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june 18/19 2016

Orgreave: John Gapper on miners and myths ‘I am the world’s best living novelist’: Michel Houellebecq speaks to Simon Kuper

UBER INCHINA

The battle for passengers in the world’s most dysfunctional ride-hailing market.

By Leslie Hook

Plus inside:

PINK SAND The FT’s pick of the best beaches

Cover: driving through Beijing’s central business district with Uber driver Mu Xuekan.

Photograph by Zeng Han

‘What was once an embodiment of a living industry is largely a museum’ John Gapper

5-11 5 Simon Kuper Football and England’s secret Europhilia 6 The Inventory Jared Diamond 8 First Person ‘I conducted EU diplomacy in a sauna’ 10 Letters

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12-50 12

DAVID SEVERN

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Chris Kitchen, the National Union of Mineworkers’ general secretary, at NUM headquarters in Barnsley

‘It’s far from clear that the Republican elite can ever control Donald Trump’

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Gillian Tett

Uber in China The car-hailing app is locked in a fierce battle for market share with a powerful Chinese rival.

Leslie Hook reports Michel Houellebecq The French novelist claims he is the world’s best. Now he has curated a show of his own photographs. By Simon Kuper The FT Pink Sand guide The best places for summer sun in our 16-page supplement Orgreave revisited John Gapper returns to the scene of the most violent battle of the miners’ strike

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‘You have to be focused, with the mental strength to cope under pressure and the ability to think on your feet’ How to be a Wimbledon ball boy or girl

‘Money matters, but sometimes financial incentives can seem insulting or grubby’ Tim Harford

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PINKSAND

16 pages: where to be beside the sea, this summer

Food & Drink 51 Jancis Robinson Miguel A Torres, grape detective 52 Five of the best Private dining rooms 53 Food shopping Le Comptoir des Producteurs, Paris 54 Rowley Leigh Lamb cutlets ‘milanese’ 56 Tim Hayward The Market Bistro, Norfolk Pursuits 58 FT Masterclass Wimbledon ‘BBGs’ with Sarah Goldson 60 Games 61 Undercover economist How to fuel a rewarding culture 62 Gillian Tett Selling Donald Trump

p25 Follow us on Twitter @FTMag

ft.com/magazine june 18/19 2016

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Simon Kuper

‘Football reveals a confused and surprisingly warm English-European relationship’

Football and England’s secret Europhilia

Illustratio on Luis Grañena

ft.com/magazine june 18/19 2016

up fingers at French policemen, but England’s hardcore fanbase is a drunken caricature of the Brexiters’ silliest instincts.

However, the team the fans watched that evening stands for a rather different English relationship with Europe. English football struggled for decades with an identity crisis: are we European or not? Should we play a clever short-passing European game, or stick with the traditional never-say-die British warrior style?

Graham Taylor, England’s manager from 1990 to 1993, was clear: “Our failure has not been because we have played the English way but because we haven’t. Bloody football should be honest, open, clear, passionate. Part of a nation’s culture, its heritage, is the way it plays its sport. And the British way is with passion and commitment.”

However, Taylor failed so spectacularly that the “British way” was then binned for ever.

In 2001 England began hiring continental managers. Their current manager, the multilingual Roy Hodgson, is practically a continental in disguise, having coached across the water for decades. In the first half against Russia, his England produced a copybook short-passing continental game. In football, Little Englanders have lost the argument.

And in football, too, the English have ditched English exceptionalism and learnt to hemsellves as just anoth her country. For see th

decades, there was national disbelief each time England failed to win a tournament. Surely the motherland of football was destined to rule the game? But in the past few years the English have reduced their expectations to near zero. Hardly any pundit went into Euro 2016 recycling the traditional line, “Could this be England’s year?” There is a growing awareness that England doesn’t have a manifest destiny, and that the British empire’s spell ruling the waves was an unrepeatable one-off.

Y

ou see a similar awareness in politics.

A few nostalgic Brexiters such as Nigel Farage think the days of British greatness can be recaptured if only the UK votes “Out”. However, these fantasies haven’t struck a popular chord. If Britons vote to leave, it will be chiefly because of immigration.

There’s one last thing that Euro 2016 reveals: a hidden subterranean English Europhilia.

The cliché is that the hooligans are an unrepresentative minority of England fans.

In fact, you could go a step further and say: England fans are unrepresentative of English fans at Euro 2016. As at every tournament, there’s a vast brigade of English people here going to matches not involving England. The day affter Englland d-R Russiia, I spotted d severall at Turkey-Croatia in Paris: quiet, overweight men in non-partisan T-shirts, marvelling att the genius of Croatia’s Luka Modric or the architecture of the Parc des Princes. England has both some of the world’s worst and the world’s best football fans. The latterr might not say it or even realise it,, but they love many things about Eurrope.

You see it every week in the English Premier League: packed-out crowds chanting the names of continental heroes such as José é Mourinho, Mesut Ozil and (forr years after he went home) Eric Canttona.

Even if the English vote “O Out”, their national pastime drrips with a Europhilia thatt rarely botherss to speak its name. 6 simon.kuper@ @ ft.com; Twitteer @ KuperSimon

Opening shot

T

he political question of next week is how the English feel about Europe. I say “English” rather than “British” because the 54 million English who make up 84 per cent of the UK’s population are more likely than Scots, Welsh or Northern Irish to vote to leave the European Union in Thursday’s referendum. It’s often said that the English – even those who will vote “Remain” – are overwhelmingly Eurosceptic. However, football reveals a more confused and surprisingly warm English-European relationship.

A nation is a nebulous concept. But the moment when you can almost see England, when the nation becomes flesh, is a big match of the national football team. England’s opening game of the European Championship against Russia last Saturday drew 14.1 million TV viewers, the UK’s largest audience of the year so far.

Little else brings the nation together.

England’s cricket matches are almost all behind the paywall, the most watched TV programme on Christmas Day drew just 6.6 million British viewers last year (down more than two-thirds since 2001), and pubs are losing their role as meeting places much as churches did before.

The UK is peculiarly atomised even by modern standards. Britons are the EU’s loneliest people, with h large numb bers not haviing strong friendships or knowing their neighbou urs, according to the Office for National Statistics.

England’’s ride at Euro 2016 is, therefore e, a rare and revealing shared national moment.

I was in Marseille for England--Russia, and on display was whaat you might call the dark Europe-h hating id of the Brexit campaign.

Groups of England fans seized the strategic heights of Marseille’s Vieux Port in a sort of parody y of their grandfathers’ invasion of Europe, and then broadcast Europhobia.

They told d the French, “If it wasn’t for the English, you’d be Krauts”; sang the old favourite es about German bombers and the IRA; and capped it with, “F*** off ff Europe, we’re all voting out.” I kn now that most “Out” voters arre upstanding citizens who don n’t go around sticking

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THE INVENTORY JARED DIAMOND

If you had a coat of arms, what would be on it?

A New Guinea bird of paradise.

‘Since 1999, I’ve spent an hour a day reading Italian’ Jared Diamond, 78, is professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles.

He has published more than 600 articles and his 1997 book Guns, Germs, and Steel was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

What was your childhood or earliest ambition?

I grew up in the aftermath of the second world war and one of my fantasies was that I’d provide food for the starving, displaced people of Europe. My mother was a concert pianist, I started playing at six years old and my monomaniac ambition was to sight-read Beethoven piano sonatas in public.

Public school or state school?

University or straight into work?

Roxbury Latin School, the oldest private school in the US – it meant more to me than university. I went to Harvard College, then Trinity College, 6

Cambridge, where I got my PhD. I had a post-doctoral position back at Harvard, then I got my first real job at UCLA – I’ve been here ever since.

Who was or still is your mentor?

New Guinea birds: they have taught me what I know about evolution.

New Guinea people. Alan Hodgkin, my thesis supervisor, who won a Nobel Prize. Richard Keynes, another great British scientist. And Ernst Mayr, the great evolutionary biologist. Ernst and I spent 30 years writing a book on New Guinea birds.

How physically fit are you?

I’m gratefully relieved that, at the age of 78, I’m still marching up and down mountains.

Ambition or talent: which matters more to success?

They’re both important.

If lost everything: would get to know JS Bach cantatas

Happiest: in New Guinea Have you ever taken an IQ test?

Yes, when I was 10. I scored high but not fabulously high.

How politically committed are you?

My political commitment is devoting my life to writing books to influence decision-making.

Do you consider your carbon footprint?

Not really.

Do you have more than one home?

I own only one house, in LA, where my wife and I live. Every year we go

to Montana, and I go to New Guinea.

I don’t own property in those places but they are my spiritual homes.

What would you like to own that you don’t currently possess?

Nothing.

What’s your biggest extravagance?

A birdwatching telescope for $4,200.

I expect to use it for another 20 years – so, in effect, it costs $210 a year.

Since 1999, I’ve spent an hour a day reading Italian: an extravagance in the time I devote to it.

In what place are you happiest?

At home with my wife and children.

And in New Guinea. And in Montana, because it’s so beautiful.

What ambitions do you still have?

To write one more book on the scale of Guns, Germs and Steel.

What drives you on?

Unanswered questions. Curiosity.

What is the greatest achievement of your life so far?

Contributing to the happiness of my family. My books and my exploration of New Guinea birds.

What has been your greatest disappointment?

I didn’t start to learn my first foreign language until I was 11 years old. Although I know lots of languages, I’m less fluent than many Europeans. And I tried to learn the viola; I spent a year practising every day but I was just too old.

If your 20-year-old self could see you now, what would he think?

He’d be astonished that life is wonderful at 78!

If you lost everything tomorrow, what would you do?

Get to know better the cantatas of Johann Sebastian Bach, play the piano and birdwatch.

Do you believe in assisted suicide?

Yes. Do you believe in an afterlife?

No. If you had to rate your satisfaction with your life so far, out of 10, what would you score?

Somewhere between 9 and 9.8.

Interview Hester Lacey Jared Diamond delivers “Crisis! A New Theory of Crises, Personal, Political & Global”, a How To Academy lecture on July 7 at 6.45pm on the Emmanuel Centre SW1P 3DW

ft.com/magazine june 18/19 2016

MAJA DANIELS; DREAMSTIME; GETTY IMAGES

Scientist and author

FIRST PERSON JAN STORE ‘I conducted EU diplomacy in a sauna’

I

Jan Store in the sauna he used when he was Finnish ambassador to the EU in Brussels A normal session would start at 6pm. I always explained that in Finland people go naked but if guests prefer they can wear a towel. One fellow had a towel around his hips, a bathrobe and something like a turban on his head. I told him, “No, it will be really hot. The towel will do.”

We would go into the sauna and then take a dip in the swimming pool. Then, after some time, we would return to the sauna. Twice was usually enough. After that, we would have a dinner that normally lasted two hours.

The Brits and the Germans were enthusiastic sauna-goers; the French less so. If I asked a French journalist to attend, I never got a clear answer.

There are a few things that people may not know about Finnish saunas. The first is that – unless they are family – men and women tend to go separately. The mixed sauna is a continental invention. There is also a misconception that the sauna is a place for heavy drinking. That is not the case. If we’re drinking something, we have beer and water – and that’s it. No vodka.

We did run into some criticism. A female Finnish journalist complained that the all-male sauna nights were exclusive, and that this was not appropriate in this day and age. My response to her was that, since Finland is not the biggest member state in the union, we have to use our natural strengths – and the sauna is one of those.

You know how it is: there are 28 member states in the EU and everybody wants to have an impact. If we are competing with bigger member states on their terms, we have no chance to have our voice heard. So if there is something we can do that’s different, then why not do it?

I retired from the foreign service in 2013 and, after writing a book about Finland and the EU, agreed to open a Brussels office for Miltton, a Finnish communications company.

The business is developing nicely. But we don’t have a sauna, and this is a big handicap. 6 As told to Joshua Chaffin Portrait by Colin Delfosse

The world’s largest public sauna opened in the Arctic Circle last year, with spectacular views over the Arctic Ocean. Set on a small Norwegian island, the Agora sauna (left) can fit more than 100 people inside, and has a fully stocked bar. It has been erected as part of an arts and music festival, SALT. However, if you want to get steamy, you’ll have to visit soon – Agora is a pop-up and will close its doors later this year.

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ft.com/magazine june 18/19 2016

MARTIN LOSVIK

n Brussels, you are invited for lunches and dinners all the time. However interesting the discussion, though, they tend to feel much the same. But using a sauna to conduct diplomacy – that is an entirely different concept. You might be introduced to someone you’ve never met before, shake hands and, five minutes later, you are sitting together naked! The atmosphere and the setting are conducive to good discussions.

I did not invent sauna diplomacy. But when I became Finland’s ambassador to the EU in 2008, we hosted regular evenings of the Finnish Sauna Society – bringing together top diplomats, journalists, ministers and civil servants. It proved highly successful.

The sauna created openness, and we had confidential discussions on every subject you can imagine. I’m pretty sure the eurozone crisis negotiations would have gone better if they had been conducted in a sauna!

The only rule was that anything said in the sauna was to remain there. During my five years in Brussels, no one ever broke it.

I grew up on the west coast of Finland, 500km from Helsinki, in a Swedish-speaking region.

As it is for all Finns, the sauna was a basic part of life. Every family goes to the sauna at least once a week. It’s a special place and I don’t think any Finn could imagine life without it.

Fortunately, when I arrived in Brussels I inherited an excellent sauna on the grounds of the ambassador’s residence. It was an old bowling hall in a separate building that had been converted 20 years earlier. There is even a log cabin built inside it. There are saunas of different quality. This one was extremely good.

But the eurozone was in crisis and everybody was busy. So I had my doubts about whether people would accept an invitation to the sauna. I soon discovered, however, that the difficulty was not getting people into the sauna – but getting them out of it.

REPLY YOUR COMMENTS Gillian Tett’s column (“A vote for online elections”, June 11/12) expresses her enthusiasm for the idea of internet voting. However, considering that the FT has itself reported that the tools for cyber hacking are accessible to individuals, private groups and states, it seems unwise to open up voting to these kinds of attacks.

Elections cannot be repaired after the fact. Online voting increases risk enormously, without providing any benefits. Even if online security were good, there would still be the danger of people being coerced as they vote. But time and again when voting technology is examined, the security is inept. No computer system has yet been created that can provide the same security and privacy as the paper ballot.

Rakerman Via FT.com What’s important is who is counting the votes, not how people vote.

Stina Andersson Via FT.com It’s not technology that is preventing online voting, it’s lack of political will and fear of enfranchising those who typically abstain and who, given this tool, might swing the vote in unpredictable ways. One technical way of making remote voting secure is voting servers, with one in each polling station set up on the day. They tally the votes and print hard copies upon each voting event for verification. Only a person registered with this station could vote and the system would have secondary verification by text.

MaxSense Via FT.com Tim Harford noted in his column (“The dubious power of power poses”, June 11/12) that while “statistical significance” sounds scientific, “it’s hardly a cast-iron endorsement of a result”. Another major problem in academic research is the publication review system.

Only three people (limited by time, and conflicts of interest, as they are in the same research area) decide 10

june 11/12 2016

SUMMER LUXURIES Honey & Co's fruit puddings Artists' food fancies In search of the real Champagne Sam Clark's lobster rice with sherry Jancis Robinson's food-friendly rosés

whether papers should be published.

This is an ancient system and there have been no efforts to improve it. Yet the academics sometimes influence policies and lives.

Zeena Via FT.com Re Tim Harford’s column: since this is psychology we are talking about, could it be that human beings, being rational, have factored the original study into their thinking and are no longer affected by power poses!?

Peace_ Via FT.com Jancis Robinson writes that rosé wine has “definitively come out of the closet marked unfashionable” (“Think pink”, June 11/12). The thing about rosés is that they look so lovely and appealing in the glass too. I have always been fond of them. But I am also a great fan of Manzanilla as a summer aperitif, which makes me a bit oldfashioned. I have never understood why these wines are undervalued.

FTreaderMC Via FT.com Re your summer berry recipes by Honey & Co (June 11/12): where is this summer of which you speak?

Dom Atreides Via Facebook To contribute please email magazineletters@ft.com. Include a daytime telephone number and full address (not for publication).

Letters may be edited.

Issue number 670 • Online ft.com/magazine • Editorial inquiries 020 7873 3636 • Advertising inquiries 020 7873 3121 • FT Weekend Magazine is printed by Wyndeham Peterborough Ltd and published by The Financial Times Ltd, Number One Southwark Bridge, London SE1 9HL • © The Financial Times Ltd 2016 • No part of this magazine may be reproduced in any form without the prior express permission of the publisher

The car-hailing app has disrupted taxi and transport companies around the world. But in China – home to hundreds of millions of urban commuters – it is losing $1bn a year in an aggressive fight for market share.

Leslie Hook reports. Photographs by Zeng Han

UBER’SBATTLE FORCHINA

ft.com/magazine october 9/10 2010

The view from behind the wheel of Uber driver Jiang Meixia, on the road in Chengdu13

I

Cleo Sham General manager, Uber Guangzhou

n Uber’s new offices in Guangzhou, China, occasional screams of delight erupt from the workers at their desks as they spot the office cat, a shy thing that mostly hides under furniture and causes uproar whenever she appears. Her name is Qianwanliang, or “10 million rides”. It’s a rather grand name for such a timid creature but this is Uber, and ambition is inescapable – even for office pets.

