GB News has been trying to shake up British broadcasting for three years. Along the way, the fledgling channel has attempted to foment an “anti-woke” crusade, stretched UK impartiality rules and lost £100mn. This summer, I had a backstage seat as it scrambled to cover Labour’s historic electoral victory and an outbreak of extremist far‑right violence. The self‑proclaimed “People’s Channel” is angrier than ever.
Monday, June 24.
10 days until the UK election
The strange thing about going inside GB News is how little there is to go inside. The broadcaster has lived rent-free in the heads of many people, but, physically, it occupies just half the basement of a nondescript building near London’s Paddington station. Its floorspace is that of a large family home.
The reception is also the kitchen. A sign reminds staff that any mugs with unfaded logos should be saved for presenters to use when on air. Around the corner is a crammed, open-plan office: producers sit a few yards from the chief executive, Angelos Frangopoulos. “We have a very simple work-from-home policy — there isn’t one,” he tells me, smiling.
The squeezed surroundings put GB News’s influence into perspective. On screen, it loudly questions gender policy, but due to space constraints its own toilets are gender-neutral. On screen, its pundits have campaigned for retailers to accept cash, but, upstairs, the building’s café only accepts card payments. The set-up is less media mogul, more student revolutionary living with the parents.
When I visited in June, GB News was struggling with two transitions. First, the market for broadcast advertising had proved tougher than expected. Three years after its launch, the channel was still losing tens of millions of pounds a year, partly because of a boycott campaign by the pressure group Stop Funding Hate, which attempts to divert advertising from media groups that it says promote “fear and division”. Second, the centre of gravity in British politics seemed to be moving away from the Brexity, anti-woke populism that GB News promised to represent.
GB News hoped to reshape British TV news in a post-Brexit world — to provide an alternative to the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Sky News, which pride themselves on impartial journalism, but which, to some, are guilty of liberal metropolitan bias. Critics worried it would have the same impact that Fox News did in the US: undermining truth, dragging voters to the right. But 10 days before the general election, it didn’t look like GB News could drag viewers anywhere.
“People aren’t searching for [the election], people aren’t sharing it,” sighed Geoff Marsh, a former Daily Express journalist who runs GB News’s website. Even an election betting scandal hadn’t excited audiences. Overhead screens showing web traffic made clear the big story was a missing British teenager in Spain. On air, the hosts were discussing the risk posed by seagulls. Then, helpfully, some royal news broke: a horse had slightly injured the king’s sister, Princess Anne. The 27-year-old presenter, Tom Harwood, told viewers solemnly that the official statement confirming the princess would make a full recovery contained “an element of hope”. Many presenters are at the very beginning of their careers, like Harwood, or the very end. “We go from wheelchairs to training wheels,” Frangopoulos joked.
GB News currently reaches 3.7 million people a month and accounts for 0.7 per cent of all live TV viewing. It has a niche. Perhaps not a profitable one, but in politics, profits aren’t essential. GB News has become influential. Half of Conservative party members watch it regularly. In by-election campaigns, “people would cross the road to say, ‘I’ve seen you on TV,’” one figure from the hard-right Reform party told me. “It’s had a massive significant impact on name recognition.”
The money, or much of it, has come from Sir Paul Marshall, a hedge fund boss, Brexiter and evangelical Christian. Marshall has emerged as one of the most important backers of rightwing and contrarian media in the UK. He founded the website UnHerd in 2017, owns 38 per cent of GB News and, this week, bought The Spectator magazine for £100mn. A self-described classical liberal, who complains that today’s “crony capitalism” is discrediting free markets, Marshall’s aim is to lead a total rewiring of Britain’s political debate. Propping up today’s Tory party is not the priority.
Indeed, back in June, Frangopoulos predicted that the Tories’ post-election implosion would play to GB News’s strengths. “For me, July 5 onwards is a bigger day than July 4,” the day of the vote, he said. By then, the channel might have its star presenter, Nigel Farage, back. And what about Boris Johnson, who signed up to GB News almost a year ago, promising to appear “shortly”? Would he ever arrive? “One would hope so.”
In the two months I spent observing and visiting GB News this summer, Johnson predictably didn’t turn up. But a lot else did. The Conservatives were nearly annihilated in the election. Farage’s Reform party emerged as a serious political force. Violence erupted on the streets of major English cities, fuelled by racist and anti-immigrant views. GB News had to choose how to frame all this, while making one in seven of its staff redundant for financial reasons.
