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
Angela Merkel
New Europe, new divide
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 shoulder
s.) 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.
Merkel’s stolid thesis reflects the extraordinary pro-tax consensus of the German political leadership: there is little difference here between Merkel, Schröder or Fischer. And without the tax card to play, Merkel is stuck arguing for labour market deregulation and programmes that would increase incentives to return to work. That’s nice, but these steps are not sufficient to restore ailing Germany. Nor do they make great billboard copy.
Still, it is foreign policy that matters most this morning and here Merkel, with her unabashed embrace of the US, has established herself as a true radical and one of the minority.
This very week, Mike Moore’s Stupid White Men, a parody-attack on the Bush administration, tops Der Spiegel’s non-fiction bestseller list. Moore’s film, Bowling for Columbine, which confirms every prejudice about US society a German might dream up, is doing pretty darn well too. Many Germans, especially eastern Germans – a great number voted for Schröder last autumn – will think she’s like Tony Blair. If he is the lapdog, she is the Schnauzer of the ‘Amis’.
The Merkel position is not even uniformly popular within her own party. This is something her rivals will try to exploit. Their goal would be to bump her up to candidate for the ceremonial presidency post, while reserving the powerful chancellor job for themselves.
Still, while Merkel may be a national exception, she is not necessarily a regional one. It was the central European nations, after all, that joined Spain in signing the Bush letter. In central Europe, pro-American sentiment is strong, and not especially party-political. Thus, for example, in neighbouring Poland opinion polls show citizens supporting the US to the same numbers that Germans reject it.
Even as Merkel finishes up at the Hotel Palace, the Polish prime minister Leszek Miller (head not of the conservative but the post-communist party) is arriving in Washington to meet President Bush and show his support. Topic A of the meeting: relocating some of the US military to Polish bases from German ones. For both Poles and the US, this prospect is delicious: no more nasty demos at Ramstein or Frankfurt. Just peace and quiet near Krakow.
The atmosphere within Germany may be changing as well. Earlier this month, voters abandoned Schröder’s Social Democrats in droves in two big state elections. Polls suggested the economy was the main factor behind their shift, but Schröder’s explicit peace-at-any-price line did not carry his party either.
Public opinion will probably move toward the US the moment an Iraq war is launched. Much, of course, depends on what happens in Iraq. In other words, Germany remains both isolated and in play. Its foreign policy confronts challenges not only from outside, but, as Merkel proves, from within.
7 JULY 2001
Queen Rania
A beauty battling for balance
Star status, world travel and controversy may have come with the job, but Queen Rania of Jordan would prefer to stay at home with her children
By Roula Khalaf
Queen Rania’s chief of protocol greets me at the River Café and tells me she is stuck in the Hammersmith traffic. ‘If she knew her way around, she would get out and walk,’ he assures me.
When the grey Mercedes enters the driveway half an hour later, Jordan’s tall, riveting beauty steps out. She apologizes as we make our way to a table in a shady corner of the garden.
She seems in a hurry and suggests we order promptly. ‘I hope they have good desserts,’ she says – a surprising remark given her tiny waist. Only nine months ago, she gave birth to daughter Selma, her third child. ‘You lose weight quickly after the third child,’ she explains. ‘And I work out.’
I stare at her – as do many around us – as she studies the menu. Her white Céline trouser suit and small diamond-studded earrings seem fit for smart royalty. But the camouflage top is the taste of a fashion-conscious 30-year-old. A few lines are visible under her huge brown eyes; the shiny eye-shadow is definitely superfluous.
Rania, brought up in a middle-class Palestinian family, has won sudden stardom as the youngest queen in the world.
‘Being the youngest queen doesn’t mean anything,’ she says, as she settles on a safe bet of mozzarella salad, grilled sea bass and sparkling mineral water. ‘Being young is temporary.’
She maintains the same confident, no-nonsense style throughout the lunch, as she displays her two personalities – the queen who speaks seemingly well-rehearsed lines with a US accent and the more spontaneous working mother who attempts to juggle family life and a hectic job and peppers her talk with Arabic expressions.
As she nibbles on a piece of bread, she tells me that King Abdullah – ‘my husband’, as she refers to him – took the children that morning to buy toys (she does not mention that he was due to meet British prime minister Tony Blair that day).
The rest of the family met her in London for a short break, following a trip to the US, where Rania attended the congressional launch of a bill providing $155m to the US Agency for International Development for microfinance projects around the world.
Her star status and interest in microfinance, the main activity of a foundation she runs, have turned her into the unofficial spokeswoman for the industry – a
role the Business Administration graduate from the American University in Cairo seems keen to highlight.
‘In a country like ours where we have unemployment, where we want people to be more self-reliant and not count on the government to create jobs for them, microfinance can be part of a solution,’ she says. ‘It’s also excellent for women. The majority of borrowers in Jordan are women and they gain confidence, become in control of their lives.’
There is, surprisingly, no hint of inexperience in her fast talk, even though she was thrust into the limelight in controversial and unexpected circumstances. The late King Hussein altered the course of the succession shortly before his death two years ago, removing his brother Hassan as crown prince and appointing Abdullah, his eldest son.
Also awkward was that her mother-in-law, the glamorous Noor, retained her title as queen – a move the late king insisted upon. ‘There is no tension between us,’ insists Rania, denying rumours of a family feud. ‘It’s very normal to have gossip about this. People come and go into positions. I understand this and she understands this – and I’m not a jealous person.’
Much of Rania’s focus seems to be on helping push forward King Abdullah’s agenda of modernizing a desert kingdom with a struggling economy. She travels around the country to open new computer centres in schools – one of her husband’s key projects. And, like him, she is often abroad.
But while the couple may be toasted in the west as a model of modern leadership in the Arab world, they are criticized at home for spending too much time away. Some people ask whether the royal family is more concerned with its international image than Jordan’s problems.
‘When people see me and King Abdullah, they see Jordan,’ says Rania. ‘In this global community we live in, if you don’t have your agenda on the world scene, you don’t get the attention.’ In fact, she adds, ‘if you ask me what I hate most about my job, I’d say it’s the travelling. I’d love to stay in Jordan, with my three kids, in my house.’
Lunch With the FT: 52 Classic Interviews Page 23