3 interesting people ft
Fergus Henderson
When I arrive at St John for lunch with Fergus Henderson, it is 12.30pm on a Monday, the most bread-and-butter day of the week. I’ve walked to the famous “nose to tail” restaurant through the coolness of London’s Smithfield Market, where meat has been traded in one form or other (dead or alive) since the 12th century. Smithfield did some pretty hard medieval partying — jousting, drinking and cutting up traitors — and, centuries later, it still has a faintly hungover air. There is a similar mood as I enter the old smokehouse on St John Street, as if a punishing grade of gluttony was achieved at the weekend. Henderson is already planted at the bar, half his considerable gravity leaning into the zinc counter, the other on to a walking stick. “So, this interview is ‘Have A Lunch With Fergus’,” he summarises thoughtfully after our hellos, in a soft smoker’s voice that emits from small, mischievous lips. “Would you like a glass of champagne to prepare yourself?” he asks, as if this would be a prudent thing to do. The dining philosophy of St John, now in its 25th year of business, is a belief in food and drink’s ability to enact subtle and sometimes vital changes of spirit — to be “nutriment that feeds the mind”, as Jonathan Swift put it — but also riotously good fun, as per medieval tradition. Henderson once told me that a tomato salad “saved his life” during a gastronomic exploration of Barcelona with his sister; today he recalls an “epiphany” that came via a glass of potent Armagnac. Eating well is partly ordering well, and knowing what you need. As befits his size, Henderson is very much a chef’s chef, revered globally by industry peers for his simple but irresistible language of British ingredients, which he pursued at a time when most professional kitchens were more intent on dicing carrots. His childhood household, living in 1970s Chelsea and then Soho, valued the power of the dinner table to knit a family together: “Both my parents were my education in food,” he says. “Mum taught me how to cook, dad taught me how to eat.” When Henderson decided to quit architecture, his parents’ profession, after studying at the Architectural Association, his father gave his blessing, on one condition: “Dad said, ‘If you’re going to be a chef, be a good one’. I think I’ve turned out to be an OK one.” “OK” is a modest report from the man who arguably rescued British meat from the lowly rank it had sunk to by the 1990s, sliced at lacklustre roast dinners in pubs and carveries, or sold cheaply at supermarkets via impersonal, industrial farms. Against this backdrop, St John’s credo of “nose to tail” eating became fashionable for its novelty, daring the customer to try trotter paste on toast or pig’s head pie, and to appreciate what would otherwise go to waste. “My hope is that St John is an institution, in the good sense of the word,” he says as we move into the dining room, gathering up the champagne. “Like a chemist or a cinema, something you need. Feeding you, watering you and dining you.” Glancing around, I see signs of an orderly institution at work, from the note on the menu reminding customers to order whole suckling pig a week in advance, to the waiters shuttling discreetly between tables in white drill jackets. Though he is the “face” of the enterprise, Henderson keeps a low profile. “I’m fairly Teflon to fame,” he says. “Fooo, fooo!” he adds, gesturing something flying over his head. We are among the first customers to sit down and unfold our napkins. Henderson’s speech is at times hard to make out, the result of early onset Parkinson’s and its deep-brain implant treatment — so for clearer acoustics we sit side by side, as if banqueting. He says his consultant is “pleased with him” for his current bill of health, and he has a healthy, tanned look from a week at a friend’s villa in Greece, a holiday he describes as: “a nice pool . . . boats . . . grilled fish . . . roast kid. All the things.” Lunch, he says as we study the menu, is “very much my favourite meal. Lunch is a wonderful thing. The strange thing is the more people tut over [a long] lunch, the more delicious. The more tuts the better.” A waiter brings warm sliced bread and a pat of yolk-coloured butter, and I decide it’s a good idea to let Henderson order for us: the crayfish and aioli special, deep-fried salt cod to share, then brill, roast Tamworth, broad beans, potatoes and greens, a bottle of Trimbach pinot noir and an ice bucket. “Now we can relax,” he says confidently. When I tell him that FT readers frequently bemoan the increasing sobriety of the “Have a Lunch with . . . ” encounters, his face brightens with delight. “Let’s give the readers what they want,” he says, as the Trimbach arrives and is poured. Henderson likes to eat here almost every day, “which is a good thing and a bad thing. Bad for my tummy. It’s bigger than I wish it was.” When I ask if this is inevitable, there’s a flash of spikiness. “You’re not saying our food is unhealthy?” he says defensively, and I find myself denying the accusation, even if the St John diet might be hard on the waistline. We discuss the rise of the vegans, and he says he has no objections, other than “the smugness”. “How do you tell someone is a vegan?” he asks. Answer: “They tell you.” This is a stock Fergus joke, but he chuckles gently at it, and adds, “We always have something vegan up our sleeve on the menu. Many vegans say we’re their favourite restaurant.” Henderson’s daily presence is a form of quality control now that Parkinson’s has separated him from the kitchen. The menu changes twice a day, and he keeps an eye on its delivery. “It’s hard for chefs if menus change all the time, but it keeps you on your toes. St John is nature-led. Runner beans come in, fish changes all the time [from boats off the east coast], nature starts hurling birds at us. Nature and time are sort of the two things that have affected us ever since we began.” St John Smithfield 26 St John St, London EC1 Salt cod £11.80 Crayfish £13.20 Roast Tamworth £25.50 Brill £26 Potatoes £5 Greens £4.50 Sorbet and vodka £8 Madeleines (1/2 dozen) £5 Bottle Trimbach Pinot Noir Reserve 2016 £55 Bottle sparkling water £3.25 Total (inc tip) £177.25 We discuss St John’s longevity, a quarter of a century being an almost freakishly long stint in London’s restaurant world. Resistance to passing fads has helped, he says. “Fashion and food don’t go hand in hand. Fashion doesn’t do you any good, eating-wise. Watch out for Gucci food. Something’s wrong with it.” St John moved to this address after a successful run at the French House, a one-room restaurant above a pub in Soho, where Henderson cooked alongside his chef wife Margot. Before that, he cooked at the Globe dive bar in Notting Hill, where Lucian Freud was a regular and goat’s neck soup was a staple of the menu, a dish that the owner promised his customers would make them “go all night”. The new digs on St John Street were covered in pork fat and smoke, but “One look at it, I was sold. That was that.” Margot stayed at the French House, and he says “she still feels rather hard done by. She was having babies at the time.” I ask if they argue about whether food remains a boys’ club. “I wouldn’t argue with Margot,” is his response. St John has managed to keep its trotters dry as a resilient operator, with additional revenue from a wholesale bakery, a second restaurant, St John Bread & Wine (located near Spitalfields Market; a third opened and closed in Bermondsey), plus a winery in the Minervois, which is overseen by Henderson’s business partner Trevor Gulliver. The winery is particularly “reassuring” when he considers what Brexit could do to wine prices. “Brexit is terrible. It’s like some hellish creature has been unleashed. Mr Boris. But we got what we deserved. It’s a sad business.” (He concedes one point of admiration: “Boris is very good on green issues.”) A rare mis-step came in 2011, when the St John group gathered new investors and headed into the hotel business, opening a hotel-restaurant version of St John on the edge of London’s Leicester Square that imploded after a year. “Covent Garden, yes,” he says wearily. “What happens when you try to grow too quickly? There lies trouble.” He moves the conversation on to a more recent collapse, that of Jamie Oliver’s casual restaurant chain, Jamie’s Italian. “I feel very sorry for him. He’s a very nice chap. Patisserie Valerie is worse — I used to love eating there on Old Compton Street. Now, all gone. London seems to have encouraged these large chains. It’s money-led. Why would you want a huge chain of restaurants?” Henderson says St John is no longer wooed for expansion. “I don’t think anyone’s really interested in us now. We’re not anonymous restaurants. We’re personality-led. It’s quite nice, as it makes us very unapproachable.” The crayfish arrive, fat and livid red, next to the deep-fried salt cod with ketchup; two opposite levels of dexterity are required for eating, crayfish not being the easiest things to shell. If he doesn’t attract investment, personality goes a long way, with “Fergus” attracting cultish fans from Japan and the US, and forging friendships with people such as the late Anthony Bourdain. The two men were “great chums”, he says, and Bourdain’s suicide last year was “really sad. I hadn’t really seen a dark side to him, he was very jolly, always . . . I was in France at the winery, and within minutes of [the news], the BBC got in touch with me,” he says, blinking at the memory. The waiter comes to take away the starters; a cod fritter remains, but Henderson holds off: “I’m done.” As a dining companion, he is as guarded as he is generous, and there are zones of mumbled storytelling where the tape doesn’t help on replay. One anecdote is about an attempted lunch in Paris, featuring a man with Tourette’s, an argument over Beaujolais nouveau, and a waitress who preferred to seat the sweary customer over the starry chef. “That exchange would never happen in this country,” he concludes, and I am none the wiser about exactly what happened. For every hard-to-follow story, there’s another delivered with fully lit clarity. Take his favourite meals in Paris. Alain Ducasse at Plaza Athénée was “extremely brilliant, which annoyed me as I thought there must be a flaw somewhere, but there was none. The only flaw was one of the waiters put the wrong sauce on — the other waiters looked at him with daggers. He ran out into the kitchen and was never seen again.” The dish in question was “a cream reduction of langoustines and a ghost of a langoustine fillet, gentle and seductive. It went on like that for hours, it was such a treat.” As a child, he was impressed by the regal interior of Le Grand Véfour, which he was taken to by his late father. “It’s really beautiful. I can be swayed by the look of a restaurant. We had soufflé of frogs’ legs. It was good. I can’t remember the middle course. For pudding, he said, ‘You choose the wine’. I was 10 or