Now that the Labour party is in power, GB News has even more opportunities to rail against the supposedly out-of-touch establishment. It has sought to drag the political debate back to immigration and other culture wars. GB News has become, in the words of one former adviser to Johnson, “the perfect metaphor for the battle for the soul of the Conservative party”. But after the conservatism of the past decade had been so discredited, could its rowdy extremism instead be the perfect match for the hard-right forces seeking to step into the void?
When GB News launched in June 2021, Boris Johnson’s brand of populist conservatism was ascendant. The channel aimed to be the biggest news broadcaster in Britain by 2028, overtaking the publicly funded BBC and Comcast-owned Sky News.
It also had a star: Andrew Neil, one of Britain’s most lauded political interviewers, who had worked for years for the BBC. Neil agreed a four-year contract as a GB News presenter, which, together with his role as chairman of the new broadcaster, would pay him about £1mn a year plus share options. But the launch was marred by mishaps: for starters, the sound wasn’t in sync with the pictures. The whole thing looked like it was “coming from the nuclear bunker of the president of North Korea”, Neil fumed to a parliamentary committee in May. Neil told me that he’d asked the board to delay the launch, but was in “a minority of one”. He broadcast eight shows, then quit.
Frangopoulos told me that Neil’s account is “absolute garbage”. It was Neil who insisted on the launch date (“that was the date he was available”) and who declined to do more than one rehearsal, he said. Neil also rejected the idea of flying on a commercial jet, even in business class, from his home on the French Riviera to London for the launch, Frangopoulos added. Flying your star presenter in by private jet from France wasn’t the ideal start for a proudly patriotic, anti-elitist channel. But nevertheless they chartered a plane. On landing, Neil sent an email with the title, “The eagle has landed”, complaining that he and his wife had survived a flight on the world’s smallest private jet. “I was, like, fuck off,” Frangopoulos recalled.
Neil, in turn, disputed this account: “I never asked for a private jet. Paul Marshall offered a private jet.” His email was intended as “a joke”, he said, but the jet was “really small . . . My wife thought we were going to crash.”
The plane didn’t but the ratings did: some GB News shows registered zero viewers. Yet, to Neil’s surprise, the channel survived. It started to outperform TalkTV, Rupert Murdoch’s rightwing start-up. At 8pm, GB News’s TV rookie Jacob Rees-Mogg, a Conservative MP best known for his beloved nanny and Victorian language, drew more viewers than TalkTV’s £15mn-a-year headliner Piers Morgan. “Even though we didn’t have the financial resources that they have, we were authentic,” said Frangopoulos.
Frangopoulos, who learnt his trade in Murdoch’s Australian media empire, has taken GB News further right than some initial backers wanted. He left his previous job running Sky News Arabia after clashing with its chairman, Sultan al-Jaber. At GB News, he is the great survivor: sacking veteran presenters and outmanoeuvring executives who brought their own ideas (one, a former ITV commissioner called Helen Warner, left after just two months). His energy was key to the channel’s launch. Ever since, he has fought his battles surreptitiously, and he has won.
July 4-5.
Election night and the morning after
Watching GB News on election night, you had the strong sense that a landslide victory was being delivered . . . for Farage’s Reform party. The channel was hosting an event in Essex with a group of viewers. “Reform — the only option!” one man announced. Shortly after midnight, political editor Chris Hope described the party’s second-place finishes in almost 100 constituencies as extraordinary.
Some Conservative advisers had hoped that GB News would be their bulwark: they made key ministers available for interview. But the channel launched just as the Johnson government’s popularity started to slump. Even voters on the right were angry. A full-fat populist alternative made better TV. GB News, which had initially promised positive news about Britain, fuelled the narrative that the country was careering downhill.
Rishi Sunak had been Neil’s first big interviewee on the channel. On election night, the presenters dispatched him with gleeful zeal. Patrick Christys asked retired darts player Bobby George to throw a dart to predict the number of hours until the prime minister’s resignation. The lighting was such that George couldn’t see the dartboard properly, but Christys was undeterred: “Just lob it!”
