the day after the deadline: can the union survive brexit and other deep questions

FT reporters are on the whole extremely well-trained and very aware that they are reporting on the City *as a story* rather than stanning for it. This breaks down a bit once you get into the opinion section but even there are some excellent writers (Martin Wolf) as well as some trash (Janan Ganesh). Its editorial team is unquestionably the strongest of any national newspaper.

janan ganesh is a good hate read tbf

in my capacity as ilx gossipmonger ratting out key elements of the professional revolutionary left, i can attest that they *all* read FT, and have done since the 60s: "it's where capital keeps itself accurately informed"

xp LOL yes, an NDA the signatories are not even allowed to read would be thrown out.

David Walliams is priapic, oleaginous trash BTW - notable even amongst comedians for being a scuzzbucket.

Hardly anyone is mentioned by name in that piece which suggests their lawyers have had a good go at it.

i: this is obviously the tip of the iceberg, there are going to be many events that are similar-but-not-quite-so-bad ( but still bad!) and some that are much worse
ii: fingers crossed it's another nail in the coffin of the third-way, public-private world as it currently functions -- events like this are exactly where councillors and developers and politicians and VCs and oligarchs and etc rub shoulders and discuss their real plans w/o being overheard, since everyone present is pressurable into silence by virtue ("virtue") of being present (even if they actually keep their hands to themselves and quietly feel bad abt it, which may be the case with a handful, they are alrwady pre-compromised)
iii: i'm thinking abt the mechanisms by which academies and [CONTROVERSIAL MODERATOR EDIT] and PFIs inevitably go rotten (from a dubious start-point)
iv: sleaze isn't really about individual peccadilloes, poor old stephen milligan with his auto-erotic tangerine, it's about communal pressure -- not to take away from how ugly it is just as an event in itself, presidents' club is by design a pressure point

lol i shd probably actually redact the more specific names in point iii shouldn't i? can a mod do this for me and i'll find a less perilous way to say it later?

DC's already done it ffs, I wanted to see :D

Reader comments on @miss_marriage's brave investigation are now closed, but read them, too, for confirmation that the attitudes and behaviour she describes are widespread. https://t.co/RtD8vR4dDx

— Andrew Hill (@andrewtghill) January 24, 2018

don't need to read the comments to know that tbf

yes i meant the section between "academies and" and "and PFIs" -- i think that could do with a <REDACTED> slapped over it

it's certainly true that you're the first person on the internet to claim that C4rillion has gone rotten. look i even googleproofed it

sigh

they're all in the guilds!

I'm not sure this will bleed into the wider PFI/Third Way story that much in the public consciousness, individuals donating to Great Ormond Street or whatever isn't really the sort of mechanism we're talking about here. What it does represent is potentially the moment where the #MeToo wave crashes straight into the wider, growing sense of anti-business, anti-establishment feeling that's been growing for the last decade.

The extent to which actual plans or business are discussed at these things is a moot point, I suspect it's more drunken jolly than anything else, but it's where connections are made that can be followed up in private later.

matt are you a mod? can you redact my (iii) as requested above? i will re-say it in a way that doesn't claim specific groups of people are being pressured towards in specific ways (which i think leaves the board a bit wide open)

speaking of which, i see great ormond street have returned the donation they received from the event xp

What does bear more examination is the murky nature of 'philanthropy' as it currently functions in international business elite culture.

(xpost - I can change it although I doubt it's an issue)

if you could

BBC Newsnight reported on this yesterday as a very bad / inappropriate / shameful event.

What does bear more examination is the murky nature of 'philanthropy' as it currently functions in international business elite culture

philanthropy has always been a figleaf to help capitalism appear less amoral, all the way back to andrew carnegie et al, but i'd struggle to name any unambiguous good which has come from it - like, i'm sure the amount this event raised for charity is absolutely dwarfed by the amount which could be raised for the treasury if the attendees and their businesses paid their fair share of tax, and stuff like the gates foundation's devotion to improving education is predicated on beneficiaries agreeing to enact bill and melinda gates' preferences for how teaching is done

I worked for charities in the past, never again.

"The comedian David Walliams was the host for the evening."

The latest Private Eye reveals that Walliams is good friends with the Candy Brothers. Jimmy Carr is too apparently.

more re david meller, pres of the pres club (and not to be confused w/david "toes" mellor or david "soons" mellor):

David Meller is also a patron of 'Academy Ambassadors', which is part of New Schools Network, led by Toby ‘best baps’ Young. ('Access denied' to the AA patrons webpage; see cached version, or Powerbase: https://t.co/xqKdThmlSh) https://t.co/FT5hnoyxBZ

— Tamasin Cave (@CaveTamasin) January 24, 2018

xp and Vernon Kay, bafflingly

lol david "soons" mellor = david "spoons" mellor (ie the late designer, as far as i know blameless in anything like this)

He’s quit now.

