a Biden-Harris administration will not inspire a new wave of political comedy. If anything, she wants them to be so bor-ing that politics recedes into the back-ground. “Americans are now intimately familiar with how our government works in a way that we weren’t before because [Trump] broke all these rules. We still have to keep an eye on politics but I don’t think it should be the subject of every conversation.”

I ask if it is right that liberals dominate the entertainment industry and stand-up circuit. “It’s so obvious to me that if you’re liberal, you’re willing to explore things,” Cooper says. “And if you’re conservative, if you conserve your thoughts, if you conserve your exploration, you just won’t be able to reach the level of humour that a leftwing comedian can reach. It’s true for come-dians, acting, arts in any form, you have to be open. And I don’t think the con-servative mindset is an open one.”

Cooper implores me to start despite there being no sign of her calamari and salad. I don’t tell her that before logging on I scoffed a mouthful of warm, tender lamb and pillowy pita bread, nor that the pickles are just the right side of sweet.

C ooper has wrongly been described as an overnight success; in fact, she was viral long before the pandemic restored the word’s medical

meaning. In 2014, her blog-post, “10 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings”, which advised workers to turn percent-ages into fractions and to draw Venn dia-grams, became a huge hit. So too did her post “9 Non-Threatening Leadership Strategies for Women”, which recom-mended peppering “emails with excla-mation marks and emojis so you don’t come across as too clear or direct.”

Financial Times readers may remem-ber her 2018 column “Six things work-ing women should pretend they can’t do”, which advised women not to take notes, plan office parties or make coffee. “The minute one of your co-workers walks into the kitchen and discovers that you know how to pour steamed milk into a cup,” she wrote, “they will assume it is part of your official duties.”

What is the secret behind internet fame? “I’ve tried to crack the formula many times. I can tell you the ingredi-

‘Satire now has to work harder — or get sillier’

Berber & Q Shawarma Bar46 Exmouth Market, London EC1

Lucky Saint lager £2.90

Jerusalem chopped salad £5.50

Lamb shawarmaplate £18.50

Iraqi hummus £8

Total £34.90

JANUARY 16 2021 Section:Weekend Time: 15/1/2021 - 16:31 User: andrew.higton Page Name: WKD3, Part,Page,Edition: WKD, 3, 1


Style

A n inherited sartorial ruleis hardwired into most of us. Mine is school-uniform shades: black, navy, char-coal-grey, khaki. Claret and

forest-green at a push. But bright col-ours? I can hear my mother now, loosely paraphrasing Hillary Clinton: “Clothes matter, and no one takes clown-clothes seriously.”

Borderline chromatophobia once made sense, particularly in British offices, where too much drawing atten-tion to oneself was regarded as suspi-cious. The brief 1990s fad for zany cloth-ing is forever associated with Colin Hunt of The Fast Show, practical joker and office irritant.

But locked down at home and recov-ering from Covid-19 in the dark of win-ter, the old rules no longer made sense. Late last year, I found myself drawn to Stella McCartney’s Kind Intarsia jumper — a deranged, psychedelic dream of a garment in a riot of acid shades, with “SMILE” written on the front. It was not just me. It has sold out once on McCart-ney’s website and in its stores, though it is now back in stock in limited sizes. No matter: this year’s Spring/Summer col-lections are a similar explosion of joy.

McCartney is persisting with a shade of ultra-pink just right for the set of Bridgerton, while Chanel is offering neon-scrawled mini dresses. Versace, meanwhile, seems to have been taken over by late-1960s-era Pink Floyd. Even Loewe is offering shorts and sweatshirts in hyperreal blue-sky prints.

None of this is accidental — brights are rational for our age, according to Karl Johan Bertilsson, one of the world’s lead-ing colour trend forecasters. Bertilsson is creative director at NCS Colour, the Swedish standardisation system used by companies such as H&M to predict hues that consumers will demand in the months and years ahead, driven by cul-tural trends. He links fashion’s chro-matic infatuation with the “radical opti-mism” movement — an “enormous

Clockwise from main: Shrimps Resort 2021; Kind Intarsia jumper by Stella McCartney, £925, net-a-porter.com; LF Markey multicoloured Finnian boilersuit, £200, lfmarkey.com; Stine Goya Arlinda dress, £310, stinegoya.com; Pangaia loungewear

W hen London went into lockdown last March, so did my beloved wallet: a perfectly lovely, palm-sized amalgam of but-

tery navy leather and neat white stitch-ing courtesy of the Australian accesso-ries brand Bellroy. It was parked in the top drawer of my bedside table. And there it has remained ever since.

Multiple reasons were at play. Given I wasn’t commuting to the office and my daily orbit was confined to the few blocks surrounding my flat, I no longer needed all that stuff: bank cards, ID, that wadge of café/smoothie bar/grocery store loyalty cards (each, without fail, boasting just one stamp).

Plus, like everyone else in the pan-demic climate, I didn’t want to touch anything unnecessarily. Amid worries that the handling of cash would lead to an increased risk of virus transmission (research from the Bank of England now indicates the risk is “low”), many restaurants and retailers in major cities switched to card- or digital-only pay-ments. As I didn’t fancy dealing with cards or machine pin-pads I down-loaded Apple Pay — just six years after its launch — and this Luddite has since gone about his days armed with scarcely more than an iPhone.

I’m hardly alone. In March, Palina Pradhan, a 34-year-old lawyer at a magic circle firm in London, decided her burgundy Burberry wallet’s time

was up. “I’ve not carried cash since then; I just carry a couple of cards to buy gro-ceries, so stopped having any use for my wallet,” says Pradhan. “It means I can go handbag-less if I want, especially if I’m just running errands.”

Charlie Reid, who works in renewable energy finance in Sydney, is “delighted” to be rid of his wallet, as is James Contos, an executive director at Goldman Sachs in London who lost his halfway through 2020 and — apart from one ill-fated trip to the office without his building pass — has realised he doesn’t need his leather companion long-term.

Chiara Rimella, an editor at Monocle magazine (and a former colleague of mine), also retired her wallet and turned to Apple Pay. “Now I only have one thing to worry about — my phone — and I always know where that is because I’m constantly on it,” she says. “Plus [using digital payments] helps me keep track of how much I spend so much bet-ter [than a physical card] because I get immediate notifications from my bank-ing app about all those small purchases I wouldn’t have remembered.”

This anecdotal evidence seems to be supported by sales figures. According to market research firm Euromonitor International, in 2020 sales of wallets and coin purses fell by almost 20 per cent globally compared with 2019, and by nearly 18 per cent in the UK (bearing in mind overall spending across many categories decreased in 2020).

Like suits, ties and stilettos, the wal-let’s slide into obsolescence appears to have been accelerated by the pan-demic. Even pre-Covid, few people were toting bundles of dosh as digital pay-ments became more widespread. George Costanza’s “exploding wallet” from the 1998 episode of Seinfeld — stuffed with banknotes in a sight that would give minimalist Marie Kondo heart palpitations — seems truly of another era. Yet while wallets have become ever slimmer, the one thing that had not diminished was their sales — until now.

“Currently, card usage is at an all-time

high as consumers ditch cash for the ease and perceived hygiene benefits of paying by card,” says Thomas Slide, sen-ior financial services analyst at global research firm Mintel.

“The future of the physical card could also come under threat as payment technology evolves at a rapid pace . . . having shifted from cash to card, the shift from cards to other pay-ment methods could prove easier for consumers to understand.” Ultimately, with no need for cash or cards he con-cludes that the days of the physical wal-let are “numbered”.

Yet wallets play other roles beyond the practical. Like fragrances or lipstick, they’re an entry-level product enabling consumers to buy a piece of a luxury brand. If they can’t afford a £3,250 Prada dress, the brand’s popular Saffiano leather wallet might be in reach at £340.

Also, they remain a popular gift option. Damien Paul, head of menswear at Matches Fashion, says the luxury e-tailer’s strong wallet sales last year are at least partly attributable to a “more indulgent gifting” season. “Gifting is a huge part of any men’s wallet business,” he says, “and because people are away from their loved ones, the customer seems to be trading up and going for something really special.”

Brands need us to keep buying small accessories but, in the future, these might not be wallets or card holders.

Lina Calabria, co-founder and chief operations officer of Bellroy, says the brand’s phone cases with one or three card slots are selling well (so you can have your driver’s license or a back-up bank card should your phone die) but, even so, we’re not quite at the stage where you can leave home with a phone and nothing else. There’s a small miscel-lany of other items we need on us each day, including keys; earphone cases; possibly prophylactics, gum and sun-glasses; and Covid-19-related essentials such as masks and sanitiser.

Bellroy, whose biggest markets are the US, UK and Australia, is seeing great demand for lightweight pouches that

can fit a few staples and often come with a handy long strap or in a sling. Among the current women’s bestsellers for lux-ury London retailer Browns are zip pouches from Saint Laurent and Burb-erry, while Matches’ Paul says high-end men’s brands are finding success with ever-more-diminutive cross-body bags.

Calabria thinks “eventually people are unlikely to carry wallets in the tradi-tional sense”. She predicts 10-15 per cent of people will stick to a “very tradition-al-looking wallet, another 10 per cent will have a one-card carry solution [like a phone holder], 40 per cent might have a small bag, and then another 40 per cent” will have something else. But she thinks we’re “pretty far away from not carrying anything with us at all”.

Minimalists will hope she’s wrong. Contos, from Goldman Sachs, says he “hates carrying stuff — my dream is to have everything done by fingerprint, including house entry so I don’t need keys. In 2019 Hyundai became the first carmaker to sell models that rely on fingerprint identification, while tech giants such as Samsung are offering similar “smart lock” solutions for the house, although these are far from mainstream.

Personally I’m eyeing Patagonia’s black “Ultralight Mini Hip Pack,” which resembles a miniature bum bag (bear with me) but looks best worn across the chest. The wallet will be staying in the top drawer.

Cash out: Why the wallet may be about to foldTrend | The accessory appears increasingly outdated as concerns over virus transmission speed the shift to a cashless society, writes Jamie Waters

George Costanza’s exploding wallet in ‘Seinfeld’, 1998

Fewer people are buyingwalletsSales of wallets and coin pouches,by region ($bn)

Source: Euromonitor International

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Western EuropeNorth AmericaMiddle East/Africa

Latin AmericaEasternEuropeAsia-Pacific

Can I dress myself happy?

Report | In search of a pandemic

pick-me-up, Helen Barrett embraces

neon brights and bold patterns

push” of joyous defiance in the face of global crises, particularly climate change. The movement, espoused by the model Lily Cole among others, is almost aggressively positive, particu-larly appeals to Generation Z (though Gen-Xers are clearly susceptible) and was gaining momentum even before the pandemic, says Bertilsson.

“Dramatic expressions, bright colours — it’s a statement, like holding a sign: ‘I want to be positive!’,” he says. “The other driver is that people are tired of the word ‘sustainability’. It is not that they don’t want their products to be sus-tainable, but everything until now has had to look sustainable. Colours looked recyclable. And consumers will be say-ing, just stop.”

Young brands are already on to col-our-as-protest. Pangaia, founded just over a year ago with offices in New York and London, deals in cultish, slightly oversized leisurewear in Teletubby brights: floor-length apple-green puffas, banana-yellow joggers and so on. It is just as loud about its environmental agenda, for example its use of non-toxic dyes and a process that treats waste effluents and recycles water.

“It’s a serious cause, but we need to translate it in a way that is relatable and happy,” says Maria Srivastava, chief brand officer. “We have a hopeful attitude about what can be done.” Brights, she says, “are a mood, an elevator . . . they sell really well”.

Some take a trip-pier approach. Stine Goya, designer of Scandi-cool womenswear, offers multi-coloured flowing pieces that recall the dreamlike 1960s and ’70s creations of English designer Ossie Clark. She describes brights as an “invigorating vehicle to happiness”.

“Colour can be scary to some, and we get that,” says Goya, who lives in Copen-hagen. But when her cli-ents wear brights, they can “ignite parts of themselves they never knew existed”.

Designers in all disciplines espouse the theory that bright colours evoke joy, even in dark times. But is there any evidence? Some, according to Professor Byron Mikellides of the Oxford School of Architec-ture and a leading expert in colour psychology. Humans perceive more colours than most mam-mals (only some of our nearest relatives, monkeys and apes, share similar abilities) and that sense evolved because it contributes to our biological survival.

Mikellides points to an essay by neu-ropsychologist Nicholas Humphrey, who writes how the colours of nature — bird plumage, pigments in fruit and flowers — act as visual signals, an evolu-tionary heritage to which we still respond. “Whatever the message, signal colours commonly have three func-tions: they catch attention, they trans-mit information and they directly affect the emotions of the viewer.”

Neat correlations between colours and moods are probably not possible, because perception can vary depending

on factors like culture, association and so on. But some evidence indicates red can stimulate feelings of both fear and pleasure, and there is even some to sug-gest that it has special significance for humans, in that it is more “activating” — or energising — than blue.

Does this mean that wearing red could affect my mood? Yes, says Mikellides, and it could also affect the people around me: “When you dress up and use bright colours, people will notice, and you will cheer them up,” he says.

I’m not yet ready for banana-yellow joggers. But Mikellides’ conviction per-suaded me to break my sartorial rules. Goya advised me to start slowly: “Try it for a day, and tell me it’s not an instant mood-booster.”

After 10 days of self-isolating and the

associated cabin fever, I was craving colour and found myself drawn

to Goya’s acid-bright Arlinda dress in orange, pink and lilac, as far from my usual palette as possi-ble. It recalls Italian designer Emilio Pucci’s 1960s heyday — per-fect for dramatic entrances. In the absence of a chic din-ner or cutting-edge gallery opening, I wore it for an evening at home. My 21-year-

old son couldn’t stop grinning when I entered the living room: “Yeah, I like it,” he said. “The new Mum! Ha ha ha!”

What about outdoors? January walks call for practical jumpsuits,

and I usually favour LF Markey’s “lux-ury workwear” in trusty black.

But its Danny jumpsuit also comes in pillarbox red —

could that be “activating”, as Mikellides says?

I loved the scarlet Danny immediately

because it gave off what I hoped was a sporty, Farrah Fawcett vibe. It was not only warm, it also met with approval from my family.

But was I radically opti-mistic enough to try LF Mar-key’s oversized, multicol-oured Finnian, in cobalt, yellow and white, with giant red daisies on the front? I was. My younger, 13-year-old son was mortified, but he always is.

My husband, bewildered at first, eventually approved: “You look more approachable than when you wear black,” he said. “If I didn’t know you, I would go up and talk to you at a party.”

I was sold. But the idea that bright col-ours date quickly is deeply ingrained. If I want to buy a coat in a colour other than boring old beige or navy, what do I choose? Tone it down, suggests Bertils-son. “An orange or yellow, but slightly darker, so you still have a hue but not that bright. We see a very clear move-ment towards darker colours a year from now.”

In the meantime, there is always that joyous Stella McCartney jumper, if I can find my size. Sadly, there’s a waiting list.

‘Colour can be scary to some [but brights can] ignite parts of themselves they never knew existed’

JANUARY 16 2021 Section:Weekend Time: 14/1/2021 - 16:44 User: claire.barron Page Name: WKD4, Part,Page,Edition: WKD, 4, 1


Style

I nto the long, colourless stretch of days between Christmas and New Year’s arrived Bridgerton: the bright, baubled, deliciously frothy Netflix period drama about a prom-

ising young debutante’s quest to find a suitable husband in her first London social season.

Set in 1813, the same year Pride and Prejudice was published, Bridgerton has all the trappings of a Jane Austen romance, but with a modern warp. It imagines a Regency-era society pre-sided over by a Queen Charlotte who is a woman of colour (some historians have theorised Queen Charlotte had African ancestry) and where titles of nobility are held by both white and black people.

An aesthetic tour de force with a racially diverse cast and a rather liberal number of sex scenes, Chris Van Dusen’s and Shonda Rhimes’ eight-episode show has been a broad crowd pleaser for Netflix. The streaming service said this week that the adaptation of Julia Quinn’s romantic novel series is on track to reach 63m households in its first four weeks, making it one of its most-watched original productions to date.

One might not expect 19th-century finery to inspire a shopping frenzy, but it is nevertheless occurring: according to fashion search engine Lyst, online searches for corsets (+123 per cent), empire line dresses (+93 per cent), pearl and feather headbands (+49 per cent) and even long gloves (+23 per cent) have soared since the show’s debut. Call it the “Bridgerton effect”.

Much of the credit for those figures lies at the hands of Ellen Mirojnick, 71, the Emmy-winning costume designer whose extensive CV includes the ward-robing of Wall Street (1987), Fatal Attrac-tion (1987) and Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (2019). In line with the show, she has taken period trappings and made them more modern, lush, extraordi-nary: fabrics and embellishments are of vibrant, man-made colours; empire line dresses are rendered soft and fluid with over-layers of organdy or tulle; wigs are towering and tinged with lilac. The men are dressed in the tightly tailored morn-ing coats, breeches and cravats of Regency dandies, but the fabrics are showier.

“This wasn’t going to be a bonneted show,” says Mirojnick on a phone call from Los Angeles. “The difference between a Jane Austen [period] piece and ours is that we chose to shift it, to give it a more modern, more aspira-tional feel, one where a modern audi-ence could look at it and perhaps say: I wish I could have that.”

Outfitting the cast of Bridgerton was a Herculean task: Mirojnick calls it “the biggest show she’s ever done”, likening the workload to “three exceptionally

Power dressing, Bridgerton style

TV | The show’s floating gowns and feathered

headdresses may be the stuff of fantasy, but they

offer lessons in looking one’s best. By Lauren Indvik

T he battle over what men and women should or should not be allowed to wear at work has beenraging for decades. Just

last week, a judge ruled that Boots,Britain’s largest pharmacy chain, had discriminated against an employeeat its Preston warehouse in northern England by reprimanding him forwearing a pair of black cotton three-quarter-length trousers to work on a hot summer day in 2018.

The case was ultimately unsuccessful (as it was submitted too late), but the warehouse worker’s sweaty-legged plight recalls a multitude of other work-place-based sartorial horror stories which have occurred over the years.

There has long been a fraught rela-tionship between men in short trousers and the offices they occupy — and the higher up the food chain one goes, the more difficult it is to get away with. The prime minister would never live it down if he wore shorts to the Houses of Parlia-ment (though he’d probably quite like to) and you’d be unlikely to catch Andrew Bailey rocking around the Bank of England in a pair of Aloha Bermudas from Prada.

The wider ramifications of last week’s ruling — along with the growing casuali-sation of workplace attire, which has been accelerated by Covid-19 — could, however, shift the dial on wearingshorts to the office. Summers, too, are getting hotter.

The good news is that it is possible to look elegant in cut-offs at work, so long as you pick the right pair. Many design-ers — from Thom Browne and Qasimi at the deeper end of the budgetary pool, to Zara and Mango at the shallower — have started producing beautifully tailored short suits designed to make theirwearers look more like serious business people and less like latter-day members of B*Witched.

Personally speaking, I’ve only ever worn shorts to the office twice. Once last

financial offices, may never be ready for the exposed male leg.

“From my perspective, the expecta-tion of my lay and professional clients would be that I am formally and appro-priately dressed. We are dealing with individuals often at the worst andmost vulnerable stages in their livesand they expect a competent and pro-fessional package: from appearance to advice,” London-based barrister Matt Warmoth tells me.

“Therefore, if there is to be any sarto-rial relaxation, I would consider the removal of a tie and possibly the jacket to be the natural progression rather than there being an industry acceptance of shorts instead of trousers.”

While financial institutions such as Morgan Stanley and PwC have loosened their dress codes in recent years — ties are thankfully no longer mandatory — the prospect a host of naked calves plonked within the close confines of a communal desk — hairs raised against the waft of the computer fan, inner thighs sweating from the toils of the commute — may just be a step too far for some employers.

“If you’re not in a client-facing role, you can wear whatever you want in the office,” a portfolio manager at a London-based investment fund writes over WhatsApp. “The question is — can you take the heat from your colleagues?”

August, when the thermometer hit32 degrees Celsius and the prospect of sitting in our sweltering fashion boxfor eight hours drove me to pull ona pair of slim cut navy shorts fromCos (the Swedish high-street brandcuts a good basic knee-skimmer). And once, when I was much younger work-ing at Esquire magazine and I wore a pair of striped shorts as part of a co-ord. The then-editor compared me to an elongated Pee Wee Herman.

In my view, the key to getting the look right is in the accessories you team it with. A seersucker short suit in a minty hue would look excellent worn with a white grandad shirt and a pair of chest-nut brown derbies, sockless; while a more classic Thom Browne-esque char-coal three-piece short suit would look best teamed with ribbed socks in a tonal hue, a pair of chunky black brogues and a spiffy shirt and tie.

But context matters. I work in media, where creativity in dress is encouraged. Psychologically, more formal work-places, such as legal chambers and

The good news is that it is possible to look elegant in cut-offs at work, so long as you pick the right pair

Let them wear shortsMenswear | The spotlight is back on shorts as workwear. Teo van den Broeke explains how they can look smart

Accessories are key to pulling off shorts at the office — Getty Images

the wearer. The most striking character is Lady Danbury (Adjoa Andoh), a com-manding hostess who sits at the centre of Bridgerton’s social web. We meet her in episode one, when the most eligible bachelor in Britain, the newly elevated Simon, Duke of Hastings (Rege-Jean Pagé), attempts to offer his regrets for not attending a ball she is hosting later that evening. “Your regrets are denied,” she replies. His resistance quavers.

Lady Danbury is a calculated power-dresser who exudes gravitas; she is queenly but with none of the excess of the show’s real queen (Golda Rosheu-vel). Her colours tend to be dark or icy — scarlet, amethyst, silver — with regal collars and sharp edges (her jewellery is “prickly”, Mirojnick points out). They also flatter her complexion. In lieu of a bonnet and purse, she wears a man’s top hat, miniaturised, with a dandy’s stately

walking stick. She doesn’t shy away from a full set of jewellery, even in day-light. Everything about her dress is designed to intimidate. In one episode, she tells the duke she was extremely shy as a girl, and to overcome it, “I sharp-ened my wit, my wardrobe and my eye, and I made myself the most terrifying creature in any room I entered.”

“We eliminated all soft elements from Lady Danbury. She had an edge,” says Mirojnick. “If you look at all of the details — her coat, sleeves, the back of her garments, they are all very precise, very sharp, and very specific, just like she is . . . She didn’t go to [the town dressmaker] like everyone else did; she had her own.”

At the opposite end of the intimida-tion spectrum is the show’s principal character, Daphne Bridgerton (Phoebe Dynevor), an innocent, chaste, well-dowried debutante determined to find a love match. Everything about her is exceedingly dainty, from the pale blues and whites of her empire waist gowns, to the slim necklaces around her throat.

And then there are the three young women of the nouveau riche Feather-

ington family, who in contrast to Bridg-erton’s soft tones are dressed in acidic hues that overwhelm their complex-ions: lemon, orange, tart green. “I think those colours suit them,” Mirojnick argues, describing them as “Versace-esque”. “They aren’t elegant — but they are elegant for the characters . . . [the whole family] is so lively and high-spir-ited and audacious.”

As for the queen? The real Queen Charlotte wore the same silhouette from the day she married George III until her death, and Mirojnick stuck to it for the series. What did change was her wigs, which took on different heights, widths, even colours. “That was her element,” she says.

Mirojnick has a talent for making actors look their best, and I ask her if she has any advice for the rest of us. “Know who you are from the inside out and see yourself clearly in the mirror. And don’t follow trends. Pick from the trends what suits you.”

‘I sharpened my wit, my wardrobe and my eye, and I made myself the most terrifying creature’

Clockwise from main: Queen Charlotte, played by Golda Rosheuvel, and her ladies in waiting; Lady Danbury (Adjoa Andoh) is the show’s power dresser; Daphne Bridgerton (Phoebe Dynevor) prefers soft, pale colours and delicate jewellery; the Featherington family favour acidic, ‘Versace-esque’ hues — Netflix

large films”. She presided over a team of 232 people, who together created or hired about 7,500 costumes — an under-taking rivalling The Crown.

The spectacle is impressive. But beneath the frippery are lessons in dressing in ways that communicate power, personality and taste, and flatter

JANUARY 16 2021 Section:Weekend Time: 14/1/2021 - 18:36 User: matthew.brayman Page Name: WKD5, Part,Page,Edition: WKD, 5, 1


Travel

From top: the Salton Sea in southern California; a shuttered cafe beside the shore; the House of Dots, an ‘art camp’ in Slab City, a former US Marines base dating from the second world war; an abandoned plane and a home in Slab City — Getty Images; Alamy

unwelcome; “while naturally such an unexpected turn has caused a great deal of inconvenience,” commented a local newspaper, “the flood will really prove a great benefit”.

And so it transpired. By the 1950s, the accidental sea had bloomed into a popu-lar resort, rechristened the “Salton Rivi-era”. An hour’s drive from the upmarket nightclubs and golf courses of Palm Springs, the Salton Sea offered a yacht club, motels, water-skiing, and — after the waters were stocked with shad, orangemouth corvina and striped mul-let — sport fishing. For a time it saw more visitors annually than even Yosemite National Park. It was, as one ad hailed it, “truly a miracle in the desert”.

But the miracle was short lived. The sea began to shrink, revealing an expanse of claylike sediment, which dried to an alkali powder laced with sele-nium, arsenic and DDT from the agricul-tural run-off that had been diverted into the sink to slow the sea’s evaporation. Blown up by the desert winds, the whole region became a dustbowl, the toxic resi-due triggering an asthma crisis across south-east California.

As the fish died, the birds that fed on them disappeared too, or worse — died off themselves. When high winds stir up the anoxic waters at the lake bed — full of all those decomposing fish and rotting mats of algae — they turn the water a gaudy green, releasing large quantities of hydrogen sulphide, a lethal toxin with the stench of rotten eggs. Today the lake covers 325 sq miles, having shrunk by about 50 sq miles since the turn of the century; the Pacific Institute predicts the volume of water will decrease 60 per cent in the next decade.

Altogether, these symptoms of envi-ronmental collapse add up to the atmos-pheric setting of a post-apocalyptic graphic novel: the toxic dust; the swirl-ing, pigmented sea; the neurotoxic algae; the fishbone beaches; the dissolv-ing seafront trailers sinking into the mud, the jetties launching out into noth-ing. Except: it’s real, it’s here, and it’s only getting worse.

I came to the Salton Sea as part of the research for a new book about the ecol-ogy and psychology of abandoned places, an investigation into how nature can adapt and recover in the long shadow cast by human activities. It had taken me to some of the world’s most eerie, ravaged and polluted sites — from the disaster zones of Chernobyl and Montserrat, to former frontlines in Cyprus and Verdun, Detroit’s blighted neighbourhoods and a Scottish island whose last residents left in 1974. The Salton Sea — its seaside resorts left land-locked by shrinking waters, its boats rotting in the bowls of dry marinas — felt a fitting final destination.

Seven miles east of the Salton Sea lies an abandoned military base dating from the second world war. Camp Dunlap fea-tured 8 miles of paved roads, a swim-ming pool, water tanks and about 30

Palm Springs

Salton City

Slab City

Salton Sea

Los Angeles

San Diego

MEXICO

PACIFICOCEAN

©Mapcreator.io/©HERE

Joshua TreeNational Park

CALIFORNIA

50 kmU S

A journey to the end of the road

California | A quest to explore the world’s abandoned places culminates

at a desert community clinging to the edge of civilisation. By Cal Flyn

Ski resorts in France are warning they are facing a “life or death” struggle if they are unable to open next month. Operators had been hoping to start their lifts for the first time on January 8 but instead were told the closure would continue until at least February, with a review on January 20. “It’s clear that if we do not open in February, the season is finished, and the resorts will have real problems of survival,” said Dominique Marcel, chief executive of the Compagnie des Alpes, the country’s biggest resort operator, speaking on

French TV channel BFM Business. “It’s a matter of life or death for certain parties — that’s not an exaggeration.”

February, which includes the two-week French school holidays, is the key period for resorts, representing 35 per cent of winter income, according to the National Association of Mayors of Mountain Resorts (ANMSM). Ordinarily the ski season would directly support 120,000 jobs, it says, warning of the potential for lasting damage to mountain communities. “The consequence of not opening is the risk

of the irreversible destruction of our economic model,” it said in a statement. “70 years of economic development in the mountains must not be destroyed in the space of a few months!”

Jean-Luc Boch, mayor of La Plagne and president of the ANMSM, said official arguments for continued closure were no longer valid, because the lack of visitors over Christmas meant there was no hospital overcrowding, while the introduction of testing centres and other measures meant safety could be guaranteed. Others fear any further

delay to a decision would leave potential customers with no time to plan a holiday.

“The government needs to let us know by January 20 if ski lifts can open or not,” says Eric Bouchet, director of the

tourist office at Les 2 Alpes. “We can’t just snap our fingers and open, it takes planning. At some point it will just be too late and not worth opening at all.”

Even when lifts do open, international guests may be unable to come. In normal years more than 42 per cent of Val d’Isère’s guests, for example, come from the UK, where the latest lockdown means foreign travel is currently impossible. Already some British tour operators have thrown in the towel for the season. Le Ski, which runs chalet holidays in Courchevel, Val d’Isère and

La Tania, announced last week that it would be running no trips this winter for the first time in 38 years. Family specialist Esprit Ski has also cancelled all its trips.

Meanwhile, Italy is due to announce on January 18 if its resorts can reopen. Some resorts in Austria are open only to locals, and a decision on whether they can welcome tourists is expected on January 24. Ski areas in parts of Switzerland remain open, but this weekend’s Lauberhorn downhill, a highlight of the World Cup season, has been called off.

Tom Robbins

Short cuts: French ski season on a knife edge

Empty ski lifts in Val d’IsèreJeff Pachoud/Getty Images

S undown in the desert. I walk out under a stained-glass sky. Carmine, indigo, amber, and a pale, sweet green move through the sky in soft

and overlapping bands, sinking to the ground as if spent, slipping behindthe mountains with the last of the day’s light.

I’ve been travelling a long time. I feel distant, lightheaded, my faltering progress increasingly taking on the diz-zying significance of a dream, in all its heavy-handed imagery: driving frac-tured roads past vacant lots, boarded houses, the basins of marinas emptied of water, and — having pulled up and left my rental car askew across the road — I stagger down between the arms of two twin piers that loom impotently over a dust-dry landscape.

Somewhere out there, I know, are the silvered remains of a sea, a sea in the process of simmering away, leaving only

spines bleached, pages swollen. In one corner, there’s a cylindrical stack of aged encyclopedias with a spray-paint label: GOOGLE. If anyone has the skills to sur-vive some unspecified global disaster, they are likely to be found among the residents of Slab City, who are living now as if the end times have already come.

The overwhelming aesthetic — partly self-aware, but largely through necessity — is of a post-apocalyptic wasteland with a Mad Max vibe. In recent years, popular culture in the west has been increasingly dominated by dystopian visions, both in cinema and in literature, including a rise in so-called “cli-fi” — fantastical visions of climato-logical disaster. And it’s impossible not to see parallels in the most vociferous of climate change literature: there toowe find that sense of impendingdisaster, of divine retribution for past

sins, the urgent need to act before it is too late.

In the library, three topless men sit at a table, shooting the breeze. One quivers a cane that produces a noise like a rain-stick — the rattle from a rattle-snake’s tail has been cut off and pinned to it. He had got up in the night and found it, “sitting waiting for me in the middle of the floor in the dark. So I shot it.” He stands up and fetches a board where the snake’s skin has been stretched out to cure. What hap-pened to the rest of it, I want to

know. He ate it, he says. Another man at the table is younger,

fresh-faced, with a look of bland good humour. He says his name is “2K”, and got here at the start of the summer after some time on the road. Before he left home, he’d been working — of all things — at a doggy daycare facility, but one day he realised he couldn’t do it any more. “I was tired of the whole Babylon thing,” he tells me. I shake my head. Babylon? Babylon, he says again. The outside world. People working all the time. Working to live, living to work. So, he opted out. He quit. He packed every-thing he owned into his truck and set off. In the end, he washed up here. He slept under a bush a few nights before he got here, he says. Now he sleeps under a tree. “I’ve gone up in the world,” he says, and it’s a joke, but it’s also for real.

“Here in Slab City we have a tremen-dous advantage,” says 2K. “All the trash from Babylon.” I look at him quizzically. He’s not being humorous. “So much trash accumulated in the desert over the years it became a resource. Every-thing we have here has been built outof trash.”

Babylon, to 2K, is all modern civilisa-tion: the great polluting monolith from which they live downstream, picking through the waste spewing from its exhausts. It is a chaotic, careless place of inconstancy and disappointment that squeezes its workers dry then deserts them. The people who end up here come partly from choice, in a quest for a dif-ferent way of life, and partly because they have nowhere left to fall. Slab City may be an abandoned, trash-strewn hinterland, but at least the rent is free.

‘Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post Human Landscape’ by Cal Flyn is published by William Collins on January 21

REPENT NOW. A crucifix sprouts from its summit like a beanstalk.

I’d heard there were hot springs at the Slabs, but Sam warns me off. They’re hot, he points out, not unreasonably: the last thing you need when you’re already light-headed and sun-sick. But Sam says he has an alternative plan. We get in my car and he directs me along a long gravel track behind the camp to where the clear waters of the Coachella Canal flow fast through a V-shaped con-crete channel, water destined for the swimming pools and golf courses of Palm Springs. I haver for a moment when I see it. It doesn’t seem real. All week I’ve been fending off the false flags of mirage as I travel through the desert: shimmering visions of flooded roads that retreat upon approach, and the floating islands of Fata Morgana. But

this is real. Cool, pure,

buildings. When the Marines vacated the site after the war they took the buildings with them, leaving only the foundations. Now they call it Slab City. Since the 1960s, this place has served as the site of a makeshift desert camp of dropouts and drifters, hippies, artists, outlaws, runaways, survivalists — a haven or a hideout for those who have no home, or carry their home on their back, or have burnt their homes down.

It’s busy here in winter, when snow-bird pensioners in expensive rigs tum-ble through, a thousand at a time, look-ing for a free place to park. But when the heat amps up in summer, as high as 50C, with no access to running water or power, they pack up and drive off.

I get here in September at the end of a long, relentlessly hot summer, when only the residue, the hardcore, the true faithful, remain. It’s squalid and ugly, but there’s a raw splendour to the place too. Here and there, the heaps of refuse have been fashioned into works of art. There’s a maze constructed of stones, piled into thin spiralling paths; a stripped-down car, propped up on bricks and with its bonnet gaping, ornamented in a thousand bottle caps like a pearly king.

Its residents call it, fondly, “the last free place in Amer-ica”. But it doesn’t feel like a hangover from some untrou-bled past. If the slabs the squats are built on are souvenirs of the atomic age, then Slab City itself seems a vision of a post-atomic future: a hardscrabble society cobbled together from the ruins of a fallen civilisation.

“Welcome to the Slabs,” says Sam when I arrive. He’s been minding the Slab City “hostel” over the summer in return for a place to live. I’m the only guest. Sam’s in his late forties, maybe early fifties, heavyset, wearing a tie-dye shirt and an elasticated skirt — for the heat, he says, which is oppressive. Not long ago, he lost just about everything he owned in a fire. He gets a bit of money from the state thanks to his disability cheque, but it’s not enough to live on anywhere else.

To the south rises the Slabs’ most famous landmark, Salvation Mountain — a hill-sized sculpture-cum-landform-cum-place of worship built of adobe and haybales and painted in bright Sgt Pep-per colours by the late, great outsider artist, Leonard Knight. GOD IS LOVE, it declares in huge bubble letters rolled from clay. REPENT, it instructs.

a pale shadow in its place. The silt here wears a hard rime of salt that gives way as I lower my weight on to it, like sun-crusted snow. As I get further out, my feet sink deeper into the thin, grey sand.

When I look closer, I see it is not sand at all, but the dry bones of fish, pounded into shards, and the tiny, skull-like husks of barnacles. This is a foul place. The air is thick with brine and guano and decomposition. Even now, in the violet dusk, the heat is oppressive. But as I cross the crystallised flats, the water gleams into view, an impossible sea in the middle of the desert.

The Salton Sea is not a true sea, but the vestige of a great flood: the conse-quence of the Colorado River breaching the banks of an ill-built irrigation chan-nel in 1905. The floodwaters carved deep gorges into the loose desert soils, and created a waterfall 80ft high that eroded its way backwards through the basin floor, moving a mile or more per day. The waters rose and rose, filling the valley like a bath and creating an inland sea 35 miles long and 15 miles wide.

The residents turned out in their hun-dreds to watch the deluge as it swal-lowed first their fields and then their homes. Though dramatic, the arrival of water in a region once known as “the Valley of the Dead” was not entirely

By the 1950s, the accidental sea had bloomed into a popular resort, rechristened the ‘Salton Riviera’

fast-flowing water. I drop my grimy dress to the dirt and jump in near a lad-der, which I use to anchor myself against the current. DANGER, reads a sign, but in my heightened state, the underlying risk seems only to intensify the experi-ence: the water so clear, so turquoise, so temperate. Tiny fish shelter under the ladder rungs. Catfish sweep the smooth concrete bottom. The sky is so cloudless it appears black when I look up. I feel dizzy if I do, as if peering over the edge into a bottomless gorge.

I think of a woman I met earlier, Ella. She moved to the Slabs for health rea-sons: chronic pain and the OxyContin addiction that came after. But she felt reborn in the desert, in the hot, dry air. She said she’d never go home. I think I know how she feels. I am baptised, wiped clean. Sam takes a running jump, and strikes out in a stiff front crawl, angled into the current so that he cuts across to the ladder on the opposite wall. He grabs a rung, and hauls himself to safety. Heaving himself half out of the water, he throws his head back and crows like Peter Pan, a wild ululation. Then he laughs: he hasn’t had a shower since July. No matter. The rich are drinking our bathwater now.

Later we end up in the library — a shack-like structure built of repurposed wood and corrugated sheets, half-open to the elements. It’s a beautiful concept — dreamed up and staffed by public-spirited Slabbers — but nevertheless the space has a dusty, passed-over atmos-phere: the books are stacked tightly,



I n a 51-minute video posted on YouTube last month, the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny described in chilling detail how a secret service hit squad had poi-

soned him with the novichok nerve agent. Navalny identified the intelli-gence operatives involved. He even tele-phoned one of them later and tricked him into describing how he smeared novichok on Navalny’s underpants, the subject of another video.

The Kremlin dismissed the accusa-tions on the novel grounds that it would have done a better job of killing Navalny had it wanted to do so. But Navalny’s video has severely dented the Kremlin’s denials of involvement and presented an alternative story to 22m viewers, something unimaginable in the pre-in-ternet era.

This extraordinary exposé was aided by Bellingcat, an open-source investiga-tive agency founded by Eliot Higgins, a British researcher and citizen journal-ist. Using airline passenger manifests, telephone records, geolocation data and personnel files, all circulating on the darker recesses of the Russian internet, Bellingcat was able to piece together the plot to poison Navalny.

Not only does Higgins antagonise the autocrats, he also takes aim at those who only bewail the downsides of the internet. “At Bellingcat, we do not accept this cyber-miserabilism. The marvels of the internet can still have an impact for the better.” In his view, the internet remains an astonishing resource for helping redress the power imbalances between the rulers and the ruled. History is no longer just written by the winners, but filmed by the losers on their smartphones.

Arguably, this kind of digital activism may mark the start of the third stage in the internet’s short history. After swing-ing wildly from the naive libertarian utopianism of the cyberspace pioneers of the 1990s to the despairing dystopi-anism about the rise of surveillance cap-italism and techno-authoritarianism in more recent years, we may be settling into a new era of steely eyed realism in which civil society fights back against dominant state and corporate interests.

Regulators around the world are finally catching up with the big tech platforms and are intent on taming their power, while digital activists and inno-vative entrepreneurs, empowered by cheap and accessible new technologies, are challenging the established online order. Even the tech platforms now accept that they cannot operate without a societal licence and are calling for lim-ited regulation to establish clearer rules on privacy and free speech. The suspen-sion this month of President Donald Trump’s Twitter and Facebook accounts over his glorification of vio-lence may mark the moment when they acknowledge they have broader respon-sibilities than making money.

