When Press Gazette suggested we take FT Weekend editor Janine Gibson to our local Wetherspoons for a “Lunch with the FT”-style interview – emphasising she could have free range on the menu – we were met with a polite counterproposal from the press office.
There are two rules for Lunch with the FT: the guest chooses the restaurant and the FT pays the bill. Perhaps, in the spirit of the now 30-year-old format, we might allow Gibson to choose the venue?
Her choice was The Quality Chop House, a charming, wood-panelled Victorian restaurant in Clerkenwell, north London.
“It used to be such a dump around here,” she says, recalling her days working at the old Guardian offices around the corner, but says the Chop House was always a bright spot. “It’s one of the few restaurants that, when it changes hands, it’s still a really nice thing.”
Related
Lunch with the FT is published on the weekend, which makes it Gibson’s responsibility, and during her tenure the paper has carried lunch interviews with the likes of Elon Musk, Liz Truss and Anna Wintour.
The waitress asks whether we’d like anything to drink. There is a pause.
I’m cautious here: I have work to do after this, for one thing, but more importantly I don’t want to make an arse out of myself in front of someone with a Wikipedia page. I respectfully place the ball in Gibson’s court.
“I can’t say ‘no, you can’t drink’ because I always moan when people are too boring,” she says. “Our recurring beef is that people are too sensible now to have a glass of wine.”
We order a glass each of the second cheapest white wine on the menu: a bright, juicy 2020 Dominio de Punctum Lagasca Viognier.
‘The business lunch is back’
It so happens that on the day we meet the most recent issue of FT Weekend was concerned in large part with business lunches.
“The business lunch is back,” Gibson pronounces. “People are starting to realise, in this highly automated age, that business lunches form bonds and relationships.
“Like, we’re pals now – it’d be very hard for us to just stitch one another up in print.”
Much of the most recent issue, she says, “is taken up with the rituals, benefits and terrible, terrible downsides of drinking at lunchtime.”
People don’t have to drink for Lunch with the FT, of course, but Gibson says “part of the charm and joy is those moments when people lose inhibition”.
Gibson refers, as an example, to an infamously negroni-propelled lunch the FT had with the poet Gavin Ewart in 1995.
Ewart’s wife rang his FT interviewer Nigel Spivey the following day, telling him: “There are two things you need to know. The first is that Gavin came home yesterday happier than I have seen him in a long time. The second – and you are not to feel bad about this – is that he died this morning.”
Gibson says: “It’s obviously childish to think that’s cool and funny. Obviously very reprehensible and terrible. Awful!
“And yet it is kind of cool and funny.”
How to write a Lunch with the FT
I ask Gibson whether she has any advice for me about conducting this lunch.
“Well obviously, in this situation, you don’t need to make much of an effort at all,” she says. “We’ll just have a lovely chat and you should just write some nice things about the FT.”
But she’s good enough to offer some specifics anyway. “It’s a good idea to have three check-ins through the piece about the restaurant”, for example, as well as another two about the food itself. “You must write about the food or the readers will kick off.”
Do not, however, “be mean about anyone that works here”.
A perfect Lunch with the FT guest has had “three acts” to their career, Gibson says. Those very few people who have had two FT lunches – she mentions Henry Kissinger and Christine Lagarde – “had a whole other act” after their first encounter with the paper.
She says she’s “wary” of lunches with serving chief executives or senior politicians.
“If you have somebody that’s too powerful they’re so limited in what they can say. If they speak too often, it’s very hard to get something new out of them.”
The ideal, she says, “is somebody who has just left or is just about to leave a very significant job”.
The waitress returns for our order. We both go for the set menu, which that week comprises a sweetcorn soup with bacon and maple syrup, Cotswold Gold chicken with chasseur sauce and a salted caramel brownie with clotted cream. We add bread to accompany the soup and, on Gibson’s recommendation, sides of cod roe and confit potatoes.
The most recent Lunch with the FT that Gibson herself wrote was with the Pet Shop Boys, back in April.
“I’d been very, very nervous. I read like three books about them” – although in the event, she says, “they were so kind!”
I have not, regrettably, read three books about Janine Gibson – although she comes up frequently in “Breaking News”, a half-autobiographical book that I have read by her former boss at The Guardian, Alan Rusbridger.
Gibson edited The Guardian in the US as it reported its Pulitzer-winning stories about whistlebower Edward Snowden and surveillance by the NSA, an episode that figures prominently in Rusbridger’s book.
“I haven’t read that,” she says. “I think it’s really bad manners to read your former boss’s book, because all you do is go ‘that’s not what happened’ and then there would be dispute. It’s his story, let him write it!”
The Snowden affair, she says, was “enough attention for a lifetime”.
I ask if Gibson would ever write a book and get a flat, repeated no.
“Honestly, my main goal is to get out of journalism without causing any further scandal.”
Across her 17-year career at The Guardian Gibson was media editor, website editor, US editor and ultimately deputy editor. She was widely tipped to succeed Rusbridger as editor but missed out in the election among journalists to succeed him – a unique Guardian tradition – to Kath Viner, who still leads the paper today.
‘Readers feel a lot of ownership’ over Lunch with the FT
In an article last month commemorating 30 years of Lunch with the FT the paper’s chief feature writer Henry Mance summed up the format’s success saying: “No one can maintain a façade when fixated on a French fry.”
Gibson says the best Lunches with the FT feel “like a real conversation”.
“I really love it when the readers say ‘I felt like I was there.’
“I don’t mind when they say: ‘Why on Earth have you had lunch with this one?’, because I take that as a compliment that they think it’s such an honour to bestow.”
