SakesâŠ
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Good piece here on the historic power bond markets have held over governments. If only Kwasi and Liz were paying attention in 2010
Political rulers can never outwit the bond titans
As a student of economic history, Kwasi Kwarteng should have known traders have called the shots since Napoleon, writes Jill Treanor
ILLUSTRATION BY JAMES COWEN
Saturday October 15 2022, 6.00pm, The Sunday Times
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For hundreds of years, bond markets have been one of the key driving forces of momentous events. They helped secure the Duke of Wellingtonâs famous victory at the Battle of Waterloo by raising the funds to get the troops on the ground. The American Civil War and the 20th centuryâs two world wars were fought as a result of finance raised through bonds. And when Covid gripped the world, governments issued trillions of pounds of bonds to fight the economic war caused by the health emergency.
Nathan Rothschild, the biggest player in the European bond marketâs early years, wielded so much power that he could reputedly dictate which government ministers were hired, or fired.
In these past few weeks, the bond market has struck again, in effect vetoing the unfunded tax cuts declared by Liz Trussâs government and forcing the sacking of their architect, Kwasi Kwarteng.
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While there may no longer be one key Rothschild-like figure, bond investors did for Kwarteng en masse by driving down the price of UK government bonds â known as gilts â and in turn forcing up interest rates on everything from mortgages, to company loans, to Britainâs ÂŁ2.3 trillion of state debt.
The markets simply did not believe that the UK, under Kwartengâs stewardship, was stable enough to invest in at the previous rate of interest on bonds. His position had become untenable. Truss acknowledged after his departure â straight off the red-eye flight from Washington, where he had cut short his trip to the International Monetary Fund â that his mini budget had gone âfurther and faster than the markets were expectingâ.
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Kwarteng, despite being a proud classicist, appeared to forget a key lesson from history: bond markets matter.
Bonds allow governments to raise funds from investors to cover expenditure that cannot be paid for by taxes. They pay investors a coupon â a rate of interest â for the lifetime of the bond and their price moves inversely to the yield, which is a gauge of borrowing costs. In turn, these investors set the rate at which governments borrow, providing a health check on the economy. When bonds are attractive to investors, the surge in demand pushes up the price and forces down the yield, or rate paid, on bonds. That is a sweet spot for any government.
But the converse is also true. âIf buyers lose confidence in you, then your cost of borrowing is not entirely in your control,â said Vivek Paul, UK at the BlackRock Investment Institute.
The jump in gilt yields since Kwartengâs mini budget has sent mortgage rates rocketing â in the expectation of further increases in the Bank of England base rate to stabilise the economy amid fears of soaring government borrowing.
Simon French, chief economist at investment bank Panmure Gordon, has warned that house prices will crash over three years. Now, Trussâs government has undertaken a series of U-turns on the mini-budget tax giveaways in an attempt to revive a sense of prudence to Britainâs reputation with bond investors.
She is not the first to have had a budget brought to heel â bond markets tamed the ambitious spending plans of Bill Clinton in the 1990s. His campaign manager James Carville ruefully quipped: âI used to think if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope ⊠But now I want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.â
A decade earlier, economist Edward Yardeni had coined the phrase âbond vigilantesâ to describe the investors who sold American treasury bonds in the 1980s in an attack on the Federal Reserveâs policies.
Historian Niall Ferguson has charted the power of bond markets back even further. By his reckoning, at the time of Waterloo in 1815, Rothschild was as important in the battlefield victory as the Duke of Wellington. Why? Because he had backed the bond issue that funded the British war effort.
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During that 23-year war between France and the other powers of Europe, Britainâs debt burden had doubled to the same size as the economy, as measured by the value of its output, or gross domestic product (GDP). Now, after the government spent ÂŁ376 billion to support the population in the Covid crisis, that debt-to-GDP ratio is back again at that level.
According to Ferguson, Rothschildâs influence was so enormous that, at the time, the MP Thomas Duncombe warned that âthe credit of nations depends on his nod ⊠Ministers of state are in [his] pay.â
Some 200 years later, that message will be ringing in the ears of Kwarteng, who had to contend not with one big player, but a vast array of investors â from pension funds in Britain to big houses overseas. Ferguson said last week: âThe Truss government forgot that, when the market sells gilts, it is expressing a view about the future probabilities of inflation and default. Foreign sellers are also expressing a view about the future exchange rate of sterlingâ.
The jump in gilt yields since Kwasi Kwartengâs mini budget has sent mortgage rates rocketing
IAN FORSYTH/GETTY IMAGES
Bond markets had been important for funding wars. Britain was a big issuer of war bonds â it used them to pay for the First World War, and these bonds were only repaid 100 years later in 2014, when George Osborne was chancellor.
In his trawl through history, Ferguson also found other war efforts where bond markets have proved crucial. One instance was the American Civil War, some 50 years after bonds played a part in financing the Battle of Waterloo.
The southern Confederate states, fighting the states in the north, had issued bonds linked to the price of cotton, the mainstay crop of the area. When the price of cotton rose during the early part of the war, it pushed up the price of bonds â but they fell in value after cotton supplies came in from other countries.
The effect on the southern states was ruinous. They issued more money to pay their debts, which fuelled inflation.
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To this day, bond investors hate inflation. Why? It makes the interest rate they receive for the investment less attractive. Yardeni spotted this when he started to talk about bond vigilantes in the 1980s.
âWhat I noticed is that financial markets had become rather important in regulating the economy,â he said last week.
