The Sunday Times May 22, 2022 23COMMENT
Matthew Syed
My friend Deborah’s dying but I
defy you to call her life tragic
She offers a
signpost to us
all: to be alive
is the greatest
mystery and
strangest giftCancer author is an inspiration and comfort to millions — and has raised a fortune for research
I
t was 7pm on a normal Thursday
when Deborah James found out she
had a 5.5cm tumour in her colon. “I
hope to share with you some golden
nuggets of advice and top tips from
the front line,” she would later
write. “The romantic in us goes
weak when presented with ‘I love
you’, is humbled by ‘I forgive you’ and is
scared to the point of no return when
hearing ‘You have cancer’.
“But I’m finding my own way — with
wine and high heels, shouting, ‘F*** you,
cancer,’ as loud as I can as I prepare for
yet another lung operation.”
I met Deborah four years ago and we
were astonished by how much we had in
common. My daughter, Evie, was about
to start at the school attended by hers,
Eloise. We had the same podcast
producer and shared a fascination with a
concept called growth mindset, which
relates to how young people, if they are
not scared by failure, are more likely to
take life-affirming risks and find it easier
to shake off setbacks. Deborah, a school
teacher, was writing a thesis on the topic
before she was diagnosed with what she
called “the big C”, and I was in the
middle of writing a book for children on
the same subject.
It is quite common when thinking
about people with a terminal illness —
Deborah is now in hospice home care
and recently let it be known that she has
weeks, perhaps days, to live — to shake
one’s head and commiserate about
“tragedy”. We ruminate on the sadness,
the waste; we talk of “a life cut short”.
Knowing Deborah, though, I cannot
agree that her life has been tragic or inany way wasted. Indeed I would suggest
that in the brief illumination of existence
that is all any of us is granted she has
shined brighter than almost any human I
have met. Over the past few days my
wife, who has become close friends with
Deborah, and I have done little more
than share anecdotes about this bubbly,
fiercely intelligent, empathetic, beautiful
human being.
Even now, her humour pierces the
darkness. She released a book last week
called How to Live When You Could Be
Dead to raise money for her cancer
foundation, and, through the generosity
of the British public, it was propelled
straight to the top of the Amazon charts.
She texted my wife: “At last, we know
what it takes to get to No 1!”
On Thursday, Deborah, 40, posted a
photo of herself in a summery dress
standing next to Eloise, sending many
thoughts through my mind. I
remembered Evie, three years younger
than Eloise, in her first days at a scary
new school, bounding through the door
with a smile on her face. Eloise had
made her feel welcome, something that
did not surprise me, for do we not often
see the goodness of parents reflected in
their children?
As I looked at that photo, I saw
something else, too. Amid the love
beaming from the face of Eloise you can
also see the gratitude of a girl spending
time with her increasingly fragile
mother. Deborah is thin, keeping herself
upright with a walking stick; Eloise is
beside her, hugging her but also
supporting her — a picture that says so
much about kindness, love,togetherness and the greatness of that
institution we call family.
Tragedy? Waste? When Deborah’s
cancer was diagnosed, she marshalled
her own growth mindset to change lives
for the better. She wrote blogs and
uploaded Instagram posts, hoping to
offer comfort and assistance to others
hearing the fateful words “You have
cancer”. She started writing a column
for The Sun — warm, intelligent, realistic
— about what it means to have a life-
changing disease. This is the essence of
Deborah, the kind of friend you would
call, day or night, if you were in trouble,
knowing she would drop everything to
help. And this is why, even when she had
accepted that the various treatments,
drugs and experimental therapies were
not going to work, when her body finally
started to give up, when she endured
suffering of a kind I cannot possibly
convey, she wished to help others. She
set up a trust, brought forward the
publication of a book and even started a
fashion line. All to raise money for
research into a disease that she wants
others to avoid. Donations already
exceed £6 million.
Tragedy? Waste? The great British
adventurer George Mallory, who also
died young, was once asked why he
wanted to climb Everest. “If you cannot
understand that there is something in
man which responds to the challenge of
this mountain and goes out to meet it,
that the struggle is the struggle of life
itself upward and forever upward, then
you won’t see why we go,” he said.
“What we get from this adventure is just
sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end oflife. We do not live to eat and make
money. We eat and make money to be
able to live. That is what life means and
what life is for.”
I think those words could have been
written about Deborah. For hasn’t she
climbed mountains of a metaphorical
kind, all while shining with a vivid
appreciation of the strange journey we
call life? “Right now for me it’s all about
taking it a day at a time, step by step, and
being grateful for another sunrise,” she
wrote last week. “Everybody has been
working crazy hard these past few weeks
to get everything in place. My whole
family are around me and we will dance
through this together, sunbathing and
laughing at every possible moment!”