Many of these themes are developed by Ronald J Deibert in Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society. As director of the Citizen Lab at the Munk School at the University of Toronto, Deibert explains how civil society can mobilise to loosen the state and corporate grip over the internet. Citizen Lab, which researches the intersection between technology and human rights, and many other civil institutions like it, can act as “counter-intelligence for global society”, he claims.

However, both writers make clear that there will be no quick and simple solutions to the multiple challenges of the internet era. It will take a painstak-ing struggle over many years and across many domains to reclaim the internet for the people.

In We Are Bellingcat, Higgins recounts how he dropped out of college in the 1990s and worked in a series of dead-end jobs in Leicester, taking refuge in video games. But his fascination with the Arab Spring sparked a new obses-sion with current affairs. By scouring online videos, using translation services and Google Maps, Higgins was able to piece together the unfolding drama and contributed to news blogs before setting one up himself.

In doing so, he built up a network of fellow citizen journalists around the world, all with their particular exper-tise. He quickly discovered that often they knew more about what was hap-pening on the ground than most ana-lysts and politicians who relied on tradi-tional methods of acquiring news. Bell-ingcat’s name comes from the old fable in which the mice hung a bell around the cat’s neck so that it would never catch them again.

Its team of researchers helped unmask the Russian spies responsible for the novichok poisonings of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salis-bury in 2018. They also tracked down

rorist attacks on New York, the US National Security Agency “piggy-backed” on the surveillance capitalism infrastructure created by private tech companies. The NSA’s vast PRISM pro-gram, revealed by the whistleblower Edward Snowden, was “like a top secret tax on Silicon Valley data harvesting practices”.

The most extreme form of techno-au-thoritarianism is being exercised in China’s western region of Xinjiang, home to the Muslim Uighur population, where more than 1m people have been interned. According to Human Rights Watch, Xinjiang authorities have started systematically collecting bio-metric data of everyone between the ages of 12 and 65, including DNA sam-ples, fingerprints, iris scans and blood types. As a result, people live in “a Kafkaesque state of perpetual fear of algorithm-driven, omnipresent, and unaccountable surveillance”.

Other authoritarian states have also embraced the use of facial recognition technology and artificial intelligence to monitor, track and hack their own citi-zens, often using products sold by out-side technology groups, such as Israel’s NSO Group. The company has faced accusations that its technology has helped governments from Mexico to Saudi Arabia to hack dissidents, jour-nalists and human rights campaigners.

Such monitoring of citizens has grown even more intense during the Covid-19 pandemic, even if few leaders have gone so far as President Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines in calling on the police to track down those who break isolation orders to “shoot them dead”.

State monitoring has been made easy by the vast scale and intrusiveness of surveillance capitalism, as described by the Harvard scholar Shoshana Zuboff. Every day, on average 1.47bn people log on to Facebook and 500m tweets are posted on Twitter. Every minute, we collectively conduct 3.87m Google searches, every one revealing an aspect of our lives.

Social media apps are crafted as addiction machines, exploiting inti-macy by design. Expecting these com-panies to incorporate privacy by design makes about as much sense as expect-ing the beef industry to protect the lives of the cattle they slaughter, he writes.

Deibert is always acute and provoca-tive but where he is most interesting is in the final section of the book, where he lays out a recipe of possible remedies. He argues strongly for regulations to limit the extent of data harvesting by private companies. Why should a weather app need to access our social contacts? To this end, he supports the call by Tim Wu, the Columbia Univer-sity professor, to create a “codified anti-surveillance regime”.

Strong antitrust laws need to be updated and enforced to reverse the concentration of corporate power. Data

portability rules should enable consum-ers to take their business elsewhere and stimulate competition. End-to-end encryption is needed to protect con-sumers from state and criminal hack-ers. To combat disinformation, we need more media literacy and fact-checking sites to act as “ideational pest control”. But he does not support the idea of scrapping Section 230 of the 1996 Com-munications Decency Act, that gives internet companies immunity from lia-bility for the content that users post. “Not only are liability protections criti-cal to ensuring free speech online, they reduce barriers for new entrants to the online space, which is essential for com-petition,” he writes.

Progress may be piecemeal and cha-otic but the combination of such meas-ures could enable civil society to turn the tide and reclaim more of the inter-net’s original promise. His core message is that we need to build more restraints into our online world, just as we have established checks and balances in our offline politics. As George Washington is supposed to have explained to Thomas Jefferson, the purpose of the Senate was to cool the passions of the House of Rep-resentatives, just as a saucer is used to cool hot tea.

National and municipal governments, civil society organisations, universities and consumer groups all have vital roles to play in building needed restraints into the system. And we need new kinds of organisations, such as Bellingcat, that stand at the nexus of journalism, activ-ism, computer science, criminal investi-gation and academic research.

“Nobody will ever ‘fix’ the internet, just as nobody will ever fix the world,” Higgins writes. But “the internet has given us immense new powers, and it is time to marshal them.”

John Thornhill is the FT’s innovation editor

We Are Bellingcat: An Intelligence Agency for the Peopleby Eliot HigginsBloomsbury Publishing £20254 pages

Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society by Ronald J Deibert House of Anansi Press C$22.95/£9.99, 419 pages

Saving the internet

Essay | After lurching from naive optimism to despairing dystopianism, is the internet now entering

a ‘third stage’ of civic minded realism? Two books suggest how that might happen. By John Thornhill

the Russian Buk anti-aircraft missile system that shot down Malaysia Air-lines MH17 over eastern Ukraine in 2104, killing 298 passengers and crew.

They have documented chemical weapons attacks in Syria and human rights abuses in Libya, that have been pursued by the International Criminal Court. Bellingcat has become “an intelli-gence agency for the people,” as Higgins puts it.

Some critics have been dismissive of citizen journalism and crowdsourced news. The low point came in 2013 when an online mob of “digilantists” on Red-dit circulated false claims and botched the investigation of the bombing of the Boston marathon.

But Higgins makes clear that while there is no substitute for on-the-ground reporting, Bellingcat can enrich it by identifying, verifying and amplifying new evidence. Its credo is that evidence

exists and falsehood exists and people still care about the difference.

In this sense, Bellingcat acts as a fire-wall against disinformation. It is in con-stant battle with what Higgins calls the “Counterfactual Community”, whose playbook is: dismiss, distort, distract, dismay. By contrast, the Bellingcat method is: click the links and check the conclusions for yourself.

Although Deibert shares Higgins’ appetite for the fight, he is much more mindful of the immense scale of the challenge. In a series of essays, origi-nally comprising the 2020 Massey Lec-tures in Canada, Deibert describes the multiple ways in which companies, gov-ernments, propagandists and criminals manipulate and exploit our online world. We have sleepwalked into a machine-based civilisation of our own making that is full of unforeseen conse-quences and existential risks.

At its core is an incestuous relation-ship between state and corporate power, most notably in the US and China. In his telling, in the aftermath of the 9/11 ter-

History is no longer just written by the winners, but filmed by the losers on their smartphones

Citizen journalists: bystanders use their smartphones to record a house burning in Kalbajar in November, during the military conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan Getty Images



E ver since 1969, people have asked themselves why if humans can land on the moon, can’t they solve press-ing problems here on Earth,

such as poverty, dementia and climate change. Mariana Mazzucato offers an answer: if only governments would apply the mission-driven methods of the Apollo project, they could.

Mission Economy, the new book from the high-profile economist noted for her advocacy of a more active state, con-tains many screenshots of the white-boards beloved of brainstorming meet-ings, each with an ambitious goal at the top: secure the future of mobility, clean oceans, defeat cancer; below is a jumble of boxes and circles linked by multidi-rectional arrows.

We need a “solutions based econ-omy”, driven and co-ordinated by more powerful governments engaged in every stage of the process of innovation.

But Apollo was a success because the objective was specific and limited; the basic science was well understood, even if many subsidiary technological devel-opments were needed to make the mis-sion feasible; and the political commit-ment to the project was sufficiently strong to make budget overruns almost irrelevant. Centrally directed missions have sometimes succeeded when these conditions are in place; Apollo was a response to the Soviet Union’s pioneer-ing launch of a human into space, and the greatest achievement of the USSR

was the mobilisation of resources to defeat Nazi Germany.

Nixon’s war on cancer, explicitly mod-elled on the Apollo programme, was a failure because cancer is not a single ill-ness and too little was then — or now — understood about the science of cell mutation. Mao’s Great Leap Forward, a vain bid to create an industrial society within five years, proved to be one of the greatest economic and humanitarian disasters in human history. At least 30m people died.

Democratic societies have more checks and balances to protect them from visionary leaders driven by missions and enthused by moonshots, but the characteristics which made the Great Leap Forward a catastrophe are nevertheless still evident in attenu-ated version.

With political direction of innovation we regularly encounter grandiosity of ambition and scale; the belief that strength of commitment overcomes practical problems; an absence of hon-

Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalismby Mariana MazzucatoAllen Lane £20272 pages

Mission improbableThe ambition and audacity of the space programmes remain inspirational,

but back on Earth the success of ‘moonshots’ remains mixed, writes John Kay

Books

Lost in the modern worldBorders and displacement are explored in this tale of a life spiralling out of control. By Lucy Scholes

I n the British writer Olivia Sudjic’s 2017 debut novelSympathy, a 23-year-old grad-uate named Alice Hare relo-cates from London (where

she was raised) to New York City (where she was born), hoping to track down information per-taining either to her biological par-ents or her adopted father, who disappeared from her life a decade earlier.

Instead, she becomes obsessed with a woman writer, 10 years older than her, who teaches at Columbia. Like her famous liter-ary namesake, Alice finds herself tumbling down a rabbit hole, though in this case it’s virtual one: labyrinthine social media stalking and Google searches.

The overall effect was fittingly disjointed, akin to the experience of losing oneself online. Although the digital element is missing in Sudjic’s new novel, Asylum Road — social media plays a relatively minor role in the narrative — this is another story about losing one-self in the modern world.

In it, Sudjic explores ideas of immigration and displacement, home and homelessness, and the breaking or bolstering of national and individual borders.

Her canvas is a broad one, but the prism through which this is all refracted is a story about a woman whose life is spiralling out of control that juxtaposes the enticing tension of a thriller with the grim entertainments of dark comedy.

When, about a third of the way through, Anya, the protagonist, accidentally leaves her mobile behind her on a plane, it marks both the moment she starts to lose her grip on events in her present and that which plunges her head-long into the traumas of her past.

“Because I was the kind of per-son who did not lose things,” she explains, “on the rare occasions I did, I too felt lost.”

Anya and her fiancé Luke have flown to Split, from where they drive to Sarajevo, to meet her fam-ily for the first time. Her history is a complicated, splintered one.

She was evacuated from war-torn Sarajevo as a child (though it “felt more like exile than escap-ing”), but her parents remained

Asylum Roadby Olivia SudjicBloomsbury £14.99, 272 pages

ing and the manufacturing and logistics capabilities of the global pharmaceuti-cal industry. The role of government, appropriately, has primarily been in funding basic research and assuring that there will be a rewarding market for successful products.

Mazzucato lists “twenty things we wouldn’t have without space travel”. Athletic shoes, CAT scanners, home insulation, baby formula, artificial limbs. Yes, really. But beyond the ridicu-lous headline, we see the reality of pro-ductive innovation: a decentralised process in which developers draw on and help create the collective intelli-gence that leads to constant incremen-tal improvement in so many fields — including better running shoes.

When historians of technology review the past 50 years, they may conclude that Neil Armstrong exaggerated when he announced “one giant leap for man-kind”. The “new frontier” of the late 1960s turned out to be, not space, but information technology. And the devel-opment of IT was characterised by a striking absence of centralised vision and direction.

No moonshots; but piecemeal innova-tion through disciplined pluralism in which temporary winners were almost

always displaced as they failed to antici-pate the next step of the journey. Do you remember Digital Equipment, Word Perfect, Wang Laboratories, Com-puServe, Netscape, AOL, BlackBerry? Each once a leader, now forgotten. Even Apple suffered more than one near-death experience, Microsoft failed to anticipate mobile computing or the cloud, IBM was swept out of the indus-try it had created.

Mazzucato has correctly emphasised the contribution of state funded basic research to Silicon Valley, but thank goodness the development was in the hands of Steve Jobs, Travis Kalanick and Elon Musk rather than a committee in the department of commerce.

No one has, or could have, the knowl-edge of present or future required to cre-ate or implement successfully the strat-egies that Mazzucato recommends. Take her modern signature example — Germany’s Energiewende, or energy transition to renewables. You will not learn from Mission Economy that this highly political, much publicised and wildly expensive project has brought about significantly smaller reductions in carbon emissions than Britain’s quiet, economically and socially beneficial substitution of gas for coal.

The failure of the Energiewende illus-trates the dangers of moonshots and the mission economy. As talk of a “Green New Deal” becomes more frequent on both sides of the Atlantic, the prospect of more large, costly and ineffectual visionary projects grows.

Politicians readily fall in love with such proposals, and Mazzucato is not shy in reminding us how anxious they are to engage with her in discussing them. But the vision that propelled China’s economic development was not Mao’s Great Leap Forward or Cultural Revolution, but Deng’s “it doesn’t mat-ter whether a cat is black or white if it catches mice”. It is more rewarding and effective to build better mousetraps than to shoot for a mice-free world.

John Kay is an economist, author and fellow of St John’s College, Oxford

The ‘new frontier of the late 1960s turned out to be, not space, but information technology

The Mission Control Center in Houston, Texas, before the aborted Apollo 13 lunar landing, 1970 — Getty Images

est feedback; the suppression of scepti-cal comment and marginalisation of sceptical commentators. All these were seen in Britain’s experience with Con-corde, the Channel Tunnel and the AGR nuclear reactor programme, some of the worst commercial projects in his-tory. More recently, there is the £12bn wasted on the NHS computerisation programme — a project that Mazzucato mentions, though only to blame private contractors for their failure to deliver on the political imperative.

On a smaller scale, Britain has suf-fered in the last year from the delays resulting from Public Health England’s insistence on central control of the coro-navirus testing programme and the pre-dictable fiasco of the attempt to sideline the expertise of Apple and Google in order to develop a uniquely advanced NHS test and trace app. And in Septem-ber there was prime minister Boris Johnson’s “operation moonshot”, designed to control the coronavirus by testing 10m people daily in early 2021.

In contrast to these failures, the rapid development of vaccines is, at least provisionally, a success story. That development is not the product of visionary central direction but is the result of a competitive process with many different teams around the world attempting to be among the first across the finishing line.

Their work has drawn on a combina-tion of existing academic science with the expertise in development and test-

People climbing over the Berlin Wall in 1989 — Jacques Witt/Shutterstock

flee over the wall but almost none for the countless refugees who have drowned in the Mediterranean in recent years, turning the sea into a giant grave?”

This impatience with the west’s dou-ble standards merges with a deep recog-nition of how accidental human fate can be. She was never, she says, a refugee. Yet she also grew up in a different coun-try, “and it was a stroke of good fortune that the Federal Republic simply issued us new West German passports — some-thing refugees today can only dream of.”

Perhaps the most poignant moments, though, are Erpenbeck’s elegiac descriptions of her East Berlin child-hood. The wall may have been an abomination, but the absence of through traffic in its shadow meant chil-dren could roller-skate there to their heart’s content.

I t was the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the sudden disappearance of her homeland that turned Jenny Erpenbeck into a writer.

Her life, she says in Not a Novel, was split into two halves divided by the

collapse of the East German state she grew up in. “Without this experience of transition, from one world to a very other one, I probably never would have started writing,” she says.

It is a blessing that she did. Over the past decade, Erpenbeck has emerged as one of the most original voices in con-temporary European letters. Her last book, Go, Went, Gone, about a group of African refugees in Berlin and how they impinge on the lives of Germans trying to help them, is one of the best novels yet written about the European migra-tion crisis.

Not a Novel is something else: a com-pendium of Erpenbeck’s texts and speeches from the last two decades. As it progresses, her perspective broadens: we start off with autobio-graphical sketches about East Berlin and end with a 2018 speech entitled “Blind Spots” that brings those experi-ences up-to-date, drawing uncomforta-ble parallels between the collapse of East Germany and the European refu-gee influx of 2015-16.

Why, she asks, are the images of East Germans sitting astride the Berlin Wall so positive and those of refugees scaling the barbed-wire fence that separates the Spanish enclave of Melilla from Morocco so negative?

“Why do we still hear laments for the Germans who died attempting to

Not a Novel: Collected Writings and Reflectionsby Jenny Erpenbeck translated by Kurt BealsGranta £14.99208 pages

Beyond the Berlin WallElegiac descriptions of East Berlin mingle with searing criticism in a collection of essays, writes Guy Chazan

“There is nothing better for a child than to grow up at the ends of the earth,” she writes.

It is just one example of the way Erpenbeck plays with the contrast between western tourists’ view of East Berlin — cold, grey, monolithic — and the perception of children who lived there.

For the latter, bombed-out ruins and vacant lots were a perfect play-

ground. An empty space was a place “that adults had either abandoned or forbidden, and so now, at least in my imagination, it belonged entirely to me.”

The building boom in post-reunifica-tion Berlin erased that world forever: and Erpenbeck’s meditations on its loss are particularly moving. She admits to deep ambivalence about the fall of the wall, which “dragged us into this big, wide world so quickly that there was no time to think”.

Suddenly the first 22 years of her life were invalidated, the country she had grown up in condemned as a “rogue regime”. “Freedom wasn’t given freely, it came at a price, and the price was my entire life up to that point,” she writes. Her childhood “belonged in a museum.”

Not a Novel is not just autobiographi-cal. There are fascinating reflections on German literature — Grimms’ Fairy Tales, Hans Fallada, Thomas Mann and Walter Kempowski’s war novel All for Nothing — as well as exquisite descrip-tions of the writing process.

Why does a person want to write? she asks at one point. It’s because “we find it hard to make ourselves understood.” “In fact,” she goes on, “as strange as it sounds, the most important reason for writing is probably that we are at a loss for words.”

Guy Chazan is the FT’s Berlin bureau chief

behind, leaving her to grow up in the care of an aunt in Glasgow.

Like Sympathy before it, Asylum Road is also a story about a search for origins. Yet rather than offer-ing her comfort or a sense of belonging, Anya’s return to her family and the city of her birth is fraught with bewilderment.

A delicious sense of unfurling chaos pervades this section of the book; caught between her family and her boyfriend, and acting as an interpreter for all, Anya begins to feel “quite mad”.

Adding to this is the fact that her mother’s Alzheimer’s has her believing the city is still under siege, and the others choose to collude in her confusion rather than risk further distress.

Asylum Road is pervaded by a genuinely unnerving sense of anxiety, dread and unease, and there’s something admirable in the stubborn way Sudjic refuses to cut her readers any slack.

Her writing is raw and frag-mented, mimicking Anya’s own disintegrating sense of self, not that this necessarily makes her character any easier to under-stand. Despite the supposed inti-macy of the first-person narration, Anya’s disquiet and apprehension fracture outward, running like fault lines through the prose. The results — at least in the first section of the book — can be disorientating.

Here, Anya and Luke journey to a hotel in the South of France (which is where Luke proposes), and thereafter take a trip to Corn-wall to visit his Brexiter parents. His mother is a particularly sharp thorn in Anya’s side, and bril-liantly drawn by Sudjic, the kind of woman who doesn’t knock before entering her son and his partner’s bedroom, “A fan of borders but not boundaries,” as Anya observes.

But, by the time she and Luke arrived in Split, I was gripped; delighted by the taut pressures of the nightmarish and often awk-wardly funny family get-together.

The book’s third and final sec-tion reaches a gloriously near-un-hinged intensity, as the outward structures of Anya’s life collapse in tandem with what’s clearly some kind of mental breakdown.

Memories of the past are presented in present tense, and a sojourn at a college reunion is sud-denly narrated in the third person. It’s a little hectic, but as Sudjic so expertly illustrates, sometimes there’s not a lot of difference between taking and losing control.

Anya was evacuated from war-torn Sarajevo as a child but her parents remained behind



Books

O n August 30 1797, at 11.20pm, the radical phi-losopher and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft gave birth to her second child,

Mary, the future author of Frankenstein. The delivery of the baby went smoothly, but the placenta was adhered to the womb and had to be removed manually. Pre-anaesthesia, this was an agonisingly painful procedure. Pre-antibiotics, it was also an extremely dangerous one.

Ten traumatic days later, at the age of just 38, Wollstonecraft died, her inter-nal organs ravaged by post-partum sep-sis. “There does not exist her equal in the world,” wrote her devastated hus-band, the writer William Godwin.

Godwin’s choice of words was apt. For Wollstonecraft, how women and men should and could exist in the world as equals was the critical question. What makes her death from childbirth, that inescapable marker of gender differ-ence, all the more tragic is that she did not merely advocate equality; to the best of her ability, and often at great per-sonal cost, she attempted to live it.

She supported herself financially as a professional author, literary critic, translator and editor. She twice became pregnant out of wedlock, lived with a man she was not married to, and was married to a man she did not live with. All of these decisions were in line with her ideas about gender relations, but no easier for that.

Today, Wollstonecraft is primarily famous for her proto-feminist mani-festo, “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman”, published in 1792. In Woll-stonecraft: Philosophy, Passion, and Poli-tics, Cambridge historian Sylvana Tomaselli argues this has unjustly eclipsed her other work and impover-ishes our perception of her true signifi-cance as a moral and social philosopher.

Tomaselli instead situates “A Vindica-tion” is its wider context, tracking the development of Wollstonecraft’s think-ing before and after 1792 by drawing on Wollstonecraft’s extensive letters, scores of reviews for Joseph John-son’s Analytical Review and other jour-nals, lesser known social and political publications, travel writing, and her unfinished novel.

Despite Wollstonecraft’s unconven-tionality, Tomaselli stresses the high store she placed on the faculty of reason and the exercise of fortitude and self-control. Her Christian faith, a subject somewhat sidelined by other biogra-phers (including the atheist Godwin, whose candid memoir of Wollstonecraft inadvertently destroyed her reputation for decades) is reappraised by Tomaselli as intrinsic to her belief in the perfecti-bility of human society.

Rousseau and Burke were powerful influences on Wollstonecraft, whose ideas about society and gender were

Wollstonecraft: Philosophy, Passion, and Politicsby Sylvana TomaselliPrinceton University Press £22, 216 pages

Mary Wollstonecraft’s spirit

and moral seriousness shine

in a forensic new biography,

writes Rebecca Abrams

Royal twist on wartime intrigue

W artime neutrality and its many shades of grey have long been fertile ground for

literary inspiration. Thriller writ-ers including Robert Wilson and Mara Timon have woven fine tales of intrigue set in 1940s Lis-bon, so it’s gratifying to have Rory Clements turn the spotlight on Stockholm in A Prince and A Spy (Zaffre, £12.99) — and bring a royal twist into his captivating historical thriller.

Switzerland’s reputation as an oasis of neutrality was destroyed by the revelations of its system-atic money-laundering for the Third Reich, but Sweden has largely — and unjustly — escaped opprobrium. Stockholm played a profitable double game, supply-ing both the Allies and the Nazis with vital war materiel such as iron ore and ball bearings, while Swedish banks also sold Berlin hard currency. Stockholm was an ideal meeting point for covert contacts. This backdrop provides Clements with rich material.

A Prince and A Spy turns on a real-life event: the death of Prince George, the Duke of Kent, brother of King George VI, in a plane crash in the Scottish Highlands in August 1942, en route from Scot-land to Reykjavik. Even today conspiracy theories swirl around the crash, pointing to the web of prewar connections between the British royal family and the Nazi leadership.

In Clements’ book the Duke meets a Nazi envoy in Stockholm before the aeroplane crash. Tom Wilde, an academic turned spy, is sent to Scotland in the aftermath of the crash to find out the truth about the Duke’s death but dark forces are determined to keep the royal links to Berlin from being exposed.

Meanwhile, Heinrich Müller, the Gestapo chief, is in Stock-holm, determined to find the trai-tor who wants to reveal the reality of the extermination of the Jews. An engaging protagonist and a gripping, intelligent storyline confirm Clements’ reputation as a master of the wartime spy thriller. (For readers interested in this episode, The Last Queen, by Clive Irving, a fascinating new non-fiction work, (Biteback £20) exposes some of the links between the Duke of Kent, the

Windsors, and Berlin — and the postwar cover-up.)

In The Night Agent (Head of Zeus, £18.99) by Matthew Quirk, Peter Sutherland is soon on the run from his own side — and his enemies have no hesitation about trying to kill him. Sutherland is an FBI agent, desperate to prove his loyalty after his father’s apparent treachery. His job is to sit in a small room in the White House waiting in case someone calls the emergency line. When the call does come Sutherland does what he thinks is the right thing. But instead he is rapidly caught up in a conspiracy that reaches to the heart of the US government. Bod-ies start to pile up and Quirk skil-fully layers the menace, so that the blandest location in Washing-ton DC — a car park or petrol sta-tion — is suddenly heavy with danger. As last week’s invasion of the Capitol showed, the US gov-ernment’s authority is more frag-ile than we knew.

Quirk, a former reporter at The Atlantic magazine, spent years investigating the dark side of the American military-industrial complex and his inside knowl-edge is expertly deployed. There are echoes here of Chris Hauty’s Deep State — a Russian mole, a threat to the Baltics, high level treachery. The slowly blos-soming love affair between Suth-erland and Rose Larkin, his eve-rywoman ally, as they go on the run is engagingly drawn. Even an on-the-hoof surveillance tutorial

can morph into a kind of first date, especially when being stalked by a hit team from Rus-sian intelligence. A plot that twists like a cobra in a sack, a whip-crack pace and engaging characters make The Night Agent a very classy thriller.

Like Quirk, Simon Berthon, author of A Time To Lie (HQ £12.99), is also a former investi-gative journalist. Berthon’s book is slower paced — sometimes too slow — but he is a deft guide to the darker recesses of a fictional Brit-ish state. When the bones of a young woman’s hand are found on a building site in London, Prime Minister Robin Sandford is forced to confront his past. The hand, according to Jed Fowkes, Sandford’s former flatmate, now an adviser to the Treasury, belongs to a young woman that Sandford had murdered, decades ago. But did he?

Sandford enlists Joe Quine, a disgraced former journalist, to try and find out. Quine’s investiga-tions draw him deeper into dan-ger, as Sandford tries desperately to keep his government together and hold on to power. The corri-dors of Whitehall and the alcoves of 10 Downing Street may be more elegant than their White House equivalents, but they can be no less menacing as this well-crafted, informed thriller shows.

Adam LeBor is the author of ‘Kossuth Square’, a Budapest noir crime thriller

A strange sisterhood A self-described ‘office slut’ is the heroine in this filthy and funny novel, writes Cherish Rufus

W ith her frank, filthy and darkly funny debut novel Luster, Raven Leilani

gives us the complex and una-shamedly flawed black heroine that we don’t see often enough in literature. Twenty-three year old Edie is working for a publishing company but barely making ends meet and living in a roach-in-fested apartment in Brooklyn. Every part of her life is messy — her work life especially so.

A self-described “office slut”, Edie has slept with 15 of her co-workers. As she candidly recounts her exploits, it becomes clear she has insatiable appetites; she speaks of “hours when I am desperate, when I am ravenous, when I know how a star becomes a void”. Once a keen painter, she is no longer able to find expression through her artwork, and when the novel begins she hasn’t picked up a paintbrush in two years.

Edie’s life is complicated fur-ther when she begins dating a white man named Eric, who is twice her age and in an open mar-riage. Their relationship is gov-erned in part by a series of rules that Eric’s wife Rebecca has laid

out but it’s Edie’s interactions with Rebecca and the married couple’s adopted black daughter Akila that prove most engrossing.

When Edie loses her job and she finds herself on the verge of homelessness, Rebecca offers up the guest room in their home in the New Jersey suburbs while Eric is away. Her generosity comes at a price though.

As Edie puts it, she is expected to perform “the role of the Trusty Black Spirit Guide”: “I find it very rich, to have been invited here partly on the absurd pre-sumption that I would know what to do with Akila simply because we are both black.”

The three female characters orbit each other and eventually form a strange sisterhood of sorts. This odd and uneasy peace is dis-turbed by Eric when he returns from a business trip to find that Edie is no longer just somewhere inside of their marriage but living in their family home.

After a brief pause, Edie and Eric’s affair resumes. But it doesn’t stop Edie from grudgingly

taking the lonely but fierce Akila under her wing, “because she is thirteen, and I remember how it felt from the inside”.

From trips to the African braid-ing salon in the city and advice on protective hairstyles to hours spent playing video games, Lei-lani adroitly captures their reluc-tant then budding friendship with her exquisitely detailed prose.

Edie’s relationships with Eric and Rebecca also mutate. As Eric goes from being the object of her obsessive affections to a “feeble man”, she becomes fascinated by Rebecca, who encourages her to start painting again, despite their adversarial relationship.

When Edie finally leaves their home and suburbia, she essen-tially finds herself back where she started, in Brooklyn, about to start a job she is not invested in. As far as coming-of-age tales go, there is no grand metamorphosis, but Leilani builds Edie’s circui-tous journey into an odyssey in itself, one that serves as a power-ful meditation on race, sex, class and intergenerational trauma.

It echoes the manner Edie looks at her own art: “A way is always made to document how we man-age to survive, or in some cases, how we don’t. So I’ve tried to reproduce an inscrutable thing. I’ve made my own hunger into a practice, made everyone who passes through my life subject to a close and inappropriate reading that occasionally finds its way, often insufficiently, into paint.”

Lusterby Raven LeilaniPicador £14.99 240 pages

GENRE ROUND-UP

THRILLERS

By Adam LeBor

Misfits and murder An Edinburgh tenement is the setting for dark, fantastically funny tales of demons and death. By Isabel Berwick

L uckenbooth, the third novel from the bracingly good Scot-tish writer Jenni Fagan, defies any sort of neat description. Let’s just say that it was, for

this reader, no less powerful in its effect than the 1994 film Shallow Grave — Danny Boyle’s debut, and a defining movie for Generation X. In that now-vintage piece, Boyle showed us that Edinburgh’s imposing tenement build-ings were perfect settings for tales about mayhem and murder.

There’s obviously also a rich literary tradition associated with the less-than-Muriel-Sparky areas of the Scottish cap-ital (Ian Rankin, Irvine Welsh) but Fagan’s new work is a clever fiction scaf-folded on to just one such place: the ten-ement at 10 Luckenbooth Close, close to St Giles’ Cathedral but hidden down “a shady narrow street”.

Terrible and extraordinary things happen here over the course of the 20th century. The author has constructed the novel in three parts, each containing three stories in three flats, rising up floor by floor through 10 Luckenbooth Close to the top, and ninth floor, where we encounter Dot, a young woman squatting in the now-condemned build-ing in 1999. By then, this once fine place “does not stand up like a time-lord that houses the souls of humans. It is curving over . . . The building’s batteries are almost fully drained.”

This demise is set in motion early in the book (and early in the century) and is linked to the fate of the story’s presid-ing spirit, 21 year-old Jessie MacRae. It’s not a spoiler to say Jessie is the devil’s daughter — it’s almost the first thing we learn about her.

Jessie has killed her father before set-ting out for Edinburgh from their island home, rowing across in a coffin he had built for her.

The opening of the book is a bleak poem in itself. “My father’s corpse stares out across the North Atlantic swells. Grey eyes. Eyelashes adorned with beads of rain. Tiny orbs to reflect our entire world.”

Fagan switches effortlessly between dreamy prose like this and a more dynamic style. Jessie’s horns — previ-ously nubs — have grown since her father’s death.

“I’d say they are almost three inches long on either side now. It is harder to hide them . . . If I’d had horns this sharp whilst he was alive, I’d have staked him at least ten times. My blood can’t carry his sins any more.”

Jessie comes to 10 Luckenbooth Close to meet Udnam, Edinburgh bigwig and owner of the building, and a man to whom she has been sold by her late father. Jessie is to carry his baby.

Udnam hasn’t reckoned with a half-supernatural being — she gestates her daughter in three days — and when Jessie meets Elise, Udnam’s young fian-cée, they fall for each other immedi-ately. That story ends in extreme vio-lence — and a curse.

There is much more violence to come inside the tenement in later decades, including a memorable 1970s gangland encounter between a local crime family and members of a triad. If you are a squeamish reader (I am) the book can be hard to read at times.

Fagan is unflinching in her depictions of derangement and death but Lucken-booth is compelling and often darkly funny. And Jessie, Elise and their daughter are never quiet or far from the action.

Fagan was named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 2013 on the strength of her debut, The Panopticon, which focused on life inside a very dif-ferent structure, a surveillance-driven tower that houses children in care who have been labelled disruptive.

Fagan herself grew up in the care system; she came to writing rela-tively late and her storytelling has an urgency and — to use an overused but apt word — authenticity.

That is not to say that the work is “gritty” or “down-to-earth”: there is a fantastical bent to this writing, and the authenticity is in the feelings, in the way the characters’ stories are propelled for-ward and told with respect. The strong sense of person and place includes the wider city, a constant and untamed liv-ing presence:

“Dot does not question why summer has commitment issues. An Edinburgh summer is usually a skittery, lying, drunk, untrustworthy foe — her legs are always spread — elsewhere. She is elu-sive and unreliable, a total fucking piss-head. The next day (for months) she pretends she’s still far too poorly to make an appearance.”

Fagan corrals demons, spies and famous writers (William Burroughs among others), mediums, misfits and outcasts. Ten Luckenbooth Close both contains them and liberates them, as they live and die and maybe even lurk forever, somewhere in the mysteri-ous world beneath Edinburgh’s beauti-ful streets.

Isabel Berwick is the FT’s work andcareers editor

Terrible and extraordinary things happen at 10 Luckenbooth Close during the 20th century

Luckenboothby Jenni FaganWilliam Heinemann £16.99, 352 pages

forged in direct and outraged opposition to theirs. She vehemently rejected Rousseau’s view that women’s primary purpose was to make themselves delightful to men, and was scathing about Burke’s defence of the status quo, social hierarchy and tradition.

Wollstonecraft in turn had a profound influence on others, not only future feminists, but the first generation of the Romantics who admired her accounts of her travels in Scandinavia as ardently as her defence of the French revolution.

Ironically for a champion of women’s rights, Wollstonecraft held a low opin-ion of actual women, the upper classes especially. She regarded contemporary society as corrupt and degenerate (for many reasons, including gross dispari-ties in education, that still apply) and held both men and women responsible for this state of affairs.

The ideal of equality was, neverthe-less, deeply embedded in Woll-stonecraft’s philosophy, whether she was writing about the French revolu-tion, education, slavery, the rights of man, or the social oppression of women. Her ideas about gender emerge from Tomaselli’s analysis as part and parcel of her philosophical vision for human civi-lisation as a whole.

As an intellectual biography, Toma-selli’s account is both forensic and fasci-nating. What gets left out, regrettably, is the personal. There are only the briefest sketches of Wollstonecraft’s actual life during the years she was producing these letters, reviews and books, and very little on how her thinking was affected by her experiences. For this,

you will have to turn to other accounts, such as Janet Todd’s enduringly excel-lent biography, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life (2000).

The glaring biographical gaps are all the more frustrating given that Toma-selli herself stresses that Wollstonecraft could not have done more to embody her philosophy, or thought more deeply about how individual’s actions shape society, and vice versa. This after all is the woman who wrote of her infant daughter Fanny: “I dread to unfold her mind, lest it should render her unfit for the world she is to inhabit.”

The antithesis of the bloodless blue-stocking, Wollstonecraft wrote power-fully about the interplay of reason and passion, and uncoyly about sexual inti-macy and sensual pleasure.

She understood all too well that freedom is not the same as licence, and that spirit and body, imagination and intellect, are obliged to coexist. A radi-cal, for sure, but as Tomaselli makes clear, one who highly valued modesty, dignity and self-governance.

Even without much biographical con-text for her writing, what shines through Tomaselli’s account is Woll-stonecraft’s moral and intellectual seri-ousness, her vitality and fortitude, and her extraordinary resilience. As for the monstrous sculpture by Maggi Ham-bling, erected in London in November 2020, Tomaselli’s book leaves me still more convinced that Wollstonecraft would have hated it.

Rebecca Abrams is the author of ‘Touching Distance’ (Picador)

Another vindicationPortrait of Mary Wollstonecraft (c1790-1) by John Opie — Tate/Tate Images



‘Life doesn’t stop when terrible things happen’

TV | Writer Russell T Davies and the

cast of his new series ‘It’s a Sin’ discuss

why their Aids-era drama is joyful as

well as poignant. By Gabriel Tate

H IV/Aids has been the sub-ject of numerous great plays and films, from the explosive theatre of Larry Kramer and Tony Kushner

and experimental cinema of Derek Jar-man and Gus van Sant to the crowd-pleasing warmth and activism of Pride and 120 BPM. British television has often lagged behind, its depictions gen-erally restricted to adaptations, plot devices on serials or more rounded por-trayals in soap opera (notably with Mark Fowler’s death in EastEnders).

The US has been more ready to explore the subject in-depth, with Ryan Murphy’s Pose the most recent example, but such portrayals have rarely featured on the main TV networks.

While plays and films can sneak out independently, television has, until recently, required the benediction of a traditional broadcaster whose conserv-atism is as much economic as cultural. Why would viewers tune in, week after week, for a story of such unremitting tragedy? Where is the light and shade?

“It’s a tricky sell,” admits Russell T Davies, whose five-part Channel 4 drama It’s a Sin (named after Pet Shop Boys' defiant 1987 chart-topper) offers irrefutable and unexpectedly joyful answers to those questions. “I wrote it to be exhilarating — it can’t just be sad moments, because that wouldn’t be true. Life doesn’t stop when terrible things happen. To miss those boys, you need to see how vital they were.”

Those “boys” are three teenagers who find themselves and each other under

the shadow of Aids in 1980s London. Closeted, effervescent Ritchie (Olly Alexander) yearns to escape the tedium of the Isle of Wight; brittle, flamboyant Roscoe (Omari Douglas) is on the run, outed by his evangelical Nigerian par-ents; sensible, sheltered Welsh valleys boy Colin (Callum Scott Howells) is an apprentice at a Savile Row tailors. Together with their confidante Jill (Lydia West), they transform their tum-bledown bedsit into “The Pink Palace”.

“A lot of gay dramas had focused on people in their thirties or forties,” says Davies, who turned 18 in 1981. “I wanted to talk about the young people who died and were forgotten more quickly, before they could make a mark. It sat on vari-ous desks at various channels a while.”

Davies had to resolve the curious par-adox that his story might be too gloomy, but also not gloomy enough. “I was told it would be commissioned if it started in the middle of the crisis then flashed back: starting when they’re young and having fun, with Aids just a rumour on the horizon, could be seen as not very dramatic. I said no, and I’m glad I stuck to my guns.”

Davies built his career on ground-breaking television. In 1994 he intro-duced an HIV-positive teenager into teatime serial Children’s Ward and, after overseeing Doctor Who’s astonishing regeneration, has delivered on his promise to make only “gay scripts”. Fol-lowing Banana/Cucumber and A Very English Scandal, among others, It’s a Sin is the apotheosis of a journey Davies began, at least publicly, with Queer as

Clockwise from main: Olly Alexander as Ritchie in Channel 4’s new drama ‘It’s A Sin’; Alexander and Lydia West, who plays Jill; writer Russell T DaviesBen Blackall

ries can become fixed and untruths pass into history, so it feels like time to say: this is what really happened.”

The series also reflects a degree of atonement on the part of its creator.“I went on marches but wasn’t on the frontline — I got my head down and worked. But then I felt guilty about it: this slow murder was hard to look at.I still remember the normal, everyday fear that a bump or mark was a sar-coma. I wasn’t one of the great activists, but I’m glad I took the long route because I’ve written something from a different perspective.”

That perspective of decades has ensured It’s a Sin isn’t swamped by anger or grief, making its lessons all the more salient now that HIV/Aids is no longer a death sentence.

“None of it is played with foreboding,” agrees Harris. “I hope younger genera-tions will appreciate what has happened and still needs to happen. The conversa-tion is still alive, and in many ways more important than ever, because we’re at a tipping point with the virus. People care more about their house burning down when they smell smoke.”