âIf the assumption was that inflation might be making a comeback â because central banks werenât going to be tough enough [in raising rates] â then the bond vigilantes would intervene and raise bond yields to the point of slowing the economy and bringing inflation down.â
After the 1992 election that swept Clinton into office, bond yields had been rising at the prospect of a free-spending Democrat arriving in the White House, and the Federal Reserve had also tightened interest rates faster than the market had foreseen.
Bond markets tamed the ambitious spending plans of Bill Clinton in the 1990s
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Contrary to expectations, Clintonâs presidency became associated with a period of solid growth and low inflation. By the end of the 1990s, America was actually running a budget surplus for the first time since 1969.
Yardeni said that by the end of Clintonâs presidency, the bond vigilantes had âgone to sleepâ. Low inflation through the decade that followed kept them content â though the onset of the financial crisis in 2008 meant central banks suddenly became buyers for bonds during quantitative easing (QE) programmes.
This might explain the violent moves in markets. âEvery time a central bank engages in large-scale bond purchases, it is artificially depressing the market rate. In our current inflationary circumstances, interest rates have to rise â the only question is by how much,â said Ferguson.
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Yardeni recalled how aggressive bond investors returned as the price of Greek debt plunged during 2010 amid fears about the countryâs spending plans. Ireland and Portugal were soon caught up in the mayhem and bailouts had to be organised by the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The bond markets had spoken and austerity measures became fashionable.
To Philip Shaw, chief economist at Investec, what happened then is a wake-up call for any government. âThis is the most poignant example of what happens if you neglect your public finances and the potential importance of bond markets,â he said.
Yardeni pointed out that in the UK, just as in the US and continental Europe, bond yields were also rising as a result of an inflation rate at a four-decade peak.
âThe bond vigilantes are in the saddle and riding high,â he said.
Albert Edwards at the French bank SociĂ©tĂ© GĂ©nĂ©rale said the vigilantes had been asleep until inflation emerged, after being âlulled into a slumber by the soothing lapping of waves of secular stagnation and the froth of QE washing gently against the shoreâ.
âNow, all that has been drowned out by the sound of gilts screaming in agony as the tortured public sector finances have awoken Rip Van Vigilante â and he ainât happy,â said Edwards.
But who are these vigilantes? Unlike in the time of Waterloo, the bond markets are made up of a wide range of investors, and they are harder for one player to dominate.
One of the investors is Pimco, founded by former professional poker player Bill Gross, who has caused problems for chancellors in the past. In 2010, with the eurozone facing collapse, Gross warned that gilts were âresting on a bed of nitroglycerineâ as the economy tried to pull out of the banking crisis-induced recession. Yet governments have to tread a line. A year later, he told Osborne that his austerity measures risked pushing the UK economy into recession. Pimco said last week that it was avoiding big positions on gilts. The market itself has spoken in unison through the gilt sell-off.
Jim Leaviss, chief investment officer for bonds at M&G, said: âThere was no âshadowy cartelâ of bond vigilantes. âItâs just simply what bond markets do when there are expectations of more supply or higher inflation,â he said.
âUnfortunatelyâ, Ferguson said last week, âthe lesson of the 1970s â another rough patch for gilts and sterling â is that you can lose credibility in a week, but it takes years to regainâ
I say âweâ, but it was mostly my wife, Leah, by a long shot. Catastrophe, the TV series I wrote and starred in alongside Sharon Horgan, got picked up for a second series before the first one even aired, and it didnât occur to me to take a break before beginning work on the second one. We just dived right in, and in my work fever I let my family simmer unattended on a back burner.
Of course, there were moments of beauty and togetherness, and Eugene and Oscar were loving and proud brothers to Henry, who smiled and babbled at them and was just generally a delightful and smooth little nugget we all loved to kiss and squeeze and make laugh. A house with three boys can seem like a ramshackle zoo on the edge of town: loud, dangerous and terrifying to the observer. Henry sensed that being the smallest animal in the zoo, heâd have to employ alternative tactics to get noticed. And he did. He was impossibly sweet and calm and lovely, so you were just drawn to him. It was a smart approach, and it worked.
I think about my son Henry as a little baby, and I think about him as a toddler. I think about the expressions he used to make, and his hands and feet and legs. Itâs wonderful and it hurts. I think about Henryâs hair every single day. Despite my own full-body coat of fur, Leah and I exclusively produce bald babies. And just as he started to grow hair, they found the tumour in his head.
Henry got sick when he was 11 months old. When he vomited at Eugeneâs fifth birthday party, we didnât think anything of it; he was our third kid and weâd cleaned up enough gallons of puke not to be fazed. Iâd been feeding him blueberries, so there were maybe 15 or 20 recognisable blueberries in there. A few too many blueberries â whatâs the big deal? Party on.
When Henry vomited two more times the next day, we started worrying and I took him into A&E. The doctor got the idea Henry might have a urinary tract infection. We left with some antibiotics, on the understanding that theyâd call us and tell us if a UTI was the culprit. It wasnât.
Over the next couple of weeks Henry kept vomiting so we brought him to our local GP, where he promptly vomited on the floor. He gave us an appointment to see a gastroenterologist. That doctor gave Henry an antiemetic and told us to monitor him for a while and come back if things got worse.
Henryâs vomiting intensified. My baby was getting smaller, and I would start crying whenever he threw up. I would try not to cry in front of his older brothers and fail, and theyâd ask why, and I would say it was because I was scared. By this point we knew we were going to get some kind of bad news; we just prayed it would be coeliac disease or a twist in his gut that could be surgically fixed.