something, and I went to the end of the list and said ‘Yquem’. My old man was very generous and said, ‘Ah, perfect, son’.” He laughs heartily. Our main courses arrive and Henderson seizes a fork to prod a broad bean. “Hmmm, quite firm”, he says, satisfied that the veg hasn’t been overcooked. He fillets the brill and serves up a plate for me. “The menus are quite clipped, which is a good thing. I’m wary of 18 courses. But it’s strange that’s the way forward now at places like Noma.” The dining room has taken on a pleasant low hum of conversation as the tables fill up. Though he’s no longer at the stove, he does still issue corrections to service, and he also offers reading lists to his staff. Among the recommended titles is Master and Commander by Patrick O’Brian. “The captain must be everyone’s friend, but keep a distance.” Henderson has mercurial literary tastes, saying that he “always wanted to write a spy story” himself. He skims over the plot: it starts in the Suez Canal, then “goes to Chernobyl”, before finishing with the disappearance of wine in Bordeaux. “Chernobyl is essential as [the spies] need it as background to cover their manoeuvres. That reminds me — I’m more of a chef than a writer,” he offers, as I look at him, perplexed. Modern chefs are showy, televisual creatures, adept at Instagram, whereas Henderson admits he is “quite shy really. Shyness is underrated.” This said, he is unerringly sociable. “I’m hopeless at being by myself, I hate it.” His limit for solitude is “a plane journey or a train journey, an hour and a half. It’s a weakness. It’s a shallow side of me.” By this point we have finished the meat and are crunching through delicious crackling. “As long as I know [crunch] there’s someone around the corner, it’s OK.” The plates are cleared and we consider pudding. Anxious to deliver on FT readers’ wishes, Henderson advises the peach sorbet and Russian vodka, with a half dozen madeleines. I recall a conversation from a few years back in which Henderson raised the strange spectre of a Los Angeles branch of St John. What, I ask, happened to that plan? He crumples his forehead. “It hasn’t totally gone away. Which I’m not thrilled about. If I say it, it sounds real . . . ” The proposed St John LA (since confirmed after our lunch to open in 2020) turns out to be in a shopping centre in trendy but business-y Culver City. “It’s meant to be the hottest spot for the young minds.” In a hammy accent, he mimics a realtor talking about “steaks this big” with hand gestures indicating something silly and mammoth. Relenting slightly, he goes on to praise California’s “exceptional” ingredients. Like what? “Mulberries,” apparently. The sorbet is sharp, swimming in a cocktail glass of vodka. I take a few spoonfuls but still have an array of drinks on the table. “Do what you can,” Henderson says with avuncular care. I believe that lunch is now more or less finished, but he suggests we have a digestif. Fine, I say, not wholly sure of my stamina. It definitely turns out to be a stretch when Henderson says he wants to go to the Groucho, in his boyhood heartland of Soho. We head to the private members’ club in a taxi, and Henderson is greeted at the door like a part-owner (he isn’t). He orders more champagne on the cramped terrace and lights up a Marlboro Red from a packet covered with Greek health warnings. We talk a bit about the “strangeness” of being in business with the same person for decades on end and it feels as if the shorter his statements, the more truthful — “tricky” he says, by way of emphasis. Now, with about four hours on the lunch clock, I really do need to get back to the office. I make to say my goodbyes, a touch guilty to be leaving Henderson on his own, but presumably not for long. “I can’t eat if I’m alone,” he says. “I have no interest. One bite of toast, that’s it.” A good thing it’s nearly dinner time.
Ken Loach
“Did you know John McDonnell had a little part in my film Hidden Agenda?” Ken Loach asks with a smile. Whether it’s the activities of the gilets jaunes or the Labour party’s shadow chancellor, my encounters with the British director always start with a round-up of French and British news. When you have known Ken Loach for more than 20 years, there is a strange feeling that while you’re definitely getting older, he seems to keep getting younger. While many of us have moved away from our early socialist convictions, Loach has never veered from his belief in social justice. At 83, he is still a prolific film-maker, and the only difference between then and now is that he recently had to stop editing on a Steenbeck machine with scissors and tape, as they did in the 1930s. “It now costs too much to do it the old way,” he says with regret — like shooting in black-and-white or on 35mm film. That’s the only bit of nostalgia he allows himself, however; otherwise he lives very much in the present. His films are a constant reminder of his political commitment through art, and his 27th film, Sorry We Missed You, is no exception. When I visit Loach in his tiny editing suite off London’s Oxford Circus, he is relishing listening to dialogue in Geordie, the dialect of the film’s Newcastle setting. “It has a purity, a sharpness and an energy to it,” Loach enthuses. And so does Sorry We Missed You. It tells the story of Ricky and Abbie, a couple trapped in the dehumanising world of zero-hour contracts. He is a self-employed parcel delivery driver, she is a home carer for elderly people. While Abbie is paid only per visit and has to cover the cost of travel to clients, Ricky must provide his own delivery van and finds himself beholden to a scanner that tracks his every move. If he takes time off, he has to pay penalties. Kris Hitchen and Katie Proctor in ‘Sorry We Missed You’ In other words, the “flexibility and freedom” of the gig economy sold to them was a lie. Exhausted, they hardly have the energy to look after their teenage children. Ricky is played by Kris Hitchen, who started off as an actor but has worked mostly as a plumber, while Abbie is played by real-life teaching assistant Debbie Honeywood. Loach often auditions hundreds of applicants for parts, usually from the area where the film is set, and likes mixing trained actors with non-professionals. He has a particular eye for casting children and teenagers such as Rhys Stone, who plays Ricky and Abbie’s teenage truant son Seb — a graffiti artist both on screen and in real life. Seb comes to despise his father for being a slave to a job that still doesn’t bring in enough money to support the family. His younger sister Lisa, played by Katie Proctor, is a lively redhead who can only look on powerless as her family slowly disintegrates under the pressure. The reality today is that employment doesn’t guarantee a decent life, enough to feed your family “What we were interested in is the impact such work had on family life,” Loach says. “In public, you have this persona, you are trying to be flexible, you are composed. But once back at home, you totally collapse, you have no flexibility left for your family.” We middle-class consumers all know people like Ricky and Abbie. They are the delivery men we meet on an almost daily basis thanks to our online shopping habits, and the women who look after our parents and grandparents. And their plight is not only a moral certainty, but a fact based on careful research carried out by Paul Laverty, Loach’s regular screenwriter. “It was Paul’s idea and he spent months investigating the delivery and care industries, doing interviews with drivers and care workers,” Loach says. “He studied the subcontracting process from councils to service providers. And all Ricky’s colleagues in the film are real-life or former delivery drivers.” After watching Loach make films for two decades, often with collaborators he has worked with since the 1970s, such as his editor Jonathan Morris, it is impossible not to admire the constancy and rate of work (17 films in 20 years). In 2014, soon after completing his Irish-set period film Jimmy’s Hall, a particularly exhausting shoot, Loach announced his retirement. It didn’t last long. Two years later he returned with I, Daniel Blake. Dave Johns in ‘I, Daniel Blake’ While the subjects of his films are always investigated thoroughly, they are also treated with humour and deep humanity. Sweet Sixteen (2002) focused beautifully on the travails of adolescence, 2012’s The Angels’ Share on a Highlands whisky heist, while Looking for Eric (2009) was a surprising piece of football poetry. Sorry We Missed You also features some lovely upbeat moments, especially between Ricky and Lisa when she joins her dad on delivery rounds. Loach has been one of the faces of British cinema abroad since his masterpiece Kes played at Cannes in 1970. He is part of an exclusive club of directors who have twice been awarded the Palme d’Or (The Wind That Shakes the Barley in 2006; I, Daniel Blake in 2016). In Britain, however, his political position, somewhere to the left of the current Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, raises eyebrows, and his views are often dismissed as anachronistic. But I, Daniel Blake, which stirred up debate on rising poverty, the benefits system and use of food banks, was intensely contemporary. What he cares about most deeply is the situation now facing the working poor. “The reality today is that employment doesn’t guarantee a decent life,” he says. “You may have a job, even two, and still not have enough to feed yourself and your family. “Look at Abbie. She is paid for the 20 minutes she spends with an elderly patient but not for the next 40 minutes she spends travelling to her next appointment, at her own cost. Which means she is actually paid a third of the minimum wage.” The core of the problem, as he sees it, is the privatisation of public services and subcontracting from local councils to the companies chosen because they are cheapest. “Nobody accepts responsibility for the inevitable dire consequences of such a system,” he says. As for the part played by new technology in all of this: “It has been used to lower labour costs rather than to benefit everyone. And I regret to say that the EU has been colluding in it.” On the EU, Loach is ambivalent. He did vote Remain, but only just, and argues that the EU has encouraged privatisation on a massive scale, benefiting capitalism rather than the people, and that EU regulations protecting workers are not as strong as they should be. Loach is a contradiction in our Brexit times. Here is a fundamentally European film-maker who found his artistic calling while watching classics of the French New Wave, Italian neo-realism and Ingmar Bergman’s early works at his local cinema. His films are also to a large part financed by European companies and generous EU schemes. Without them, he most probably wouldn’t be able to work the way he does. But this is one area of politics that Loach is reluctant to be dragged into. “The big issues transcend Brexit,” he says.
