Lunch With the FT: 52 Classic Interviews (31 page)

So apartheid
was
wrong, I say as we push back our chairs. Even now this National Party scion chooses his words carefully. The idea of separate homelands for South Africa’s black tribes – ‘nation states’, as he describes them – was ‘morally defensible’, he says. But it failed for three reasons: the whites were too selfish; as the economy grew so the races became intertwined – ‘we became an omelette and you can never unscramble an omelette’; and the ANC did not want to accept division along tribal lines. ‘In the end, because we failed we ended in the place which was totally morally unjustifiable.’

It is classic de Klerk. Most modern politicians would have concocted a more disingenuous response but he doggedly insists apartheid in its purest form just might have worked. At dinner that night, I ask my oldest South African friend, a liberal Afrikaner lawyer, about F. W. He was not an inspirational politician, the lawyer reflects. And yet, at a critical moment in his country’s history, he conquered his fear of the unknown and acted in the best interests of his country and not of his party – and that, we agree, marks him out with greatness.

28 SEPTEMBER 1996

The
FT
tries to tempt a slim former Chancellor of the Exchequer

By Lucy Kellaway

So there I was last Tuesday lunchtime at London’s Savoy Grill, offering Lord Lawson some advice on cosmetic surgery.

The problem with losing five stone, he had admitted, is that his skin is now too big for him. ‘It gradually adjusts but at my age it won’t adjust totally. I haven’t had anything done about it yet. I may or I may not, I haven’t decided.’

I looked at the loose skin under his chin and counselled him against a cut and tuck. Just imagine the figure of fun he would become. Just think of the newspaper headlines. ‘Perhaps you are right,’ he said. ‘I think I will take your advice.’

Had you told anyone 10 years ago that the then chancellor, famous for his arrogance and his fatness, would be reborn as a thin man, the author of a diet book, who meekly takes advice on personal matters from a journalist, you would not have believed it.

And you would have been right to be sceptical. In terms of bulk, Lawson is two-thirds the man he once was, but in terms of personality he has not changed one bit.

I had met him a year earlier at a dinner for writers of the
FT
Lex column and, on that occasion, he had seemed wearied by my attempts at small talk. He had also looked terrible, with skin yellow and crumpled like that of a tortoise; one could not say that the weight loss suited him.

Still, on Tuesday he was in excellent form and looking better; older
but spry. ‘My favourite thing is grouse, and there is no better grouse than at the Savoy Grill,’ he said cheerfully.

In an attempt to provoke him, I ordered a fattening dish of fried fish cakes with potato ratatouille. But nothing doing: his full attention was fixed on the wine.

‘Can I have something really good?’ he asked. He had in mind a 1989 Chateau Kirwan at £37.10 a half-bottle; I asked how much the next one down was. There seemed to be a wine which he was prepared to drink at £23.65, but not wanting to seem mean, I told him that he would have to make the choice himself. ‘Well, if it won’t get you into trouble …’

‘So tell me about yourself,’ he said, once the waiter had been dispatched. I talked. He listened charmingly.

But before long we got down to the serious business of discussing diets, and
The Nigel Lawson Diet Book
in particular.

‘Did you enjoy it, may I ask?’ he inquired.

I muttered something about me not being his target audience, but said I admired its length, a mere 120 half-sized pages of which he had written 60 and his wife the rest. ‘It is a limited subject and only requires a short book,’ he said, commending to me some of the psychological tricks described in the book that make the discipline of a diet less difficult.

However, his most effective ‘trick’ seems to have been in marrying Thérèse Lawson. When he decided to diet he gave her a list of acceptable ingredients and she drew up some delicious menus. A typical dinner chez Lawson might be a rack of fat-trimmed lamb, roasted
à point
with ginger, a strongly flavoured jus, and steamed spinach with lemon. I remarked that the diet might work less well for those of us for whom a typical dinner is microwaved lasagne.

‘The principles can be applied by anyone, but it may not taste quite so good,’ he insisted.

Over our first courses – his a marinated salmon with an anything but innocent looking sauce – we got on to the ticklish matter of his changed appearance. ‘People are extremely disconcerted,’ he explained, ‘because they have an image of me and if I don’t conform to it they feel uncomfortable. You know inside you are the same – but there is a mismatch
with other people, who think you must be different. I think that happens with the ageing process too.’

I was glad it was he who brought up ageing, so without seeming rude I could say that losing weight makes you look older.

He gave me a fixed look. ‘At first I may have looked older, partly because my clothes didn’t fit me,’ he replied. However, so many people asked him if he was ill that he started to fret. ‘I was worried, so I went to the doctor for a thorough health check.’

His grouse arrived and he was poured some wine. He gestured for a brief silence while he tasted it.

Does he expect his diet book to outsell
The View from Number 11
, his heavyweight political memoirs? I asked. ‘Nobody in their right mind, first of all,’ he said, easing himself into a lecture, ‘judges the merit of relative books by how much they sell. My ambition with my memoirs was to write something that would be of lasting value. I would hope that it will still be read long after I’m dead. But I wrote this book because it was meeting what appears – to my surprise – to be a demand, and it was something I could do jointly with Thérèse.’

Still, how would he feel if this book was so successful that he went down in history as Nigel Lawson, the man who lost the weight?

‘If I thought that was the only thing I’d be remembered for I’d feel disappointed.’

The waiter poured another half-inch of the wine into Lawson’s glass.

