Comment
Getty
My message of hope for the young
Last week, says Mariella Frostrup in The Times, I sat in a grand hall, surrounded by excited young adults ready to head out into the world and make something of their lives. But this landmark moment – my daughter’s graduation – was entirely spoilt by the miserable speech given by the vice-chancellor. All this person could think to talk about was what difficult times lay ahead, with a challenging job market, global turbulence and the ever-encroaching threat of AI, culminating in a pathetic squeak of “hope” that a few of them might make it out alive. As with so much of society’s messaging these days, the overall theme was: God help you all.
What a wasted opportunity. If ever there was a moment to galvanise these graduates’ aspirations to make a mark, change their world for the better and be a hopeful and hard-working citizen, “this was surely it”. When I arrived in London in 1979, we faced rocketing inflation, soaring mortgage rates and mass unemployment. But no one told us to wallow. Instead, we pulled up our socks, built up resilience in the face of knock-backs and climbed the ladder. It’s also worth saying what the Bristol bigwig didn’t, which is that having a degree remains a phenomenal achievement, which leaves graduates a third less likely to be unemployed than those without. Success in life isn’t fostered by counting up the odds stacked against you but by believing opportunity is there for the taking. The world may not be perfectly as we would like it, but changing the status quo means “nurturing and fuelling the younger generation’s ambition to change it”, rather than offering up excuses for why they might fail.
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Property
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Life
The would-be racing driver who ended up at Cocaine Castle
Paddy McNally’s dreams of becoming a racing driver were thwarted by modest talent, says The Times. Instead, he became a motorsport journalist, before briefly managing three-time world champion driver Niki Lauda, then going on to “revolutionise” advertising and hospitality in Formula One, including setting up the franchise’s swanky Paddock Club. This turned out to be lucrative business, and by 2006, he’d sold up for a staggering £262m. His fortune bought him homes in Britain, France and Switzerland, where he spent many heady years in the exclusive Alpine resort of Verbier.
McNally, who has died aged 88, frequently held court at Verbier’s Farm Club, dancing the night away with a coterie of regulars whose individual bottles of expensive vodka, initialled with a marker pen, were stashed behind the bar. A table was reserved for him every night, just below the DJ booth, with proximity to his perch “defining the club’s social hierarchy”. He hosted raucous parties at his chalet for hedonistic hedge fund managers and “louche members of the British upper class”. The property became known as “Cocaine Castle”, and many a tall story emerged, including of the time a guest parked in front of the garage. Rather than asking for the car to be moved, McNally “drove straight through the offending vehicle”. It was during these years that he struck up a relationship with Sarah Ferguson, who was 22 years his junior but who found the “balding bespectacled widower” fun, charming, “and most importantly rich”. Despite a turbulent romance – McNally was a cad with a “roving eye” – he remained one of her most loyal friends. “Whenever I wanted advice, I turned to him,” she once said. “He seemed to have seen and done everything.”
Global update
The Pyongyang skyline in 2018. Simon Holmes/Getty
The chilling truth about North Korea’s “Pyonghattan”
In central Pyongyang, says Christopher Harding in The Telegraph, a cluster of residential districts has acquired the unlikely nickname: “Pyonghattan”. Built for North Korea’s elite, the area boasts brand-new flats, cinemas, shopping centres, bars and restaurants. The “chosen few” stroll around litter-free streets, buy Chanel and Rolexes, undergo expensive cosmetic surgery and are driven around in Mercedes-Benz saloons, complete with drinks fridges. The best digs are reserved for top-level scientists working on nuclear and space projects, who enjoy air conditioning and state-of-the-art Japanese bidets. All, of course, courtesy of an extractive state machine that preys on ordinary North Koreans through unpaid labour and compulsory “patriotic gifts” of cash and goods, as well as hard currency generated abroad through large-scale cryptocurrency theft.
Still, “money can’t buy you everything”. No one is permitted full access to the internet for fear they will see how life compares elsewhere, and they are subject to a finely tuned repressive machine “combining surveillance with harsh punishment”. Homes are wiretapped, with comings and goings and domestic conversations routinely recorded then made available to fellow elites who may covet your job, car or apartment, encouraged by the state. Those who fail to inform on others can “expect the firing squad”, and in a society where guilt by association is deeply ingrained, innocent family members are also dragged in to face death. They are placed in the front row of executions and, according to one senior North Korean defector, “their reactions carefully observed”. They can’t cry and know that if they lower their gaze, “hundreds of people connected to them could also suffer”. But they can’t rebel, either. A revolution, after all, will only result in their “losing a lot more than their Rolexes and karaoke nights”.
The Knowledge Crossword
Quirk of history
Berlusconi and Putin in Sardinia in 2003
Berlusconi’s “playground for whims”
Before Mar-a-Lago, there was Villa Certosa, says Mattia Ferraresi in Air Mail: Silvio Berlusconi’s sprawling estate on the northeast coast of Sardinia, which provided the template for a home where “international politics and frat-house spirit merged”. The bombastic Italian prime minister insisted that his 300-acre fiefdom be kitted out as a “maximum-security site” – complete with nuclear shelter – and all activities there were automatically classified. During his “effervescent” years, heads of state from all over the world visited. Vladimir Putin, who was “among the most frequent guests”, once brought a giant firefighting plane he hoped to flog to the Italian government. Tony Blair was welcomed by Berlusconi in a “generously unbuttoned” shirt and a bandana covering “yet another hair transplant”.
In Villa Certosa’s heyday, visitors enjoyed a variety of wonders: an amphitheatre with 2,100 species of succulents; a collection of larvae imported from Brazil that turned into butterflies all at once; a giant whale fountain that spouted water on command; a meterorite that had landed in India on display in the garden; a swan lake; and a bumper-car track where he pitted his ministers against one another. The pièce de résistance was an artificial volcano, which exploded with lava at the press of a button, and which he first set off in 2006 “following a stinging electoral defeat”. Wild nights of “bunga bunga” at Villa Certosa did, naturally, produce the odd victim. Paparazzi caught the then prime minister of the Czech Republic, Mirek Topolánek, naked and “flying his flag at half-mast” by the edge of one of the seven swimming pools. But it was a true “playground for whims” – like Mar-a-Lago, but on a “far grander scale”.
Quoted
“Nothing shows a man’s character more than what he laughs at.”
Goethe
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