In his just-published memoirs, Lionel Barber, who was editor of the Financial Times from 2005 to 2020, has written about three trips to India and interviews with Narendra Modi, Manmohan Singh (“softly spoken Sikh”), P Chidambaram (“bumptious”), Rahul Gandhi (“Modi is a lot sharper”), the “feuding” Mukesh and Anil Ambani, Raghuram Rajan (“a brilliant academic”) and MK Narayanan (“formerly India’s chief spook”) at Raj Bhavan in Calcutta. In some ways, I find that FT — which Barber is proud of having transformed into a ‘global news organization’ with a million paid subscribers, is the best newspaper in London. Which is why I spent much of Tuesday reading The Powerful and the Damned: Private Diaries in Turbulent Times.
Barber has had a lot of lunches with a lot of important people but he told the Foreign Press Association in London on Monday: “Remember when you’re the editor you’re not friends with these people — there has to be some distance. And the reporters would confirm that I never sought to suppress a story or interfere where I knew the people.” His book reveals he set “a new rule for reporters: in future, all FT stories must be based on two independent sources. I want to be first with the news, but it’s more important to be right rather than first.”
In the ‘dramatis personae’ in politics, he lists 13 world leaders, including Modi, whom he interviewed first as “the firebrand chief minister of Gujarat” and subsequently as prime minister. “People are afraid, I tell Modi. He smiles grimly. ‘If the sun rises over darkness and people are afraid, it is not the fault of the sun’.”
Barber, a cricket fan, ends one trip to India by witnessing “Sachin Tendulkar, India’s greatest ever batsman, in his 200th and final Test match. Everyone... wants the Little Master, now 40, to make a century against the West Indies. Alas, it was not to be. Tendulkar fell at 74 to a sharp slip catch. The groans turned into a standing ovation as he made his way off the pitch — a memorable end to a memorable trip to the subcontinent.”
Help the world
The late Lieutenant-General Faridoon Noshir Bilimoria (“General Billy”) would have been very proud of his son, Lord Karan Bilimoria, who presided over the annual conference of the Confederation of British Industry last week as the organization’s first Indian head. Afterwards, when we talked of the small but influential Parsi network, Karan mentioned that his close friend, Cyrus S Poonawalla, the founder of the Serum Institute of India, was contracted to manufacture a billion doses of the Covid-19 vaccine developed by Oxford University in conjunction with AstraZeneca.
“I am so proud of him,” said Karan, the founder of Cobra Beer and chancellor of Birmingham University. “Cyrus Poonawalla, in many ways, deserves a Nobel Prize because of the tens of millions of lives that he has saved over the decades. He had a stud farm and is producing equine vaccines. And from nothing, he’s built this multi-billion dollar business... and is now the largest vaccine manufacturer in the world. But most importantly, he has produced vaccines at an affordable rate and they have been exported all over the world.”
Time together
It was sad to read that Robert Fisk, with whom I shared taxis in Tehran, had died, aged 74, at a hospital in Dublin, apparently from a severe stroke, according to The New York Times. I remember he enjoyed sticking his head out of the window and waving traffic out of the way with shouts of, “Press patrol! Press patrol!” On one occasion, an Iranian helicopter took us near Basra during the Iran-Iraq War and dropped us recklessly between the lines. We escaped only because both sides were terrible shots. On another, he accompanied me to see Ayatollah Sadegh Khalkhali, who expected me to ring him daily at 4 pm so that he could say gruffly/amicably: “Why are you bothering me — don’t you know I sign execution orders just now?”
At Qasr prison, Khalkhali would not talk to me until we had finished ice cream. Then he offered to hang a prisoner of our choosing “so you can have a good story”. By now I had learnt revolutionary lingo: “Agha, your hospitality knows no bounds... perhaps another day...”
In the taxi ride back to our hotel, Fisk appeared to be not entirely happy with me. He was then the star correspondent of The Times, and later moved to The Independent. He made enemies only because he was vehemently opposed to the policy of the United States of America in Iraq, Iran and West Asia generally. Fisk, who was named international journalist of the year a record seven times, once said: “You cannot get near the truth without being there.” Michael D Higgins, the president of Ireland, said in his tribute: “With his passing, the world of journalism and informed commentary on the Middle East has lost one of its finest commentators.”
Closer than before
Will Donald Trump merit big, fat books many decades from now? John F Kennedy was assassinated in 1963 but the passing decades have not dimmed the lure of ‘Camelot’. I have just started reading the 792-page JFK by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard historian, Fredrik Logevall. This “takes us as close as we have ever been to the real John F Kennedy in this revelatory biography of the iconic, yet still elusive, thirty-fifth president”. And this is only Volume One.
Footnote
Memo to Flurys on Park Street: Ravneet Gill tells me she is very keen to visit you. Ravneet is the 29-year-old star pastry chef in London who has written The Pastry Chef’s Guide: The Secret to Successful Baking Every Time, and just started as The Daily Telegraph’s new baking columnist with a recipe for “crème fraiche breakfast loaf with jam and pistachio cream”. She says: “I’ve been to India a few times and... was in Mumbai in July last year, teaching how to bake pastry... it was so much fun.”