A few years back, an old friend invited me up to his and his wife’s glorious Scottish estate where they hold an annual international festival called Beyond Borders. I was asked to be part of a panel where the subject was as the title of this blog. Just before we took to stage, I tugged the jacket of the session’s chair and cheekily asked to go first. Probably because he was a regular at The Cinnamon Club and it was well known that I allotted the best tables to people I liked, he agreed.

This, from memory, is what I said when he asked: “I’ve never really had a choice in the matter as I’ve always been told who I am. When we first came to Britain in the 1960’s, I was a Pakistani, abbreviated by thugs to Paki. Then after liberation in 1971, I was a Bangladeshi. Then everyone was lumped together, and I became coloured, then an immigrant. Then it was considered polite to call me an ethnic minority. Then I was called Black, then Asian, then Black and Minority Ethnic, then some Asians said they weren’t included in this, so I became Black and Asian Minority Ethnic. Then with the rise of extremism, I was called a Muslim (not in a nice way, obvs).

“I’ve probably missed out a few, but no-one’s really ever asked me what I call myself. If they had, my answer would always have been the same: I’m a Londoner.”

Now that nearly everyone has had their say on the “really from” issue, perhaps it’s now time to capitalise on this national embarrassment and explore how we get beyond othering to adopt more inclusive thinking and talking. And here we hit a stumbling block which has largely gone off our radar these past few days because of the Buckingham Palace incident of whether we can ever transition from being British to being English. As Beyond Borders was held just outside of Edinburgh, I also made the observation there that Asians in Scotland called themselves Scottish, but people of Asian descent in England didn’t call themselves English.

The subject is most pertinent right now because of the World Cup, where for 90 minutes we all become English, just as a report found during the last Euros. Both in that study and elsewhere, we have large amounts of evidence to show that the vast majority of white English people say they don’t believe you need to be white to be English, but the same belief doesn’t hold true for most of the rest of us.

I have a friend in Bradford whose family settled there from Pakistan who calls himself a Yorkshireman just as I do as a Londoner. So, what’s holding us back from calling ourselves English – and does it matter? I would say it matters because while we can identify with being British as our nationality and feel part of the particular region where we settled, there’s still that tingling feeling that we’re not there yet. England undoubtedly has bigger class differences than say Scotland or Wales and minorities (or in the case of Leicester and Birmingham, majorities) tend be disproportionately at the lower socio-economic end so the facts rather than the words paint a different story.

The Scots, the Welsh and the Irish of course all demanded independence from England which will have helped a national buy-in from minorities in those parts. With England being seen as the home of empire and elitism, rather than associated with, say, factory workers or miners, there remains a rocky road to travel to get us all to believe that outside of those 90 minutes and despite the diversity of the team, that English still doesn’t just mean white.   

It’s more than a skin-deep issue and it’s not one that’s easily solved. But it’s only after we accept this is a problem, which many people feel it isn’t, that we can begin to start fixing it. We’d all be in a better place if we could do that.

My latest column for The Sauce https://thesaucemag.com/eating-with-your-hands

My latest column for The Sauce, this time on the logic to feed prisoners properly. https://thesaucemag.com/iqbal-wahhab-on-prison-food/

Last night when the publishers of this unsolicited piece on me posted it on Twitter I had two thoughts. Firstly, whoever kindly wrote it had done a huge amount of research on me, citing things I’d said in the past which I had forgotten and then quickly I moved on to consider all the things I’ve done wrong or got wrong which tend not to get written about. From poor commercial decisions to failures of character, there are things I have only recently opened up about, like I did in a magazine column where I wrote of the poor manner in which I used to sometimes treat people working at The Cinnamon Club and Roast when pride in one’s work can in a flick of light turn into anger and aggression.

I don’t think I’d ever like anyone other than myself to write or speak about these things though. Earlier this year the much-respected Russell Norman very bravely opened up to The Guardian about the traumas of opening a post-pandemic, post-Brexit restaurant and I remember saying to media friends at the time that I wouldn’t like to see myself portrayed in that way, as a victim of external events and talking about the difficulties in overcoming them.

