What do you do?
Semi-retired, but hill farming, with fingers in various educational and environmental pies.
Where do you live?
The Brecon Beacons, in Wales.
Do you vote?
Yes, always.
How long have you been a subscriber?
Too long to recall.
What made you start?
It was thanks to my father, EF Schumacher, who wrote Small Is Beautiful. He was a life-long Labour supporter who used to say he would “vote Labour with tears streaming down his face” but that if he tried to vote Conservative “the pen would wither” in his hand!
Is the NS bug in the family?
Yes. I keep giving subscriptions to family members.
What pages do you flick to first?
I start at the beginning.
How do you read yours?
From cover to cover.
What would you like to see more of in the NS?
More political commentary.
Who are your favourite NS writers?
Andrew Marr, Kevin Maguire.
Who would you put on the cover of the NS?
Jeremy Hunt. Or my father, who foresaw so much of what is going on today.
With which political figure would you least like to be stuck in a lift?
No one. I’d enjoy interrogating them whoever they were.
All-time favourite NS article?
There have been too many.
The New Statesman is…
a weekly fix of sanity in an increasingly crazy world.
[See also: Munira Mirza: “The constant briefing at Westminster is corrosive”]
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This article appears in the 09 Nov 2022 issue of the New Statesman, On the brink