On April 26, 2016, Sharon and I won the Bafta for comedy writing and the very day after that, a doctor told us Henry might have a brain tumour, and scheduled the MRI that would confirm it. That conversation, understandably, is seared in my mind. And yet so many of the days, months and years that followed are obscured by a fog. Grief drove a bus through the part of my brain where memories are stored. After the MRI, Dr Anson confirmed that Henry had a large tumour in the back of his head, near his brain stem. He delivered the news calmly, and ended by saying a paediatric brain surgeon would come to see us within a few hours. We sank inside ourselves. The heaviest pain in the world. I felt like I had suddenly quadrupled in weight, and an oily, black whirlpool began to swirl where my heart had been.
Dr Anson said we could go and see Henry, so we left his office and headed down a flight or two of stairs. Along a corridor, Leah found an unoccupied breastfeeding room and went inside and started screaming. I held her.
When we were able, we left that room and walked out of the building and across the street to the one Henry was in. Henry was just waking up, and Leah tenderly hugged and kissed him. I wrapped myself around Leah and Henry. He looked at us, tired and confused. He had turned one less than two weeks before. Sitting with him in those hours after his MRI, after we found out about the tumour, we werenât thinking about the next year of his life; we could only think about the next few days.
Eventually a brain surgeon from Great Ormond Street Hospital came to the private hospital and introduced himself to us. He was a nice, calm, quiet guy named Mr Elsawi. He said we were going to get to know each other well, which was both comforting and upsetting. He told us that Henry had a tumour the size of an apple near his brain stem and that he would open Henryâs head in a few days and try to remove the tumour. We digested that news and a little while later, Henry and Leah and I were taken to Great Ormond Street Hospital.
Upon our arrival, Henry was admitted and given a bed in their brain and neurology ward. We were shown to a shower room where all three of us could fit in, and Leah showered with Henry, holding him. I took their picture and in it, beautiful naked Leah is cradling beautiful naked Henry under the warm water and the expression on his face is one of pain and fatigue you would normally associate with an old man.
In those first few hours at the hospital, we met doctors and nurses whoâd seen Henryâs type of tumour before. They were calm, purposeful. We were disorientated and in shock. We held him and loved him and got ready for the big surgery a few days later.
We spent the four days leading up to Henryâs surgery in terrified anticipation. The surgery would take all day, so Leah and I got a hotel room close to the hospital. At the hotel we were so crazy and scared and holding each other so tight, we actually wound up having sex, twice, a few hours apart.
I realise it sounds insane to say that we had sex twice while our one-year-old had brain surgery across the street. I would normally omit that very personal fact, which might horrify some people, but I am sharing it primarily for the benefit of other parents who might have been through something similar and were terrified and crying and nearly hyperventilating with anxiety. I guess we were just so scared and wanted to be so close, and the horror of what was happening around the block didnât erase the fact that we loved each other, and sometimes that love manifests as sex, even in the absolute worst of times.
After 13 hours we were told the surgery was done and we could see our beautiful baby boy. We kissed him and told him we loved him. Elsawi said that he had removed all the tumour he could find. Henry had a vast number of tubes and wires attached to him and going in and out of orifices, and cannulas going into various veins. A few days after the surgery, we were allowed to carefully hold Henry on a pillow. Heâd have to be gingerly lifted out of his bed by two or three people, making sure none of his lines and ventilation got tangled, but we could hold our baby boy again.
The weight of him in my arms was heaven. The ability to kiss him, to put my lips on his tummy and his shoulders. His ears werenât yet freed from the bandages, but I would get to kiss and nibble gently on those soon too. He was quite knocked out from the surgery. He did start to wiggle about and respond definitively to all our stimuli, however, and was very awake and alert after a week. Things like crawling or cruising, however, were gone for a long time, and would need to be relearnt.
The big motherf***er was that he had lost the ability to swallow. They told us he might regain it in time. In the days following Henryâs surgery, Leah and I moved into housing next to the hospital that is provided for parents whose kids are in the paediatric ICU, or âPICUâ.
It often felt like we were falling down a flight of stairs in slow motion with each successive piece of bad news we got. One day, we were going through the notes on Henryâs surgery and learnt that the nerve that allowed him to hear with his left ear had been severed, and the nerve that went to his right ear was damaged.
Discovering weeks into hospital life that, on top of everything else, he was deaf in one ear and hard of hearing in the other was emblematic of the whole vicious experience; a terrible knock-on development with massive consequences that was buried among everything else to the point where weâd almost missed it.
After two months in the ICU, Henry moved into one of the hospitalâs cancer wards. He was getting chemo for several months, going through cycles of treatment and recovery that left him by turns sick, exhausted and desperate to play games like any other one-year-old.
Henryâs first hairs fell out and he was bald again, and I would hold his head and kiss it and feel the warmth of it. It was such a pleasure to do that. When he grew hair after the chemo, we didnât cut it and, oh my God, it was so beautiful. I loved to put my fingers through it and comb it behind his ear and just ⊠I get mad when I think about how beautiful he was. His hair, his face, his eyes that were such a bright blue. It makes me angry that people wonât get to look at them. Those eyes were two of the most glorious things Iâve ever seen and it offends me that theyâre not there for people to gaze into.
Once the nightmare of his diagnosis and surgery and disability and chemo and all that entailed became our norm, we did our best to be a family that was spread over two hospitals and our home.
