My conversation with... Michael Hastings

Re-Enchanting… Public Life. Belle Tindall reflects on what is (perhaps surprisingly) her favourite conversation so far.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

A man in conversation laughs and throws his head back

Michael Hastings being interviewed at Lambeth Palace Library.

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This opening paragraph may well break every rule in the Podcast Hosting Handbook, but I’d like to offer some context for my conversation with Lord Michael Hastings by putting my cards on the table for a moment. If there’s one place where I, the co-host of the Re-Enchanting Podcast, have become disenchanted; it’s politics. It’s capitalism. It’s leadership. It’s public life.

It is for this reason that I am still surprised that our episode with Michael has become my personal favourite (and if you’ve been listening to the podcast, you’ll know that it has notably stiff competition). The conversation really has done what it set out to do, it has begun to re-enchant me.

Michael Hastings, for those who are not yet acquainted, is a force of nature.

He is an Independent Peer in the House of Lords, and that’s only the beginning. Allow me to mention just a few of his other current roles: he is the Chairman of the School of Oriental and African Studies, the London Chamber of Commerce, and the Industry Black Business Association. He’s the Vice President of UNICEF, a Professor at the Utah State University, an ambassador for Tearfund, and a personal mentor to hundreds of people.

He was the BBC’s Head of Public Affairs before becoming its first Head of Corporate Social Responsibility. He was also GMTV’s Chief Political Correspondent.

So, to sum up: Lord Hastings’ work resides in the realm of politics, capitalism, leadership, and public life.

This was always going to be interesting. I just wasn’t sure it was going to be that enchanting. How deeply wrong I was.

When Michael was just sixteen years old, he was asked what he wanted to do with his life, and the words he spoke that day are the exact words he still lives by now. He said,

"I want to speak up for the poor. I want to bend the power of the prosperous to the potential of the poor."

And that, it seems to me, is exactly what he does. That is precisely why he sees such value in serving in the business sector, the commerce sector, the political sector. In those places, he is able to ‘leverage opportunity for others’. He does all that he can, in those public spaces, to bend the power of the privileged few in the direction of the poor.

What I found even more interesting is that, the way he speaks of such things, it’s as if he sees no other way of operating in those societal spheres; he accepts no other (valid) reason why one would enter politics; no other (ethical) motivation behind economic prosperity. You could call such optimism naivety. Or, as I’ve learnt, you could call it enchantment.

It strikes me that this conversation may just be the balm that the 65 per cent of people who have lost trust in the government need. Whether one agrees with the details of what Lord Hastings says or not, it’s certainly striking how foreign it feels to hear someone speak of service as the beginning and the end of their political and commercial aspirations.

From the moment I met Lord Hastings on a drizzly Wednesday morning, I was utterly captivated by his warmth and immediately at ease in his presence. And, as a result, a truly inspiring encounter ensued.

Article

Culture

Film & TV

11 March 2024

4 min read

The Oscars and ourselves

Beyond the shiny escapism, the awards spotlight all our stories.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

A closely cropped group of gold Oscar statues showing mostly their head and shoulders.

Oscars.org

The Oscars are a funny old thing, aren’t they? Every year, I find myself wondering why we care about them so much.

And sure, we could go for the low-hanging answers: because the show is brimming with glamour, because it’s packed with celebrity, because we may be treated to Ryan Gosling performing his Barbie anthem with Slash. We’ve been trained to gravitate toward such things, and that makes the Oscars the jackpot. And so, while shiny escapism is an undeniable aspect of the enormous hype attached to the Academy Awards, I think it would be unfair to assume that these are the only reasons we are still so drawn to this event.

If we’re meaning-making creatures, and I believe that we are, then these films mean something.

I once heard renowned mythologist, Dr Martin Shaw, say that ‘story is the best way to talk about almost anything’, and I wonder if cinema is evidence of how heartily we agree. The stories that are being crafted and told are important, they matter, they actually affect things. Or, at least, the good ones do.

And this year, when I assess the films that swept up the majority of the prizes at the 96th Academy Awards, I noticed a trend. I noticed that these films are essentially humans talking to humans about what it means to be human.

In many ways, for better or for worse, we spent 2023 telling stories about ourselves. Allow me to break down what I mean.

These movies tell us of our own brokenness, our own breaking-things-ness.

Oppenheimer, which won six awards, and Zone of Interest, which was the first British film to win the Oscar for Best International Film – they tell our darkest stories. We know the 20th Century horrors of the dropping of the atomic bomb and the Holocaust, but these two movies introduce us to the faces behind the horror. And, what’s more, they hauntingly remind us that those faces could have been ours. They introduce us, not to monsters that we can keep at a comfortable distance, but to people who sanction, create and do the unimaginable, and then go home for dinner with their children.

People did these things. People like us. These movies tell us of our own brokenness, our own breaking-things-ness. They remind us that the possibility of evil is not beyond us, it is within us, and that the most dangerous thing one could do is to believe otherwise.

But then there was the acutely tender The Holdovers, and the deeply profound Past Lives. These movies tell of our gentleness, our fragility, our innate need for intimacy; they remind us that we were designed to be known and loved. They reintroduce us to our deepest and most innate needs - The Holdovers, in particular, tells us of the sacrality of relationship. Its success has me wondering if a story of three lonely people forced to spend Christmas together in an empty boarding school could tell us more about what our souls require than any academic deep dive.

Yet again, these films seek to tell you the story of you; they aim to be windows into the souls of the characters, while also acting as mirrors through which we can catch glimpses of our own.

Each movie, in one way or another, was a wrestle with personhood. What makes us, us?

And finally, there were two films, Barbie and Poor Things, which, to criminally over-simplify them, are the stories of two women (or, rather, one toy and one new-born baby in the body of a grown woman… don’t ask) who are working out what it means to be a person. Both Barbie and Bella Baxter walk through worlds that are entirely new to them, but completely familiar to their audiences. They assess the good and the bad of humanity as if utterly detached from it, until they are forced to confront their own place in the worlds that they are slowly coming to terms with. As is written into the script of Poor Things and was read aloud over a montage at the Oscars ceremony,

‘We must experience everything. Not just the good, but degradation, horror, sadness. This makes us whole Bella, makes us people of substance. Not flighty, untouched children. Then we can know the world.’

(Is it me, or is there a little touch of – ‘just take a bite of the apple, Eve’ in there?)

So, you see my point – this year, in the world of film, humans talked to other humans about what it means to be human. Each movie, in one way or another, was a wrestle with personhood. What makes us, us? Where does our propensity for goodness come from? How are we this clever? And how are we this clueless? Why do we do such evil things? And why do we have such tender needs? What is the difference between the worst and the best that we could possibly be? What and why are we? Or, in the simple words of Billie Eilish’s Oscar-scooping song – what were we made for?

And listen, perhaps this is always somewhat the case. Maybe every film can be boiled down this way, and maybe the Oscars are just a storm in a particularly glitzy tea cup. And maybe nobody would be talking about it this morning had Slash not been involved.

But I just have this sense that these movies, and the prizes that they won, mean something. These existential-yearning kind of films, I’m not sure they’re going anywhere anytime soon – if we’re wondering what we were made for in such public places, I’m wondering if it’s because we’re also wondering the same thing in the most personal places.

If you’re asking me, last night was filled with as many cultural heart-cries as it was prizes.