“It represents some of our trip goals,” admits Cleo Sham, a spiky-haired thirtysomething who has helped to turn Guangzhou, home to 12 million people in southern China, into Uber’s busiest city globally. When she joined a year and a half ago, the Guangzhou office was a room of just 180 sq ft.

“Three of us were crammed into a room, day and night,” Sham says with a touch of nostalgia. She handed out flyers, made cold calls, ran marketing booths. No one in Guangzhou had heard of Uber, and many people she approached would confuse Uber’s Chinese name, Youbu, with Youku, a Chinese video service. “There was a lot of scepticism, a lot of rejections,” she recalls.

Name recognition is no longer a problem. China is now Uber’s largest market, accounting for more than a third of its business in terms of weekly trips.

It is Uber’s biggest bet, and also its toughest market: the company loses more money here than anywhere in the world. Last year, losses in China came to more than $1bn, and they are set to be at least as high this year, as Uber fights for market share against its powerful Chinese rival, Didi Chuxing.

The drive to conquer the Chinese market comes directly from Travis Kalanick, Uber’s 39-year-old chief executive, whose aggressive personal style has defined the company’s rise. Kalanick founded Uber in San Francisco six years ago with his friend Garrett Camp; the two originally envisaged a phone app for summoning limousines that would allow people to simply “push a button and get a ride”.

Since then, the company has grown into a personal car service that has disrupted taxi and transportation companies around the world.

Uber now operates in 68 countries, but China was always special. “Travis was personally invested in the success of Uber in China to a much greater degree than any other country,” recalls Allen Penn, a 32-year-old American who is head of Asia operations at Uber. Last year, Kalanick spent nearly one in five days in China. In other countries, the company hires local chief executives, but here Kalanick maintains a hands-on role as chief executive of Uber China.

The company’s adventures in the country started just over three years ago, when Kalanick, Penn and a few top lieutenants took a scouting trip to try to figure out how Uber could avoid repeating the mistakes of other foreign tech companies. Most Silicon Valley tech giants, from Facebook and

Google to Amazon, have met with failure in China, for reasons ranging from censorship to IP theft to government regulations that favour domestic champions. But Uber has always believed in its own exceptional status. “We like to go after the thing that seems impossible,” Kalanick tells me. “It was pretty far-flung for us to try at that time – but that was also what made it exciting.”

Uber decided on a China strategy that was unlike anything it had tried elsewhere. It would set up a separate Chinese entity, Uber China, which would court local investors as well as getting financial support from the global Uber business, which holds a large undisclosed stake in the subsidiary. The hope was that a Chinese company could avoid some of the restrictions faced by foreign businesses.

At the time of that scouting trip, Uber was a relatively small start-up. It had just over 100 employees, operated in 10 countries and had raised a cumulative $50m from investors. It was far from obvious then that the car-hailing app would become the global juggernaut that it is today – the most funded start-up of all time, with a private market valuation of $62.5bn. Its most recent cash injection, announced earlier this month, was a $3.5bn investment from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund. It is also in talks to raise as much as $2bn in debt, which could bring its war chest to more than $13bn.

“We came to China and people just called me crazy,” Kalanick said in a speech in Beijing in January. “And maybe we still are.”

U

ber was so focused on avoiding the pitfalls of western tech companies that its Chinese competitors – who simply offered traditional taxi services through apps – must have seemed like a sideshow during that first trip. In early 2013, China’s two largest taxi apps, Didi and Kuaidi, were just small companies with business models completely different from Uber’s.

But as Didi and Kuaidi grew, they went to war with each other, showering subsidies on taxi drivers and riders as they fought for market share. The subsidies were so generous that sophisticated scammers developed software to exploit them. Didi and Kuaidi were marking the playing field for what would later become the world’s most irrational ride-hailing market, and the rules of the game were largely set by the time Uber joined the fray.

In terms of its transport infrastructure, the Chinese market had many elements that made it ripe for disruption. Rapid urban migration has seen hundreds of millions of people pour into new cities over the past two decades, and transport options have not kept up. Taxi ranks have failed to keep pace with economic growth, making it hard to find a cab in certain cities. Gridlock and pollution ▶

UBERINCHINA April 2013 Uber execs take scouting trip to China August 2013 Uber soft launches in Shanghai

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Feb 2014 formal launch in Shanghai, Shenzhen and Guangzhou October 2014 launch of People’s Uber, a budget service akin to UberX and UberPop

Feb 2015 merger of Didi and Kuaidi is announced

September 2015 Uber China raises $1.2bn from investors

May 2015 Uber’s Guangzhou and Chengdu o�ices are raided

September 2015 Didi raises $3bn from investors

October 2015 Uber establishes a Chinese entity, Uber China, based in the Shanghai Free Trade Zone October 2015 China publishes a draft of its new ride-hailing regulations

December 2015 Uber China announces a partnership with Guangzhou Auto; Uber Global raises $2.1bn from investors at a valuation of $62.5bn

January 2016 Uber China announces a partnership with HNA May 2016 Didi kicks off a multi-billiondollar fundraising round with a $1bn investment from Apple

June 2016 Uber raises $3.5bn from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund and enters talks over a separate debt deal that could raise up to $2bn

$7bn

valuation ofUber China

30%

Uber’s market share in China

56m+ Uber ridesin Chinain March 2016

‘We came to China and people just called me crazy.

And maybe we still are’ Travis Kalanick Uber co-founder and CEO

$1bn+ losses in2015

ft.com/magazine october 9/10 2010

15

Head of strategy and government relations, Uber China

◀ are the result – problems that Uber proposes to help solve.

Uber’s formal launch in China came in February 2014, with the introduction of luxury car services in three Chinese cities: Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen. There were plenty of speed bumps, including the fact that Google Maps, which Uber uses to locate drivers and riders, is blocked in China, forcing the company to redesign its software. That autumn, Uber expanded its offering to include a cut-price service, People’s Uber, which allows anyone who clears a background check to offer rides in their personal vehicles. By the end of the year, Uber had captured about 1 per cent of the Chinese ride-sharing market.

Meanwhile, Didi and Kuaidi’s subsidy war eventually drove them into each other’s arms, and they announced a merger in February 2015.

Today, Didi Chuxing (known as “Didi” in China) is by far the largest ride-sharing group in the country, and the best capitalised. Last year it raised more than $2bn from investors including Tencent, Alibaba and China’s sovereign wealth fund, CIC. Now Didi is poised to close a fresh fundraising round, which it says will raise more than the $3.5bn Uber got from Saudi Arabia. Investors in Didi’s latest round include Apple, which put in $1bn last month, and China Life, which put in $600m.

Didi has operations in more than 400 Chinese cities and is profitable in half of those. Uber initially focused on China’s largest cities and is now in more than 50, with a plan to reach 120 by September.

One immediate result of the merger was that Didi and Kuaidi started spending less on taxi subsidies, and instead took aim at the private 16

car-hailing market. Their subsidies for private car rides soared, costing the newly combined company $270m during the first five months of the year.

The use of subsidies turned Uber’s business model on its head. Typically, Uber takes a cut of about 25 per cent of the passenger’s fare and passes the rest of the fare on to the driver. Costs are kept low because Uber doesn’t employ the drivers, or own the cars. However, in China, Uber pays drivers a multiple of the passenger’s fare, meaning that the company loses money on most rides.

Other Chinese ride-hailing companies employ a similar strategy.

Didi and Uber blame each other for the game of subsidy one-upmanship that has come to define the Chinese ride-hailing market. Usually, “Uber doesn’t really do this type of thing,” says Kalanick.

“But we are the number two in China and we have to, in some ways, follow the lead of the number one.”

Meanwhile Didi paints its subsidies as purely defensive. Didi is “quite profitable” in cities where competitors’ subsidy practices are less aggressive, says Stephen Zhu, vice-president of Didi. “The reality is that subsidies are used to compensate for an inferior user and driver experience,” he says, without mentioning Uber by name.

The subsidies are pernicious, not only because they drain cash, but also because they mask true levels of demand and supply. “You can go out, spend a bunch of money in a city and gain some market share, but that’s not real,” says Penn, Uber’s Asia business head. “You’re just kind of buying all of it – [though] you’re really more renting than buying.”

Many drivers for Uber say they would not be driving if it weren’t for the bonuses, while

Tiger Fang General manager, Uber Chengdu

passengers also say they would ride less if the services became more expensive. “I used to use Didi most of the time, but I switched to Uber because it was cheaper,” said Xu Desheng, a 32-year-old living in Beijing, who says he has become a daily Uber user because of the prices. While Uber’s services include luxury cars, cheaper rides are a bulwark of Uber’s business in China. Uber’s carpool service, with fares as low as Rmb2 (21 pence) accounts for more than half of rides in several key cities.

I Travis Kalanick Co-founder and CEO, Uber

s Uber legal in America? Because it isn’t here,” says a 21-year-old driver in Beijing, surnamed Dong, the proud owner of a sedan that his parents helped him to buy.

It’s a question asked by almost every Uber driver when they carry a foreign passenger.

Dong tells me that his brother was picked up by traffic cops while driving an Uber just a few days before, and was fined Rmb20,000 (£2,100) – roughly two months’ salary. As we approach my destination, a train station, he nervously tucks away the phone running the Uber app, then asks if he can drop me a few blocks away. Drivers are constantly sharing info about new traffic-cop checkpoints, and Beijing South Station was on the list that day.

Most Chinese drivers believe Uber is illegal (yet drive for it anyway), but the company is not technically banned in the country. In some ways, Uber’s rule-breaking ethos fits in with China’s rough-andtumble economy, where entrepreneurialism is prized and bending the rules is normal. Kalanick says that, “China has been one of the most welcoming places we do business.” While that may be a ft.com/magazine june 18/19 2016

BLOOMBERG

Liu Zhen

Uber driver Mu Xuekan with a passenger in Beijing

slight exaggeration, it is true that the occasional police raids on Uber offices in China are minor frustrations compared to the outright bans Uber has faced elsewhere.

“There are a lot of grey areas,” explains Liu Zhen, Uber China’s head of strategy and government relations, referring to the regulation of ride-hailing.

“I wouldn’t say that it is not legal, it is in the process of being legalised.”

Liu has become the face of Uber in China when Kalanick is not around, and one of her prime tasks is to make sure that the “process of being legalised” goes as smoothly as possible. Beijing is working on a set of regulations that will completely redefine ride-sharing in China. An initial draft of the rules, published by China’s ministry of transport in October, proposed the potentially devastating move of banning ride-sharing in private cars.

Uber and Didi were both fairly quiet when the new rules came out. But within the government, there was pushback. “Innovation” and “the sharing economy” have become buzzwords at the highest echelons of the Communist party, and the new draft regulations were hardly in keeping with that spirit.

The State Council, China’s cabinet, asked the ministry of transport to revise the regulations, sparking a debate that is still going on.

After China’s decades of economic reform, embracing the sharing economy is a small step in the broader transformation to a market economy, says Liu Yuanju, a Shanghai-based economist.

“There’s a lot of will to support innovation,” he says.

“There are parts of the government that definitely want to embrace this [the sharing economy] but they also face a lot of pressure.” ft.com/magazine june 18/19 2016

Many drivers for Uber say they would not be driving if it weren’t for the bonuses – and passengers would also ride less if fares went up He explains that the ride-sharing rules are just a bit part in a much larger drama, as a behind-thescenes struggle between conservative and innovative factions within the Chinese state plays out. China’s premier, Li Keqiang, has made innovation a key part of his agenda, and has personally met Kalanick, as well as Didi’s founder, Cheng Wei. So far there have only been a few hints as to what the new rules might contain. In March, China’s transport minister delivered a blistering critique of the ride-hailing subsidies, calling them “unsustainable” and “unfair” to taxis. However, he also acknowledged that private car services were popular, and hinted that they could be formally legalised after some type of driver-registration process.

Zhou Hang, the founder of the ride-sharing start-up Yidao Yongche, says he expects ride-sharing in private cars to be permitted under the new regulations – but that the number of these cars will be “very limited”. He expects the cheapest type of ride services will be the most affected, which could spell bad news for Uber. However, few analysts expect that Uber’s foreign roots will mean it faces special barriers. “It’s very different from Facebook

or Twitter” says Liu, the economist, referring to the services banned in China because of censorship.

Zhang Yi, the CEO of iMedia, a Guangzhou-based consultancy, points to Apple, which draws a quarter of its sales from China. “Why did Apple succeed [in China]? It’s because they were purely about business,” he says, waving his iPhone in the air.

Uber’s business doesn’t touch on sensitive topics such as national security, he says, adding that its devolved corporate structure helps. “Didi has foreign investors, and Uber China is independent, so in terms of the shareholders there is basically no difference.” Uber has already nodded to any data concerns Beijing might have by storing riders’ information on local servers in China.

W

hile questions about ride-sharing rules hang in the air, Uber China is also grappling with a different threat: fraud.China has the most sophisticated ride-hailing scams in the world, in which drivers and hackers milk ridehailing companies for bonuses without carrying actual passengers.

The scammers have even developed their own lexicon, to make it easier to communicate covertly in online forums. A fake ride is known as “getting an injection”, a reference to the red location pins in the Uber app. “Hey, give me a shot,” a driver will post – and then a scammer, who typically advertises themselves as a “professional nurse”, will respond.

The scammers create a fake passenger account that will appear to take a ride with a driver – who gets the bonus. About 3 per cent of Uber’s rides in ▶ 17

An Uber driver with her car at one of the panda-shaped Uber Stations in Chengdu, where passengers can pick up a ride

◀ China were fraudulent during the summer of 2015 – about 30,00 daily rides – and fraud continues to be a problem.

Uber managers spend hours each week checking driver logs for fraud patterns and deciding which drivers to deactivate. “Every Monday is pay day, and fraud day,” recalls a former Uber employee, explaining that fraud reviews happened just before drivers are paid. When he worked at Uber, in 2015, “The frauds that got caught were the really severe cases… only those who do hundreds [of fraudulent trips] per week.”

Uber says it has improved at fighting fraud. “We have some of our smartest engineers working on this problem,” says Tiger Fang, who heads Uber’s operations in Chengdu, and has himself dived into some of the scammers’ online chat-rooms, posing undercover to ask about their methods. There’s a team of 50 engineers at Uber headquarters in San Francisco that focuses on fraud detection, as well as local manual review teams in each Chinese city.

Uber recently introduced additional identity verification features – such as voice recognition for passengers and facial recognition for drivers – in an effort to cut down on fake accounts.

Fraud levels are falling not only because of these efforts, but also thanks to the fact that subsidies have been greatly reduced, lowering the financial incentives for fraudsters. Uber says it has cut subsidies in China by 80 per cent on a per-trip basis over the past year, while the volume of rides has risen by 16 times during that same period.

This trend is a key part of Uber’s argument for why it can eventually succeed in China without subsidies. Fang, the Chengdu manager, explains that the subsidies become less important as Uber’s network grows and drivers can carry more passengers per hour. “The more rides we do, the less money per trip we are losing [on subsidies] because we are increasing efficiency through the overall system,” he says.

But removing subsidies altogether will not be easy. Examples from other markets show that heavily subsidised businesses sometimes just evaporate once the subsidies disappear.

The taxi-hailing business of Didi and Kuaidi, which was initially fuelled by subsidies, is now a tiny fraction of their merged business and 18

UBERCHINA:HOWITWORKS

People’s Uber Plus Passengers share a ride with others heading in the same direction in unlicensed cars – known as UberPool elsewhere.

Uber’s cheapest offering in China, with flat fares as low as Rmb2 (21 pence).

People’s Uber A ride from A to B using drivers in unlicensed cars. (The equivalent of UberX in the US or UberPop in Europe.)

UberX Offers a ride in a mid-range vehicle, in

partnership with car-rental companies.

Uber Black Uber’s signature luxury vehicle car service.

Uber Commute Allows drivers to enter their own daily commute into the app, then get matched with a passenger along the way. For passengers this appears like any other People’s Uber Plus ride; for drivers, it offers a easy way to earn extra income while heading into work.

generates no revenues. Smaller ride-hailing companies in other markets, such as EasyTaxi in Jakarta, found that their business dried up completely when subsidies ended.

Cutting subsidies is particularly hard for a company that, like Uber China, is not the market leader. Market share figures in China vary greatly depending on who is counting – Uber says it has more than 30 per cent of the ride-hailing market, while Didi says it has more than 80 per cent – but everyone agrees Uber is far smaller. Having the greatest market share confers a huge advantage in ride-sharing, because the quality of the product improves as more drivers and riders join the system: passengers don’t have to wait as long and drivers can make more money. This “network effect” is the reason ride-hailing companies are willing to spend everything to gain dominance in a market.

How much Uber will keep spending in China to fight for that market share is a key question.

Unlike in other countries, Uber China is a separate entity with plans for an independent IPO, and it does its own fundraising in addition to getting cash from Uber Global. Last year Uber China raised $1.2bn after a prolonged fundraising effort, at a valuation of $7bn. However, it would not disclose how much of that was from investors and how much from Uber’s own coffers – nor what Uber’s stake in Uber China is. (The company says only that it is the “largest” shareholder in Uber China.) The

fundraising did succeed in attracting some highprofile Chinese backers, including HNA Group and Guangzhou Auto.

