Lionel Barber (2020). The Powerful and the Damned. London: WH Allen.
If one wants to understand power today, one could do a lot worse than reading former Financial Times editor Lionel Barber’s memoir-esque book, The Powerful and the Damned (2020). Sociologists like to think they understand power, but it is all too liable to be a power in the abstract; Barber, though writing polished prose in the retroactive style of a “diary” (he admits in the preface that he was not in the habit of keeping a diary during his 15 years’ tenure as FT editor, so the book is a backdated construction of sorts), produces a tantalizing glimpse into the personal relations and institutional fabric that undergird what we might term, following Bourdieu, the transnational field of power, a web of interconnected organizations, groups, and individuals who make up the upper echelons of financial, political, media, and even ecclesial power around the world. (Churchmen make their appearance several times throughout the book, often in unflattering proximity to the heavy-handed wielders of temporal power.) Though perhaps unsurprising to savvy social observers, Barber shows how power finally relies upon dense webs of personal relationships, constituted in the last instance by the interaction of flesh-and-blood individuals who mobilize money and words (or economic capital and symbolic power) to promote an agenda that they are not always in control nor even conscious of. And these webs of relations both enable and ensnare the operators of power, posing particular risks to journalists, who are always at risk of becoming caught up in the heady social games of the powerful, thereby forgetting their mission: the ceaseless, remorseless critique of power in the service of reducing social domination. All too often, however, Barber’s memoirs reveal how the media becomes a willing participant in relations of domination, not merely a bystander to but a willing participant in and party to the field of power, entranced by its interior privileges, spellbound by the gifts of the dominant, sometimes material, but often wholly symbolic (a gesture, a sign of deferral at the right time, a flattering invitation or visit, a sense of “belonging” to the club of the wealthy and esteemed).
What Barber shows so convincingly, perhaps against himself, is how much of the transnational field of power relies upon what we might call the bribe, those “gifts” or conferrals of “grace” that bestow upon the recipient an at times unconscious sense of obligation, debt, and even fealty to the giver. No more so than in the journalistic field, it seems, which is of course Barber’s sole vantage point, writing as he does from his perch atop the mighty, global newspaper FT, whose competitors, Barber repeatedly notes, are not so much other UK newspapers like the Times or the Guardian, even if the Guardian’s long-time editor Alan Rusbridger at one point seems to inspire Barber to try harder in the critique of power, probably unsuccessfully, but rather global and partly online outlets: “our direct competitors – Bloomberg, the New York Times, Reuters and the Wall Street Journal” (p. 258).
To be a successful transnational media operator, like Barber, means entering into the rough-and-tumble of reciprocal (metaphorical, sometimes concrete) gift-giving, schmoozing, and close-up involvement with financial, economic, and political power-players. “Breakfast with [Cabinet secretary] Sir Jeremy Heywood at the Cinnamon Club” (p. 258); “To Clarence House for a second ‘get to know you’ meeting with Prince Charles” (p. 267); “I’m happy to escape for a couple of nights at the five-star Beau-Rivage Palace hotel in Lausanne on the edge of Lake Geneva, in my capacity as host of the FT’s annual Commodities Summit” (p. 286); “George Osborne has invited me to Downing Street for a pre-election-day conversation” (p. 289). And so on, and so on, for fifteen consecutive years.
This mixing and mingling can only breed confusion—about the properly critical, and at the risk of sounding pathetic, watchdog role of the press. But Barber’s dilemma, who early on decides, unusually, to be a roving, roaming editor-writer, splitting his time between the London office and being out in the field interviewing powerful players—from Putin to Mohammed bin Salman to Theresa May (and one sense that his title smooths the way to interviewing these “movers and shakers”)—is that the bribe is in some sense the only way to “get by” in the transnational field of power. Taking the bribe, metaphorically speaking, is the only way to come along for the ride. The FT needs above all else access, which means obtaining early, semi-privileged information, or engaging in off-the-record background conversations that nevertheless inform or “color” the newspaper’s reporting or editorial stance, which means cultivating personal relationships, and which in turn demands throwing one’s whole personality and being into the ring of power.