misha glenny
I was always relieved to arrive in 1980s Hungary from austere Czechoslovakia or from the open prison that was Romania. In fact, even identifying Hungary as “communist” back then was stretching the point. With one foot in the west and one in the east, the country had since the mid-1960s been described as “the happiest barracks in the camp”. Underneath the veneer, an active secret police force harassed, intimidated and imprisoned the democratic opposition. This umbrella group of dissidents played a vital role in sustaining the ideals of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising. Yet chiefly consisting of bespectacled intellectuals and veterans of that time, it failed to gain a large following among ordinary people. Then in 1988, an energetic and radical force emerged. This new group made a point of only accepting members under the age of 35. Young people took to the streets under its banner in greater numbers than Budapest had seen since 1956. I remember them marching on Budapest’s Orszaghaz, the parliament building. They were fearless. They walked under the banner of Fidesz — the Alliance of Young Democrats. At their head stood an articulate, charismatic young man proclaiming that the time of the communists was at an end. He spoke excellent English, and during that period I interviewed him on a few occasions to hear his vision of the future: multi-party democracy, freedom of speech, a free media and the freedom of assembly. He certainly convinced me. Since then, Viktor Orban has gone on to convince millions of Hungarians. Only his message has changed. Now, the once fervent democrat is the inventor of a peculiar hybrid, “illiberal democracy”. He is the very embodiment of the past 30 years: from authoritarianism to freedom and back to a kind of authoritarianism. Mired as we are in a new era of nationalism and intolerance, it is hard to conjure the euphoria and optimism of those days in November 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell. Starting in 1991, the extreme violence of the break-up of Yugoslavia was an early warning sign that the transition from communism to capitalism would face serious challenges. Across the region, the incoming governments of dissidents and technical experts were flat broke. The EU offered warm words and began contemplating a plan for integration. Germany, especially, but France too, invested a great deal in the central European economies. But the west also encouraged a swift and often traumatic switch from planned economies to the free market, for which the rusted institutions of the communist states were not prepared. The result quickly acquired a brutally honest moniker: gangster capitalism. To understand the emergence of a culture of corruption and the devastation inflicted by organised crime, you must first return to the very height of the cold war, when I began visiting communist countries — first as a tourist, later as a journalist and, for a few heady years in the 1980s, as an activist smuggling out messages from beleaguered dissidents. East Germans crossing the Hungarian border, 1989 © Ullstein Bild via Getty In my memory, a chilly fog always accompanied me when I crossed from west to east. This can’t be true but perhaps my first trip to Warsaw, Leningrad and Moscow in 1973 became branded on my subconscious. I had just turned 15 and an unusually enlightened teacher at my school thought that year’s trip should take in Moscow and St Petersburg. Although it was almost May, snow was still falling and darkness came early. My most vivid recollection is of a small group of elderly men and women in Moscow as they entered a church to celebrate Easter. A group of thugs jostled and jeered the ageing worshippers as police and KGB officers looked on mockingly. I felt the mixture of fear, curiosity and indignation that would become so familiar over the next decade and a half. On that trip, I changed money on the black market for the first time, using the funds to buy a genuine Soviet army belt. As I slipped the dodgy vendor some roubles, my heart went into overdrive. I couldn’t but contemplate the worst possible outcome — being hauled off to a cell at the Lubyanka, the KGB’s Moscow headquarters. Relief. My trading partner was no stooge and I was thrilled with my purchase. The black market was intrinsic to life in eastern Europe. Even in relatively advanced countries such as Hungary or Czechoslovakia, queues were a daily reality, and not just for luxuries. I recall walking into Kotva, Prague’s showcase department store, and being confronted in the fruit and veg section with row upon row of pickled gherkins. Nothing else. If you needed something specialised like a carburettor or a part for a washing machine, there was little choice but to hit the black market. Forbidden western items such as copies of Playboy or video cassettes fetched the highest prices. People with relatives in the countryside had an advantage when it came to securing the vitamins needed to sustain a balanced diet. Each country had its own word which translated as “connections”, the linguistic pivot around which the informal economy circled. Without “connections”, life was frankly miserable (it wasn’t that great even if you had them). Misha Glenny in 1981, next to the train that took him from Vienna to Prague © Edgar de Bruin Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, I kept returning. Fascinated by the paranoid atmosphere that existed throughout the bloc, I got used to the rituals of the border crossing: the pointlessly intrusive forms to fill out; the border guards’ scowl; and, on the other side, the joyless visual uniformity of the one-party state. Occasionally giant slogans adorned the crumbling buildings: “We will fulfil the resolutions of the XVI Congress of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia”, and other phrases that stood out for their meaninglessness. Because communist regimes sought so fiercely to shape the public sphere, interior lives were all the more important. In the workplace, people may have reluctantly parroted the party line, but at home they would engage with philosophy, politics, history and social issues with an intensity rarely seen in the west. Friendships formed here ran deep because trust, non-existent in public life, was such a precious commodity. In 1981, I was awarded a British Council postgraduate scholarship to study in Prague. I joined an eccentric band of would-be academics — a year’s research in communist Czechoslovakia was not seen as a fast-track to career success at the time. Yet learning Czech and, later, other Slavic languages would prove to be transformational and set me on the path to becoming a writer. Apart from becoming a connoisseur of Bohemia’s fabled beer, I spent time and earned money recording English voice-overs for products such as the Slovak Zetor tractor range. I also assisted my friend, the late Olda Cerny, then head of dubbing at Barrandov film studios. Together we translated films into Czech. (Many years later, finding myself next to the actor John Hurt at dinner, I was able to tell him that I knew all his lines from Alien in Czech.) Hungary's Viktor Orban in Budapest, 2014 © Eyevine Olda was not on the secret police’s dissident list, and so he suffered no persecution. Nonetheless, throughout the 1980s he was one of the quiet supporters of the opposition movement Charter 77. He didn’t sign the charter itself, but he would translate its documents and articles to be smuggled out to the west — and he invited me to help him. Returning to London in 1982, I contributed to a remarkable magazine, Labour Focus on Eastern Europe. This was the mouthpiece of a disparate group of leftists who supported the struggle for democratic rights in eastern Europe. Its greatest strength lay in its links with Polish free trade union movement Solidarity, whose emergence in 1980 shook the communist world to its foundations. Labour Focus often scooped the mainstream media when eastern European and Soviet dissidents smuggled out information about human rights abuses. Yet many on the left in Britain, including much of the Labour party, regarded Labour Focus with suspicion and hostility. From the countless arguments I had with them in my local Labour party or in the National Union of Students, they regarded the Soviet Union and its satellites as the lesser of two evils in the cold war. Anything that rocked the Soviet boat was, by implication, the work of lackeys aiding the US. I concluded that for all their right-on credentials, most wouldn’t recognise a genuine workers’ movement such as Solidarity if it had slapped them across the cheek. The reluctance to criticise authoritarianism in the east (a trait that is still observable in today’s Labour leadership) was a gift to Margaret Thatcher and western conservatism. She deftly integrated resistance to the status quo in eastern Europe into her own political narrative. Ironically, she extolled the heroism of the workers’ struggle in Poland while crushing union power in Britain. It wasn’t until determined activists such as the historian EP Thompson and political scientist Mary Kaldor helped breathe life into a joint east-west movement for European Nuclear Disarmament in the early 1980s that the left belatedly started to take the opposition in eastern Europe seriously. I now joined