Kalanick says Uber also uses its profits from other markets to support investment in China, but won’t say by how much. Since February, Uber has been profitable, excluding interest and tax, in North America, Australia and in its Europe-Middle EastAfrica region.

But there are other demands on Uber’s cash, the largest of which is defending its market share against other incumbents. Even outside China, Didi has become a formidable enemy for Uber by forming an alliance with several competitors, including Lyft in the US, Ola in India and Grab in Southeast Asia.

Didi has encouraged its Chinese backers such as Alibaba and Tencent to invest in those rivals. The four companies are also linking their apps, so that customers can tap into the others’ car networks when travelling.

Uber’s profits have not been totally immune to this pincer movement. It has cut prices and become unprofitable in some cities in the US in order to stave off advances from Lyft. “Though we do become profitable from time to time, we have to make conscious decisions, even in mature markets, to go unprofitable to protect market share,” says one Uber exec. He says the subsidy competition would “just end if this irrational funding would stop at some point”, referring to fundraising by global ridesharing groups. When companies are losing money on every trip, “it really reminds me of 1999, or the tech bubble”, he adds.

Uber’s biggest problem in China has turned out to be not that it is a foreign company, but that it has finally met a counterpart every bit as disruptive and aggressive as itself. “For Uber, the biggest risk is from a competitive market, not from the government,” says iMedia’s Zhang.

Given Uber’s deep reserves of cash, it can afford to keep investing. And as a private company, it won’t come under pressure from shareholders demanding profits. Kalanick has said that Uber will go public “as late as humanly possible”, giving a range of one to 10 years – ample time to keep pouring money into loss-making operations. But is there a point at which it would draw a line in China? Kalanick says there’s not a specific number in terms of how much he is willing to invest. “The most important limit is the return on investment,” he muses. “What is your business worth? You certainly don’t want to spend more than it is worth.”

With no net revenues and no profits, Uber China’s worth is hard to assess. As number two in the market, it will always have a somewhat precarious position. Several top Uber China executives say that the company does not need majority market share in China in order to have a sustainable, profitable business. Kalanick, however, defines success in China as being number one – and he doesn’t give up easily. “We like those problems that are hard, those are the ones that excite us most,” he says. “Those are the ones that give us that little glimmer in the eye and get us up in the morning.” 6 Leslie Hook is an FT San Francisco correspondent ft.com/magazine june 18/19 2016

‘i am a little bit a star’

Michel Houellebecq describes himself as the world’s best living novelist, and now he has curated an exhibition in Paris of his own photographs. Simon Kuper talks to him about misogyny, Islamophobia and his Welsh corgi Clément Sur le continent by Marie-Pierre Gauthier

H

alf an hour late, the sound of panting comes from the stairs. More time passes. Getting up to the first floor of Paris’s snooty Monsieur Bleu restaurant in the Palais de Tokyo museum of contemporary art seems to be a challenge. Finally Michel Houellebecq, France’s best-selling novelist – and, as he will explain, the best living novelist on earth – makes it into the room. Now that he no longer receives security protection against Islamist terrorists, he is alone.

Nearing the table, he exudes a whiff of alcohol.

In most of his publicity portraits, Houellebecq looks revolting. But in the flesh he is rather elegant, even handsome. (With most writers and their publicity photos, it’s precisely the other way around.) He apologises for being late, orders a midafternoon bottle of white wine, and lights a cigarette as if France had not banned smoking in restaurants in 2008. Luckily, we are alone in the room. He holds his cigarette delicately between forefinger and middle finger, like a genteel lady from a bygone age.

Most novelists aren’t very visual people. That’s why they developed an ear for words. But Houellebecq is a gifted photographer. An exhibition consisting mostly of his photographs, called Rester vivant (“To Stay Alive”, also the title of his debut collection in 1991), opens in the Palais de Tokyo on Thursday. His pictures chart the same great theme as his novels: the collapse of western civilisation.

And nobody incarnates that collapsing civilisation better than Houellebecq himself.

He was born in the French island of Réunion in the Indian Ocean in 1956 (or, perhaps, 1958, he thinks). Abandoned soon afterwards by his hippie mother, he was raised mostly in French exurbs, and has ended up incapable of believing in anything.

Read against this background, his philosophical novels are peculiarly autobiographical. His standard main character is a godless Frenchman bereft of family and other traditional structures, living in an

20

ugly modern world in which everything – especially sex – has been reduced to a consumerist free market.

I put it to him that he is the atomised modern man he always rails against.

“Yes, yes,” he agrees. “I’m railing against myself.

I deplore what I am.”

The photographs in the exhibition cover recognisably Houellebecquian subjects: mass tourism, shopping malls, ugly bits of France, and (almost the only pictures featuring humans) erotic photographs of women.

We leaf through a printout of his photos, and end up studying a half-naked portrait of his exgirlfriend Esther. He admits she was “a bit the model” for the character Esther in his novel The Possibility of an Island (2005). His photographs feed his writing, he explains. “I always go to a place to take pictures before writing scenes.”

But don’t these erotic pictures support feminist accusations that he treats women as sex objects?

“That one,” he points at Esther, “she is alluring but she isn’t only alluring. That’s not a sex object, it’s an object of love.” And think of the female characters in his novels, he continues. Whereas his standard main male character is lost and weak, “My variety is my female characters. The women are a more diverse world, more distinct personalities.”

He speaks softly, slowly, almost as if to himself.

Is he saying he views women as sex objects but also as more than that? “Yes. But I don’t want to reconcile myself with the feminists. Their criticisms are completely idiotic because I’m not misogynist at all. But ‘Islamophobe’, that isn’t wrong.”

He has been called “Islamophobe” at least since the publication of his novel Platform in 2001. The book, which ends with an Islamist assault on a decadent Thai tourist resort, prompted death threats. On September 10 2001 his publisher Flammarion apologised for any offence caused.

“You’re saved,” the writer Michel Déon told him the next day as they watched the planes hit the World Trade Center. ▶ 41

Clément One room in the exhibition is a de facto shrine to Houellebecq’s late dog Clément (20002011). Houellebecq co-authored the room with ex-wife Marie-Pierre, who made watercolours and a slideshow of their Welsh corgi. “It’s the most autobiographical room in the exhibition,” Houellebecq says in the catalogue.

“The other partly autobiographical room is the one with the women [some of his exes].

I’ve never photographed my life very much, but I think I’ve photographed what counts: a few women, and a dog.” Houellebecq has said: “A dog is like a child, except that a dog never grows up.”

Admiring the pictures of Clément on a printout, he says, “There’s a song Iggy Pop made of a text of mine. He used the [English] translation and it’s better in translation, more brutal:” What is a dog but a machine for loving?

You introduce him to a human being giving him the mission to love Houellebecq expresses for Clément the kind of deep sentiment that other writers express for people. He finds that normal: “I have loved several women but I have only loved one dog.

Having said that, I would like to have another dog, but I’m not yet ready to go through the procedure to get a new one.”

When Houellebecq expresses strong feeling for anything, let alone a Welsh corgi, any reader of his novels will suspect irony. But Houellebecq insists: “There is no irony here, none.” He says it’s wrong to see him as a strictly ironic or cynical writer. “I’ve also written poems in which there was zero irony. The irony is more for the novels. But it’s true that my ironic dimension has been much emphasised, and my non-ironic dimension less so.”

He agrees that the sentiments he expresses for Clément echo 19th-century romantic poetry. “I can’t say the contrary because the romanticism of 200 years ago was my first love. In painting, in literature, in music, I adore the romantic movement. I feel I am its distant descendant.” ▶ 22

‘What’s very amusing is that the opening of the exhibition will coincide with a possible Brexit. It’s June 23 .

It’s going to be hot!’

Michel Houellebecq at home, Paris, 2014

‘rester vivant’:

photographs by Michel Houellebecq

Il est temps de faire vos jeux The exhibition opens with this photo taken from Houellebecq’s apartment window. In the reddish sky over Paris’s suburbs, Houellebecq sees a brewing conflict. That feeling is emphasised by a line from one of his poems: “Il est temps de faire vos jeux” (roughly, “It’s time to place your bets”). He says this image contains “a promise of civil war”.

Submission, his most recent novel, also evokes a possible French civil war.

Houellebecq explains: “It’s an underlying idea among many Europeans that Europe is heading for a generalised civil war. I think the danger is real.”

Last year’s terrorist attacks on France confirmed his thinking. “Let’s say that the attackers’ objective is clear: to provoke a counter-reaction. The process will really have begun when there are murderous attacks on a mosque or halal business. Then we might fork off into real civil war. Then, objectively, it will be time to ‘place your bets’, to choose sides.

I imagine a civil war with assassinations.”

Isis is merely the latest episode in a long story, he believes. “In my adult life I haven’t really known periods without terrorist danger.

I think I will never take public transport without fear, without wondering if there’s a package somewhere. If I pass a rubbish bin I always look to see what’s inside.”

He first became aware of terrorism in 1972, with the Palestinian attack on the Munich Olympics. “I began to be personally marked by it after the Hezbollah attacks [in Paris], in 1984 to 1986, because I ought to have been killed by one of them. I was five minutes from the spot.

From that moment on, I felt I would live with that as long as I stay in Europe.”

Inscriptions #013

Children’s playground Soon after Houellebecq bought his holiday home in Alméria, southeastern Spain, the financial crisis struck. Local construction of resorts pretty much ceased. That gave him the perfect view of a subject that fascinates him: failed mass tourism.

“It was a great failure,” he recalls. “Buildings were stopped mid-construction. Those that were finished never found buyers.” Hence this photograph (in screaming colours, like his other photographs of mass tourism) of a children’s playground without children.

Houellebecq says that abandoned places “have a very post-apocalyptic aspect”.

He muses, “I saw a film made by a Frenchman, I think, about Detroit. I’m not saying this cynically, but it makes you want to take pictures. It’s the end of the automobile industry, if I understood rightly. If you want to say it in more general or theological terms, it raises a question I often ask myself: ‘What will remain of humanity after humanity?’”

He answers himself: “Some objects will remain. There’s a text in one of my novels about the Rolleiflex camera. I think a double-objective Rolleiflex will last for centuries. It’s really well made. I’m much less sure about the iPhone.”

Espagne #001

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ft.com/magazine june 18/19 2016

Europe Some time in the early 1990s, Houellebecq visited Calais with members of the eloquently named movement “les banalystes”. He took this photograph at the “Europe” shopping mall. In the exhibition catalogue he says of the photo: “There’s both a coercive side, and a rapid degradation process, which nicely sums up what I think about Europe.”

Now he adds: “What’s very amusing is that the opening of the exhibition will coincide with a possible Brexit. It’s June 23 [when the UK holds its referendum on membership of the European Union]. It’s going to be hot!”

He is rooting for Brexit: “I’d love it. I’d love it if the English gave the starting signal for the dismantling. I hope they won’t disappoint me.

I’ve been against the [European] idea from the start. It’s not democratic, it’s not good.

“I really like England, I really like the fact of it having been the only country, for quite a while, to have resisted Hitler. I’d really like it to leave, to signal the independence movement.”

But his political engagement doesn’t extend to the US: “Trump I don’t care about. We have to disconnect from the US. They aren’t the masters of the world anymore. They aren’t our bosses. Now there are other countries, there’s China, India. American problems aren’t mine.

Trump is dreadful but he’s their problem. But England is a bit my problem.”

France #014

Avallon suburbs: Despite suffering from vertigo, Houellebecq took this photo from a hot-air balloon over Avallon, in the Yonne region of northern France. The vantage point in the sky is the one he occupies in his frequent dreams of flying.

In his photographs as in his novels, Houellebecq is drawn to France’s unlovely modern exurbs. “I don’t love them,” he explains, “but those are the places I know the best. That’s where I grew up. So I get my bearings easily. I know how these places are organised – well, they aren’t very organised, but I know what happens there.

“Where I spent my adolescence was a peri-urban zone at the time. It was about 50 kilometres from Paris. I went back there, and in the meantime they had built Euro Disney.

It had become very, very bizarre, because there were lots more train and bus lines and yet there weren’t really any shops. It’s a bit chaotic. I didn’t know all these new bus lines, there were zones that hadn’t been built when I was there, new neighbourhoods.

It’s disturbing.

“The peri-urban, for me, is the kind of chaos that has been much expanded in recent times.

It starts about 20 kilometres from Paris, and ends 100 kilometres from Paris. It’s in this kind of place that most people now live.” And yet, he complains, few novelists write about such places. “It’s true that they are more difficult to describe.”

Rich Parisians are expected to live in the city’s chic old neighbourhoods but Houellebecq says: “I’m not in love with Paris.

Often they tell me I should live in SaintGermain-des-Prés but I don’t feel like it.”

Instead, he lives in one of Paris’s few highrises, near the Place d’Italie, close to the ring road. ▶ 41 ft.com/magazine june 18/19 2016

France #033

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JUNE 18/19 2016

Where to be beside the sea this summer

Brazil’s Discovery Coast New waterfront hotels A fresh beat in Biarritz British beach retreats Jan Morris in Wales and Waikiki

Soneva Jani, Maldives ▲ Opening October The “over-water villa” has become a standard feature of Maldivian resorts, but the Soneva group’s latest property takes the concept to new extremes. Its 24 villas, suspended over a lagoon off the island of Medhufaru, all have their own swimming pool and roofs which retract at the touch of the button so guests can lie in bed and watch the stars. Some have swing seats that hang above the lagoon, others have slides from the top deck straight into the water.

Villas for two from $1,870 per night; soneva.com ft.com/pinksand summer 2016

THE NEW WAVE

Lap up luxury in sublime waterfront settings: Tom Robbins checks out the latest additions to the hotel scene

Coes Faen, Wales ▲ Opened February This Victorian lodge sits beside the Mawddach Estuary and on the edge of Snowdonia national park. Built to accommodate the domestic staff for a grand house nearby, it has been converted into a slick hotel. Its six bedrooms have “spa bathrooms” with features such as steam rooms or wooden baths for two. Doubles from £145 per night; coesfaen.co.uk

Six Senses, Zil Pasyon ▼ Seychelles Opening October The latest in the Six Senses chain of resorts is currently taking shape on Félicité, a pristine island in the Seychelles fringed by whitesand beaches. A former coconut plantation, it will have 30 villas, six restaurants and bars, a big spa and a “kids’ camp”. As well as water-based activities, guests can hike on trails that crisscross the island, or take a boat over to neighbouring La Digue to go cycling. Villas for two from €1,200 per night; sixsenses.com Il Sereno, Italy ▲ Opening August It’s not on the sea but Il Sereno does have a private beach and two classic Riva boats on hand to whisk guests across the water. The hotel sits on the shore of Lake Como and all 30 rooms have large balconies

with views over the lake. Unlike the faux renaissance and neoclassic architecture that dominates the area, Il Sereno is unashamedly modern, with floor-to-ceiling windows and an infinity pool suspended over the lake. Suites for two from €800 per night; ilsereno.com

PINK SAND NEW HOTELS

Miavana, Madagascar ▲ Opening December This promises to be a game-changer for the African nation’s tourism industry – a super-luxury private island retreat that will allow it to rival the Seychelles and Maldives for the first time. Miavana, which will cater for a maximum of 44 guests, occupies Nosy Ankao, the largest of five islands in an archipelago off Madagascar’s northeast coast. Guests will arrive by helicopter and spend their time on “blue safaris” – snorkelling, scuba diving and turtle-, whaleand dolphin-watching – as well as enjoying the spa. The resort comes with a pedigree – the owners also created the celebrated North Island in the Seychelles – and a price tag to match. $2,500 per person per night, or $100,000 per night for exclusive use of the island; timeandtideafrica.com

Santo Maris Oia, Greece ▲ Opened April The whitewashed houses of the village of Oia are scattered along the northern edge of the volcanic caldera that forms the island of Santorini. Just outside the village, and close to the cliffs where visitors gather to watch what locals claim is the best sunset in the world, the Santo Maris is built in traditional style, with 44 suites. Suites for two from €285 per night; santomaris.gr

3

Clockwise from main Espelho beach with, on the left, Sylvinha’s restaurant and the river that diners must wade through to reach it; bar and surfers in Trancoso; the pool at Uxua hotel; playing football near Trancoso’s church

O LY M P I C BEACHES

GOLDENSHORES After the crowds and commotion of the Rio games, the wild sands and remote villages of Brazil’s Costa do Descobrimento are the perfect place to unwind. By Claire Wrathall

4

Dehouche (who had arranged my trip), “You need to leave a message on her phone.” There’s no signal where Sylvinha lives but “at about 10pm each evening she goes to find one, collects her voicemails and calls you back.”

He adds: “It is well worth wading across the river for.” We asked the concierge at our hotel to ring her; unexpectedly, she picked up and fortuitously had a table for 1pm.

“Espelho” means mirror, though the green Atlantic was not what you’d call glassy that day. Nor was the journey to get there exactly smooth. For this you need a boat or a four-wheel drive and an ear sufficiently attuned to Brazilian Portuguese to comprehend the instructions of the man who guards the chain gate at the entrance to the rutted track that leads to the beach.

Sylvinha’s full name is Maria Sylvia Esteves Calazans Luz, though like so many Brazilian celebrities she is known by a single diminutive.