Leah and I made an active decision to protect our marriage, day in, day out, throughout Henryâs illness. The way this manifested was simple. Leah and I would go on a date once a week, even when Henry was in the ICU. It didnât have to be a fancy restaurant with a tablecloth. It could be a walk around a park, holding hands. It could be breakfast near the hospital. But we had to look at each other and touch each other and check in and see how the other one was doing. Then we carried that communication through the rest of the day, touching, speaking, just listening to each otherâs voices.
I hesitate to give advice, but I have to say that if youâre ever in a situation like the one in which my family found ourselves, do not forget to love, touch and look into the eyes of every other family member regularly. Early during our time in hospital, I started to think of us as five fingers of the same hand. Every finger is important, even the crooked and/or hairy ones. There is a temptation to only pay attention to the patient, especially if theyâre a young child, but you ignore other family members at your peril. I canât speak for my Henry, but Iâm willing to bet he was happy that Leah and I took good care of the brothers he loved so much, and each other.
After seven months in Great Ormond Street Hospital and seven months in Whittington, we were desperate to get Henry home. He had just turned two. We hadnât dared assume heâd have a second birthday with the prognosis heâd received, but that day came.
When he moved home in June 2017, he exploded even more furiously into life. It meant seeing him interact with us in a way he hadnât for so long. Playing with the toys his brothers played with, lying in our bed with us, flying around the flat on the little scooter heâd mastered. He loved going to the park and playing catch with dogs, dancing wildly to Sia and Justin Bieber with his mom, and playing with his brothers, whom he was crazy about, and who cared for him so lovingly. Henry smiled all the time. And if he opened his mouth when he was smiling and showed you some teeth, thatâs when you really knew you had him.
Having Henry at home was terrifying at first. We had to turn his bedroom into a specialised hospital room with some sizeable machines, including an oxygen concentrator, feed pump and assorted monitors. The first couple of weeks felt like running a half-marathon. But we did it. And after the initial fear subsided, we loved it. We were home together, under one roof. We could spend the whole day together, from waking until sleeping, as a family. It felt good and it felt right.
In September 2017 he had another MRI to see if any cancer had returned. The big boys didnât have school that day, so we brought Eugene and Oscar along with Henry and his carer, Angela, when we went into Great Ormond Street to get the results. I remember walking into the room and thinking it had more people in it than normal. Rather than launch into the results, his main oncologist, Dr Mitchell, asked how Henry was doing. We said he was doing great. Really progressing with physical therapy. Cruising beautifully and crawling quickly upstairs, leading us to believe that walking might not be far off. He was very happy to be at home.
âWow,â said Dr Mitchell. âWell, I asked because I am sorry to say that the MRI showed that the cancer has started to return.â Henry played obliviously, beautifully, on the floor. My stomach filled with stones. They told us they felt there were options, like more surgery and radiation, but we could talk more about that after weâd digested the bad news. I donât remember anything else about the meeting. We shuffled out of the room to the area where Angela was waiting with the two big boys. Our eyes met hers, and she knew. We all cried.
Leah understood before I did that there could be no more treatment. I am so grateful that she is so smart and so strong. We decided to stop Henryâs treatment. We were told we could expect him to live for three to six more months.
We told Eugene and Oscar, who were four and six, that Henryâs cancer had come back and that there was nothing more that could be done. They asked if he was going to die. We said yes. We were in our back garden, where the three of them played together. The three boys, whose health and vitality I used to consciously marvel at and be grateful for before Henry got sick.
One night, soon after, I told one of Henryâs night carers, Rachel, that his cancer had returned and that he was going to die. She yelled, âOh no! Oh, Henry! Oh, Jesus Christ, no!â She recoiled from the news like Iâd hit her. âNo, no, no,â she continued. âYes, yes,â I thought. Her response was like water in the desert to me. Rachel was from Nigeria and a mom and a devout Christian. Maybe one or more of those factors explained her response, I donât know. But it beat the hell out of a lot of the responses Leah and I were getting from people when they heard the news. Many people are afraid of you when your child is dying. I preach sympathy in lots of situations, but not this one. Perhaps because my sympathy wouldnât do anything. Life, and death, will kick their own door down soon enough; I donât really know that a lecture from me on how theyâre a coward would help. So, Rachel, thank you for gasping in pain and sadness when you learnt Henry would die. In the years since, I think of it often as the absolute best response I received. It helped me, Rachel. Yes, scream it from the rooftops. My beautiful baby boy is going to die.
It was so f***ing confusing seeing him bound around so happily, functioning at the highest level of his life, physically and mentally, knowing he was going to die. I felt absolutely insane. We went to the park all the time. I signed on to do a fourth and final series of Catastrophe in the future, so I knew Iâd make money again at some point. Henry played with his brothers and little buddies. Weâd cry with our friends and family and his carers.
We had a guy who did animal birthday parties come over and bring tarantulas and turtles and weird little mammals. Henry was overjoyed. We took baths and the five of us routinely crowded our tiny shower and laughed, played and splashed. He glowed with joy, and so did we.
And so 2018 arrived. It was on the morning of about January 9 that Henry didnât seem to totally wake up. He seemed sluggish and he held his head at an angle, indicating pain. We called the palliative care team at Great Ormond Street and they came to our house. The doctor confirmed that his sluggishness and discomfort probably meant that the tumour was growing and creating the problems that a large foreign object in a childâs head is known to do.
