Lunch With the FT: 52 Classic Interviews Read online

  Lunch with the FT

  52 Classic Interviews

  Edited by Lionel Barber

  Foreword by John Ridding

  Illustrations by James Ferguson

  Contents

  Foreword by John Ridding

  Introduction by Lionel Barber

  The Lunches

  ARTS

  Martin Amis

  Michael Caine

  Sean ‘P. Diddy’ Combs

  Gavin Ewart

  Zaha Hadid

  David Hockney

  Angelina Jolie

  Albert Uderzo

  Ronnie Wood

  Yu Hua

  BUSINESS

  Prince Alwaleed

  Jeff Bezos

  Anatoly Chubais

  Henri de Castries

  Oleg Deripaska

  Stephen Green

  Lord Hanson

  Mo Ibrahim

  Michael O’Leary

  George Soros

  Shaw-Lan Wang

  Steve Wozniak

  FASHION AND LIFESTYLE

  Eden Collinsworth

  Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana

  Tamara Mellon

  Twiggy

  FOOD

  Jennifer Paterson

  Marco Pierre White

  POACHERS AND GAMEKEEPERS

  Martin McGuinness

  General Rosso José Serrano

  Ksenia Sobchak

  POLITICS

  Bao Tong

  Fernando Henrique Cardoso

  Jimmy Carter

  Helen Clark

  Saif Gaddafi

  Paul Kagame

  F. W. de Klerk

  Lord Lawson

  Angela Merkel

  Queen Rania

  Donald Rumsfeld

  Morgan Tsvangirai

  SPORTS

  Akebono Taro

  Imran Khan

  David Millar

  THINKERS

  Jacques Attali

  Václav Havel

  Paul Krugman

  Nouriel Roubini

  Yuko Tojo

  James Watson

  Contributors

  Acknowledgements

  Foreword

  Lunch with the FT has long been a mainstay of the Financial Times weekend section, a consistently entertaining read, and a unique ‘seat at the table’ with the personalities and players who have shaped our times. This book is, therefore, a fitting way to mark the newspaper’s 125th birthday – rekindling memorable moments and reacquainting ourselves with the protagonists from that history.

  But these interviews also tell a broader FT story. They provide a reminder of some of the guiding beliefs and objectives that have served us well over the years, and will remain at the centre of our publication and our purpose. While many in media and publishing struggle to survive amid the forces of digital disruption, the FT remains in strong shape. This is partly because we have embraced digital delivery and innovative web formats. But it is mainly because of our sustained commitment to quality journalism and our confidence in its value and importance to our readers.

  That commitment to quality is matched by our dedication to a global perspective. Our international expansion from the FT’s UK roots was well under way when our first lunch guest sat across the table in 1994. Since then, our branches have extended and flourished across the US, Asia and the fast-rising economies of the BRICs and beyond.

  These portraits chart the evolution and revolutions of global society, which will always be at the heart of the Financial Times.

  John Ridding

  CEO, Financial Times

  Introduction

  From the very first mouthful, Lunch with the FT was destined to become a permanent fixture in the newspaper. The formula was deceptively simple: a conversation-cum-interview over an agreeable lunch. Since its debut in 1994 there have been more than 800 lunches, featuring presidents, playwrights, tycoons, film-stars, monks and more than the occasional oddball. Lunch with the FT has become an institution, as entertaining and enduring as the Lex column.

  To celebrate this year’s 125th anniversary of the Financial Times, we are publishing 52 of the best of the genre – one for every week of the year. Our list is an international who’s who from the arts, business, politics and science. The selection pays due regard to gender and geography, but above all it seeks to meet the test once set out by Richard Lambert, a former editor of the Financial Times. The task of FT journalism, he reminded colleagues, is not only to inform but also to delight readers.

  Lunch with the FT was conceived by Max Wilkinson, a crusty, enterprising editor of the Weekend FT with an acute sense of the absurd. He thought the new interview format would provide ‘a ray of sunshine’ in the paper. The rules were straightforward. The guest/interviewee would choose the restaurant, and the FT would foot the bill. In fact, the Wilkinson rules were broken on the very first outing.