An artist as well as a chef, she first came here from São Paulo in 1974 and never went back, painting in the mornings and then preparing a three-course, no-choice meal for

TO REACH CARAIVA, YOU ARE FERRIED ACROSS THE ESTUARY IN A BRIGHTLY PAINTED PUNT-LIKE BOAT

which she charges R$100 (about £20) a head, excluding caipirinhas, cans of Bohemia beer or water.

The first course was a crisp flatbread served with something between hummus and tahini. There followed a tableful of bowls of varying sizes, the largest of which contained steaks of amberjack, the firm-fleshed fish known here as olho de boi, cooked with orange, ginger, soy and coriander. To accompany it was a stir-fry of peppers, beans ft.com/pinksand summer 2016

and cauliflower; a heap of steamed barley; purées of plantain and cassava; passion-fruit and mango chutneys. Everything was intensely seasoned with combinations of star anise, cloves, coriander, cardamom and cinnamon, as was the aromatic, almost frozen custard – based on a recipe of Sylvinha’s grandmother’s – which came with a thermos of coffee brewed with water in which cinnamon quills had been simmered. It was all utterly delicious. We were glad we’d swum first. Now we needed to walk off lunch.

Whichever direction you opt for, the wild coast at Espelho is scalloped with little coves, backed

by low sandstone cliffs and divided by flat boulders over which it is easy to clamber. Walk north and there are a handful of simple pousadas tucked among the sea almond trees beyond the beach. Turn south and the sand underfoot changes colour and texture – there are stretches where it’s pale and powdery, others where it’s almost black and glitters with what I took to be mica.

We walked for hours, passing scarcely a soul. It was only the realisation that sunset would be upon us by six o’clock that made us turn back.

A further 10km or so down the beach (or 22km by unpaved road) from Espelho and you come

early morning, and little marmosets forage for fruit in the trees by the iridescent, aventurine-quartz-lined pool. In short, Uxua offers the best of both worlds: the sense that you are sequestered away amid subtly restrained jungle yet also within five minutes’ walk of a lively village and a handful of terrific restaurants.

My tips would be Capim Santo and Aki Sushi, though you could do a lot worse than eat in: Uxua’s moqueca – grouper and giant shrimp in coconut milk and palm oil, topped with spiced toasted manioc flour – in particular is outstanding.

Better yet, a succession of great beaches are accessible without need for a car. (There are horses if you want to explore the furthest of them.) Trancoso itself stands on a cliff, and not far from the edge is a handsome 18th-century Jesuit church. Beside it, a cobbled path descends to a stretch of mangrove, through which a rickety wooden bridge leads to the sea.

For sofas, bossa nova and Uxua’s beach club, turn left towards the stretch of sand known as Barra do Rio Trancoso. For solitude, turn right and, past the coconut palms and beach bars of Praia dos Nativos, a string of coves reveals itself: first Coqueiros with its tidal pools and coral sand; next Rio Verde (a backdrop of luxuriant vegetation gives it its name); then on to even more secluded Itapororoca, Patimirim and – once you see the stand of cashew trees and perhaps a few surfers – Itaquena.

You may be within walking distance of civilisation of the most sophisticated kind, but this remains a pristine landscape and still very much a coast to discover. 6

D E TA I L S FERNANDO LOMBARDI; CLIO LUCONI; GETTY

PINK SAND OLYMPIC BEACHES

S

everal people had told me that the best food in Brazil is to be found in Bahia, and that the best food in the south of the state is what Sylvinha serves on the otherwise empty beach at Espelho, 18km south of Trancoso. A thousand kilometres north-east of Rio de Janeiro, this part of the coast – the Costa do Descobrimento (it means “discovery”) – is a Unesco-protected littoral that runs south from Porto Seguro, where the first Portuguese settlers are believed to have made landfall when they arrived in Brazil in 1500. It could not feel further from the crowds, the noise, the energy, the edginess of Ipanema and Copacabana. That much nearer the equator, even the sea temperature is appreciably warmer.

The challenge, however, is getting a reservation. There are just three picnic tables on the two terraces of Sylvinha’s barraca (hut) – though by pushing them together she can squeeze in a party of 14 – and she cooks only at lunchtime. To get a table, advised Paul Irvine, co-founder of the specialist Rio-based travel agency

to Caraíva, a sleepy village of some 300 people, where mules and carts are the only means of transport and where there was no electricity before 2008. To reach it you are ferried across the estuary of the Caraíva river in a brightly painted punt-like boat.

Ten minutes later and your feet are in sand again: there are no roads here, only sandy lanes. And though there are perhaps a dozen simple, inexpensive places to stay, you can find yourself alone on a wild beach within minutes if you head south along a stretch of sand that runs unbroken for 8km, backed by the immense rainforest-cloaked Monte Pascoal National Park.

Back in the village, it’s worth pausing at Boteco do Pará, close to the quay and celebrated for its pastels de arraia, little crescent-shaped parcels of deepfried pastry filled with arraia (a kind of skate) and tomato.

With their terracotta roofs and colourful facades, the single-storey fishermen’s dwellings at Caraíva recall the 50 or so that surround the Quadrado, the grassy car-free main square in Trancoso, the loveliest resort in Bahia. Indeed, until a decade or two ago, when it began to morph into the boho celebrity hangout it is now, it probably felt a lot like Caraíva remains.

Unless you crave real seclusion, however, Trancoso is the obvious place to base yourself, not least because it has an exceptional hotel in Uxua, a collection of 11 houses, four of them historic structures on the Quadrado, the rest newly built from timber in the cultivated jungle of its grounds. Here, capuchin monkeys cavort on your roof in the

Dehouche can arrange similar itineraries (dehouche.com). Uxua has double rooms from £300 per night (uxua.com). Flights from Rio de Janeiro to Porto Seguro on GOL (voegol.com.br) take an hour and 45 minutes; Trancoso is about 80 minutes’ drive from the airport. To book a table at Sylvinha’s call: +55 73 9985 4157

ft.com/pinksand summer 2016

5

PUTTING ON THE BIARRITZ Ever since Napoleon III built a villa for his wife here, this majestic city has been a glamorous getaway for royalty, film stars and, latterly, shaggy-haired surfers.

By Rebecca Rose

ALAMY

W

hen Victor Hugo visited Biarritz in 1843, it was still a fishing village.

But with its craggy cliffs, splendid arc of sand and effervescent surf, he quickly noted its potential for gentrification.

“I do not know a place more charming and magnificent,” he wrote. “I only have one fear: that it will become fashionable.”

A little more than 10 years later, the empress Eugénie fell for the spot too; her husband Napoleon III promptly built her an enormous Belle Epoque villa in the shape of an E, overlooking the sweeping grande plage below. And that was that. Biarritz was on the map.

The villa became the luxurious Hôtel du Palais in 1883, graced by royalty from around the globe and, later, the likes of Coco Chanel, Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner.

Today, it still dominates the mishmash architecture of the seafront, and receives a regular clientele of well-heeled French, Spanish, Americans and Brits, who return year after year. The decor is remarkably unchanged – the hotel’s chandeliered dining room, all heavy curtains and ironed tablecloths, is a glamorous relic from an era when continental travel was reserved for the lucky few.

The rest of Biarritz has long moved on, however. It became the surf capital of France in the 1960s (legend has it that Peter Viertel, Deborah Kerr’s husband, was the first to ride its waves in 1957) and, for many decades

ft.com/pinksand summer 2016

now, visiting European gentry have happily rubbed along with the perennial influx of flipflopping, shaggy-haired surfers.

That lively duality still drives the place today. On the sunny terrace of l’Hôtel du Palais, I watch a Russian family with two identical and immaculately dressed young boys stroll across the lawn to the curvaceous heated pool. On the beach below, surf-school students, boards in the air, head out to the waves like a line of ants carrying leaves. It’s a grey day but the sea is a pearlescent green, the surf frothing invitingly over the fine sand.

Behind it, the parade of shops and cafés along the promenade is a blur of surf labels – Quiksilver, Rip Curl, Reef – that clearly caters to the neoprene set. A couple of streets back, a window cleaner is busy polishing the already sparkling vitrines of Longchamp and Hermès, while the sales assistant looks out patiently.

Further away from the seafront, things liven up a bit. A constant stream of customers files in and out of Pare Gabia, purveyor of classic Basque espadrilles since 1935, its shop front ablaze with canvas and jute. After a lengthy consultation, I purchase a pair in canary yellow – toe-crunchingly small, but I am assured that they will give within half an hour of wear.

Just up the road, I stumble upon a hive of local activity around Biarritz’s fragrant covered daily market, Les Halles. White asparagus and strawberries are in season, alongside regional staples such as Bayonne ham and gâteau basque. In the next street is Arostéguy, a delicatessen that has been in business for five generations. Inside, dark wood panelling reminiscent of an old apothecary showcases beautifully packaged jars of piment d’Espelette, tins of Spanish Ortiz tuna and frosted bottles of Provençal rosé.

Food is, of course, taken seriously across all of France but the Côte Basque is a particularly gastronomic corner, its cuisine infused with heat from across the border with Spain. At the top of the sloping rue Gambetta, you could be

D E TA I L S Rebecca Rose was a guest of SJ Villas (sjvillas.co.uk). One week at Ocean View costs from €8,000 for up to 12 people. For more on Biarritz see tourisme.biarritz.fr

in the trendy 9th arrondissement of Paris if it weren’t for the warm salty air and pristine pavements. A young crowd is filling up the terraces of three new eateries: Saline, a ceviche restaurant; an artisanal burger joint; and La Cabane à Huitres.

Saline and La Cabane have made it into Le Fooding, France’s online bible for hipster dining – no small feat. The chef at La Cabane is from San Sebastián, the elegant Spanish seaside town half an hour from Biarritz that glitters with Michelin stars – a heritage reflected here in the delicious small plates of

chipirones (cuttlefish) and gambas a la plancha (grilled shrimp) and the laid-back Iberian vibe. This kind of eating is a far cry from the brasserie fare of the traditional French seaside resort – silvertiered platters of fruits de mer, îles flottantes – and even further from the starched pyramidal napkins and creamy sauces of the Hôtel du Palais. And all the better for it.

After this fruitful reconnaissance mission in Biarritz, I’m quite happy to spend the next few days wearing in my espadrilles around our villa in Bidart, a cliff-top enclave just ▶

PINK SAND CLASSIC BEACHES

CLASSIC BEACHES

From top the Hôtel du Palais; the cliff-top Villa Belza overlooking the town; Biarritz’s beach

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Right Ocean View, a six-bedroomed villa in Bidart, built in the local Basque style Below the panoramic view that gives the villa its name

C L A S S I C C OA S TA L GRANDES DAMES

PINK SAND CLASSIC BEACHES

Grand Hotel Heiligendamm Heiligendamm, Germany Founded in 1793 by Duke Friedrich Franz of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, whose doctor prescribed sea bathing, this is the oldest purposebuilt seaside resort in Europe, a cluster of majestic neoclassical and gothic buildings. Even in summer the Baltic here rarely warms above 20C, but there’s a heated indoor pool and first-rate spa, and the beach has Strandkörbe – wicker seats with awnings – to keep off sun and wind.

From €220 per night; grandhotelheiligendamm.de

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◀ to the south of the city. Ocean View is a fabulous six-bedroom house in the local Basque architectural style. With its dramatic chalet-style sloping roof, whitewashed walls and deep-red timber, it has a definite Pyrenean feel unsurprising given the foothills can be seen from the east-facing windows. To the west is the staggering view the villa is named for, which looks over rolling surf and the curved headland down to Spain.

Like an increasing number of the traditional Basque houses in the area, it has recently been restored and reinvented as a glamorous holiday home. This one is the beachside bolthole of the Goring family, hoteliers by royal appointment and owners of the Goring Hotel in London. (Guests at the coronation of George VI and the Queen stayed there, the late Queen Mother ate at the restaurant, and it’s where Kate Middleton spent the night before her wedding to Prince William.)

The villa’s interior is a fitting mix of stalwart British quality – John Lewis crockery, Burlington taps – and local Basque linen and

BIDART AND GUETHARY ARE HOME TO SOME OF THE MOST EXCLUSIVE VILLAS IN THE BASQUE REGION wicker furniture. Its airy extension, with its giant island kitchen and glass-walled TV snug, was finished a couple of years ago, and only recently the family started to rent out the property with luxury travel company SJ Villas.

Bidart and neighbouring village Guéthary are home to some of the most exclusive villas in the Basque region – enormous detached houses owned by wealthy French, English and Russian families that sometimes remain shuttered for most of the year. Ocean View is part of a growing trend among owners to open up their houses for rental during the shoulder seasons, when the weather is balmy and, particularly in September and October, the sea reliably warm. The Gorings are professed

surf-lovers, and both Bidart and Guéthary boast some of the top surf spots in the region. Guéthary even has its own wave, the Parliamentia, a right-handed reef break that draws surfers from all over the globe.

I was too timid to venture into the waves – especially after having seen a rescue helicopter hovering – and preferred to bask by the villa’s small heated swimming pool, set at a pleasant 26C yearround. Watching the surfers in action, however, is strangely mesmerising, I discover. From the villa’s top balcony – an ideal spot for an early-evening aperitif – you have an almost aerial view. And long after the sun has set and the waves are tinged with gold, they are still out there, bobbing around, waiting for that perfect swell.

Back in London, Jeremy Goring, the fourth generation of his family to run the hotel, tells me he first went to the Côte Basque on a school rugby tour. He ate oysters straight from a fishing boat at Saint-Jean-de-Luz, fell for the region and is now a keen surfer, going as often as he can get away.

That is becoming easier – British Airways launched direct flights to Biarritz from Heathrow last month, and there are now non-stop services from Geneva, Madrid, Stockholm, Strasbourg, Southampton and many more cities. “It’s more connected than ever,” Goring tells me. “The area is very definitely on the move… Everybody hopes it won’t go too far.” The spirit of Victor Hugo lives on. 6

Belmond Villa Sant’Andrea Taormina, Sicily Given the scarcity of great beaches in Italy, its grand hotels tend not to be noted for the sand out front.

Belmond’s Villa Sant’Andrea in Taormina is a rare exception, a handsome mansion built in 1830 directly above its own stretch of sand on the Bay of Mazzarò, where it has sunbeds, a beach bar and six private cabanas (from €495 a day), each with its own sofa, table, tented veranda, loungers, minibar and WiFi. Guests at venerable sister property the Belmond Grand Hotel Timeo can also use its beach.

From €1,101 per night; belmond.com

Hotel du Cap Eden-Roc Antibes Little raises the spirits like a first glimpse of the “flushed facade” of, in F Scott Fitzgerald’s description, this “summer resort of notable and fashionable people”, the most splendid, most cosseting seaside hotel in France. The beach – nothing more than some rocks with ladders down to the sea – is not the point.

Instead, the beau monde gather by the huge saltwater infinity pool, dynamited out of the headland in 1914 when the hotel was used as a Red Cross hospital and the manager noted that the nurses liked to swim.

From €1,100 per night; hotel-du-capeden-roc.com Claire Wrathall

ft.com/pinksand summer 2016

Galatea and Vanguard Whitby, North Yorkshire Lighthouses are hard to beat when it comes to dramatic coastal locations and now, thanks to automation, many of the keepers’ cottages are available as holiday lets. Galatea and Vanguard, at Whitby’s 19th-century lighthouse, are perched on towering cliffs just outside the historic harbour town. The decor is homely rather than luxurious, but this place is all about the views and sense of glorious isolation.

Each cottage sleeps five, from £1,202 per week; ruralretreats.co.uk. (All prices are the lowest available between now and the end of September) The Beach Hut Widemouth Bay, Cornwall Halfway between Boscastle and Bude, the Beach Hut sits on a grassy knoll overlooking the little valley of Millook, a small stream and a wide beach. Built as a tearoom in the 1920s, it has been ft.com/pinksand summer 2016

A SEASIDE SANCTUARY BRITISH BEACHES

From lighthouse keepers’ cottages to a converted tearoom: Joanne O’Connor finds the UK’s most dramatic and secluded coastal hideaways

restored as an idyllic hideaway, with clapperboard exterior and whitewashed wood-panelled walls inside. Often appearing in photo-shoots, it is booked long in advance, despite sobering highseason rates. The only weekend left this July costs £2,150 for three nights. Better to wait until autumn, when a full week costs £1,800 and you can warm up by the woodburner after a bracing swim.

Sleeps two, from £3,000 per week; uniquehomestays.com

Shore Cottage, Croft 103 near Durness, Sutherland Shore Cottage is one of two dwellings on this remote Scottish croft that fuse eco-friendly credentials with cutting-edge design. The full-height windows of this bold, barrel-shaped building on the shores of Loch Eriboll offer ever-changing vistas of the sea, sky and mountains. Local timber and stone have been used inside and ▶

PINK SAND BRITISH BEACHES

Clockwise from top left Vanguard lighthouse keeper’s cottage, Whitby; the Beach Hut, Widemouth Bay; Shore Cottage, near Durness; and the Cable Hut, Abermawr

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Right Martello Tower on Aldeburgh beach, Suffolk Below Blackpool Mill Cottage, Devon

◀ out to create a calm, minimalist space in harmony with the surroundings. Soak up the view from the outdoor bathtub (and perhaps spot puffins or whales), go for long walks on the white beaches or, if you’re feeling energetic, climb nearby Ben Hope, Scotland’s most northerly Munro.