She prescribed morphine and gabapentin to help with his pain. The morphine was a bright red powder that I would mix with water and then load into a syringe, which Iâd then attach to his feeding tube to administer. Iâm glad it was bright red. The thing you put into your dying child to dull his pain should be bright red, like a flag or a flare or a fire truck racing to a disaster.
Morphine and gabapentin work, so he would relax and we would hold him. He got slower each day, as though a dial was being turned down. A big Lego Duplo ice-cream cone became very important to him, and he liked to hold it in his hand all day. Rather than wait until he seemed to be in pain we were told we could give him his medication on a schedule, so there would be little or no pain any more. I dissolved the bright red powder in water and gave it to him, day and night. I lay with him, and Leah held him and danced with him. His brothers read to him and played with him.
Henry began to open his eyes less and less. He held his little ice-cream cone. He was dying.
He was unconscious. I made sure to keep up with the red powder. Our moms took the boys to dinner and some sort of winter light show in a nearby square so we could be with Henry.
Sending them out the door was excruciating, as we didnât know if Henry would be alive when they returned. We told our night carer not to come in that night. We lay on either side of Henry on the couch. We carried Henry out to the back garden so he could be under the stars and in the night air one more time before he died. Leah took a bath with him, and I sat on the floor next to him. He was so beautiful and so smooth and so perfect. His hair was pretty long, as we never cut it once it grew back after chemo.
Our boys returned and Henry was still alive. Then it was just the five of us in the house. Five people who loved each other and needed each other. Henry opened his eyes and looked into Leahâs eyes around five the next morning. Then he died.
I am so happy Henry died at home. I am so happy that he did so in the arms of his beautiful mother, who loved him desperately. I am so happy that he lay between us afterward and we could kiss and hold him and stroke his beautiful long, sandy-blond hair. I am so happy that shortly afterward, his brothers Eugene and Oscar came up and cuddled with him and kissed him and were not afraid, because they had been so intimately involved in his care over the last two years, in the hospitals and then at home. Henry knew happiness and curiosity and love and brotherly squabbles every day that he was home. And that absolutely included his final days. His death was good. We kept Henryâs body at home for most of the day. They were some very precious hours.
People who loved him visited. A doctor came by to confirm and record his death. Oh Christ, he was beautiful in death. In his little pyjamas. We kept the windows open so he could stay cold. I told the loud builders next door that my son was lying dead on our bed and we had to keep the windows open, so please stop work for the day. They did.
When youâre a parent and your child gets hurt or sick, not only do you try to help them get better, but youâre also animated by the general belief that you can help them get better. It might not be the wound-cleaning you personally administer or the medicine you yourself pour into their mouth â you might have to get them to a nurse or a doctor who has the right equipment and skill set â but you believe that itâs you who will get them to the right place, via car or taxi or, God forbid, ambulance, and that, once there, youâll sit by their side or maybe hold them in your lap and theyâll get what they need. Add a little time to mend, heal, rest, and youâll soon have an exciting story to tell. Thatâs not always the case, though. Sometimes, the nurses and the doctors canât fix whatâs wrong. Sometimes, children die. Whateverâs wrong with your child gets worse and they suffer and then they die.
After they die, their body begins to decompose and later itâs zipped into a black bag and taken away by an undertaker in a black van. A few days later, your child is buried in a hole in the ground or cremated in a furnace that incinerates their body into ashes, which you take back to your house and put on a shelf. You wish you could take a kitchen knife and stick it into yourself near one of your shoulders and pull it down and across to the hip on the opposite side of your torso. Then youâd tear apart skin, fat, muscle and viscera, and pull your child out of you again and kiss them and hold them and try frantically to fix what you couldnât fix the first time. But that wouldnât work. So you sit there like a decaying disused train station while freight train after freight train overloaded with pain roars through you. Maybe one will derail and explode, destroying the station and killing you, and you can go and be with your child. Would that be so bad?
Why do I feel compelled to talk about it, to write about it, to disseminate information designed to make people feel something like what I feel? What my wife feels? What my other sons feel? Done properly, it will hurt them. Why do I want to hurt people? (And I do.) Did my sonâs death turn me into a monster? Thatâs certainly possible. It doesnât sanctify you. Things get broken. Maybe itâs because I write and perform for a living that I canât help but try to share or communicate the biggest, most seismic event that has happened to me. The truth is, despite the death of my son, I still love people. And I genuinely believe, whether itâs true or not, that if people felt a fraction of what my family felt and still feels, they would know what this life and this world are really about.
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Thatâs a stunning bit of writing. Raw and fucking heartbreaking
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Dan has a book out. The womenâs racing is more interesting to watch. The men would put you to sleep and often do.
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Too many Dutch druggies in the women.
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Itâs the same in all sports as they become more scientific. Stats & science should be banned.
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Seems very young to be in that job? Fair play to him.
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RuadhĂ n is a great journalist and a lovely bloke as well. I remember he did a load of coronoer court stories that were very well done. Think he did a spell in paris too that was good.
The Phoenix had an article recently about the fight between finance and journalists for the editor position. Seems the journos won.
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His book about the Supreme Court was a nice read.
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Tipp Tipp Tipp
Sometimes, Fergal Keane will wake with a start to find he is drenched in sweat. âIâll be absolutely soaked,â he says. He is visited by nightmares that are both vivid and recurrent: in one, he is buried beneath a pile of dead bodies as a machete-wielding killer searches him out. In another, a girl stands at the foot of his bed and regards him silently.