  The FT’s first guest on 23 April 1994 was Marco Pierre White, the celebrity chef-cum-restaurateur whom our interviewer (Michael Thompson-Noel) memorably dubbed ‘the wild man of English cooking’. White, who had chosen one of his own restaurants in which to be amply wined and dined, rejected any notion that the FT would pick up the tab. The principle that the FT pays has otherwise mostly held firm, despite protestations from interviewees. What we view as a declaration of editorial independence has often been taken as a cultural insult or a poor reflection of the guest’s own financial standing. ‘Now I know why the FT is so expensive’ was the barbed quip of billionaire Michael Bloomberg on failing to pick up a $96 bill in New York, where he is now mayor.

  The original idea behind Lunch with the FT was to rediscover the art of conversation in a convivial setting. Good food was essential, preferably washed down with a decent bottle of wine to elicit insights and the occasional indiscretion. The combination led to some memorable encounters, notably a liquid lunch of biblical proportions at the Café Royal between Nigel Spivey, a Cambridge don and freelance FT writer, and Gavin Ewart, the 79-year-old poet. The next day, Spivey received a call from Mrs Ewart, saying that her husband had returned home happier than she had seen him in a long time. ‘The second [thing] – and you are not to feel bad about this – is that he died this morning.’

  Less fatal twists of fate feature in this book. In 1996 Jacques Attali, the enfant terrible of French intellectual life, announced halfway through lunch in Paris with Lucy Kellaway that he had to leave – to go to a second lunch. Apparently, gastronomic two-timing was de rigueur for Attali. Another mid-lunch upset saw Ronnie Wood, the ageing Rolling Stone, excusing himself from his oysters to take a call from the Sun newspaper inquiring about his teenage mistress. But the ultimate bombe surprise came from Yuko Tojo, the granddaughter of the Japanese prime minister hanged after the Second World War. She brought his remains to lunch in Tokyo with David Pilling, our Asia editor.

  Many lunches in this book show the FT at its eclectic best. Naturally, there is star-power aplenty: Angelina Jolie, Michael Caine, Martin Amis and Sean ‘P. Diddy’ Combs, the hip-hopper-cum-business-magnate, who turned up in a Seventh Avenue soup shop in New York. There are statesmen and -women: Václav Havel, the Czech playwright-turned-president and father of the post-communist nation; F. W. de Klerk, who brought about the end of apartheid in South Africa; and Angela Merkel, in a revealing interview in 2003, before she became German chancellor and arguably the most powerful politician in Europe. There are fashionistas such as Tamara Mellon, the founder of Jimmy Choo, as well as a rare luncheon duet with Domenico Dolce and his partner Stefano Gabbana. And there are tales of the unexpected from General Rosso José Serrano, the Colombia police chief who cornered Pablo Escobar
before the drug kingpin died in a hail of bullets.

  Inevitably, lunch – like the FT – has evolved over the 18 years since its inception. In the age of the BlackBerry, the smartphone and still or sparkling water, the idea of a long boozy lunch is almost quaint. Reluctantly, the FT has occasionally accommodated the busy lives of the rich, powerful and self-important by agreeing to a breakfast, tea or the occasional sandwich. But even modest fare can produce scintillating copy. Just read Pilita Clark’s opening exchange with Michael O’Leary, the potty-mouthed boss of the no-frills airline Ryanair.

  Today’s lunches reflect the FT’s global reach. We have an ABC (Africans, Brazilians, Chinese) of prominent persons which stretches all the way to Z (Zimbabwe’s Morgan Tsvangirai, the battered opposition leader interviewed over sundowners by Alec Russell, formerly the FT’s man in Johannesburg).

  There are also some excellent interviews which failed to make the cut: Emily Stokes filleting the ambitious author-soldier-politician Rory Stewart at Harvard’s Kennedy School; Paulo Coelho talking about prostitutes and the Pope with fellow author A. N. Wilson; Sean Parker, the tech guru, telling John Gapper in Los Angeles that a million dollars ‘is not cool’; or Roger Waters of Pink Floyd comparing himself to Shakespeare and Woody Guthrie – and ordering a £75 piece of gravadlax.