Sleeps two, from £1,500 per week; croft103.com

Pagham Beach House Pagham, West Sussex Modern architecture fans will be seduced by the sleek good looks of this single-storey pavilion on Pagham Beach. The glass walls fold back to allow unobstructed views

of the shingle and sea beyond, and a series of small courtyards further blurs the boundaries between inside and out. The RSPB Pagham Harbour nature reserve is just a 10-minute walk away and the South Downs National Park a short drive.

Sleeps six, from £1,975 per week; paghambeachhouse.co.uk

The Cabin near St Ives, Cornwall This lofty seaside retreat for two combines the best of both worlds – a secluded position yet within easy reach of the popular Cornish harbour town of St Ives. Accessible only by foot, it clings to the cliffs above the gorgeous sands of Porthkidney. Inside, all is shipshape, with porthole windows, nautical knick-knacks and a snug mezzanine sleeping area with sea views.

Sleeps two; from £879 per week; boutique-retreats.co.uk Blackpool Mill Cottage Hartland, Devon If this clifftop cottage looks familiar, it’s because it appeared

in the recent TV serialisation of John Le Carré’s The Night Manager.

It dates back to the 15th century, and its rustic charm and dramatic setting have made it popular with location scouts and holidaymakers alike. Take a walk along the South West Coast Path, which passes in front of the cottage, a cream tea at Hartland Abbey (the cottage is part of the abbey estate) or a boat trip to Lundy Island from nearby Clovelly.

The path down to the nearest beach is steep but the reward is that you will most likely have it to yourself.

Sleeps eight, from £1,175 per week; hartlandabbey.com

Martello Tower Aldeburgh, Suffolk Built in the early 19th century to protect English shores from Napoleon, this imposing fortress is enjoying a new lease of life as one of the UK’s most unusual holiday homes, thanks to the efforts of the Landmark Trust, which saved it from dereliction.

Cross the wooden bridge into the sturdy circular tower to find lofty,

vaulted ceilings, teak floors, antique furniture and your very own rooftop battery – the perfect spot to settle down with some of Aldeburgh’s famous fish and chips and admire the views across the Orford Ness peninsula and out to sea.

Sleeps four, from £1,673 per week; landmarktrust.org.uk

The Cable Hut Abermawr, Pembrokeshire Built to house the first telephone lines being laid across the Atlantic, this charming little cabin has been rescued from ruin by its owners and converted into a romantic bolthole for two. Small it may be but it packs a big design punch, with crisp red-and-white colour scheme, quirky industrial objects and luxuries such as a king-size cast-iron bed, slipper bath with sea views and underfloor heating to keep things cosy year-round. The beaches of Abermawr and Aberbach are a pebble’s throw away, as is the Pembrokeshire Coast Path.

Sleeps two, from £1,250 per week; uniquehomestays.com 6

PINK SAND BRITISH BEACHES

W H AT TO W E A R O N T H E B E AC H T H I S S U M M E R

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When packing your suitcase this summer, take inspiration from Andre de Dienes’ 1949 shoot of the then relatively unknown Marilyn Monroe parading on Santa Monica beach in a ruched, halterneck white swimsuit.

Flirty, 1950s shapes are in, and this season’s swimwear is both flattering and feminine. From LA-based brand Marysia (1) come one-shoulder swimsuits and bikini crop tops with sweet scalloped edges and high-waisted briefs. Lisa Marie Fernandez’s on-theme one-pieces have a nautical rope-belt fastening, while Norma Kamali’s bandage-wrap

costumes come with cutesy cut-out waists, and Heidi Klein’s are strapless with a sweetheart neckline, recalling Monroe’s in an array of vivid shades. This summer’s key styles are brightly coloured and mono-shaded – great for offsetting a tan.

A wide-brim hat with a floppy peak will ward off the sun’s rays: brands such as Filù (which crafts its styles in the Italian Alps using centuries-old methods) and Sensi Studio (whose ribbontied Panama hats are 4 inspired by traditional

Ecuadorian techniques) have a great selection. Handmade beach bags from British brand Rae Feather (2) are big enough to fill with all the essentials.

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2 3

The dolce-vita trend follows through to cover-ups: crisp, cotton dresses and separates in feminine, 1950s shapes are this season’s must-pack staple, as they work for both beach and bar. Look for off-the-shoulder tops or pretty, tiered slips with ribbons and bows.

Lisa Marie Fernandez’s (3) flouncy dresses are cute yet classic – seersucker stripes with a flamenco frill, or the button-up gingham outfit

that’s her interpretation of the traditional school dress.

Men have an easier task.

Simple, tailored swim shorts from brands such as Orlebar Brown (4), Onia and Saturdays NYC are fail-safe.

The ideal length is around the mid-thigh, and in shades of navy, chambray or olive they are smart enough for the bar. For something more casual, French brand Officine Générale offers a grey swim short that looks great with a white T-shirt. And if you insist on a beach accessory, try Frescobol Carioca’s (5) beach bats in polished Brazilian wood. Grace Cook

ft.com/pinksand summer 2016

JAN MORRIS A TALE OF TWO BEACHES house that, many years ago, stood beside it, but it is owned now by a successor that can claim to be one of the most luxurious hotels in the whole world, the Halekulani.

Here’s why I have cherished Gray’s little beach down the years. I have loved going there for a bathe in the evening twilight, swim-time in the comforting Pacific – warm water, gentle tides, hints of phosphorescence in the gathering dusk: and when I have luxuriated there enough, and have dried the salt off me, I like to walk back off the sand into the grounds of the hotel behind. There beneath the assembled stars, to the gentle music perhaps of a Hawaiian combo somewhere, I lie on a chaise longue sipping that old essence of Polynesia, a Mai Tai (rum, lime juice, curaçao liqueur), served by some infinitely courteous waiter from the Halekulani hotel.

And the chances are that I dream there, while the music plays on, of the pebble beach at Cricieth (one c), Welsh fruit cake, instant coffee and home. 6

ALAMY; GETTY

I

am by no means a beach person, preferring mountains, meadows and even city streets to sand and sun lotion. Two beaches in particular, though, are permanently lodged in my memory and my affections, so disparate yet so connected that I venture to call this little contribution a Tale of Two Beaches.

One is a modest enough example, rather Victorian in style. It is a small pebble beach at Cricieth in north Wales, which I prefer to spell in the Welsh way (with one c in the middle rather than two) because it is an altogether Welsh sort of place. The coming of the railway, in the 1860s, ft.com/pinksand summer 2016

turned it from a fishing village into a resort popular with English visitors, but it is handsomely overlooked at its western end by the castle that Welsh rulers built, nearly eight centuries ago, on a commanding rocky height.

At the other end of the beach, to maintain balance, there is a smart café in the 1930s moderne style, and between the two, above the pebbly shoreline, a promenade is popular with saunterers, lovers young and old, and dog-walkers.

It is not a thrilling beach, nor a smart beach, but it is a family sort of beach, and I love it for two reasons: first, because through all the centuries it has been so loyal to its roots; and second, because just up the road from the promenade is my own house, so I can be home in a few minutes for my morning mail, Welsh fruit cake and instant coffee.

But, oh, how different is the second of my two beaches! On the other side of the world, across two western oceans, is that celebrated icon of popular Americanism, the Hawaiian suburb of Waikiki. Bang next door is its much statelier mother-city of Honolulu, with its ancient traditions and cultural richness, but it is Waikiki that

the world chiefly knows, for its whole-hog, full-blast Americanism, all rock ’n’ roll and dazzle, grand hotels and tourist trash. Well, on the shore of Waikiki, within sight of the skyscrapers, is the second beach of my affections. Gray’s Beach is a small sandy pleasure-strand looking out across the limitless Pacific. It is named for the boarding

D E TA I L S For information on where to stay in Cricieth, visit the town’s website, criccieth.co.uk; visitwales.com has more general information. The Halekulani Hotel (halekulani.com) has double rooms from around $575 per night; see also gohawaii.com

The all-American glamour and Pacific warmth of Waikiki (above) and the pebbly shoreline of Cricieth, with its hilltop castle

PINK SAND JAN MORRIS

Where Waikiki is full of rock ’n’ roll dazzle, Cricieth in Wales has rather more modest charms. But, says the renowned travel writer, there are reasons to love them both

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Leader Price Houellebecq is a connoisseur of supermarkets – a “modern paradise”, he has called them.

In the exhibition catalogue he says that “hard discount” (an English marketing phrase that delights him) “comes from an advanced stage of civilisation, because it doesn’t exist among people who just have small businesses and then nature”.

This photograph depicts what he believes will be a surviving monument of our civilisation. Millennia from now, he says, this Leader Price supermarket in France’s rural Auvergne region still won’t have returned to nature.

He says part of the impact of the photo comes from the English words, “Leader Price”.

“The English language goes well with the brutal message. It’s an advantage in rock music, the brutality of the language.” Perhaps, he reflects, French – as a more abstract language – tends to be “more euphemistic”.

◀ Submission, Houellebecq’s most recent novel, imagines France electing an Islamist president. The day the book appeared, January 7 2015, terrorists shot up the offices of the Charlie Hebdo newspaper in Paris. Houellebecq says, “Enormous numbers of Europeans are now afraid of Islam – and they aren’t wrong to be afraid. Enormous numbers of Arabs are also afraid of Islam, because they were used to a liveable Islam.” He speaks without obvious anger, or indeed any energy at all.

We pour ourselves more wine.

If he despairs of France, as Submission suggests, why stay here? “Because I’m too old to move. It’s too tiring. I ask myself why I returned to France [in 2012, after living in Ireland], and the first idea that came to me was that it was to write Submission.

When I left France [in 1999], nobody was talking about Islam. When I returned, people were talking only about that. So, obviously, it struck me.

“Now that the book’s written, I could leave again. This is a bizarre country. Liberty of expression is very restricted. And yet there are always things that emerge.”

What kind of things? “Let’s say Eric Zemmour.”

Zemmour is a best-selling far-right polemicist who laments immigration and French decline. Does Houellebecq admire him? “That’s not really my sentiment, but let’s say he has succeeded in existing despite frenetic opposition to him.”

By this point Houellebecq is mumbling almost inaudibly. Yet he seems quite happy to keep answering questions. He gives the impression of having no sense of a schedule, or a busy world outside. Now that he is here, in this empty room, with his bottle of wine, talking about his work, he seems to have abandoned all thought of ever leaving.

More than perhaps any other serious European novelist, Houellebecq reaches a broad public.

Submission sold 345,000 copies in France alone in its first 12 days after publication. “Public acclaim”, he says, “has real pertinence. Typically, the public’s 41

judgement of a novel is an emotional judgement of affection or hatred for the characters: ‘I don’t like Esther,’ ‘Chloé disgusts me,’ that sort of thing. It’s a way of reacting to novels that I find very just.”

But public acclaim also disgusts him. He recites some lyrics from the American singer Iggy Pop (with whom he has a mutual admiration society): You can convince the world That you’re some kind of superstar When an asshole is what you are.

“I’m a little bit a star, and I perfectly recognise myself in those words,” he says. “I find that a perfect text. Inside oneself, one knows one is overrated.

Still, rather me than someone else. The other writers who take themselves for superstars are actually less good than me. So why not me? Even so, it’s a bit ridiculous.”

I start saying, “Are there no writers today who you…” and Houellebecq interrupts : “No, I am the best.” He then hastens to limit his claim: “I am not the best in general: in the past there were others better than me. But, currently, I am the best.”

I fumble for a retort. Finally, I come up with, “How about Philip Roth?”

“Look, we won’t speak badly of Philip Roth in the interview, there is no purpose in that, but I find that he repeats himself. It’s often the same book, in my view.”

If Houellebecq is the best, how can public and critics overrate him?

“They overrate me because they lack culture.

There are always exceptions but in France most people who exercise the function of literary critic have read Céline, a bit of Proust, Camus, Sartre, but they barely know the 19th century. Next to Balzac I am little, tout petit. What I envy in him is this ubiquity that allows him to get into the skin of a labourer, a concierge, a banker. For me that’s the greatest thing.”

As I probe for parallels between Houellebecq and Balzac, Houellebecq says: “He mostly appeared as an essential witness of his era towards the end, and especially after his death. I have become famous earlier in my life than Balzac did.” But Houellebecq grants that he, too, is a significant witness of his era: “I am recognised for that, and rightly so.”

Occasionally as he talks, his eyes slowly slide shut. I worry he will soon be asleep.

What will he write about next? “I’d like to devote myself a bit to the ultra-rich. I feel they have become a central subject.” However: “The fact is that I don’t know the rich. I don’t know how they live. And as a little disciple of the immense Balzac, I’d like to know this world that is closed to me. I’d have to go and see people. And now people distrust me. When they meet me, they know they risk serving as the model for a character. But I’d like to meet the rich. Maybe this article will help.”

I ask whether writers peak and then decline like athletes. Houellebecq replies, “I’m still at a good age. In general, one does best at 60. I believe I can still do one great book. Not two.”

Rumours of his death that flourished in 2011 (after he forgot to show up for a book tour through the Low Countries) were premature. One day, though, the collapse will be complete. Together we examine a photograph of a skull framed by CocaCola cans, above a plaque that reads, “Michel HOUELLEBECQ 1958-2037.”

Houellebecq explains: “It’s a present I received by post, a real little mausoleum. An author I don’t know sent it to me, as a sort of homage. I took it as an act of love. I really liked this sculpture, and as I was the only one to like it, I put it in the exhibition.

I don’t know who the author is, I’ve lost his details.

I hope he will make himself known on the occasion of the exhibition.” 6 “Rester vivant”, Palais de Tokyo, Paris 75016, June 23-September 11 ft.com/magazine june 18/19 2016

© BarBara d’alessandri/starface; courtesy of the artist and air de paris, paris

France #002

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ft.com/magazine october 9/10 2010

Orgreave revisited On a hot summer’s day in South Yorkshire 32 years ago, hundreds of miners and police fought a pitched battle for the future of industrial relations in Britain. John Gapper, who followed the story as a young reporter, returns to Orgreave to ask what really happened. Photographs by David Severn

Above, June 18 1984: miners run from the police at the Orgreave coking plant near Rotherham; left, the Barnsley headquarters of the National Union of Mineworkers today

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‘We were outnumbered, out-armed and outdone’

W

hen Norman Strike was a coal miner, his surname was apposite. In 1983, at the age of 32, Strike stood for election as a union official at his mine, Westoe colliery in South Tyneside. He lost by seven votes: “I said it was because nobody wanted to vote for a Strike.”

A year later, on June 18 1984 – 32 years ago this weekend – Strike reached the top of a hill above the Orgreave coking works near Rotherham in South Yorkshire. It was just after 8am on a hot, sunny day and he was in a group of miners who had come by coach from Westoe to picket. The National Union of Mineworkers, led by its controversial president Arthur Scargill, had called a national strike three months before to resist a programme of pit closures backed by Margaret Thatcher’s government.

From his vantage point, Strike gazed down on a scene of battle. He heard a loud roar as hundreds of miners ran up a field towards him, chased by mounted police. Beyond them, he saw lines of police in riot gear, and behind them the plant itself, a sprawling, smoking complex at which fuel was refined from coal. Strike had been reading Germinal,

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‘We were outnumbered, out-armed and outdone’ Norman Strike Former miner

Emile Zola’s novel about a miners’ strike in 19thcentury France, as part of an Open University course, and he remembers that a passage from it came vividly to mind: “This pit, piled up in the bottom of a hollow with its squat brick buildings, raising its chimney like a threatening horn, seemed to him to have the evil air of a gluttonous beast, crouching there to devour the earth.”

The day culminated in a pitched fight in the village of Orgreave, with a car set on fire, miners throwing bricks and stones, and mounted police cantering along a village street beating miners and others with batons. There were more than 120 official casualties, including broken bones, cuts from bricks and truncheon blows. Ninety-three miners were arrested and 55 were later charged with riot, then a common law offence for which the maximum sentence was life imprisonment.

Orgreave was a pivotal moment in the strike, which lasted until March 1985 before being called off as many miners crossed picket lines to return to work. By the end of June 18 1984, it was clear picketing would not halt coke production at Orgreave and thus close the steelworks at Scunthorpe that relied on it. Scargill was injured and taken to hospital, with one of his key aims defeated. “Until then, I was optimistic that we could win but the writing was on the wall after that,” says Strike. “We were outnumbered, out-armed and outdone.”

The winners were the National Coal Board and Thatcher, who wanted to impose the government’s will over nationalised industries, and stop unions blocking closures or shrinkage. With the defeat of the NUM, and later of the print workers in the 1986 Wapping dispute, the government had the upper hand. Thatcher’s ability to reform the economy and unleash the rationalisation of loss-making industries – and deregulation of the City of London in 1986 – was ensured at Orgreave.

History is written by the victors, and the narrative of Orgreave is that the police had to battle to contain violent picketing. But after 32 years, the losers may be about to rewrite it. Pressure on home secretary Theresa May to set up an inquiry increased when an inquest jury found in April that South Yorkshire police, the force in charge at Orgreave, contributed to the deaths of 96 Liverpool football fans at Hillsborough in 1989. Officers then tried to hide their blunders by blaming fans.