the dozens of activists from across the ideological spectrum who engaged in one of the most persistent smuggling syndicates of the cold war. My earlier petty cross-border criminality came into its own — but I needed to become more professional. Vendors and shoppers brave the cold in Budapest in 1987 © Life Images Collection/Getty I took a train from Vienna to Budapest as a reconnaissance. These were made up of different carriages belonging to Romanian, Hungarian, Austrian and West German railways, which I casually studied for places to hide material. Being so badly constructed, the Romanian ones were a dream. Behind a filthy toilet, I spotted a panel that yielded to a penknife. The next time I travelled, I was able to stow parts of a dismembered Xerox machine when we left Vienna and retrieve them after we crossed the border. In the Hungarian capital, I found my way to a safe house to hand over the equipment to Laszlo Rajk Jr and Gabor Demszky, the two most charismatic members of the Hungarian opposition. As an idealistic 21-year-old, I tentatively extended my hand to Rajk in the belief that I was touching history. Tall, with a sonorous bass voice and idiosyncratic charm, he was the son of the most famous victim of the Stalinist show trials that had swept eastern Europe in the early 1950s. Last month when I heard that Rajk had died, I remembered that first encounter and shed a quiet tear. The highlight of my relationship with eastern Europe came on November 24 1989. I was in the antechamber leading to the balcony overlooking Prague’s Wenceslas Square, from where the leaders of the Velvet Revolution addressed the packed boulevard below. Alexander Dubcek, the great hero of the 1968 Prague Spring, smiled as he walked past me to address the crowd. He greeted the millions in front of him in his gentle Slovak brogue and all of us in the antechamber were overwhelmed. The west was eager to share in the new optimism spreading across the east. In that spirit, it was easy to miss the occasional dyspeptic outbursts: the belches of violence in Bucharest or Transylvania; mysterious murders in Sofia; or the sudden proliferation of explicit pornography, with thousands of young women turning to sex work to make ends meet. Václav Havel, right, and Margaret Thatcher in Wenceslas Square in 1990 © Eyevine Vaclav Klaus, the Czech prime minister, in 1992 © Sygma via Getty Francis Fukuyama’s thesis about “the end of history” was already looking ropey when it was published in 1992, as the Yugoslav wars had erupted a year earlier. Clearly relations between Yugoslavia’s several national and confessional groups played an important role in the calamity. Less obvious, however, was the systematic transfer of state assets into private hands taking place throughout the country under the fog of war. The culture of “connections” (veze in Serbo-Croat) was assuming a brutal industrial scale. By the time the conflicts were over, the new web of gangster capitalism spun by an alliance of politicians, security services, oligarchs and organised crime had the bloodied Balkans firmly in its grip. Gangster capitalism was replicated in different forms and at different speeds across the former communist world — albeit usually with less violence than in Yugoslavia. The anarchic form of the free market was most visible in Russia, where global fortunes could be made thanks to the country’s mineral wealth. For many eastern Europeans, organised crime and corruption seemed inextricably linked with the free market. Silently, communist bureaucrats had been preparing themselves for the new capitalist dawn for several years. In Bulgaria, over 90 per cent of the joint-stock companies that had been formed since 1986 in the spirit of perestroika were actually owned by members of the communist secret police. Having warned the population for decades about the evils of capitalism, these senior party functionaries were now about to show them what this meant in practice. Many of the dissidents, so important in forcing change, were swept aside. In Danton’s Death, his play about the French Revolution and written in 1835, Georg Büchner wrote how “the revolution is like Saturn. It devours its own children”. In eastern Europe, it was not long before the ruthlessly acquisitive new forces adopted this maxim by pushing aside the old dissidents. Václav Havel, who had written the script of Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution, became the tragic hero in his own drama. His nemesis, economist turned prime minister Václav Klaus, had gone from being a resentful spear-carrier to directing the whole show. Possibly the most unpleasant politician I have ever met, Klaus quickly sniffed out Havel’s weaknesses. As the freshly inaugurated president, Havel distracted himself by entertaining leading world intellectuals, Hollywood stars and musicians such as Frank Zappa. Klaus, by contrast, was building a powerful party machine and testing the waters of populism early on issues such as migration, climate change denial and Euroscepticism. The failure of the dissidents as effective democratic politicians contains important lessons. Often they held wholly unrealistic expectations about how quickly their countries could prosper in the free-market system. The European Union insisted that the price of joining would involve painful reforms — worth it in the long run but always carrying the risk of a backlash. After half a century under the tyranny of the Soviet bloc, many eastern Europeans resented the prospect of joining another supranational structure — albeit one much more tolerant and considerably wealthier. This latent suspicion of the EU shot through the surface after the financial crash of 2008. The very model that the new democracies were expected to emulate now turned on them. In Hungary, for example, many had been encouraged to take out mortgages in currencies such as the Swiss franc and the euro. When the crash came, tens of thousands of ordinary householders were bankrupted. In such circumstances, the rot of populism spread quickly. Queue at a Pepsi-Cola stand in Moscow, 1988 © Magnum Few in the west expected the communist system in eastern Europe to collapse. Even the CIA started taking the possibility seriously only in 1988, while West German political circles were taken completely by surprise. Although it had its hairy moments, the policy of deterrence, backed by the nuclear threat of MAD (mutually assured destruction), had led to an apparent equilibrium. The west did not imagine that ordinary people would muster the temerity to take to the streets. After all, had not the greatest mass movement in eastern European history, Solidarity in Poland, failed after the insurrection of 1980 and 1981? But having missed the coming revolution, we were all then guilty of assuming that the Havels of this world would steer eastern Europe towards a prosperous future. They failed, of course. The only true dissident who succeeded in holding on to power was Orban — renouncing his youthful ideals. Yet the idealists left their mark. While Orban and other populist leaders control Hungary and Poland and wield great influence in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, they face dogged resistance among large parts of the population. That resistance draws in part on the tremendous struggles for freedom that punctuated the 40 years of communism in eastern Europe: Hungary in 1956; Czechoslovakia in 1968; the strikes of Romania’s Jiu Valley miners in the late 1970s; Solidarity; Charter 77. It is thanks to this rich history that the revolutions of 1989 have not yet been comprehensively defeated. But when I think of how I watched Havel and Dubcek on the balcony in Wenceslas Square, it feels as if we were caught up in a youthful, inspiring but ultimately illusory dream.
You have managed to completely miss the point of the 1989 revolutions. The point was multiparty competition in democratic elections. The point was being able to think, say and write what you want without fear of a knock at the door in the middle of the night and having the living daylights beaten out of you or worse. Today, and ever since 1989, the central European countries are, and have remained, democracies with due respect for the rule of law and human rights. To then write with a straight face I assume “that the revolutions of 1989 have not yet been comprehensively defeated” indicates a blindness that cannot tell night from day. The fact that conservatives like Orbán and Kaczyński are winning elections simply means that conservative parties are winning democratic elections in Hungary and Poland. You may not like the fact that conservative parties have been winning elections in those countries, but then that’s democracy for you. That democracy is the achievement of 1989. — Indeed, Orbán’s ally Tárlos recently lost the mayoralty of Budapest, indicating that Hungarian democracy is indeed alive and well contrary to recent narrative peddled in this and other newspapers. Sad that having bought the propaganda of the (often ex-communist allied) opponents of the current, democratic, and therefore temporary, governments you doubt the permanent achievements in the region since 1989. Otherwise a comprehensive and reflective article on a world whose passing we should be unashamedly celebrating; not questioning, or worse mourning.
