I interviewed Ed Balls at Hay. I was looking forward to it enormously because his book is hugely entertaining and, of course, we all know him from Strictly Come Dancing and I knew he would be an entertaining person. I didn’t simply want to let him off the hook by being entertaining only though. I wanted to cross horns with him about politics to some extent, and we’d agreed beforehand that we would talk politics which the audience liked very much. Then we finished off with some slightly breezier anecdotes from him, so it ended on a high and that was enormously popular and engaging. We both enjoyed the event.
I also chaired a really important discussion that was a tribute to Sue Lloyd-Roberts, the frontline journalist who died recently. She was a pioneering campaigning journalist who reported on the plight of women around d the world. There was no subject that afflicted women that she didn’t explore very thoroughly and so we had several women to discuss her legacy: Helena Kennedy, human rights lawyer among many other things, Christine Lamb foreign correspondent from The Sunday Times, and Rachel Jolly, editor of Index on Censorship.
Now, all these women were extremely fluent and extremely concerned about the plight that women face around the world. The feminist movement that swept the world in the 1960s and 1970s improved the lot of women in many ways, but there are many places around the world where things like honour killings, arranged marriages, afflictions of young children, and female genital mutilation, are still happening on an enormous scale. So we discussed all of these issues and more. We took it seriously, but in good heart. We were very encouraging of women and their situation, but it was also something of a rallying call for women to feel that the battle is won. There are still plenty of issues in which women are very much abused and treated as second class citizens, so that was a really important item to contribute and the audience was very responsive to it.
The whole point about coming to Hay is to enjoy every event that you’re involved with and the company that you keep. Hay is one of the world’s greatest book clubs. We all come together as if we were all part of a book group because we all love reading books and we all love talking about books and meeting authors. Authors like meeting other authors and authors like meeting readers. It’s an enormously self-indulgent orgy of book talk and there’s nothing better than that.
So there’s all of that’s going on and there’s the socialising that goes on with every Festival, which I’ve enjoyed hugely and am still doing but I’m keeping that rather private.