Barbara Jackson, a former NCB employee who took part in the strike, leads the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign, a pressure group of former miners and allies formed four years ago. “Thatcher won industrially but she did not win culturally or emotionally,” she says. “It has not made people love what happened. For a lot of them, it was a shock to see a government could treat its own people like that.”

It is another sunny day as I ascend to the spot where Strike stood in 1984. The landscape is hugely changed. The coking plant was demolished after its closure in 1990 and the field is steadily being covered. “Welcome to Renaissance,” reads one sign advertising “a fantastic range of three and four bedroom houses”, selling for up to £320,000. An industrial park sits nearby, with a manufacturing research centre run by Sheffield University, two wind turbines and a new Rolls-Royce engine blade plant. The past is buried and the new town on the site of the battle has been christened “Waverley”.

Kevin Horne, a former miner arrested that day and charged with unlawful assembly, although the charge was later dropped, walks beside me. ▶ ft.com/magazine june 18/19 2016

The Waverley housing development on the site of the battle betwen miners and police

BattleofOrgreave: How it happened

Rive

1. Miners gather in front of police lines and push forward, with stones thrown

r

the r Ro

Coking Coking plant plant Railway bridge

1 2

3

4 5

Police lines

Striking miners

2. Mounted police advance three times amid clashes with miners 3. Mounted and riot police clear field by chasing miners towards railway bridge 4. Battle of police and miners around bridge 5. Mounted police chase miners into Orgreave village

Orgreave

45

◀ Horne is part of the Orgreave campaign and argues that South Yorkshire police could gain as much from an inquiry as ex-miners and their relatives.

He says it may provide a sense of closure since police are still distrusted in former mining villages although most are too young to have been there.

“I was upset at the time and even if I see it on television now, I get upset,” Horne says. He coughs slightly as he climbs the hill. “My wife cries, even my granddaughter cries. She’s 18. They’re the people I would like to start respecting the police again, because we can’t go on forever. They’re all we’ve got, no matter how good or bad they are. We’ve got to give them a chance to make a fresh start.”

I

was at Orgreave on May 29 1984, another day of trouble three weeks earlier. It featured mounted police charges, stone throwing, pickets shoving police lines, and 80 arrests. Scargill was arrested for obstruction the next morning as he stopped on that hill and the Yorkshire Post’s headline read, “The Battle of Orgreave”. It turned out to be a prelude to the bloodier, decisive battle to come.

As a 25-year-old news reporter for the northern edition of the Daily Mail, I spent weeks that year

46

‘I would like people to start respecting the police again.

We’ve got to give them a chance to make a fresh start’ Kevin Horne Former miner

reporting on the strike, arriving in pit villages before dawn to see whether any miners would cross picket lines. After that, I might walk to the makeshift canteens set up by the Women Against Pit Closures group and have a cup of tea. The Mail’s sympathies were heavily with the government and working miners, but I usually got a polite welcome.

On May 29, I drove to Orgreave and walked down the hill to a pen behind the police lines where the media were corralled. The Mail had sent more senior reporters and my presence was superfluous, so I decided to climb up and stand among pickets who were gathering to try to block lorries of coking coal from leaving the plant. It was 7am and, with the midsummer solstice near, the sun was already high.

For a while, the few hundred miners milled around and chatted in front of a line of police, or sat on the stubble in the mown field and enjoyed the sun. Scargill arrived, in a trucker’s cap with the logo of a supportive US union, and stood 50m to my right.

At 8am, as 35 lorries laden with coke emerged, the miners chanted, “Here we go, here we go,” and trotted forward to push en masse at the police lines. As they did, a few men threw missiles – stones and half-bricks – from the back. ft.com/magazine june 18/19 2016

Scargill emerged from the crowd to remonstrate through a loudhailer. “We are not going to do anything by throwing things except hit our own lads,” I noted him saying at the time. “If there had been no missiles, we would down be at the gates by now.”

But as frustration grew, so did disorder and police reaction, with mounted police riding out to break up the crowd. By the end of the day, 24 police had been treated for injuries, along with 19 pickets.

“Largely a museum now”: union history at the NUM headquarters

T

he battles of Orgreave might not have occurred at all. Some officials in the NUM’s Yorkshire area, which had 250,000 working members at the time, thought focusing on Orgreave was a waste of energy because the police were so well organised. They favoured sending more pickets to Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, where many miners were still working.

“Flying pickets” – striking miners who went to other regions to enforce the strike – found their task hard, though. Pressed by the government to block mass picketing, the police turned cars full of miners away from motorway exits near pits. But they did not cordon off Orgreave. “The police told us where to go. They couldn’t have been more helpful unless they’d put on valet parking,” says Chris Kitchen, then a 17-year-old striker and now the NUM general secretary. “With hindsight, that was probably a good reason to say, ‘Hang on, we’ll go somewhere else.’”

Scargill chose Orgreave in an effort to repeat his victory at the Saltley Gate coke works in Birmingham in 1972, shut by a mass picket of the NUM and other unions in protest at the pay restraint policy of Edward Heath’s government. Thatcher was determined not to be caught in the same way, and South Yorkshire police were extremely well prepared. On June 18, they assembled a force of 4,200 from 10 counties, including 50 mounted police, 58 police dogs and several riot units.

That June morning, as Norman Strike ran down the hill to join other pickets, he was joining the second phase of battle. The first, before 8am, involved a build-up similar to May 29, with miners milling around in front of the police lines and probably (although some dispute it) sporadic stone throwing. The second started at 8am, after an initial shove against police lines as the lorries entered the plant to load up. The lines parted and mounted police cantered through, sending miners running.

As Strike arrived, the police line had reformed.

“Scargill was at the front and I was right beside him.

I remember him saying, ‘Come on lads, I’ve seen bigger horses at Scarborough racecourse.’” The miners pushed forward at the line again, with more missiles being thrown from the back. “There was a core of dedicated pickets and others who went along for the ride and would throw stones,” Strike says. “Often they’d hit us. I assume they were miners but I called them bloody idiots.”

A line of police in riot helmets, holding long shields, now stood at the front. A second mounted advance had no greater effect in calming the crowd – the reverse, in fact – and finally, at 8.30am, a historic event occurred. The line again parted and horses cantered forward, this time followed by riot police running out with round shields and truncheons raised. It was one of the first times that riot tactics drawn from policing in Hong Kong and former British colonies had been used on the mainland. “You know what you are doing. No heads, ft.com/magazine june 18/19 2016

‘It was a shock to see a government could treat its own people like that’ Barbara Jackson, Secretary of the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign bodies only,” one officer was recorded calling on police video.

In the melee of police and miners fighting as the riot snatch squad tried to pull particular people out of the crowd, an ITV camera crew filmed one officer with a raised truncheon striking the head and shoulders of a miner who was falling to the ground.

It had a shock effect when broadcast on national news that evening, along with other scenes of running battles and violence. The Telegraph reported the following day that the Queen had expressed concern at the televised spectacle.

After the third cavalry charge, calm returned and some miners drifted off to buy drinks on what was by then a hot, thirsty day. (“Miners work in that temperature all the time, so we know about keeping hydrated,” Kitchen jokes.) The police, many helmeted and in heavy uniform, had less opportunity for refreshment, which may have made them touchier. As tensions mounted again, Anthony Clement, the assistant chief constable in charge of operations, fatefully ordered the clearance of the field.

Three decades later, it is not clear why he did, rather than ordering the police to hold the line and

soak up the pressure. Strike thinks the move was provoked by a group nearby setting fire to a riot shield they had captured. “I was talking to a journalist from Socialist Worker and he said, ‘Norman, your trousers are on fire.’ The stubble was very dry and flames had spread. As I bent down to put them out, the line parted again. I can still see the horses trotting out and breaking into a gallop.”

The police chased hundreds of miners up the field towards a railway embankment and bridge leading into the village. “A horse was coming after me, and I heard the swish of a truncheon,” Strike recalls. “I leapt over a wall at the top and rolled down the embankment.” Ken Capstick, who later became the Yorkshire NUM’s vice-president, ran across the bridge with his son and into a supermarket. “God knows what the shoppers thought when the miners invaded for shelter,” he says.

Events were now spiralling out of control. The police were far from the coking plant, facing hundreds of frightened, angry miners. Scargill was injured and taken to hospital, claiming to have been struck on the head by a riot shield (police said he had fallen over). Some strikers built barricades, and a car was dragged across the road by the bridge ▶ 47

◀ and set on fire. The stone and brick throwing intensified. Finally, Clement ordered a charge of mounted police into Orgreave village itself.

An iconic photograph of Orgreave (shown on page 45) was taken there: Lesley Boulton, from the Sheffield Women Against Pit Closures group, raising her arm as a mounted officer leans out to strike her with a long baton. “I remember seeing one man run up a fire escape at the side of the supermarket, and a police horse trying to chase him up it,” says Strike.

“There might have been some stones thrown, but come on. [The police] were armed from head to toe, and it was our lads who got their heads beaten.”

M

ike McColgan, legal adviser to the Orgreave campaign, was then a trainee solicitor in Sheffield and knew Gareth Peirce, a human rights lawyer who had represented striking miners. “Gareth phoned and said, ‘Oh, Mike, I wonder if you could come over to Rotherham? We’ve got 71 clients in custody.’ There were six to eight to a cell and it was boiling hot.”

Horne, who had been arrested in a picket near the coking plant gates, remembers being taken to

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‘The police couldn’t have been more helpful beforehand.

With hindsight, that was a good reason to say, “Hang on, we’ll go somewhere else”’ Chris Kitchen General secretary, NUM

a courtyard at a Sheffield police station, and finding a group of injured miners. “They were in a very bad way, bleeding from their heads and some with broken legs. Most injuries were on the backs of their heads, as if they had been running away. The best we could do was bandage them with T-shirts.”

The 1985 riot trial ended with the prosecution withdrawing its case after Clement faced tough cross-examination on his version of events, and police statements about individual arrests were found to have many similar phrases. Charges against other miners were dropped and South Yorkshire police paid £525,000 compensation and legal costs in a settlement. “Batons were used without compunction on that day and caused inordinate injuries,” says Michael Mansfield, a defence barrister at that trial. “Yet not a single police officer has been disciplined or prosecuted.”

South Yorkshire Police has declared itself open to an Orgreave inquiry. Dave Jones, appointed interim chief constable after the Hillsborough inquest, says he would “welcome an appropriate independent assessment”. Until now, the nearest to an inquiry was a “scoping exercise” last year by the Independent Police Complaints Commission, which decided not to conduct a full investigation, partly because of “the passage of time” making it impossible to pursue allegations of assault.

The police conduct is not the only source of resentment; there was also the conduct of the media, especially the BBC. Although Fleet Street newspapers such as the Mail tended to take the government’s side, public service broadcasters were supposed to be balanced. The BBC’s 5.40pm news bulletin on the day did not have the same footage as ITV of police hitting miners and Alan Protheroe, the BBC’s assistant director general, told an internal meeting later in the week that he thought it “might not have been wholly impartial”.

Another accusation – first noted in the same meeting – has steadily escalated over the years: that the BBC “reversed the footage” deliberately or accidentally to give the impression that police had attacked miners before the latter responded with stone-throwing. The late Tony Benn, MP for the mining constituency of Chesterfield, told parliament near the end of the strike that, “I know from BBC editors who took part in that bulletin that there were three cavalry charges before a single stone was thrown.”

This version of history is clearly untrue – no one I talked to who was there on June 18 argues that.

Some, including Kitchen, make a lesser claim: that miners threw stones only after the first mounted advance. Even this appears quite unlikely. Howard Giles, a historical re-enactment specialist who in 2001 worked with the artist Jeremy Deller on his reconstruction of the battle of Orgreave in 2001 (an event involving 800 miners, police and volunteers) believes it is inaccurate.

“The miners were standing around, it was quite good-natured and there was a bit of football and banter between lines. Then the stones started hitting, the police brought in long shields, and it started to turn nasty,” says Giles, who interviewed many participants on both sides. “Whoever threw those stones set off a battle that the vast majority of the police and miners did not want.”

In 1991 the NUM’s The Miner newspaper reported one BBC manager admitting in a letter that “an editor inadvertently reversed” one sequence, but the correspondence has since been lost. “I am ft.com/magazine june 18/19 2016

martin shakeshaft; john harris/reportdigital.co.uk

not sure that I have ever got to the bottom of that,” says Tony Harcup, a senior lecturer in journalism at Sheffield University who investigated the affair.

The BBC has never officially conceded it and there were so many advances and counter-attacks that it is not even clear what the missing letter meant.

There is a danger of replacing one myth – that the battle of Orgreave was entirely the striking miners’ fault – with the equal and opposite myth that they were victims of wholly unprovoked aggression. A more plausible history is that occasional stone throwing in the early stages, such as I witnessed on May 29, triggered a police response that passed through choreographed stages of escalation to violent, chaotic loss of control.

Clifford Stott, a professor of social psychology at Keele University, has studied other examples of public demonstrations that turned violent. “There is often a tendency to focus on who started it, but it is really in the interaction of both sides,” he says.

“Often, it’s the outcome of what is essentially police ineptitude. Senior commanders attempt to disperse the crowd but they are not really in control. Units start to act independently as they get embedded in hostile conflicts of their own creation.”

For the Orgreave campaigners, ineptitude is an insufficient explanation. They point to how police guided miners there while turning them away from other sites. “If the police and the government didn’t want June 18 to happen, all they had to do was put road blocks in place,” says Barbara Jackson. “It was a set-up and a showdown. This is unfinished business because it is so close to us. The miners are convinced that there is one rule of law for them and another for other people. “ The psychological impact of the strike has lingered longer than most physical injuries. Many miners felt betrayed not just by police actions but how the story was told. Nick Jones, industrial correspondent for BBC radio at the time, partly agrees.

“There was no doubt the strike was seen as a threat to democracy, and I think I ended up becoming a sort of cheerleader for the return to work. I reported on a narrative that suited the establishment.”

In one respect, Jones thinks Orgreave would be impossible today. “At Orgreave as with other confrontations, the media tended to be behind police lines or at the edge of the action. There are very few press pictures [in the middle], which is why the image of Lesley Boulton is so memorable. Today, everyone has a camera in his or her phone. There would be so much material that it would be impossible for the police to get away with what they did.”

T

he Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre by the Orgreave site is an encouraging example of what was often promised to regenerate industrial areas but too rarely delivered. It is run

by Sheffield University in partnership with aerospace and high technology manufacturers including Boeing, Airbus and Rolls Royce. It researches techniques such as how to make an aero engine’s titanium shell with less waste. From six employees in 2012, the centre has grown to 530 and expects to double that.

Three years ago, it opened a training centre at which 350 apprentices are being taught to work in such companies. They join at 16 and study for four years, during which they are paid between £7,000 and £12,000 a year. “With the history of this area, a number of them are earning the only income in

ft.com/magazine june 18/19 2016

‘God knows what the shoppers thought when we invaded the supermarket for shelter’ Ken Capstick Former vice-president of the Yorkshire NUM

their families,” says Colin Sirett, chief executive of the AMRC. “It is very humbling to hear the challenges they’ve faced.”

The last miners’ jobs vanished from Yorkshire last December when the Kellingley deep mine closed with the loss of 450 jobs. The NUM, once one of the UK’s largest and strongest unions has been reduced to a curiosity – it has only 300 paying members. Kitchen works at the union’s head office in Barnsley, where banners from all the old mines line its grand assembly hall. What was once an embodiment of a living industry is largely a museum.

The union provides advice to retired miners on health conditions, often lung diseases such as pneumoconiosis, bronchitis and emphysema. Kitchen estimates that 60 per cent of former miners have health issues. “With the benefit of hindsight, it was always going to be an uphill struggle,” he says of the strike. “It was never going to be won with the Tories in power because they were pursuing a plan to privatise the assets. Not because I’m a miner, purely as a UK citizen, I think that’s damaged everyone.”

I met Margaret Thatcher only once, two years after Orgreave, when I had left the Daily Mail for the Daily Telegraph (a year later, I would join the

FT as a labour correspondent). The strike was beaten and she was nearing the peak of her powers as the economy expanded and unemployment fell. The biggest criticism she faced was that the north was being left behind as the south boomed – then called the “north-south divide”.

Thatcher was touring Manchester and came one evening to visit the Telegraph’s new print plant. I was among a group of employees to whom she was introduced and she chatted to us for two minutes.

The next day I covered her visit to a hospital, outside which a noisy crowd of protesters had gathered.

“What about the north-south divide, Mrs Thatcher?” a journalist asked amid the din, as she stood with her back to me.

“There is no such thing,” she declared. “There are examples of enterprise around the country...”

As she spoke, she turned and, incredibly, recognised me. “... such as the Telegraph plant in Trafford Park,” she finished triumphantly to my face. It is how I remember the prime minister who defeated the miners – defying shouts of protest and, in an instant, seizing the narrative. 6 John Gapper is the FT’s chief business commentator 49

Jancis Robinson The grapedetective

M

iguel A Torres was one of the most famous wine producers in the world when, in 1979, the 1970 Cabernet Sauvignon he made in Barcelona’s hinterland, Penedès, triumphed over the likes of Ch Latour 1970 and Ch La Mission Haut-Brion 1961. The competition was the Gault-Millau Wine Olympics, and some think the French gastronomic magazine organised the taste-off to re-establish French supremacy after California’s triumph in the so-called Judgment of Paris three years earlier. If so, it failed.

