The Economist has officially lost interest in the ANC’s broad-based black economic empowerment, or BBEEE, which means that European high finance and industry will soon lose interest too. The Economist was once firmly a BBEEE groupie – quite literally the turquoise-eyed Swede aid worker drooling over Musa the Sudanese drummer at an after-dinner, sustainable development summit feature as he drummed away by the fire.

But this was in an age where there were lots of European businessmen selling arms to South Africa, which the country couldn’t operate and didn’t need, and when a situation mutates all JM Coetzee on you – as South Africa appears to The Economist to have – slippery opportunists bolt first, taking their reading material with them.

This is monumental: where The Economist leads, London’s Financial Times follows. Then all the others.

Respect

There is reason to respect the magazine’s editor, Zanny Minton-Bedoes, despite her being an Oxbridge PPE (the latter – one destroyer of western civilisation) and the very model of snooty establishment media. In 2018 The Economist hosted the Open Future Festival and Minton-Bedoes invited two particular people.

One was Steve Bannon, who had previously inherited the Breitbart News kingdom following the founder’s untimely death from a heart attack, and played a significant role in amassing the populism that compelled Trump 2016 – first to contend, then to win.

The second she invited was a radical, feminist, anti-racist, queer-compliant English writer called Laurie Penny, who was supposed to be on a panel discussing the current thing of 2018: “#metoo”. Bannon would be interviewed by Minton-Bedoes directly after that panel finished. Penny demanded Bannon be scrapped from the program. Minton-Bedoes said no. Penny then withdrew, four or five gratuitous Nazis later.

On stage the conversation between Minton-Bedoes and Bannon got off to a rocky start, with Bannon frequently interrupted, then smeared by implication. But the German in Minton-Bedoes caught her tongue, let her controversial guest speak and found objectively assertive questions to ask him.

Uninitiated

It would have become clear to the uninitiated shortly thereafter that Bannon, contrary to neurotic opinion, was a deep thinker with a firm grasp of economic nationalism, which remains the foundation for most of his arguments today.

This kind of talk is always a trap for entitled Europeans – and Minton-Bedoes obliviously stepped in. She claimed that she – of mixed European parentage – had enjoyed a long passage of peace and prosperity since the end of the Second World War, to which Bannon responded: “sure, on the backs of the deplorables”. Minton-Bedoes changed the subject to trade.

Rather than cancelling Bannon, popular at the time but by no means as popular as it was to become in 2020/2021, Minton-Bedoes did the smart, fair thing. She platformed someone who successfully relayed the perspectives of groups abandoned by the US Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) in 2008. What emerged had nothing to do with race or religion, but class and frustration.

Black and white Americans had their homes repossessed. Investment bankers kept their bonuses. French boomers could sleep easy and continue to start drawing their pensions in their early 60s.

American power brokers

The Economist is to European financiers what The Atlantic (owned by Apple founder Steve Jobs’s widow) is to American democratic power brokers. This was clear when former CNN anchor Chris Cuomo was fired in 2021.

Cuomo was one of lockdown’s most insufferable broadcasting personalities – permanently scolding everyone and everything for not thinking like him, or for being caught walking in a park, or complaining about New York’s ludicrous state rules (which, of course, his brother – the former Governor – had a hand in drafting).

There were many things Cuomo’s bosses could have rumbled him for – his preposterous lies about Covid self-isolating, his conflicts of interest – or even just his standard disposition: once in conversation with his co-host, the equally objectionable Don Lemon, Cuomo sat back and remarked: “You know, I just sit here, as we’re talking, wondering…what it must be like to be a black and gay man in America”.

But none of these things led to his dismissal – that came from an article in The Atlantic written by David A Graham complaining about him. Two days later he was sacked. What America’s power democrat socialites want, they get.

Continuing debate

Just how influential will be The Economist’s position be in the continuing debate about the relevance and future of BBEEE? Very. That’s because it can be located just as easily on the desk of a Marxist professor at a London university as it can in the back of the robber baron’s chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce.

Latest editions are found in trendy, right-on social impact member’s club, and conservative ones – in the seat sleeves of Eurostar carriages or left behind on the tables of tapas bars in the Iberian Peninsula.

In the UK and Europe, The Economist inspired a generation of Trump and Vladimir Putin-loathing boomers, none of whom will ever return to normality. It rarely makes mistakes and when it does, they’re negligible – for example, Mark Carney, the Canadian Prime Minister. The Economist likes him, but in recent weeks has tempered the adoration, presumably sensing just how unlikeable he is. Its Israel / Palestine position is another.

But whether The Economist is right or wrong or left or right doesn’t actually matter anymore. Even in a changing world, in a changed media environment, it remains ubiquitous, and it’s that – always there, always taking the temperature, then a swift, icy calculation before it sets off again – is why it matters.

The ANC has lost one of its most cosmopolitan sympathisers, and it should be worried. Interestingly, you never see The Economist in bathrooms in London anymore. That’s because reading about the UK economy on the loo would breach health and safety legislation. Read the backs of shampoo bottles instead.