When I arrive at St John for lunch with Fergus Henderson, it is 12.30pm on a Monday, the most bread-and-butter day of the week. I’ve walked to the famous “nose to tail” restaurant through the coolness of London’s Smithfield Market, where meat has been traded in one form or other (dead or alive) since the 12th century. Smithfield did some pretty hard medieval partying — jousting, drinking and cutting up traitors — and, centuries later, it still has a faintly hungover air. There is a similar mood as I enter the old smokehouse on St John Street, as if a punishing grade of gluttony was achieved at the weekend. Henderson is already planted at the bar, half his considerable gravity leaning into the zinc counter, the other on to a walking stick. “So, this interview is ‘Have A Lunch With Fergus’,” he summarises thoughtfully after our hellos, in a soft smoker’s voice that emits from small, mischievous lips. “Would you like a glass of champagne to prepare yourself?” he asks, as if this would be a prudent thing to do. The dining philosophy of St John, now in its 25th year of business, is a belief in food and drink’s ability to enact subtle and sometimes vital changes of spirit — to be “nutriment that feeds the mind”, as Jonathan Swift put it — but also riotously good fun, as per medieval tradition. Henderson once told me that a tomato salad “saved his life” during a gastronomic exploration of Barcelona with his sister; today he recalls an “epiphany” that came via a glass of potent Armagnac. Eating well is partly ordering well, and knowing what you need. As befits his size, Henderson is very much a chef’s chef, revered globally by industry peers for his simple but irresistible language of British ingredients, which he pursued at a time when most professional kitchens were more intent on dicing carrots. His childhood household, living in 1970s Chelsea and then Soho, valued the power of the dinner table to knit a family together: “Both my parents were my education in food,” he says. “Mum taught me how to cook, dad taught me how to eat.” When Henderson decided to quit architecture, his parents’ profession, after studying at the Architectural Association, his father gave his blessing, on one condition: “Dad said, ‘If you’re going to be a chef, be a good one’. I think I’ve turned out to be an OK one.” “OK” is a modest report from the man who arguably rescued British meat from the lowly rank it had sunk to by the 1990s, sliced at lacklustre roast dinners in pubs and carveries, or sold cheaply at supermarkets via impersonal, industrial farms. Against this backdrop, St John’s credo of “nose to tail” eating became fashionable for its novelty, daring the customer to try trotter paste on toast or pig’s head pie, and to appreciate what would otherwise go to waste. “My hope is that St John is an institution, in the good sense of the word,” he says as we move into the dining room, gathering up the champagne. “Like a chemist or a cinema, something you need. Feeding you, watering you and dining you.” Glancing around, I see signs of an orderly institution at work, from the note on the menu reminding customers to order whole suckling pig a week in advance, to the waiters shuttling discreetly between tables in white drill jackets. Though he is the “face” of the enterprise, Henderson keeps a low profile. “I’m fairly Teflon to fame,” he says. “Fooo, fooo!” he adds, gesturing something flying over his head. We are among the first customers to sit down and unfold our napkins. Henderson’s speech is at times hard to make out, the result of early onset Parkinson’s and its deep-brain implant treatment — so for clearer acoustics we sit side by side, as if banqueting. He says his consultant is “pleased with him” for his current bill of health, and he has a healthy, tanned look from a week at a friend’s villa in Greece, a holiday he describes as: “a nice pool . . . boats . . . grilled fish . . . roast kid. All the things.” Lunch, he says as we study the menu, is “very much my favourite meal. Lunch is a wonderful thing. The strange thing is the more people tut over [a long] lunch, the more delicious. The more tuts the better.” A waiter brings warm sliced bread and a pat of yolk-coloured butter, and I decide it’s a good idea to let Henderson order for us: the crayfish and aioli special, deep-fried salt cod to share, then brill, roast Tamworth, broad beans, potatoes and greens, a bottle of Trimbach pinot noir and an ice bucket. “Now we can relax,” he says confidently. When I tell him that FT readers frequently bemoan the increasing sobriety of the “Have a Lunch with . . . ” encounters, his face brightens with delight. “Let’s give the readers what they want,” he says, as the Trimbach arrives and is poured. Henderson likes to eat here almost every day, “which is a good thing and a bad thing. Bad for my tummy. It’s bigger than I wish it was.” When I ask if this is inevitable, there’s a flash of spikiness. “You’re not saying our food is unhealthy?” he says defensively, and I find myself denying the accusation, even if the St John diet might be hard on the waistline. We discuss the rise of the vegans, and he says he has no objections, other than “the smugness”. “How do you tell someone is a vegan?” he asks. Answer: “They tell you.” This is a stock Fergus joke, but he chuckles gently at it, and adds, “We always have something vegan up our sleeve on the menu. Many vegans say we’re their favourite restaurant.” Henderson’s daily presence is a form of quality control now that Parkinson’s has separated him from the kitchen. The menu changes twice a day, and he keeps an eye on its delivery. “It’s hard for chefs if menus change all the time, but it keeps you on your toes. St John is nature-led. Runner beans come in, fish changes all the time [from boats off the east coast], nature starts hurling birds at us. Nature and time are sort of the two things that have affected us ever since we began.” St John Smithfield 26 St John St, London EC1 Salt cod £11.80 Crayfish £13.20 Roast Tamworth £25.50 Brill £26 Potatoes £5 Greens £4.50 Sorbet and vodka £8 Madeleines (1/2 dozen) £5 Bottle Trimbach Pinot Noir Reserve 2016 £55 Bottle sparkling water £3.25 Total (inc tip) £177.25 We discuss St John’s longevity, a quarter of a century being an almost freakishly long stint in London’s restaurant world. Resistance to passing fads has helped, he says. “Fashion and food don’t go hand in hand. Fashion doesn’t do you any good, eating-wise. Watch out for Gucci food. Something’s wrong with it.” St John moved to this address after a successful run at the French House, a one-room restaurant above a pub in Soho, where Henderson cooked alongside his chef wife Margot. Before that, he cooked at the Globe dive bar in Notting Hill, where Lucian Freud was a regular and goat’s neck soup was a staple of the menu, a dish that the owner promised his customers would make them “go all night”. The new digs on St John Street were covered in pork fat and smoke, but “One look at it, I was sold. That was that.” Margot stayed at the French House, and he says “she still feels rather hard done by. She was having babies at the time.” I ask if they argue about whether food remains a boys’ club. “I wouldn’t argue with Margot,” is his response. St John has managed to keep its trotters dry as a resilient operator, with additional revenue from a wholesale bakery, a second restaurant, St John Bread & Wine (located near Spitalfields Market; a third opened and closed in Bermondsey), plus a winery in the Minervois, which is overseen by Henderson’s business partner Trevor Gulliver. The winery is particularly “reassuring” when he considers what Brexit could do to wine prices. “Brexit is terrible. It’s like some hellish creature has been unleashed. Mr Boris. But we got what we deserved. It’s a sad business.” (He concedes one point of admiration: “Boris is very good on green issues.”) A rare mis-step came in 2011, when the St John group gathered new investors and headed into the hotel business, opening a hotel-restaurant version of St John on the edge of London’s Leicester Square that imploded after a year. “Covent Garden, yes,” he says wearily. “What happens when you try to grow too quickly? There lies trouble.” He moves the conversation on to a more recent collapse, that of Jamie Oliver’s casual restaurant chain, Jamie’s Italian. “I feel very sorry for him. He’s a very nice chap. Patisserie Valerie is worse — I used to love eating there on Old Compton Street. Now, all gone. London seems to have encouraged these large chains. It’s money-led. Why would you want a huge chain of restaurants?” Henderson says St John is no longer wooed for expansion. “I don’t think anyone’s really interested in us now. We’re not anonymous restaurants. We’re personality-led. It’s quite nice, as it makes us very unapproachable.” The crayfish arrive, fat and livid red, next to the deep-fried salt cod with ketchup; two opposite levels of dexterity are required for eating, crayfish not being the easiest things to shell. If he doesn’t attract investment, personality goes a long way, with “Fergus” attracting cultish fans from Japan and the US, and forging friendships with people such as the late Anthony Bourdain. The two men were “great chums”, he says, and Bourdain’s suicide last year was “really sad. I hadn’t really seen a dark side to him, he was very jolly, always . . . I was in France at the winery, and within minutes of [the news], the BBC got in touch with me,” he says, blinking at the memory. The waiter comes to take away the starters; a cod fritter remains, but Henderson holds off: “I’m done.” As a dining companion, he is as guarded as he is generous, and there are zones of mumbled storytelling where the tape doesn’t help on replay. One anecdote is about an attempted lunch in Paris, featuring a man with Tourette’s, an argument over Beaujolais nouveau, and a waitress who preferred to seat the sweary customer over the starry chef. “That exchange would never happen in this country,” he concludes, and I am none the wiser about exactly what happened. For every hard-to-follow story, there’s another delivered with fully lit clarity. Take his favourite meals in Paris. Alain Ducasse at Plaza Athénée was “extremely brilliant, which annoyed me as I thought there must be a flaw somewhere, but there was none. The only flaw was one of the waiters put the wrong sauce on — the other waiters looked at him with daggers. He ran out into the kitchen and was never seen again.” The dish in question was “a cream reduction of langoustines and a ghost of a langoustine fillet, gentle and seductive. It went on like that for hours, it was such a treat.” As a child, he was impressed by the regal interior of Le Grand Véfour, which he was taken to by his late father. “It’s really beautiful. I can be swayed by the look of a restaurant. We had soufflé of frogs’ legs. It was good. I can’t remember the middle course. For pudding, he said, ‘You choose the wine’. I was 10 or something, and I