“The older actors flocked to the project,” says Davies. “Every one of them rattled off a list of friends [who had died]. Not a day would pass on set without remembering someone, reviv-ing their memory.”

Oberman remembers someone whose bedclothes were burnt in the gar-den of a friend’s parents after a visit. Hawes and Harris recall a teacher and friend, respectively, whose deaths from Aids were never given a name. “Some-one isn’t at work, things aren’t so good, they pass away,” remembers Harris.“It was all very quiet.”

Fry’s memories come in a torrent: like the young men of It’s a Sin, he moved to London in 1981, although his experi-ences were very different. “I never liked The Scene, the gay pubs and bars and clubs,” he says. “I thought people would take one look at me and think: no thanks. By the late ’80s, I was aware that had probably saved my life. I found myself sitting on the beds of dying friends, going to funerals with dis-traught parents . . . I read the script through walls of tears. I saw the faces of all these dead friends, the parents, the whole broken promise of it.”

Part commemoration, part celebra-tion, It’s a Sin is also inadvertently timely. The treatment of those infected unavoidably recalls the early months of Covid, complete with PPE, isolation wards, frantic disinfection and conspir-acy theories over its origins, albeit driven in those days by an absence rather than a surfeit of information. More positively, advances in virology and immunology made in HIV/Aids research unquestionably contributed to the rapid production of Covid vaccines.

By its very existence, It’s a Sin embod-ies the enormous strides in equality and representation made since the 1980s, but Davies remains cautious. “Our rights are paper thin and it’s insane to think progress is permanent. You have to keep fighting, which is what I’ve done in my dramas — they’re all about the right to be gay.”

‘It’s A Sin’ is on Channel 4 on January 22 and available as a boxset on All 4

‘I wrote it to be exhilarating — it can’t just be sad moments, because that wouldn’t be true’

E very year almost 1,000 festi-vals take place in Britain. Most are music festivals. They range from gargantuan Glastonbury with its 200,000

attendees to numerous grassroots events: vegan music festivals onfarms, folk festivals in pubs, punk festi-vals in Blackpool, micro-festivals in back gardens, classical festivals on country estates. All life is there. Or was, before coronavirus.

After last year’s wipeout, the pros-pects for 2021 hang in the balance. There are hopes for a return to action later in the year.

But time is running out. According to evidence given to a parliamentary select committee this month, big festivals such as Glastonbury must know this month if they can go ahead or there won’t be time to organise. Smallerones could possibly wait until Marchor April.

Another year of closures threatens ruin. Glastonbury’s founder Michael Eavis claimed after last summer’s can-cellation that “it will be curtains” if the same happens in 2021. Rumours that

this year’s event has already been can-celled — the source was Mel B of the Spice Girls, speaking in a radio inter-view about her group’s supposed plans to appear at the festival — have been denied by Glastonbury organiser Emily Eavis. There was “no news at this end”, she insisted this month.

Various requests for government sup-port were made by the festival repre-sentatives who appeared before the cross-party MPs of the culture select committee. Their biggest ask was two-fold — for an official date to be set after which festivals would be allowed to take place and for a government-backed insurance scheme if they subsequently have to be cancelled.

Similar backstops exist in othercountries. Last month, the Germangovernment announced a €2.5bn can-cellation fund for events in the second half of 2021.

The purpose is to indemnify organis-ers against upfront costs such as book-ing staff and stage crews and paying deposits to performers.

“It is a very challenging road in front of us but not impossible,” a festival rep-

resentative, Anna Wade, told the select committee. She feared that her festival, Boomtown in Hampshire, would not survive a second cancelled summer.

The plight of festivals such as Boom-town is felt throughout the arts. Last year, the government created a £1.57bn fund to protect the culture and heritage sectors from the pandemic. It was an important intervention, more generous than expected. But the call for an insur-ance scheme is a different proposition. Will it be successful?

“I’ve been racking my brains to think of a precedent with pop festivals,” says Professor Martin Cloonan, director of the Turku Institute for Advanced Stud-ies in Finland and author of Popular Music and the State in the UK.

“The one that jumps out at me from history is the Windsor Free Festival. That’s a very rare example of central state support for pop or rock festivals.”

The Windsor Free Festival was among the numerous illegal events held in the early 1970s. Sited in Windsor Great

Park, provocatively near the royal resi-dence of Windsor Castle, it was shut down violently by police in 1974. Amid calls for an inquiry into the police response, the then Labour government provided funds for the festival to take place the following year at a new loca-tion. It did so, but folded afterwards.

“The Economist at the time got furi-ous and said that pop is a free market form and must be left to the market,” Cloonan says.

The viewpoint was shared on the other side of the divide. “There is a strand of thinking in the music indus-tries in general which is uber-capitalist and ‘leave me alone’. You can see that in 1960s ideology as well: government is bad. But although the central state has not been much involved in festivals, the local state has.”

Since the 1980s, local authorities in cities and shires alike have played an active role in supporting festivals.Help comes in the form of grants, licens-ing decisions, use of venues and market-ing. The motive has sometimes been political, as with the large anti-unemployment free festivals organised

by the Greater London Council in 1984 and 1985.

More typically it is linked to raising money and attracting visitors. “Festi-vals have become a tourism strategy,” Cloonan says.

Competition between different regions of Britain was among the dynamics fuelling a boom in festivals in the 2000s, with numbers doubling between 2005 and 2011. Despite the expansion, the market is not saturated. In 2019, festival attendance in Britain went up from 4.9m to 5.2m.

There will be no problem with demand when it is judged safe to resume festivals: in fact, the opposite. The ques-tion is, what will be left of the industry to meet it?

Local government’s role in supporting music festivals now falls, far more force-fully and at greater cost, to central gov-ernment. It faces an unaccustomed dilemma. The gamble of underwriting a 2021 festival season that might be writ-ten off must be set against the gamble of not doing so, and the risk of decimating a thriving cultural sector. The deadline for a decision is fast approaching.

Folk at the tail-end of the ’90s. Amid its taboo-busting gay sex and celebration of Manchester’s queer community, it controversially omitted any mention of HIV/Aids — a decision Davies stands by, having refused to let the lives of gay men be defined by the virus.

The impact of Queer as Folk was felt both in the UK and across the Atlantic. As a result, Neil Patrick Harris jumped at playing a supporting role in It’s A Sin as Colin’s mentor, and was joined by fel-low small-screen veterans Stephen Fry (as a closeted, hypocritical Conserva-tive MP), Tracy-Ann Oberman (Ritchie’s supportive acting agent) and Keeley Hawes (Ritchie’s emotionally repressed mother). It also enticed Alex-ander away from pop stardom with his

band Years & Years, resuming an acting career that had been on hold five years.

“When I was 14, we’d sneak into my friend Caz’s bedroom and watch the epi-sodes in secret,” says Alexander. “These bums, men kissing each other . . . it was very powerful for me, although I didn’t understand why I felt that way at the time. Russell’s work has helped shape my identity as a gay person.”

It has been a long time coming for Davies, who based every story on either first- or second-hand experience. “We shouldn’t spend all our lives looking backwards,” he says. “But every so often you have to stop and make some sort of memorial. So many people died of Aids and their parents said it was cancer. It’s still said to this day. Those false memo-

Second summer of doubt could spell the end for festivalsMusic | The often anti-authoritarian scene is now looking for government support to limit the damage to a once-thriving cultural sector, writes Ludovic Hunter-Tilney

DJ Craig Harrison performs at the UK’s first purpose-built socially distanced music festival, Gisburne Park Pop-Up, last year Getty Images



Arts

T wenty-first-century movies have loved capitalism for the chaos. Think of the bed-lam of The Wolf of Wall Street or The Big Short and its joy-

ride into the 2008 crisis. But these tales of a system gone wild took place mostly in boardrooms and high-rise towers. To view things on the ground you need Ramin Bahrani, the Iranian-American filmmaker whose movies could be filed beside the hardback critiques of Tho-mas Piketty. The grind at its most pre-carious has been his muse for years — the market as experienced not by fund managers but street coffee vendors, taxi drivers and construction workers. Cogs in the machine.

Now Bahrani is adding to their number Balram Halwai, loyal chauffeur turned cut-throat tycoon. Balram is the protagonist of The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga’s sardonic novel of master and servant, winner of the 2008 Booker Prize, and adapted into the director’s next film. Epic and starry — the cast includes celebrated Indian actors Priya-nka Chopra Jonas and Rajkummar Rao — it is the biggest film of a career that has earned Bahrani widespread respect, if not quite the name he deserves. As is now the norm, he will mark its release at home, inside his Brooklyn apartment. On Zoom he is lean and genial.

Post-production was under way last March when Covid hit New York. All but overnight, Bahrani’s editors scattered for flights home. “It got a little lonely,” he admits. At the same time, his movie suddenly felt acutely of the moment. “With Covid, the inequality was right there. Visible. Inescapable. And Balram is inequality personified. He’s the Seam-less delivery person bringing your meal, your Uber driver, the healthcare worker New York clapped for who couldn’t afford healthcare themselves.”

There is anger in his voice. In the film as well. But anger is not the whole story. “Will you let people know the movie is fun?” Bahrani asks. That much is simple. It is. While he admires Ken Loach, The White Tiger also has the zip and swagger of Scorsese. Goodfellas was an inspira-tion. “The rage was easy to tap in to,” he says. “But I also wanted to capture how funny Aravind’s book is. The sarcasm and satire and how playful it can be.”

The overlap between his world view and the novel makes it feel like Bahrani was fated to adapt it. Therein hangs a

Film | Ramin Bahrani talks

about bringing Booker Prize

winner ‘The White Tiger’ to

ferocious life. By Danny Leigh

for a landlord’s family in a brutal, glit-tering Delhi. The result was harder and smarter than the Vikas Swarup novel Q&A it was often contrasted with, then newly adapted by Danny Boyle as Slum-dog Millionaire. Similar comparisons have greeted Bahrani’s film. One critic has called it the “anti-Slumdog”. Bahrani smiles. Boyle is a master stylist, he says. “Thematically, it just doesn’t suit me because I don’t enjoy fairy tales. The poor kid from the village never really wins a million dollars.”

Yet Slumdog did help begin a transfor-mation. If Adiga caught the moment in which India and China first suggested a sunset for western dominance, the film industry in 2021 may have finally caught up. Bahrani’s new movie is funded by Netflix, working with Indian co-producers. The White Tiger is a movie made for America only inasmuch as it was also made for India — and every-where else. “Audiences are global,” Bah-rani says. “And The White Tiger wasn’t cheap. There is no way a studio would have made it when the book came out. Now Netflix will hire an Iranian-American director to make a film of this scale about poor, brown-skinned peo-ple. Trust me, that is new.”

After Columbia, Bahrani travelled to Iran. He spent three years in the deep south of the country where his father had grown up. “That period was founda-tional. Coming back to the US, I felt like I had a mission.” Now he was set not just on making films, but films about capi-talism. Man Push Cart, Chop Shop and Goodbye Solo were made for $1.4m in total. “They were written that way. I didn’t want to have to wait for someone to open the door for me,” Bahrani says.

The rise of the gig economy only sharpened his focus. So, too, revolutions in tech. “Our phones becoming a mobile sweatshop, a directory of servants,” Bahrani says. In 2014 came 99 Homes, a scalding account of a Florida real estate scam, starring Andrew Garfield. The state was riddled with foreclosures. Back in New York, Bahrani told friends that Donald Trump was about to win the presidency. “Everyone in Brooklyn called me an idiot. But it was obvious.”

The White Tiger demanded he venture still further from Brooklyn. He arrived

in India ahead of the shoot, his first visit to the country taken under Adiga’s guid-ance, travelling for research on foot or by bus. In Delhi, he spoke with inden-tured drivers in their grimy living quar-ters under gleaming apartment blocks. Did they share Balram’s scathing take on socio-economics? Bahrani twinkles slightly: “Absolutely.”

Aside from his friendship with Adiga, Bahrani felt another connection with India. “Balram’s childhood village reminds me so much of the places my dad came from. There were cultural nuances, of course, but endless similari-ties. No electricity. Attitudes to money. To family.” On screen, alongside Chopra and Rao, the prize role of Balram went to unknown Adarsh Gourav. “A lot of Indian and diaspora actors with famous names wanted to play Balram, but I

wanted someone who wasn’t a star or from a wealthy background. And Adarsh was great.”

Bahrani demurs when I ask about India’s future. The country is too com-plex, he says, for a non-Indian to com-ment. Adiga says his novel was a prod-uct of the bold “new India” as much as a critique of it. Now, the economy is creaking. “Even more troublingly,” Adiga writes, “freedom of expression is under threat. For me there is now some-thing elegiac in The White Tiger.”

In New York, Bahrani considers the strangeness of the moment — his career never better, the world in flames. He is cautious about the Biden presidency. “Last time, the Democrats did next to nothing for working-class America.” Covid will, he says, only make more Bal-rams. “The gig economy is going to drag in a whole new set of people. And I can’t say I’m an optimist. I’ve never been that person. But we’re going to need opti-mism to get through what’s coming.”

On Netflix from January 22

‘Balram is inequality personified. He’s your delivery person, Uber driver, healthcare worker’

L ong before the hair metal years, David Coverdale of Whitesnake was a soul boy. When he joined Deep Purple in 1973, his favourite

album was not Led Zeppelin IV but Donny Hathaway Live. And when his new band, Whitesnake, recorded their first EP in spring 1978, alongside the three originals was a cover of a soul song from four years before, recorded by Bobby “Blue” Bland on his album Dreamer.

“Ain’t No Love in the Heart of the City” had been written by Michael Price and Dan Walsh, a pair of journeymen songwriters who could turn their hands to almost anything (they had also written The Grass Roots’ 1970 hit “Temptation Eyes”). It was given to Bland as part of an attempt to reinvent him in the first half of the 1970s, from a bluesman to a contemporary adult soul singer. The version that opened Dreamer was a glorious few minutes: Bland’s voice slightly sandpapered, perfectly controlled, mournful and defiant.

The song itself had the lilting rhythm guitar of disco, but taken at heartbroken pace — a style later commemorated on the Too Slow to Disco compilation series. It had a sombre, claustrophobic chorus — in which the lack of love in the heart of both city and town is bemoaned — blooming into ecstatic verses, carpets of strings underfoot, contrasting with Bland’s misery. It reached number 91 on the Billboard singles chart and number nine on the R&B chart.

Whitesnake’s version was a little less disco, but not too much. What it added was a simple lead guitar line by Bernie Marsden, a little more force in the verses, and a change of one great voice to another, because

people when the band headlined the Monsters of Rock festival at Castle Donington in 1983.

“Ain’t No Love”’s next unlikely recontextualisation was on Jay- Z’s 2001 album The Blueprint, heavily sampling the original on “Heart of the City (Ain’t No Love)”, to a more insistent rhythm, to a lyric that was part lament for black musical heroes past, part insistent brag. What, Jay-Z asked, was all the fussing for? “Because I’m grubbing more/And I pack heat like I’m the oven door?” The swirls of strings and horns suddenly change meaning in their new context, taking on a swagger and hustling Jay-Z along.

To the hard rock and hip-hop interpretations, add mod. He has never recorded it, but Paul Weller performed “Ain’t No Love” on Dutch TV during his 1990s revival. It’s the version that’s far afield from the original, spiky and gnarly, as if he’s trying to take Bland to the field blues. But whatever his merits as a singer, Weller doesn’t have the

tenderness of Bland or Coverdale. It sounds as though his baby not being around hasn’t devastated him so much as reminded him he hadn’t turned off his hot water before going on holiday.

It’s such a well-formed song that most artists take their

versions from Bland’s (even the country star Crystal Gayle didn’t

take it too far from the template), so kudos to Irish singer Mary Coughlan for assembling it around acoustic

guitars and muted percussion that make it sound smokier, sleepier and distinctly more Latin than any of the covers. It’s also less lachrymose than either Bland or Coverdale, and rather sexier as a result.

It’s not uncommon for songs to end up with their genes spliced into wildly different descendants. It’s rarer, though, for one to crop up in such divergent and unrelated places, and for it to be instantly recognisable as that song. Journeymen they may have been, but Price and Walsh knew universality when they heard it.

Michael HannFor more in the series go to ft.com/life-of-a-song

at this point Coverdale’s was a caramel wonder, all carnal exhalations. It certainly wasn’t heavy rock, yet it almost immediately became a song indelibly associated with Whitesnake. On their first tour in spring 1978, they stopped at the Regal Theatre in Ashington, in the industrial north-east of England. “That was the first night we played ‘Ain’t No Love in the Heart of the City’ live, and it was devastating,” Marsden says. “It was as if we had been playing there every night for five years. They stood and sang and we looked at each other and said, ‘Oh, we’ve got something here.’”

“Ain’t No Love in the Heart of the City” became the centrepiece of Whitesnake’s live show, the communal singalong moment, not just at Ashington Regal, but in front of 70,000

The song first recorded by Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland in 1974 became a Whitesnake staple — Redferns

THE LIFEOF A SONG

AIN ’T NO LOVE IN THE HEART OF THE CITY

T here is a sense of déjà vu. When the world was reeling from the onset of the pan-demic last year, the first country to pick itself up and

resume live concerts was Taiwan. Now concert halls in the west are shuttered again and the spotlight has turned back to east Asia, where Taiwan is enjoying a full programme of music and the arts.

The handsome National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts, opened in 2018, has just announced a wide-ranging spring season. Chien Wen-Pin, conductor and general and artistic director, has a full diary, with a concert of Brahms and Beethoven coming up shortly, and much more at the arts centre at Kaohsiung, known as Weiwuying, to follow.

“This is the biggest theatre complex under one roof in the world,” says Chien proudly. “It is the newest cultural build-ing in Taiwan and the only one built after the political change in 2000 — a symbol of freedom and democracy. Peo-ple are eager to have everything that was denied to them previously and in that spirit the centre was designed to be totally open for everyone.”

The photos are stunning. Designed by the Dutch firm Mecanoo, the building looks like a vast, elegant space ship that has settled gracefully among a subtropi-cal park in the suburbs. Inspired by the local banyan trees, the open structure welcomes visitors under an undulating roof, inviting open-air performances or street art along its walkways.

In the 1980s, when the National Theater and Concert Hall was opened in Taipei, all the cultural activities were in the north of Taiwan. By pushing for-ward with the new arts centre at Kaohsi-ung, the government has shown that it wants to level up cultural development between the north and south of the island. The new mayor of Kaohsiung has nominated the area around the arts cen-tre for future cultural development; property prices there have been soaring.

Under the arts centre’s wave-like roof

lie multiple venues, including Taiwan's first dedicated opera house, a theatre, concert hall and recital hall. That must be both a challenge and an opportunity to Chien as its director.

“The architects left so many possibili-ties for creating new work,” Chien says. “In the opera house, we have not only standard opera, but experimental thea-tre with the audience and performers together on the stage. Similarly, we decided to do something new in the con-cert hall and that housed a circus, like a traditional circus but without animals. Next year we will hold an organ festival, as we have the biggest organ in Asia. Then there will be an international music festival with visiting orchestras.”

As a conductor, Chien says his per-sonal enthusiasm lies firstly with opera. From the mid-1990s he was based at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein in Dūsseldorf/Duisburg and has been a guest conduc-tor at the international companies in Amsterdam, Hamburg and Berlin.

Chien’s proudest achievement was the first Taiwan production of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen. In general, Wag-ner’s epics have been less popular in Asia than the human passion of Italian opera, and the casts have depended heavily on artists from the west — but not this time.

“I was so proud that we only needed

seven foreign singers,” says Chien. “We had always been under the impression that Taiwanese singers were not for Wagner, but after two years’ training we proved they can do it. It is the physical strength as well as everything else. We had a Taiwanese singer as Mime who doubted if he would be up to it, but the German coach told him, ‘Run 3,000 metres every day, and sing while you run.’ It was a big success, helped by the fact the audience were well-prepared, as we ran pre-performance education events and co-operated with a radio sta-tion on talks by musicologists.”

For all that, Chien believes a ground-ing from Europe will hold its value. The new focus on Asia, he says, is more about the size of its market, especially the big opportunities afforded in China, whereas Europe will always benefit from the historical depth of its culture.

“Everything we know about classical music comes from Europe,” he says. “We need to experience the music there, to feel it in our heart, and get to know the people. After leaving Germany, I went back to guest conduct and it was fascinating to see how the air is different there, and how that affects our perform-ances as artists. Europe is not a museum. It will always be alive.”

At times it seems that the flood of young musicians from east Asia, espe-cially China, will take over, as there has been no stopping the flow of teenage pianists and violinists. Chien, though, who has the experience of conducting widely in China, Malaysia, Singapore, Japan and Korea, has his doubts.

“It used to be like that in Taiwan when I was young,” he says, “but the birth rate is quite low and there is less interest in becoming a musician these days. People used to play Bach or Beethoven to show they were educated, but now young peo-ple have so many more possibilities.” Maybe in that respect as well Taiwan is one step ahead. The future will tell.

npac-weiwuying.org

Taiwan’s arts hub springs to lifeMusic | The stunning National Kaohsiung Center’s live concerts can bring a new focus to classical and opera in east Asia, says conductor Chien Wen-Pin. By Richard Fairman

Chien Wen-Pin at the ‘Weiwuying’

Belly of the beastFrom main: Iranian-American director Ramin Bahrani has turned his lens on India; Adarsh Gourav, Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Rajkummar Rao in ‘The White Tiger’ Brad trent/Redux/eyevine

Bahrani followed it with Chop Shop (2007) and Goodbye Solo (2008), nuanced, humane stories of a Queens street kid and Senegalese cab driver in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where the director had grown up. Meanwhile, Adiga was sending him works in progress. “I have drafts of his novel going back to 2005 on the machine I’m talking to you on,” Bahrani says. Finally, one employed the droll, cynical first-person voice that so excited readers.“I thought, my God. If this doesn’t get published, we should both just quit.”

Balram escapes rural poverty by becoming a driver and de facto servant

tale. The book is dedicated to the direc-tor. He and Adiga have been friends since the 1990s. They met as students at Columbia University, united by the power of stories and on the side of the economically excluded — the “invisible people”, Adiga says by email. Each planned to bring the two together. Bah-rani got there first, releasing his first fea-ture Man Push Cart in 2005, a beautifully observed tale of a former Pakistani rock star selling coffee on a Manhattan side-walk. Adiga says his friend’s “entrepre-neurial zeal” became his blueprint. “When Ramin made Man Push Cart, he launched two careers, his and mine.”



Collectors are snapping up limited edition Augmented Reality art, viewable only through a screen and capturing attention in an increasingly digital world. “The creative possibilities are infinite, this is the beginning of a new era,” enthuses the Stockholm-based contemporary art collector Johannes Falk. He recently bought “Companion (Expanded)”, a 1.8 metre virtual trademark sculpture by KAWS that was priced at $10,000 from a now sold-out edition of 25.

Free-to-view exhibitions and down-loads helped develop a commercial appetite for art in AR, notes Jacob De Geer, founder of Acute Art, the extended reality app developer that sold the KAWS works. Unlike the free-to-download images, “If you own one of the works, you can make it public. If you put it in front of your house, say, anyone passing by can see the large sculpture in the garden. That’s a huge difference,” De Geer says. There are additional appeals for collectors: Falk notes “no shipping or storage costs”.

Another series of the scalable KAWS Companion is available to buy through Acute Art (edition of 10, $50,000 each) as well as images by Darren Bader (edition of two, $15,000) and Bjarne Melgaard (edition of five, $7,000). The works are among 10 in the London-centred exhibition Unreal City, which Acute Art has made lockdown-friendly with the works available to download from their app (until February 9, in partnership with Dazed Media).

Extended reality works are still a small proportion of the art world but seem to chime well with collectors and

Collecting

New era for augmented reality

The Art Market | AR appeal; Foundation warns of

Josef Albers forgeries; war-torn artists at Sotheby’s;

Pace signs Brazilian painter. By Melanie Gerlis

From main: KAWS’s virtual sculpture ‘Companion (Expanded)’ (2020); Marina Perez Simão’s ‘Untitled’ (2020)

that Gabriele Seno said that he inherited the work from his father, who had bought the painting in 1986. His lawyer, Alessandro Sacca, says that his client has appealed the judgment and that he is “absolutely certain of [Gabriele Seno’s] innocence”.

Redensek says that five major groups of Josef Albers forgeries have been identified since the artist died in the US in 1976. Weber’s advice: “Works must be vetted by the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation.”

The auction houses are continuing to merge categories and mix up formats to find the best ingredients for their livestreamed sales during the

pandemic. Sotheby’s next London-based outing will be on March 25 and will be another Old Masters to contemporary evening sale, preceded by a Paris-based day sale of Impressionist and Modern art. At this stage there are no blingy showstoppers — which feels appropriate during a global health crisis — but a group of four works offers insights into the troubled time in France immediately after the second world war.

The earliest from the collection are two Hostages series paintings by Jean Fautrier — “Corps d’otage” (1944, est £500,000 and £700,000) and “Otage no. 15” (1945, est £350,000-£450,000) — made soon after the artist was briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo then released to a mental asylum on the outskirts of Paris. The other works are Jean Dubuffet’s “Le Cavaliere aux Diamant” (1945, est £2.5m-£3.5m), a more romantic depiction of an engagement. The latest work is “La Turquoise” (1947, est £1.2m-£1.8m) by the German émigré artist known as Wols, who spent a year in a concen-tration camp in France in 1939. Both these works were first shown by the Paris gallerist of the avant-garde, René Drouin, who hosted an exhibition for Fautrier in November 1945.

The group is being sold by the daughter of a late Belgian collector whose father had bought them soon after they were made. They have been kept in a bank vault since last exhibited more than 30 years ago, Sotheby’s confirms. “Such a group is as rare as hen’s teeth,” says Sotheby’s Europe chairman Oliver Barker. “The artists were getting to grips with the atrocities witnessed often first-hand and all responded with such innovation.”

Pace gallery has signed up the Brazilian painter Marina Perez Simão (b1981), its second, recent artist collaboration with São Paulo’s Mendes Wood DM gallery. Last summer, Pace took on representation of Sonia Gomes (b1948) and showed her work with Simão’s in its new East Hampton gallery. “It was a happy accident but the work by these two incredibly strong, talented women worked so well together,” says Pace senior director Samanthe Rubell. Pace plans an exhibition of new paintings by Perez Simão in its New York gallery between April 1 and 24 (priced between $15,000 and $60,000), together with the artist’s preparatory watercolours. Rubell describes Perez Simão’s works as “internal, imaginary landscapes that transport you to another dimension”. Rubell says: “She reminds you how to pause, and to hope, which feels important at this time.”

England’s elite grandmasters, silver medallists behind Russian gold in the 2019 World Teams, stayed on top at the weekend as the traditional Hastings New Year tournament celebrated its centenary. The £7,000, 12-player, online invitation event was backed by Caplin, the specialist providers of desktop etrading.

David Howell won the £1,200 first prize with an unbeaten 9/11 after the

Sussex GM, 30, scored wins against two rivals. Howell’s endgame finesses against seven-time British champion Michael Adams provided the most cultured game of the event, while his calm refutation of Luke McShane’s speculative attack made a tricky defence look easy.

McShane scored 7.5, Adams 7, and Gawain Jones 6.5, while the youngest and lowest ranked, Cambridge economics student Matthew Wadsworth, 20, totalled a

take part — the four winners at the weekend plus the former world title challenger Nigel Short and 2694-rated Matthew Sadler.

Another approach would be to reserve three or four of the 12 places to under-20s, providing an incentive to young talents to raise their game to international level.

2402Al Horowitz v Alex Kevitz, New York 1931. How did White (to play) win in style?

Solution, back page

promising 5/11. If Covid-19 induces Hastings to go online in 2021-22, it would be interesting if all six of the nation’s top players could

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A B C D E F G H

CHESS LEONARD BARDEN

POLYMATH 1,109 SET BY SLEUTH

Diversions

try to beat that and score +640. She won A♣ and cashed ♥AKQ, discarding a spade from hand.

Then, utilising the high trumps in both hands, she laid down A♠ and cross-ruffed her way to all 13 tricks. This score lost out only to a couple of pairs who played in 4S, making with overtricks, and the one pair who manged to bid 6D. They used the auction above but, at the end, held their breath and chanced the slam.

That the same cards can yield so many different outcomes is one reason why our game is so constantly challenging. What would your partnership have made of this deal?

Having opened 1S and hearing a 9pt+ 2D response from partner, what would you rebid on the North cards? A Splinter works if you play them agreeing a minor suit. Most players would assume that a jump to 4D would show 6-4, or 6-

BRIDGE PAUL MENDELSON

CROSSWORD 16,685 SET BY MUDD

Jotter pad

Crossword competitions suspendedDear readers — we have suspended the Crossword and Polymath competitions while our editors work from home. We hope you continue to enjoy completing them until normal newsroom services resume.

strong 5-4-4-0 hand so South downgraded her A♣ and settled for 5D.

West led K♣. Many lines of play present themselves. As you must at Duplicate Pairs, declarer thought about what other contracts might be played. 3NT could boast 10 top tricks for a score of +630, so South decided to

Dealer: North Game All

North East South West1S NB 2D NB2H NB 2S NB4D NB 5D

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artists alike. Sylvain Lévy, who began to digitise his DSL Collection in 2005, says that “Born into a screen-based world, today’s new generation move in and out of the physical and virtual worlds at ease, believing that each world is “real” to them.” He is currently working on a social, virtual reality “art village”, similar to a video game.

Nicholas Fox Weber, executive director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, has spoken out about forgeries of the “Homage to the Square” works purportedly by the German-born painter Josef Albers. “People think they are easy to forge as essentially they are three squares, but in fact [forgeries] are quite recognisable,” Weber says. Tell-tale signs include the way the paint is applied to the canvas — Albers used a

distinct painter’s knife — and the position of his signature, he explains.

Weber’s warning comes soon after the Milan gallerist Gabriele Seno received a suspended prison sentence of one year and eight months, plus fines, for allegedly offering a forged yellow and orange “Study for Homage to the Square” at €320,000. Weber examined the work and “immediately noticed it was an imitation”, the court papers say. This was then confirmed by the art historian Jeannette Redensek, research curator and Josef Albers catalogue raisonné director at the Foundation, which was advised by the legal firm Jucker in Lugano.

The Court of Milan judgment records

JANUARY 16 2021 Section:Weekend Time: 14/1/2021 - 17:16 User: andrew.higton Page Name: WKD12, Part,Page,Edition: WKD, 12, 1


A distinguished Whitehall scientist sounded the alarm. Henry Tizard had served during the war as a special emissary between

Winston Churchill and Franklin DRoosevelt, criss-crossing the Atlantic to manage the exchange of military secrets. A thoughtful, unflashy civil servant, Tizard became chief defence scientist in Clement Attlee’s government.

In the summer of 1945 the nation had poured into the streets to celebrate the great victory over Hitler’s Nazis. Four years later, as it counted the cost of vic-tory with continuing food rationing and recurring financial crises, Tizard saw a yawning gap between exalted ambition and diminished circumstance. Britain was behaving, he wrote in a Whitehall minute, as if it were still a great power. The world had changed.

Hitler’s defeat had marked the end of the Pax Britannica. Great power rela-tions had been reframed by the contest between the US and the Soviet Union. Britain had fallen into the second tier. “We are not a great power and never will be again,” wrote Tizard. “We are a great nation, but if we continue to behave like a great power we shall soon cease to be a great nation.”

There are many reasons why a small majority of those who voted in the 2016 referendum backed Britain’s departure from the EU. Stagnant incomes, auster-ity, rising inequality, fears about immi-gration, concerns over sovereignty, regions left behind by globalisation and technological change — all played their part. So too did the desire to deliver a kick to political and business elites.

The Brexit decision, though, was part also of a broader tapestry, woven through the postwar decades as Britain struggled to find an identity after the loss of empire. In demanding the nation “take back” control, Brexit reached into an idealised past. At its heart was an English exceptionalism that defied the facts of the nation’s geography and its waning economic power.

Britain had won the war, the story began. The rest of Europe might feel impelled to pool national sovereignty, but the UK could look to the wider world. Anthony Eden’s disastrous Suez expedition and the Brexit decision 60 years later were bookends in this search for a role — the first, empire’s last trum-pet, the second a refusal even after four decades of EU membership to accept a more modest role.

As a reporter, editor and commenta-tor at the FT, I have watched as the argu-ment over Britain’s place in Europe has ebbed and flowed for three decades, lay-ing low a succession of Tory leaders along the way. For now the question of EU membership has been settled but the argument about national identity will not go away.

Brexit cannot change the facts of eco-nomics, geography and geopolitics. Brit-ain remains as it was — a leading Euro-pean power, albeit one with far flung interests. Its prosperity and security remain inextricably tied to its own con-tinent and to preservation of a rules-based international order. It will con-tinue to look across the Atlantic for security, but if the past 75 years hold a lesson it is that, outside or inside the EU, it will have to balance its relationship with Washington with close collabora-tion with its neighbours.

The EU accounts for about 45 per cent of UK trade and it takes only a glance at the revanchism of Vladimir Putin’s Rus-sia, Islamists in the Middle East, and violent chaos in the Maghreb to under-stand that Europe’s security is also Brit-ain’s. The other message is governments must balance overseas ambition with economic performance. A nation can for a time “punch above its weight”, but it has to be able to pay the bills.

In Tizard’s day as in our own, such sentiments were not what politicians wanted to hear. Winston Churchill saw Britain as, uniquely, at the intersection of three circles of power — the Empire and Commonwealth, the US and Europe. Churchill counted himself a good European, but unity was for the rest of the continent.

He was far from alone in his hubris.

Britain’s departure from the

EU closes a chapter in which

the country served as a bridge

between two continents —

and reopens a difficult

debate over its place in the

world. By Philip Stephens

Illustration by Tom Straw

Above: British soldiers wave to United Nations soldiers as they withdraw from El Cap in December 1956. Egypt had nationalised the Suez Canal in July that yearGetty Images

cloak over the shift from global power to membership of the US-led alliance.

John Selwyn Lloyd, the foreign secre-tary, wrote it down: “The United States is so much the most powerful nation in the western camp that our ability to have our way in the world depends more than anything else upon influence upon her to act in conformity with our interests.” Henceforth, Brits would whisper wisdom into the ears of unso-phisticated Americans.

Margaret Thatcher was never so con-tent as when dancing on the interna-tional stage with Ronald Reagan. Tony Blair once told me he thought it a “duty” to stay on good terms with Washington. Boris Johnson is now trying to kick over the traces of his kowtowing to Donald Trump in order to ingratiate himself with Joe Biden.

The awkward question was always when “special” becomes “servile”. The Americans eschew emotion in favour of national interest. Britain was bank-rupted by the war while the US pros-pered mightily. Yet Truman cancelled Lend-Lease — the financial lifeline that kept Britain solvent — within weeks of victory. Dispatched to Washington to negotiate an alternative arrangement, John Maynard Keynes found the US had its own demands.

In the description of William Clayton, the assistant secretary of state for eco-nomic affairs: “We loaded the British loan negotiations with all the conditions the traffic would bear.” Britain’s reward for its great sacrifice, the Economist magazine thundered, was “to pay trib-ute for half a century to those who have been enriched by the war”.

Wartime ties between the two nations’ military, intelligence and nuclear establishments have continued to thrive. There is a considerable infra-structure of co-operation and reservoir of mutual trust. The difference is, as a senior US administration official once told me: “We [the US] have lots of other special relationships.”

Richard Neustadt, an adviser in John F Kennedy’s White House, offered a fair description: the UK, he said, was “a mid-dle power, neither equal nor vassal, which history, geography or economics rendered especially significant to us for the time being”. Reagan’s admiration for Thatcher did not extend to sharing his plans for nuclear accords with Mikhail Gorbachev, or to giving her due warning of the invasion of the Commonwealth state of Grenada. George W Bush appre-ciated Blair’s support for the Iraq war, but denied him a role in its planning.

It was Jacques Delors’ grand Euro-pean vision that infuriated Thatcher. But it was the prospect of a Europe led by a reunified Germany that really alarmed her. The president of the Euro-pean Commission’s plans for single cur-rency brought forth the Lady’s famous Bruges speech in which, in September 1988, she declared: “We have not suc-cessfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them reim-posed at a European level, with a Euro-pean superstate exercising a new domi-nance from Brussels.”

A year later, in September 1989, Thatcher was in the Kremlin, meeting with Gorbachev. The Soviet empire was in turmoil. Hungary had opened its bor-ders to the west, the future of the Berlin Wall was in doubt. Thatcher, according to the Kremlin record, asked the note takers to put down their pens so the

true. Lodging Britain’s first application to join the six-nation common market, Macmillan himself had remarked that: “We have to consider the world as it is today . . . and not in outdated terms of a vanished past.” By the early 1960s, the Franco-German market had turned out a success. To be left behind by the US, the Soviet Union and, perhaps, China was one thing. To be eclipsed by those it had rescued or defeated during the sec-ond world war was too much for Britain to bear.

De Gaulle initially blocked the way, but once the common market gathered strength, Britain knew it had to join. There were objectors, of course. The loud arguments about “sovereignty” heard during the 2016 referendum cam-paign might have been cut-and-pasted from speeches made during the 1960s and early 1970s. Enoch Powell stood at the head of the English nationalists on the Tory right; Tony Benn and Peter Shore were among prominent objectors on the left.

But for more than 40 years after it joined the EC in 1973, Britain seemed to have come up with its riposte to Ache-son. Its pursuit of the national interest would rest on the twin pillars of the inti-mate security relationship with the US and a leading role in the EU. This was often an awkward balancing act but by and large it seemed to work. Britain was a European power with a global outlook. Influence in Washington amplified Brit-ain’s say in Brussels — and vice versa.

And now? Soon after the retreat from Suez, Anthony Eden had jotted down some private reflections. The signifi-cance, he concluded, was not so much that the debacle had rewritten the future but that it had revealed the harsh realities of relative decline. Brexit demands the same sort of reckoning.

In blowing up the European pillar of its foreign policy, Britain is confronted again with Acheson’s question. Where does it fit in a world dominated by much larger power blocs?

The Brexiters have long confused sov-ereignty with power. The notional sov-ereignty now reclaimed from Brussels does not confer a capacity to act. Instead, Britain has lost its voice in European affairs and diminished its influence in Washington.

So the reckoning must begin with a touch of humility — how best, in reduced circumstance, can Britain promote its core concerns and objectives. One obvi-ous route is to seek new leverage in stronger bilateral relationships — within Europe and beyond — to promote clubs of liberal democracies that share its lib-eral democratic values. Alongside its soft power — the language, history and crea-tivity still count — it still has more spe-cific talents to contribute — effective intelligence, a strong diplomatic service, capable armed forces willing to deploy, and a culture comfortable with interna-tional problem-solving.

Making a difference, though, demands the insight shown by Tizard more than 70 years ago. The days of great power posturing have passed. As for Europe, history as well as geography and geopolitics tells us that sooner or later Britain will be drawn back to its own continent.

Philip Stephens is the FT’s chief political commentator. His book ‘Britain Alone: The Path from Suez to Brexit’ is published this month by Faber & Faber

leaders could speak without inhibition. At Bruges she had played the Iron Lady, demanding the EU remember those imprisoned behind the walls of commu-nism. Now, the Kremlin record notes, she assured Gorbachev Britain and the west did not want German unification: “[We] are not interested in the destabili-sation of Eastern Europe or the dissolu-tion of the Warsaw Pact either . . . we will not interfere in them and spur the decommunisation of Eastern Europe.”

For a politician who had spent a life-time denouncing the evils of commu-nism it was an extraordinary démarche — vivid proof of the depths of Thatcher’s fear and mistrust of Germany. Her loyal aide Charles Powell later wrote two accounts of the meeting. Only a handful of officials got the full story. We journal-ists were also kept in the dark. I was among those travelling in the prime minister’s rickety VC10 aircraft. We were given no hint of her proposed bar-gain with Moscow.