It wasn’t a vintage night for GB News. At one stage, its graphic mixed up the exit poll and showed a victory for the Conservatives. Its election night audience totalled just 584,000, one-ninth that of Sky News and less than one-third of Channel 4’s. BBC One, meanwhile, reached 11.2 million.
The following morning I returned to the office to see how GB News was adjusting to life after the Tories. “Do you live here now? Are you and him going out?” asked Mick Booker, another former Daily Express journalist who, as editorial director, is Frangopoulos’s second-in-command. Frangopoulos was chipper. Nigel Farage, Lee Anderson and Richard Tice — all GB News presenters — had been elected as Reform members of parliament. “The story is there’s a new political party that’s come from nowhere, and three of the four MPs are GB News presenters.” Reform later won a fifth MP, although the other news channels decided the bigger story was Labour entering government.
In its early days, GB News wooed Tory politicians: it paid more than £660,000 in appearance fees and salaries to Conservative MPs, and just £1,100 to Labour MPs, according to analysis by The Guardian. One of those Tory MPs was Anderson, who earns £100,000 a year from GB News, and defected to Reform. GB News’s centre of gravity shifted too. The afternoon and primetime schedule is now presented entirely by allies of Farage or of his previous parties:
3-6pm: former Brexit Party MEP Martin Daubney
6-7pm: former Brexit party candidate Michelle Dewberry
7-8pm: Farage himself (replaced by Anderson on Fridays)
8-9pm: Jacob Rees-Mogg, who has called for Farage to be welcomed into the Conservative party
Last year, Frangopoulos said GB News was “not just channel Farage”. But it’s not far off.
On July 5, Frangopoulos insisted the election had managed to “normalise” GB News. The channel is now part of the TV pool system, taking turns to film interviews that are distributed to all broadcasters. Political parties had given it exclusive interviews. Its coverage had not sparked regulatory investigations — “touch wood”.
There were complications. Rees-Mogg had lost his seat. In a post-defeat interview, he had said he’d see his viewers at 8pm on Monday as normal. But Frangopoulos seemed worried he might be past his sell-by date. “We’re probably going to have to have some conversations.”
Around 12.30pm, Keir Starmer appeared outside Downing Street. Frangopoulos asked for a simple layout: “This is history. Keep it clean.” Then, to his horror, a small box warning viewers about flash photography appeared on the screen. He demanded it be removed, but was told it was a regulatory requirement. “Ofcom bullshit!” he retorted, noting that BBC, Sky and ITV — carrying the same footage — had no such warning. “A good example of double standards.” In fact, channels have discretion on how to handle flashing lights: GB News’s overstretched team had, this time, been overcautious.
Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator is a grey, highly technical agency. It oversees Britain’s widely admired broadcasting industry and, as of last year, is charged with controlling harmful content on the internet. To have a broadcasting licence, British broadcasters must commit to “due impartiality and due accuracy” in their news coverage. Ofcom was initially tolerant in how GB News interpreted this, distinguishing between news, which would be held to strict standards, and current affairs like evening chat shows, which were allowed more leeway. It allowed politicians to present current affairs shows.
GB News has bent the norms of journalism. A member of staff likened its approach to paparazzi trespassing on to someone’s lawn to get the right photo. One presenter told me they had informed a cabinet minister of the questions they would be asked to lure him on to the show. Another, Bev Turner, refused to be vaccinated against Covid. She told me the £37bn that the UK spent on Covid testing and tracing might have led to secret surveillance technology. “We need to ask questions . . . The state in collaboration with big business is keen to control people. You only have to look at the UN Agenda 2030 — it is all there . . . I lie awake at night worrying: will I be able to travel freely without a carbon credit?”
In 2023, Ofcom’s tolerance reached its limits. One obvious turning point was an incident where GB News regulars Dan Wootton and Laurence Fox made misogynistic comments about a female journalist — an incident that provoked more complaints to the regulator than any other British TV broadcast in 2023. The channel fired Wootton, Fox and another presenter who supported them. Ofcom later ruled it had “significant concerns about GB News’s editorial control of its live output”.
