Once, Financial Times man sat astride the globe without really having to explain himself. His was a world so arcane and procedural in its stratospheric dullness — with its sovereign debt markets, Patek Philippe watches and flights to Geneva — that it seemed like it might last forever. But then he found himself cast as a villain — a member of the parasitic global liberal elite. Steve Bannon, often pictured with the paper, finally had his number. Fast forward to 2025, with Trump again in the White House and the energies of Brexit now marching on Downing Street, and somehow, in an effort to come out fighting and make himself better understood — if at least to himself — he has ended up in field in Hampstead listening to David Baddiel talk about AI and dementia.
£226.80 gets you a ticket to the “Financial Times Weekend Festival” where you can observe this embattled psyche explore itself over 8 hours of serious discussion and ample wine. A sort of Hampstead dinner party turned into a giant adult play pen. Three years ago such a thing did not exist: no bidding hundreds of pounds for a lunch with Stephen Bush, no crab and lobster toasties nor reflections on how to prepare your garden for climate change. Now, in the grounds of Kenwood House, it announces itself with a brash, defiant ostentation against the world.
The first thing to understand about the Financial Times Festival is that no one really wants to be there. There is an aggrieved, slighted atmosphere, not least when it comes to the people who run it and find themselves forced to come face to face with their readership. A band plays an insidious lounge jazz, a sort of David Lynch nightmare soundtrack that accompanies sixty something men in linen jackets lasciviously hobknobbing with female FT columnists and Simon Schama.
This is “Glastonbury for the upper 8% of taxpayers,” as Robert Shrimsley, the paper’s political correspondent put it. But the reality was in fact something far stranger, less festive: more pagan, ritualistic and unnerving. A disturbed, vengeful minority had found itself unmoored from the once unimpeachable assurances of its superiority, smugness, taste and intellect. Now it had to save itself through some attempt at humour, humanity and self-awareness.
The last two decades are recalled as a paradise lost through spite and ignorance
This of course was highly painful, but almost understandable. Much of the festival’s discussion is delivered with a grave flourish, a smothering therapeutic intellectualism about the dismantling of the post-war liberal. It was lapped up by the festival goers, who want the greatest hits: Brexit was a disaster, Trump is a demagogue and populism is a sort of bored affliction for the resentful lower middle classes. The last two decades are recalled as a paradise lost through spite and ignorance. Any sense of responsibility from those who once ran the world is replaced by a sort of romantic fatalism. You can always make the case for nice things like the EU and the rules based international order, but it doesn’t really matter because no one listens to the facts now anyway.
Once you realise this, you are set free to worship those reassuringly dull totems from the past in the hope they might resurrect an increasingly vague sense of sanity. Nick Clegg was the most popular of these — greeted by a growing excrescence of severe-looking women with tote bags from the Literary Tent. Clegg had just written a book, as had his co-pannelist Lea Ypi. The presence of the Albanian academic appeared to unnerve the sizeable cohort of coiffed and tanned middle aged men, given that a previous appearance on stage had once driven one of their own, The Spectator’s theatre critic Lloyd Evans, into a libidinal fugue that he lovingly — and controversially — recounted in a subsequent column. We were here to discuss whether Democracy would survive the “nationalism, populism and advances in AI”.
The discussion soon turned to “irregular migration”, which appeared to mean the government’s policy of importing a small city into the country for the last decade. “When people don’t have a grasp of the actual facts,” said the host, without any facts having been mentioned, “how do you counter that narrative?” One panellist, who prefixed his controversial digressions by assuring us he was a liberal, mumbled something about local authorities not having enough money to integrate people. Lea Ypi pointed out that borders have never been more closed for some, and more open for others, by which she presumably meant her audience.
Clegg finally stepped in: “politicians are not philosopher kings,” he said, before bemoaning that missing from the narrative about “irregular migration” was that it causes economic and environmental crisis. The EU, the UN and international aid were the best institutions to deal with this. But like everything sensible in the world they were being undermined by “populism”. Besides, “political and media incentives” always developed short term thinking. The audience applauded. One would have thought that one of the more clumsy of those incentives was to bring in 12 million people in the space of a decade to prop up a stagnant economy, destroy the world’s oldest and most successful political party and put Nigel Farage in Downing Street. But like many other things in the audience it went unmentioned.