I’ve always taken a slightly different approach – be open about the difficulties you face but only after you have overcome them. Just over 20 years ago this played out in a particular way when the BBC made a fly on the wall documentary about me opening The Cinnamon Club. At the tenth anniversary dinner for it, I was set next to its producer and I told her a whole host of things that happened which I hadn’t shared at the time and she said: “Oh my God why didn’t you say any of that?”.

A lot of businesspeople come off badly when doing fly on the wall programmes but I was more concerned about agreeing to have The Observer’s restaurant critic Jay Rayner do a fly on the wall feature which turned out to be a fun few months of him quizzing me about everything but again unbeknown to him, I held back as much as I shared.

Fast forward to now and there’s a TV company looking to make a series about my much delayed and most ambitious project to date. They’ve been filming me walking through different parts of London where I’ve talked excitedly about The Grand Plan and The Mission and they’ve interviewed some of the team I’ve been assembling about what they make of it all.

One day after some filming with the producer and cameraman we had lunch over which I inadvertently changed my tone and shared how difficult it is to start a new business these days and I got the same reaction: “Why do you never talk like that on camera?” That’s still difficult for me – not because I don’t want to be honest but because I’m careful about what I want to be honest about and what I aspire to achieve.

I still don’t really share much about how I’m feeling. Apart from the fact that I’ve just shared that.

A few days back I was treated to lunch by my pal Mallika Basu which was a joyously painful affair at the brilliant Smoking Goat in Shoreditch where they use all sorts of chillies in all sorts of ways including in a strawberry salad – who would have thought? Amidst the coughing and the tears that ensued, she floored me with this question: why did I write my book on the failure of charity six years ago when its underlying message – that business, not the public or third sector, is the best vehicle to tackle inequality and save the planet – is only becoming relevant now?

Being told you were ahead of your time may sound flattering, but it is not a rewarding experience.

Indeed, the book’s argument is not just relevant now but is beginning to be proven to be the case. Another close friend Karan Bilimoria recently shared with me a lecture he gave at Oxford in which he spoke about how both as an independent member of the House of Lords and as President of the CBI, his entrepreneurial skills made the government eventually see sense on the business interruption loans scheme and then more recently getting businesses to quickly send their support to the people of Ukraine.

Reading Karan’s lecture made me realise there was a gap in my argument: it’s not business as such that needs to be the force for good, a phrase that is increasingly becoming part of our vocabulary, but the entrepreneurial mindset. Entrepreneurs often fail but they don’t give up – they lick their wounds and live to fight another day. So when they decide it is their duty to be agents for change, as we’re seeing more and more with the Steven Bartletts of the world, Ella’s Kitchen founder Paul Lindley creating a global competition to fund businesses that are formed to tackle the UN’s sustainable development goals and a new impact-driven model is devised whereby people identify a social or environmental problem and then create a commercial solution to it like Jenny Costa did with Rubies in the Rubble, we’re onto something.

Soon after I wrote the charity book, which was hated and tolerated in equal measure, I asked a literary agent whether I should do a follow up book charting the history of capitalism and seeing its next iteration to go from being the creator of our problems to being the solver of them. Her reply was: “Don’t predict it. Prove it.”

We’re currently at the “can you prove it?” stage in how we hold businesses to account, in particular on net zero progress and on improved gender representation across the board, though we’re less well advanced in challenging racial diversity.

Where the entrepreneurial mindset steps in is when a business founder hones their unrelenting zeal for more than making their own business work.

Despite a few shaky moments, Karan has remained chair of Cobra Beer for over 30 years and has seen his passion for business take him to circles where he has been able to use the belligerent nature that forms an essential part of the entrepreneur’s DNA into arenas like hounding government and shaking up education.

Entrepreneurs see the finishing line and not the barriers in the way. Now we need to get better at sticking it out – the average life expectancy of a founder as CEO of their business is just two and a half years – because only when we build at scale can we become effective changemakers. And only when we do that can we rely less on government and even less on charities.