Ofcom also found a GB News immigration debate had dismissed “limited alternative views”. The channel had launched a Don’t Kill Cash campaign, inspired by an employee’s elderly relative being unable to pay for parking. It was justified on anti-establishment, libertarian grounds: vested interests wanted card payments, through which third parties would be able “to track you and your spending”. But the regulator found that, as a campaign to change government policy, Don’t Kill Cash breached impartiality rules. In total, Ofcom found that GB News breached rules 12 times since 2021. (ITV and Sky News had zero breaches over the same period.) Another investigation is still open. Critics want the law changed so that all current affairs output is held to the same standards as news programmes. GB News, on the other hand, is seeking a judicial review of some of the decisions.
Following the rulings, GB News tried to whip up anger, telling its viewers: “Don’t let them silence you . . . there are those who want us — and you — silenced. They will stop at nothing to have this channel and free speech shut down.” According to a former employee, “Angelos saw rows with Ofcom as a badge of honour.” In response, Frangopoulos said that “good journalism should always challenge the boundaries. We chose to be regulated and we take compliance seriously.” But the channel was cowed. A Reform party figure told me that he felt GB News was becoming “less friendly” to the party. “I think GB News is very worried about Ofcom.” One of its most controversial guests, the historian David Starkey, stopped appearing on air in February. Starkey had been “cancelled” from other channels for saying that “slavery was not genocide, otherwise there wouldn’t be so many damn blacks in Africa or in Britain”. Now even GB News had not renewed his contract.
Wednesday July 17.
Day of the King’s Speech
GB News keeps its spiciest content for the evenings. After the election, the culture secretary Lisa Nandy declared that the government would no longer stoke culture wars. But GB News isn’t interested in a truce. “Three-quarters of the Muslim population in Britain don’t pose us any difficulty or problems at all, but there’s a growing number of young men particularly that do,” said Farage, now an MP, on his GB News show of July 16. He was interested in the “rise of sectarian voting . . . a Muslim vote.”
Later, Christys discussed Labour’s plans for more devolution to regional cities, arguing that more power would end up in the hands of mayors “like Brighton and Hove’s recently elected mayor, Mohammed Asaduzzaman”. The screen cut to footage of a Muslim man having a garland of flowers draped around his neck. “You know, all right, OK,” Christys said. “But realistically do we want more power in the hands of people like that?”
The leader of Brighton council called the clip “racist garbage”. It was a triple outrage. The mayor of Brighton is a largely ceremonial position, appointed by councillors and entirely unrelated to the regional mayors, who are part of the devolution plans. The footage had been taken from an anti-Muslim account on X, RadioGenoa, that would later describe far-right rioters as “patriots”. And it wasn’t even of Asaduzzaman. Two days later, Christys apologised for wrongly identifying the mayor, and wrongly describing his role. But the basic thinking remained unquestioned. “Farage knows where the line is,” said a former employee who left this year. “We have a bunch of people who don’t even know the line exists.”
Frangopoulos said Christys “was clearly referencing people being in positions of power . . . who hold views that may be seen as anti-Israeli”. The show presented no evidence that Asaduzzaman held such views. Two other people told me that the production team has tried to steer Christys away from talking about Muslims. Christys denies this.
GB News’s presenters are mostly avowedly rightwing, so it seeks to meet rules on balance by inviting on leftwing guests. There seems no prospect that the audience will agree with them. The approach is “pretend pluralism”, said the former employee who left the channel recently. The Fox News-ification of GB News means “holding your viewers in such contempt that you think you’re there to wind them up”. James Schneider, who was a spokesman for the leftwing former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, and is a regular guest on GB News, disagrees. Although the channel is “structurally highly biased against the progressive voice, through topic selection, framing and personnel, they do generally give you more space to argue your side than other broadcasters”, he said. On GB News, it might be “two from the hard right versus me”, compared to “four versus one” on the BBC.
Rolling news and debates are now the staple fare. It’s a diet of immigration, culture wars and Brexit betrayal. Frangopoulos cancelled On the Money, a finance show presented by Liam Halligan, on the morning of its anniversary show in 2022. “He made sure it was as brutal as possible,” said one person involved. Halligan, one of GB News’s most credible journalists, stayed at the channel until he was made redundant this year.
Watching several hours of GB News’s output, I could accept its appeal. The evening shows featured a rambling discussion of politics — they could easily keep you company. Farage is a good broadcaster, articulate, relaxed, not entirely predictable. But he comes at a cost. He is a target for those pushing the advertising boycott. The radio station LBC dropped him in 2020, after he compared Black Lives Matter protests to the Taliban.