Clegg started talking about his book, so I took off to explore the festival. John Burn-Murdoch, the paper’s data guru was sat in a dark tent looking aloof while a discussion about the “Crisis of Gen X” played out. A distressed, slightly hysterical woman in the audience raised the issue of young people at her school watching hardcore pornography on their phones. “Well we’re not the experts on that,” said the host, “But I can let John speak to the data.”
Next door a sinister and obsequious man in a tight, crotchal suit was trying to get a peacockish pensioner to buy a Tracey Emin. In the “How to Spend It” tent, a guided meditation session was taking place. “Let the sun warm your thoughts and dreams”. In front of me a man was wearing a self-designed shirt composed of his favourite FT clippings and headlines. The face of Janan Ganesh, stretched out across a flabby shoulder, glared back at me. A smug, intractable gaze canonised by lunatic fandom that might be — to his satisfaction — the most successful incarnation of his life’s work.
Outside the Big Ideas festival, a worryingly large crowd had gathered. The editorial board were going to tell us “what they really think” in a giant, circus-like marquee. “You need to open that gate a bit further to us in,” snapped a flustered American at the security guard as we all bustled to get in. An unthinkable, preternatural roar suddenly came from the rally of subdued FT subscribers as Stephen Bush, Martin Wolf, Gilliat Tett and Gideon Rachman took to the stage. “It’s like being at a rocket concert” said Rhula Khalaf, the paper’s editor, half impressed and half disturbed.
“I’m not going to plagiarise Nick Clegg’s muscular liberalism”, said Stephen Bush during a freewheeling brainstorm about life in the New Trump Order. “Liberalism and innovation wins because freedom is uniquely better.” A big applause rippled across the room. An audience member took the microphone, “Trump is clearly owned by Putin,” she concluded after a rambling non-sequiter. “Well” said Martin Woolf, comfortably sunken in a sofa like an early retiree who had taken to haunting a Cotswolds gastro pub, “It’s certainly consistent with the evidence.”
It became apparent, as it had for many others, that to survive the afternoon I was going to need to drink. Much of the festival had already succumbed to a sort of restless tipsiness, preyed upon by luxury travel companies plying attendees with flutes of champagne. On the slopes of Kenwood House, like a routed medieval army at rest, were scores of wealthy pensioners in colourful attire, snoozing off a German wine tasting session. “I hope you weren’t expecting something more intellectual,” said a sad, owlish man smoking under a tree as we wondered whether the panels could have been more self-critical. We stubbed out our cigarettes and finished our drinks. The boomy voice of Yuval Noah Harari was beckoning us back to the Big Ideas marquee for another round.
“I think this will be deep,” said Rhoula Khalif to the best-selling historian, who went on to state, while musing on the purpose of his life and work, that the “mind likes to create things and impose them on reality.” The enthralled, gushing, and slightly unstable atmosphere lingered somewhere between a provincial Waterstone’s book signing and a Nuremberg rally. Harari, who had clearly not read his audience well, suggested that the best way to approach the chaos was to take humble solace in finding meaning in one’s immediate work as a doctor, teacher, or nurse.
They had been weaned on Britain’s Big Ideas Industry and it had turned them into monsters
But the festival and its attendees clearly wanted more. They had spent their life in a relentless churn of Peter Frankopan tomes, gorged on podcasts and long reads about contemporary Chinese literature and the global supply chain of lithium. They had been weaned on Britain’s Big Ideas Industry and it had turned them into monsters. I had succumbed to this myself, too drunk and over-indulged to think too deeply. Like other lost men attracted to the festival, I had found myself putting up my hand and asking deranged, interrogative questions.
By the late afternoon, rumours were leaking in from the Reform conference. In Birmingham they were listening to Lucy Connolly and Asheem Malhotra. In a field in Hampstead, meanwhile, David Baddiel was praising Stephen Fry’s performance of a dementia patient. We were discussing how to get ready for AI. In the boozy, September haze, a disturbing vision was coalescing of where this was all heading. Surely this was the future — one finally free to carry out its own prejudices and explore its own resentments. In the next decade, maybe, it will get what it’s always secretly wanted — its own unimpeachable demagogue ready to remake the world as it once was.