Entrepreneurs will increasingly own that process.

That’s the prediction. Now we need to prove it.

I really wish the rail strike wasn’t on this week. Not because I need to use trains right now but because the real story of the year isn’t getting the look-in it deserves, by which I of course mean the lifting out of The Times’s report on Saturday about Boris Johnson seeking to use his influence when Foreign Secretary to get his then girlfriend Carrie Symonds a £100,000 a year government job.

With everything else that’s going on, we just haven’t had enough dwell time on how Downing Street simply picked up the phone to Murdoch’s folk and the report disappeared without a trace.  Journalists, especially those based in Westminster, often indulge in “horse-trading” – knowing something scandalous about a well-connected politician, telling said politician they can run this story or let them have the option for the MP/minister in question to make sure it never sees the light of day by ditching the dirt on a number of their colleagues instead. It happens all the time – in my PR days, I brokered a couple of these deals myself.

Westminster has always been awash with scandals that we never get to hear about. The reason why sitcoms like Yes Minister and The Thick of It are so popular is because they are so close to the truth.

It’s not just governments that have historically manipulated the media; it’s businesses too. In 1956, The Guardian was the only newspaper to oppose Britain’s involvement in The Suez Crisis where Israel invaded Egypt. But their stance lost them so much advertising revenue from businesses that they were on the brink of financial ruin. The only way for them to survive was to reverse their stand, which they did and the bookings came back.

I remember from my journalist days writing a feature in 1990 for The Independent at the time of the first Gulf War when the world was focussed on Iraq and the invasion of Kuwait. My piece was a colourful look at the flourishing community in London of Iraqi people of Jewish origin. I’d got some great interviews and the photographer assigned with me got some fantastic pictures for it. The spread look amazing but it never saw the light of day because at the last minute one of the editors pulled it as the Saatchi brothers were from this community and we could not risk offending them and losing their clients’ massive advertising spends.

Carrie Symonds knows better than most as to how the press’s bread is buttered and here’s why: her father Matthew was one of editors of The Independent at the time.

I do wish doctors would stop saying face to face consultations are a waste of time. If my GP lived next door to me and had to listen to my relentless asthmatic coughing bouts during the night, they’d be more likely to have me visit and get me more than another useless lesson on how to breathe (in through the nose, out through the mouth – who’d have thought?) to get me off their radar.

The radar on racial injustice is rather similar. The 18^th century Irish philosopher Bishop Berkely had the puzzling theory that if you can’t see something, how do you know it exists? If you don’t see or experience racism, you don’t believe it can be as bad as people make it out to be. In polite circles, I imagine many people quietly hold the view that racism really can’t be as bad as we say.

The other day, my face lit up with glee when receiving an invitation to an event at the media and celebrity haunt The Groucho Club featuring two close friends of mine. Simon Woolley has recently written an autobiography called Soar about his meteoric rise from a council estate kid from Leicester not just to become a Lord but also the first black principal of a Cambridge University college. He is to be in conversation with the wonderfully gifted June Sarpong who grew up in Walthamstow, became a TV star and is now the author of her own celebrated books.

Simon and I bonded a couple of decades ago through a shared passion for people from minorities to get more engaged in British politics. He had created Operation Black Vote and in 1987 in my first job out of the LSE, as deputy editor of The Asian Times, I had commissioned a major national opinion poll on ethnic minority voting patterns.

With The Cinnamon Club being round the corner from parliament, I would regularly host events there with him.

Soon after leaving The Asian Times, I started writing for The Independent following a meeting I had arranged with their founding editor Andreas Whittam Smith and David Upshal, who had grown up from a broken home in south London but got a First from Oxford and had become political editor at The Voice.