Douglas Hurd, the foreign secretary, later wrote: “Nothing had entered her own life to erase vivid memories of the German past. She did not believe that Germany would subordinate itself to a process of European integration.” When Nicholas Ridley, one of her favourite ministers, remarked in an interview that the single currency plan was “a Ger-man racket designed to take over the whole of Europe”, he was giving voice to

her instincts. The effect was to add a new toxicity to the rising tide of hardline Euroscepticism in the Conservative party. Britain now faced not just an EU plot but the threat of a Fourth Reich.

Prime ministers always add the adjec-tive “independent” when talking about the British nuclear deterrent. Macmil-lan’s deal with Kennedy in December 1962 to buy the Polaris submarine-based missile system was in its way a personal success. Britain had the bomb but desperately needed a missile to carry it. Kennedy’s advisers lined up sol-idly against the sale. Kennedy overruled his aides, but imposed conditions on the sale. The deterrent would be put at the disposal of Nato. Only if “supreme national interests” were at stake would a British prime minister take full control.

Macmillan’s cabinet voiced the obvi-ous concern that the arrangement would create “a suspicion that our mili-tary independence was, or might be, less secure than, for example, the French”. For all the doubts, Macmillan, it soon turned out, had built a psychological prison from which none of his succes-sors dared try to escape. Independent or otherwise, the deterrent was henceforth deemed a vital emblem of national pres-tige. Long after the end of the cold war, a close aide to Blair told me that to ques-tion its utility in the absence of the Soviet Union would be viewed as some-thing akin to treachery.

Dean Acheson’s famous jibe in December 1962 that Britain had lost an empire and failed to find a role was all the more wounding for the British establishment because it knew it to be

From Suez to Brexit and back again

Tony Blair once told me he thought it a ‘duty’ to stay on good terms with Washington

“Britain’s story and her interests lie far beyond the continent of Europe”, his foreign secretary Anthony Eden pro-nounced in 1952. “Our thoughts move across the seas to the many communi-ties in which our people play their part, in every corner of the world, and these are our family ties — that is our life.” Every subsequent turn in the postwar story brought a bruising collision between inflated ambition and strait-ened circumstance. Yet Eden’s senti-ments have tumbled through the dec-ades, turning up in their latest guise in Boris Johnson’s fevered imaginings of a second Elizabethan age.

The conspiracy with France and Israel to take back control of the Suez Canal after its seizure by Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser was soaked in extraordinary duplicity. It was bad enough that Eden lied to parliament and people. He also made the mistake of deceiving the US. The forced retreat from the canal of British forces amid a cacophony of national and international protest drew an indelible line under imperial adventurism.

Eden had thought Britain’s national power and prestige would not survive the defiance of the leader of Arab nationalism. The US president Dwight Eisenhower had other concerns. He cut off Britain’s access to international financial support for sterling. Treasury Secretary George Humphrey offered the prime minister a choice between “an immediate ceasefire and a war on the pound”. When Eden had looked in the mirror he had seen a great power that could still get its way in the world. Retreat shattered the glass.

Serving during the war with General Eisenhower in Algiers, Harold Macmil-lan coined the conceit that Britain could act as Greece to America’s Rome. Replacing the ruined Eden, Macmillan decided that the road to global influence would run henceforth through Wash-ington. Churchill had freighted the rela-tionship with all manner of emotional baggage — unique linguistic, cultural and historic ties, unbreakable links of kith and kin. For Macmillan, it was a



He was keen to join his peers in battle, but committed to his work with me. In May, after I left Libya, he finally enlisted. “I don’t think I would have been able to live with myself if I hadn’t done it,” he says now. “It still annoys me today that I wasn’t able to reach the pro-tests on February 17.”

Three months later, he was in the rev-olutionary convoy that rolled into Tripoli as huge crowds cheered their lib-erators. The images are still vivid: “You think these things are imaginary and made up, but it was like that exactly.” Ahmed then took part in the assault on Gaddafi’s compound, which signalled the fall of Tripoli. The culmination of seven months of tumult and bloodshed, it was also an intoxicating period of hope, as the nation felt the shackles being lifted.

Academics, lawyers and others now had a chance to shape the nation in their vision. Ahmed put down his AK-47 and returned to Benghazi to raise awareness about the constitutional process, voting and political parties. Most Libyans had zero experience of elections but, in July 2012, they cast their ballots. “It was like Libya had won the World Cup — national flags everywhere and people hanging out of cars, honking their horns,” Ahmed says. “A lot of people, even in Libya, forget how good it was because of how bad things are [now]. But if you talk to anyone and remind them of the details, they remember, yeah, actually how powerful it was.”

Syria: Assad cracks down As Egypt, Libya and Tunisia navigated the bumpy road towards elections, Mazen Darwish was braving security forces’ bullets in Damascus. In March 2011, he was briefly detained as the Syr-ian uprising against the Assad regime gathered momentum. The shootings, beatings and arrests “were an early sign that it was not going to go the same way as Egypt or Tunisia”, he remembers. A human rights lawyer, Darwish knew the risks of opposing a regime with a history of ruthlessly snuffing out dissent. But he prayed Assad would agree to compro-mises, so the protesters could, at least, achieve partial gains.

Early on, Darwish and others met groups of youths and warned them against violence and sectarianism. “We thought the regime couldn’t win if the opposition used political or peaceful and moral means because our demands were patriotic,” he recalls. “But we always said if the regime managed to lure the protest movement to violence or sectarianism, it would win because these are its two favoured arenas.”

He believes the opposition’s use of arms was inevitable after the regime resorted to brutal methods to crush them. It also became apparent that the struggle in Syria would not remain a domestic affair. The regime was soon supported by Iran and the militias it backed, including the Lebanese move-ment Hizbollah. In 2015, Russia’s inter-vention tilted the war irrevocably in Assad’s favour. And as peaceful protest morphed into armed rebellion, govern-ments such as Turkey and the US pro-vided arms and cash to the opposition, including the Islamist factions that ulti-mately dominated moderate groups.

Darwish and others tried to convince Islamists to avoid violence but, he says, “The regime, regional actors, domestic factions, they all had an interest in vio-lence.” However, it was the regime, with its chemical weapons and barrel bombs, that “started the violence and created the ground for others” to behave like-wise. Darwish endured this brutality first hand. In February 2012, regime forces sealed off streets around his office in Damascus, bundled him and 15 oth-ers into a bus and carted them off to a military base. Over three and a half years of detention, he was beaten with clubs, shocked with electric prods and hung by his arms. On one occasion, his limp body was dumped among the dead, only for guards to realise he was alive. “It was a form of revenge with no other objective,” he says, speaking in a measured tone.

He was released in 2015 to a Damas-cus he no longer recognised. Most of his friends had left Syria or were impris-oned or missing — among tens of thou-sands of people the regime had “disap-peared”. Darwish escaped to Germany, joining the nearly six million Syrians — almost a third of the population — who have fled their homeland.

Today, Assad, with Russian and Ira-nian backing, has reclaimed control of most of the country. But he clings to a pyrrhic victory as the broken nation’s economy teeters towards collapse. Mil-lions are destitute. Isis, the jihadi group that exploited the chaos to take over swaths of Syria, remains a threat despite losing its hold on territory. “There are no victors in Syria,” Darwish says. “The Syrian nation lost.”

Now 47, he knows “utopian” thoughts of regime change are delusional for the foreseeable future, though he believes Assad will eventually be replaced from within as his foreign backers realise they are better off without him. “The regional and international players will reach a point . . . where it will no longer be possible to invest in the Syrian war,” Darwish says. But even that seems opti-mistic for now.

Continued from page 1

A devastated YemenYemen was already one of the most frag-ile Arab nations before uprisings erupted against its veteran president Ali Abdullah Saleh in the last days of Janu-ary 2011. Tribalistic, impoverished and blighted by a corrupt, weak state, it was awash with arms and a base for one of al-Qaeda’s most active branches.

After months of protests, Saleh, a des-pot who once compared ruling Yemen to “dancing on the heads of snakes”, agreed to a transition that would end his 33-year reign. Another ageing veteran of the regime, Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, took over, but all the old problems con-tinued. “You had all these hopeful mes-sages on the political side, while people saw a deterioration in every basic serv-ice,” Rafat al-Akhali tells me. “Corrup-tion and patronage was even expanding as new powers came into the transition.”

Akhali saw it happen from close up. He left Yemen’s capital Sana’a as a 19-year-old after winning a scholarship to Canada in 2002 but continued to work with youth at home. He returned when the revolution was in its infancy, con-vinced the “tide had changed”. After the transition, he took a post with a govern-ment bureau that oversaw reforms, believing the moment was ripe to push for change from within.

It was not to be. As the government floundered, the Houthi movement of battle-hardened Islamists from the country’s north saw an opening to move on Sana’a, vowing to sweep the corrupt from office. Young militiamen took over ministries, stopping and searching cabi-net members. Akhali, who was briefly youth and sports minister, recalls how teenage fighters, AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades slung over their shoulders, demanded to see govern-ment documents, even though many were illiterate: “They’d hold the paper upside down and say, ‘What is this? You are not allowed to bring this in.’”

Akhali realised the state in Yemen was a “mirage”: “You suddenly find there’s no military, no security — there’s nothing.” In January 2015, the Houthis attacked the presidential palace, forcing Hadi’s government into exile. The region’s next proxy war was about to explode. Days after this assault, King Salman ascended the throne in neigh-bouring Saudi Arabia and appointed his favourite son, Prince Mohammed bin Salman, as defence minister. The 29-year-old MBS was on a fast-track to becoming crown prince. By March, he was spearheading a Saudi-led offensive — blessed by Washington — against the Houthis, who are viewed by Riyadh as an Iranian proxy stoking conflict in their backyard.

In Sana’a, Akhali, his wife and two young sons fled to their basement as fighter jets pummelled the neighbour-hood. After two weeks of bombard-ment, they jostled through crowds and boarded an evacuation flight to Jordan. “It was the worst thing to be woken up by an explosion, so we thought we needed to get out for a few weeks until this stuff is done and [the warring par-ties] reach an agreement,” he says.

It would be four years before Akhali returned, fleetingly, to a devastated nation stalked by disease, with 14m peo-ple — about half the population — at risk of famine. The UN describes Yemen as the world’s worst man-made humani-tarian crisis. According to a 2019 report, about 60 per cent of the more than 233,000 Yemenis who have died, either in fighting or through lack of food or access to services, were children aged under five. Thousands of boys have been recruited as child soldiers; young girls have been forced into marriages by desperate families.

Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, is bogged down in a conflict it cannot win while the Houthis retain their hold on Sana’a and the north. Akhali relocated to the UK and is a fellow at Oxford university’s Blavatnik School of Government. “It

outcomes are respected. Akhali says “electoral democracy” should be an end result, not a starting point. “It’s not up to international powers to say, ‘No, you have to get there in two or three years.’ No state was formed, or evolved, in two years.”

Rebuilding from zeroEven the most successful Arab spring experiment underscores how hard it is for countries to emerge from dictator-ship. Tunisia has many elements of sta-bility that have eluded others. The mili-tary is not powerful enough to meddle in politics. The main Islamist movement, aware of the regional dynamics, was quick to rebrand as a Muslim demo-cratic party and cooperate with secular parties. There is also a vibrant civil soci-ety and greater social freedoms.

Yet unemployment has remained at about 15 per cent and there are still gap-ing regional inequalities. Many Tuni-sians are angry at politicians they see as self-interested and unable to work for the public good. “We are rebuilding from zero,” says the Tunisian civil soci-ety activist Lamloum. “We lived under dictatorial regimes for decades . . . The absence of alternatives and the diffi-culty of constructing alternatives goes back to that.”

According to the International Mone-tary Fund, Tunisia needs about five years of 5 per cent growth even to reduce unemployment to 11 per cent. Yet the economy expanded by an aver-age of 1.7 per cent from 2010-17, far below the decade before spring 2011. Still, Lamloum says there is no sense of “crushing defeat”. “There are still youths who have not been defeated and are still able to fight some battles — and win them,” she says. “The revolution did not succeed, but in my opinion the revo-lution lost a battle, it did not lose the war, the bracket has not been closed.”

All those interviewed agreed the uprisings had been inevitable, whether in 2011 or at another point, due to the conditions people were living under. Ahmed says: “There was so much good, but so much bad as well.” Citing histori-cal precedents, such as the 1968 Prague spring, he says “these springs take time”. “I just regret there are still gov-ernments and groups of interests who don’t want these societies to have free-dom,” he adds. “They are still trying to insist on providing two options, either dictatorship or chaos.”

In Yemen, Akhali believes warring factions will ultimately thrash out a power-sharing agreement, but then comes the daunting task of rebuilding a devastated society. “Is it fixable? We have to cling to that hope,” he says.

In Berlin, Mazen Darwish keeps his revolutionary flame flickering as presi-dent of the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression. He documents abuses in Syria and helped German prosecutors charge a notorious former intelligence officer, Anwar Raslan, with war crimes. It is, he says, his way of keeping “justice on the table” and pre-venting “the politicians, the princes of war . . . the regional governments” from agreeing political settlements that fail to secure a genuine peace based on accountability.

When he reflects on the events of a decade ago, Darwish says Syrians were pushed to revolution by “years of des-potism, of backwardness and bad eco-nomic and social conditions . . . but it isn’t possible to have real structural change without a heavy price. Person-ally, I was prepared to pay the price, although I never wished for the price to be this. Never.”

In Cairo, Mona Seif planned to begin a PhD, but has put her studies on hold to focus on the plight of her brother and sister. The re-arrest of Alaa — a blogger detained in September 2019, six months after completing a five-year jail term — “made me realise I can no longer try to sustain a normal life”, she says.

Seif, who documented abuses by the security services, can barely hide her anger as she struggles to comprehend the popular support for the 2013 coup that brought an end to Egypt’s brief democratic chapter. She never under-stood those people, some of whom had packed into Tahrir Square to call for Mubarak’s resignation, “selling the idea of a pragmatic choice” of siding with the military because they loathed the Mus-lim Brotherhood government.

“There was this notion . . . [among] a lot of Sisi supporters . . . that, ‘Yes, the army was going to commit massive vio-lations, but it’s never going to touch us, it’s going to be against Islamists.’” It was a period, she says, that “changed our worlds, our social circles and friend-ships”. Egyptians, like many other Arabs, argued over the question of sta-bility versus democratic freedoms. “I never felt so alienated.”

When I returned to Cairo for the 2018 presidential election, virtually all forms of critical debate had been silenced. The president secured 97 per cent of the votes. Those businessmen willing to talk on the record lauded Sisi for returning stability and reviving a bankrupt econ-omy after the Brotherhood’s divisive and turbulent rule. But an improving macroeconomic picture often masks the reality for most — in Egypt, poverty has continued to rise. Even before the 2011 uprising, the country was attract-ing record levels of foreign investment and enjoying a spurt of healthy growth.

HA Hellyer, an Arab-English Middle East analyst, describes a “tinderbox” in the region, where the structural prob-lems, from economic inequalities to demographic pressures, are worse than before 2011. The coronavirus pandemic has exacerbated these. He believes lead-ers could push through reforms and provide better services to ease people’s frustrations, but “instead, I think they’ve decided, ‘We tried this whole opening up thing a decade and a half ago and that resulted in inadvertently empowering civil society that eventu-ally led to the events of 2011. So they are going to clamp down and make sure it never happens again.’”

Things can’t go on like this indefi-nitely, he says. “It doesn’t mean things are going to blow up tomorrow, but . . . at some point it will crack.” In the past two years, such cracks appeared with protests in Sudan, Alge-ria, Iraq and Lebanon forcing political resignations. Once more, however, they revealed the challenges of securing sub-stantive change from the street — in the latter three, ruling elites remain entrenched, while in Sudan the military shares power with civilians in a transi-tional government.

In Cairo, Seif describes a “brewing anger beneath the surface”. “This is very similar, but in a more intense way, to 2010, where many of the younger gener-ation were feeling there was no space for them, for work or having families or any kind of future,” she says. “The current situation cannot be sustained for ever, but I don’t know if that will lead to another 2011 — I didn’t expect a 2011.”

Like other activists, she sounds worn down, the glorious moments of revolu-tion not forgotten, but overwhelmed by what followed. She keeps the memories of 10 years ago hidden deep inside, “pro-tected from all the darkness”, and says she will only truly begin to reflect when she’s sure of the safety of her family and friends. But like others interviewed here, she has no regrets about standing up to power.

“It’s weird because I’m not saying it as a statement. I actually questioned myself a lot and I find it so strange that despite all of this happening, at my low-est moments, never once did I feel, ‘Fuck this, I regret the revolution.’”

Andrew England is the FT’s Middle East editor. Additional reporting by Heba Saleh, FT North Africa correspondent

Spectrum

seems if you want to have any change, you need foreign backing and you need weapons,” he reflects. “Can we effect change at this time? That’s the question I struggle with.”

Lessons from Libya In Libya, Ahmed’s nagging doubts about the country’s trajectory grew as neo-phyte politicians failed to knit together a functioning state and as armed fac-tions, born out of the revolt, battled over the oil-rich nation’s resources. He recalls predicting to his mother in 2014 that there was going to be a war that year. “She was like, ‘What are you talk-ing about?’ I told her, ‘The polarisation, it’s just escalating.’”

But even he underestimated how bad it would get, as Libyan warlords, such as the septuagenarian former military officer General Khalifa Haftar, carved the country into fiefdoms. “Everything we had struggled for, [Haftar’s forces] were like just, bang, undo it,” Ahmed says. “Life just stopped . . . it was the whole thing, street-to-street fighting, jets bombing, tanks in the street.”

He views Haftar as a wannabe dicta-tor in the mould of Gaddafi. But the gen-eral’s self-proclaimed assault against Islamists resonated with Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. Militias in the west of Libya, some Islamists, drew backing from Qatar and Turkey. On April 4 2019, Haftar launched an offen-sive against a weak UN-backed govern-ment in Tripoli, triggering a proxy war on the Mediterranean’s southern shores.

When I visited Tripoli last February, the capital had been under siege for months. As fighters hunkered down in abandoned, bullet-scarred homes, civil-ians in surrounding areas lived in fear of the next rocket or drone attack. Turkish intervention turned the tide against Haftar and today there is an uneasy peace, but many believe foreign powers will determine their country’s future. “There were definitely a lot of wrong decisions made by Libyans, the fighting, watching the attacks against each other. So we definitely need to take responsi-bility,” Ahmed says. But “70 per cent of it is an international conflict, Libya is just the battleground”.

Ahmed, who is now studying for a master’s degree in peace and conflict studies in Turkey, believes one lesson of the past decade is that if the guns do fall silent, local actors should not be pres-sured to rush transition periods. Ahmed and Akhali argue that internationally backed initiatives often put too much emphasis on elections, instead of sup-porting fragile states to build effective institutions and lay the foundations needed to ensure voters have buy-in and

‘Personally, I was prepared to pay the price, although I never wished for the price to be this. Never’

Above, from left: an Egyptian flag flies over a protest in Tahrir Square in January 2011. A popularly backed military coup in 2013 ended the brief democratic chapter ushered in by the Arab spring;ten years after the Arab spring, Egyptian activist Mona Seif remains focused on the plight of her jailed brother and sister Ivor Prickett/Panos Pictures; Christina Rizk

A Yemeni child walks through the rubble of a building hit by an air strike in Taez, March 2018 — Ahmad Al-Basha/Getty Images



B y most measures, 2014 was a good year for Eula Biss. Her third book, On Immunity, impressed the critics. Sales were strong. Closer to home,

her job teaching creative nonfiction at Northwestern University now looked permanent enough for Biss and her hus-band to take out a mortgage, leave their Chicago apartment and move with their young son to a more spacious two-bed-room bungalow a few miles north of the city. But she was uneasy.

“The house felt enormous to me,” Biss says on a video call. “I felt kind of upset about it, like we have too much, we clearly have too much.”

She tells a story from shortly after they arrived, when a Mexican woman with four children in tow rang the door-bell to inquire whether the curtainless and visibly empty front room was avail-able to rent. Told that it was not, the woman asked why.

“It was a deeply embarrassing moment,” says Biss. “I thought she was right, and I could see that by her terms and in her eyes we had plenty of extra space, and we should be sharing it. But it also kind of mortified me that this woman thought a family of five could use the space that we weren’t using.” Biss’s new book, Having and Being Had, is in part a record of that discomfort, based on the diary that the writer, then in her late thirties, began keeping to document her feelings before it all started to seem normal. But the real subject, as has often been the case with her work, is much bigger than the inti-mate method might suggest.

Notes from No Man’s Land, the 2009 collection that announced Biss’s arrival as one of the leading lights of the mod-ern American essay, examined race and racism through the prism of her own white identity; On Immunity looked beyond her experience as a mother con-templating vaccinations for her baby to the social contract underwriting our approach to infectious disease. Now, in Having and Being Had, she tackles capi-talism, property and class privilege.

The new book has a more comic aspect than its predecessors, which seems to suit Biss, and there’s an engag-ing kind of lexicographical drama to early chapters as she finds words that she had seldom wondered about breaking apart under the pressure of her inquiry. “Work,” she writes, “is interfering with my work, and I want to

work less so that I can have more time to work.”

Biss’s frankness about her own privi-lege, meanwhile, extends further than most would expect. We learn that she has a salary of $73,000 and a household income of $125,000; that she makes $8,000 renting out her house for a TV commercial, pays a mother’s helper $8 an hour and spends $200 on a necklace. She leafs longingly through catalogues of paint that costs $110 a gallon and rounds down from $485,000 to $400,000 when she mentions the cost of her house to her sister — a piece of dubi-

ous accounting that, on later considera-tion, persuades Biss to set a rule requir-ing her to give exact figures whenever money is mentioned in the book.

The point here is that we tend to com-pare ourselves with those who are wealthier, and so do not perceive our cir-cumstances quite as the numbers would suggest. Did she find this a difficult rule to follow? “It was quite excruciating, and I was very surprised,” says Biss. “I’ve written about vaccination, I’ve written about race, I’ve written about my own body, I’ve written graphically about my child’s birth — I’ve written

about all these things that people con-sider sensitive or personal, and I have never been as uncomfortable with the material I was putting on the page as I was with putting down my own salary or what I paid for my house.”

In search of an exception, I observe gingerly that the formula she uses to describe the advance that allows her to go part-time — “more than the total of what I’ve earned from all my writing over the past twenty years” — was per-haps a little vague. The reason, it turns out, is that this was just a number floated by a publisher and the eventual

Eula Biss’s essays have turned

a fearless gaze on race, birth,

vaccination — and now money.

She talks to Lorien Kite about

the culture of secrecy around

what we earn and own

figure, negotiated outside the period described in the narrative, was a little less. “But because of the project, I’m happy to tell you that the advance was $650,000,” she says. “That’s for two books, so I’m only halfway through the work.”

I apologise for prying but Biss brushes aside my discomfort. “It seems to me that we have various different polite habits around talking about money, and one of them is that you never mention your salary, or that you avoid specific sums,” she says. “When I thought about, ‘Well, who does this serve? Who does this way of thinking or talking serve?’, it is always the people who have more . . . It’s in the interests of the peo-ple who have more to not talk about money, to have these silences written into our conversations and our exchanges.”

Raised near Albany, New York, the daughter of an artist and a doctor, Biss describes her parents as unconven-tional and anti-materialist. She makes herself sound like a dreamy child, most at home in the woods. But she thrived as an undergraduate at Hampshire Col-lege, Massachusetts, where the liberal ethos of self-directed learning suited Biss well enough for her to emerge from her studies with the core of her first book, The Balloonists, a work of prose

poetry published in 2002. Then came various jobs in New York and California before she arrived in the Midwest to join the University of Iowa’s well-established writing programme.

I’m interested in how Biss sees her work’s relationship to memoir and, while at pains not to disparage that form, she is very clear about this: the ideas come first, no matter how large the life experience might seem to loom. Her chief models were Joan Didion and James Baldwin, both of whom are cen-tral to the courses she now teaches at Northwestern, and she has written of being given “permission to think” by Susan Sontag, whose investigations into the language of disease in Illness as Meta-phor were an important influence on On Immunity.

Today, as her work is held up along-side that of writers such as Maggie Nel-son, Claudia Rankine and Leslie Jami-son as evidence of a revival of the essay form, does she see herself as part of a lit-erary movement? “Yes, the answer is very much so. I’m not sure whether to call it a movement — I don’t know what it is. A situation?” she says. “A great many of these essayists are women and, for me, that’s just tremendously excit-ing. And the other thing that’s hap-pened, at least in the US, is that this has suddenly become a viable commercial genre.”

What does she think is driving this renaissance of the essay? Biss wonders, following the theorist Theodor Adorno, whether it is an essential genre for polit-ical moments “that lean fascist”, in which orthodoxies are being imposed or enforced. “There’s less opportunity to be formulaic in the essay,” she says.

Continued on page 16

‘I have never been as uncomfortable with the material as putting down my own salary or what I paid for my house’

Eula Biss, photographed for the FT by Guanyu Xu

Spectrum

Nightingale:the pandemic hero we need

T he Florence Nightingale Museum in London, devoted to the

pioneering 19th-century nurse, is closing its doors, indefinitely. The museum director, David Green, describes the plan as “hibernation”; the collection will remain on site at St Thomas’s Hospital.

The timing could hardly be more ironic. Last year was Nightingale’s bicentennial. The museum had invested in a new exhibition; it opened in early March, less than a month before the UK’s long first lockdown. Celebratory events across the country had been planned, but instead Nightingale was commemorated by the decision to name new emergency hospitals after her.

As the British healthcare system strains to stay upright under the force of the second wave of Covid-19, the Nightingale hospitals are all too appropriately named. Florence Nightingale led a small team of nurses to Istanbul in 1854 to assist in the care of British soldiers fighting in the Crimean war. They were promptly overwhelmed by the sheer volume of casualties, chaotic logistics and shambolic political leadership. “This is the Kingdom of Hell,” wrote Nightingale.

But while she is most famous as a nurse, Nightingale was also a massive geek. She was the first female fellow of what became the Royal Statistical Society, and never happier than when

poring over a table of public health statistics.

For Nightingale, however, the data were not just a passion but a weapon. “Whenever I am infuriated,” she wrote to her friend, the politician Sidney Herbert, “I revenge myself with a new diagram.”

Nightingale had much to be infuriated about. Returning from the war, she led a long and arduous campaign to improve standards of public health and sanitation. She had a saintly reputation and powerful friends, but was also a woman in a man’s world, facing implacable opposition from the medical and military establishment.

In a strange forerunner to last year’s debate about herd immunity, in 1858 John Simon, the chief medical officer, argued that we should simply be taking contagious diseases such as cholera and dysentery on the chin. They were, he declared, “practically speaking, unavoidable”.

Alison Hedley, an expert in 19th-century data visualisation, says that

Nightingale’s diagrams were particularly striking at the time. Statisticians tended to present data in the form of tables, even if those tables sprawled across page after page. Nightingale understood that if she was to win an argument, she needed something more eye-catching. (After sending a report to Queen Victoria, Nightingale witheringly commented, “She may look at it because it has pictures.”)

The best-known of Nightingale’s diagrams was published in 1859, a year after Simon’s remarks. Often known as the “rose diagram”, two pale blue spirals tell a powerful two-act story of catastrophic disease in the Crimean war hospitals, followed by recovery after sanitary conditions improved. The diagram is a brilliant visual argument, and it won the day: new public health acts were passed, life expectancy soared and Simon quietly revised his opinions.

There’s a famous remark in a letter that passed between Nightingale and her ally, the great statistician William Farr: “You complain that your report would be dry. The dryer the better. Statistics should be the dryest of all reading.”

Several biographers have reported that remark as being written by Farr to Nightingale, the fusty old statistician reining in the fiery younger campaigner. But while researching my new book, which includes a chapter on Nightingale, I tracked the letter down and realised that the historical record

While she is most famous as a nurse, Florence Nightingale was also a massive geek

had become confused. The letter wasn’t from Farr to Nightingale. It was the other way round: she was telling him to play it straight.

It’s puzzling: how could Nightingale produce artfully constructed statistical arguments while admonishing William Farr to keep it dry? My guess is that she realised that the more spectacular the statistical rhetoric was, the more unimpeachable the underlying numbers needed to be.

At a time when we are surrounded by visual presentations of life-and-death data, it is a lesson. I can’t help but think of the chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, presenting in mid-September a widely scorned “projection” of what might happen if Covid-19 cases doubled every week.

We now know that Vallance’s alarming warnings were prescient. But they were thinly supported by the data available at the time, which left him all too vulnerable to critics looking for flaws in the scientific advice. Nightingale might have warned him, “The dryer the better.”

Nightingale is an icon for our times in another way. Chronically ill after her return from the war, she rarely left her bedroom. She was, nevertheless, an astonishingly productive campaigner. Her symptoms eventually faded after a quarter of a century, and she emerged to the astonishment of many.

I hope the Florence Nightingale Museum will not have to hibernate for quite so long. And that the rest of us will escape not in decades, but in weeks.

Tim Harford’s new book is ‘How To Make The World Add Up’ (UK); ‘The Data Detective’ (US)

Claire Merchlinsky

Tim Harford

Undercover economist

‘It’s in the interests of the people who have more to not talk about money’


16 ★ † FTWeekend 16 January/17 January 2021

I f you love beef — if you love it truly — you will know the best bits are not those fancy, expensive cuts of fillet or rib-eye. Keep them for amateurs and kids or oligarchs who want to

impress each other in restaurants. Things become a bit more toothsome

when a bone is involved, preferably T-shaped, but it’s the slow-cooked cuts where it gets really interesting — bris-ket, feather blade, shin. These hard-

working muscles demand a bit of effort but reward it in richness and flavour. Among these cuts, oxtail is king — and now is the time to cook it.

It is, of course, available all year round but it’s only now, when the wind is icy and we get home soaked, that we really want to cook it.

Turkey season begins with Thanks-giving in late November, peaks on Christmas Day and ends abruptly with

the last turkey sandwich/curry/pie/sha-warma (try it!). It has nothing to do with the lifecycle of these birds — they’re in season because we’ve decided they are for cultural reasons.

Likewise, the months of January and February are peak oxtail season for us. It’s in the bones, you see. The oxtail pieces want nothing more than a long, hot bath so the strands of meat can become meltingly soft and the bones can turn the cooking liquid into a rich, slick and filling broth, which is the best tonic we’ve come across to take the sting out of these biting months.

Here, Espelette salt and roasted bell peppers bring a touch of extra warmth to the broth and thin strands of pasta complete it. Boiled winter greens will go nicely on the side. Or a bowl of sharply dressed salad — even though, strictly speaking, it’s not quite salad season yet.

Recipe | Honey & Co’s Sarit Packer and Itamar

Srulovich on why this dish is the best tonic for

taking the sting out of the biting winter months

Food & Drink

claims. A keen diver, he is well aware of the problems of plastic waste, as highlighted so vividly by David Attenborough in his Blue Planet series. Even though the food-friendly PET plastic from which Navarro’s smooth, olive-green bottle is moulded has already been used once — and in general plastic has a much lower carbon footprint than single-use glass — some consumers are convinced that all plastic is evil.

In fact, there are many different forms of plastic, of which PET is arguably the most sustainable, and Navarro treasures the letter he received from Sir David congratulating him on his novel design.

The problem with plastic is not so much the material itself but how to manage it after use. According to the British Plastics Federation, about 50 per cent of all plastic in

the UK is recycled. Yet unlike glass, which can be recycled many times, plastic can be recycled effectively much less often because it degrades — though work is ongoing to improve this.

Wine in cans is becoming popular in the US, where a high proportion of all drinks is sold in cans already. They tend to be much smaller than a regular bottle and, let’s face it, there are some pretty huge disadvantages to the 75cl bottle. It’s way too much for one person, often too much for two at a single sitting, and the unit

price is far higher than a can’s, which some younger potential wine drinkers in particular find off-putting. Cans are convenient: they can easily be popped into a picnic bag or even, should we return to office life, a briefcase.

Made from steel or aluminium, they can also be recycled almost infinitely. Still, like glass, the manufacturing process is heavy on energy and resources.

Glass, so usefully inert, will surely remain the material of choice for fine wine that deserves long ageing, but for the sake of the planet we do need to look more favourably on the alternatives for that which is drunk within days or weeks of purchase — which constitutes by far the majority of all wine sold.

Borough Wines in London deserves mention for its work founding Sustainable Wine Solutions, which offers a bottle return scheme, a refillable box (a “zero-waste alternative to bag-in-box”) and what it claims are “the UK’s only 100 per cent reusable kegs”.

The latter are a fine solution for restaurants and bars — should they ever be in business again.

The glass isn’t always greener

F or many of us wine drinkers, our first conscious act towards saving the planet was to separate empty bottles

from the rest of our rubbish. It made us feel pretty good, even though most of us were — and continue to be — shockingly ignorant about what then happens to them.

Today, few really understand the relative merits of different forms of packaging for wine in terms of sustainability. And this is hardly surprising, since even those whose job it is to study such things admit that the whole subject is hugely complex and definitive statistics are extremely difficult to come by.

To the average consumer, a glass bottle may seem virtuous because they generally assume that it’s both recycled and recyclable. Hence when the European glass manufacturers association, FEVE, commissioned a consumer research project last year involving 10,000 15-minute interviews in 13 European countries, it was able to boast that 91 per cent of interviewees agreed glass is the best packaging material for wine. (Brits are the most sceptical about glass, apparently — only 82 per cent of us agreed.)

On the strength of this research, Europe’s glass manufacturers have come up with a new hallmark on bottles that, as far as I can make out, merely confirms that the bottle you have in your hand is indeed made of glass, even if the design of the logo vaguely suggests recyclability.

The official online presentation of this innovation last November skipped lightly over the massive carbon footprint of producing and transporting glass bottles, the biggest factors in any winemaker’s carbon audit. A greener sort of furnace, which relies more on electric power than fossil fuels, is being piloted in Germany over the next few years, yet it will require considerable effort and investment for bottle manufacturers to reach FEVE’s ambition of carbon neutrality by 2050.

One of the keys to this is, of course, recycling rates. The figure FEVE likes to quote is that Europe’s “average glass collection for recycling rate” is 76 per cent (which it would like to see reach 90 per cent by 2030), though it acknowledges that not all of this will ultimately be recycled.

In the UK, each local authority is in charge of contracting waste management, which means that standards and practices can vary enormously from place to place. Overall, only about 50 per cent of

all glass containers in the UK are recycled, compared with well over 90 per cent in Switzerland and Scandinavia. (Swiss citizens are incentivised by a combination of free glass collection points and a tax on bags for general rubbish.) The British Standards Institution, which sets national standards for everything from financial services to medical devices, would like to see recycling protocols harmonised.

Recycling bottles is complicated. They come in all sorts of colours which have to be separated from each other, while labels and foils have to be removed. The farsighted Torres winemaking family in Catalonia is pressing for a standard wine bottle that could be recycled and reused anywhere in the world — or at least anywhere in Europe to begin with.

Yet this would require EU legislation, admits Miguel Torres,

which seems a very distant possibility to me, when so many wine producers choose to use bottle design and weight — especially weight — to try to carve out a distinctive identity for their wines. (It was notable in a recent online forum on the future of wine that the greatest opprobrium was directed towards those who use heavy bottles unnecessarily.)

Increased awareness of sustainability issues has also resulted in a flurry of new designs for wine packaging. These include a replica of a standard bottle from Frugalpac, which is made from 94 per cent recycled paperboard (and “a food-grade liner”) that can in turn be recycled.

One of the most energetic and thoughtful innovators on this side of the Atlantic has been Santiago Navarro, chief executive of Garçon Wines. He has designed an almost flat wine bottle that can fit through a letter box and is much lighter, considerably more space-saving and less fragile than the traditional glass bottle. If the option of an active oxygen scavenger is applied, the wine will stay fresh for more than 12 months before opening, he

Jancis Robinson

Wine

Leon Edler

Beef it up Patricia Niven

Serves 4Ingredients 1 oxtail cut into large chunks (about

1.5kg)1 tbs Espelette salt, or 1 tbs salt mixed

with ½ tsp chilli flakes2 large bell peppers, about 350g2 large onions, about 250g4 garlic cloves, peeled and sliced1 fresh red chilli2 bay leaves1 tsp paprika800ml water250g vermicelli, or broken spaghettini

Method 1. Season the oxtail pieces with the chilli salt and rest for at least an hour and up to 24 hours.

2. Heat your oven to 200C (fan assist).

Oxtail with red pepper and vermicelli

Place the pieces of oxtail in one layer in a deep roasting tray and roast for 15 minutes. Remove, flip and roast for another 10 minutes, or until the pieces are really dark golden all over.

3. While the oxtail is roasting, roughly dice peppers and onions and slice the garlic and the chilli. Once the meat has roasted, add all vegetables, mix well to coat the pieces with any juices that have formed in the tin and return to the oven to roast for another 10 minutes. Meanwhile, boil a kettle.

4. Remove from the oven. Add the bay

leaves, sprinkle the paprika and pour over 800ml of boiling water. Cover and return to the oven for one hour. Remove, baste carefully and flip the oxtail pieces in the liquid that has formed. Re-cover and reduce the oven heat to 180C. Return the covered tray to the oven and

cook for another hour. Remove, flip the pieces again and add the vermicelli to the liquid that has formed. Mix to coat. Add a little extra boiling water if the pasta seems very dry but don’t cover with water, just moisten. Re-cover and return to the oven for the last 15 minutes. Remove, mix and serve.

A little later, she frames it in the most universal terms. “When we see some-one putting their life in relationship to history, thinking through their life in conversation with some other system of thought, I do feel like it’s a map or a tem-plate,” she says. “The service offered is that when that work is done well, it helps you, the reader, think through your own experience — even if your own experience is vastly different from the author’s. You don’t have to share the author’s experience, you’re just walking the lines of their map.”

I often thought of Biss’s On Immunity over the past year, as slightly specialised virological terms that I last encountered there became everyday buzzwords. We are talking in late December and Biss has been home schooling her son, now 11, since March. “It has really taken a toll on my writing time and my produc-tivity as a writer,” she says. “I know this is true for women across the world — there are huge dents being made in peo-ple’s careers because of the time that’s been lost.” As someone who has written


Biss at home near Chicago. In ‘Having and Being Had’, she writes frankly about finance, revealing her own salary, household income and the price of her houseGuanyu Xu

about anti-vaxxers, is she optimistic about the take-up of vaccines against Covid-19 in the US in the months ahead? “Well, it’s been mishandled,” she says. “The communication around the vac-cine has been so mishandled that I think a lot of damage has been done. That is not to say that the vaccine development itself has been mishandled, I don’t know

of any evidence that it has. But even just the naming of the vaccine development project, ‘Operation Warp Speed’ . . . that is not going to inspire confidence in peo-ple. People want to know that care has been taken and that every precaution has been taken.”

For Biss, the big exception in a year of tight lockdown came following the kill-ing of George Floyd in the summer, when Black Lives Matter protests swept America. She participated in these with

trip to Laxton in Nottinghamshire, home to Britain’s last surviving feudal open-field system, where farmers still cultivate strips. “I thought it would be like a living history museum,” she says. “But that is not what’s going on in Lax-ton, it’s not a demonstration — it’s peo-ple who are dedicated to the continuity of a way of life.”

Biss accepts that Having and Being Had is a less polemical book than its prede-cessors, focused not so much on articu-lating alternatives as on unpicking the contradictions she observes in her own life. Even so, there’s an intensity to her gaze that any of us would find daunting.

Ultimately, the question for Biss was whether she could sustain her values in a world she views as hostile to them.

“Capitalism doesn’t care about rela-tionships between people, it’s not a sys-tem that is built to forward or enrich relationships,” she says. “My most major form of resistance is to privi-lege relationships with people over other things.”

Lorien Kite is the FT’s deputy Life & Arts editor. Eula Biss’s ‘Having and Being Had’ is published this month by Faber & Faber

‘It’s in the interests of the people who have more to not talk about money’taken down in the night.” She feels hopeful about the movement. “I think it’s just incredible,” says Biss. “It fills me with a sense of the wheels turning in a new direction, and makes me excited for my son’s generation too — you know, I dedicated Notes from No Man’s Land to my son, he was born just a few months after it was finished, and as I was finish-ing that book, I did feel dismay about the world he was being born into.”