went to the end of the list and said ‘Yquem’. My old man was very generous and said, ‘Ah, perfect, son’.” He laughs heartily. Our main courses arrive and Henderson seizes a fork to prod a broad bean. “Hmmm, quite firm”, he says, satisfied that the veg hasn’t been overcooked. He fillets the brill and serves up a plate for me. “The menus are quite clipped, which is a good thing. I’m wary of 18 courses. But it’s strange that’s the way forward now at places like Noma.” The dining room has taken on a pleasant low hum of conversation as the tables fill up. Though he’s no longer at the stove, he does still issue corrections to service, and he also offers reading lists to his staff. Among the recommended titles is Master and Commander by Patrick O’Brian. “The captain must be everyone’s friend, but keep a distance.” Henderson has mercurial literary tastes, saying that he “always wanted to write a spy story” himself. He skims over the plot: it starts in the Suez Canal, then “goes to Chernobyl”, before finishing with the disappearance of wine in Bordeaux. “Chernobyl is essential as [the spies] need it as background to cover their manoeuvres. That reminds me — I’m more of a chef than a writer,” he offers, as I look at him, perplexed. Modern chefs are showy, televisual creatures, adept at Instagram, whereas Henderson admits he is “quite shy really. Shyness is underrated.” This said, he is unerringly sociable. “I’m hopeless at being by myself, I hate it.” His limit for solitude is “a plane journey or a train journey, an hour and a half. It’s a weakness. It’s a shallow side of me.” By this point we have finished the meat and are crunching through delicious crackling. “As long as I know [crunch] there’s someone around the corner, it’s OK.” The plates are cleared and we consider pudding. Anxious to deliver on FT readers’ wishes, Henderson advises the peach sorbet and Russian vodka, with a half dozen madeleines. I recall a conversation from a few years back in which Henderson raised the strange spectre of a Los Angeles branch of St John. What, I ask, happened to that plan? He crumples his forehead. “It hasn’t totally gone away. Which I’m not thrilled about. If I say it, it sounds real . . . ” The proposed St John LA (since confirmed after our lunch to open in 2020) turns out to be in a shopping centre in trendy but business-y Culver City. “It’s meant to be the hottest spot for the young minds.” In a hammy accent, he mimics a realtor talking about “steaks this big” with hand gestures indicating something silly and mammoth. Relenting slightly, he goes on to praise California’s “exceptional” ingredients. Like what? “Mulberries,” apparently. The sorbet is sharp, swimming in a cocktail glass of vodka. I take a few spoonfuls but still have an array of drinks on the table. “Do what you can,” Henderson says with avuncular care. I believe that lunch is now more or less finished, but he suggests we have a digestif. Fine, I say, not wholly sure of my stamina. It definitely turns out to be a stretch when Henderson says he wants to go to the Groucho, in his boyhood heartland of Soho. We head to the private members’ club in a taxi, and Henderson is greeted at the door like a part-owner (he isn’t). He orders more champagne on the cramped terrace and lights up a Marlboro Red from a packet covered with Greek health warnings. We talk a bit about the “strangeness” of being in business with the same person for decades on end and it feels as if the shorter his statements, the more truthful — “tricky” he says, by way of emphasis. Now, with about four hours on the lunch clock, I really do need to get back to the office. I make to say my goodbyes, a touch guilty to be leaving Henderson on his own, but presumably not for long. “I can’t eat if I’m alone,” he says. “I have no interest. One bite of toast, that’s it.” A good thing it’s nearly dinner time.
Ken Loach
“Did you know John McDonnell had a little part in my film Hidden Agenda?” Ken Loach asks with a smile. Whether it’s the activities of the gilets jaunes or the Labour party’s shadow chancellor, my encounters with the British director always start with a round-up of French and British news. When you have known Ken Loach for more than 20 years, there is a strange feeling that while you’re definitely getting older, he seems to keep getting younger. While many of us have moved away from our early socialist convictions, Loach has never veered from his belief in social justice. At 83, he is still a prolific film-maker, and the only difference between then and now is that he recently had to stop editing on a Steenbeck machine with scissors and tape, as they did in the 1930s. “It now costs too much to do it the old way,” he says with regret — like shooting in black-and-white or on 35mm film. That’s the only bit of nostalgia he allows himself, however; otherwise he lives very much in the present. His films are a constant reminder of his political commitment through art, and his 27th film, Sorry We Missed You, is no exception. When I visit Loach in his tiny editing suite off London’s Oxford Circus, he is relishing listening to dialogue in Geordie, the dialect of the film’s Newcastle setting. “It has a purity, a sharpness and an energy to it,” Loach enthuses. And so does Sorry We Missed You. It tells the story of Ricky and Abbie, a couple trapped in the dehumanising world of zero-hour contracts. He is a self-employed parcel delivery driver, she is a home carer for elderly people. While Abbie is paid only per visit and has to cover the cost of travel to clients, Ricky must provide his own delivery van and finds himself beholden to a scanner that tracks his every move. If he takes time off, he has to pay penalties. Kris Hitchen and Katie Proctor in ‘Sorry We Missed You’ In other words, the “flexibility and freedom” of the gig economy sold to them was a lie. Exhausted, they hardly have the energy to look after their teenage children. Ricky is played by Kris Hitchen, who started off as an actor but has worked mostly as a plumber, while Abbie is played by real-life teaching assistant Debbie Honeywood. Loach often auditions hundreds of applicants for parts, usually from the area where the film is set, and likes mixing trained actors with non-professionals. He has a particular eye for casting children and teenagers such as Rhys Stone, who plays Ricky and Abbie’s teenage truant son Seb — a graffiti artist both on screen and in real life. Seb comes to despise his father for being a slave to a job that still doesn’t bring in enough money to support the family. His younger sister Lisa, played by Katie Proctor, is a lively redhead who can only look on powerless as her family slowly disintegrates under the pressure. The reality today is that employment doesn’t guarantee a decent life, enough to feed your family “What we were interested in is the impact such work had on family life,” Loach says. “In public, you have this persona, you are trying to be flexible, you are composed. But once back at home, you totally collapse, you have no flexibility left for your family.” We middle-class consumers all know people like Ricky and Abbie. They are the delivery men we meet on an almost daily basis thanks to our online shopping habits, and the women who look after our parents and grandparents. And their plight is not only a moral certainty, but a fact based on careful research carried out by Paul Laverty, Loach’s regular screenwriter. “It was Paul’s idea and he spent months investigating the delivery and care industries, doing interviews with drivers and care workers,” Loach says. “He studied the subcontracting process from councils to service providers. And all Ricky’s colleagues in the film are real-life or former delivery drivers.” After watching Loach make films for two decades, often with collaborators he has worked with since the 1970s, such as his editor Jonathan Morris, it is impossible not to admire the constancy and rate of work (17 films in 20 years). In 2014, soon after completing his Irish-set period film Jimmy’s Hall, a particularly exhausting shoot, Loach announced his retirement. It didn’t last long. Two years later he returned with I, Daniel Blake. Dave Johns in ‘I, Daniel Blake’ While the subjects of his films are always investigated thoroughly, they are also treated with humour and deep humanity. Sweet Sixteen (2002) focused beautifully on the travails of adolescence, 2012’s The Angels’ Share on a Highlands whisky heist, while Looking for Eric (2009) was a surprising piece of football poetry. Sorry We Missed You also features some lovely upbeat moments, especially between Ricky and Lisa when she joins her dad on delivery rounds. Loach has been one of the faces of British cinema abroad since his masterpiece Kes played at Cannes in 1970. He is part of an exclusive club of directors who have twice been awarded the Palme d’Or (The Wind That Shakes the Barley in 2006; I, Daniel Blake in 2016). In Britain, however, his political position, somewhere to the left of the current Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, raises eyebrows, and his views are often dismissed as anachronistic. But I, Daniel Blake, which stirred up debate on rising poverty, the benefits system and use of food banks, was intensely contemporary. What he cares about most deeply is the situation now facing the working poor. “The reality today is that employment doesn’t guarantee a decent life,” he says. “You may have a job, even two, and still not have enough to feed yourself and your family. “Look at Abbie. She is paid for the 20 minutes she spends with an elderly patient but not for the next 40 minutes she spends travelling to her next appointment, at her own cost. Which means she is actually paid a third of the minimum wage.” The core of the problem, as he sees it, is the privatisation of public services and subcontracting from local councils to the companies chosen because they are cheapest. “Nobody accepts responsibility for the inevitable dire consequences of such a system,” he says. As for the part played by new technology in all of this: “It has been used to lower labour costs rather than to benefit everyone. And I regret to say that the EU has been colluding in it.” On the EU, Loach is ambivalent. He did vote Remain, but only just, and argues that the EU has encouraged privatisation on a massive scale, benefiting capitalism rather than the people, and that EU regulations protecting workers are not as strong as they should be. Loach is a contradiction in our Brexit times. Here is a fundamentally European film-maker who found his artistic calling while watching classics of the French New Wave, Italian neo-realism and Ingmar Bergman’s early works at his local cinema. His films are also to a large part financed by European companies and generous EU schemes. Without them, he most probably wouldn’t be able to work the way he does. But this is one area of politics that Loach is reluctant to be dragged into. “The big issues transcend Brexit,” he says.
