My guest is Lionel Barber.

Lionel Barber is a journalist, an author, an editor of the Financial Times from 2005 to 2020.

Welcome to the podcast, Lionel.

Good to be here, Paul.

We're going to talk about many, many things, including the future, the media landscape,

relationship between maybe the media and politicians,

the European debate, which is ongoing in the United Kingdom, as you know very well indeed.

But before we start all that, I'd like to, if you don't mind, talk a bit about you and your career.

It's not that it's coming to an end, on the contrary, but I want to talk about the path you took.

You leave Oxford

with a joint honours degree in German and modern history. Did you immediately think that journalism

was going to be your preferred career, your chosen career? I only settled on journalism finally

in my last year at Oxford because I had a rather wacky idea that I should go into business

and help Britain in the late 1970s, which was a grim period, if you remember.

And I'd spent a year abroad working in a village in Germany, including a stint as an interpreter and translator.

And for some reason, I thought that maybe I could apply these skills to the likes of Unilever

or Shell or Procter and Gamble.

And funnily enough, none of them wanted me after the first interview. So,

you know, I'd hesitated about journalism because my father was a journalist and he'd been quite

successful. He'd left school at barely 15 years old. He came, you know, he was self-educated.

And I didn't think I should go in the same field as him.

And I didn't think I could be anywhere near as good as him.

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