How has the debate changed in that time? “This sense of racism being a white problem, caused and promoted and continued by white people, that really was not in the air in any main-stream way when I was writing Notes . . . The white liberal position then was that the best way to not be rac-ist was not to acknowledge race ever, to never speak of it, to be ‘race-blind’. We’ve shifted far from that, and to the point where I think there are things in that book that now read as, to my eyes, very fumbling and naive.”

Biss is already immersed in the sec-ond part of her two-book project, a more outward-facing, internationally focused collection of essays on land ownership. She tells me about a recent

‘The house felt enormous to me. I felt upset about it, like we have too much, we clearly have too much’

her family locally and speaks of a trip to Atlanta, Georgia, where friends of hers were campaigning for the removal of a Confederate monument. “I was taking photographs because I couldn’t believe what was written on it, phrases like ‘These men were of a covenant keeping race.’ The next day, it was gone — it was


16 January/17 January 2021 ★ 17

A fter a near decade of cultural hegemony, social media now finds itself unstuck. The exile of Donald Trump from

Twitter this month may have seen the platform finally acknowledging responsibility for its users’ content, but for many the prevarication over the rights and wrongs of online censorship has been lamentably slow. There’s a widespread disillusionment about social media influence, a general acceptance that it’s feeding a malaise.

The “digital detox” has become a well-worn phrase in recent years as people have attempted to prise their eyeballs away from the more addictive platforms. Now there seems an appetite for quitting it for good. Earlier this month, Bottega Veneta, the Kering-owned fashion house and darling of the style cognoscenti, kissed goodbye to 2.5m Instagram followers without warning and deleted its entire social media footprint in one stroke. And in Los Angeles, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex have launched Archewell, their not-for-profit compassion initiative, amid speculation that they have dumped their social media feeds.

For Meghan and Harry, who have more than 10m Instagram followers on @sussexroyal but have not posted anything since last March, the virtual world has become intolerable. Meghan claimed that in 2019 she was “the most trolled person in the entire world, male or female”, and that the couple has suffered an “almost unsurvivable” volley of abuse.

Certainly, in the inflammatory world of current politics the tenor of engagement has reached a screech. Even relatively benign platforms such as Instagram have become hazardous with conflict. Sensitive topics, compressed into memes and slogans, have become fresh ammunition and everything from fiction to Vogue covers has been co-opted to fight the culture war. Cancel culture may be part of an ongoing social evolution, but it can be a

expostulating in the Netflix documentary Pretend It’s a City with other Lebophiles on Instagram. Or swap sea shanties on TikTok with the financial opinion editor of the FT.

It will take more than a few hateful messages before I attempt my dopamine fast. However, there is something in the Bottega decision that gives me pause for thought. I admire their drift away from virtual messaging, and the recognition that creativity should not be expressed in squares. In a press pack to accompany its latest show, the designer sent out a vinyl record and an assortment of material in order to communicate a 21st-century interpretation of the Victorian-era salon vibe. Smaller, quieter, with a focus on the physical.

Bottega is one of a clutch of brands, and influencers, who have tapped the general craving for a more intimate exchange. Such analogue objects as a pen and paper, books and records have taken on a luxurious new lustre in this sterile pandemic world. While our working lives are still lassoed to video conferencing and laptops, it has become a peculiar indulgence, for instance, to pick up the telephone. Closer, more personable — and, perhaps cynically, far easier to retract.

Then again, Bottega doesn’t need social media. It has a wealth of highly engaged fan sites doing a far more effective job of promoting — and selling — the brand’s wares. Maybe that’s the answer. In order to protect ourselves from vitriol, we should simply outsource our social media selves to someone else. Or maybe, to further still our anger, we could swap identities in a kind of epic “share the mic” experience with our social media foes. Rather than walk a mile in our enemy’s shoes, we could instead share shoe-fies, try to understand their viewpoints and learn TikTok dances with their friends. It would be excruciating, but it might stop everyone from shouting. And it would sure make us less mean.

[email protected]

T he first television news report I can remember with some clarity was the King’s Cross fire of 1987. Going over old clips for this

column, it is the near-Pathé News quaintness of the coverage that stands out. The reporter’s voice (you never see her) is crisp and imparts almost nothing that is not a fact. There is no vox pop or third-party talking head. Bar a glimpse of flowers at the end, the images are there to inform and not simper. All is speed and compression in this time-pressed bulletin: another appears between a Viennetta advert and a rerun of Ordinary People.

I know now, as I did not at age five, that an era was ending. Britain would soon get its first round-the-clock news channel, with all the ephemera it takes to fill one. At the same time, the Federal Communications Commission scrapped the “fairness doctrine”, freeing US broadcasters to editorialise. Throw in some cable upstarts and you have the bagginess, the histrionics, of today’s TV, where all news is BREAKING, and each anchor a monologue merchant. It is hard to convince the young how terse and inscrutable these desk-bound enigmas once were.

The debasement of TV has done far more than social media to pollute civic life. I don’t only (or even mainly) mean Fox News, that province of bad faith and interchangeable haircuts. Nor is it right to both-sides this and blame the stupor of liberal self-love on other channels. What I have in mind is a subtler loss of rigour, a widening of what counts as “news”, even among

Supreme Court justices (a proxy measure of bipartisanship) disappeared. Newt Gingrich broke through. The best guess is that unipolarity, the fall of communism, cost the US: the absence of an enemy freed Americans to fight themselves. But even if we turn from the geo-structural to mere media for a culprit, it cannot be Facebook or Twitter. Each was still a decade or more from inception.

As Europe’s intra-Christian wars followed the printing press, and fascism trailed radio, perhaps the strife of our day is traceable to a new means of communication. The error is to cite the most modish one. Just as likely, we are still processing an expansion of TV news that is not that much older.

I have spent enough time in and around those studios to be complicit but also to know that no harm is meant. TV producers are bound by the imperative to fill time. The contrived debates, the tendentious guests from campaign groups, the “engagement” with viewers: the aim here is to populate a schedule, not to cretinise or incite. The terminal point of this ravenousness for content is the newspaper review, in which journalists sift through journalism on a journalistic platform. In a world of discrete bulletins at 6pm and 10pm, none of this fluff was viable. In ours, it proliferates. TV news established the idea that what matters about an event is its contested meaning, not its core of facts. Mark Zuckerberg just monetised the contest.

[email protected]

those with no agenda. Reporting can still be heroically brave. But what used to be a bone-dry recitation of the facts is too often padded out with interpretation, contention and the quest for a story’s “meaning” (leave that nonsense to columnists). Were the phrase not taken by another medium, we might call it Impressionism.

It is hard to sell the public on the sanctity of facts when they account for such a small share of broadcast time. A change in the nature of TV is a change in the mental habits of a nation. According to the Pew Research Center, 18 per cent of US adults cite social media as their main source of

political news. Those who name TV, whether network, cable or local, amount to 45 per cent. Ofcom reports similarly one-sided figures for the UK. Because my trade is part of that minority (Twitter is a big WhatsApp group for journalists) it tends to overrate the psychic hold of these platforms on the masses, even as the masses use them for Neymar clips and side-on gym selfies.

Nor does the chronology of real-world events implicate social media as the problem. If there was an identifiable rupture in public civility, it was the turn of the 1990s. That was when unanimous confirmations of

It is hard to sell the public on the sanctity of facts when they account for so little broadcast time

“Beneath the roof of sleeping leaves the dreams of trees unfold,” sings Tolkien’s Treebeard in The Lord of the Rings. For photographer Jeroen Toirkens and his film-making collaborator Jelle Brandt Corstius the forest doesn’t just dream but tells stories too: the Dutch duo have travelled together across the taiga of northern Europe, Asia and North America listening to the trees and those who live among them as they face threats from logging, wildfires and climate change.

The boreal zone contains roughly a third of the world’s trees — including vast numbers of its pines, firs and spruces — yet only around 10 per cent of it is protected. Toirkens and Corstius’ exhibition offers up the beauty but also the vulnerability of these species, forced like Tolkien’s Ents to fight for their survival.

Chris Allnutt

‘Borealis — Life in the Woods’ is showing at Fotomuseum Den Haag from January 20 to June 13

SNAPSHOT ‘Boreal tree # 25’ (2017) byJeroen Toirkens

Should we quitsocial media, too?

Jo Ellison

Trending

Chess solution 2402 1 Qg5! and if Qxg5 2 Rxe8 mate. Better but insufficient is 1...g6 2 Qh6! gxf5 3 Rg4+! fxg4 4 Bxh7+ Kh8 5 Bg6+ Kg8 6 Qh7+ Kf8 6 Qxf7 mate.

The FT Weekend Festival is back, with a new Spring digital edition, on March 18-20. Once again, we will take on the big ideas and themes of 2021 from the agenda of the new US administration to life after Covid-19, from the debate over “cancel culture” to the countdown to the autumn’s critical climate change summit. Suffusing the three days

will be a hopeful spirit of renewal in the worlds of arts and literature as well as politics and economics. And adding fizz to the programme, we will have interactive wine and cocktail tastings to be enjoyed from the comfort of your home. For passes and programme: ftweekendfestival.com

FT Weekend Festival: Spring Edition

How TV news de-civilised us

Janan Ganesh

Citizen of nowhere

brutal battleground. And from being the ne plus ultra of modern communi-cation, our feeds have become the manifestation of a toxic status quo.

Worse. When it’s not being mean and spiteful it makes us miserable instead. Numerous studies — and popular documentaries such as The Social Dilemma — have established that social media can precipitate depression, engender feelings of low self-esteem and encourage sleep disorders. Scientists and behavioural psychologists have long entreated us to quit. One study of Facebook users found that those who stopped engaging felt a distinct deceleration in their feelings of anger, depression, loneliness and anxiety after quitting Facebook. And that was after just one week.

Which belies the argument that social media can serve as a proxy family, and better connect us, especially during this pandemic when real-life encounters have been so hard.

But while there’s every evidence to suggest that getting off social media would make me happier, more productive and a great deal less anxious, am I quitting? Absolutely not. For all their evils, Instagram and Twitter have still been my comfort blanket throughout this ghastly period. They’ve also been an essential tool for working, a constant source of inspiration, an amazing network system and a means for getting news. Besides, without social media, I might not have caught The Governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger, exhorting the sanctity of American democracy while wielding his Conan the Barbarian sword. Nor would I have been able to share excerpts of Fran Lebowitz

For all their evils, Twitter and Instagram have been my comfort blanket during this ghastly period

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18 ★ 16 January/17 January 2021

JANUARY 16 2021 Section:Weekend Time: 14/1/2021 - 14:01 User: john.lee Page Name: WKD16, Part,Page,Edition: WIN, 18, 1

Saturday 16 January / Sunday 17 January 2021

most of these issues had far more to do with maintenance and policy than any failure of design.

By the mid-1980s Brutalism was over and, although some architects have referred to it in admiring sideways glances, it has never truly returned. Yet here was Trump, in the dying embers of his presidency, trying to stop Brutalist buildings being built. So expressive is that name, it seems, that it has become a cipher for everything a populist’s audi-ence might not like. Brutalism is, as it has been for decades, a soft target — albeit one wrapped in reinforced concrete.

The US president knows there aren’t many Brutalist fans among his base. In his executive order, it says that before selecting an architectural firm or design style for a new building, the General Services Administration (GSA) should seek input from the building’s future users and from the “general public”, which it defines as “members of the pub-lic who are not: artists, architects, engi-neers, art or architecture critics, instruc-tors or professors of art or architecture”. There is a lot of truth in the long-running joke that Brutalism’s loudest champions — and many of the residents of London’s most famous Brutalist estates, including the Barbican and Keeling House — are all architects themselves.

In recent years, many of Brutalism’s best examples have already been demolished, from Portsmouth’s Tricorn Centre, a spiralling mass of sculptural concrete, to the striking inverted ziggu-rat of Birmingham’s Central Library.

Continued on page 2

D onald Trump might now forever be associated with classical architecture, just not necessarily in the way he would have wanted. The

image of rioters storming the Capitol building in Washington, DC, this month, snapping selfies and stealing souvenirs, will be the indelible final memory of his tempestuous presidency. But one of his last acts in office was to issue an execu-tive order that new federal buildings must be built in a classical style. What they should not be, it specified, is Bru-talist. This is how it was defined:

“Brutalist means the style of archi-tecture that grew out of the early 20th-century Modernist movement that is characterised by a massive and block-like appearance with a rigid geometric style and large-scale use of exposed poured concrete.”

For a big builder, Trump seems to have misunderstood the moment. Bru-talism has been over as a way of building for about 40 years. No new US govern-ment buildings are in danger of being Brutalist. Perhaps he was thinking of the J Edgar Hoover Building, the FBI HQ a block away from the Trump Interna-tional Hotel. The chunky concrete building has always been unpopular.

Not only is Brutalism no longer an applicable style, but hundreds of its best buildings are in danger of being lost for-ever through neglect, ignorance and laziness. Many have been demolished or are currently threatened. Trump’s exec-utive order ingrains (at least temporar-ily) a prejudice against modern archi-tecture’s most maligned moment, a uto-

(From top) Villa Van Wassenhove, by the Belgian architect Juliaan Lampens; Robin Hood Gardens, social housing in east London, now being demolished; the ‘mesmerising ruins’ of Giuseppe Perugini’s Casa Sperimentale, near Rome © Jessy van der Werff; Inigo Bujedo Aguirre/VIEW; © French+Tye

Architecture | President

Trump recently clamped

down on it — and Brutalist

buildings worldwide are

endangered or lie derelict.

Edwin Heathcote explains

why this most maligned of

styles is worth preserving

Beauty and the Brutalists

pian approach which aimed to reconcile the monumental with modernity. The housing estates and libraries, town halls and theatres, parking garages and apartment blocks that were the fruits of this concrete explosion are being lost at an alarming rate, in the US and beyond.

However, in the midst of this vis-ceral destruction and loss, Brutalism has been enjoying a revival of interest in other media. There has been a cas-cade of books, tea towels, bookends, mugs, maps and models made as gifts for Brutalist groupies and a stream of images on social media featuring tower blocks, bleak former Soviet hotels and striking Yugoslav war memorials, the previously unloved and often now decrepit concrete mon-uments of late Modernism.

The word Brutalism has recently become a catch-all for almost any Mod-ernist architecture, at least anything in concrete, but the first houses described as Brutalist are not at all what the description has come to signify.

The Villa Göth in Uppsala, Sweden, designed by Bengt Edman and Lennart Holm in 1949, is a friendly-looking brick house with a nice, white-painted timber porch and balcony. The Sugden House in Watford, designed by Alison and Peter Smithson five years later, is simi-larly unthreatening, a brick box with a pitched roof — it even has timber beams on the ceilings. I suspect most people would be hard pressed to distinguish it from the bland 1960s brick houses that litter the edges of every UK city.

It was the critic, academic and ludi-crous self-promoter Reyner Banham

(1922-1988) who promoted the use of the word so that Brutalism became more widely associated with the con-crete blockbusters we’re familiar with. Influenced by Swiss architect Le Cor-busier’s designs and mixed with the remains of ruined German wartime bunkers, Brutalism (derived, after all from the French béton brut, or “raw con-crete”) became an architecture of the public realm, buildings for the people.

Its most enduring landmarks, such as London’s Southbank Centre — designed in the late 1960s by the architects of the

Greater London Council, then the big-gest practice in the world — the Barbi-can and New York’s Whitney Museum (designed by Marcel Breuer), were almost fortified in appearance, citadels of culture and housing resisting the city but also revelling in renewing it.

There were Brutalist theatres, churches, schools, cultural centres, town halls and, most of all, housing. All were designed to give dignity, solidity and urban presence to a newly educated, suddenly more affluent working class. It didn’t last. As Brutal-ism was reaching its apogee in the late 1960s and 1970s it was already being derided as monstrously inhuman, out of scale, ugly and dangerous — though

As Brutalism was reaching its apogee it was already being derided as monstrous and dangerous

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Poppy love Robin Lane Fox on sowing seeds of hope — GARDENS PAGE 10

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House Home

(From top) The home of architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha in São Paulo exemplified his idea that a home was a public space, a microcosm of a city; the demolition of Birmingham’s Central Library with its ‘striking inverted ziggurat’ © Leonardo Finotti; Paul Pickard/Alamy Stock Photo

Miracles with a paintbrush

We have just moved into a new home and are considering what colours to paint the walls. It seems a lot of people on my street are going for deep, gloomy colours these days. What do you think the colours of 2021 should be?

Last February, I declared purple and peach the hot wall colours for 2020. In fact, I ended up using peach quite liberally at the hotel I have been decorating in Paris. But I also stated that choosing a paint colour is a deeply personal decision, and I stand by this. When it comes to your own home, there really are no right or wrong answers. I advocate following your instincts and not worrying about what is perceived as popular.

Pantone’s colours of 2021 were announced recently: a very cheerful bright yellow called Illuminating, and Ultimate Grey. Pantone maintains that “these colours convey a message of strength and hopefulness that is both enduring and uplifting”. The yellow I can get behind: it’s a good one, clear and joyful like early Cornish daffodils. The grey, on the other hand . . . I’m not sure that I would call this an uplifting colour. It says prison cell to me.

Now that we are in the middle of another lockdown, many of us are pondering what miracles we can achieve at home with a paintbrush and

a toolbox. High-end paint sales at Mylands and Farrow & Ball surged after the first lockdown in March. I am on the hunt for a new studio space here in the Cotswolds, and this may present an interesting opportunity. Naturally, it will depend on what I can find — the architecture, the light and so on — but what colours am I craving?

I still love those we chose for our cottage in the summer of 2018, but they are generally either fairly dark and rich (grassy olive, deep mustard) or dusty and pale (lilac, plaster pink, sky blue). They are all rather bold colours, I would say, but not particularly intense. Our guest bathroom, however, remains a favourite room because of its searing arsenic walls, ceiling and woodwork. I would like to continue this idea with a punchy studio: walls in a shocking pink or marigold.

As I will only be working in this new space in the daytime, I won’t have to worry about how a lemon or fuchsia room will function in the evening. But this is something you should consider. We painted our sitting room in London shocking pink a few years ago and had to repaint it a few days later because in the evenings, with table lamps on, we were living inside a highlighter pen. Not even the combined efforts of sunglasses and

paracetamol could provide relief. Think about using bright hues in a

clever way: smaller spaces such as loos can certainly take them. Patrick Baty’s Papers and Paints ranges include many fabulously vivid shades. I like the look of Lemon and Plum from the company’s marvellous 1960s selection.

The colour dial doesn’t always want to be turned up to 11. Milkier, subtler shades are intriguing too. I am never into chilly colours — cool blues and such — and besides, this year we need a bit of extra cocooning, and warmer shades can provide this. I am rather into the idea of a new workspace with walls painted to look like overly buttery hollandaise. Little Greene’s Carys, described as a “classic Regency colour”, might do the trick. I like the idea of pale, minty avocado, too — see Little Greene’s Cupboard Green. Or how about something just a little

I keep returning to the Regency era. John Soane’s zesty yellow drawing room has provided much inspiration

punchier? I am often drawn to limy chartreuses, such as Edward Bulmer’s Olympian Green (wonderful name), which would be a glorious backdrop for brown furniture and contrast beautifully with white woodwork.

Throughout my own search, I keep returning to the Regency era. Sir John Soane’s zesty yellow drawing room has provided much inspiration (pictured). Early 19th-century colours — lilacs and pale yellows — make up one of my favourite palettes, and come with some rather fascinating backstories, too. Think of Puce, the colour of 1805: the name refers to the colour of coagulated blood found inside fleas (puces).

Green is a favourite colour, but my last studio had olive walls and our country sitting room recalls ferns and vines. I can’t do another green space. Or can I? I’ve become a bit obsessed with Pomona Green — a completely new one on me. Regency interiors were all about classical flamboyance. Pomona was the Roman goddess of the orchards and the apple, naturally, was her favourite fruit. Pomona is apple green with a more romantic name.

So let’s embrace the Regency this year: I’ll agree with Pantone that daffodil yellow is an excellent, cheerful choice for 2021, but I’ll replace Prison Grey with my new zingy find: Pomona Green. Yes, that’s two punchy choices, but gosh knows, we need them.

If you have a question for Luke about design and stylish living, email him at [email protected]. Follow him on Instagram @lukeedwardhall

Luke Edward Hall

Questions of taste

never quite went away in São Paulo and still influences its contemporary archi-tecture. The architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha told me once this was because, as “a postcolonial” country, “we are condemned to be modern”. In 1966, he completed a pair of houses in São Paulo for himself and his sister and they per-fectly illustrate his idea that a home was a public space, a microcosm of a city. Open and flowing spaces are framed by powerful concrete mem-branes with even the work surfaces and desks cast in the material.

His contemporary, friend and fellow communist Vilanova Artigas created some of the best buildings of the mod-ern age, including the FAU-USP Archi-tecture School (1969), one of the vanish-ingly few buildings that genuinely moved me, a gut-punch of architectural brilliance in an open, expansive and uplifting space. Past students have since told me the school was cold and imprac-tical, albeit still beloved — a good meta-phor for Brutalism itself.

Photographer Simon Phipps’ new book Brutal North covers the plight of Brutalist buildings in northern England using stark black-and-white images, and the remarkable success of publisher Blue Crow’s Brutalist maps might seem to point to a future in which this once-most-maligned of architectures has

been newly appreciated. An exhibition that opened in October, featuring the eye-wateringly brilliant houses of Bel-gian Brutalist Juliaan Lampens at the Vlaams Architecture Institute, may pique a little more interest in one of the style’s less familiar protagonists.

Yet we continue being careless with brilliant buildings which might have had a great future almost every week. Currently under threat of demolition are Derby’s Assembly Rooms, a serious, urbane building of brick and concrete, Dunelm House in Durham, an elegant cascade of concrete with a slender bridge on the river Wear, Kenzo Tange’s brilliantly eccentric Kuwait embassy in Tokyo and Tao Gofer’s inventively piled-up Sirius building in Sydney.

Brutalism has shown a capacity to rep-resent radically different things in differ-ent places — and often radically different things to different people in the same places. We have seemingly regained our respect (if not always affection) for the weight and commitment of Brutalist architecture to the creation of a better and more public shared future through building. In the UK, it might stand for a lost dream of generous housing for all and commitment to culture, while in São Paulo or Abidjan or it might represent a postcolonial confidence. In eastern Europe, it might equally evoke nostalgia or provoke unease.

Trump’s condemnation may well pro-voke some to reassess it — if he hates it then it can’t be all bad. But Brutalism always has the capacity to carry meaning through form, sometimes, ironically, when it is at its most neglected and for-lorn, the rain-stained ruins of a dream of a Modernist world that never arrived. It is an architecture that creates charis-matic space and leaves beautiful remains, sometimes almost unbearably ugly, sometimes shocking, sometimes sublime — but always interesting.

Edwin Heathcote is the FT’s architecture critic

Golden Lane Estate, City of London, £425,000A studio apartment in Crescent House, available through The Modern House.

Brutalist homes for sale in London

The Barbican, City of London, £1.6mA three-bedroom flat on the 17th floor of Cromwell Tower. Through Hamilton Brooks.

Alexandra & Ainsworth Estate, St John’s Wood, £350,000A one-bedroom apartment in Rowley Way, available through The Modern House.

There was Bertrand Goldberg’s beauti-ful Prentice Women’s Hospital in Chi-cago, a cluster of concrete cylinders on an unlikely slender base; Paul Rudolph’s Shoreline Apartments in Buffalo, and John Johansen’s tough-as-an-armadillo Mechanic Theatre in Baltimore. Hun-dreds of others across the world are endangered or derelict.

Much has been written, from a social as well as an architectural view, about the loss of landmark social housing com-plexes such as Alison and Peter Smith-son’s Robin Hood Gardens in east Lon-don or Thamesmead (used as a location for Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange when it was newly built). But less has been said about private Brutalist works.

A couple of years ago, on my way back to the airport in Rome, I asked the cab driver to take a short diversion so I could look at the astonishing Casa Sperimen-tale in Fregene. From the late 1960s to the mid-1970s, architect Giuseppe Peru-gini and his family experimented with ideas about the house as a kind of adventure playground. Its mesmerising ruins, the red-painted steel and the con-crete spheres, all now graffitied, sit awk-wardly between past and future.

Similarly atmospheric and haunt-

ingly overgrown is St Peter’s Seminary in Cardross, Scotland. There were plans to turn this brilliant building by Glasgow Brutalists Gillespie, Kidd and Coia into an arts centre but they fell through, leaving one of Britain’s most charis-matic ruins. Another tragically neglected Scottish masterpiece is textile designer Bernat Klein’s studio in Galash-iels. Designed by the brilliant though underrated Peter Womersley, it recently featured in The See-Through House, Shel-ley Klein’s moving memoir of growing up in the neighbouring house (also designed by Womersley).

Although Brutalism certainly started in northern and western Europe, it really took off in the east. Many of the most inventive and ambitious Brutalist complexes were conceived in the former Soviet Union and its satellite states and, after the collapse of the bloc, their close association with the old regime led to hundreds of startling structures being neglected or deserted.

The crumbling Yugoslav Brutalist “Spomenik”, or war memorial, has become a widely shared image on social media but there is much more. Take the trade union resort at Bankya in Bul-garia. Planned in the mid-1970s, Bulgar-ian leader Todor Zhivkov took a liking to it and requisitioned it as a residence. After the regime changed, it became a hotel and, allegedly, a brothel. Designed by Pavel Nikolov, it is an astonishing ensemble with pierced facades, sculp-tural op-art reliefs and wavy balconies. Gevorg Kochar’s 1969 Writers’ House (an extension to an earlier hotel of his — he was exiled to Siberia in between jobs), cantilevered precariously over Lake Sevan in Armenia, is another neglected wonder, crumbling away.

What started in Europe arguably reached its zenith in Brazil. Brutalism


Beauty and Brutalism

Brutalism carries meaning through form, sometimes when it is at its most neglected and forlorn

Inside

Beachy keenProperties for sale with sun and sand on their doorstepPage 6

Never dull DulwichThe villagey south London enclave is also close to the cityPage 4

Bookshelf starsMeet Stephen Foster, who curates the books on view in filmsPage 8

Robin Lane FoxNow is the time to make a seed plan for a happier seasonPage 10

House & Home Unlocked

FT subscribers can sign up for our weekly email newsletter containing guides to the global property market, distinctive architecture, interior design and gardens. Go to ft.com/newsletters

Nip mud in the budAccessories for the home to help keep it tidy after muddy walksPage 7

Ercol chairs may well be familiar to people who lived through the period of emerging wealth in Britain during the 1960s, particularly if they’d shopped for furniture at, say, Heal’s. The range (of which that pictured was among the earliest) was, however, begun in the austerity years of the second world war.

Ercol was then based in the Buckinghamshire town of High Wycombe, a traditional home of the UK chair trade thanks to having the beechwood Chilterns on its doorstep.

The company’s founder Lucian Ercolani — his grandfather had made picture frames for the Uffizi gallery in Florence — came to England in 1898. He worked for some years with the Gommes company, later known for the mid-century G Plan furniture range.

Ercolani had gone his own way in 1920 and established Ercol as a leading manufacturer by the time of the second world war. Much of its capacity was adapted to the war effort, with such products as tent pegs and ammunition boxes.

The company joined the government’s Utility Furniture

Scheme. This aimed to make items with the optimum

use of labour — with so many workers

The home in 50 objects #26: the Ercol chair

away at war — and strategic materials (Whitehall had no idea how much timber the country had as the war began and had to quickly organise a tree census).

Before the scheme, British furniture had come in for strong criticism from some designers. It was too complicated, dark and heavy, they complained, with the industry stuck in the belief that customers were unimpressed by anything “light on French polish”.

Ercol’s chairs emerged from a time of constrained construction into an era of simpler and lighter Modernist design, increasingly popular in the 1960s and 1970s.

For what became its classic range, Ercol took the standard Windsor chair design, familiar to the High Wycombe area for 300 years. The legs and back are attached into the seat, unlike the conventional chair back, which runs from the ground to the top of the chair.

Ercol took beech, relatively easy to bend, for the legs and back of the chair. It used elm, strong and with an attractive grain, for the base. (Both have since given way to ash.)

The company, now based in Princes Risborough, Bucks, still makes Windsors with recommended retail prices in the £350-£950 range. Sellers of vintage Ercols might expect to make more.

Peter Chapmanmuseumofthehome.org.uk



House Home

Germany property As rising values price out locals, efforts to become Europe’s biggest financial centre after London could be set back by the pandemic. ByAlice Kantor

A fter being awarded a gener-ous promotion, 52-year-old finance professor Claus Rerup is looking to buy his first home in Frankfurt.

Finding a place in Holzhausenviertel, an attractive inner-city neighbourhood where he currently rents a two-bed-room, 100 sq m apartment for €2,400 a month, is proving difficult though. “Housing is really becoming a problem in Frankfurt,” he says. “It may not be London prices but it’s not uncommon for a place to go for €10,000 a sq m.”

Low interest rates and a high level of pent-up demand from renters waiting years to buy a place they can afford have meant that prices for flats have kept rising in the past year, despite the pandemic’s hit to the economy and people’s livelihoods.

In the third quarter of 2020 prices for new apartments averaged €7,200 per sq m, up 8 per cent from the same quarter of 2019, according to Bulwiengesa, a real estate consultancy. Since 2014, prices for all apartments have been growing at about 10 per cent per year, according to the property company JLL.

Such has been the pace of recent growth that, last year, UBS ranked Frankfurt as having the second-most overvalued housing market of any major city in the world, behind fellow German city Munich, according to its Global Real Estate Bubble Index.

(Above) Frankfurt attracts foreign wealth; (below) a one-bedroom apartment, €969,000 through Engel & Völkers — Evelyn Dragan; AFP via Getty Images

As one of Europe’s biggest financial centres, Frankfurt attracts foreign workers and high-earning employees. Developers have also taken advantage of economic growth to invest in the upper segment of the market, contrib-uting to house price inflation, UBS says. But, a correction phase will likely emerge when state subsidies linked to Covid-19 are withdrawn and pressure on income increases from recession.

In recent years, a lot of investment has come from overseas, says Sebastian Grimm, an analyst and valuation direc-tor at JLL. Low interest rates and the idea that Germany’s residential sector would bring in reliable yields throughout the pandemic has been a bigger factor than Brexit, he adds.

After the UK voted to leave the EU in 2016, some in Frankfurt predicted the city would become Europe’s next finance capital after London. Frankfurt

Main Finance, the city’s lobby group, predicted that 10,000 jobs would relo-cate there over a period of eight years. More recently, local bank Helaba esti-mated that 3,500 finance jobs will have been created in Frankfurt by the end of 2021, with the Bundesbank calculating that non-German banks could move €675bn to the country this year.

But the pandemic could be a setback. In Frankfurt, a report by Helaba in October found that coronavirus could cost 2,000 banker jobs by the end of 2022 — about 3 per cent of the total.

So far, Germany has weathered the coronavirus crisis better than many of its neighbours, with about two-thirds of the UK’s cases and a little more than half the deaths. But rising infection rates in recent weeks have led to the imposition of tighter lockdown restrictions, which could have a knock-on effect on the city’s property market, says Grimm.

“There’s been less migration this year and the private sector could be hit harder with this second lockdown,” he says. Grimm says prices could increase at a slightly lower rate as a result.

Many Frankfurt residents struggle to afford the city’s high property costs as it

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is. “A lot of people have difficulty finding a place to rent, people end up couch surfing for a month or so,” says British-born entrepreneur Amjed Younis, who moved from Lancashire to Frankfurt two years ago. “And, when they find something, there is already a queue of 20 people [at the viewing],” he adds.

“People with money can buy in the centre and believe the price will double in 10 years’ time,” says Andreas Rein-hardt from the agency Reinhardt Immo-bilien, “For families who don’t work in finance, it’s completely unaffordable.”

The demand for high-end homes is strong, he says. Apartments in the spa-cious Holzhausenviertel or attractive Westend sell for €10,000-€15,000 per sq m, he adds.

The rise in remote working has led people to look for more spacious hous-ing in the suburbs, says Florian Wenner, an analyst with Bulwiengesa. The wooded areas of the Taunus have become popular among day trippers — and homebuyers. But most still choose to live relatively central, says Wenner, as they enjoy the bustling city.

Younis is among them, having recently swapped his one-bedroom flat near the European Central Bank — which cost him €1,500 a month — to a 45 sq m apartment in the Bornheim neighbourhood for €850 a month.

One of the most popular districts in the city, Bornheim has a farmers’ mar-ket and a variety of bars. Other popular areas include Sachsenhausen, along the Main river, famous for its apple-wine pubs and historic timber-framed houses, and Holzhausenviertel, where Rerup is looking, home to green spaces such as Adolph von Holzhausen park.

“People really enjoy the parks,” says Rerup. “A lot of people are working from home, but I don't have a sense that the city is being emptied out.”

i / Buying guide

Transaction fees vary between 13 and 20 per cent of the purchase price, including a 2 per cent notary fee and a 6 per cent property transfer tax. Estate agent fees (which range from 3.5 to 8 per cent) are split between seller and buyer.

What you can buy for . . .

€745,000 A 126 sq m flat in the attractive Westend area.

€1.9m An exclusive penthouse of 244 sq m in the charming diplomats’ quarter.

Banking on Frankfurt



O n Crystal Palace Road in East Dulwich, there’s a new resident: Albus Dumble-dog. He’s the golden retriever puppy that Cat

Hughes and Kieran Holmes-Darby, a couple in their twenties, bought last month — and one reason for their recent move to this area of south London.

“It got to the point where a one-bed-room flat wasn’t big enough, and we’d saved up some money with some help from the family so were looking around London for a two-bed with a private gar-den because we wanted to get a dog,” says Holmes-Darby, who moved with Hughes one month ago from Crouch End in north London.

Sitting just south-east of Brixton, Dul-wich has excellent schools and an urban village environment — spacious period houses, woods, parks and even a golf club — which have given it a timeless appeal to those looking to settle down, upsize and have a slice of countryside life while keeping one foot in the big city.

In the third quarter of 2020, the aver-age property price in Dulwich was £815,229, up 7 per cent from the end of 2019, according to Land Registry data. The Countrywide group, which owns Hamptons International and other agents, says it has sold 65 per cent more homes in Dulwich in 2020 than in 2019, largely thanks to a summer boom: between July and September, sales were up 100 per cent, but have dropped since.

“It’s so popular at the moment because we’ve seen this real need for a sense of community — a high street and outside space,” says Caspar Harvard-Walls, partner at buying agent Black Brick. “People want to be a part of the area they’re moving to. They want to know people on their high street — who the butcher is, say hi to the guy they get their coffee from.”

Mel Carter, head of Dulwich sales for Hamptons, says a number of buy-ers had been considering areas like Clapham, but switched to Dulwich for something “a bit more rural” after being cooped up over lockdown. The prime spot is Dulwich Village, with its

white wooden fingerpost signs and enormous Georgian mansions. Neigh-bouring East Dulwich attracts a slightly younger crowd, as more of the homes are smaller terraced houses or flats, and its organic grocery stores and cafés adjoin the buzzier Peckham.

While those spending millions for homes in the village are unlikely to be greatly affected by the UK’s stamp-duty holiday — saving buyers up to £15,000 — for Holmes-Darby and Hughes, it helped offset the cost ofan extra bedroom and a garden for Albus Dumbledog.

“Being in lockdown in a one-bedroom flat without a garden made us really realise we do need more space, and the stamp-duty holiday really accelerated the process because it made it more financially viable,” says Holmes-Darby.

Many move to Dulwich so their chil-dren can attend its top public and state schools. But Sam Lloyd, a 25-year-old hockey player, needed to be close to them for a different reason — his girl-friend is a teacher at Alleyn’s, one of sev-eral well-regarded private schools, including Dulwich College and James Allen’s Girls’ School. Lloyd, originally

that location because of the road clo-sure,” says Carter, who’s hoping the scheme is disbanded.

Road closures aside, activity in the local market has slowed, with England in its third national lockdown andthe stamp-duty holiday due to endin March. By the end of 2020, the aver-age price in Dulwich was £816,418, only marginally up on the third quar-ter, according to Hamptons’ Land Reg-istry data.

“It’s by no means dead but it’s perhaps a little quieter than we’d expect at this time of year,” says Carter. “Maybe a lot of people just don’t want to look at houses at the moment, they feel that it’s just not appropriate and they’d rather wait till after the vaccine,” she adds.

i / buying guide

Dulwich is in the London borough of Southwark, where the annual council tax for homes in the top tax band is £2,881.

Dulwich does not have a London Underground stop, but there are National Rail services to North Dulwich, East Dulwich and West Dulwich.

In the past decade, the average property price in Dulwich has increased by just over 66 per cent; across London, the average has increased 61 per cent.

What you can buy for . . .

£4.3m A five-bedroom Grade II-listed family home with a large garden and a carriage driveway, just across the road from Dulwich College.

£2.45m A six-bedroom, double-fronted detached Victorian house with a large garden and conservatory in West Dulwich.

£730,000 A two-bedroom Victorian house with a south-facing garden in East Dulwich.

UK property A village feel, excellent schools and a palpable sense of community attract buyers to this south London area, writes Antonia Cundy

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(Main picture) Dulwich offers lots of green space while keeping a foot in central London; (left) a six-bedroom house, £2.45m, Harvey & Wheeler — Getty Images/iStockphoto

House Home

from Derbyshire, says it’s a “nice half-way house” between the countryside and the rest of London. “Dulwich is more hectic, obviously, than Derbyshire but it’s got a proper village feel about it, so it’s the best of both worlds.”

That village feel is largely maintained by the Dulwich Estate, a charity set up in 1619 that owns 1,500 acres of land and controls development in the area. “There’s a terrific shortage of property in Dulwich,” says Gareth Martin of Har-vey & Wheeler, an independent agent. “There’s been a little bit of building but not a huge amount, and you’ve got these huge green spaces that will probably never be built on.”