Walliams is claiming he didn’t see anything.

david walliams is appalled 👍

big of him

tbf it's hard to live as a typo

you have one bullet, use it wisely

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/imageserver/image/methode%2Ftimes%2Fprod%2Fweb%2Fbin%2F9ad8b71c-e67f-11e7-a07e-b2db9e9d66b2.jpg?crop=1593%2C896%2C0%2C83&resize=685

the angle might work for a single shot there

tbf to Walliams how was he to know that this event where the only women allowed in were paid hostesses would turn out to be a bit sordid?

i'd be tempted to put it in my own head tbh, and i don't think anyone could fault me for it xp

i hate these ppl -- and this kind of celebrity activity -- with the force of a trillion mcgraths and wish them the harm they deserve, but i actually suspect being "host" mainly involves being parachuted onto the dais for a bad keynote then tootling off to the next envelope-opening

more importantly they are a distraction from the mellerses

sure, i don't care about the celeb aspect, but this "oh it was just a paycheck i wasn't aware of the details" isn't far from the kind of excuse the attendees use for their own business practices

you don't not know. the pure stink of cosseted old het boners must have been smellable all the way to putney

i'd like to think that if i was rich, powerful and evil (last descriptor kinda redundant but i'll leave it in) i'd at least have the imagination to give my supervillain summits a bit of panache and hold them in my state-of-the-art sun-gun lair buried beneath an active volcano or something

a bunch of sweaty businessmen slavering over minimum-wage women in their late teens in some shitty nightclub is just so fuckin tacky, at least use your wealth for something creative

as i say, i think this is mid-level stuff: for worse, visit the luxury yachts of oligarchs

FT News Editor @SpiegelPeter has emailed newsroom staff about @miss_marriage’s Presidents Club investigation: "We're already at 525,000 page views, and it's clearly headed to the most read piece of FT journalism online ever."

— Mark Di Stefano 🤙🏻 (@MarkDiStef) January 24, 2018

holy moly

(btw how great a name is madison marriage)

it's like a weird inversion of ashley madison

https://realityisscary.files.wordpress.com/2016/08/olm-party.jpg?w=641

philanthropy has always been a figleaf to help capitalism appear less amoral, all the way back to andrew carnegie et al, but i'd struggle to name any unambiguous good which has come from it - like, i'm sure the amount this event raised for charity is absolutely dwarfed by the amount which could be raised for the treasury if the attendees and their businesses paid their fair share of tax, and stuff like the gates foundation's devotion to improving education is predicated on beneficiaries agreeing to enact bill and melinda gates' preferences for how teaching is done

This is true - the actual motives are likely to be varied (PR value, guilt, tax dodging, religion, genuine altriusm, ego, influence etc), but I suspect what unites a lot of them is devotion of a kind of privatised goodwill - individuals rather than governments deciding which good causes are allowed to benefit.

i actually suspect being "host" mainly involves being parachuted onto the dais for a bad keynote then tootling off to the next envelope-opening

I watched Michael McIntyre memorably alienate the audience and die on his arse at an awards ceremony once and he looked like he was hating every minute of it, so I suspect this is probably true. Everything about this particular example though screams the fact that everyone (including the woman who ran the hostess agency) knew exactly what was going to go down and their were structures in place to prevent anyone talking about it. As for Walliams, from a brightly lit stage you can't always see what's going on in a darker hall but even if he did he would have been incentivised to keep quiet like everyone else.

i'd like to state for the record that i'm absolutely certain that, once his hosting duties were complete, david walliams at no point waded into the crowd to sexually harass the hostesses like a horny octopus with a taste for human flesh

xp to a.lowe -- yes i think it's worth noting that this scuzzy interzone is NOT a new invention in british politics, esp.local politics: cf also our friends in the north

xp to matt: one of the key things private-public partnerships has imported into public works projects is a commercial-secrets block on public oversight (it's why i'm pleased at the FT's scornful attitude to the NDAs in this parrticular story, tho more business-directed NDAs won't be such a pushover)

non-xp: octopuses are good not bad

actually you're right i fucking love octopuses and i should not have defamed them thusly

Madison Marriage is being interviewed on WS r/n.

(mods can we have an i love octopuses board for mark and me pls)