The meeting with David and I at The Independent was based around a proposition that they create a special section to the paper on minority issues which got poo-pooed by the boss as he felt we would be “ghettoised” but he wanted us to work there and so we were shown around the newsroom and when we were introduced to the legal affairs editor, David asked him: “Mate, do you feel ghettoised?” That was the end of him there (he’s now a celebrated documentary maker), but I got a job. The 350 strong team (from memory), all on one floor, was all white apart from me and one day a sub-editor came to my desk and asked: “Excuse me, are you Iqbal Wahhab?” I stood up, looked around the room and said: “Well I guess I must be.”

In those times there was only one reporter on The Sunday Times (Amit Roy) and one on the FT covering race apart from me. One day I was in a lift for a press lunch at the then Commission for Racial Equality and a black guy got in, looked at me and said: “Are you Iqbal Wahhab?” To which I said: “In which case you must be Joel Kibazo.”

In 1991, David, Joel, and I set up the Black Journalists Association and soon found 300 people from minorities at various stages of their media careers. We threw a party at a club for an awards ceremony where we were graced by the likes of Moira Stuart. Sadly, not much has changed in the media since those days and I imagine many of those 300 moved into different career paths for failing to have their skills recognised. For those who persevered, unlike Joel or I, it’s often not been a great time with many telling me over the years of their continual disappointment at seeing less talented people being promoted over them.

Ironically June’s chat with Simon is happening at the same club as our BJA event 30 years ago. It’s ironic because the club is named after Groucho Marx’s famous joke: I would never join a club that would have me as a member. In our inner cities, aspirations among young black and brown kids are generally so low that they do not consider becoming a member of the club of opportunity and success as an option for them.

Let’s hope Simon and June have helped pave a path for a better next 30 years where we don’t just celebrate great people, but also great progress.

It’s only taken me 12 years to know about it, but I’ve just recently watched the Ricky Gervais film Cemetery Junction. Unless you’re averse to his rather generous use of profanities, I’d recommend it. The theme of the film revolves around an old Arab proverb: “Throw your heart out in front of you and run ahead to catch it”.  Although it was probably never intended to have this consequence, it’s a great mantra for people to follow if they’re bored of the job they’re in and wish they had their own business but don’t want to risk the certainty that comes with a regular pay cheque.

Going one step further and seeking to set up a business that does more than set out to make a profit sends alarm signals to out-of-touch investors. I’ve seen many people with business plans to do their bit to save the world thwarted in their ability to get funded but largely, they keep going in their endeavour until they eventually do, often at great personal sacrifice. And when they do get backed, they tend to admit that if they’d got their money earlier, they wouldn’t have had the time to iron out the flaws in their original proposition.

On my regular visits to the great Fallow restaurant, I have yet to be drawn to order the cod’s head, but they tell me it’s by far and away their most popular dish and the chefs, having tested out their plans in an earlier pop-up site, really have their fingers on the pulse of how people are increasingly thinking these days. I was telling someone recently that I can’t imagine anyone wakes up thinking “I could really murder a cod’s head right now” but large swathes of their following order it knowing what would happen to it otherwise – it would likely end up in a bin or at best in a stock.

Instead, it becomes a meal that I guess makes one feel good by adapting “nose to tail” eating to fish rather than just meat. The fact that it comes smothered siracha sauce will come as a bonus draw and will tip me over in to having it next time I go.

If you were told that a restaurant would open in the fancy St James’s area with a cod’s head on the menu, conventional wisdom would justify you thinking either “what else have they got that might make me want to go there” or “I bet that doesn’t stay on for long”.

But what they’ve achieved is something I have regular differences of opinion with industry friends on when I say that that increasingly people are looking for businesses whose values – what they hold dear – are aligned with their own. The regular retort to that is that’s wishful thinking, falsely assuming the millennials this is aimed at actually have any money to spend. They in fact do because they don’t do what I did in my 20s and buy a flat and buy a car. It was us back then that this was true of.

Likewise, The Conduit Club was expected by many to fail because sceptics thought the heart it threw would never find enough people to run after it. Although it did have an early tumble, it’s honed its proposition and is back with great gusto.