And I know as profoundly as I know
anything that Eloise, Hugo, her 14-year-
old son, and Sebastian, her husband,
will come to regard her life as beautiful
and revelatory, even as they deal with
the chaotic emotions of seeing her
struggle in her final days. Indeed I would
suggest that Deborah offers a signpost to
us all — with or without cancer, male or
female, rich or poor — that to be alive, to
exist, is the greatest mystery and most
confounding gift, to be regarded with
awe and seized with daring before we
depart into the limitless night that awaits
us all. As one of the main characters
wisely observes in Sartre’s play The Devil
and the Good Lord: “Do you think I count
the days? There is only one day left,
always starting again: it is given to us at
dawn and taken away from us at night.”
Donate at justgiving.com/campaign/
BowelbabeFundA
chap called Stuart Kirk got on
stage at a finance conference
on Thursday and cheerfully
blew both his feet off. Kirk,
head of responsible investing
at HSBC Asset Management,
compared climate change to
the millennium bug and said
that throughout his career there had
“always been some nutjob telling me
about the end of the world”. Arguing
that we should focus on adapting to the
crisis rather than trying to stop it, he
said: “Who cares if Miami is six metres
underwater in 100 years? Amsterdam
has been six metres underwater for ages,
and that is a really nice place.”
There was more. Kirk suggested that
the former Bank of England governor
Mark Carney, now a vocal climate
campaigner, was spending his time
flying around the world trying “to
out-hyperbole the next guy”. He quoted
Carney on a slide headlined:
“Unsubstantiated, shrill, partisan,
self-serving, apocalyptic warnings are
ALWAYS wrong.”
I have been to these summits and
know how boring they are. The real
shame would have been that Kirk’s
speech lasted only 15 minutes.
But you know what happened next.
The Twitter outrage mill whirred into
action and HSBC abased itself before the
moronic inferno. Kirk’s boss issued a
statement saying that his remarks did
“not reflect the views of HSBC Asset
Management or HSBC Group in any
way”. For good measure his boss’s boss
then took to LinkedIn and emphasised
the bank’s commitment to “a better
future”. Kirk will presumably now be
taken away for a lengthy period of
re-education, if not fired outright.
No such fate awaits Elon Musk, who
moaned last week that Tesla, his
$665 billion electric car firm, had been
excluded from a version of the S&P 500
stock market index screened for
environmental, social and governance
(ESG) criteria, while the oil giant
ExxonMobil made it into the top ten.
“ESG is a scam,” Musk tweeted, with
his trademark subtlety. “It has been
weaponised by phony social justice
warriors.”
You don’t have to agree with whatOne ESG
database ranks
Unilever the
same as the fast
fashion firm
Boohoo. Eh?Kirk or Musk said to dislike the other
side in the argument. In different ways
both men put their finger on something:
the nonsense of the ESG movement.
For the uninitiated, the debate over
ESG is the closest the business world
comes to a culture war. Very few people
advocate more pollution, worse
treatment of staff or dodgier boardroom
practice. Yet the dogmatic way ESG is
applied by the high priests of finance is
leading to a groundswell of discontent.
There are several problems with it.
One, as per Musk’s tweet, is the absence
of standardised and transparent scoring.
Some companies, such as Sustainalytics,
have tried to produce clear-cut rankings.
But they are so vanilla as to be almost
useless. According to Sustainalytics’s
database, Unilever, the right-on peddler
of useful products such as Marmite, has
the same ranking as Boohoo, an online
retailer exposed by us a few years ago for
using sweatshop labour in Leicester. Eh?
Another, as illustrated by Kirk’s swift
gagging, is the Orwellian way the ESG
agenda is policed. Even FTSE 100 bosses
grumble quietly about it and then get on
with reams of ESG-related paperwork.
Musk is something of a JK Rowling figure
in this regard — rich enough not to care
about being cancelled.
ESG now accounts for $2.7 trillion of
assets globally, according to the research
firm Morningstar. And that’s the biggest
problem: such concerns should be part
of every company’s decision-making,
not hived off into a distinct industry and
monetised to the hilt.
The box-ticking application of ESG has
led to perverse outcomes. Energy
companies have been made to spin off
“dirty” fossil-fuel assets, often to less
transparent buyers that run them harder
and generate more pollution. Until
Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the
latest ESG obsession was defunding
companies involved in nuclear weapons.
I have previously recommended
replacing ESG with CDP — common
sense, decency and pragmatism. But
that would disenfranchise the parasitic
industry of advisers that has grown up
around ESG, so it is unlikely to happen.Oliver
Shah
Corporate
virtue
signalling
is ripe for
ridicule
“I’m definitely not on it but
I expect Lulu Lytle is”“Humpty Dumpty’s gone to throw himself
at a statue of Margaret Thatcher”NEWMAN’S
WEEK
“Godot’s waiting for the
Sue Gray report”“Let’s do our shoplifting tomorrow,
when everything’s pricier”