Torres was lauded for his cosmopolitan outlook and for following in the footsteps of the much smaller producer Jean León by importing well-known international grape varieties such as Cabernet and Chardonnay into Penedès.

But 10 years later, in a dramatic volte-face, he began a quest to find and rescue local Catalan grapes from various points on the spectrum between obscurity and near-extinction. The move was not just prescient – indigenous varieties are much more fashionable at the moment – but also driven by concern about climate change and sustainability, the theory being that vines with a long history in a region are likely to be particularly well acclimated to it.

This vine recovery programme, now involving his son Miguel Torres Maczassek, who returned from the company’s Chilean operation four years ago, has been an extremely long-term project, embarked upon in the late 1980s and dependent on the simple expedient of putting ads in the local press asking people to contact them if they came across unidentified grape varieties.

As a result, the Torres bodega in Vilafranca del Penedès received hundreds of telephone calls. Torres worked on samples of vine fragments in conjunction with the University of Montpellier and its DNA-analysing equipment.

In about 50 instances, the mystery vines turned out to be genuinely mysterious.

The next step was to treat the plant material to ensure it was entirely free of the viruses that plague so many grapevines, then to multiply it in vitro before planting the baby vines in their greenhouse nursery, grafting the cuttings on to rootstocks resistant to the phylloxera louse, the scourge of grapevines

Illustration Graham Roumieu

ft.com/magazine june 18/19 2016

Torres Grans Muralles 2009 The recuperated Garró and now Querol are minor ingredients in the Grans Muralles red blend that is my favourite wine from a vast range made

by Torres’s various operations in Spain.

The 2009 is £68.90 at Hedonism Wines (0207 290 7870)

throughout the world, before planting out blocks of each variety that are big enough to yield grapes from which several hundred litres of a sample wine could be made. Torres now has a specific microvinification cellar where Miguel’s sister Mireia is in charge of research.

Tasting and analysing all 50 of these samples was a painstaking task, and disappointing in most cases. The varieties may have been rare and unequivocally Catalan but very few yielded wine of any real interest. In the end, the Torres family’s patient researches have managed to identify and rescue six distinct and promising indigenous grape varieties.

Varietal versions of five of them were bottled earlier this year for the first proper vintage of 2015. A varietal 2014 Garró had already been bottled because this vine variety was identified as early as 1990 and has been part of Torres’s spicy, complex Grans Muralles blend of local grapes since its first vintage in 1996.

One of the most promising new finds is a white wine grape the family call Forcada. They have fewer than three hectares planted, as high as 500m in the Alt Penedès, near Torres’s Sauvignon Blanc (sold as Fransola). It has the disadvantage of being very late-ripening, a whole month after Chardonnay, for instance.

But it has great extract, acidity and firm flavours, somewhere between peach and leafy. I could easily imagine it making fine base wine for classic sparkling wine such as the vast amount of Cava that is produced around Torres headquarters in Penedès. But the still varietal 2015 I tasted in London in April was impressive in its own right.

Of the reds, in addition to the spicy, plummy Garró 2014, I tasted 2015s made respectively from Pirene (planted in Torres’s highest vineyard at an elevation of 950m), Moneu, Gonfaus and Querol. I was impressed by how distinctively different they were from each other. These were wines with real personalities, even if in the long run they may not be bottled as single-varietal wines but may be used more often as components to improve a blend.

From the 2015 vintage, the quantities made of these varietal wines vary from just 450 litres to 2,700. The Torres family are still waiting for the Spanish and Catalan authorities to recognise these “new old” vines officially and this may not happen for a year, or more in the case of particularly virused Pirene. ▶

Food&Drink Wine

‘Torres began a quest to rescue Catalan grapes from various points on the spectrum between obscurity and near-extinction’

51

Five of the best Private dining rooms From a country pub to an intimate space in the heart of London, Andrew Webb picks dining tables with secluded charm

The Six Bells This charming country pub in Suffolk has three private dining spaces.

Wood-panelled walls are decorated with framed antique butterflies. Head chef John Tremayne includes local ingredients as well as those harvested from his kitchen garden.

Dishes include locally shot fallow deer haunch, served with courgette, St George mushroom and

polenta, or whole saltcrusted Suffolk free-range chicken with lemon and thyme stuffing, bread sauce and roast potatoes.

The Street, Preston St Mary, Sudbury, Suffolk, CO10 9NG; 01787 247 440; thesixbellspreston.com The Rosevine A boutique hotel on the stunning Cornish coast with an on-site deli and a beautiful mahogany table in the private dining room.

Head chef Tim Pile’s dishes make full use of the sea and include whole grilled sole, Véronique sauce, broccoli and peppercorn sauce or grilled cod fillet, brown shrimps, spinach and Parmesan gnocchi.

Near Portscatho, Truro, Cornwall TR2 5EW; 01872 580206; rosevine.co.uk Andina If you’re after something different, this modern take on the traditional Peruvian all-day restaurant, or picanteria, has a private music room that hosts up to 22 guests.

Food is served family style, and features superfood

ingredients native to the Peruvian Andes paired with the best of British produce. Dishes include “ceviche Andina”, made with sea bass, sweet potato and avocado or “chancho con mani”, crispy pork belly, coriander and corn purée with peanut amarillo chilli sauce.

1 Redchurch Street, Shoreditch, London E2 7DJ; 020 7920 6499; andinalondon.com Quill This first-floor restaurant has a sophisticated private dining room that seats up to 20 guests. Chef Curtis Stewart’s modern British cuisine has European influences. Dishes include tuna with ponzu, miso and fermented kohlrabi, or duck with turnip, smoked garlic and hen of the woods. Of particular note is a five-course signature tasting menu.

20/22 King St, Manchester M2 6AG; 0161 832 7355; quillmcr.co.uk Andrew Webb is the author of “Food Britannia” (Random House)

Food&Drink Wine

Tasting notes on Purple Pages of JancisRobinson.com

Andina

Piquet Tucked away off Oxford Street and seating just six, The Snug is one of the smallest private dining rooms in London. The space features decorative gesso panels, vintage furniture and classic French pewter table tops.

Chef-patron Allan Pickett offers a modern European restaurant combining classic French techniques and using the best of British ingredients, with particular attention paid to his native Kent and items from his mother’s garden.

92 Newman St, London W1T 3EZ; 020 3826 4500; piquet-restaurant.co.uk

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ft.com/magazine june 18/19 2016

PAUL WINCH-FURNESS

◀ This is a great shame since Pirene was the most forward and expressive of them, charming, fruity and bursting with redcurrant flavours. It reminded me a little of the Mencía of Bierzo in north-west Spain.

Moneu was grippy, even a little bitter, and seemed rather Italianate in structure – a good blender, perhaps? Gonfaus was also very impressive – the most voluptuous wine with a hint of orange peel, already quite well-balanced and very direct but still quite youthful. As for Querol, it is extremely strong, almost feral, combining masses of tannin with wild elderberry flavours.

The Torres family are keen to encourage as many of their neighbours to plant the varieties they have recently discovered – “especially Forcada”, says Miguel Torres Maczassek. There is no reason why this sort of recuperation could not be undertaken all over Spain, and the Torres team have already started putting small ads in the local press in Galicia, Rioja, Ribera del Duero and Rueda. They point out that it is the less productive varieties that are most likely to have fallen out of favour because producers in the recent past have tended to be motivated more by quantity than quality.

What is particularly exciting is that a similar sort of vine-sleuthing programme could in theory be undertaken anywhere in any region with a long history of wine production. 6

Food shopping Allez les verts A Parisian greengrocer is now offering the kind of fruit and vegetables once reserved for the grands chefs. By Isabel Best

Le Comptoir des Producteurs, Paris In the highest echelons of French cooking, the grands chefs are naturally obsessional about all their ingredients, not least their fruit and vegetables. Alain Passard, king of vegetarian elegance at his three-star Paris restaurant L’Arpège, has three kitchen gardens around France to ensure quality. Asafumi Yamashita, a Japanese market gardener based in Yvelines, south-west of Paris, supplies only a handful of select chefs, including Pascal Barbot and Pierre Gagnaire. His produce is so sought after that clients take whatever comes their way and Yamashita scrutinises use of his vegetables carefully; one chef saw his spinach quota reduced to two deliveries a year after he committed the faux pas of blanching it.

Le Comptoir des Producteurs, a new greengrocer in the 14th arrondissement, is bringing haut de gamme veg within reach of the domestic cook. The shop belongs to the Charraire family, which has been supplying Parisian restaurants since 1945 – current clients include the George V, the Plaza Athénée and the Ritz.

The Charraires work with the sort of fruit and vegetable growers who “talk to their greengages”, says Anaïs Bernier, the granddaughter of the founders, who now runs Le Comptoir. These include Pierre Baud from the Vaucluse, who cultivates more than 300 kinds of fig, and Michel and Bénédicte Bachès, near Perpignan, who have devoted 30 years to collecting and cultivating more than 850 varieties of citrus. It’s thanks to the Bachès that Le Comptoir des Producteurs is one of the rare places in Paris where you can buy fresh Japanese yuzu or Corsican citron.

Other suppliers are “heirloom” specialists, producing rare local varieties such as the Boulette de Bussy (€4.90 per kilo), a sweet turnip only grown in the village of Bussy-le-Château in Champagne. All work with sustainable methods and many are organic. ft.com/magazine june 18/19 2016

Inside the shop, the produce is worthy of a Chardin still life, displayed in old-fashioned wooden boxes and appearing as if pulled fresh from the garden. Prices start at around €3.90 per kilo for locally grown apples and rise for more unusual produce: organic carrots grown in Breton sand (€4.05 per kilo); herbs such as purslane, chickenweed and wood sorrel (€4.90 per punnet); or asparagus from Provence, green-tipped and charmingly irregular (€29.90 per kilo).

At home, I make a salad from two kinds of yellow beetroot (3.90€ per kilo) and briefly blanch their leaves, drizzling both in a garlicky vinaigrette. The leaves taste like buttery spinach, while the roots have a subtle, rich flavour that I would challenge the most vehement beetrootphobe not to enjoy.

In the colder months, I follow Bernier’s suggestion of slowly frying chervil roots in butter in a covered pan, then tossing them with minced parsley. They are quite delicious; chestnutty, slightly sweet, crunchy on the outside and potato-soft within. One of Bernier’s chef clients cooks these as a dessert.

Another time, I try a couple of oranges: one from Nice – sweet, juicy and surprisingly devoid of acidity – and a vanilla orange from Tunisia. The rind does indeed smell of vanilla but the flavour is quite bizarre, neither sour nor particularly sweet.

With a few other notable exceptions (such as invitingly plump Peruvian mangoes), the stock is French and changes from week to week; strawberries from Pithiviers, perhaps, mushrooms from Picardy, or apricots from the Languedoc. With its headquarters at the famous Rungis fruit and vegetable market, the Comptoir can also fulfil special requests – an affordable way to taste as much of the French larder as possible.

Le Comptoir des Producteurs 25 rue Mouton Duvernet, 75014 Paris Tel: + 33 (0) 1 45 40 48 02; comptoirdesproducteurs.fr 53

Cooking Rowley Leigh

A cutlet above

Lamb cutlets ‘milanese’ Chefs can’t be bothered to make breadcrumbs these days and use the Japanese panko crumbs.

They are pretty good and handy to have in the cupboard. Recipe for two.

S

chnitzels are not as easy as all that.

Thousands of restaurants – Italian, Austrian or just plain “continental” – are testimony to either soggy cardboard or dry plywood rather than a crisp, slightly crunchy crumb.

Likewise, the meat inside this elegant sandwich is often somewhat desiccated. To be any good, it requires not scrimping on the quality of the meat, attention to the coating and, above all, care in the gentle frying in a bubblingly hot mixture of oil and butter. Plus, a careful drying off – kitchen paper and a pinch of salt – before putting the schnitzel on the plate is essential.

Most attempts to substitute out-of-favour veal with pork, chicken or even turkey (not quite as silly as it sounds) do not really work. They lack the milky, savoury quality that the combination of veal, crumb and a squeeze of lemon can possess.

Indeed a good cotoletta alla milanese, a chop still on the bone and beaten out to the thickness of a pound coin and big enough to overspill the largest plate, might well be a desert-island dish if only the castaway had someone with whom to share it.

It may seem odd to apply this treatment to lamb. And I wouldn’t. At least I wouldn’t with most lamb, most of the time. However, the lamb we can get now and for the next month or two should be young and genuinely spring lamb. Most chefs I know don’t have much time for it. The fashion now is for rare breed hogget, beasts that have seen a winter on the fells and have a pronounced flavour: young spring lamb is seen as insipid and lacking in taste. This is right and wrong. It is delicate and sweet and should not be overwhelmed with strong and contrasting flavours.

Cutlets from the best end of spring lamb are still highly prized, however, and expensive.

Beating them out a little and coating them with crumbs does help to eke them out a little.

The meat is tender and responds well to the treatment: I like to put a little Parmesan in the crumb – a trick that might be frowned on in Italy – to give extra umami to the proceedings.

Whereas this is an elegant little supper for two, it has another application. Fry off a dozen or two in the morning, swaddle in paper towels, put them in a Tupperware container – other brands are available –and bring them out at a picnic. The response will be very positive. 6

• 1 rack of new season’s spring lamb • 5 tbs plain flour • 2 eggs • 2 tbs sunflower oil • 6 tbs breadcrumbs, quite fine, or use panko crumbs • 2 tbs finely grated Parmesan • 50ml sunflower oil • 50g butter Ask the butcher – or do it yourself – to cut away the flap covering the rack and to remove the fine silverskin membrane that covers the meat, and then cut the rack into four large cutlets (there are normally seven). Clean any fat and connective tissue from around the bones and then, with the meat between two sheets of heavy film – a carrier bag will do the trick – beat out the meat to the thickness of a pound coin. If you don’t have a meat bat, a very small saucepan will do the trick.

Prepare three little dishes: one with the flour well seasoned

Heat the oil and add the butter. Once it is foaming, slip in the cutlets, holding them away from you.

They should become crisp and golden brown within a minute: turn them over and repeat on the other side. Lift them out on to kitchen paper, add a pinch of salt and serve up with a generous wedge of lemon.

Peas and pea shoots It’s shocking, I know, but I bought shelled peas and pea shoots from a well-known online supermarket. The shame.

Very good, though.

• 400g of fresh peas • 3 or 4 handfuls of pea shoots • 6 mint leaves • 1 tbs butter Drop the peas into a large pot of salted water.

When tender – anything between a minute and 10, depending on the size and age of the peas – drain and toss them, off the heat, with the butter, mint and pea shoots.

More columns at ft.com/leigh 54

with salt and fine white pepper; the second with the eggs and oil beaten together and the third with the crumbs and Parmesan well mixed.

Immerse each cutlet in all three bowls to coat.

Photographs Andy Sewell

ft.com/magazine june 18/19 2016

55

Food shopping Allez les verts A Parisian greengrocer is now offering the kind of fruit and vegetables once reserved for the grands chefs. By Isabel Best

Le Comptoir des Producteurs, Paris In the highest echelons of French cooking, the grands chefs are naturally obsessional about all their ingredients, not least their fruit and vegetables. Alain Passard, king of vegetarian elegance at his three-star Paris restaurant L’Arpège, has three kitchen gardens around France to ensure quality. Asafumi Yamashita, a Japanese market gardener based in Yvelines, south-west of Paris, supplies only a handful of select chefs, including Pascal Barbot and Pierre Gagnaire. His produce is so sought after that clients take whatever comes their way and Yamashita scrutinises use of his vegetables carefully; one chef saw his spinach quota reduced to two deliveries a year after he committed the faux pas of blanching it.

Le Comptoir des Producteurs, a new greengrocer in the 14th arrondissement, is bringing haut de gamme veg within reach of the domestic cook. The shop belongs to the Charraire family, which has been supplying Parisian restaurants since 1945 – current clients include the George V, the Plaza Athénée and the Ritz.

The Charraires work with the sort of fruit and vegetable growers who “talk to their greengages”, says Anaïs Bernier, the granddaughter of the founders, who now runs Le Comptoir. These include Pierre Baud from the Vaucluse, who cultivates more than 300 kinds of fig, and Michel and Bénédicte Bachès, near Perpignan, who have devoted 30 years to collecting and cultivating more than 850 varieties of citrus. It’s thanks to the Bachès that Le Comptoir des Producteurs is one of the rare places in Paris where you can buy fresh Japanese yuzu or Corsican citron.

Other suppliers are “heirloom” specialists, producing rare local varieties such as the Boulette de Bussy (€4.90 per kilo), a sweet turnip only grown in the village of Bussy-le-Château in Champagne. All work with sustainable methods and many are organic. ft.com/magazine june 18/19 2016

Inside the shop, the produce is worthy of a Chardin still life, displayed in old-fashioned wooden boxes and appearing as if pulled fresh from the garden. Prices start at around €3.90 per kilo for locally grown apples and rise for more unusual produce: organic carrots grown in Breton sand (€4.05 per kilo); herbs such as purslane, chickenweed and wood sorrel (€4.90 per punnet); or asparagus from Provence, green-tipped and charmingly irregular (€29.90 per kilo).