‘If you put the rest in the glass I can calibrate – co-ordinate – how much is left with the food.’ The waiter was at a loss, so Lawson explained more directly that he wanted all the wine poured out. ‘Thank you. Excellent.’

A trolley of desserts was wheeled past. ‘A double espresso,’ he said, as if he had been saying that all his life.

Still, he had had a good meal – rather better than mine – and the only things he had refused were bread, bread sauce and the dainty little crisps with the grouse.

So what is your next book going to be? I asked as I put my credit card on top of a bill for £114.55p.

‘I don’t want to say anything now,’ he said in a tone familiar from years of fending off questions on BBC Radio 4’s
Today
programme. ‘I wouldn’t want to tempt providence.’

The meal over, I took him to meet the photographer. ‘I hate having my photograph taken,’ he complained. Was that because he doesn’t like how he looks? I asked.

No, it turns out that if you are Lord Lawson you can teach yourself to change the eating habits of a lifetime. But you can’t teach yourself to hold a convincing smile.

22 FEBRUARY 2003

The chairwoman of the Christian Democratic Union has established herself as very different from most other leading German politicians. Preparing for a trip to the US this week, she talked to the
FT

By Amity Shlaes

Everyone is talking about the New Europe these days, so I thought I might seek her out. Who is this creature who dares to diss Schröder, Fischer and Chirac?

In the end, I located her – or one of her kind – in an improbably Old European setting: a private breakfast room in downtown Berlin’s Hotel Palace, the sort of sterile five-star place where the ghosts of the Elysée Treaty might commune. She appeared in the person of Angela Merkel, potential chancellor of Germany.

Merkel may be chairwoman of one of the stuffiest of Europe’s political parties, the go-along, get-along Christian Democratic Union. But this season she has challenged the German establishment by throwing the support of her party behind the smaller nations that penned the ‘New Europe’ letter to President Bush. On a Washington visit later this month, Merkel plans to take a position decisively to the right of Germany’s other big conservative leader, the preachy Edmund Stoiber of the Christian Social Union.

The Merkel rallying cry – ‘dictators understand only the language of threat’ – is so sharp, so inappropriate to the salon as to seem positively un-German.

When we met at the Palace, I reflected that the 48-year-old Merkel differed from most German alpha politicians in at least three ways. The first is that she is not a professional politician. She trained as a particle physicist, a job more serious and precise than any to be found in the marketing-obsessed Bundestag. The second is that she is an Easterner and lived plenty of adult years under the communists, even years when it still seemed at least possible that the Soviets would send their tanks rolling westward. In other words, her formative experience was the cold war. And she and her constituents in northern Stralsund and Rügen have had personal experience with a regime that is worse than anything the bad old US could possibly represent.

The third is that she is a woman, still not the norm for the top echelon of German politics. (In Germany, speechmakers from all parties but the Greens expand their chests like gorillas behind their podiums in order to maximize the breadth of their shoulders.) And while certainly pretty, Merkel does not sport the irradiated blonde look that tends to be mandatory for bright-eyed power women over the age of 35.

All these factors mean that the German political world tends to underestimate her as a competitor, or dismiss her as ‘not cutting edge’. A non-blonde, non-young woman without a big power base can’t win for the CDU and is just a quota choice, goes the received wisdom. Therefore, Stoiber had to be the 2002 chancellor candidate. Besides, Merkel’s critics argue: the cold war and its rhetoric are so yesterday. But it also means that she is accustomed to criticism, and is therefore refreshingly unflappable.

This morning, in any case, it does not seem to bother her a bit that the federal chancellor and foreign minister Joschka Fischer are hard at work negotiating the twists and turns of the German Sonderweg (special path) not far from where she sits. By her second sip of orange juice, Merkel has already detailed differences between her position on the US and Chancellor Schröder’s. These turn out to be wider than – to stick to the cold war imagery – the old Fulda Gap.

‘If I had been the head of the government, I would have signed that initiative,’ she says, referring to the letter published by leaders of eight countries airing their differences with German policy on Iraq.

‘There are two lessons we have from history. The first is “no war”. The second is “no special path for Germany.” ’ And that means, she sums up,
‘We always have to find solutions with our allies.’ This is the opposite approach of Schröder and Fischer’s UN blocking action.

‘What’s more,’ she says, staring from beneath her fringe, ‘Germany must ask: “What is in German interest?” It is not merely giving thanks to the US for history.’ It is also aiding the US. Germans, she says, are completely convinced that if anything happens to them, the US will save them. ‘They don’t realize if we don’t help America, America won’t help us.’

Now she speeds up, and the salmon, sausages and swirls of smoked ham in front of her lie untouched. Germans, she says, have to think about the reality of their new life as a big nation. Freedom is fine. But ‘we have not only rights, but also duties’.

There remains, however, the question of whether the ‘Angela as Rebel’ model will break down when it comes to economics. Chancellor Schröder has left the CDU and its Christian Social Union partner an enviable opportunity when it comes to taxes. Schröder’s insistence that it is time to raise rates provoked national outrage, generating a pop hit, ‘The Tax Song’ (‘Dog tax, tobacco tax – did you really believe more wasn’t coming?’). It’s a telling fact that the hit is also available in karaoke, so that the super-tax frustrated can belt out anti-tax solos to their heart’s content.

Merkel, alas, does not seem eager to exploit her tax advantage. Rather, she posits that Germany cannot afford rate cuts because they will widen the deficit too much.