During daylight hours, he struggles with noise. If he is in a restaurant, ambient sounds take on a strange, insistent clarity and seem to bore into him. âEvery voice seems loud. If someone behind me is laughing, Iâm already starting to shake.â The unexpected clang of someone dropping a knife will make him jolt with panic and leave his heart pounding. A few weeks ago, he was walking with some friends in London when a car engine backfired. âAnd within seconds, Iâm standing there shaking and crying. And I felt ashamed. I felt ashamed of my responses in public.â
Keane suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a condition which, in addition to the symptoms already detailed, sees him struggle with depression, flashbacks and a simmering sense of anger. He is also one of the most prolific and acclaimed foreign correspondents in British and Irish journalism. Keane was 21 years old when he persuaded the editor of the Limerick Leader to let him cover the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. It signalled the start of a career that would see him spend most of the next four decades employed by the BBC and travelling to the parts of the world most marked by conflict, suffering and strife.
Keane reporting from the Central African Republic
BBC/YOUTUBE
He has reported from Rwanda, Kosovo, Darfur, Iraq: places whose names have all served as shorthand for horror, but whose realities Keane conveyed with a clarity and humanity that would win him awards from Amnesty International, Bafta, the Royal Television Society and more. He describes how the late Sunday Times reporter Nicholas Tomalin, who was killed on the Golan Heights, once listed the qualities required of a good foreign correspondent. âYou need a little literary ability. A plausible manner. And ratlike cunning.â Keane, by his own admission, has all three.
But in the course of his work, he exposed himself to atrocity after atrocity. In Sri Lanka, he came across the bodies of five children, beheaded by guerillas and arranged in a neat row. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, he met a teenage girl gang-raped to incontinence. In the Balkans, he witnessed the disinterment of bodies from mass graves and the plaintive cries of elderly parents recognising the remains of their sons. In Ukraine, in 2014, while racing to the wreckage of the downed Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, he encountered the lone body of a toddler, blown far from the crash site by the force of the blast.
That Keane should come out the other side of these experiences with trauma does not, in a sense, require much investigation or explanation. What does require investigation is the fact that, despite these traumas, Keane found himself returning to these places again and again, seeking out suffering, seeking out strife. He has lived with the effects of PTSD since at least 1994 and his time in Rwanda reporting on genocide. He received a formal diagnosis in 2010, but even then he hid this fact from almost everybody and continued to pursue a career that was unravelling him.
âThere were so many points along the way when I was aware that I was being traumatised, and I knew that I was traumatising myself,â he says. âAnd I still went back.â
But why? This is the question Keane grapples with in The Madness, a book he has written about his work, his life and his PTSD, and the intensely interwoven nature of all three. We meet in the quiet corner of a hotel restaurant in Kingâs Cross, north London. Keane is now 61. He is a gentle, unobtrusive presence, with sharp, dark eyes set beneath a floppy grey fringe, and he talks with a voice that is soft and, for the most part, steady.
At one point, however, when I ask about the self-styled âBang Bang Clubâ â a group of young reporters and photographers who covered the township violence in South Africa as apartheid was dismantled â he drifts first into silence, then into tears. Many of them would end up dead, either killed in the course of their work or dying later, having succumbed to addictions or taking their own lives. After wiping his eyes, he waves away my offer to omit this moment from the finished article. âWrite what you want,â he says, chuckling wearily. âIâm not going to be prescriptive.â
In The Madness, Keane says that, âI have been afraid all my life.â Growing up in Dublin then Cork, he endured a dysfunctional childhood. His father, Eamonn, was an actor and an alcoholic, and Keane fretted constantly for his parentsâ marriage. He developed facial twitches and could not bear to be parted from his mother, habits that only exacerbated the bullying he was subject to. He became, he says, a âhyper-vigilant childâ, forever reading people â and particularly his father â for signs of trouble.
But while some people who have endured unstable childhoods seek out routine as they enter adulthood, Keane did the opposite. Having spent so many years feeling fearful, he now wanted, more than anything, to prove that he had courage. âAnd that was really rooted in the feeling that I didnât have that as a kid,â he says. âSo I tried to live up to this image of the brave and bold war correspondent. But inside, youâre scared shitless.â
He believes that, in many ways, the bullying, fear and anxiety he grew up with have helped him in his job. A heightened sense of watchfulness and suspicion of others, combined with a knack for presenting as meek and unthreatening, can be life-saving skills in a war zone. âThe gifts from childhood, if you want to call them that, were working for me. Every time Iâd pull up to a roadblock, Iâd be reading the guyâs face. Iâm reading the tension in a township.â
Keane suffered his first breakdown in 1990, just as he was about to start work as the BBCâs South Africa correspondent. Already struggling with alcoholism, he explained away this episode â of prolonged panic and disorientation â as a one-off bout of depression. His bosses let it slide and within a few weeks, he was able to begin reporting. Over the next four tumultuous years, he established his reputation. He also saw his first colleagues die: Abdul Shariff, a photographer, shot dead in a township during factional fighting; John Harrison, another BBC journalist, killed in a car crash during racial violence, and whose body Keane had to identify.