misha glenny
I was always relieved to arrive in 1980s Hungary from austere Czechoslovakia or from the open prison that was Romania. In fact, even identifying Hungary as “communist” back then was stretching the point. With one foot in the west and one in the east, the country had since the mid-1960s been described as “the happiest barracks in the camp”. Underneath the veneer, an active secret police force harassed, intimidated and imprisoned the democratic opposition. This umbrella group of dissidents played a vital role in sustaining the ideals of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising. Yet chiefly consisting of bespectacled intellectuals and veterans of that time, it failed to gain a large following among ordinary people. Then in 1988, an energetic and radical force emerged. This new group made a point of only accepting members under the age of 35. Young people took to the streets under its banner in greater numbers than Budapest had seen since 1956. I remember them marching on Budapest’s Orszaghaz, the parliament building. They were fearless. They walked under the banner of Fidesz — the Alliance of Young Democrats. At their head stood an articulate, charismatic young man proclaiming that the time of the communists was at an end. He spoke excellent English, and during that period I interviewed him on a few occasions to hear his vision of the future: multi-party democracy, freedom of speech, a free media and the freedom of assembly. He certainly convinced me. Since then, Viktor Orban has gone on to convince millions of Hungarians. Only his message has changed. Now, the once fervent democrat is the inventor of a peculiar hybrid, “illiberal democracy”. He is the very embodiment of the past 30 years: from authoritarianism to freedom and back to a kind of authoritarianism. Mired as we are in a new era of nationalism and intolerance, it is hard to conjure the euphoria and optimism of those days in November 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell. Starting in 1991, the extreme violence of the break-up of Yugoslavia was an early warning sign that the transition from communism to capitalism would face serious challenges. Across the region, the incoming governments of dissidents and technical experts were flat broke. The EU offered warm words and began contemplating a plan for integration. Germany, especially, but France too, invested a great deal in the central European economies. But the west also encouraged a swift and often traumatic switch from planned economies to the free market, for which the rusted institutions of the communist states were not prepared. The result quickly acquired a brutally honest moniker: gangster capitalism. To understand the emergence of a culture of corruption and the devastation inflicted by organised crime, you must first return to the very height of the cold war, when I began visiting communist countries — first as a tourist, later as a journalist and, for a few heady years in the 1980s, as an activist smuggling out messages from beleaguered dissidents. East Germans crossing the Hungarian border, 1989 © Ullstein Bild via Getty In my memory, a chilly fog always accompanied me when I crossed from west to east. This can’t be true but perhaps my first trip to Warsaw, Leningrad and Moscow in 1973 became branded on my subconscious. I had just turned 15 and an unusually enlightened teacher at my school thought that year’s trip should take in Moscow and St Petersburg. Although it was almost May, snow was still falling and darkness came early. My most vivid recollection is of a small group of elderly men and women in Moscow as they entered a church to celebrate Easter. A group of thugs jostled and jeered the ageing worshippers as police and KGB officers looked on mockingly. I felt the mixture of fear, curiosity and indignation that would become so familiar over the next decade and a half. On that trip, I changed money on the black market for the first time, using the funds to buy a genuine Soviet army belt. As I slipped the dodgy vendor some roubles, my heart went into overdrive. I couldn’t but contemplate the worst possible outcome — being hauled off to a cell at the Lubyanka, the KGB’s Moscow headquarters. Relief. My trading partner was no stooge and I was thrilled with my purchase. The black market was intrinsic to life in eastern Europe. Even in relatively advanced countries such as Hungary or Czechoslovakia, queues were a daily reality, and not just for luxuries. I recall walking into Kotva, Prague’s showcase department store, and being confronted in the fruit and veg section with row upon row of pickled gherkins. Nothing else. If you needed something specialised like a carburettor or a part for a washing machine, there was little choice but to hit the black market. Forbidden western items such as copies of Playboy or video cassettes fetched the highest prices. People with relatives in the countryside had an advantage when it came to securing the vitamins needed to sustain a balanced diet. Each country had its own word which translated as “connections”, the linguistic pivot around which the informal economy circled. Without “connections”, life was frankly miserable (it wasn’t that great even if you had them). Misha Glenny in 1981, next to the train that took him from Vienna to Prague © Edgar de Bruin Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, I kept returning. Fascinated by the paranoid atmosphere that existed throughout the bloc, I got used to the rituals of the border crossing: the pointlessly intrusive forms to fill out; the border guards’ scowl; and, on the other side, the joyless visual uniformity of the one-party state. Occasionally giant slogans adorned the crumbling buildings: “We will fulfil the resolutions of the XVI Congress of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia”, and other phrases that stood out for their meaninglessness. Because communist regimes sought so fiercely to shape the public sphere, interior lives were all the more important. In the workplace, people may have reluctantly parroted the party line, but at home they would engage with philosophy, politics, history and social issues with an intensity rarely seen in the west. Friendships formed here ran deep because trust, non-existent in public life, was such a precious commodity. In 1981, I was awarded a British Council postgraduate scholarship to study in Prague. I joined an eccentric band of would-be academics — a year’s research in communist Czechoslovakia was not seen as a fast-track to career success at the time. Yet learning Czech and, later, other Slavic languages would prove to be transformational and set me on the path to becoming a writer. Apart from becoming a connoisseur of Bohemia’s fabled beer, I spent time and earned money recording English voice-overs for products such as the Slovak Zetor tractor range. I also assisted my friend, the late Olda Cerny, then head of dubbing at Barrandov film studios. Together we translated films into Czech. (Many years later, finding myself next to the actor John Hurt at dinner, I was able to tell him that I knew all his lines from Alien in Czech.) Hungary's Viktor Orban in Budapest, 2014 © Eyevine Olda was not on the secret police’s dissident list, and so he suffered no persecution. Nonetheless, throughout the 1980s he was one of the quiet supporters of the opposition movement Charter 77. He didn’t sign the charter itself, but he would translate its documents and articles to be smuggled out to the west — and he invited me to help him. Returning to London in 1982, I contributed to a remarkable magazine, Labour Focus on Eastern Europe. This was the mouthpiece of a disparate group of leftists who supported the struggle for democratic rights in eastern Europe. Its greatest strength lay in its links with Polish free trade union movement Solidarity, whose emergence in 1980 shook the communist world to its foundations. Labour Focus often scooped the mainstream media when eastern European and Soviet dissidents smuggled out information about human rights abuses. Yet many on the left in Britain, including much of the Labour party, regarded Labour Focus with suspicion and hostility. From the countless arguments I had with them in my local Labour party or in the National Union of Students, they regarded the Soviet Union and its satellites as the lesser of two evils in the cold war. Anything that rocked the Soviet boat was, by implication, the work of lackeys aiding the US. I concluded that for all their right-on credentials, most wouldn’t recognise a genuine workers’ movement such as Solidarity if it had slapped them across the cheek. The reluctance to criticise authoritarianism in the east (a trait that is still observable in today’s Labour leadership) was a gift to Margaret Thatcher and western conservatism. She deftly integrated resistance to the status quo in eastern Europe into her own political narrative. Ironically, she extolled the heroism of the workers’ struggle in Poland while crushing union power in Britain. It wasn’t until determined activists such as the historian EP Thompson and political scientist Mary Kaldor helped breathe life into a joint east-west movement for European Nuclear Disarmament in the early 1980s that the left belatedly started to take the opposition in eastern Europe seriously. I now joined the dozens of activists