Many of GB News’s ads concern reclining chairs, retirement homes and prostate cancer. Only 10 per cent of viewing hours are from people under the age of 54 — and big-name advertisers are wary. For more than two years, GB News has been broadcasting the same ad by Gold Reserves, a chain of three Welsh jewellery shops. “They’re the most crap ads,” says one former employee. “I don’t know how they can expect viewers to sit through an ad break.”
The coverage also features wild swings of the camera, unexplained crashing sounds from out of shot, and guests talking over each other while not visible. The station still hasn’t bought enough microphone battery packs, so presenters sometimes find communication cut off. To save money, GB News asks presenters to control their own autocue, and has no camera operators in the studio. Sometimes a single “pilot” must direct the show and arrange the sound and graphics — jobs that at the BBC or Sky might be done by three or four people. “We really can’t do with less people,” one producer told me. “No one ever really gets breaks . . . At the end of the day, I’m shattered.” But while the BBC and Sky News can feel exhaustingly earnest, GB News has the rowdiness of a discussion outside a pub. For a rightwing news junkie — unbothered by anti-Muslim insinuation, dodgy visuals and repetitive ads — it might well make sense.
The anti-Muslim rhetoric has been echoed by GB News’s co-owner, Paul Marshall, who has “liked” extremist content on social media. In January, Marshall liked a tweet from RadioGenoa with a photo of praying Muslims captioned: “These people . . . came to conquer and replace British people. Allah wants this.” Marshall has said the likes do not reflect his views. In April, he nonetheless stood down from the board of GB News’s parent company, which now comprises a former government minister, three investment managers and an investment banker.
All the board members have actively supported conservative politics. None has prior experience in TV. Alan McCormick, the chairman, explained: “Ask anyone under 50 and almost no one receives their news and debate via television, this is fast becoming a bygone era, we need fresh thinking.” Three years after launching as a TV channel, GB News sees the future elsewhere.
Marshall and GB News’s other owner, Dubai-based investment firm Legatum, have bankrolled the broadcaster. In the year ending May 2022, its pre-tax loss was £30.7mn. The following year losses widened to £42.4mn. Marshall and Legatum agreed to put in a further £60mn.
“It’s never going to make enough money,” says Gill Hind, a media analyst at Enders Analysis.
In the US, Fox News and other cable news channels are paid by cable companies for the right to transmit them. UK channels, in contrast, are almost entirely reliant on advertising. Financially, GB News really isn’t Fox News: its revenues were £15.5mn last year, while Fox News’s were about $3bn. Total losses have now exceeded £100mn.
Billionaires tend to tire of losing such sums, even on passion projects: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos made cuts at The Washington Post, which he bought in 2013 and which lost $77mn last year. “Paul and the Legatum guys have deep pockets, but they are not infinite,” says one person who has worked with them. “He likes new toys . . . GB News is a very demanding baby,” said another. Having bought The Spectator, Marshall is among a small group of bidders for The Telegraph, expected to cost somewhere below £600mn. Those outlets have a record of profits.
To reduce costs, GB News announced 40 job losses but found more volunteers, cutting headcount from 295 to “well below 250”. A number of senior women left. Four female former employees said they felt GB News was a difficult place for women, although they asked for their specific experiences not to be detailed so as not to identify them. Some had signed non-disclosure agreements. “Whether it’s intended or not, there’s an inherent misogyny coming from Angelos,” said one. Frangopoulos rejected this, pointing out that GB News’s commercial director is a woman, as is one of its five board members.
In search of extra advertising, GB News repackages its sound for a digital radio station. It has started using AI — trained on the voice of one of its presenters — to announce sports results for radio listeners. The voice of “real Britain” is now partly computer-generated.
Another idea has been to sign up its audience as members. Within five years, GB News hoped that 134,000 people would be paying £5, £10 or £20 a month. The overhead screen in the office told me that so far only 8,885 had joined. (The number is now about 12,000.) Frangopoulos pointed to new revenues from the US and from social media advertising. When I asked him when GB News would stop losing money, he was vague, pointing to “the next few years.” Meanwhile, the online store sold Farage-branded pint glasses for £16.99 and branded red, white and blue socks for £26 a pair.