These sights, he admits, should have caused him to stop and question what he was doing. But he was now in the grip of what he today acknowledges as an âaddictionâ to this kind of work, and the idea of stepping back was unthinkable. His star was rising, strangers were getting in touch to commend his courage and stress the importance of his reporting. âYou try to live up to the image of the war correspondent,â he says. âSo much of my self-worth was tied up in being this guy.â
He was winning awards too, which didnât help. âIf youâre addicted to something like war, then having people patting you on the back and saying, âGod, youâre brave. Have this prize,â makes it an acceptable addiction,â he says. âNot just acceptable, but validating. If youâre an alcoholic or a junkie, nobodyâs going to say, âHey, that was a great puke you did there, or, âThat was a great blackout you had last night.ââ
It was Rwanda, though, that would both shape and break Keaneâs life in ways he could not have imagined. It was not just the fear he felt for himself that changed him, or even the monstrous sights he would encounter daily: of murdered Tutsi civilians piled up in churches or children who had escaped from Hutu militias bearing machete wounds. More than anything, he explains quietly, it was the soul-corroding despair of being in the presence of people who had been taken over by a hatred so profound.
âIt was the realisation that people are capable of anything. Absolutely anything. That there is no harm, no degradation, no brutality that people are not capable of inflicting.â Of course, he had always understood that in the abstract. âBut to experience it on a personal, visceral level is quite different. The scale. The pitilessness. Thatâs what I struggled with.â
Keane in Ukraine, 2016
Not long after leaving Rwanda, he began having recurring nightmares as well as the other symptoms of PTSD â the sleeplessness, anxiety and anger â that would go on to dominate his emotional and psychological landscape. Rather than pulling away from the horror, though, he leant in. He became, he says, âpreoccupied with genocideâ, obsessing over it, reading about it, making programmes about it. âWhat was I doing? I went and made a film about the Armenian genocide,â he says, shaking his head. âDarkness, darkness, darkness.â
He drank, but he did not seek help. He didnât even really know what was wrong with him. âDid I even conceive of the idea of post-traumatic stress at that time? No. Did anyone at work ask me, are you OK? Do you need help? No. And Iâve wondered if I had sought help at the time to deal with the trauma, would it have made a difference? I donât know. Maybe, by then, the addiction was too strong.â
In 1999, after a stint in Kosovo during which he drank himself to sleep each night, he sought treatment for his alcoholism. By now father to a young son, Daniel, he promised his wife, Anne, that he would seek help. âItâs quite straightforward. Stop drinking. Go to AA meetings. Talk to your mates. Donât take a drink today,â he says, counting off on his fingers.
Far more difficult was accepting and addressing his addiction to his job. Because over the next 20 years, Keane would return time and time again to report from war zones and places of conflict. In Sierra Leone, he sees torture. In Pakistan, he comes close to being kidnapped. In Iraq, he loses more colleagues and swears off covering âhot warsâ. But with an addictâs inertia, he is back in Lebanon within a year of his pledge, watching on as 16 dead children are pulled out of a building after an Israeli air strike. He works undercover in Myanmar and Zimbabwe, reporting on human rights abuses. He does not stop.
âI had everything invested in keeping going,â he says. âSo much of my self-worth and self-image were tied up in it. It meant everything to me at the time. If you take it away from me, what am I?â
In 2008, Keane agreed to testify at a Rwandan genocide trial, taking place under the auspices of the United Nations. The experience, which left him weeping in the courtroom and unable to speak, prompted him to seek medical help and, in time, receive a diagnosis of PTSD. Even with this knowledge, he continued to work. In 2014, while reporting on Russiaâs annexation of Crimea, he found himself under artillery fire. It was only after a second breakdown, prompted by the massacre of Sudanese protesters in Khartoum that, in 2020, he revealed he was living with PTSD, and would move to an editing, rather than reporting, position within the BBC.
Since his initial PTSD diagnosis, Keane has worked with a therapist. So much of his anger and guilt, he says, stemmed from a belief that he could and should have done something to stop what unfolded in Rwanda. His therapist asked him, â âWho do you think you are, who could save all those lives?â â he says. âIt was kind of a bucket of cold water in the face. But it was a really important moment. The danger of the saviour complex.â
He has also undergone various treatments and therapies including EMDR, a technique that involves the rapid movement of the eyes as a means of processing trauma. Today, he struggles to accept sympathy for his condition, given that he made âconscious choices and selfish choicesâ to go to these places and see what he saw. âThereâs always been the much louder voice in my head saying, âYouâre a piece of shit. Youâre worthless,ââ he says. âBut Iâm getting better at it.â
He says he still struggles daily with the urge to get on a plane and go to war zones. When the conflict in Ukraine broke out this year, he found himself wheedling up to an editor at the BBC, trotting out a laundry list of reasons why it would be OK for him to go to the warfront. âIt was like an alcoholic going, âIâll only have a shandy!ââ he says. The editor wouldnât budge, though. âHe called me out on it.â
The urge is still there, though. âIf Iâm f***ing honest with myself, this is about almost every day having to say to myself, âYou cannot do this any more.â I suspect itâs going to be like that until the day I die. Because that impulse is not something Iâm ever going to cure.â
He avoids Twitter, with all its soul-sapping beefs and journalists âmouthing off about war zones theyâve never been to and have no real knowledge ofâ. Instead, he says he prefers watching cute cat videos while online. He finds joy in poetry, walking his dog, spending time with friends who have nothing to do with journalism and in being in the crowd at rugby games. âGoing to a match and just losing yourself in the tribal atmosphere is one of my great escapes.â
Keane is still, he believes, a work in progress. âVery often in journalism, thereâs a search for a narrative that has a neat beginning, middle and end. Mine isnât. Thereâs no neat narrative. Itâs f***ing hard. And there are days when itâs a lot harder than other days. Yes, Iâve had breakdowns. And I still suffer from depression and PTSD. But I think Iâm actually quite resilient,â he says softly. âI think Iâm quite a resilient person.â
Extract
âTears come, unending. I know I should be in hospitalâ
Reporting on a refugee camp massacre in Beirut, 2001
BBC
In the late spring of 2019, vast pro-democracy demonstrations have overthrown the dictatorship of President Omar al-Bashir in Sudan. Tens of thousands of people are camped outside military headquarters in Khartoum. The scene is joyous. Ethnic differences are cast aside as people demand an end to autocracy. Across Africa, a vibrant civil society is emerging. There are websites, small newspapers, independent campaign groups on human rights, climate, gender, and there are genuine elections in places that have only ever known dictatorships or stitch-ups. This is what drew me to apply for the position of Africa editor at the BBC. Here was the chance to put the days of war behind me, to report on a different kind of history in the making. I have the chance to mentor young African journalists and learn from them. I am still travelling but not in fear. It is all working, working well, until events intervene.