So, if you ever decide to throw your heart, be sure to engage your head to ensure that you can catch it.

About 20 years ago I met someone in New York who even though we can often go as much as a year without speaking, we still consider soul mates. I was this arrogant git (some will say “what’s changed?” but you should have seen me then) who was going to take the Big Apple by storm and open the first branch of The Cinnamon Club there. A typical example of this arrogance was that alongside meeting landlords, lawyers and architects, I was from the outset interviewing PRs to get profiles of me done. In one firm, I met someone who was so smart, so funny and so charming that I told her she needed to stop working for the clown who employed her and instead start her own firm.

It took a few years, but Becca Parrish set up what has for over a decade been America’s top hospitality PR firm and she hasn’t changed a bit. Nothing has made her ego out-grow her despite representing the country’ most saluted three Michelin star chefs and many loved brands. Once she stared this story with me which is hugely relevant to London’s restaurant scene as I saw yesterday.  She had placed one of her clients onto a high-profile wine tasting competition. On the day, the organisers found themselves one person short for the panel and asked Becca to step in.  She wiped the floor against the alleged (male) experts and shocked everyone in the process.

Yesterday someone posted on Twitter her dismay at a restaurant manager refusing to believe her when she said the wine that she had chosen with her dinner was corked. It takes confidence and knowledge to send back a wine and it takes a high level of arrogance for a typically male manager or sommelier to refuse to accept the opinion of a female diner. Now, it just so happens to be the case that the person his happened to is one of the country’s top food writers, Xanthe Clay.

I imagine this is a common occurrence for female diners.

Hospitality businesses are slowly waking up to culture bias, but this is mainly focussed on who they hire and at what level of seniority. What the sector has yet to do is address the culture bias in how it deals with customers and in the case of women and wine, a little science is worth learning. Women have 50% more neurons than men when it comes to the ability to smell. Walk into the wine lovers’ members club 67 Pall Mall, and you’ll often see half of the members present are women. So, if a female diner says her wine doesn’t smell right, she’s pretty likely to know what she’s talking about.

Thanks, Xanthe for calling this out. It’s a practice I imagine is rife but never really addressed and it’s about time that changed.

There’s a thin line between doing the right thing and telling other people to do the right thing, even worse for people to show how to do the right thing and then get shown up for not doing it themselves as I am about to do.

Julian Richer, the founder of Richer Sounds, has earned a reputation for bringing his philanthropic approach to life into the core of his business and is one of the poster boys for “responsible capitalism”- using business as a force for good as so many people are now saying we should.  From what I’ve read about him, he seems like a decent bloke.

He has a column in The Sunday Times and today he has used it to talk about a project of his called The Good Business Charter which seeks to advise organisations on how to be better versions of themselves and offers accreditation to those who pass muster. I hadn’t heard of it before and as it sounded like my kind of thing, I looked them up and did a double-take because their website leads with a picture of Mr Richer along with a group of people who are all white, all, with one possible exception, who look over 40 and one who is dressed up in some old-fashioned regalia – possibly a mayor or a rural High Sheriff.

They appear not to understand that people who don’t look like them are more than likely to think “this isn’t meant for us”.

I decided I’d drop them a line to point out what was clearly an oversight, but I thought I’d get to know more about them first in case it was something I’d nonetheless want to be part of, so I read through what they offer. It assesses an organisation’s eligibility through 10 components with guidelines on how to do the right thing in each. One of them happens to be diversity and inclusion and the first top tip they give is on the attraction of talent and it’s this: “Diverse imagery and language used in adverts”.

Hmm, I thought. They’re telling me to do things they palpably don’t do themselves. In other words, you’d be forgiven for thinking that they aren’t practising what they’re preaching. This is the “do as I say and not as I do” school of thought leadership that I thought we’d gotten over.

Companies are now being called out on their sustainability claims and increasingly on their gender mix. But race and ethnicity have yet to come front and centre in corporate thinking and doing. It’s time that changed and the way that change will come about needs to start with the good side getting its own house in order.