As a big fan of the “Lunch With the FT” feature, I was always likely to enjoy an anthology like this. The writing is of a high quality, the guests are famous or impressive or both and the muddling of career summaries and contemporary opinions with quotidian observations about their culinary choices, manner of consumption, dress sense and social style is pleasing.
Some of the interviews alerted me to extraordinary individuals that I had no idea about and these were amongst the most enjoyable as they served as an appealing introduction to find out more. I would place Anatoly Chubais and Bao Tong in this category. Others gave insight into people I knew of and whose work I had enjoyed such as Yu Hua, Imran Khan and Zaha Hadid.
In other cases, the interviews are interesting to look back on from today's perspective: a 32 year old Marco Pierre White in 1994, Angela Merkel in 2003 before she was Chancellor, Jeff Bezo in 2002 when Amazon had recently made its first profit and its share price was less than $20 and Martin McGuiness in 1997 before the Good Friday Agreement.
‘Lunch with the FT’ also does a good line in sending up rich or famous people who are laughably out of touch with reality! In these cases, most of the credit must go to the journalist. Courtney Weaver does a wonderful job of exposing Ksenia Sobchak as a vacuous arsehole. Lucy Kellaway does a similarly great job in exposing Jacques Attali as a pretentious narcissist. Simon Kuper’s magnificent sketch of Prince Alwaleed reminded me of what an insightful and interesting journalist he used to be before he decided to focus solely on slagging off people who voted for Brexit. Roula Khalaf and Matthew Garrahan give a good impression of how ludicrously otherworldly Saif Gaddaffi and Angelina Jolie are, respectively.
Interviewees can end up being caricatures of themselves like the late Lord Hanson, of the erstwhile, eponymous conglomerate, or Micheal O’Leary, CEO of Ryanair. The Hanson interview reminded me of Henry Mance’s more recent, excellent lunches with Nigel Farage and Dermot Desmond. If Mance is my current favourite, then the queen of this era (mid 90s to 2012ish) is Lucy Kellaway, who does a splendid job with all four of her interviews included in the book. In second place numerically is Nigel Spivey with three, including the excellent Lord Hanson one, several journalists have two and most only one.
Some interviewees are interesting because of the place the interviewee has occupied in history; such as Paul Kagame, Donald Rumsfeld, Jimmy Carter and F.W. de Klerk.
The least enjoyable interviews for me were the economists who all, rather predictably, make hilariously inaccurate prognostications about the future. Infuriatingly, like all soothsayers, they continually claim that they’ve been right about everything but I suppose this is to be expected given the nature of their job. For example, Nouriel Roubini is catapulted to fame (and Lunch with the FT!) for predicting the financial crisis, which he got spectacularly right. Since then he has been making erroneous bearish predictions for a decade while the US stock market enjoys the longest bull market in history. As Benjamin Graham wrote in Part 1 of “Security Analysis”, ‘In the purely speculative field the objection to paying for advice is that if the adviser knew whereof he spoke he would not need to bother with a consultant's duties’. Applied to this case, if they understand how the global economy works so well why are they consultants and not billionaire hedge fund managers? The answer seems to me that they don’t believe their own spiel! One could argue fund managers are much the same but at least some of them put their money where their mouths are and have externally validated track records. Roubini struck me as a good deal more interesting than Krugman although this could be down to Martin Wolf’s inelegant writing, whose popularity is very puzzling to me. Gillian Tett, on the other hand, is a pleasure to read and manages to make Roubini’s insufferable smugness bearable.
This was a very enjoyable read but I found it was best in short bursts of one or two lunches at a time. Consuming larger quantities in one sitting left me longing for a longer format. The interviews are necessarily quite brief and in this sense I believe newspapers can be seen as a forerunner of social media insofar as they are short form, quite addictive, satisfy a superficial urge but are not ultimately very nourishing!