In late July, Britain went mad, and GB News presenters saw an opportunity. After three children were killed in a tragic stabbing at a dance studio in Southport, Farage wondered, first on X and then on his GB News show, whether “the truth is being held from us” by the police. “Is it fair and reasonable to ask questions?” he asked his viewers. Violent incidents were evidence of “societal decline”, he added.
Riots had broken out across the country, fuelled by the idea that the 17-year-old attacker was a Muslim immigrant. They continued, even when it was revealed that the suspect was the Cardiff-born son of Rwandan Christians. GB News banged the anti-immigration drum harder. Starkey was invited back on air. He predicted “sustained inter-ethnic conflict . . . Hindu and Pakistani, Hindu-Muslim and, I’m afraid, between whites and everybody else”.
Mark Dolan, filling in for Christys, seemed more interested in blaming mainstream politicians than the rioters. “Although the riots in Southport were an absolute disgrace, Britain’s multicultural experiment is in crisis,” he said. “Why shouldn’t people be angry about vast, legal net migration? . . . They should be angry,” he continued the next day.
Back from holiday, Christys referred to grooming gangs, “machete madness every single day”. “There is no place for far-right criminality in Britain. But there are millions and millions and millions who are just fed up.” On August 1, GB News’s poll of the day was: “Are the left elite to blame for the violence in Southport as they continue to smear and ignore angry communities?” Two-thirds of the online respondents voted Yes.
Senior figures at GB News were pleased: viewing figures were “through the roof”, in the words of one presenter. Frangopoulos was on holiday in Australia, but the coverage bore his imprint, especially in refusing to label the rioters far-right. “I think one of the great problems that journalism has is placing labels on people, without any nuance,” he told me. He declines even to call Tommy Robinson, the UK’s most famous anti-Muslim rabble-rouser, far right. “As a non-Brit, I don’t know him, I’ve never met him, he’s never been on the channel.”
By now, senior staff who might have pushed for a different angle had left. “In my experience, anyone still left there is thankful to still have a job and do what they are told,” said one former employee. A producer told me they would challenge some views in meetings “in the hope that those views don’t go on television”. They were proud of the audience that GB News had achieved, but added: “A lot of producers are probably looking for other jobs.”
In July, GB News said it would be “closely monitoring” Elon Musk’s antitrust action against advertisers who boycotted his social media platform, X. Frangopoulos, 59, has pitched GB News as a tech company, a “broad-based media company”. To me, it resembled something less novel: a rightwing tabloid. The issues, the campaigns, the occasional overstepping of the line would be familiar to readers of The Sun, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express. So would the celebrity clickbait: “Carlos Alcaraz and Emma Raducanu dating rumours have persisted over the past few months, despite nothing to back them up,” began a recent story on GB News’s website, now the 13th-biggest news site in the UK. It’s no coincidence that a number of its senior staff have come from the Daily Express: the most tribally pro-Brexit of the tabloids, and the one with arguably the most shoestring budget.
GB News is a story of fragmentation: the splitting of audiences away from major broadcasters into smaller groups. The irony is that the self-defined “patriotic media” is part of the trend that undermines our shared experiences. But it has failed to find a new business model for rightwing news, or to unearth the personalities — a British answer to Tucker Carlson or Joe Rogan, that would energise the right. Britain, the conservative writer Aris Roussinos has bemoaned, does not have “the matrix of think-tanks and sinecures that nurture conservative talent in the US”. If JD Vance were British, he “would be competing for a slot on GB News”.
I asked Frangopoulos if he is worried that GB News might one day collapse. “We launched, and I was told point-blank to my face by everybody that we had six months at best . . . Yesterday we beat Sky News for the day. That’s a 35-year-old with a rock-solid brand.” “Quite frankly, all media faces existential moments,” he added, more downbeat. He is not wrong. The BBC’s licence fee has not risen in line with inflation. Sky News is lossmaking. The fall of broadcast advertising has hit both ITV and Channel 4. Netflix doesn’t bother with news.
As the Conservatives gear up for an autumn leadership election, the strongest candidates are from the right fringe of the party. Someone will channel their voices. If GB News sticks around, why shouldn’t it be the one? On the other hand, its funders may tire of the project before they have the chance. If that happens, the basement in Paddington will be easy enough to clear.
Henry Mance is the FT’s chief features writer
Follow @FTMag to find out about our latest stories first and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