One recent change has ruffled feath-ers in the village, however. To increase space for pedestrians and reduce air pollution, Southwark council has closed some residential cut-through roads, as well as the junction between Calton Ave-nue and Court Lane in Dulwich Village. While some approve, others say it is a nuisance that increases congestion on already busy roads and has left some residents spending hours taking the long route round to access residential roads near the closure. “I have had one or two people saying I don’t want to be in

Sources: Land Registry; Hamptons

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The Dulwich itch



JANUARY 16 2021 Section:Weekend Time: 13/1/2021 - 15:04 User: john.lee Page Name: RES5, Part,Page,Edition: RES, 5, 1


Hot propertyBeachside

I Grape Bay, Bermuda, $35m

Where Grape Bay Beach in Paget parish, a mile — or five minutes’ drive — from Hamilton, Bermuda’s capital. Hamilton International Airport is about eight miles away.What A 14-acre gated-entry beachfront estate with 15 bedrooms and 19 bathrooms. There is a range of facilities including a saltwater aquarium in the library and a home cinema. Built between 1939-41 for the late oil industry entrepreneur Carbon “Petroleum” Dubbs, it was extensively renovated in the early 2000s. Why The property enjoys expansive Atlantic views and overlooks what are known as the pink sands of Grape Bay Beach. For more than 30 years, it served as the official Bermuda residence of the US consul-general. Who Christie’s International Real Estate

By Peter Chapman

House Home

K Western Cape, South Africa, $3.33m

Where On Moses Beach, Clifton, the affluent Cape Town suburb about 4km from the city. Cape Town International Airport is 32km, just over half an hour’s drive, away. What A three-bedroom, three-bathroom apartment with unobstructed views of the beach and direct access to it. The property has an open-plan kitchen,

B Nassau, Bahamas, $25.5m

Where Located in a gated community on Paradise Island, a 20-minute ferry ride off Nassau, the capital of the Bahamas. Lynden Pindling International Airport is about 20km away.What A single family home with six bedrooms, eight bathrooms and a well-equipped kitchen. The property has a spacious oceanfront gymnasium or games room,

multiple areas for outside dining and entertaining, as well as a three-car garage. Why The property, which comes with 2.7 acres of landscaped grounds, has sliding glass doors that allow superb views of the ocean. The gated community has an 18-hole golf course and plenty of opportunity for waterfront biking and jogging.Who Damianos Sotheby’s International Realty

a large master suite and a wraparound terrace, with two secure parking bays and 24-hour security.Why The apartment looks on to the Twelve Apostle mountains and the area’s several beaches, the latter catering to varied lifestyles from family to the vigorously trendy. Neighbouring Camps Bay is known for its waterfront bars and restaurants.Who Savills

K Miami Beach, Florida, US, $19.25m

Where On Atlantic Way in the Altos Del Mar area, a private residential community, and about 14 miles from Miami International Airport. What A family home on three levels, with five bedrooms, seven bathrooms and a large kitchen. Built in 2015, it has a saltwater pool, a Jacuzzi, a fire pit and large manicured backyard. A private terrace overlooks the Atlantic. Why Spectacular ocean views, with the beach just beyond the garden. The home is a few minutes’ drive from Bal Harbour’s shopping area.Who Knight Frank

K Vanuatu, South Pacific, $4.15m

Where Paradise Cove, on Vanuatu's main island of Efate; flights to Sydney take about three and a half hours. Twenty-five minutes from Bauerfield International Airport. What An estate on about five acres of land with six bedrooms and four bathrooms, set in walled grounds. The property has a private beach, coral reef and private helipad.Why Landscaped gardens of palm, fruit trees and bougainvillea; excellent swimming, snorkelling and kayaking. Restaurants and markets are a bicycle ride away.Who Christie’s International Real Estate



House Home

K Floral greeting doormat by Anthropologie £44This vinyl-backed, coconut fibre mat provides a practical and cheerful welcome. anthropologie.com

Bet your boots

Interiors | Keep things tidy after

muddy walks. By Roddy Clarke

I Elona shoe storage cupboard by Made £279Shown in a fern green finish, this practical unit has two levels of storage in each compartment. made.com

M Coat hook by FUZL£40This wall-mounted design is made with the material left over from the workshop’s larger furniture projects. fuzl.co

I Marquetry Fan console table by Cheskie £3,600A glorious surface on which to place keys and sunglasses, this design uses rye straw applied with a marquetry technique. cheskie.co.uk

K Walking stick set with stand by Richard Nissen £11,640A vintage set handmade in the 1950s by the Danish wood turner, including a walnut shoehorn and boot scraper. thekairoscollective.com

I Pina coat rack by Schöenbuch €296Available in three colour options and multiple sizes, this wall-mounted steel rack can also hold coat hangers on the connecting arcs. schoenbuch.com

B Folded shelf by Johan van Hengel for Muuto £119Available in different colours and sizes, here is an ingenious steel design to provide accessible storage for your keys and coat. somedaydesigns.co.uk

M Striped runner by SCP £495Brighten up the hallway while protecting the floor with this vintage piece. scp.co.uk

I Shoe brush by Labour and Wait£14To ensure your shoes remain clean, try these brushes, handmade by one of England’s last remaining brush makers. labourandwait.co.uk

B Coat rack bench by GebrüderThonet Vienna £1,630With a beechwood frame and woven cane seat, this contemporary design is also available in a white finish. monologuelondon.com

M Cast-iron boot scraper from Shacklady’s Antiques £1,275This vintage Regency design makes an elegant yet useful hallway accessory. pamono.co.uk


8 ★ † FTWeekend 16 January/17 January 2021

House Home

with period and character-appropriate books in The Danish Girl.

Thanks to Foster, one character who would likely earn a top rating from Bookcase Credibility is James Bond. Look at the bookshelves in Skyfall or Spectre, and it is clear the agent is a dis-cerning reader. No wonder he would pick books by travel writer and adven-turer Patrick Leigh Fermor, who was also special ops. A history of the Scottish highlands shows how much Bond’s her-itage matters to him, and the glossy tome on Aston Martin is hardly surpris-ing. Squint closer, though, and you might even spot Birds of the West Indies, written by one James Bond — a book owned by Ian Fleming, and from which he cribbed 007’s name.

Foster had initially had another idea, though: “We’d done all the books on [Bond spoof] Johnny English about three months before, and had them all boxed up and ready. I did wonder if anyone would spot if we just used those.”

Set in the 1920s, the script for Mr Hol-mes — starring Ian McKellen as Sherlock Holmes — called for him to turn to a book of colloquial Malay. “I was sur-prised when I found one,” he says. “It was called Colloquial Malay and pub-lished in 1923.”

But even Foster could not fulfil the brief for another Sherlock Holmes — the knuckle-dusting 2009 version directed by Guy Ritchie and starring Robert Downey Jr. He was warned that the A-lister would only work with originals, not replicas. The problem was that the script required Holmes be thumbing through an oversized ornithology book from the high Victorian era. The only

good quality, so they could be barnacled with all sorts of stuff for Ariel’s library under the sea.” Thankfully, though most producers prefer to rent titles, Disney always buys whatever it uses, he says, probably in case those props need to be repurposed at theme parks or similar.

The rise of high-definition cameras has underpinned his business, as it has nudged production designers into ensuring every on-screen detail is cor-rect. The convenience of his location has helped, too; Chiswick is close to the Golden Triangle in west London where production facilities, like prop houses, once clustered to be near the former BBC studios, Elstree and other studios.

Foster’s temperament has also been a factor. “Booksellers can be grumpy, especially about borrowing books, but because we were amenable, word got out,” he says. “I’m not going to fob them off with something that’s not right just to make money.” (He declines to name exact fees, noting that the amount charged depends on the title, length of loan and the film-maker’s budget.)

Foster has expanded into working with museums, helping with historic tableaux — at the just-renovated Audley End in Essex, he helped English Herit-age fill the children’s nursery with many of the books that the house inventory suggested had been there in the 1830s. English Heritage also hired him to fill the bedroom shelves at Darwin’s House, using the scientist’s own records of what he owned as a starting point.

Otherwise, 2021 has been quieter than usual, thanks to pandemic-induced production shutdowns, although Foster has a few projects under way, including Disney’s Little Mermaid and the latest remake of Cyrano de Bergerac now filming in Sicily.

He has not yet worked on a personal library for a work-from-homer keen to upgrade his or her backdrop for the next six months of video conferencing, but he’s open to the gig. “We’re pretty flexi-ble, and I like a challenge.”

Anyone who can’t afford Foster, though, can opt for a budget alternative: Penguin Random House offers themed “credibility bookshelves”, free to down-load from its website. “Literary Heavy-weight” features Zadie Smith and Ta-Nehisi Coates, while “Classics Collector” is heavy on Austen and Brontë. Hope-fully, Gove and co have downloaded a few for their next appearance.

N ever have the contents of bookshelves been scruti-nised with more gusto. For nearly a year, bored Zoom users have scanned the titles

artfully arranged behind colleagues or friends — a duty performed for public figures by the Twitter account Bookcase Credibility (@BCredibility). It launched last April to track, rate and assess vol-umes spotted behind talking heads with the tagline, “What you say is not as important as the bookcase behind you.”

Sometimes it’s intriguing — what exactly was in the small black case among the books floating behind Tom Hanks’s head? Otherwise, there are gotcha moments: the shelves of Ama-zon founder Jeff Bezos bereft of books perhaps, or Holocaust denier David Irving’s work spotted chez Michael Gove. Or it could simply confirm expectations: Prince Charles’s shelves show he is partial to equestrian topics.

Last year bookshelves became a bea-con into the soul — or at least, the image their owner arranged them to convey. When it comes to deploying this skill, though, one man has a decade’s head start on the rest of us: Stephen Foster. He owns and runs Foster Books in Chis-wick, west London, an independent shop that has been in his family for close to five decades. It has long specialised in old or rare books and first editions. But in the past 10 years or so, Foster has carved out another speciality: movie librarian, the man who curates the shelves in films by Mike Leigh, Jane Campion or Guy Ritchie.

Some free advice from Foster in advance of that next Zoom session. “The key is authenticity, about making things feel as real and in place as they can be. If nobody notices [the bookshelves on a movie] you’ve done a good job,” he says. “The same logic applies with Zoom calls.

If I have a bugbear it’s the people who are trying too hard — turning the book so the front board is out.”

Politicians are most prone to this, keen to signal their intellectual heft with front-facing biographies and their well-thumbed Dan Browns con-cealed behind them. Writers are their antithesis. “Their shelves often seem very genuine: these are their tools, and they are comfortable with them in their surroundings.”

It was Charlotte Watts, an Oscar-nom-inated set decorator, who first opened up this niche to Foster. She came to his shop in search of an elusive volume by Keats while working on Campion’s Bright Star (2009), starring Ben Whishaw as the poet. Watts asked about a book that Keats had published to little acclaim and low sales, which they hoped to feature. Could Foster track one down?

It’s very expensive, he explained, but he did know of a facsimile, and could likely have one custom-made using paper much the same as that in use 200 years ago. “And we ended up doing the set dressing,” he says. “We’d always sold the odd book to prop buy-ers, but that was when we started to supply the hero items, those which are handheld, or scripted, and you really need to get right.”

Since then, largely thanks to word of mouth, Foster has worked on eight or nine TV and film productions each year, whether kitting out a room in era- and character-appropriate titles, or hunting down a rare book required by a script.

He is distinct from a prop house, many of which also rent out books; they are often charged by the metre. Foster is more painstaking: steering the produc-ers of The Crown to use the right parlia-mentary papers, or dressing shelves

‘Authenticity is key and the same applies with Zoom calls. My bugbear is people who are trying too hard’

(Clockwise from top) Stephen Foster in his bookshop in Chiswick, west London; a rare edition Foster sourced for the Bond film ‘Spectre’ (2015); books he selected in 2017’s ‘Beauty and the Beast’; and in ‘Peterloo’ (2018); the exterior of his shop; as members of the royal family paid tribute to the world’s nurses in May, spectators had a view of their bookshelvesEvening Standard / eyevine; © Stephen Foster; Alamy Stock Photo; © Charlotte Dirickx | Set Decorator; Kensington Palace via Getty Images

In cinema’s

Zoom has exposed the reading habits of

colleagues and public figures. Meet the

man who curates the books we see in films

from Bond to ‘The Crown’. By Mark Ellwood

good books

movie; her surroundings resemble the classic library that so many Zoom users seem keen to evoke on their at-home shelves.

They’re primed to fail miserably, as Foster explains. “It quickly became apparent that the size of the library she was going to get lost in would be too expensive and impractical to do with real books, so they

decided to do CGI — we supplied some very pretty 17th-century bindings, and they took good photographs of them then turned them into the grand library you saw.”

Foster’s brief for the upcoming live-action Little Mermaid was different. “We had to supply books that weren’t such

suitable one available at the time was The Birds of Great Britain by John Gould, worth £50,000 and too deli-cate and valuable to bor-row. Instead, Foster helped the art depart-ment create a custom fake that even Downey Jr couldn’t disdain.

Another customer is Disney, whose creatives have tapped him to work on its live-action cartoon remakes, such as Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast. Many of these stories derive from the writings of Charles Per-rault, a 17th-century author, so require books that evoke that periwigged period. Bookish Belle gets lost in a library at one point during the latter

Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, UKAmong the treasures at Chatsworth, home to 16 generations of the Cavendish family, is its magnificent library. It comprises more than 30,000 volumes, while a pair of fake bookshelves containing spurious titles and authors invented by Patrick Leigh Fermor (eg Through a Glass Darkly by Ivor Guinness) hide staircases to a gallery above.

Hearst Castle, California, USOnce home to the newspaper tycoon William Hearst, Hearst Castle’s 80ft library is lifted straight from the pages

collection of more than 150 ancient Greek vases.

The Library of the History of Human Imagination, Connecticut, USPart MC Escher puzzle, part imaginarium, the unique library belonging to the entrepreneur Jay Walker occupies a 3,600 sq ft wing of his home. Floating stairways, glass bridges and dynamic lighting add an element of theatre to a collection of 50,000 books and antiques, including a facsimile of the Declaration of Independence and an original Sputnik satellite.

century and now houses about 22,000 books in its carved oak shelves. The 10-bedroom property is for sale through Knight Frank (offers in excess of £7m).

Blickling Hall, Norfolk, UKThe National Trust has more books here than in all its Welsh properties together; 12,500 volumes are exhibited under tapestries and stained glass windows. Started in the 18th century, the library includes the first full Bible printed in English and first editions of Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. Chris Allnutt

The world’s most spectacular libraries

Chatsworth charm www.shoot360.co.uk Chanters is for sale Josephine M Collingwood

of Edgar Allan Poe, with its crimson fabrics, chandeliers and dark wood panelling. Beyond the 4,000 books on its shelves, the library also boasts a

The Chanters House, Devon, UKThis more than lives up to the Coleridge family’s literary legacy. The great library was added at the end of the 19th

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House Home

A packet of possibility

Start the year in hopeful mode by ordering seeds,

whether your fancy is a wildflower meadow or

embellishing a cultivated garden

for adventurous British gardeners, full of fascinating rarities and advice on how to make their seeds come up.

This year’s new arrivals include a white-skinned radish, Albena, which is “resistant to cracking and bolting”. Its flesh will enliven any summer lunch table and it germinates very easily, even for children. The newly listed globe artichoke Violet de Provence would be spectacular too as a first course, one whose edible buds are violet-purple, never to be seen in supermarkets. It germinates readily.

Seeds of the fabulous Rock varieties of peony are more of a challenge, but I succeeded with the white one 15 years ago and my plant of it is now my pride and joy. Plant World is offering other colours, including lilac and rose pink. They may take two years to germinate, but they will appear eventually if they are left away from squirrels in a damp seed box in a semi-shaded place outdoors. This type of peony was voted China’s national flower in a referendum in 1994. You may resent referendums, but the voters in that one were on target.

There are some exciting new begonias on offer too, not heavy-flowered ones for exhibitors but wild ones, including the imperilled aequatorialis from Ecuador. It is hardy in a sheltered bed and, as its seeds are very fine, it arrives mixed in with fine sand to give you every chance of success. I have high hopes of it and am excited to grow a wild plant at risk.

I may seem to have strayed from the needs of new recruits, locked down yet again. I have not. Plant World gives clear advice on how and when to sow, and I can only applaud their insistence that they often sow in unheated greenhouses at any time of year. Lockdown can be put to immediate use. Try, for starters, seeds of the true alpine strawberry, a winner for every garden, big or small, urban or not. It will flourish in shade, but to make its seeds come up, you may have to put it in the fridge in a tray of damp soil for at least four weeks. My shop-bought celery, plastic-packed ham and netted onions sit there anyway for just as long.

When these strawberries finally come up and grow on, their fruit is the supreme delicacy as a summer pudding. Simply mix the berries with lemon juice, freshly squeezed, and white caster sugar. Nothing from the fridge can match it. Even I, a chef malgré soi, cannot spoil it.

Morgan, Mr Fothergills, Johnsons Seeds and Suttons, among others.

My first moves in the year are towards suppliers of seeds of plants we cannot buy easily or cheaply as pre-grown specimens. By sowing thoughtfully you can make a garden with an original range, truly yours. Near Bath, Special Plants are one of the best sources for thoughtful sowers (email [email protected] for a copy of the new catalogue). Derry Watkins has years of experience with British weather and British hopefuls. Her seed list begins with some of the prettily coloured alonsoas that she offers as pre-grown plants later in the year.

Chiltern Seeds, at Wallingford in Oxfordshire, has one of the fullest lists of seeds that nobody else lists together (chilternseeds.co.uk). Several are new in the 2021 catalogue, including neglected former winners such as Calendula Indian Prince, an upright pot marigold with a lovely darker centre, which picks well for a vase. They also offer the invaluable white-flowered annual corncockle, Agrostemma Milas Snow Queen, a graceful plant, up to 3ft high, whose slender stems fit easily into gaps in a summer border. I am also

tempted by their Lupinus mutabilis Javelin White with widely spaced cream-white flowers at a height of 4ft. It too will flower in its first year.

Chiltern Seeds selects varieties for us, writing them up in tempting terms. In Devon, near Newton Abbot, Plant World Seeds are a different operation, trial growers of much they list and well able to give exactly the advice that hopeful sowers need. At plant-world-seeds.com you can log into this top list

I n and out of the garden, hope is an essential accompaniment for this difficult January. In the sexist ancient Greek story, Zeus gave Pandora, the first woman, a jar and

told her to leave it sealed. Curiosity prevailed and she opened it. Out flew diseases, perhaps coronaviruses among them. At the bottom of the jar Hope remained, but Greek opinion varied as to whether Hope was a good or bad remainer. Was she another part of Zeus’s planned torment for mankind or was she its consolation?

For gardeners she is a consolation. During the current shutdown she will help us to survive by planning for a happier season. Seed plans can brighten the next few weeks just as sunshine and spring gardening did in last year’s first lockdown. My plans may help you to start, but first there is, however, one trap for the hopeful: wildflower gardening from seed.

Many new recruits to gardening have been asking me how they can best sow and grow wildflowers. Some of them explain that they do not want to do anything too fancy or difficult, and as wildflowers grow wild, they like the idea of them. They also think they will be restoring Britain’s lost “heritage” by laying out a small meadow of their own.

How charming, and of course wildflower sowing can be done, but be aware that it is not an easier alternative to the cultivated gardening that I love. There is far more to making a meadow than scattering bags of wildflower seed on to a field of bare earth. Seeds are not even the best way forward in most

situations. Pre-germinated plug plants, set at intervals, are a better bet, left to seed themselves in future years.

Before you start wildflower sowing on any scale, consult an established expert. Emorsgate in Norfolk are the By Appointment seed suppliers to Prince Charles, whose garden at Highgrove in Gloucestershire has battled with wildflower sowing for nearly 40 years. At their website wildseed.co.uk you will find helpful contacts and advice for beginners, especially on sites and soils and on the various premixed seeds they will supply. They also offer site visits.

In Devon, Charles Flower seeds also have years of experience and charlesflower-wildflowers.co.uk is a good first step for the hopeful. They even have a section called Getting Wild Seeds To Grow: Why Is It So Difficult?. In no way is this warning a deterrent. Newly sown meadows can be made to endure, but they are not a pushover.

I admire them, but feel at home in a garden. Here I will leave the bigger seed companies’ catalogues for another week, noting only that a new grey-flowered poppy in their lists looks irresistible. It is Poppy Amazing Grey and is a variation on the Corn Poppy, Papaver rhoeas, wild in fields and waysides. After a fine showing at recent seed trials, it is being billed as a game-changer. The flowers are single or semi-double, so it is distinct from the basic opium poppy. Its colouring is more grey than purple and it grows about 2ft tall as an annual, flowering in its first summer. It is offered by Thompson and

(Above) Papaver poppies in a cottage garden; (below right) Amazing Grey Shirley poppies GAP Photos/Elke Borkowski; Kelly Coultas/Alamy Stock Photo

Robin Lane Fox

On gardens


JANUARY 16/17 2021

TheArab spring promised to transform life in the region. Those caught up in it tell AndrewEnglandwhatwentwrong

DECADE

LOSTTHE

5FT.COM/MAGAZINE JANUARY 16/17 2021

7 SimonKuperNeeded: a playbook forJoe Biden in a new age

8 InventoryKeeley Hawes, actress

10 Robert ShrimsleyVaccinated veterans, your nation needs you!

10 Letters12 TechWorld

How today’s tech boom is reshaping cities14 Undercover Economist

Florence Nightingale: the pandemic herowe need right now

16 TheArab spring 10years onA decade after mass protests swept throughthe region, toppling dictators and promisinga new start, how much has changed?Activists and revolutionaries reflect on theirstruggles for reform in the countries theyfought to free. Andrew England reports

24 Interview: Eula BissIn her new book, the fearless essayistturns her gaze on one of the most taboosubjects – money. She talks to Lorien Kite

28 Shining throughThe shoe-shiners in Bolivia’s capital wearmasks because of the stigma attached tothe job but, in a new series, photographerFederico Estol reimagines them as thesuperheroes he believes they are

34 Not your average boozerThe opening of The Eagle – Britain’sfirst gastropub – transformed London’sculinary landscape. Thirty years on,co-founder Michael Belben fears for hisindustry’s future. By Helen Barrett

39 Nick LanderA restaurant with a bar? I’ll drink to that

40 Honey&CoOxtail with red pepper and vermicelli

43 Jancis RobinsonWhy the glass isn’t always greener

44 Classic cocktailFrançois O’Neill of Maison Françoison his favourite French 75

45 Games46 Gillian Tett

Why America needs a rethink

@FTMag

‘Being a shoe-shiner is considered the worst jobin Bolivia, so all of them hide their identity’Federico Estol’s pictures of La Paz’s boot-polishers, p28

FED

ERIC

OES

TOL

Cover: an Egyptian flag flies over a protest inTahrir Square in January 2011 © Ivor Prickett/Panos Pictures; Mona Seif in Cairo in December2020 © Christina Rizk

‘The oxtail pieces wantnothing more than along, hot bath so thestrands of meat canbecome meltingly soft’Honey & Co, p40

‘I have never been asuncomfortable withthe material I wasputting on the page asI was with puttingdown my own salary’Eula Biss, p24

Issue number 904 • Online ft.com/magazine • FT Weekend Magazineis printed by the Walstead Group in the UK and published by TheFinancial Times Ltd, Bracken House, 1 Friday Street, London EC4M9BT © The Financial Times Ltd 2021 • No part of this magazine may bereproduced in any form without the prior express permission of thepublisher • Publishing: Daphne Kovacs, head of FT Weekend Magazine– [email protected] • Production: Danny Macklin, advertisingproduction – [email protected] or [email protected]

7ILLUSTRATION BY HARRY HAYSOMFT.COM/MAGAZINE JANUARY 16/17 2021

[email protected] @KuperSimon

Meanwhile, China and post-Soviet Russia,whichhadbeendocileabroaduntilRussiainvadedGeorgia inAugust 2008, have taken over theUS’sroleofaggressiveinterventionism:theRussiansinUkraineandSyria,China inHongKong.The US is no longer the only economic super-

power either. In another reversal since 2008,China’s economy is now bigger by some meas-ures.And theUShasn’tbeenavalues superpowersinceabout2003.Post-Trump, the countryneedsto take rather than dispense lessons on democ-racy. Even on climate, where Biden has said the

US “must lead the world”, it has in fact followedtheEUandChina incommitting to reachnet-zeroemissions. The world, knowing that Trumpistsmight return in 2024, won’t follow Biden’s long-termleadonanything.• Social media is now the main source of

information. In 2008, Facebook and Twittercombinedhadabout100milliondailyusers,whileWhatsAppandInstagramdidn’texist.Today3.96billionpeople – over half theworld – are on socialmedia, said the Digital 2020 report byHootsuiteandWe Are Social. This shift has brought us thedeathof truth, thedeathof privacyand:• The dominance of tech giants. In August

2008, the US company with the largest marketcapitalisation was the oil major Exxon, worth$425bn.Amazonwasworth$33bn,andFacebookabout $15bn. At the time, the fossil-fuels lobbystalkedWashington.Sincethen, thevaluationsofAmazonandFacebookhaverisen50-fold.TodaythesixmostvaluableAmericancompaniesarealltechbusinesses (countingTesla as tech).• Healthcare has ceased to be an individual

problem. Until 2020, the American healthcaresystem worked perfectly well on its own terms:it was a money-spinner for the 18 per cent ofthe economy that lived off it, and it provideddecent if exorbitantly priced services to well-offAmericans.Mostvotershadhealthinsurance,anddidn’tworrymuchaboutpeoplewhodidn’t.The pandemic changes that. You can have the

most expensive personal healthcare on earth,but you can still die from a virus that you catchfrom your cleaner, driver or waiter. Even if youget vaccinated, if the coronavirus keeps prolifer-ating among poor Americans, it will eventuallyprobablyproduceamutationthatcandefeatyourvaccine. Suddenly healthcare becomes a collec-tive problem. That’s just one of the unforeseenissues that theAmerican political system isn’t setup tohandle.

On August 23 2008, Barack Obamachose Joe Biden as his presiden-tial running mate. That choice setBiden on the path to being swornin next Wednesday as the secondmost powerful man on earth.(China’s leader Xi Jinping ranksfirst, because he doesn’t have toworry much about separation ofpowers and may enjoy popularsupport for military adventures.)Biden’sadministrationwill include

manyveteransof 2008.But theworldand theUSof 2008 no longer exist. Biden, 78, needs a play-book for a new age. Here are just a few of thedizzying, distressing, interconnected changes ofthepast 12 years:• National downward mobility. In August

2008, Americans still thought that incomesand life expectancy rose inexorably outsideworld wars. Despite brief recessions, the arcbent upwards. That has changed. Americanlife expectancy began falling in 2014 and, giventhe pandemic, may now be lower than in 2008.Moreover, by last October, more than one in fiveAmericanhouseholdsdidn’treliablyhaveenoughmoney for food – ahigher figure than at theworstpoint of the financial crisis, says Lauren Bauerof the Hamilton Project policy institute. ManyAmericanswho once assumed they’d outdo theirparents arenow livingoff their inheritance.• Climate change is here now. For more than

200 years, economic growth has relied on emit-ting carbon. Biden hopes to break that link, atleast by a little.Hehas to.Wildfires alreadymakeCalifornia periodically unliveable, while takingout a 30-year mortgage in flood-threatenedMiami, New Orleans or even parts of New Yorkhas become a folly. Longer term,Americansmayremigrate to theUpperMidwest, where there areno coasts to flood, natural supplies of drinkingwater and fewheatwaves.• Antidemocratic candidates can win elec-

tions. In 2008, a President Donald Trump wasunimaginable and Viktor Orbán was still a dem-ocrat. Now, Trump can while away the years tillthe next election by encouraging far-right terror-ism and perhaps sparking secessions in southernstates. What happens if a Trumpist crowd takesthe Alabama statehouse and declares independ-ence fromBiden’sUS?•TheUSisnolongerasuperpower. It still has

theworld’s strongestmilitary, but sending troopsinto action has become politically impossible aswell as pointless. The US can detach from its oldstomping ground of the Middle East anyway,given that the country became a net exporter ofenergy in 2019. Norwill any enemy ever attemptto invadeAmerica.The US military therefore now serves three

main purposes: a rationale for the state-fundeddefence industry; a need-blind stimulus pro-gramme for placeswithmilitary bases; and a jobsandwelfareprogrammeformilitarypersonnel.

‘Biden’s administration willincludemany veterans of 2008.But the world and the US of2008 no longer exist’

SIMONKUPEROPEN ING SHOT

Needed: aplaybook forJoeBiden inanewage

8

‘My teenage childrenconnectmorewithpoliticsthan I did at their age’

I NVENTORY KEELEY HAWES, ACTRESS

FT.COM/MAGAZINE JANUARY 16/17 2021

KeeleyHawes, 44,wasnominatedfor aBafta forherperformancein theBBC’sLine ofDuty. Herother televisionappearancesinclude roles inBodyguard,SpooksandTheDurrells

Whatwasyour childhoodorearliest ambition?To be a ballerina. Then I fellinto acting andwent to dramaschool – the Sylvia Young TheatreSchool. From then on, that wasall I wanted to do.Private school or state school?University or straight intowork?A state primary school close towhere I grew up inMarylebone.Sylvia Youngmoved premises toLisson Grove, opposite the houseI lived in. Had that not happened,I’mnot sure I would even have

known therewas such a thing astheatre school – how could youat nine? I came froma bigworking-class family and it was a privateschool. Sylvia generously gaveme a grant, and I worked quite a bitas a child actor.Whowasor still is yourmentor?Two brilliant teachers, one speechand drama, Jackie Stoker, and adrama teacher called Clive – I don’tknowhis surname, we just calledhimClive. I wanted to dowellfor them – to do better for them.Theywere a big part of the personI’ve become.Howphysicallyfit are you?Probablymore fit than I’ve beenin a long time. I’ve been havingpersonal training sessions. Ithought I’d hate it – I’mnot big onexercise. But I’m really enjoying it.

It’s very good formementally andI’m feeling stronger and stronger.Ambitionor talent:whichmattersmore to success?A little bit of both, and a little bitof luck.Howpolitically committedare you?I’m certainly committed to theEmilyMaitlisAmericast podcast onBBC Sounds. I vote and I take aninterest. The political landscapehas changed somuch over the pastfour years – the only good thingto come out of that is that peoplehave becomemore politicised.My teenage children connectmorewith politics than I did at their age.Whatwouldyou like toown thatyoudon’t currentlypossess?I’ve got a red poodle called Busterand I would happily bringmore

of those intomy life. He is sobright and funny and clever, anda great companion.What’s yourbiggest extravagance?It was travel – not anymore.Cashmere trousers are anextravagance, but also a necessity.Inwhatplace are youhappiest?I love our home and everythingit represents.What ambitionsdoyou still have?I lovemy job and I feel very luckyto have it, but I’mnot ambitious –I don’t feel like that, I never have.I recently started a productioncompany and Iwould liketo succeed at that endeavour.What is the greatest achievementof your life so far?My children. They’re kind, funny,nice people. I love beingwith them.Whatdoyoufindmost irritatinginotherpeople?I try to find the good in people.But spitting, and texting anddrivingmakemewant toscream. Andmeanness isn’t agreat trait.If your 20-year-old self could seeyounow,whatwould she think?She’d be amazed that I don’t putmake-up on to go out of thehouse! I would hope she’d be quiteproud. Things I really worriedaboutwhen Iwas 20wouldn’t evenbe onmy radar now. So I thinkshe’d be quite pleased to seemyshoulders have relaxed a bit.Whichobject that you’ve lost doyouwishyou still had?I try not to givematerial thingstoomuchweight. I’m very good atgetting rid of them.What is the greatest challengeof our time?Climate, because ultimately,without ourworld intact, none ofthe others reallymatter.We needto listen to the younger generation,hear their worries.Doyoubelieve in anafterlife?No, though I amquite enviousof peoplewho do, because I canimagine it’s very comforting.So be nice to everyone and havea good time!If youhad to rate your satisfactionwithyour life so far, out of 10,whatwouldyou score?In terms of how lucky I’ve been,it would be churlish forme to sayanything other than 10.Withoutsounding smug, I’ve been veryblessed. I can only answer fortoday –who knowswhatmighthappen tomorrow?

Interview byHester Lacey.Keeley Hawes appears in theChannel 4 series “It’s a Sin”

10

Re “InsideGermany’s abattoirs:the human cost of cheapmeat”(January 9/10). This is not just aGermanproblem. Exploitation ofcheap labour is occurring inwesterncountries and probably inmostplaces. Perhaps the best solution is adecentminimumwage and stickingto proper conditions andworkinghours. “Oh! Food priceswill becomeunaffordable!”No, the priceswillrise.Wewill either pay up or eat lessmeat etc. Price rises could lead toinflation in all wage scales. Bring iton.Weneed some inflation.WilliamB via FT.com

Re SimonKuper’s “The triple threatto London’s top spot” (January9/10).Within (my) livingmemory,Londonwas in decline – betweenthe end of thewar and the 1980s itwas a drab, fading place. OK, therewere the “Swinging 60s” and punk,but thosewere for a smallminority.Kuper is right – cities can go “offtrend”. For those of uswho haveno plans to leave, this could be agood thing. It’ll be less crowded,and cheaper, and somemight argueLondon has been poisoned by aflood of dubiousmoney.Maybetime for a detox.Blazmo via FT.com

ReTimHarford’s “Is ‘first dose first’the right vaccination strategy?”(January 9/10).Mywife and I aregetting our first jab of the Pfizer vacthismorning.We have no promiseof when or if therewill be a secondjab. I’mnot happy about this. Yetthere is a chance that the seconddosemay be provided. Sowe’regoing ahead on the TimHarfordinstinct. I’m 76 by theway, andmywife is 72 and recently completed ayear of cancer care.Wish us luck!Ettubrute via FT.com


Reply

Vaccinatedveterans,your nationneeds you!

To contributePlease email [email protected]. Includea daytime telephone number and full address(not for publication). Letters may be edited.

ILLUSTRATION BY LUCAS VARELA

ROBERT SHRIMSLEYTHE NATIONAL CONVERSATION

Mymother got hersecond jab this week.We aren’t entirely surehow it happened; she

looks nothing like Boris Johnson’sdad.Wewere on tenterhooksright up to the end as towhetherthe hospitalmight turn her awayas part of the new strategy ofdelaying the second vaccination.I understand the case for this newapproach but, frankly, the planalways looked a littlemore logicalonceMumwas safely through thesystem. Since no one got in touchto postpone her appointment,it just felt rude not to turn up.Anyway, it is obviously

tremendous news, not onlybecause the oldest are themostat risk but also because there area lot of errands I’m too nervousto runmyself which she can nowtake on.We’ve helped her rightthrough 2020 so it’s about time.And, frankly, since she hit hereighties she’s just not been pullingherweight. All those lifts I usedto get as a kid have completelydried up and the babysitting hasbeen neglected since the spawnturned 16. That’s the problemwithoctogenarians, it’s take, take, take.Wewill go easy at first. But

over theweeks, I am surewe canrampup her errands; those oldbookcases aren’t going to takethemselves to the dump. At thevery least she could helpwith thetakeaways – the Deliveroo billsare really starting to rack up.As the vaccine rollout gathers

pace, there is no longer any excusefor the newmaster race of Covid-secure citizens not to do their bit.Come onGran, nomoreNetflixfor you, we’ve got shoppingweneed done. Officially, of course,these vaccinated veterans remainunder lockdown, not least becausescientists are still researchingwhether they continue to spreadthe virus even if they are safe fromits ravages themselves.We can’t

let themout until we are surethey are not superspreaders whomight infect our teenagers.Butwe can all imagine the huge

psychological boost from seeingour parents feeling safe enough toget out and about. It will be like oneof those Colditz filmswhen theyannounce that an escapee hasmadeit to Switzerland. “Gather round,men. I’ve received some rather goodnews. Last nightGrandadwent overthewall andhehas just sent us thistext from freeTesco – ‘Greetingsfrom the fruit and veg, can I getyou anymangowhile I’mhere?’”As freedom is progressively

returned to the nation, thevaccinatedmust surely be amongthe early beneficiaries.While themiddle-aged sit andwait for liberty,pensioners can reclaimour cities.I like to think of themcongregatingin town centres, picnicking ingroups of seven or hanging out inlarge crowds at the SouthBank ortheBullring, filming themselvesonTikTokdancing to Bill Haley.Perhaps therewill be Grey

LivesMattermarches anddemonstrations to protect thestatue ofMontgomery of Alamein.Among themost radical groupsthere is even talk of bridge-ins.Theywill take back the coffeeshops, allowing staffwonderful

new opportunities to explainwhata chai tea lattemight be andwhythey can’t just call the cup sizessmall,mediumand large. And oncethey have taken back control, whoknows if theywill surrender it.Itmight be just like an episode ofFriends but one inwhich the sexysix turn up at Central Perk only tofind their couch has been taken by80-year-olds discussing The GreatBritish BakeOff. Nightclubsmightbe repurposed for tea dancing, andsoccer pitches as bowling greens.I suppose it’s toomuch to expect

many of them to take onkey-worker roles, though I’m certainlyprepared to fit a stair lift if itmeansI can get the bathroomdrain fixedmore expeditiously.We lockeddown the country to save the aged(well, strictly speaking, to save thecountry and government from theconsequences of an overwhelmedNHS, but the elderlywere themain beneficiaries). It is time forthem to give something back. Thegreatest generation has onemoremission. Theyneed to give a lead,get back out into theworld andsave our businesses. To borrowanold advertising slogan, the future’sbright, the future’s grey.

[email protected]@robertshrimsley

Plans are on hold but planning doesn’t have to be. FT Globetrotter offers insider guides to greatcities, with expert advice on eating and drinking, exercise, culture andmore. If you’re rediscoveringyour own city in the new normal or dreaming of somewhere else, we’re here to help youmake themost of it – now and later. ft.com/globetrotter

@w1lkns Jan 10Nike’s image to the consumer isprogressive and supportive of theunderdogs but is it the samewhenyou look into their internal structureas a company? Great article by@germanotes in @FT

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12 FT.COM/MAGAZINE JANUARY 16/17 2021

Tim Bradshaw is the FT’s globaltechnology correspondent

How the latesttechbubble isreshaping cities

When shares in theUSfood delivery appDoorDash jumped by86 per cent on their

first day of trading lastmonth, it didnot take long for sceptics to startfrothing about another tech bubble.DoorDash has never generated

annual net profits. It haswarnedinvestors the losses will onlycontinue as it prioritises growth.Analysts have questionedwhetherthese “on-demand” ecommercebusinesses can evermakemoney.Yet DoorDash is valued at around$50bn; Uber’smarket capitalisationis now around $100bn.WithDeliveroo’smultibillion-

pound initial public offeringsoon to follow in theUK, despite2019 losses swelling to £318mbefore the pandemic boostedits profitability, I can seewhysome investorsmay look back inanxiety at the 2000 dotcombust.What is often forgotten about the

last tech bubble is the foundationthat it left behind, onwhich today’smore robust internet businesseswere built. Billions of dollars werespent on laying fibre-optic cableand creating excess capacity thatreduced broadband costs andgave a leg-up to Google, Amazonand Facebook years later.If the legacy of dotcommania

was its digital infrastructure,today’s pandemic-drivenecommerce boom is creating anewphysical infrastructure in ourcities, building logistics networksthat will last for decades.Themost visiblemanifestation

is the courier and driver networkthat ferries our goods around. Thatcontract-free pool of labour, while

fluid and vulnerable to exploitation,is unlikely ever to disappear. Thisis a boon to new entrants, such asniche food-delivery apps cateringto specific cuisines or areas, whichare finding itmuch easier to recruitcouriers thanDoorDash, Deliverooor Uber didwhen they started up.The less obvious part of the

ecommerce infrastructurebeing developed is the deliverywarehouses, both big and small.The vast and increasinglyautomatedwarehouses built byAmazon and online supermarketoperator Ocado can cost hundredsofmillions of dollars. But thatinvestment is vital when – ashighlighted by the return of Ocado’sdreaded online queuing systemwith the announcement of thenewUK lockdowns – capacity isoftenmaxed out almost as soonas these facilities come online.

Aswell as out-of-town storage,ecommerce companies are lookingto build small fulfilment centresnearer their customers. Amazonrecently struck a deal with the Cityof London to turn 39 undergroundcar parking spaces close to the FT’soffices into a “lastmile logisticshub”. Parcels will be dropped offat the hub, then ferried to theirfinal destination by electric cargobikes or on foot. The City hopesto remove dozens of vans fromits streets every day, reducingpollution and congestion. Rightnow, delivery vans are prettymuch the only traffic in theSquareMile, but those efficiencieswill be all themore importantwhen normal life resumes.These local hubs are not

reserved for companies withAmazonian resources. DeliveryHero, the German food deliverygroup, has created hundreds of“dark stores” – little warehousesoptimised for rapid delivery in thesameway that “cloud kitchens”are for takeawaymeals. Venturecapitalists are throwingmillions atsimilar local grocery start-ups suchas Gorillas, goPuff, Getir andDija.These are capital-intensive

businesses to start, andmanywillfail. But the convenience of regular,fast deliveries becomes a hardhabit for consumers to kick. Oncethat expectation of 30-minutegratification is created, someonewill step in tomeet the demand.Themost significant lesson from

DoorDash’s success is that suchconvenience is no longer reservedfor city professionals. Early on,DoorDash targeted the suburbs,where less congestion anduntappeddemandmade for an easier sell.In NorthAmerica, it is the

cities outside the 100 largestmetropolitan areas that are thefastest-growing ecommercemarkets. Taking a hint fromits rival, Uber Eats is nowavailable to 75 per cent of theUKpopulation, up from50 percent a year ago. Increased useof robotics inwarehouseswillfurther improve these services’viability in less dense areas.Similar to laying fibre-optic

cable 20 years ago, deploying thisnew logistics infrastructure takesmore spadework than technicalinnovation. But even if theecommerce bubble does deflateonce lockdowns lift, consumerswill be left with a far strongerlogistics network that can onlybring us all long-termbenefits.

