The Capitalist: ABBA legend speaks to near-empty room at SXSW London as £1k pass-holders left outside
Mishaps at London SXSW, fishticuffs at London restaurants and a Bitcoin breakfast with Reform at The Shard; catch up on the latest gossip in this week’s edition of The Capitalist
SXSW LONDON: £1K TO QUEUE FOR ABBA AT THE FESTIVAL OF IDEAS
SXSW, one of the world’s most prestigious festivals of ideas, has arrived in London. Pass-holders are scurrying around Shoreditch heading to talks with world-leading entrepreneurs, musicians like Bjorn from ABBA and actors like Idris Elba. For £1,300 the Platinum pass suggests getting into the most coveted talks should be a doddle, with website material saying holders “benefit from priority access to ALL events”. But queues half the length of Brick Lane snaking around the Truman Brewery, and plenty of irate looking lanyard-wearers, suggested the opposite. “It’s a lot of disappointment,” one insider admitted. One particularly angry-looking subset queuing outside Björn from ABBA’s talk would have been furious to find out that the legend actually walked on stage to a near-empty room, facing over a thousand empty seats. Management issues filling the hall meant that even the lucky ones who’d been queuing for an hour hadn’t been filed through into the venue in time. Thankfully it was no such bother for The Capitalist: we skipped right in with our priority journalist lanyard.
TURBOT DITCHED BY STINGY CHEFS
Alarming news for Capitalists who still enjoy the finer things in life: an increasing number of chefs are taking the King of Fish off their menu. Turbot is proving too pricey to turn a profit on, with one chef telling The Telegraph that whereas he paid £18 per kilo pre-pandemic, it can now be as much as £65. Spikes in the cost of labour, energy and shipping have seen the price of seafood climb ever higher, putting the likes of turbot beyond the reach of many restaurants, and diners. Fortunately, there are some City eateries prepared to swallow the cost in order to retain this celebratory fish dish. Craig Johnston, head chef at Michelin-starred Angler, tells us “we’re absorbing some of the margin ourselves because we believe our diners deserve the very best” – a sentiment The Capitalist fully endorses.
REFORM STORMS THE SHARD
So too, it seems, does Reform, which last week wasted no expense schmoozing London hacks with a press breakfast on the 34th floor of The Shard. The “party of the working class”, the five-star Shangri-La was the natural venue to launch Reform’s Cryptoassets and Digital Finance Bill, which pledges to make the UK “the world’s premier hub” for blockchain innovation. The Capitalist enjoyed digging into the spread of English fare on offer, complete with symbolic Brexit-embattled British sausages. In the absence of party leader Nigel Farage (away at Bitcoin 2025 in Las Vegas), guests were treated to the orations of party chairman Zia Yusuf, who promised to turn the UK into a crypto haven without descending into “an alt-coin scammers paradise” (Reformcoin, when?). To demonstrate its commitment, the party also announced it would now be accepting donations in Bitcoin, Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies in an historic move. What currency the Shangri-La bill was paid in, The Capitalist was unable to confirm.
HONEY-TONGUED TORIES
Tory Party chair and former City financier Dominic (Lord) Johnson has shared a captivating Linkedin video of his bee-keeping efforts, using a heated blade to slice the wax layer off a tray of fresh honey. While the hypnotic honey harvest is possibly better suited to Tiktok, Johnson doesn’t miss an opportunity to offer a political parable. “The fact is with bee keeping you can’t take too much honey or the bees die in the winter. It’s like the state – it eats far too much of our honey and what happens is that the colony perishes.” Food for thought.
LIKE FATHER LIKE SON
Sky News anchor Wilfred Frost recently praised his late father, the great interviewer Sir David Frost, for his ability to keep “innovating and adapting” throughout the decades during which his conversations with everyone from President Nixon to Yasser Arafat captivated global audiences. The younger Frost is now demonstrating his own versatility with the launch of a new Master Investor podcast, in partnership with top investor Jim Mellon. The teaser episode dropped last week and Frost Jr tells the Capitalist that he’s secured some of the biggest names in finance to appear over the coming months. We’ll be listening.
LEAN IN CLOSELY…
As much as we’d like to think we were, we’re not the purveyors of all City gossip. Some things – very occasionally – pass us by. If you’ve got an insider scoop you’d like to share with us for consideration in The Capitalist, please email us at thecapitalist@cityam.com. We’re all ears.