How did that come about?

Well, I didn't decide.

I was invited.

Oh, okay.

Because otherwise the place would be stacked full of everybody because people couldn't decide.

So what it was, I became chairman of a group of Midlands industrialists called the Midland Industrial Council.

And we used to invite politicians to come speak to us and, you know, prime ministers and all sorts of things uh used to come um mainly they came because they wanted funding so i i can't say uh they came because they loved us but they wanted the money but it gave us an opportunity to talk to them And I don't know that we ever got our policy changed, but the good thing about it was we came to learn what was in their mind so we could prepare our businesses for what they were likely to do if they got into power.

so let's kind of look back over all of this i mean so exciting all these things have happened but what can we learn from all of this that we've talked about today all the journeys the ups and downs what can we learn from it all

Hmm.

They've never been exposed to it.

So it's our responsibility to make sure we don't give them access to too much, and we release it gradually.

So that's the kind of stewardship issue and something we've learned.

But providing ...

When you've done that ...

Um, I think we had one funny example in Zambia on a farm.

Wow.

What was your life like? A little bit different, would you say? Yeah.

Very different.

I traveled around a lot.

I was born in India.

My dad was a pilot in the war.

In fact, my grandfather was born on a boat going to India.

And so it was the British colony at that time, the jewel in the crown, because there was about a million expats used to live there.

How did you eventually get into business?