The terrible truth is that there is no way to fully cover the field of power, journalistically speaking—going to the conferences, meetings, summits, doing the requisite interviews, snapping up the deep-background “color” and texture, which set papers of record like the FT apart from mere (and bland) news aggregators—without at the same time being coopted by the field of power. To write about the dominant, one must cultivate a personal relationship with the dominant, which appears to involve allowing them to infiltrate one’s being. In this sense there is something vaguely vampirical about business journalism (or reporting on power as such, for any lengthy, and therefore meaningful, time period). You can’t write about power without letting them sink their fangs into you, it would seem. Barber recounts how, right after Brexit, he is awarded France’s Légion d’Honneur, which British tabloids perhaps rightly understand as a kind of reward for trying to stave off Brexit (the FT was a Remainer outlet), and for the award ceremony “at the ambassador’s residence on ‘Billionaire’s Row’ in Notting Hill Gate,” Mario Draghi himself, flies in “quietly from Frankfurt” to be in attendance. “[T]his honour may have come from a foreign government, but it means a lot to me” (p. 341). As well it should, signaling the hug of death by a section of the field of power; no sufficiently critical reporter would ever accept a “prize” of this nature amidst one of their home country’s most fundamental socio-political struggles (i.e. Brexit) in decades.
At one point, Barber writes about the FT’s many “conferences” and how they “contained in-built conflicts between our duties as inquiring journalists and our responsibilities as event organisers,” which “required constant monitoring to ensure things did not become too cosy” (p. 287). But could not the same conflict be said to exist between reporting on the field and (therefore) participating in the field of power? The field of power exercises a kind of black-hole gravitational pull, sucking all bystanders into its event horizon. No matter one’s bulldog inclinations, the most hard-boiled reporter cannot withstand the allure, temptation, and flattery of unadorned Power. The proximity to power becomes a drug, a far more addictive cocktail than mere alcohol or narcotics, which are after all chemical intoxicants, unmatched by the sheer power of social intoxication. The “flattery” implicit in being chauffeured around the Saudi royal family’s palatial complex, the “flattery” of having to complain about endless rounds of jet-lag, the flattery of being addressed by the new British Prime Minister Theresa May on a first-name basis, the flattery of meeting on casually amicable terms with the then-Prime Minister Tony Blair, “who preferred sofa talk,” or David Cameron, “who liked to banter with chums” (p. 333), or who offers “a gracious thank-you for sticking with the Tories through austerity” (p. 289). Through no real fault of his own, Barber discloses the intimacy and rapport, the “palliness,” that spontaneously arises between members of the field of power, unless they maintain an absolute and almost super-human social vigilance, premised on the critique of power and reduction of social domination, elevated to the kind of civic duty that is in short supply in this book’s pages.
We read newspaper headlines daily, but rarely see the relations of power that go into their formation. What Lionel Barber’s book does quite well, perhaps in spite of itself, is draw back the veil on this process of symbolic production. Who will guard the guardians—when the guardians seem so content to stay in five-star hotels, jet around the world, attend banquets with the rich and powerful, and hang on their every word? Being a power-player like Barber was for years is no doubt hard work, and this book is filled with recollections of what must at times have been nearly back-breaking labor and excruciatingly long hours; but one wonders whether the press as reported on in these pages, and especially that part of the press devoted to financial and political power is not, finally, itself a part of the problem—and not the solution. Perhaps the implicit criticism here is asking too much of the FT, which is hardly a left-wing paper. But Barber’s decade-and-a-half-long stint at the apex of one of the world’s most influential media outlets serves as a reminder that behind every headline, there is a flesh-and-blood encounter between individuals; and this relation, necessary to generate information, is itself a risk, giving rise to a potential for affinities and proximities that threaten to impinge upon the deployment of media power.
The powerful know all too well the power of the press and will do a great deal to keep it in obeisance; to resist their charms, it would seem, takes more than we see on offer in these pages.