I did not see the horror that was to come.
On the night of June 3, 2019, the militia attack the protesters. I am back in London and am woken by a call from a friend in Khartoum. âIt has started,â he says. âThey are killing.â I arrive a day later to a cityscape made silent by killing; where the vehicles of the militia, festooned with rocket launchers, dominate every intersection and prowl the dusty back lanes. There has been mass shooting and bloodshed, rape. The city of the peopleâs revolution has been destroyed.
I am given the address of a safe house in Omdurman where I am told Iâll find survivors. The room at the safehouse is tiny. It smells of wounds going bad and the dried sweat of many people. I count 20 men in a space meant for no more than 5. A man is introduced as an ambulance driver who has been ferrying the wounded to hospital during the massacre. I ask him to tell his story. âI used my ambulance to take people to the hospital,â he says. âI saw a young man carrying a woman who looked to be injured. They were stopped by a group of militia. They started raping her. When I got out, I saw that the woman they were raping was actually dead.â
I feel his body start to shake. A Sudanese colleague whoâs been translating the driverâs story places an arm around him. At this gesture of tenderness the driver collapses, physically and loudly. He cries out and thrashes free of the translatorâs embrace. I run to fetch our security adviser, who is outside watching the street for any sign of militia. When we leave, the driver is slumped against the wall, crying. The best I can do is to ring a psychologist I know from a human rights organisation. I have ignited great distress in this man by interviewing him. I have not manufactured the horrors in his head, but I have summoned them into a public space. Having done so I left him and returned home, as Iâve left so many others.
Khartoum reopened the wounds. The breakdown comes one week after I return from Sudan. We are in France for a wedding, driving north through the VendĂ©e and on until we reach the vineyards of Alsace. There are stops in small towns, service stations and country lanes so that I can get out of the car and try to control my breathing. I ring my therapist but am unable to speak. Breathe in deeply, I am told, hold the breath for a few seconds and then slowly release. But the anguish does not abate. The tears come, unbidden and unending. I am constantly jumpy and snapping. I imagine being abandoned by all who love me. I turn to Xanax. One. Two. Three. This is worse than the last time. I lie awake all night in our small, rented house. My mind goes back and forth, an endless tyranny of rumination. What use am I? Youâre nothing but a piece of shit. A burden. Youâre a f***ing fraud. Youâre useless⊠See all your wrongs⊠Go on, make a long list. Look at what youâve done and what youâve failed to do. Live and suffer and pray that you are granted an early deathâŠ
I am to attend the wedding in the village of ThanvillĂ©. Fear and grief have blocked out all other feelings. From here it is a tranquillised fog. Without sedative medication I feel I will die from panic. I am hearing people like they are miles away, their voices carried to me on the wind, out of reach. I think: you should be in hospital. It is not safe out here. But I do not want to go back to hospital. What would happen to me then? Iâll end up destitute. I see myself on the streets lying under cardboard, or locked away in a psychiatric hospital.
On the morning of the wedding, I swallow the requisite quantity of tablets, enough to guarantee that I wonât disintegrate in front of everyone. Everything happening now is happening inside my head. In the garden of the ChĂąteau de ThanvillĂ© I smile and shake hands with people I do not know. Later I slip away and find a narrow road that leads into the hills above the village. I spot a cemetery with row after row of black crosses: the graves of 607 German soldiers who died during the Great War. No one can disturb me here. I slump against the wall of the graveyard and fall asleep. It is twilight by the time I wake up.
The following morning, I take a train for Paris. After a few minutes I hear an announcement telling me I am in fact on my way in the opposite direction, bound for Switzerland. This is how it always starts. The unravelling of the basic details. Fixed facts begin to slip. The mind refuses to cooperate. I have only vague memories of what follows. A kind railway guard who helps me off the train and puts me on another bound for Paris. Dr Campbell in London telling me, âYouâll be all right. The circuits have tripped. You should probably go in for a whileâŠâ
I do go into hospital, to a new locked ward. I am grateful for the quiet, too tired to feel shame. That will come later, after the terror eases. I know I should not have gone to Khartoum after the massacre. I hadnât stopped to think about the risk to my mind. What is left is the rawness of a struggle with myself. Who will I be if I do not go to the war fronts? The people who follow my journalism, by and large, are those who care about places torn apart by war or those labouring under injustice â a committed audience though not a vast one. What would I do if I was not the person the audiences knew?
Extracted from The Madness: A Memoir of War, Fear and PTSD by Fergal Keane, published on November 10 by William Collins (ÂŁ20)
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A truly great man
Thatâs savage, in every sense of the word
Can you post this up for the poor?
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Sounds very similar to Anthony Llyod