  The job of an editor is, however, to choose. In this case, I would like to thank Lucy Kellaway, a founder luncher and a mistress of the art, as well as Matthew Engel, the FT columnist, for his splendid essay on the 18th anniversary of the Lunch published last year (www.ft.com/lunch). Leyla Boulton, who co-ordinated this book project with patience and skill, has been indispensable. I am also grateful to James Ferguson, the FT’s brilliant cartoonist, whose illustrations have graced Lunch with the FT off and on since 2004.

  Lionel Barber

  Editor, Financial Times

  Arts

  2 NOVEMBER 2007

  Martin Amis

  Literary lion

  The novelist and commentator has lost none of his appetite for a war of words. He talks about Islam, his father and the ‘marooned ideologue’ Terry Eagleton

  By Lionel Barber

  Martin Amis greets me with an uncertain handshake and a furrowed brow. He is smaller and greyer than I had imagined. Is this slight figure in a waistcoat the imperious author of a dozen novels whose trademark is sledgehammer prose? For several minutes Amis does not utter a word. He stares at the menu at Odette’s, a restaurant in celebrity-packed primrose Hill. The silence is awkward, perhaps calculated (I arrived seven minutes late). Finally, England’s one-time enfant terrible speaks: ‘The menu is very pig-oriented.’ The voice is deep and gravelled; the accent a languid Oxford drawl. Amis orders his main course (roast quail), a glass of Chardonnay and, reluctantly, a green salad; then he excuses himself to smoke a roll-up outside. I place my order (a velouté of sweet corn, and organic salmon) and another glass of Chardonnay.

  When Amis returns, I ask him about his running public feud with Terry Eagleton, the Marxist English literary professor. Eagleton has accused Amis of Islamophobia, castigating him for advocating strip-searches of young British Muslims and raising the threat of repatriation to Pakistan.

  ‘I never wrote it and I never said it,’ snaps Amis. He does, however, admit to favouring ethnic profiling at airports after an incident at Carrasco airport in Montevideo, Uruguay. Amis claims a security guard searched his then six-year-old daughter and ‘f -f *d’ her fluffy toy duck.

  The novelist and his family have since returned home after two and a half years in Uruguay, the birthplace of his second wife, Isabel Fonseca. Plainly, the fluffy duck episode still pains him, much more than his spat with Eagleton, an academic colleague at the University of Manchester, where Amis has just begun teaching a popular course in creative writing.

  ‘This is very minor stuff. He is a marooned ideologue who can’t get out of bed in the morning without guidance from God and Karl Marx. This makes him very unstaunch in the struggle against Islamism because part of him is a believer.’

  Amis employs a linguistic defence: ‘I said quite clearly I am not an Islamophobe. What I am is anti-Islamist. “Islamistophobe” would be the right word, except that it’s not the right word because a phobia tends to be an irrational fear and it’s not irrational to fear people who want to kill you. So I’m anti-Islamist.’

  I joke that the Amis–Eagleton feud is the equivalent of Manchester United versus Manchester City. Amis declines the opening. A tall, blonde Russian waitress arrives with the Chardonnay. I note that my last Lunch with the FT – with an Irish politician in Washington DC – turned into an epic drinking session. For the first time, Amis smiles.

  It is time to switch to highbrow. I want to explore the relationship between Amis and his father, Kingsley, the distinguished comic novelist. What was it like trying to write great prose, knowing that every word was likely to be scrutinized?

  ‘I never felt any kind of particular pressure. He wasn’t an invigilator. It was nice having a kind of a lazy father, a very soft, sweet father. But lazy, jealous of his time …’

  But while Kingsley liked his son’s (award-winning) first novel, The Rachel Papers, he did not think much of his second, Dead Babies. ‘That was a physical shock, like a blow,’ he confesses, before switching the subject to his new creative writing course at Manchester.

  What has drawn Amis to teaching? He picks at his quail and admits to ‘a bit of paternal influence’ (Kingsley taught English at Swansea University for 12 years). But the other two attractions are ‘a vulgar curiosity about youth’ and being forced to read great books.

  In Amis’s literary pantheon there is no place for younger writers, with the exception of his buddies Zadie Smith and Will Self. ‘There’s something humiliating about reading younger writers. You’re more likely to be on to something if you’re reading V. S. Pritchett, Saul Bellow … But any young squirt, you’re not going to read except out of a kind of sociological curiosity.’

