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13 August, 2023

Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty

“As long as I’m not the richest man in the world, I won’t really be happy”

Bernard Arnault, CEO of the luxury conglomerate LVMH and competitor with Elon Musk for the title of world’s richest man, is “on a par with a head of state”, say Elsa Conesa and Solenn de Royer in Le Monde. His €412bn company is the globe’s 14th-largest, and worth more than all four major German carmakers put together. In his home country of France, he has private dinners with Emmanuel Macron several times a year, and LVMH brands like Louis Vuitton have quasi-exclusivity in dressing Macron’s wife Brigitte. The group’s links with Paris city hall “sometimes verge on incestuous”: local police have been instructed to stop ticketing the sedans “permanently parked in front of the Cheval Blanc hotel”, where Arnault entertains his VIP guests. 

His network extends far beyond France. Tony Blair is a “friend and tennis partner”; in China, where LVMH generates almost 30% of its sales, his visits attract huge crowds. Arnault has personally known every US president since Ronald Reagan, and was able to get his champagnes exempted from the customs sanctions against French wines introduced by Donald Trump in 2019. There is a “long history” between Arnault and Vladimir Putin, too. In 2003, he hosted the Russian president “with great pomp” at one of his vineyards, where he presented him with a case of wine of different vintages “corresponding to key dates in his life”.

🤑😳 The late businessman Jean-Noël Tassez once escorted Arnault to his car after a dinner in Saint-Tropez, and remarked, “Bernard, you look a little sad.” “As long as I’m not the richest man in the world, I won’t really be happy,” replied Arnault. “His dumbfounded companion was unsure whether he was being serious.”

THE COUNTRY HOUSE Cressy Hall is set in nine acres of grounds in rural Lincolnshire. The Grade II listed Georgian manor retains many of its original 18th-century features, including a sculptural wooden staircase and a three-arch stone fireplace with meathooks above. There are seven bedrooms, a wine cellar, a game larder, a studio and a billiards room, as well as old stables outside. Spalding station is a 15-minute drive, which is a 20-minute train ride from Peterborough. £1.6m.

William Friedkin, who died this week aged 87, directed the bone-chilling 1973 film The Exorcist. But the “terrifying happenings which occurred on set are arguably more frightening than fiction”, says the Daily Mail. Early on, an unexplained fire burned down most of the set – “curiously” sparing only the bedroom of the possessed character. A carpenter cut off his thumb; a lighting technician lost a toe. Actors Vasiliki Maliaros and Jack MacGowran, whose characters perished in the film, both died before the movie’s release. When Friedkin looked back at rolls of uncut footage, it looked as though they had been tampered with, because of spooky “double exposure” shots. Still, everything worked out all right in the end: the movie made more than $440m at the box office – $1bn in today’s money – and became the first horror film nominated for a Best Picture Oscar.  

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Pedestrians in Shanghai. Getty

China and the West: sleepwalking to the same future

The fight for supremacy between the West and China is often seen as an ideological battle “between democracy and autocracy”, says NS Lyons in UnHerd. In fact, the two superpowers “are not diverging but becoming more alike”: both are converging on a system that George Orwell and the philosopher James Burnham described as “managerialism”. At the heart of this is a conviction that “all things – even the complexity of society and Man himself – can be understood, managed and controlled like a machine”. This is most obvious in China’s “blossoming social-credit system”, in which individuals get a trustworthiness score which affects access to travel, housing, higher education and even healthcare. As late as the mid-2010s, everyone in China would jaywalk to cross the street – now, thanks to facial recognition cameras, they’ve been conditioned out of it.

“This is not a million miles away from what is happening in so-called Western liberal democracies.” Take the debanking trend, which Coutts tried with Nigel Farage and is an “increasingly routine practice”. Those who have the wrong political opinions can, “in a society as digitised as ours”, be cut off from almost all aspects of life if they’re stripped of a bank account. And in the rise of scoring schemes like the Corporate Equality Index and ESG (environmental, social, and governance), we can see something like a social credit system taking shape. Private companies have to follow these diktats to “survive and thrive” in an increasingly managerial economy. Even as China and the West “roil and clash”, they are converging on “the same socially engineered submission of everything human, real and free to technocratic nihilism”.

A wild swimmer: Westminster, beware. Getty

Hobbyists are “the most powerful yet overlooked force in British politics”, says Bagehot in The Economist. Outdoor swimmers have managed to generate nationwide anger over sewage being pumped into our waterways, despite the fact that they are cleaner today than they were in the 1990s. Classic cars are one of the few categories of polluting vehicles exempt from London’s Ulez. During Covid, garden centres were allowed to remain open. “Even the Treasury whimpers in the face of Big Hobby” – the tax code is littered with exemptions for craft brewers, “to encourage people to turn a brewing hobby into a job”. The truth is that for politicians, “a fight with hobbyists is not worth having”. As Tony Blair said of his ban on fox hunting, he would have encountered less opposition if he had “proposed solving the pension problem by compulsory euthanasia for every fifth pensioner”.

Dakota Johnson being a girlboss in Persuasion (2022)

Where are all the weak women?

In a recent interview, says Jane Shilling in The Daily Telegraph, the screenwriter Andrew Davies decried the “monoculture” among heroines of current period TV dramas. “Strong” female characters are all the rage, he explained, to the near exclusion of less feisty types. Davies himself has had pitches for “frail, delicate, slightly soppy” female leads rebuffed by execs. It’s yet another example of our strangely anachronistic insistence that historical characters must all be “resilient, idiosyncratic and courageous” feminist types. And it fails to notice that often these frail and delicate creatures can be just as powerful as their “more assertive” sisters.  

Take the “mousy narrator” of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, identified solely as the second Mrs de Winter. She’s often considered to be a “helpless pawn” – but the “real power”, so far as the reader is concerned, is hers, given the novel is written entirely from her perspective. Jane Austen’s Fanny Price and Anne Elliot are similarly “not assertive”, but their “apparent passivity” conceals an inner core of moral strength. And George Eliot’s Dorothea Brooke may harbour a “romantic vision of herself” as the helpmeet of a great man, but her “capacity for self-delusion” is later magnificently transformed into self-knowledge. Sure, these characters might clash with our modern sensibilities. But they remind us that there’s still hope for the meeker among us. Some strength is “rooted in frailty”, and we need to hear those stories, too. 

In 1975, a Californian advertising executive called Gary Dahl was listening to his friends complaining about their pets when he had a brainwave, says Historic Vids on X (formerly Twitter). The perfect non-human companion, he declared, was a rock. It would be cheap as hell, and wouldn’t require “feeding, grooming or attention”. His buddies laughed, but Dahl took his “Pet Rock” idea seriously. He ordered a shipment of large stones from Mexico, packaged them in a cardboard box – complete with straw bedding and “air holes” – and wrote a mock 32-page training manual entitled The Care and Training of Your Pet Rock. They were a hit. Over the next six months, more than 1.5 million Pet Rocks were sold, making Dahl a millionaire and spawning countless imitators including Pet Logs, Pet Stones and Pet Bricks. “People are so damn bored,” he told People magazine. “This takes them on a fantasy trip – you might say we’ve packaged a sense of humour.” 

“I would like to die on Mars. Just not on impact.”

Elon Musk

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