The six types of people you meet at Lunch with the FT
To explain the success of Lunch with the FT, you have to go back to the Middle Ages. Bear with me.
Medieval kings did not get much time alone. They would eat their meals in large halls or castles, in front of many of their subjects — a bit like a college dining room operates today, says Andrew Spencer, an academic at the University of Cambridge. Eating in public perhaps helped these monarchs show that they were alive and in control.
Our modern-day equivalents of kings and queens are different. They eat in private rooms that most of us rarely step into. When they appear in public, they are often giving speeches or interviews that have been carefully choreographed. At receptions, they nurse an iced water. These appearances communicate a message, but rarely communicate a human being.
This is where Lunch with the FT comes in. When the great and the good eat, they have to become human. No one can maintain a façade when fixated on a French fry. The genius of Lunch with the FT is that it encourages people who are trained not to relax in public to do exactly that. It allows them to show themselves in 3D. So it is, as one of the best publicists around puts it, “press for people who don’t do press”.
Lunch with the FT was born 30 years ago, in 1994, the same year that Oasis released their debut album. Have both been marked by egos, walkouts and financial excesses? It’s hard to say: I don’t know enough about Oasis. The key thing is that Lunch with the FT doesn’t need a comeback tour because it never went away.
What’s more, unlike Oasis on their forthcoming tour, Lunch cannot be accused of being in it for the money — almost the opposite. The format was the brainchild of Max Wilkinson, a former editor of FT Weekend, who wanted to counter the advertising department’s idea of a weekly interview sponsored by a car brand. He identified something great about lunch. Or as Tracey Emin would later put it over the cheapest white wine that Scott’s of Mayfair had to offer: “I love lunch more than dinner. I always get too pissed in the evening.” (That was one of her more family-friendly sentences.)
Looking back at the archive — the past 20 years of Lunches are available online; a selection of the best Lunches has also been published as two books — what strikes you is the range. There are dictators and dissidents, chief executives and communists, philosophers and fraudsters. We’ve interviewed a convicted murderer and a poet who died the next day. Plenty have gone on to win power and prizes. Some have gone on to jail, while others have simply reached out-of-court settlements with no admission of liability and retired from royal duties.
One Lunch guest, writer Joan Didion, described California as a selfish place, “a state settled by people who were careless — they had left everything behind”. Several other Lunch guests, including Elon Musk, have arguably proved her point. What the interviews have in common is an intimacy, whether the guest is Angelina Jolie (“I’m Angie”) or Sir Keir Starmer (“If I’m honest I prefer Keir”).
As a rule, people can have Lunch with the FT only once, though there have been exceptions, mainly for people who insist on living almost for ever — RIP Henry Kissinger. Lunch with the FT is also strictly a one-on-one encounter, but some guests come as a pair (Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalynn, private equity barons Henry Kravis and George Roberts, the Pet Shop Boys) or stiff us with the bill for their four-man entourage (South African firebrand Julius Malema).
I’m lucky to have written quite a few Lunches with remarkable people — though I realise I will only ever be remembered as the journalist who got drunk with Nigel Farage. For me, Lunch with the FT is the ultimate intellectual stimulation — it is a form of heaven. In my experience, there are six types of people you meet there.
The star
The star is, at least on paper, the best Lunch guest. They have one big advantage: anything they say is automatically more interesting. Middling anecdotes, familiar opinions, usual career angst — all will shine if it’s a household name who’s speaking. A lot of actors’ interviews are, in effect, minor HR grievances; they can still be riveting.
The first principle of lunch — eating — is familiar even to the greatest stars, except athletes and fashion magazine editors. The second principle — not paying — is also surprisingly familiar. Things should go smoothly. But the star exerts a force field that makes normal interaction almost impossible. As an interviewer, your mouth will be fixed in a gormless grin, your cutlery will slip through your fingers.
Lunch is the opportunity to reveal the real person inside the star. On rare occasions, complications arise because the person departs too far from the persona. What if a national treasure turns out to be a chauvinist? Or an icon of cool turns out to be self-centred? Luckily, more often, stars understand themselves better than you expect. You start to see the iceberg, not just the tip.
The politician
The politician gives many interviews. They are used to talking and used to eating. For the most part, they will pretend not to be used to drinking — even if (especially if) it is common knowledge that they are. They will choose an unflashy restaurant, probably in the local area that elected them — except if they are French, in which case they will gently insist on somewhere decent.
What do you talk about? The past? You cannot expect the politician to admit their mistakes any more than you can expect an architect to bulldoze their own buildings. Some can’t bring themselves to admit their record is hugely flawed; others really believe it isn’t. At most they will say they should have been bolder or communicated better.