‘Today’s pandemic-driven ecommerceboom is buildinglogistics networks thatwill last for decades’

T E C H

W O R L DBY T IM BRADSHAW

ILLUSTRATION BY PÂTÉ


The FlorenceNightingaleMuseum in London,devoted to the pioneering19th-century nurse, is

closing its doors, indefinitely.Themuseumdirector, David Green,describes the plan as “hibernation”;the collectionwill remain on siteat St Thomas’s Hospital.The timing could hardly

bemore ironic. Last yearwasNightingale’s bicentennial. Themuseumhad invested heavily in anew exhibition; it opened in earlyMarch, less than amonth beforetheUK’s long first lockdown.Celebratory events across thecountry had been planned – I was toattend one organised by the RoyalStatistical Society – but insteadNightingale was commemoratedby the decision to name newemergency hospitals after her.As the British healthcare

system strains to stay uprightunder the force of the secondwave of Covid-19, theNightingalehospitals are all too appropriatelynamed. FlorenceNightingale leda small teamof nurses to Istanbulin 1854 to assist in the care ofBritish soldiers fighting in theCrimeanwar. Theywere promptlyoverwhelmed by the sheer volumeof casualties, chaotic logistics (“nomops, no plates, nowooden trays”)and shambolic political leadership.“This is theKingdomofHell,”wroteNightingale.But while she ismost famous as

a nurse, Nightingale was also – and Isay this inmost sincere admiration– amassive geek. Shewas the firstfemale fellow of what became theRoyal Statistical Society, and neverhappier thanwhen poring over atable of public health statistics.ForNightingale, however,

the datawere not just a passionbut aweapon. “Whenever I aminfuriated,” shewrote to her friend,the influential politician SidneyHerbert, “I revengemyself witha newdiagram.”Nightingale hadmuch to be

infuriated about. Returningfrom thewar, she led a long andarduous campaign to improvestandards of public health andsanitation. She had a saintlyreputation and powerful friends,but was also awoman in aman’s world, facing implacableopposition from themedical andmilitary establishment.In a strange forerunner to

last year’s debate about herdimmunity, in 1858 John Simon,the chiefmedical officer, arguedthatwe should simply be takingcontagious diseases such as choleraand dysentery on the chin. They

would be dry. The dryer the better.Statistics should be the dryest ofall reading.”Several biographers have

reported that remark as beingwritten by Farr toNightingale, thefusty old statistician reining in thefiery younger campaigner. Butwhileresearchingmynewbook, whichincludes a chapter onNightingale,I tracked the letter down andrealised that the historical recordhad become confused. The letterwasn’t fromFarr toNightingale.It was the otherway round: shewastelling him to play it straight.It’s puzzling: how could

Nightingale produce artfullyconstructed statistical argumentswhile admonishingWilliamFarr to keep it dry?My guess isthat she realised that themorespectacular the statistical rhetoricwas, themore unimpeachable theunderlying numbers needed to be.At a timewhenwe are

surrounded by visual presentationsof life-and-death data, it is a lessonto remember. I can’t help butthink of the chief scientific adviser,Sir PatrickVallance, presenting inmid-September awidely scorned“projection” of whatmighthappen if Covid-19 cases doubledeveryweek.

Wenowknow that Vallance’salarmingwarningswereprescient. But theywere thinlysupported by the data availableat the time, which left him alltoo vulnerable to critics lookingfor flaws in the scientific advice.Nightingalemight havewarnedhim, “The dryer the better.”Nightingale is an icon for

our times in anotherway.Chronically ill after her returnfrom thewar, she rarely left herbedroom. Shewas, nevertheless,an astonishingly productivecampaigner. Her symptomseventually faded after a quarterof a century, and she emergedto the astonishment ofmany.I hope the FlorenceNightingale

Museumwill not have to hibernatefor quite so long. And that the restof uswill escape not in decades, butinweeks.

‘While she ismost famousas a nurse, Nightingalewas also – and I say this inmost sincere admiration– amassive geek’

ILLUSTRATION BY CLAIRE MERCHLINSKY

TimHarford’s newbook is“How toMake theWorldAddUp”

TIMHARFORD

FlorenceNightingale:thepandemicheroweneed

THE UNDERCOVERECONOMIST

FRAN

MONKS

were, he declared, “practicallyspeaking, unavoidable”.AlisonHedley, an expert in

19th-century data visualisation,says thatNightingale’s diagrams–which are still admired today –were particularly striking at thetime. Statisticians tended to presentdata in the formof tables, even ifthose tables sprawled across pageafter page. Nightingale understoodthat if shewas towin an argument,she needed somethingmore eye-catching. (After sending a reporttoQueenVictoria, Nightingalewitheringly commented, “Shemaylook at it because it has pictures.”)The best-known ofNightingale’s

diagramswas published in 1859, ayear after Simon’s remarks. Oftenknown as the “rose diagram”, twopale blue spirals tell a powerfultwo-act story of catastrophicdisease in the Crimeanwarhospitals, followed by recoveryafter sanitary conditions improved.The diagram is a brilliant visualargument, and it won the day: newpublic health acts were passed,life expectancy soared and Simonquietly revised his opinions.There’s a famous remark in

a letter that passed betweenNightingale and her ally, thegreat statisticianWilliamFarr:“You complain that your report

French Art de Vivre

PhotoMichelGibert,photographusedforreferenceonly.Sculpturewww.antoinepierini.com

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16

THEARABSPRING10YEARSONAdecade aftermass protests and civilunrest swept through the region, topplingdictators andpromising a new start,howmuchhas really changed?Activists,dissidents and revolutionaries reflect ontheir struggles for reform in the countriesthey fought to free.Andrew England reports

17

herewasachill intheairasMonaSeifwalked toCairo’sTahrir Square fromaprotestoutside theheavilyguardedstate television office known as the“fortress of lies”. Eighteen days intoEgypt’s “January 25” revolution in2011, President Hosni Mubarakstubbornly clung to power and themood, thoughdefiant,wassubdued.

As Seif reached the neoclassi-cal EgyptianMuseumon the edge ofthe square, crowds of people beganto scream deliriously. It took the24-year-old activist a split second tocomprehend what was happening:after three weeks of extraordinaryhighs and deflating lows, punctu-ated by state-sponsored violence,Mubarak had finally bowed topopular pressure and ended his30-yearreign.

Hundreds of thousands of peopleexploded in a frenzy of celebration.Women leapt in the air and menpumped their fists. Others kneltand faced Mecca in prayer. “I justremember I cried,” says Seif. “I kepton screaming with people aroundme and some started hugging me. Iwanted to reachmyparents, but thephoneswerecompletelydown, therewere so many people calling. So Istarted… to look for familiar faces –mybrother,myfather.”

In that giddymoment, itwas easytobelieve theArabworldhad funda-mentally changed.Never inmoderntimes had the region been grippedby such expectation. In December2010, 26-year-old Tunisian streetvendor Mohamed Bouazizi fatallyset himself alight in an act of despairthat resonated across nations. Thesubsequentmass protests forced thedictator ZineElAbidine BenAli intoexile on January 15 2011 and trig-gered a wave of popular revolutionsas theArabspringunfolded.

If Bouazizi’s tragic act sparkedthe uprisings, it was Mubarak’s fallthat truly emboldened protestersthroughout the Middle East, break-ing a decades-long veil of fear andreinforcing thebelief that thepeoplecould make a difference. As the ▶

T

Protesters gather at Tahrir Square inCairo to demand that President HosniMubarak step down in February 2011


◀ region’s most populous nation,Egypt was traditionally its trend-setter, and Mubarak was the doyenof Arab despots. If he could fall,who was safe? For millions deter-mined to shake up the old order,it was the moment the impossibleseemedpossible.

“We felt so empowered that webelieved we would be able to dealwith anything that came next,” saysSeif, who spent the revolution shut-tling between Tahrir Square and a“citizens’ journalism hub”, as activ-ists used social media to mobiliseand spread their message aroundtheworld.“Wealsoknewthatthere’ssomething else to deal with,” shesays. “But I don’t think we under-stood themagnitudeof it.”

It was a prescient sentiment.Adecadeon,Seifhasnever feltmorefearful for the future. Her olderbrother, Alaa, an icon of the revolu-tion, and her younger sister, Sanaa,are among tens of thousands ofpeople jailed since President AbdelFattah al-Sisi seized power in a pop-ularly backed2013 coup that oustedthe democratically elected MuslimBrotherhood government. Egypt ismore oppressive than ever. A with-ering crackdown that first targetedthe Islamist movement has evolvedinto an assault against all forms ofcritical debate. “I don’t operate onhope any more. I’m mostly moti-vated by household survival,” Seifsays, her speech racing with emo-tion. “The current state of things istooviolent, toonightmarish.”

Her family’s experience epito-mises a decade of shattered dreams.Rather than ushering in the free-doms many Arabs yearned for, theuprisings exposed the difficulty offostering change in nations longruled by despots who had hollowedoutstateinstitutionsandbuiltpreda-torypatronagenetworks.

The Arab spring also highlightedthe struggles of popular movementsin transforming people power intoinstitutionalised political influence.Today, it is the strongmen who stilldominate, while the grievances thatinflamedmillionsofArabs, fromsys-temic unemployment to corruptionand yawning inequalities, remain.In many cases, they have worsened.Young revolutionaries whose cour-age drove the uprisings have beenpersecuted,withmanyseekingexile,exhaustedbywavesofcrackdowns.

Syria,YemenandLibyaarerippedapart by conflict, with hundreds ofthousands dead and millions forcedfrom their homes. Even in Tuni-sia, which has managed a successfultransition to democracy, there isan aching sense of unfulfilment.“Therevolutionraisedtheslogansof

leaving their countries. In Libya,Egypt and Tunisia, many predictedprotests could erupt again, citingcorruption and lack of jobprospectsas the main causes of instability.Lamloum points to the thousandsstill making the perilous journey toItaly inboats asa signof thisdespair.“This confirms they believe thereis no hope left for them in Tunisia,”she says.

TAKINGONGADDAFIOn February 17 2011, Libyansinspiredbyevents inCairoandTunisusedsocialmedia tocall fora“DayofRage”toprotestMuammarGaddafi’sdespotic 42-year rule. The dictatorresponded with predictable ruth-lessness, dispatching his fearedsecurity forces to demonstrations inthe eastern city of Benghazi. But theprotesters remaineddefiant.

Ahmed (not his real name) was a22-year-old fresh out of university,determined to join the crowdsfillingBenghazi’s streets. On February 18,he ventured out with his father. “Iremember thousands and thou-sands all over and screaming andyelling against Gaddafi… and look-ingatmy father’s face,”Ahmedsays.“He was in such awe, such disbelief,because he lived through the primeof Gaddafi’s authority in the 1970sand 1980s, when colleagues [in aca-demia]werehanged.”

As torched state buildings andpolice stations smouldered andthe bodies of martyrs were laid torest, the security forces began pull-ing back. “It was unimaginable,”Ahmedrecalls.

I first met Ahmed a few dayslater, when I crossed into Libyafrom Egypt after covering the fallof Mubarak. As Gaddafi’s grip loos-ened, Benghazi was a city high withexpectation. The old courthouse,which looked out on the Mediterra-nean, was a cacophony of activity, afocal point for revolutionaries whoset about establishing a “nationalcouncil” andpublishing thefirst edi-tionsof theLibyaFreenewspaper.

Ahmed, who spoke perfect Eng-lish, became my fixer. Over thecomingweeks,wespedalongbehindtrucks and cars crammed withrebel fighters towards “front lines”that in the early days were often nomore than barriers erected acrossthe desert road to Tripoli. Mosthad never picked up a gun in anger.Often, they would fire in the air in ashow of bravado, then retreat afterGaddafi’s better-equipped forceslobbed mortars and rockets in theirdirection. But they were resolute,and the intervention of Nato fighterjets in March neutralised Gaddafi’smilitary superiority.

freedom,dignity andemployment…It was carried out by the defeated,the excluded and themarginalised,”saysOlfaLamloum,anexiledregimeopponent who returned to Tunisiaafter Ben Ali was deposed and nowruns an NGO. “Ten years after therevolution... they’re still marginal-ised. They’re still excluded. They’restillwithoutdignity.”

She could be speaking about anyof the countries where uprisingserupted. In 2011, there were abouteight million people in the MiddleEast andNorthAfrica living below apoverty line of $1.90 a day. By 2018,that number had swelled to 28 mil-lion, according to the World Bank,in a region with the world’s high-est youth unemployment rate.Ten years on from that hopeful dayin Tahrir Square, a recent survey ofyoung Arabs found that nearly halfof18-to24-year-oldshadconsidered

From top: a protester burns a poster of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi inBenghazi in March 2011; the family of Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi,whose fatal self-immolation sparked mass protests

28mThe number of people in theMiddle East and North Africaliving below a poverty lineof $1.90 a day in 2018 –an increase of 250 per centfrom 2011


Ahmed watched from the side-lines. He was keen to join his peersin battle, but committed to his workwithme. InMay, after I left Libya, hefinallyenlisted.“Idon’tthinkIwouldhavebeenable to livewithmyself if Ihadn’t done it,” he says now. “It stillannoysmetoday that Iwasn’t able toreachtheprotestsonFebruary17.”Threemonths later, hewas in the

revolutionary convoy that rolledinto Tripoli as huge crowds cheeredtheir liberators. The images are stillvivid: “You think these things areimaginary and made up, but it waslike that exactly.” Ahmed then tookpart in the assault onGaddafi’s com-pound, which signalled the fall ofTripoli. The culmination of sevenmonths of tumult and bloodshed,it was also an intoxicating period ofhope, as the nation felt the shacklesbeing lifted.Academics, lawyers and others

nowhadachancetoshapethenationin their vision. Ahmed put downhis AK-47 and returned to Beng-hazi to raise awareness about theconstitutional process, voting andpolitical parties. Most Libyans hadzero experience of elections but, inJuly 2012, they cast their ballots. “Itwas like Libya had won the WorldCup – national flags everywhere andpeople hanging out of cars, honk-ing their horns,” Ahmed says. “A lotof people, even in Libya, forget howgooditwasbecauseofhowbadthingsare [now]. But if you talk to anyoneand remind themof thedetails, theyremember, yeah, actually how pow-erful itwas.”

SYRIA:ASSADCRACKSDOWNAs Egypt, Libya and Tunisia nav-igated the bumpy road towardselections, Mazen Darwish wasbraving security forces’ bullets inDamascus. In March 2011, he wasbriefly detained as the Syrianuprising against the Assad regimegathered momentum. The shoot-ings, beatings and arrests “were anearly sign that it was not going to gothesamewayasEgyptorTunisia”,heremembers. A human rights lawyer,Darwish knew the risks of opposinga regimewith a history of ruthlesslysnuffing out dissent. But he prayedAssad would agree to compromises,so the protesters could, at least,achievepartial gains.Early on,Darwish and othersmet

groups of youths and warned themagainst violence and sectarianism.“We thought the regime couldn’twin if the opposition used politi-cal or peaceful and moral meansbecause our demands were patri-otic,” he recalls. “But we always saidif the regime managed to lure theprotest movement to violence or ▶

WEFELTSOEMPOWEREDTHATWEBELIEVEDWEWOULDBEABLETODEALWITHANYTHINGTHATCAMENEXT…BUTIDON’TTHINKWEUNDERSTOODTHEMAGNITUDEOFITMONASEIF,EGYPTIANACTIVIST

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◀sectarianism, itwouldwinbecausetheseare its two favouredarenas.”Hebelievestheopposition’suseof

armswas inevitable after the regimeresorted to brutalmethods to crushthem. It also became apparent thatthe struggle in Syria would notremainadomesticaffair.Theregimewas soon supported by Iran and themilitias itbacked, includingtheLeb-anesemovementHizbollah. In2015,Russia’s intervention tilted the warirrevocably in Assad’s favour. Andas peaceful protest morphed intoarmed rebellion, governments suchasTurkeyand theUSprovidedarmsandcashtotheopposition, includingthe Islamist factions that ultimatelydominatedmoderategroups.Darwish and others tried to con-

vince Islamists toavoidviolencebut,hesays,“Theregime,regionalactors,domestic factions, they all had aninterest inviolence.”However, itwasthe regime, with its chemical weap-ons and barrel bombs, that “startedthe violence and created the groundforothers” tobehave likewise.Darwish endured this brutality

first hand. InFebruary 2012, regimeforces sealed off streets around hisofficeinDamascus,bundledhimand15 others into a bus and carted themoff to a military base. Over threeand ahalf years of detention, hewasbeaten with clubs, shocked withelectric prods andhungbyhis arms.On one occasion, his limp body wasdumped among the dead, only forguards torealisehewasalive. “Itwasa form of revenge with no otherobjective,” he says, speaking in ameasured tone.He was released in 2015 to a

Damascus he no longer recognised.Most of his friends had left Syriaor were imprisoned or missing –among tens of thousands of peoplethe regime had “disappeared”. Dar-wishescapedtoGermany, joiningthenearly sixmillion Syrians – almost athird of the population – who havefledtheirhomeland.Today, Assad, with Russian and

Iranian backing, has reclaimed con-trol of most of the country. But heclings to a pyrrhic victory as thebroken nation’s economy teeterstowards collapse. Millions are des-titute. Isis, the jihadi group thatexploited the chaos to take overswathes of Syria, remains a threatdespite losing its hold on territory.“There are no victors in Syria,” Dar-wishsays. “TheSyriannation lost.”Now 47, he knows “utopian”

thoughts of regime change are delu-sional for the foreseeable future,though he believes Assad will even-tually be replaced from within ashis foreign backers realise they arebetteroffwithouthim.“Theregional

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and international players will reacha point… where it will no longer bepossible to invest in the Syrianwar,”Darwish says. But even that seemsoptimistic fornow.

ADEVASTATEDYEMENYemen was already one of the mostfragileArabnationsbeforeuprisingseruptedagainst itsveteranpresidentAli Abdullah Saleh in the last daysof January 2011. Tribalistic, impov-erished and blighted by a corrupt,weak state, it was awash with armsandabase for oneof al-Qaeda’smostactivebranches.

After months of protests, Saleh,a despot who once compared rulingYemen to “dancing on the heads ofsnakes”, agreed to a transition thatwouldendhis33-yearreign.Anotherageing veteran of the regime, Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, took over,but all the old problems continued.“Youhadall thesehopefulmessageson the political side, while peoplesaw a deterioration in every basicservice,” Rafat al-Akhali tells me.“Corruptionandpatronagewasevenexpanding as newpowers came intothe transition.”

Akhali saw it happen from closeup. He left Yemen’s capital Sana’aas a 19-year-old after winning ascholarship to Canada in 2002 butcontinued to work with youth athome. He returned when the revo-lution was in its infancy, convincedthe “tide had changed”. After thetransition, he took a post with agovernment bureau that oversawreforms, believing the moment wasripe topushforchange fromwithin.

It was not to be. As the gov-ernment floundered, the Houthimovement of battle-hardenedIslamists from the country’s northsaw an opening to move on Sana’a,vowing to sweep the corrupt fromoffice. Young militiamen took overministries, stopping and searchingcabinet members. Akhali, who wasbriefly youth and sports minister,recalls how teenage fighters, AK-47sandrocket-propelledgrenades slungover their shoulders, demanded tosee government documents, eventhoughmanywere illiterate:“They’dhold the paper upside downand say,‘What is this? You are not allowed tobringthis in.’”

Akhali realised the state inYemen was a “mirage”: “You sud-denly find there’s no military, nosecurity – there’s nothing.” In Janu-ary 2015, the Houthis attacked thepresidential palace, forcing Hadi’sgovernment into exile. The region’snextproxywarwasabouttoexplode.

Days after this assault, KingSalmanascendedthethroneinneigh-bouring SaudiArabia andappointed

his favouriteson,PrinceMohammedbinSalman, asdefenceminister.The29-year-oldMBSwas on a fast tracktobecomingcrownprince.ByMarch,he was spearheading a Saudi-ledoffensive – blessed byWashington –against theHouthis, who are viewedby Riyadh as an Iranian proxy stok-ingconflict in theirbackyard.

In Sana’a, Akhali, his wife andtwo young sons fled to their base-ment as fighter jets pummelled theneighbourhood. After two weeks ofbombardment, they jostled throughcrowds and boarded an evacuationflight to Jordan. “It was the worstthing to be woken up by an explo-sion, sowe thoughtweneeded to getout for a fewweeks until this stuff isdoneand[thewarringparties] reachanagreement,”hesays.

It would be four years beforeAkhali returned, fleetingly, to a dev-astated nation stalked by disease,

with 14 million people – about halfthe population – at risk of famine.The UN describes Yemen as theworld’sworstman-madehumanitar-iancrisis.Accordingtoa2019report,about 60 per cent of the more than233,000 Yemenis who have died,either in fighting or through lack offood or access to services, were chil-dren aged under five. Thousands ofboyshavebeenrecruitedaschildsol-diers; young girls have been forcedintomarriagesbydesperatefamilies.

Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, isbogged down in a conflict it cannotwin while the Houthis retain theirholdonSana’a and thenorth.Akhalirelocated to the UK and is a fellowat Oxford university’s BlavatnikSchool of Government. “It seems ifyou want to have any change, youneed foreign backing and you needweapons,” he reflects. “Canweeffectchange at this time?That’s the ques-tion I strugglewith.”

LESSONSFROMLIBYAIn Libya, Ahmed’s nagging doubtsabout the country’s trajectory grewas neophyte politicians failed toknit together a functioning stateand as armed factions, born out ofthe revolt, battled over the oil-richnation’s resources. He recalls pre-dicting to his mother in 2014 thattherewas going tobeawar that year.“Shewas like, ‘What are you talkingabout?’ I told her, ‘The polarisation,it’s justescalating.’”

But even he underestimated howbad it would get, as Libyan war-lords, such as the septuagenarianformermilitaryofficerGeneralKhal-ifa Haftar, carved the country intofiefdoms. “Everythingwehad strug-gled for, [Haftar’s forces] were likejust, bang, undo it,” Ahmed says.“Life just stopped… it was the wholething, street-to-street fighting, jetsbombing, tanks in thestreet.”

HeviewsHaftarasawannabedic-tator inthemouldofGaddafi.Butthegeneral’s self-proclaimed assaultagainst Islamists resonated withEgyptandtheUnitedArabEmirates.Militias in the west of Libya, someIslamists, drew backing from QatarandTurkey. OnApril 4 2019,HaftarlaunchedanoffensiveagainstaweakUN-backed government in Tripoli,triggering a proxy war on theMedi-terranean’s southernshores.

When I visited Tripoli last Febru-ary, the capital hadbeenunder siegefor months. As fighters hunkereddown in abandoned, bullet-scarredhomes, civilians in surroundingareas lived in fear of the next rocketor drone attack. Turkish interven-tion turned the tide against Haftarand today there is an uneasy peace,but many believe foreign powers ▶

A Yemeni child walks through the rubble of a building bombed inan air strike in the southern city of Taez in March 2018

60%Proportion of the morethan 233,000 deaths inYemen’s crisis that werechildren aged under five

IJUSTREGRETTHEREARESTILLGOVERNMENTSANDGROUPS…WHODON’TWANTTHESESOCIETIESTOHAVEFREEDOM.THEYARESTILLTRYINGTOINSISTONEITHERDICTATORSHIPORCHAOSAHMED,LIBYANREVOLUTIONARY


◀ will determine their country’sfuture. “There were definitely a lotof wrong decisions made by Lib-yans, the fighting, watching theattacksagainsteachother.Sowedef-initely need to take responsibility,”Ahmed says. But “70 per cent of it isaninternationalconflict,Libyaisjustthebattleground”.

Ahmed, who is now studying fora master’s degree in peace and con-flict studies in Turkey, believes onelessonof thepastdecade is that if thegunsdofallsilent, localactorsshouldnot be pressured to rush transitionperiods. Ahmed and Akhali arguethat internationally backed initia-tives often put too much emphasison elections, instead of supportingfragile states to build effective insti-tutions and lay the foundationsneeded to ensure voters have buy-inandoutcomesarerespected.

Akhali says “electoral democ-racy” should be an end result, not astarting point. “It’s not up to inter-nationalpowers to say, ‘No, youhaveto get there in two or three years.’No state was formed, or evolved, intwoyears.”

REBUILDINGFROMZEROEventhemostsuccessfulArabspringexperiment underscores how hardit is for countries to emerge fromdictatorship. Tunisia has many ele-ments of stability that have eludedothers. The military is not power-ful enough tomeddle inpolitics. Themain Islamist movement, aware ofthe regional dynamics, was quickto rebrand as a Muslim democraticparty and cooperate with secularparties. There is also a vibrant civilsocietyandgreater social freedoms.

Yet unemploymenthas remainedat about 15 per cent and there arestill gaping regional inequalities.Many Tunisians are angry at politi-cians they see as self-interested andunable to work for the public good.“We are rebuilding from zero,” saysthe Tunisian civil society activ-ist Lamloum. “We lived underdictatorial regimes for decades...The absence of alternatives and thedifficulty of constructing alterna-tives goesback to that.”

According to the InternationalMonetaryFund,Tunisianeedsaboutfive years of 5 per cent growth evento reduce unemployment to 11 percent. Yet the economy expandedby an average of 1.7 per cent from2010-17, farbelow thedecadebeforespring 2011. Still, Lamloum saysthere isnosenseof“crushingdefeat”.“There are still youths who have notbeen defeated and are still able tofight some battles – and win them,”she says. “The revolution did notsucceed, but inmyopinion the revo-

In Berlin, Mazen Darwish keepshis revolutionary flame flickeringas president of the Syrian Centerfor Media and Freedom of Expres-sion. He documents abuses in Syriaand helped German prosecutorscharge a notorious former intelli-gence officer, Anwar Raslan, withwar crimes. It is, he says, his way ofkeeping “justice on the table” andpreventing “the politicians, theprinces of war… the regional gov-ernments” from agreeing politicalsettlements that fail to secure a gen-uinepeacebasedonaccountability.

When he reflects on the events ofa decade ago, Darwish says Syrianswere pushed to revolution by “yearsof despotism, of backwardness andbadeconomicandsocialconditions…but it isn’tpossible tohavereal struc-tural change without a heavy price.Personally, Iwasprepared topay theprice,althoughIneverwishedfortheprice tobe this.Never.”

In Cairo, Mona Seif planned tobegin a PhD, but has put her studieson hold to focus on the plight of herbrother and sister. The re-arrest ofAlaa – a blogger who was detainedin September 2019, sixmonths aftercompleting a five-year jail term –“made me realise I can no longer trytosustainanormal life”, shesays.

Seif, who documented abuses bythe security services, canbarelyhideher anger as she struggles to com-prehend the popular support forthe 2013 coup that brought an endto Egypt’s brief democratic chapter.She never understood those people,some of whom had packed intoTahrir Square to call for Mubarak’sresignation, “selling the idea of apragmatic choice” of siding with themilitary because they loathed theMuslimBrotherhoodgovernment.

“Therewas this notion…[among]a lot of Sisi supporters… that, ‘Yes,the army was going to commit mas-sive violations, but it’s never goingto touch us, it’s going to be againstIslamists.’” It was a period, she says,that “changed our worlds, our socialcircles and friendships”. Egyptians,like many other Arabs, argued overthe question of stability versusdemocratic freedoms. “I never feltsoalienated.”

When I returned to Cairo for the2018 presidential election, virtu-ally all forms of critical debate hadbeensilenced.Thepresidentsecured97 per cent of the votes. Those busi-nessmenwilling to talkontherecordlauded Sisi for returning stabilityand reviving a bankrupt economyafter the Brotherhood’s divisiveand turbulent rule. But an improv-ing macroeconomics picture oftenmasks thereality formost– inEgypt,poverty has continued to rise. Even

lution lost a battle, it did not lose thewar,thebrackethasnotbeenclosed.”

All those interviewed agreedthe uprisings had been inevitable,whether in 2011 or at another point,due to the conditions people wereliving under. Ahmed says: “Therewas so much good, but so much badaswell.”Citinghistoricalprecedents,such as the 1968 Prague spring,he says “these springs take time”. “Ijustregrettherearestillgovernmentsand groups of interests who don’twant these societies to have free-dom,” he adds. “They are still tryingto insist on providing two options,eitherdictatorshiporchaos.”

In Yemen, Akhali believes war-ring factions will ultimately thrashout a power-sharing agreement,but then comes the daunting taskof rebuilding a devastated society.“Is itfixable?Wehave tocling to thathope,”he says.

A crowd gathers at a square in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia, in December 2011, named afterMohamed Bouazizi, to commemorate the one-year anniversary of his death

WELIVEDUNDERDICTATORIALREGIMESFORDECADES...THEDIFFICULTYOFCONSTRUCTINGALTERNATIVESGOESBACKTOTHATOLFALAMLOUM,TUNISIANNGODIRECTOR

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beforethe2011uprising, thecountrywas attracting record levels of for-eign investmentandenjoyingaspurtofhealthygrowth.HA Hellyer, an Arab-English

MiddleEastanalyst,describesa“tin-derbox” in the region, where thestructural problems, fromeconomicinequalities to demographic pres-sures, are worse than before 2011.Thecoronaviruspandemichasexac-erbated these. He believes leaderscouldpushthroughreformsandpro-vide better services to ease people’sfrustrations, but “instead, I thinkthey’vedecided, ‘We tried thiswholeopening up thing a decade and ahalfago and that resulted in inadvert-ently empowering civil society thateventually led to the events of 2011.So they are going to clampdownandmakesure itneverhappensagain.’”Things can’t go on like this indef-

initely, he says. “It doesn’t meanthings are going to blow up tomor-row, but… at some point it willcrack.” In the past two years, suchcracks appeared with protests inSudan, Algeria, Iraq and Leba-non forcing political resignations.Once more, however, they revealedthe challenges of securing substan-tive change from the street – in thelatter three, ruling elites remainentrenched, while in Sudan themil-itary sharespowerwith civilians in atransitional government.In Cairo, Seif describes a “brew-

ing anger beneath the surface”.“This is very similar, but in a moreintenseway, to 2010,wheremany ofthe younger generationwere feelingthat therewasno space for them, forwork or having families or any kindof future,” she says. “The current sit-uation cannot be sustained for ever,but I don’t know if that will lead toanother2011–Ididn’texpecta2011.”Like other activists, she sounds

worn down, the glorious momentsof revolution not forgotten, butoverwhelmed by what followed.She keeps thememories of 10 yearsago hidden deep inside, “protectedfrom all the darkness”, and says shewill only truly begin to reflect whenshe’s sure of the safety of her familyand friends. But like others inter-viewedhere,shehasnoregretsaboutstandinguptopower.“It’sweird because I’mnot saying

it as a statement. I actually ques-tioned myself a lot and I find it sostrange that despite all of this hap-pening, at my lowest moments,never once did I feel, ‘Fuck this,I regret the revolution.’”

AndrewEngland is the FT’sMiddle East editor. Additionalreporting byHeba Saleh, FTNorthAfrica correspondent

IT’SNOTUPTOINTERNATIONALPOWERSTOSAY,‘YOUHAVETOHAVEELECTORALDEMOCRACYINTWOORTHREEYEARS.’NOSTATEWASFORMEDINTWOYEARSRAFATAL-AKHALI,FORMERYEMENIMINISTER

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24

‘It’s in the interests of the people who

havemore to not talk aboutmoney’

Eula Biss’s acclaimed essayshave turned a fearless gazeon race, birth, vaccination –and nowmoney. She tellsLorienKitewhywriting abouther salary and the price ofher housewas ‘excruciating’.Portraits byGuanyuXu

Bymostmeasures, 2014was a goodyearfor Eula Biss. Her third book,On Immunity,impressed the critics. Sales were strong. Closerto home, her job teaching creative nonfictionat NorthwesternUniversity now lookedpermanent enough for Biss and her husbandto take out amortgage, leave their Chicagoapartment andmovewith their young son to amore spacious two-bedroombungalow a fewmiles north of the city. But shewas uneasy.

“The house felt enormous tome,” Biss sayson a video call. “I felt kind of upset about it, likewe have toomuch, we clearly have toomuch.”

She tells a story from shortly after theyarrived, when aMexicanwomanwith fourchildren in tow rang the doorbell to inquirewhether the curtainless and visibly emptyfront roomwas available to rent. Toldthat it was not, thewoman askedwhy.

“It was a deeply embarrassingmoment,”says Biss. “I thought shewas right, and Icould see that by her terms and in her eyeswe had plenty of extra space, andwe shouldbe sharing it. But it also kind ofmortifiedmethat this woman thought a family of five coulduse the space that weweren’t using.”▶


◀Biss’s new book,Having andBeingHad, is inpart a record of that discomfort, based on thediary that thewriter, then in her late thirties,began keeping to document her feelings before itall started to seemnormal. But the real subject,as has often been the casewith herwork, ismuchbigger than the intimatemethodmight suggest.Notes fromNoMan’s Land, the 2009 collection

that announced Biss’s arrival as one of the leadinglights of themodernAmerican essay, examinedrace and racism through the prism of her ownwhite identity;On Immunity looked beyondher experience as amother contemplatingvaccinations for her baby to the social contractunderwriting our approach to infectious disease.Now, inHaving andBeingHad, she tacklescapitalism, property and class privilege.

Thenewbookhas amore comic aspect thanits predecessors, which seems to suit Biss, andthere’s an engaging kind of lexicographical dramato early chapters as she findswords that she hadseldomwondered about breaking apart underthe pressure of her inquiry. “Work,” shewrites,“is interferingwithmywork, and I want toworkless so that I can havemore time towork.”

Biss’s frankness about her own privilege,meanwhile, extends further thanmost wouldexpect.We learn that she has a salary of $73,000and a household income of $125,000; thatshemakes $8,000 renting out her house for aTV commercial, pays amother’s helper $8 anhour and spends $200 on a necklace. She leafslongingly through catalogues of paint that costs$110 a gallon and rounds down from$485,000to $400,000when shementions the cost of herhouse to her sister – a piece of dubious accountingthat, on later consideration, persuades Bissto set a rule requiring her to give exact figureswhenevermoney ismentioned in the book.

The point here is that we tend to compareourselveswith thosewho arewealthier, andso do not perceive our circumstances quiteas the numberswould suggest. Did she findthis a difficult rule to follow? “It was quiteexcruciating, and I was very surprised,” saysBiss. “I’vewritten about vaccination, I’vewrittenabout race, I’vewritten aboutmy own body,I’vewritten graphically aboutmy child’s birth– I’vewritten about all these things that peopleconsider sensitive or personal, and I have neverbeen as uncomfortable with thematerial I wasputting on the page as I waswith putting downmy own salary orwhat I paid formy house.”

In search of an exception, I observe gingerlythat the formula she uses to describe the advancethat allows her to go part-time – “more than thetotal of what I’ve earned fromallmywritingover the past twenty years” –was perhaps a littlevague. The reason, it turns out, is that this wasjust a number floated by a publisher and theeventual figure, negotiated outside the period

imposed or enforced. “There’s less opportunityto be formulaic in the essay,” she says.

A little later, she frames it in themost universalterms. “Whenwe see someone putting their lifein relationship to history, thinking through theirlife in conversationwith some other systemofthought, I do feel like it’s amap or a template,”she says. “The service offered is that when thatwork is donewell, it helps you, the reader, thinkthrough your own experience – even if your ownexperience is vastly different from the author’s.You don’t have to share the author’s experience,you’re just walking the lines of theirmap.”

I often thought ofBiss’sOn Immunityoverthe past year, as slightly specialised virologicalterms that I last encountered there becameeveryday buzzwords.We are talking in lateDecember and Biss has been home schooling herson, now 11, sinceMarch. “It has really taken atoll onmywriting time andmyproductivity as awriter,” she says. “I know this is true for womenacross theworld – there are huge dents beingmade in people’s careers because of the timethat’s been lost.”

As someonewho haswritten about anti-vaxxers, is she optimistic about the take-upof vaccines against Covid-19 in theUS in themonths ahead? “Well, it’s beenmishandled,”she says. “The communication around thevaccine has been somishandled that I think alot of damage has been done. That is not to saythat the vaccine development itself has beenmishandled, I don’t know of any evidence thatit has. But even just the naming of the vaccinedevelopment project, ‘OperationWarp Speed’…that is not going to inspire confidence in people.People want to know that care has been takenand that every precaution has been taken.”

For Biss, the big exception in a year of tightlockdown came following the killing of GeorgeFloyd in the summer, when Black LivesMatterprotests swept America. She participated inthesewith her family locally and speaks of a tripto Atlanta, Georgia, where friends of hers werecampaigning for the removal of a Confederatemonument. “I was taking photographs becauseI couldn’t believewhatwaswritten on it, phraseslike ‘Thesemenwere of a covenant keeping race.’The next day, it was gone – it was taken down inthe night.”

She feels hopeful about themovement.“I think it’s just incredible,” says Biss. “It fillsmewith a sense of thewheels turning in a newdirection, andmakesme excited formy son’sgeneration too – you know, I dedicatedNotesfromNoMan’s Land tomy son, hewas bornjust a fewmonths after it was finished, andas I was finishing that book, I did feel dismayabout theworld hewas being born into.”

Howhas the debate changed in that time? “Thissense of racismbeing awhite problem, caused

‘We have toomuch.

We clearly have toomuch’

described in the narrative, was a little less. “Butbecause of the project, I’mhappy to tell you thatthe advancewas $650,000,” she says. “That’s fortwo books, so I’monly halfway through thework.”

I apologise for prying but Biss brushes asidemy discomfort. “It seems tome that we havevarious different polite habits around talkingaboutmoney, and one of them is that younevermention your salary, or that you avoidspecific sums,” she says. “When I thoughtabout, ‘Well, who does this serve?Who doesthis way of thinking or talking serve?’, it isalways the peoplewho havemore… It’s in theinterests of the people who havemore to nottalk aboutmoney, to have these silenceswritteninto our conversations and our exchanges.”

Raised near Albany, NewYork, thedaughter of an artist and a doctor,Biss describes her parents asunconventional and anti-materialist.Shemakes herself sound like adreamy child,most at home in the

woods. But she thrived as an undergraduateatHampshire College,Massachusetts, wherethe liberal ethos of self-directed learningsuited Biss well enough for her to emergefromher studies with the core of her firstbook, TheBalloonists, a work of prose poetrypublished in 2002. Then came various jobs inNewYork and California before she arrivedin theMidwest to join theUniversity of Iowa’swell-establishedwriting programme.

I’m interested in howBiss sees herwork’srelationship tomemoir and, while at painsnot to disparage that form, she is very clearabout this: the ideas come first, nomatter howlarge the life experiencemight seem to loom.Her chiefmodels were JoanDidion and JamesBaldwin, both of whomare central to the coursesshe now teaches at Northwestern, and she haswritten of being given “permission to think”by Susan Sontag, whose investigations intothe language of disease in Illness asMetaphorwere an important influence onOn Immunity.

Today, as herwork is held up alongsidethat of writers such asMaggie Nelson, ClaudiaRankine and Leslie Jamison as evidence of arevival of the essay form, does she see herselfas part of a literarymovement? “Yes, theanswer is verymuch so. I’m not sure whetherto call it amovement – I don’t knowwhat it is.A situation?” she says. “A greatmany of theseessayists are women and, forme, that’s justtremendously exciting. And the other thingthat’s happened, at least in the US, is that this hassuddenly become a viable commercial genre.”

What does she think is driving thisrenaissance of the essay? Biss wonders, followingthe theorist Theodor Adorno, whether it is anessential genre for political moments “thatlean fascist”, in which orthodoxies are being


and promoted and continued bywhite people,that reallywas not in the air in anymainstreamwaywhen IwaswritingNotes... Thewhite liberalposition thenwas that the best way to not beracist was not to acknowledge race ever, to neverspeak of it, to be ‘race-blind’.We’ve shiftedfar from that, and to the point where I thinkthere are things in that book that now readas, tomy eyes, very fumbling and naive.”

Biss is already immersed in the second partof her two-book project, amore outward-facing,internationally focused collection of essays onland ownership. She tellsme about a recent

Ultimately, the question for Biss waswhether she could sustain her values in aworld that she views as hostile to them.

“Capitalismdoesn’t care aboutrelationships between people, it’s not asystem that is built to forward or enrichrelationships,” she says. “Mymostmajorform of resistance is to privilege relationshipswith people over other things.”