  For Amis, the authors that really matter are Saul Bellow and Nabokov, followed by, among others, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Jane Austen. The novel he most admires is Nabokov’s Lolita. ‘I must know it as well as I know any book. But it’s always different … You’ve got to read it every decade of your life because you are a different person.’

  Amis’s elder daughter is 10, but he still finds the novel enchanting, particularly the last 100 pages whose pace he previously thought tailed off. At about page 220, when Lolita leaves Humbert, there’s a huge influx of energy, he says.

  ‘Nabokov might have ended the novel around there, instead of having those three years trying to find her and finding her. That marvellous scene where Humbert goes to see her and her beauty’s all gone, she’s pregnant … I cried quite a lot towards the end. It’s morally very complicated and very unreassuring.’

  Morally complicated, unreassuring: that’s Amis in a nutshell. His novels are savagely comic and unsentimental; his literary criticism uncompromising; his choice of vocabulary rich to the point of self-indulgent. (Over lunch, ‘jocose’, ‘palpating’ and ‘adulterous assignation’ trip off the Amis tongue, leavened by a stream of four-letter words.) The result is usually enlightening, invariably entertaining.

  Feeling outgunned on English literature, I mention that I studied German at Oxford, his alma mater. Amis is intrigued and asks me if I have read Kafka in German. When I reply in the affirmative he embarks on his own aphoristic literary tour.

  The shorter Kafka works best. The dream logic in The Castle is staggering but ‘nothing odd works long’. The other literary rule: ‘Tell a dream, lose a reader.’ Joyce’s Ulysses is a noble, beautiful book. And borrowing from Nabokov, Finnegans Wake is a snore in the next room.

  According to Amis, the relationship between writer and reader is a love affair. Sometimes the writer falls out of love with the reader. It happened to Henry James, it happened to Joyce. But if it really is a love affair, then why is Amis so keen on impressing the reader (and me?) wit
h his command of the English language?

  ‘I am not a great user of obscure words,’ he replies, with a straight face. But he admits to writing prose which is ‘packed’, ‘slightly goading’ and ‘sort of in-your-face’. I want to ask Amis about male friendship, but he excuses himself for a second cigarette break, leaving his green salad untouched.

  Male friendships are a vital part of Amis’s world. His closest pal is perhaps Christopher Hitchens, the US-based author and polemicist. Their friendship goes back more than 30 years to when both worked at the New Statesman magazine.

  Amis cites his father’s friendship with Philip Larkin, the poet. Except between man and wife, there are fewer limits to candour and intimacy between male friends than between men and women, where sex has a habit of intruding on friendship. ‘Sadly I reached the conclusion that Larkin didn’t really reciprocate this love.’

  I suggest Larkin was a bit of a cold fish. ‘Yeah, and an envious bugger,’ replies Amis, noting that Larkin was jealous of Kingsley’s ability as a novelist, his metropolitan life and mainly his women. ‘Larkin was a sexual sloth who hated spending money on women, though there were many poets who splashed their way through women, like today’s footballers.’

  Our conversation turns to ‘The Hitch’ and life in London in the late 1970s, the subject of a novel which Amis is working on. ‘What we talked about was women and it was all very carnal, in incredible detail about encounters, but serious … And very clear about feelings that were not to be trifled with, and quite moral, given it was low-bohemia promiscuity, but certainly not heartless. Dirty but not heartless.’

  I nod in mock comprehension. My peppermint tea arrives, alongside an espresso for Amis. It is time, again, to move away from boys’ talk to politics. Next year Amis will publish a compilation of his writing on the 9/11 terrorist attacks, The Second Plane. ‘If September 11 had to happen, I am very pleased it happened in my lifetime because it’s just endlessly riveting and couldn’t be weirder.’

  The crisis of Islam, he argues, is a crisis of masculinity. He speaks of ‘centuries of humiliation’, first by the west, latterly by Israel. ‘How do you get back God’s favour? You come to a T-junction: one says “less religion”; the other says “more religion” and you turn to the right. Absolutely desperate.’