At home, I make a salad from two kinds of yellow beetroot (3.90€ per kilo) and briefly blanch their leaves, drizzling both in a garlicky vinaigrette. The leaves taste like buttery spinach, while the roots have a subtle, rich flavour that I would challenge the most vehement beetrootphobe not to enjoy.

In the colder months, I follow Bernier’s suggestion of slowly frying chervil roots in butter in a covered pan, then tossing them with minced parsley. They are quite delicious; chestnutty, slightly sweet, crunchy on the outside and potato-soft within. One of Bernier’s chef clients cooks these as a dessert.

Another time, I try a couple of oranges: one from Nice – sweet, juicy and surprisingly devoid of acidity – and a vanilla orange from Tunisia. The rind does indeed smell of vanilla but the flavour is quite bizarre, neither sour nor particularly sweet.

With a few other notable exceptions (such as invitingly plump Peruvian mangoes), the stock is French and changes from week to week; strawberries from Pithiviers, perhaps, mushrooms from Picardy, or apricots from the Languedoc. With its headquarters at the famous Rungis fruit and vegetable market, the Comptoir can also fulfil special requests – an affordable way to taste as much of the French larder as possible.

Le Comptoir des Producteurs 25 rue Mouton Duvernet, 75014 Paris Tel: + 33 (0) 1 45 40 48 02; comptoirdesproducteurs.fr 53

Sarah Goldson (far left), who trains and selects 250 BBGs for Wimbledon. Jeremy Taylor (Number 158) joins a practice session

FT MASTERCLASS

Pursuits Wimbledon BBGs 58

…with

SARAH GOLDSON Wimbledon’s ‘BBGs’ are strictly drilled in gathering and handling tennis balls. Jeremy Taylor, aka Number 158, is nimble enough around the court but can he stand perfectly still for three minutes?

Photographs by Cian Oba-Smith

C

ompetition is fierce at Wimbledon – and not just among the tennis players. I watch in awe as a steely-eyed teenager dispatches three tennis balls rapidly from an outstretched arm above his head with pinpoint accuracy. A moment later they’re rolled back to his feet, collected with a knee bend that would grace the corps de ballet.

The ball boys and girls, otherwise known as BBGs, have been perfecting handling skills like these for the past six months. Any teenage tomfoolery during training simply isn’t tolerated – later this month they could be on Centre Court, tossing balls to Novak Djokovic in front of a global audience of millions.

“Get your arm up straight Number 158!” barks the instructor. “Don’t let that elbow bend – it shouldn’t brush against your hair.

Keep your thumb in.” I look around to find the culprit, then remember 158 is the number pinned to my shirt. I’ve already had a roasting for not tucking in my smart new polo shirt.

Turning my head earns me another black mark as BBGs aren’t permitted to watch the course of play. They can follow a rally with their eyes but woe betide anybody who cranes their neck for a better view of Andy Murray’s lethal drop shot.

In charge of this elite band of unnaturally well-behaved teenagers is Sarah Goldson.

The PE teacher from Basingstoke has sifted through thousands of applications and is now running training sessions for the 250 BBGs who will perform at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club – home to the Wimbledon championships, which will be played from June 27 to July 10 this year.

The club receives thousands of applications from people aged between 14 and 18, when the process starts in September. That figure is trimmed down to the 400 who are invited to a trial in January. Prospective BBGs are mostly from local schools and arrive with little idea of the strict training programme. “They’re not allowed to talk, even when they’re getting changed,” explains Goldson. “BBGs have ft.com/magazine june 18/19 2016

to walk everywhere in single file and their coaches are addressed as ‘Sir’ or ‘Miss’.”

My session starts with some vigorous exercises, before a silent run around the indoor court complex at Wimbledon. BBGs are encouraged to be light on their feet because a heavy-footed stomp might disturb a player’s serve. It would also increase the risk of damage to the precious grass courts.

I’m breathing heavily already but then comes the tough bit – standing perfectly still for three minutes. It sounds simple enough but fidgety 15-year-olds find this is one of the tougher challenges, especially after a workout. BBGs have been known to collapse on court, especially in hot temperatures.

BBGs require a good knowledge of tennis but numerical skills come in handy too. Remembering who serves next and what balls should be where during a tiebreak is surprisingly tricky.

“Shoulders back, chest out 158!” I’m in trouble again. But at least none of the other BBGs dares to turn their head to see who the bumbling culprit is. ft.com/magazine june 18/19 2016

“I can usually spot the ones who are going to make it,” says Goldson. “There’s a determination to succeed. They have to be focused, with the mental strength to cope under pressure and the ability to think on their feet. If they can’t, they’re out.”

D

uring matches, there are teams of six BBGs and six tennis balls on court at any one time. Some of the selected teenagers will become bases, standing at the back of the court to feed balls to the server.

They gather up stray balls and then bounce them to the player when required. Knowing when to throw and how hard takes practise.

“You’re looking for eye contact and, perhaps, a little nod,” says Goldson. “It’s a crucial part of a BBG’s training – knowing what to look for.”

Others will be centres, crouched at each end of the net like an Olympic sprinter. Their job is to gather in balls and roll them back half a court’s length to the bases. My rolling action is fine but it

has to be even faster to ensure I’m not launching balls between a player’s first and second serve.

“There’s a lot to remember,” says Goldson.

“When a BBG walks on court for the first time, it’s a nerve-wracking experience. That’s why we drill them hard – so they react automatically in a situation and don’t go into a panic.”

BBGs are fully aware that from day one they are under intense scrutiny. That includes their behaviour both on and off court, how they walk in single file and their general appearance.

So what do they get out of it, apart from two weeks off school and the chance to catch a sweaty towel hurled by Roger Federer?

“We pay travelling expenses and they can keep the uniform, which has just been newly designed by Ralph Lauren,” says Goldson. “They also learn valuable life skills. I’ve had thank-you emails from parents after their dishevelled children become a model of tidiness.” 6 To apply for BBG training visit wimbledon.com in September. The tournament starts on June 27

Quiz answers The link (for Father’s Day) was five pairs of Shakespearean fathers and their children 1. Gloucester 2. Edgar Allen Poe 3. Sarah Montague 4. Romeo 5. Edward Lear (“The Owl and the Pussycat”) 6. Jack Regan 7. Ian Duncan Smith 8. Malcolm X 9. Henry (vacuum cleaner) 10. HAL (2001: a Space Odyssey) Picture quiz Deliciously Ella + Scott Fitzgerald = Ella Fitzgerald

BALLBOY, BALLGIRL

Games The Crossword No 289. Set by Aldhelm

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1. Going downstream, what’s the last English county town on the river Severn?

2. Which American writer did Arthur Conan Doyle (below) credit with having created the detective story as we now know it?

3. Who replaced Sue MacGregor as the main female presenter on Radio 4’s Today programme in 2002?

4. Which child of David and Victoria

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The Across clues are straightforward, while the Down clues are cryptic ACROSS 1 Calculating frame (6) 5 Two sevens (8) 9 Tiny organisms (8) 10 Office (6) 11 Actor (8) 12 Big cat (6) 13 Retired (8) 15 Small dam (4) 17 Perform again (4) 19 Crumble, give way (8) 20 Clannish (6) 21 Longing (8) 22 Motive (6) 23 Battlefield defensive structure (4, 4) 24 Arterial swelling (8) 25 Very easy thing (6) 60

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DOWN 2 Tell hobo about place of safety (8) 3 Jog around one’s container (8) 4 Burn forest – it goes out without energy (3, 4, 2) 5 Overturning fines, claimants embrace unknown world of money (9, 6) 6 Be heard to bellow and swear, being noisy (7) 7 Invigorate Greens, ie undergoing reform (8) 8 I turn out with one particle (8) 14 Spontaneous one with Poland’s princess and daughter (9) 15 Women’s group tries moving a plant (8)

16 Irish capital city over edges of the water (8) 17 Group of soldiers in grass joined up again (8) 18 Ruin Northern Irish county trip (8) 19 70s skiing legend heard this great outcry (7)

A T R O C I T Y A U G L I E R

C A U A L A O A A A R A N A E

C A N T A L O U P A A V E N S

E A N A R A L A O A P A L A T

P H Y S I O A A S U P R E M O

T A A A T A A A I A L A G A R

A A B E Y O N D T H E P A L E

C A A A A A C A I A A A N A D

H E R C U L E P O I R O T A A

I A O A N A S A N A E A A A S

C O M P A C T A A S P I R I T

K A E A W A O A S A L A A A A

P I T T A A R U I N A T I O N

Beckham (above) was born in 2002?

5. In a poem by whom do the main characters dine on “mince, and slices of quince”?

6. What was the name of the charac

ter played by John Thaw in The Sweeney?

7. Who became the leader of the Conservative party after the 2001 general election?

8. Who was assassinated in New York’s Audubon ballroom on February 21 1965?

9. What’s the best selling product made by the company Numatic International?

The Picture Who or what do these pictures add up to?

E A E A R A A A L A C A S A Z

A G R E E D A E T C E T E R A

Solution to Crossword No. 288

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=?

GETTY IMAGES; ALAMY

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A Round on the Links

By James Walton

By James Walton

Answers page 59

TimHarford The undercover economist

oney matters, ‘Mo bu ut sometimes we find financial inccentives to be insultiing or grubby’

How to fuel a rewarding culture

H

ere’s an age-old management conundrum: who should be rewarded for high performance, and how? As Diane Coyle, the economist and former adviser to the UK Treasury, recently observed in this newspaper, the answer to the question is usually self-serving.

Simple and easily monitored jobs, such as flipping burgers, are natural candidates for performance incentives. Yet somehow it’s the inhabitants of the C-suite who tend to pick up bonuses, despite the fact that their complex, hard-to-measure jobs are poorly suited to the crude nature of performance-related pay.

But let’s assume that managers really want to answer the question.

The answer is deliciously complex.

Money matters, but sometimes we find financial incentives to be insulting or grubby. And we can respond keenly to non-financial rewards such as praise, status or the satisfaction in a job well done.

So managers might try running experiments to see what works in a particular situation. There is a long tradition of this, going back to Harvard professor Elton Mayo’s productivity trials at Western Electric’s Hawthorne works in the 1920s and early 1930s.

The Hawthorne experiments themselves, alas, were flawed and have been mythologised. But more modern experiments are revealing some intriguing results. I reported a few years ago on the curious alliance between “Farmer Smith”, owner of a large British fruit farm, and three economists, Oriana Bandiera, Iwan Barankay and Imran Rasul. Bandiera and her colleagues designed and tested different incentive schemes on Farmer Smith’s farms. (The deal: he got higher productivity; they got the data.)

The fruit farm experiments show that financial incentives do matter,

Illustration Harry Haysom ft.com/magazine june 18/19 2016

at least for casual immigrant labour on fruit farms. First, a piece-rate scheme boosted productivity by 50 per cent; then, performance pay for the front-line managers ensured that work was no longer assigned as a favour to friends, and productivity increased another 20 per cent; then, a tournament encouraged workers to sort themselves into productive teams, and productivity increased by a further 20 per cent.

In another study by Bandiera (with Nava Ashraf and Kelsey Jack), hair stylists in Zambia’s capital Lusaka were recruited to sell condoms and give advice on HIV prevention. It turned out that celebrating the top performers at a public ceremony proved a far better

Gosnell, List and Metcalfe teamed up with a commercial airline that wanted to encourage captains to save fuel. Broadly, there are three ways to do this: before take-off, by carefully calculating fuel requirements; after landing, by switching off some engines while taxiing; and during the flight, by carefully adjusting the flap settings and negotiating the most efficient altitude, speed and course with air traffic control. The airline’s own data suggested that captains could potentially save 3 to 6 per cent on fuel – a substantial financial and environmental gain.

But how to incentivise them?

Gosnell, List and Metcalfe designed an experiment that did not rely on paying bonuses.

approach than providing financial incentives to sell more condoms.

But sometimes neither a public ceremony nor a financial incentive is appropriate. Consider the case of long-haul airline captains. Unlike part-time condom agents or fruit pickers, these senior pilots have high-status, six-figure salaries and powerful unions to defend their pay and conditions. Nevertheless, a recent experiment conducted

by Greer Gosnell, John List and Robert Metcalfe examines what can be done to influence the behaviour of these star players.

Instead, the captains were told that their company was running an experiment with h the aim of saving fuel, and that the researchers would maintain anonymity for all the captains. There would be no financial incentives and no league tables.

Instead, the captains were e split randomly into four groups. The “information” group received monthly feedback reports detailing how often they had saved fuel before, during and after each flight. The “target” group received the same reports but were also set targets to improve their performance. (The reward for

hitting the target was a hearty “well done!”) The “incentives” group were told that for each target they hit, £10 would be donated to the charity of their choice – a total donation of £240 was possible if all three targets were hit across the eight months of the study. A control group was simply told that a study into fuel efficiency was taking place.

T

he most obvious outcome was that there was a large and lasting “observer effect”.

Merely telling captains that the experiment was happening prodded them into being more careful and saving a lot of fuel. It is always possible that the sudden switch to fuel-saving behaviour had a cause that was nothing to do with the experiment but there are no apparent alternative explanations.

The second outcome was that all three treatments saved fuel compared with the control group but setting targets (with or without the charitable donation) had a particularly notable effect. And the third outcome was that captains who hit their targets were substantially more satisfied with their jobs.

“I just couldn’t believe the impact we had on job satisfaction,” says Metcalfe. Far from annoying the captains, the fact that the company was taking an interest in fuel saving, and acknowledging success, seemed to delight them.

No performance scheme will fit every occasion but the fuel-saving study does suggest an approach worth trying more broadly. If you want people to do a good job, tell them what success looks like to you – and that you’ve noticed when they’ve achieved it. 6

Tim Harford is the author of “The Undercover Economist Strikes Back”. Twitter @TimHarford 61

Gillian Tett

‘Not only is it unclear whether the Republican elders can ever control Trump, it is less clear whether Trump can control himself’

Selling Donald Trump

E

arlier this month, I attended a delightful dinner in New York with a collection of Republican luminaries.

Unsurprisingly, the conversation was dominated by the topic of Donald Trump – and many of the assem mbled Republicans were deeply anxious.

Litttle wonder: in recent days Trump, the presu umptive Republican nominee for president, has de elivered another stream of invective that makes many top Republicans cringe; or, mo ore accurately, long for the patrician self-control of a man such as George HW Bush.

Bu ut this particular dinner included an intrig guing twist: the main speaker at the table was a charming Republican power broker who I shall call “Bob”. And Bob had arrived with a mission to “sell” Trump – verbal gaffes and all.

Bob has dealt extensively with The Donald for many y years and endorsed him. And now he has embaarked on the challenging task of persuading otherr elite Republicans to do the same.

So how do you make Trump sound palatable to nerr vous conservative voters? It is worth laying g out the sales pitch I heard from Bob, not be ecause I endorse it but because I suspe ect these arguments will be tossed aroun nd numerous other dinner tables in the e coming weeks and months.

Esssentially, Bob’s argument boiled down n to three points. First – and most obvio ously – Trump is a genius at conne ecting with the crowds. That is one e good reason for Republicans to em mbrace him, Bob said, given that other leaders of the GOP have lacked that popular touch h (just think of Mitt Romn ney or Jeb Bush).

Seccond, Trump also has in nnate “leadership” skills and is “decisive”, not le east because he is, acccording to Bob, “the first entrepreneur to run n for president”.

Of cou urse, the fact that Trum mp has spent his life in busin ness does have one huge disadv vantage in the eyes of the po olitical class: he does not speak k or act like a traditional Illustration Shonagh Rae

62

politician – just listen to his aggressive diatribes.

But as the wine flowed over dinner, Bob smoothly brushed away the misgivings that some Republicans might feel about Trump’s more incendiary comments by stressing that The Donald is still a political neophyte.

A

nd that leads into the th hird – and most important – pointt in this sales pitch: Trump will only be the frontman of any Re epublican campaign. More specifi fically, precisely because he is a political neophyte, he does not have the type of sophisticated organisational framew work or funding structure in place that is nee eded to win elections. Under normal circumstances, that might seem to be a disadvantage e but it underlines his outsider credentials, while at the same time leaving room for the Republican establishment to bring its own ideas,, funding machine and priorities into play.

Or to put it another way, Trump iss best viewed as an “empty vessel” that me en such as Paul Ryan, the speaker of the Ho ouse of Representatives, will fill, by prov viding the policy brains and organisationaal brawn.

And that, Bob argued, is why senior Republicans should now fall in line: by voting for Trump now, you get a future administration that will be essentially controlled by people such as Ryan.

Now I dare say that som me FT readers will recoil in horror from the cynicism embedded in this sales pittch; others will argue that it is dange erously naive. After all, it is faar from clear right now that the e Republican elite can ever con ntrol Trump – not least becau use it is even less certain that Trump can control himself.

But by the end d of the meal I had the im mpression that the table was split: some of the diners were still too uneasy to vote fo or Trump; others were relucctantly falling in line. But what happens next is an nyone’s guess; we now live in n a political Alice-in-Wonderland d world. 6 gillian.tett@ft.com ft.com/magazine june 18/19 2016