Insights

It has been a year of Events and the term “news anxiety” entered the lexicon. A swathe of global elections formed floating icebergs round the great glaciers of superpowers.

I have just come back from Antarctica so excuse the metaphor. By the way, a wonder of Antarctica, thanks to the treaty, is that nobody owns this massive continent, and all are pledged to protect it environmentally. What a model for peace on earth.

The world order has been tested by the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and then the war in the Middle East following the Hamas led attack on Israel in October 2023. The media has predicted third world wars. And yet the year ends, with the leader of the free world, widely reported to be crazy, but apparently a catalyst for ending the two wars for which there seemed to be no solution.

The phrase “sane washing” is used by some who are coming to terms with President Trump. For those of us who have made their careers in the media, it is a year in which we should humbly concede that we know nothing.

The election in the UK was both expected and unexpected. The timing of it caught some of us on the hop, including those of organising the Braemar Summit. It was as predicted a Labour landslide, but the results were also turbulent. In my rural constituency in South West Norfolk, the sitting MP, Liz Truss, got 11,217 votes. The Labour MP won 11,847 votes. Reform 9,958 votes and the Independent 6,282 votes. It was like watching a mad game of marbles.

When the farmers revolted against Labour’s budget, some of those Tory MPs who lost their safe rural seats shrugged that it was Brexit all over again and that the farming communities reaped what they voted for. And at the end of the year, Reform is still a destabilising force, boosted from its support by the personality of the year – Elon Musk.

Tuesday 5th November the world changed. The US West Coast elite were reported to be heading for the Cotswolds as a safe haven. Steve Bannon, voice of Trump’s America responded in the Sunday Times: “They’re not resilient. They had every advantage of state power. They had the high ground. And guess what, we broke them and now they’re whining like little children.”

Free speech got a little rougher and conventions of political discourse also changed. Again, as Bannon put it, “Somebody’s got to break the system.” Musk started a running commentary on the UK as a woke basket case. He defended The Telegraph journalist Allison Pearson after the police visited her home following an anonymous complaint about one of her tweets.

In the new world, in a smashing up of the system, one of the most powerful figures in the world, with more that 200 million followers, can get engaged in a scuffle on a dot on the map.

It is somehow significant that Elon Musk is now in a race to control space. It is apt that the Booker Prize winner, Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, is about the view from the space station of this utterly beautiful planet, somehow obscured by politics of conflict.

The year of news anxiety has been accompanied by a sense of fragility. The announcement in February that King Charles was suffering from cancer, was followed in March by a personal message from Catherine, Princess of Wales that she too was being treated for cancer. It has been a year for compassion and resilience. Mortality also came to parliament with Kim Leadbeater’s private members bill on assisted dying.

Meanwhile, low-level malaise continued to afflict the nation with more than four million people of working age on sickness benefits. Achieving growth without productivity is a headache for business leaders and politicians.

But hope springs eternal. Business conditions may be hard but at Hawthorn we are seeing green shoots everywhere and, particularly in science and technology, huge leaps of innovation and scale.

This year, at Braemar in London, we celebrated the extraordinary advances in medicine under the heading The Age of the Cure.

It was a year when celebrities publicly lost weight thanks to one drug. On a bigger stage energy is undergoing a massive transformation.

And a purpose-driven young workforce looks to improve conditions as well as to generate wealth. I have been personally thankful to Tilly Roylance and Bella Streule from Hawthorn for their foundational work in creating a network of support for the women of Afghanistan FAWN and many other causes have been aided thanks to the volunteering spirit of this company.

The restoration of Notre Dame is somehow a metaphor for the robustness of the human spirit. A group of us who visited Kering headquarters earlier this year took a detour to glimpse the progress and I reckon we need to return to appreciate the full glory.