LorienKite is the FT’s deputy Life &Artseditor. Eula Biss’s “Having andBeingHad”is published thismonth by Faber&Faber

Today’s anti-racistmovement ‘is just incredible.

It fills mewith a sense of the wheels turning in a new direction’

trip to Laxton inNottinghamshire, home toBritain’s last surviving feudal open-field system,where farmers still cultivate strips. “I thoughtit would be like a living historymuseum,” shesays. “But that is not what’s going on in Laxton,it’s not a demonstration – it’s peoplewho arededicated to the continuity of away of life.”

Biss accepts thatHaving andBeingHad is a lesspolemical book than its predecessors, focusednot somuch on articulating alternatives as onunpicking the contradictions she observes inher own life. Even so, there’s an intensity toher gaze that any of uswould find daunting.


SHININGTHROUGHTheshoe-shiners inBolivia’s capitalwearmasksbecauseof the stigmaattached to the jobbut, in this newseries, photographerFederico Estolreimagines themas the superheroeshebelieves they really are


There are 3,000 shoe-shinerswho go out into the streetsof La Paz, the Boliviancapital, each day in searchof clients. They are all agesand have become a uniquephenomenon: distinguishedby their use of ski masks toavoid being recognised bythose around them.

The masks have their origins in the trade’scut-throat nature. In the 1980s, newcomersstarted to work on the patches of moreestablished shoe-shiners in strategic cornersof the city, angering them; so they wore masks,shone fast and ran away if noticed.

Later, in the 1990s, people started assumingthese masked shoe-shiners were hiding theirfaces because they were criminals – using drugsor committing robberies. The stigma of being ashoe-shiner grew; now it is considered the worstjob in Bolivia, so all of them hide their identity.

In their neighbourhoods, no one knows thatthey work as shoe-shiners, they keep their jobssecret at school and, in many cases, even theirown families believe they do something differentwhen they head down to the centre of La Pazfrom El Alto, a neighbouring city.

The mask is their strongest identity: it makesthem invisible but at the same time unites them.This collective anonymity makes them tougherwhen facing the rest of society and is their▶

PREVIOUS PAGES: WHILESHINY SHOES WALK THESTREETS, SHOE-SHINERSPATROL THE CITY

ESTOL PLAYS UP SOME OFTHE MORE SUPERHEROICASPECTS OF LA PAZ’SSHOE-SHINERS – THEMIRRORS THEY USE TOCHECK THE POLISHINGPROCESS (ABOVE) ANDTHE BRUSHES HELDALOFT LIKE SWORDS(ABOVE RIGHT). TOP RIGHT:A STATUE OF A SHOE-SHINER IS BLESSED


‘Theykeeptheir jobssecretatschool,andeven their familiesbelieve theydosomethingdifferent’


◀ resistance against the exclusion they suffer.Shoe-shiners may be as young as five – includingabandoned children – and there are those in theirseventies too. Most are men, but there are alsowomen. There are immigrants from the ruralareas of Bolivia and high-school students workingto help their poor families. Young mothers shineshoes to help their parents.

Many do the work only temporarily, perhapswhile studying or to complement their income.I have met a mechanic and a lawyer who wereshoe-shiners in their younger years.

Their equipment consists of a brush, shoepolish (betún) and awooden box,which actsboth as a case and a rest for the customer’s foot.On the boxes they put photos of family or footballplayers or of themselvesworking, alongwithstickers and decorations. Their hands get reallydirty, so they go to a shelter to clean themandcomehome as if after a day in the office.

For three years, I have been collaboratingwith 60 shoe-shiners associated with theNGO Hormigón Armado, which works toprotect the younger ones from exploitation,on the creation of a photo essay inspired bygraphic novels. This shows the shoe-shiners asthe superheroes they are: I can attest that thereare shoes in Bolivia that dazzle thanks to theirsuperpowers. (The shoe-shiners’ nicknameis hormiga, or ant, so the NGO’s name meansArmed Ant, suggesting their strength.)

We planned the scenes during a series ofworkshops, incorporating the local elementsof El Alto, and then staged the shoots.Hormigón Armado will use the images I’veshot as postcards, selling them to the touristsin La Paz, and will produce a photobook withthe full series. The money from these saleswill provide a more certain income for theshoe-shiners’ families.

“The ShineHeroes” photobook is availableat federicoestol.com/shineheroes.ShineHeroeswill be at FORMAT21 fromMarch 12www.formatfestival.com

‘Themask is theirstrongest identity:itmakes theminvisiblebutatthe sametimeunites them’


A SHOE-SHINER RACES FROMEL ALTO TO LA PAZ


Britain’s first gastropub,The Eagle in London’sFarringdon, reshaped theculinary landscape when itopened in 1991. But asco-founder Michael Belbentells Helen Barrett,Covid-19 now imperilseverything about theindustry he has dedicatedhis life to. Photographsby Charlie Bibby

NOTYOURAVERAGEBOOZER

Londonwas once a diceyprospect for anyonewitha substantial appetite andfinicky palate. Betweensandwich bars, fast-foodchains and standard pub

fare therewas little gastronomicpleasure for lunch or supper.But in January 1991, on a shabbythoroughfare just outside theCity, a small venturewas aboutto change all that.“Visit The Eagle public house if

you like good food and drink servedin convivial surroundings” ranits opening publicity campaign –home-printed leaflets handed outby co-founderMichael Belben.Belben and chef David Eyrewere

hoping to tempt customers from araft of creative businesses that werestarting to open nearby, as well asjournalists fromTheGuardian’soffices down the street and fromnews broadcaster ITN,whosestudios were around the corner.“Michael waswalking down

FarringdonRoad, handing outflyers,” says Piers Gough, foundingpartner of architectural practice▶


Pictures taken in the 1990s, duringThe Eagle’s early years (clockwisefrom top left): co-founder DavidEyre; Eyre with co-founder MichaelBelben (left); Angus DenoonDuncan (left) in the kitchen; dinersat the Sunday lunch club that thepub used to host; Belben at thebar; renovations by regularsoverseen by architect DominicCullinan (centre); Amanda Pritchettand Margot Henderson (right)cooking in the kitchen; Eyre writingup the menu on the blackboard;Margot and Fergus Henderson


‘Our manifestowas one line:“Never forget it’sa pub.” And notabs, no cards,no reservations’Michael Belben, co-founder

◀CZWG. “He said, ‘Please come,’ soI did, on the first day. And I’ve beengoing ever since.”

“What people forget about thatperiod is therewas a fraction ofthe restaurants we have now,”recalls Oliver Peyton, the Londonrestaurant impresariowhose high-octaneAtlantic Bar &Grill openedin theWest End in 1994. “It was allabout veneration. You had to dressup as if youwere going to see thebankmanager. The Eagle didn’t feellike that. It felt like a pub, which iswhat it was – the congeniality of it,the owners serving – andDavidwasa fabulous host.”

Not only did a stripped-outboozer feel renegade, so did themenu. To Londoners in 1991, Eyre’sfoodwas both comfortingly familiarand shockinglymodern.

Therewere fat steak sandwiches,picante sausages and fleshy fishstews, alongside plates of exoticasuch as quail, rabbit and octopus.The vegetables and saladswereravishing. “Even kidneys soldwell,”recalls Eyre. “And notmany otherplaces were doing pesto, becauseyou couldn’t get basil in vastquantities.”

The foodwas delicious, butthe economic outlookwas lessso. TheUK entered a recession asThe Eagle opened. The oil-priceshock of the previous year hadknocked consumer confidence.Meanwhile, the generous businessexpense accounts of the 1980s hadstarted drying up. Belben and Eyreborrowed a third of the costs of thelease and had no backers. Therewas room for only two people inthe kitchen because they couldn’tafford to build a bigger one.

Yet despite the odds, TheEagle changed theUK’s culinarylandscape. Theword “gastropub”entered theOxford EnglishDictionary five years later, poppingup for the first time in the EveningStandard in 1996, in an articleheadlined: “Will stale pork piesand reheated bangers ever beaxed frompubmenus?”

A generation of entrepreneurialcooks graduated fromThe Eagle,includingMargotHenderson of TheFrenchHouse Dining Room, food


writer TomNorrington-Davies andpub entrepreneur TrishHilferty.

Within a decade, pubseverywhere had copied The Eagle’slook, ripping out patterned carpets,fruitmachines and cod-Victorianaand replacing themwith churchchairs on bare floorboards andmismatched crockery on scrubbedtables. Theywould serve (oraspire to serve) restaurant-qualityfood, withmenus scrawled onblackboards and – usually – openkitchens. But in London, Belbenand Eyre got there first.

“We invented a genre,” saysBelben, now 68 and sitting inThe Eagle bar on aweekdaylunchtime in late 2020. The decor isunchanged in 30 years, its walls andceiling painted in the same shadesof buttermilk and forest green. “Notmany people can say they did that.”

TheUK gastropubrevolution happenedbecause the pub-diningmarket was “waitingto be exploited”, asBelben puts it. In 1989,

six big breweries operatedmostpubs, when theMonopolies andMergers Commission launched aninquiry under the pro-competitionThatcher government.

Pub food and drink in the 1980swasmostly desultory. “It was classicmonopoly behaviour, controlledby big business and they didn’t havetomake any effort to improve,”says Belben. “If youwanted to opena pub, a load of publicanswouldbewhipped up bymanagementto object to the licence. It wasa closed shop.”

The so-called Beer Orderschanged themarket, after theinquiry recommended the numberof pubs that big breweries licensedbe capped. Following subsequentlegislation,more than 11,000UKpubs fell out of the hands of leadingowners between 1988 and 1992,according to TheMorningAdvertiser, theUKpub tradepublication. Small-scaleentrepreneurs – “people likeDavid andme”, says Belben –could suddenly lease licensedpremisesmore easily.

Belben, whoworked inrestaurants, and Eyre, amechanicalengineering graduatewho grewup partly inMalawi,met in thelate 1980s. Belben ran Smith’s inCovent Garden – one of a handfulof establishments with self-taughtchefs that formed a nascent late-1980s scene. They includedAlastairLittle in Soho andTheRiver CafeinHammersmith (Belben andEyre admired both). Smith’swas owned by Christina Smith, adynamic entrepreneur and formerdesign assistant toHabitat founderTerence Conran. Belben creditsSmith’s inspirationwith The Eagle’sflair for casual aesthetics.

“I gaveDavid a job as a busboy[at Smith’s],” says Belben. “That’smy skill – picking good people.”

Eyremoved to “a crazy bistro”–Mélange in Endell Street, wherehe taught himself to cook – andthe pair realised they could runtheir own place. Covent Gardenrents were high, but therewasanother option: following the BeerOrders, pubswere now cheap inless salubrious areas where creativeindustries were taking root.

In 1990, Belben and Eyresecured the lease on The Eagle, anunpretentious but elegant Victoriantavern in Clerkenwell twomilesfrom theWest End, frombrewerBanks&Taylor’s. “We got in herefor a few grand,” says Belben.The lease cost £15,000, but thepair had only £10,000. The brewerywas so keen to off-load the place,it lent them the rest.

Belben and Eyre tookwhatthey had learnt in theWest Endand applied it to their constrainedcircumstances. Could theymakescarcity a virtue? Could their fooddazzle against plain surroundings?

“Ourmanifestowas one line:‘Never forget it’s a pub,’” saysBelben. “No tabs, no cards, noreservations.” Like the decor,mostrules hold 30 years later (thoughcard payments are permitted).Arriving customersmust pounceon tables as soon as others leave.“And no optics,” says Belben,referring to themeasuresmostpubs use to dispense spirits,“so ungenerous.”▶

Facing page: MichaelBelben, photographedat The Eagle, London,earlier this month

Above: pages froma lithographic cookerybook self-publishedby Emma Hill in 1994;the artist runs the EagleGallery above the pub


‘Restaurants wereall about veneration.You had to dressup as if you weregoing to see yourbank manager’Oliver Peyton, restaurateur

Steak sandwiches and fleshy fish stews sat alongsideplates of quail, rabbit and octopus on early menus

2004. Pedro Chaves fromTheRiverCafewas first, overlappingwithEyre for awhile. Chaveswas aprofessional who knewhow to cookpasta in big quantities andwhichgrill to buy. In 1996, the self-taughtTomNorrington-Davies, a formerdrama student, took over, drawnto “ingredients sat nonchalantly infull view: olive oil, rocket, thingswe take for granted that at thetime seemed terribly new,” he says.“And cooking in fishermans’smocks, not chefs’ whites.

“I was part of the secondgeneration of this newwave,”Norrington-Davies recalls.“Davidmade those jobs attractiveto people likeme.Hewas preparedto take on untrained people andteach them theway he had taughthimself. Then it started happeningin pockets all over London.

Hilferty, anAustralianwhojoined the kitchen in 1996,went on to co-found the CantonArms in Stockwell, The Fox inShoreditch andTheAnchor&Hope inWaterloo (inwhich Belbeninvested). All, she says, wereinfluenced by The Eagle. She hadpreviouslyworked at the “high-pressure” Bibendum, an exclusiveFrench restaurant inKensington.

“The Eagle was laid back, whichwas just really, really nice,” she

says, “after havingmentalmenscreaming atme and everythinghaving to be perfect.”

Today, gastropubs areeverywhere. Some,such as All Bar One,are chains run by bigoperators. Others areindependent. Smarter

venues echo 1980s formality, withwhite linen tablecloths in husheddining rooms.

Some offer exceptional food.The Stagg Inn inHerefordshirewas first to earn aMichelin star in2001. TomKerridge’s TheHand&Flowers in Buckinghamshire is theonly pubwith two.

But Nicholas Robinson, editorof online guide Top 50Gastropubs,believes parts of the industryhave lost sight of Belben andEyre’s “never forget it’s a pub”formula. “They are often expense-account places with people havingtraditional businessmeetings, idealfor impressing a big client,” he says.

Numbers are hard to findbecause “gastropub” is not aseparate category, but there areproxies. According to Statista, ofabout 47,000UKpubs in 2019,more than 7,000were “food-led”,andmore than 900 labelled“rural character (food-led)”.

Yet pubs are in decline, withabout 7,600 lost in the past decade.More than 13,500 have gone since2000, a fall blamed variously on theindoor smoking ban, rising alcoholprices and a generationmoreinterested in “wellness” than booze.The industry predicts almost20,000more are unlikely to survivethe pandemic, taking 250,000 jobswith them. InNovember,Mitchells& Butlers, All Bar One’s owner,posted steep falls in takings.

Can independent gastropubssurvive? Robinson thinks thestrongest neighbourhood offeringswill. “They have suffered in 2020...But [in the summer] people did goback in big numbers. Tradewas ona parwith Christmas forweeks onend for some.”

However, the gastropub style isout of step in a public health crisis,as Belben knows. “The pandemicfeels like an attack on everythingwe’ve done,” he says. “I’mmakingmy living out of people in a crowdedspace, encouraging them to drink tolubricate the interaction.”

The Eagle serves a local crowdaswell as officeworkers, whichis an advantage, and customersdid return in July. But betweenintermittent lockdowns, it operatedat low capacity andwith 10pmclosures. The vaccine, says Belben,is the onlyway out – for The Eagleand for all hospitality.

Despite the fragility of chains,independent pubs aremorevulnerable. Belben andEyre neverconverted The Eagle formula into abrand, unlike contemporaries suchas Carluccio’s. The pair receivedprivate equity interest, and therewas once talk of an outpost in atheatre, saysNorrington-Davies.But Belben says a chain of Eagleswas never a serious proposition.“We always claimedwe couldn’trepeat it, andwewere right.”

Eyre now lives in rural Portugal.What does hemiss?More thanthe food, he longs for the sounds:“The hubbub, the chink of thecutlery and the clash of the pan.

“Just like any pub, really.”

HelenBarrett is deputy editor ofFTWealthmagazine

◀They put a record player behindthe bar and gave over the firstfloor to a fine art gallery, run byEmmaHill. The kitchenwas sosmall theywere often forced tochange themenu in themiddle ofa shift – “a radical idea at the timeand determinedly unrestaurant-like”, says Eyre, who brought thePortuguese-inflected cooking of hisMalawian childhood to the venture.

Despite the recession, The Eaglewas rammed from the start. “Bythe fifthweek, we tookwhatwehad projected to take in the 52nd,”says Eyre.

Six weeks after opening,they had earned enoughto expand the kitcheninto the bar, openingthe cooking process fordiners to see, burners

raging all lunchtime. The unusualwillingness to show the process andthe no-reservations policy boostedtakings: “You had to pitch up,” saysBelben. “That is howwewere ableto serve 120 people at lunchtime,doubling the covers.Which arestaurant is always trying to dobut nevermanages to achieve.”Therewas the odd issue. Sometimesthe foodwould take far too long toarrive, and sometimes the crowdswere overwhelming.

But prices were reasonable –some say too low. “Every pennythatMichaelmade out of the drink,Davidwould present as fabulousfood at bargain prices,” saysGough. “An outrage against everyrestaurant norm.”

By July, The Eagle was runner-up in The Times’ annual pub foodawards. The paper explainedhowEyre’s Venetian sausagesand garlicmashwere pulling in athirtysomething clientele “whocome fromall over London andpack the pub out every night”.The cultural critic JonathanMeadesdescribed its style as “big flavoursand rough edges”, which becamethe title of Eyre’s book of recipes.

Other than Eyre (who left in1997, eventually founding EyreBrothers restaurant), The Eagle hashad just three chefs. Incumbent isEdwardMottershawwho joined inJO

HN

CAREY

‘According to KingsleyAmis, one of the mostdepressing sayings in theEnglish language was,“Shall we go straight in?”’

Fifty years ago,wherever itwas possible, restaurantshad a bar area. Once past afearsome receptionistwho

had taken their coats, guestswereescorted to the armchairs there andinvited to take a seat. Theywereexpected to order a drink andmightwell be offered a range of nibbles.After a fewminutes, theywere

given amenu to peruse (awordthat I haven’t used in 50 years)and their orderwas taken, often bythemaître d’, not infrequently thechef’s wife. The orderwas handedto a junior, whodashed it off to thekitchen, and soon guestswould beushered into the restaurant properwith thewords “Your table is ready”.This system still prevails in

certain restaurants – on the groundfloor at LeGavroche in London,for example, before patrons godownstairs to dine; in the drawingroomof theGeorgianmanor housethat is home toRead’s restaurantin Faversham,Kent, whereRonaPitchford has been taking ordersfor decades.Most recently, Iexperienced this stately ritual inOctober, at theTroisgros family’swonderful restaurantwith rooms,LaMaisonTroisgros, outsideRoanne in eastern France.But I think the restaurantwith

bar, civilised and elegant, is due fora comeback – andwemight haveCovid-19 to thank. Letme explain.This layout had its admirers

and its raisond’être.Most notableamong the formerwas the novelistKingsleyAmis, an influentialrestaurant reviewerwhen Iwas arestaurateur running L’Escargotduring the 1980s. According toAmis, one of themost depressingsayings in theEnglish languagewas,“Shall we go straight in?”Sowhenwe openedL’Escargot,

our bar area had been thoughtfullyset up in front of a fireplace on thegroundfloorwith armchairs andcouches. This arrangement lastednomore than threeweeks. Thecoucheswere removed and replaced

somethingwhichwould suit thego-go 1980swith its sharp suits,earlymobile phones and roaringbusiness climate. I claimno creditfor this transformation but it is onethat has only accelerated since.Thefinal nail in the coffinof

the bar area,which tended tostand empty until about 8pm,wasrising rents. No restaurateur couldafford to justify the space devotedto it. Nowonly hotels are able toaccommodate such a luxury of abygone era. As younger customersdid notmind sittingmuch closertogether, so they did notmindhaving their pre-dinner drinks atthe same table as their food. Smallmergedwith intimate.Other changes followed. “No

bookings” was one, with customersseemingly happy to wait for theirtable outside or hanging arounda lobby. Holding on to yourcoats was another: cloakroomswere considered too expensivean overhead.But the pandemic has upended

these trends, for two apparentlyunconnected reasons, andthe restaurant-barmaybe onitsway back. Thefirst is thedramatic shift in power fromthe landlord to the restaurateur.With somanypremises lyingempty, once everyonehas beenvaccinated, fortunewill favourthose restaurateurs brave enoughto step up and take their chances.Spacewill no longer be at a

premium.Restaurateurswillbe allowed to stretch theirimaginations inmanyways that theconstrictive leases of the pastwouldnever have allowed: to let theircustomers breathemore easily.The second factor ismore

personal but I believe applies toeveryone.Wehave allmissedeach other somuch over the past10months that I have a long list offriends Iwould happily just sit with,nomatterwhat is on the table.So if you’re looking for

somewhere comfortable, spaciousandwhere the selection of drinksandnibbles is good... a barwith arestaurant attached, perhaps?

with small tables atwhich couplesor fours could sit, drink and eat.Having the couches in the first

placewas amistake on our part.I was 29 at the time,mydesigner 30,yet our experience of restaurantshad principally been in thoseplaceswhere orderswere takenanddrinks served. But our newcustomers, it tookus only amatterofweeks to realise, simply did notwant this. Theywanted to looktheir companions in the eye acrossa table. Theyweremuch youngerthanwehad expected andwantedto drink and to eat as soon as theysat down.Andourwaiting staffpreferred not to have to benddownto try and catchwhat the customerswere saying. (The couches endedupin a hostel down the street.)Thatwas the summer of 1981

and anewapproach to restaurantdesign and layoutwas underway, More columns at ft.com/lander

ILLUSTRATION BY PETER PHOBIA

A restaurantwith abar? I’ll drink to that

Restaurant InsiderNicholas Lander

FT.COM/MAGAZINE JANUARY 16/17 2021 39

If you love beef – if you love it truly – youwillknow that the best bits are not those fancy,expensive cuts of fillet or rib-eye. Keep themfor amateurs and kids or oligarchswhowantto impress each other in restaurants.Things become a bitmore toothsome

when a bone is involved, preferably T-shaped,but it’s the slow-cooked cuts where it gets

really interesting – brisket, feather blade, shin.These hard-workingmuscles demand a bit ofeffort but reward it in richness and flavour.Among these cuts, oxtail is king – and now isthe time to cook it.It is, of course, available all year round but it’s

only now,when thewind is icy andwe get homesoaked, that we really want to cook it.Turkey season beginswith Thanksgiving in

late November, peaks on Christmas Day andends abruptlywith the last turkey sandwich/curry/pie/shawarma (try it!). It has nothingto dowith the lifecycle of these birds – they’rein season becausewe’ve decided they are forcultural reasons.Likewise, themonths of January and February

are peak oxtail season for us. It’s in the bones,you see. The oxtail pieces want nothingmorethan a long, hot bath so the strands ofmeat canbecomemeltingly soft and the bones can turn thecooking liquid into a rich, slick and filling broth,which is the best tonic we’ve come across to takethe sting out of these bitingmonths.Here, Espelette salt and roasted bell peppers

bring a touch of extrawarmth to the broth andthin strands of pasta complete it. Boiledwintergreenswill go nicely on the side. Or a bowl ofsharply dressed salad – even though, strictlyspeaking, it’s not quite salad season yet.

Oxtailwith redpepperandvermicelli

Beef it up

By Itamar Srulovich. Recipe by Sarit Packer

Serves four

• 1 oxtail cut into largechunks (about 1.5kg)• 1 tbs Espelette salt, or1 tbs salt mixed with½ tsp chilli flakes• 2 large bell peppers,about 350g• 2 large onions,about 250g• 4 garlic cloves, peeledand sliced• 1 fresh red chilli• 2 bay leaves• 1 tsp paprika• 800ml water• 250g vermicelli, orbroken spaghettini

1—Season the oxtailpieces with the chilli saltand rest for at least anhour and up to 24 hours.

2—Heat your oven to200C (fan assist). Placethe pieces of oxtail in onelayer in a deep roastingtray and roast for 15minutes. Remove, flip androast for another 10minutes, or until thepieces are really darkgolden all over.

3—While the oxtail isroasting, roughly dice thepeppers and onions andslice the garlic and thechilli. Once the meat hasroasted, add all thevegetables, mix well tocoat the pieces with anyjuices that have formed inthe tin and return to theoven to roast for another10 minutes. Meanwhile,boil a kettle.

4—Remove from theoven. Add the bay leaves,sprinkle the paprika andpour over 800ml ofboiling water. Cover andreturn to the oven for onehour. Remove, bastecarefully and flip theoxtail pieces in the liquidthat has formed. Re-coverand reduce the oven heatto 180C. Return thecovered tray to the ovenand cook for anotherhour. Remove, flip thepieces again and add thevermicelli to the liquidthat has formed. Mix tocoat. Add a little extraboiling water if the pastaseems very dry but don’tcover with water, justmoisten. Re-cover andreturn to the oven for thelast 15 minutes. Remove,mix and serve.


Photographs by Patricia Niven


Formany of uswinedrinkers, our first consciousact towards saving theplanet was to separate

empty bottles from the rest ofour rubbish. Itmade us feelpretty good, even thoughmostof uswere – and continue to be– shockingly ignorant aboutwhat then happens to them.Today, few really understand the

relativemerits of different formsof packaging forwine in terms ofsustainability. And this is hardlysurprising, since even thosewhosejob it is to study such things admitthat thewhole subject is hugelycomplex and definitive statisticsare extremely difficult to come by.To the average consumer, a

glass bottlemay seemvirtuousbecause they generally assume thatit’s both recycled and recyclable.Hencewhen the European glassmanufacturers association,FEVE, commissioned a consumerresearch project last year involving10,000 15-minute interviews in13 European countries, it wasable to boast that 91 per cent ofinterviewees agreed glass is thebest packagingmaterial for wine.(Brits are themost scepticalabout glass, apparently – only82 per cent of us agreed.)On the strength of this research,

Europe’s glassmanufacturers havecome upwith a newhallmarkon bottles that, as far as I canmake out,merely confirms thatthe bottle you have in yourhand is indeedmade of glass,even if the design of the logovaguely suggests recyclability.The official online presentation

of this innovation last Novemberskipped lightly over themassivecarbon footprint of producingand transporting glass bottles, thebiggest factors in anywinemaker’scarbon audit. A greener sort offurnace, which reliesmore onelectric power than fossil fuels, isbeing piloted in Germany over thenext few years, yet it will requireconsiderable effort and investment

all glass containers in theUKarerecycled, comparedwithwell over90per cent in Switzerland andScandinavia. (Swiss citizens areincentivised by a combination offree glass collection points and atax onbags for general rubbish.)TheBritish Standards Institution,which sets national standards foreverything fromfinancial servicestomedical devices, would like tosee recycling protocols harmonised.Recycling bottles is complicated.

They come in all sorts of colourswhichhave to be separated fromeach other, while labels andfoils have to be removed. ThefarsightedTorreswinemakingfamily in Catalonia is pressingfor a standardwine bottle thatcould be recycled and reusedanywhere in theworld – or at leastanywhere in Europe to beginwith.Yet thiswould require EU

legislation, admitsMiguelTorres, which seems a verydistant possibility tome,whensomanywine producers chooseto use bottle design andweight –especiallyweight – to try to carveout a distinctive identity for theirwines. (It was notable in a recentonline forumon the future ofwinethat the greatest opprobriumwasdirected towards thosewhouseheavy bottles unnecessarily.)Increased awareness of

sustainability issues has alsoresulted in a flurry of new designsfor wine packaging. These includea replica of a standard bottle fromFrugalpac, which ismade from94 per cent recycled paperboard(and “a food-grade liner”) thatcan in turn be recycled.One of themost energetic and

thoughtful innovators on this sideof the Atlantic has been SantiagoNavarro, chief executive of GarçonWines. He has designed an almostflat wine bottle that can fit througha letter box and ismuch lighter,considerablymore space-savingand less fragile than the traditionalglass bottle. If the option of anactive oxygen scavenger is▶

‘A bottle from Frugalpacis made from 94 per centrecycled paperboard, whichcan in turn be recycled’

The glass isn’t greener

JancisRobinsonWine

As imagined by Leon Edler

43

for bottlemanufacturers toreach FEVE’s ambition ofcarbon neutrality by 2050.One of the keys to this is, of

course, recycling rates. Thefigure FEVE likes to quote is thatEurope’s “average glass collectionfor recycling rate” is 76 per cent(which it would like to see reach90 per cent by 2030), though itacknowledges that not all of thiswill ultimately be recycled.In theUK, each local authority

is in charge of contractingwastemanagement, whichmeans thatstandards andpractices can varyenormously fromplace to place.Overall, only about 50 per cent of


◀ applied, thewinewill stayfresh formore than 12monthsbefore opening, he claims.

A keen diver, he is well awareof the problems of plastic waste,as highlighted so vividly byDavidAttenborough in hisBlue Planet series. Even thoughthe food-friendly PET plasticfromwhichNavarro’s smooth,olive-green bottle ismoulded hasalready been used once – and ingeneral plastic has amuch lowercarbon footprint than single-use glass – some consumers areconvinced that all plastic is evil.

In fact, there aremanydifferent forms of plastic, ofwhich PET is arguably themost sustainable, andNavarrotreasures the letter he receivedfromSir David congratulatinghim on his novel design.

The problemwith plastic isnot somuch thematerial itselfbut how tomanage it after use.According to the British PlasticsFederation, about 50 per cent ofall plastic in theUK is recycled.Yet unlike glass, which can berecycledmany times, plastic canbe recycled effectivelymuch lessoften because it degrades – thoughwork is ongoing to improve this.

Wine in cans is becomingpopular in theUS, where a high

proportion of all drinks is soldin cans already. They tend to bemuch smaller than a regular bottleand, let’s face it, there are somepretty huge disadvantages to the75cl bottle. It’s way toomuch forone person, often toomuch fortwo at a single sitting, and the unitprice is far higher than a can’s,which some younger potentialwine drinkers in particular findoff-putting. Cans are convenient:they can easily be popped intoa picnic bag or even, shouldwereturn to office life, a briefcase.

Made from steel or aluminium,they can also be recycled almostinfinitely. Still, like glass, themanufacturing process is heavyon energy and resources.

Glass, so usefully inert, willsurely remain thematerial ofchoice for finewine that deserveslong ageing, but for the sakeof the planet we do need tolookmore favourably on thealternatives for that which isdrunkwithin days orweeks ofpurchase –which constitutes byfar themajority of all wine sold.

BoroughWines in Londondeservesmention for its workfounding SustainableWineSolutions, which offers a bottlereturn scheme, a refillable box (a“zero-waste alternative to bag-in-box”) andwhat it claims are “theUK’s only 100 per cent reusablekegs”. The latter are a fine solutionfor restaurants and bars – shouldthey ever be in business again.

More columns at ft.com/jancis-robinson

‘Glass will surely remain thematerial of choice for finewine, but we do need to lookat the alternatives’

44

The ultimate classic cocktail is theFrench 75, a perfect blend of decadence,simplicity and kick. Cocktails, like food,are very evocative for me, and a French 75will always bring back fond memories ofaperitifs on the terrace at Les Deux Magots(above) in Saint-Germain, Paris. It is theperfect spot to spend a few hours watchingthe world go by – a favourite pastime forlocals and tourists alike.It’s only gin, citrus (preferably Amalfi

lemons) and sweetness (a locallysourced honey, such as Epping GoodHoney from Epping Forest in Essex,would be my preference), finished offwith Philipponnat champagne. WhenI really need reviving, I add a splashof Louis Roque La Vieille Prune.

GET

TYIM

AGES

MY CLASSIC COCKTAILFRANÇOIS O’NEILL, PROPRIETOR,MAISON FRANÇOIS & FRANK’S BAR

French 75 recipe

• 100mlchampagne• 35ml gin –I use Hepple• 20ml lemon juice• 15ml honey• Splash ofLouis Roque LaVieille Prune

Pour all theingredients, exceptthe champagne, intoa cocktail shaker orjug. Add cubed ice,cover and shake.Strain into a chilledcoupe or flute, top upwith the champagneand stir gently.

François O’Neill is proprietor of MaisonFrançois & Frank’s bar in St James’s, London;maisonfrancois.london

FT.COM/MAGAZINE JANUARY 16/17 2021 45

All the answers hereare linked in someway. Once you’vespotted the link, anyyou didn’t know thefirst time aroundshould become easier.

1. What, perhapssurprisingly, is theonly one of the UK’sfive best-sellingsingles of the 1960sthat wasn’t byThe Beatles (above)?

2. What straitseparates Tasmaniafrom mainlandAustralia?

3. According to thelast census (2011),what is the secondmost commonlyspoken languagein England?

4. In which monthis VJ Day?

5. In which jail didOscar Wilde (right)

spend two years for“gross indecency”?

6. Which commonmetal has the atomicnumber 82?

7. What first nameis shared by a teamcaptain on AQuestionof Sport from 1996to 2007 and theTV character playedby Calista Flockhartfrom 1997 to 2002?

8. The Cape Doctor,the Sirocco andthe Mistral are allnames of what?

9. What’s the nationaldrink of Japan?

10. What wordappears in the titlesof the James Bondfilms released in1967 and 1973?

+ =

00 00 00 00 00 00 00

00 00 00

00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

00 00 00 00 00 00

00 00 00 00 00 00 00

00 00 00 00 00 00 00

1

11

13

12

14 15

2625

27

2 3

7 8

21

18

20

5 6

9

4

10

16

19

2422

17

23

The Across clues are straightforward, while the Down clues are cryptic.

Who or what do these pictures add up to?

The CrosswordNo 522. Set by Aldhelm

A Round on the Linksby James Walton

The Picture Roundby James Walton

Answers page 10

ACROSS1 Reckless,cavalier (5-3-4)9Amidst (5)10 Supplier ofpaper etc (9)11 Relevant previousexample (9)12Meat (5)13 Bistro, café (9)16 Book of maps (5)18Verse, poem (5)19 Bomb’s trigger (9)20Nonsense,claptrap (5)22Able to soakup liquid (9)25Disputed booksof the Bible (9)26 Film medium (5)27 Sullenly, bad-temperedly (3-9)

DOWN1Animal roamedabout in desert-likeenvironment (9)2 Rough fever followsonset of virus (5)3 It’s regularlywoven into plaid –silver thread (5)4 Flat tyre initiallyappears after meantrap goes wrong (9)5 Series of linksincorporating, that is,newspaper leader (9)6Compass taken fromveteran general (5)7Annual declarationwithout software ishit hard by differentunknown number (5, 8)8Arrangementof golden boxallocation (13)14 It decreases as moretin is processed (5, 4)

15 Special treatmentfor northeastEnglish racecoursefavourite (3, 6)17 Try a delta’s ragingcurrent (6-3)21 Barrow, perhaps,for some of the gallonkegs put up (5)23 This step with meon could be 14 (5)24Wandered overabout Germany (5)

Solution to Crossword No 521

C O M E D Y A H OA V A X A E A A AJ E T T I S O N AA R A E A T A S AS C O R E S E AA A A I A R A L AA S A O R D N A NS T A R A A A N AO A B A S Y N D R

S

U R H A N DA E A R A ES T U P O RA R A E A IH G G I SA C A G A OC E A I A RL A B O D YO M E A R A

A

R A R A A A A G AB R O L Y A R UO A G A I A A E AN E A T E N A T RN A T A N A A E AE V E N T F U L A

LU A A A E AD N E S SN A C A S AI B U N A LN A R A G AE D D I E D

E

GamesGET

TYIM

AGES

ILLUSTRATION BY SHONAGH RAE FT.COM/MAGAZINE JANUARY 16/17 2021

[email protected]; @gilliantett

or social group, meaning that “trust is local”.Tribalism is rife, in otherwords, inboth ideologi-cal andepistemological terms.The knee-jerk reaction of most Democrats is

to blame Donald Trump. But a more nuanced –and potentially more constructive – view can befound in a brilliant recent book by the Harvardevolutionarybiologist andanthropologist JosephHenrich. In The Weirdest People in the World, heoutlines what he describes as the mentality ofWestern, Educated, Industrialised, Rich andDemocratic (“WEIRD”) people, versus othernon-WEIRDgroups.

For Henrich, WEIRD modes of thought arebased around the ideals of individualism, moralconsistency and, above all, the type of sequen-tial logicused inalphabet-basedwriting systems.Western elites tend to assume that it is the onlyvalidmodeof thought.But in reality, Henrich notes, most societies

throughout history have used different mentalapproaches: they seemorality as context-based,presume that someone’s identity is set by familyand, crucially, favour “holistic reasoning” not“analytical reasoning”. “Analytic thinkers see instraight lines,”Henrichwrites. “Holistic thinkersfocusnot on theparts but thewhole…andexpecttime trends tobenon-linear, if not cyclical.”This last point is difficult to appreciate if you

have been educated for years in a system predi-catedonWEIRDlogicandthustakeit forgranted.But the key point to understand about non-WEIRDmodes of thought is that gut reactions tothe patterns in an ecosystem matter more thanfocused, one-directional reasoning and that per-formative symbols countmore thanwords.While America ismostlyWEIRD, inHenrich’s

framework, therehas always beenplenty of non-WEIRD thinking too, albeit less visible. WhatTrump has done is invoke this mentality on anepic scale. Formany educated elites, however, itis so hard to comprehend that they have eitherignored it or scorned it.Here lies the epistemological split – and the

futility of elites invoking “reason” to persuadeTrumpvoterstorethinktheirconvictions.Wordsalonewill not heal America. Neitherwill the law,nor logical analysis of the constitution. Whatis desperately required is empathy and a newapproach that might tap into WEIRD and non-WEIRDmodes of thought. You can only counterthe legacy of Trump if you first graspwhyhewassopotent to startwith.

It’s just twomonths since former US pres-ident Barack Obama solemnly told TheAtlantic magazine that his country was“entering into an epistemological crisis”.“If we do not have the capacity to distin-guish what’s true from what’s false, thenby definition the marketplace of ideasdoesn’t work,” he declared. “And by defi-nitionourdemocracydoesn’twork.”How true those words now seem.

America – and the wider world – is stillreeling in horror at the vicious political

chasm exposed by the violence in the US CapitolinWashingtonDClastweek.Butwiththereckon-ingof thoseeventsunderway, ithasbecomeclearthat this is not just an ideological fight.AsObamaearliersuggested, this isalsoabattle

around knowledge and thought that has beenescalating since Donald Trump hit the presiden-tialcampaigntrail in2015.Futurehistoriansmayconclude thatoneofTrump’s largest legacieswasto expose andcrystallise this struggle.The national reaction to the Washington

attacks isonlythelatestexample.Democratsandthosewhobelong to the country’s educatedeliteshave generally portrayed the assault in terms ofan abuse of the constitution, which needs to becounteredby logic and law.“We have to use faith and reason to confront

this,”thehistorianJonMeachamtoldthe(liberal)television channel MSNBC. Trump supportersthink differently. They are seething about thesymbolism of their leader being kicked off socialmedia platforms and the perceived arroganceof suchelites.Opinion polls are another indicator of this

epistemological gap. A snap YouGov surveyreleased last week suggested that only a quarterofRepublicansviewedtheattackontheCapitolasa threat todemocracy–andalmosthalfapprovedthe stormingof thehalls of Congress.A separate poll last December by Quinnipiac

University showed that three-quarters ofRepublicans thought that there was widespreadvoter fraud during the November presidentialelection (while 97 per cent of Democrats did notbelieve this).This might shock some, given that US jour-

nalists, election officials and lawyers are amongthosewhohave repeatedlydeclared therewasnoevidence of electoral fraud. But another survey,this one from the public relations companyEdelman, shows why this pushback is not work-ing. It reveals that a mere 18 per cent of Trumpvoters trust the media and just 30 per cent thegovernment, versus 57 per cent and 45 per centof Biden voters.More strikingly, the level of trustexpressed in institutions by the “mass popula-tion” is far lower thanthatshownbytheso-calledinformedpublic – those educated elites again.Indeed, the Edelman survey suggests that

manyAmericans today only have faith in peopleand institutions that are familiar to them, be itin their neighbourhood, company, line of sight

‘Western elites tendto assume that their wayof thinking is the onlyvalid mode of thought’

GILLIANTETTPART ING SHOT

WhyAmericaneeds a rethink

46

EU alarm at Pfizer vaccine delay

Documents

Transcript of EU alarm at Pfizer vaccine delay