"The Powerful and the Damned" by Lionel Barber - book review

Having not read a book from cover to cover for ages, I am somewhat “chuffed” as we Brits say, to have finished Lionel Barber’s The Powerful and The Damned.

It was no hardship to read this 450 page in less than 48 hours. It has the same addictive qualities as short videos on Facebook or YouTube. Every few pages, a delicious name is dropped, a pen portrait is made of a world leader, a global crisis is briefly examined, and a VIP meeting in Davos or Dubai or Beijing is captured. No problems with readability!

My mood at the end was nevertheless that the author of this book deserves a bit of a finger wagging.

I admire his business skills and leadership - he seems charismatic and jovially pugnacious. His claim to fame is that he “saved the FT” by focussing on digital, shifting to expensive online subscriptions, and becoming global. No doubt.

But for a man who harps on about being a reporter at heart, one wonders how he will be recognized in terms of the quality of his journalism - by which I don’t mean the stylistic qualities that plenty of its reporters like to show off - you know who you are!

He and the FT failed to predict Trump in 2016 or Brexit a couple years later. Failure to predict is not a crime - but being stunned and having to comfort a room full of weeping journalists after the Brexit referendum does not reflect the kind of calmly cynical attitude journalists should, in my estimation, possess - at least, if they want to avoid the increasingly common insult of being “political activists”, rather than honest purveyors of the news.

I am not sure how many “me-too” scoops Barber and his team have to produce to make up for these failures -but he managed two, about the Presidents Club, and about Crispin Odey.

Is that really part of the purview of a business and finance newspaper? I am not sure, although I can see how it sent a message to those powerful people who might have otherwise taken FT submissiveness for granted.

In the last years of his tenure he oversaw the Wirecard scoop - and this is indeed first-class work, which like all really great scoops reflects the sins of a far wider canvas than the parameters of the scandal itself. In this case, the ineptitude of the official auditors and the mediocrity of the German establishment were revealed to a world which still believed in Germanic excellence.  Only 1-2 newspapers in the world could have run this scoop, so very well done.

Intellectually, the book is frothy, like a made-for-Netflix movie. Barber’s analysis never rises beyond the level of daily news and VIP gossip, however many Blairs, Putins, Modis, Merkels and Xi Jinpings he interviews.

I think Barber vaguely realized that the pre-2008 Financial Times was in thrall to its banking sources, excessively deferential to the establishment, and prized clever-clever analysis over news.

He set out to dull the academic polish and ask his reporters to get their hands a little dirty. And they do, as the above scoops attest. (Given many of his correspondents are themselves quite patrician, this is no small thing to ask them!).

But compare that record to the Guardian or the New York Times. Under the leadership of Alan Rusbridger, the Guardian broke story after story, including the UK tabloid phone-hacking scandal, Wikileaks with Julian Assange and Edward Snowden’s revelations of mass US government surveillance.

I think the fundamental problem is that Barber lost sight of how appalling the people he circles around are. A description of a London party by the son of a KGB agent, and himself a Boris Johnson appointed British peer Evgeny Lebedev springs to mind. Seemingly without irony, Barber describes the guests, like the children of Prince Andrew, as “high society”. I think that somewhere along the line Barber lost the ability to be shocked by the appalling people whose attention he solicited. All their sins came to be excused by his need to prove he was needed.

No surprise then, that he was never going to predict or truly understand the surge of post-2008 populism.

I would add that a lack of a keen moral edge just generally makes the revelation of painful topics less likely. This surely explains the superior performance of Rusbridger’s Guardian.

Finally, to bury my lede here, I was irritated by Barber’s pompous insistence on the importance of “editorial independence”, a horse he flogged frequently with whoever the FT’s owners were at the time: first, the Pearson Group and then the Nikkei.

But really this pitch for his editorial independence (Barber pointedly introduced the slogan “without fear and without favour”) is in fact an obvious power-play to safeguard Barber’s own authority - used in exactly the same way by every other editor impatient of being ordered around by his shareholders. (I am sure regular CEOs must be green with envy!).

Barber never honestly admits that his memoir is precisely the supreme example of why “editorial independence” is a chimera in the elite media: people only speak to reporters and their publications voluntarily in return for their own message getting out, on their terms. All those advertisers and sponsors at the swanky FT conferences, all those 5-star hotels and exotic foreign trips - at each point, you make a withdrawal from your “editorial independence” account. You pull a punch. You don’t offend powerful people.  If you close ranks to protect media colleagues (as he did), even when  they slander a man you claim you admire, how can you be trusted to turn on your charming and sophisticated hosts - however much blood you see dripping from their fingers?

The question for me, despite the respectable scoops the FT made under his tenure - how many were not made? (For example, the HSBC scandal, which was incongruously uncovered by the Guardian).

To close off this review, let’s think about his legacy, namely how the FT performs today. Under his hand-picked successor, Roula Khalaf , the FT has hardly set the world alight.

For me, a particular disappointment was the obdurate refusal to write a single word about the recent Benjamin Mauerberger scandal.

The focus is once more on worthy commentary from veteran columnists, many of whom need to do something new with their lives. How many more Martin Wolfe articles bemoaning the arc of globalization do you want to read? Or Gillian Tett’s “light-touch” articles about her banker chums?

It’s quite amusing that the standard-bearer of global capitalism operates with the same loyalty to its senior staff as a traditional Japanese behemoth, although obviously being part of the Nikkei might explain some of that, as might dancing around the Mauerberger story.

So, to my conclusion. Yes, I think the FT improved journalistically under Lionel. It perked up, and became more alert to the iniquities of the elites it covered. Yes, I think that he had decent people instincts. His contempt for David Cameron and fools like Prince Andrew is enjoyably obvious and he felt sorry for Theresa May. But being charming and successful himself seems to make him too susceptible to other charming and successful people, but who were terrible for Britain, like George Osborne, Nick Clegg, and Boris Johnson not mention numerous other powerful individuals.  He endorsed the shambolic Tories at THREE general elections, the party of austerity and Brexit. (That’s another gripe of mine - how can a publication asking to be trusted by its readers “endorse” one political party over another without its readers suspecting it of bias?)

His successor is presiding over a surprisingly vast and thriving business. Will that make her more conservative editorially or will it allow her to take more risk? I am watching closely. After all, I have been reading the FT for decades, I still think of it as British, and I want it to succeed. Go Roula!