from across the ideological spectrum who engaged in one of the most persistent smuggling syndicates of the cold war. My earlier petty cross-border criminality came into its own — but I needed to become more professional. Vendors and shoppers brave the cold in Budapest in 1987 © Life Images Collection/Getty I took a train from Vienna to Budapest as a reconnaissance. These were made up of different carriages belonging to Romanian, Hungarian, Austrian and West German railways, which I casually studied for places to hide material. Being so badly constructed, the Romanian ones were a dream. Behind a filthy toilet, I spotted a panel that yielded to a penknife. The next time I travelled, I was able to stow parts of a dismembered Xerox machine when we left Vienna and retrieve them after we crossed the border. In the Hungarian capital, I found my way to a safe house to hand over the equipment to Laszlo Rajk Jr and Gabor Demszky, the two most charismatic members of the Hungarian opposition. As an idealistic 21-year-old, I tentatively extended my hand to Rajk in the belief that I was touching history. Tall, with a sonorous bass voice and idiosyncratic charm, he was the son of the most famous victim of the Stalinist show trials that had swept eastern Europe in the early 1950s. Last month when I heard that Rajk had died, I remembered that first encounter and shed a quiet tear. The highlight of my relationship with eastern Europe came on November 24 1989. I was in the antechamber leading to the balcony overlooking Prague’s Wenceslas Square, from where the leaders of the Velvet Revolution addressed the packed boulevard below. Alexander Dubcek, the great hero of the 1968 Prague Spring, smiled as he walked past me to address the crowd. He greeted the millions in front of him in his gentle Slovak brogue and all of us in the antechamber were overwhelmed. The west was eager to share in the new optimism spreading across the east. In that spirit, it was easy to miss the occasional dyspeptic outbursts: the belches of violence in Bucharest or Transylvania; mysterious murders in Sofia; or the sudden proliferation of explicit pornography, with thousands of young women turning to sex work to make ends meet. Václav Havel, right, and Margaret Thatcher in Wenceslas Square in 1990 © Eyevine Vaclav Klaus, the Czech prime minister, in 1992 © Sygma via Getty Francis Fukuyama’s thesis about “the end of history” was already looking ropey when it was published in 1992, as the Yugoslav wars had erupted a year earlier. Clearly relations between Yugoslavia’s several national and confessional groups played an important role in the calamity. Less obvious, however, was the systematic transfer of state assets into private hands taking place throughout the country under the fog of war. The culture of “connections” (veze in Serbo-Croat) was assuming a brutal industrial scale. By the time the conflicts were over, the new web of gangster capitalism spun by an alliance of politicians, security services, oligarchs and organised crime had the bloodied Balkans firmly in its grip. Gangster capitalism was replicated in different forms and at different speeds across the former communist world — albeit usually with less violence than in Yugoslavia. The anarchic form of the free market was most visible in Russia, where global fortunes could be made thanks to the country’s mineral wealth. For many eastern Europeans, organised crime and corruption seemed inextricably linked with the free market. Silently, communist bureaucrats had been preparing themselves for the new capitalist dawn for several years. In Bulgaria, over 90 per cent of the joint-stock companies that had been formed since 1986 in the spirit of perestroika were actually owned by members of the communist secret police. Having warned the population for decades about the evils of capitalism, these senior party functionaries were now about to show them what this meant in practice. Many of the dissidents, so important in forcing change, were swept aside. In Danton’s Death, his play about the French Revolution and written in 1835, Georg Büchner wrote how “the revolution is like Saturn. It devours its own children”. In eastern Europe, it was not long before the ruthlessly acquisitive new forces adopted this maxim by pushing aside the old dissidents. Václav Havel, who had written the script of Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution, became the tragic hero in his own drama. His nemesis, economist turned prime minister Václav Klaus, had gone from being a resentful spear-carrier to directing the whole show. Possibly the most unpleasant politician I have ever met, Klaus quickly sniffed out Havel’s weaknesses. As the freshly inaugurated president, Havel distracted himself by entertaining leading world intellectuals, Hollywood stars and musicians such as Frank Zappa. Klaus, by contrast, was building a powerful party machine and testing the waters of populism early on issues such as migration, climate change denial and Euroscepticism. The failure of the dissidents as effective democratic politicians contains important lessons. Often they held wholly unrealistic expectations about how quickly their countries could prosper in the free-market system. The European Union insisted that the price of joining would involve painful reforms — worth it in the long run but always carrying the risk of a backlash. After half a century under the tyranny of the Soviet bloc, many eastern Europeans resented the prospect of joining another supranational structure — albeit one much more tolerant and considerably wealthier. This latent suspicion of the EU shot through the surface after the financial crash of 2008. The very model that the new democracies were expected to emulate now turned on them. In Hungary, for example, many had been encouraged to take out mortgages in currencies such as the Swiss franc and the euro. When the crash came, tens of thousands of ordinary householders were bankrupted. In such circumstances, the rot of populism spread quickly. Queue at a Pepsi-Cola stand in Moscow, 1988 © Magnum Few in the west expected the communist system in eastern Europe to collapse. Even the CIA started taking the possibility seriously only in 1988, while West German political circles were taken completely by surprise. Although it had its hairy moments, the policy of deterrence, backed by the nuclear threat of MAD (mutually assured destruction), had led to an apparent equilibrium. The west did not imagine that ordinary people would muster the temerity to take to the streets. After all, had not the greatest mass movement in eastern European history, Solidarity in Poland, failed after the insurrection of 1980 and 1981? But having missed the coming revolution, we were all then guilty of assuming that the Havels of this world would steer eastern Europe towards a prosperous future. They failed, of course. The only true dissident who succeeded in holding on to power was Orban — renouncing his youthful ideals. Yet the idealists left their mark. While Orban and other populist leaders control Hungary and Poland and wield great influence in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, they face dogged resistance among large parts of the population. That resistance draws in part on the tremendous struggles for freedom that punctuated the 40 years of communism in eastern Europe: Hungary in 1956; Czechoslovakia in 1968; the strikes of Romania’s Jiu Valley miners in the late 1970s; Solidarity; Charter 77. It is thanks to this rich history that the revolutions of 1989 have not yet been comprehensively defeated. But when I think of how I watched Havel and Dubcek on the balcony in Wenceslas Square, it feels as if we were caught up in a youthful, inspiring but ultimately illusory dream.
You have managed to completely miss the point of the 1989 revolutions. The point was multiparty competition in democratic elections. The point was being able to think, say and write what you want without fear of a knock at the door in the middle of the night and having the living daylights beaten out of you or worse. Today, and ever since 1989, the central European countries are, and have remained, democracies with due respect for the rule of law and human rights. To then write with a straight face I assume “that the revolutions of 1989 have not yet been comprehensively defeated” indicates a blindness that cannot tell night from day. The fact that conservatives like Orbán and Kaczyński are winning elections simply means that conservative parties are winning democratic elections in Hungary and Poland. You may not like the fact that conservative parties have been winning elections in those countries, but then that’s democracy for you. That democracy is the achievement of 1989. — Indeed, Orbán’s ally Tárlos recently lost the mayoralty of Budapest, indicating that Hungarian democracy is indeed alive and well contrary to recent narrative peddled in this and other newspapers. Sad that having bought the propaganda of the (often ex-communist allied) opponents of the current, democratic, and therefore temporary, governments you doubt the permanent achievements in the region since 1989. Otherwise a comprehensive and reflective article on a world whose passing we should be unashamedly celebrating; not questioning, or worse mourning.
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