The readers “feel a lot of ownership” over Lunch with the FT, Gibson says, but “I never think ‘how dare you’ – I always think ‘how lovely that you care’”. Some readers, particularly those who get FT Weekend in print, tell her they spend a week with the interview.
Asked who her favourite Lunch with the FT interviews had been, Gibson pulls a list of names from her bag which coincidentally identifies several of the Lunches that will be available to read for free in the promotional “The Best of Lunch with the FT” newsletter that is going out weekly for the next two months.
The first two interviews she mentions are with Reform UK MP Nigel Farage and former Daily Express and Daily Star proprietor Richard Desmond, both of which were written by Mance.
“One of them cost the FT a fortune and the other one – Henry is so clearly very drunk…
“I think if you read those two carefully, you can see everything that you need to know about how to do a Lunch with the FT. They are” – she mimes doing a chef’s kiss.
“For the ladies,” Gibson continues, “I have Kristin Scott Thomas and Anna Wintour as my top, in my era.”
Scott Thomas, she says, “so obviously terrifies” Mance, while she enjoyed the Wintour interview “because Anna was so on brand that she managed to take a format which has only two rules and ignore both of them”. (Wintour procured the table for the interview, at London’s Ritz hotel, and ate nothing, opting instead for a bottle of San Pellegrino.)
Often, Gibson says, they come up with interviewees by asking FT staff to identify “the most interesting person on their patch”.
“That’s how you get the right mix of politically relevant [and] culturally fun.”
The whole Lunches archive is yet to surface: Gibson says they are “quite hard to find” in the old clippings. The Lunch that saw off poet Ewart in 1995, for example, does not appear to be available online.
‘You can’t say it’s all very good. What do you think of the combination of flavours?’
The soup arrives, along with the still-warm bread and cod roe. Gibson instructs that I need to “put in a bit of colour about the food” and I ramble a note for later toward the dictaphone, mentioning that it’s “all very good”.
“You can’t say it’s all very good, Bron. What do you think of the combination of flavours?”
(Surprising: I’ve not had a sweetcorn soup before, let alone a soup that features maple syrup, but the sweetness is punctuated nicely by the bacon lardons.)
“Yes, and you notice that I’ve eaten all of mine very quickly.”
I ask who the FT is still chasing for lunch. They’ve had a few US presidents, she says, but not Obama yet. She’d like to do Rupert Murdoch – or indeed any Murdoch: “I just really think that he would like to talk with us and we’re available at any time.”
She adds that “personally – for me, just for me, as a little treat before I die – I want to do Jeremy Clarkson.
“He’s fascinating and incredibly talented and misunderstood and also very well-understood. I find the body of work extraordinary and almost unique and, I think, under-appreciated. That’s my most controversial opinion.”
There are others she wants to do, Gibson adds, but “I’m not going to tell because of the number of imitations – pallid imitations! – that there are out there”.
Around the time the chicken lands the waitress asks if we would like more wine. We again stare at each other in silence. This time I take the initiative: yes, we will. The chicken is accompanied by the crisp confit potatoes which, true to Gibson’s recommendation, steal the bird’s scene somewhat.
‘I think print will outlast me and you’
The print version of the FT has come up several times over this lunch, and I ask whether Gibson believes in the longevity of the medium – and indeed whether a long-form interview format like Lunch with the FT will survive the consumption changes heralded by the likes of Tiktok and Instagram. FT Weekend sells around 60,000 copies per week at £5.10 each and the Financial Times in general boasts more than one million paying digital subscribers.
“I think print will outlast me and you,” she says. “If you look at your Enders Analysis or whatever they’ll tell you the same thing.”
She says weekly print products, specifically, have room to run.
“I really think this is borne out. Look at The Fence, and the absolute resilience of Private Eye – I mean, The Spectator’s just sold for £100m, whether or not that is an accurate price or some kind of auction madness…
“Ten, 15 years ago, people would say all the time: ‘Oh, I worry so much for access to quality information in the digital era and all the good stuff will be behind expensive journals at The Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times or whatever.
“But actually new things pop up all the time. That’s the way the communications industry is – if everything gets too closed up, then something new will pop up for the young people, like Buzzfeed or Vice or whatever in their heyday.” This point is perhaps somewhat undermined by the sign of the cross Gibson makes following her mention of Buzzfeed: she was editor of Buzzfeed News in the UK from 2015 to 2019, helping it win a clutch of awards before it closed in 2023.
The real threat to Lunch with the FT, she says, “is this thorny question of drinking at lunchtime”.
‘This interview is a disaster’
As I just about see away the generously-portioned brownie dessert it comes time to pay.
The FT press office had suggested the bill be split down the middle – Gibson, however, is having none of that and springs for the reader with her company card. The rule is, to be fair, that the FT pays, but I am nonetheless presently in contact with the PRs about Monzo-ing them £60.
The waitress leaves us two cubes of fudge as a parting treat: I eat mine, Gibson leaves hers.
Gibson mentions in an off-hand comment that, after five years there, she is “relatively new to the FT”.
Is that not quite a long time?
“I think we’re a cradle-to-grave employer.”
Asked whether she would stay at the FT until the end of her career, she laughs that “it’s very indelicate to refer to a lady’s age, Bron”.
She will remain at the FT, she says, “as long as they will have me. It’s a wonderful publication and a real privilege to have a bit of time at it.
“I genuinely think I have the best job in journalism. I try to keep it very quiet – this interview is a disaster.”
Email pged@pressgazette.co.uk to point out mistakes, provide story tips or send in a letter for publication on our "Letters Page" blog