Nonetheless, politicians do have more insight than they are given credit for: they have met many people, and most have thought about society relentlessly. The best are truly brave, and the wisest know how to let down their guard without impeaching themselves.
The thinker
The thinker has written a book. This is a transformative act, because an author is keen to sell books in the same way that the person crawling across the desert is keen to drink water. They will arrive at lunch with a delighted look; indeed, they will probably have arrived long before you.
To be clear, this is not a criticism. The thinker has spent months, years, pent up in their study preparing to say something and now they can say it! They make excellent company, at least for a couple of hours.
The thinker-author’s political views will usually turn out to be more extreme than their audience’s. But they themselves tend to be thick-skinned. They might prefer that someone hadn’t published a detailed critique of their book, but their disappointment is outweighed by their pleasure at someone having read it. Very little is off limits.
The executive
Pity the executive. Corporate power, unlike stardom, does not make you more interesting. In fact, possibly the reverse. All that time in airport lounges — thinking of ways to cut costs, while racking them up yourself — well, it does not produce glitter. Many executives find it hard to change their register away from a shareholder meeting. Prepare yourself for more references to execution than at Hampton Court Palace.
Nonetheless, if any setting is going to make the executive interesting, it is Lunch. The executive probably dreams of being a star, and the meal is their stage. The executive is probably lonely, and you are their company. Once you get past their usual complaints about the quality of politicians, and their inability to justify their own pay, you may hear the wisdom that comes from being a person of action. Listen harder, and you may hear a cry for help. If you want the executive really to open up, you have to wait for them to be sacked or, erm, “leave abruptly”.
The maverick
Good news: the maverick is unashamed about enjoying good food and other luxuries because they feel they have earned it. They have succeeded where others have not dared to tread. They are also happy to opine on base human motivations — greed, power, laziness; topics that make others squeamish. Why? Because mentally mapping such things has been key to their success.
A lifetime of defying norms and dodging accountability can, however, lead to a certain lack of self-awareness. Be prepared for the maverick to order a fantastically expensive bottle of wine or drop in the name of the editor.
The humble achiever
No one can plan for one day rescuing a child dangling from a balcony or ensuring the flow of Covid vaccines. So the humble achiever has probably not imagined they would be interviewed over Lunch by the FT. They are generally unfazed by the experience. They are themselves. Their very normality is their selling point. They will remind you that a remarkable act does not require a remarkable ego.
What makes a good Lunch? Alcohol? Well, sometimes. But it’s not essential (OK, unless the guest is Liz Truss). Lavishness? In general, the quality of the conversation correlates with the quantity of the bill, although there are plenty of exceptions: Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary was a lot better than the €5.50 bagel he bought my poor colleague.
What is essential is time. We want a guest who can speak in paragraphs — a guest who will be at the table long enough to reflect on an earlier answer and say: you know what, there’s more to it than I said earlier. It probably helps if they are, like the environmental author Kim Stanley Robinson, advocating a “post-capitalist view of things where time is not of the essence”. Special mention, too, to French actress Isabelle Huppert, who cleared her schedule for the 12-course menu at L’Arpège in Paris, and who, when the coffee finally arrived, sighed: “Ah, they’re not bringing any sweets with it.”
For some interviewees, used to endless media commitments, interviews can feel as if they are being mined for information. The best interviews are not extractive, but catalytic — inspiring thoughts that the interviewee themselves may not have even articulated before. As Jeff Bezos put it in his Lunch with the FT in 2002: “I mean, nobody likes answering the same questions 10,000 times, it’s dull. But hey, this is more fun than most interviews because you’re asking me some new questions.” Indeed, the promise of Lunch with the FT is that it will not be dull.
Who would we most like to interview? It depends when. Interviewing Boris Becker in 2023, shortly after his release from jail for bankruptcy offences, was a very different proposition from interviewing him a few years earlier, when he was in the midst of fighting off the charges. It’s surprisingly hard to tell who will be interesting over the next year.
It’s largely irrelevant whether readers like the Lunch guest. A better test is whether they can learn something from them. That is something the series has nearly always managed over the past 30 years, whether it’s Musk’s criticism of immortality (“It’s important that people die. How long would you have liked Stalin to live?”) or author Francis Spufford’s defence of Christianity (“Christianity seems to me more true than other stories of the world that I’ve come across, and it nourishes me”). Hopefully we will manage it over the next 30 years too.
Henry Mance is the FT’s chief features writer
What is your favourite Lunch with the FT of all time, and why? Leave a comment below and we may publish a selection of the best next week
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