Work dictated that my last blog was written on Tuesday and Wednesday. It ‘went to press’ before the sad news about Her Majesty was announced on the Thursday evening. I know several members of TAB UK – and friends – who had met the Queen: none of them had anything but good to say. On behalf of everyone in TAB UK, Rest in Peace, Ma’am.
Work similarly dictates that this blog was written in the week commencing September 12th. If something major has happened (a coup in Russia?) by the time you read it, I can only apologise.
The subject for this week was easy – was going to be easy. The title would be ‘The New Broom’ and I’d write about the economic plans – perhaps even a mini-Budget – of the new Prime Minister and Chancellor.
This blog started in the summer of 2010. As the Chairman of the 1922 Committee read out the result, Liz Truss became its fourth Prime Minister. But not for one second did I expect to be writing about the blog’s second Monarch. Like, I suspect, a great many of you I was affected far more by the Queen’s death than I’d expected to be. She was 96: you knew it couldn’t be far away. But when it happened… Like everyone reading the blog, I’ll never forget where I was when I heard the news.
So suddenly the UK has not just a new PM but a new King. Liz Truss becomes the first Prime Minister to serve under both a Queen and a King since Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, who was in his third term in office when Victoria died, and who first became PM in 1885.
At the end of July I wrote a post on ‘Evolution or Revolution.’ I suggested that gradual evolution was almost always more successful than sudden revolution. But what now? With a new King and a new PM you might argue that the UK is facing revolution, not evolution. And you wouldn’t be human if you didn’t ask ‘what will it mean for my business?’
I was much impressed by King Charles’ TV address following his mother’s death. The sudden shift in sentiment towards him is remarkable. Liz Truss, meanwhile, duly announced the predicted cap on energy bills. Although the Bank of England delayed a decision on interest rates following the Queen’s death, City AM suggested that we could soon see rates heading up to 4% – with the Bank viewing the energy price cap as inflationary.
The Queen’s funeral is (‘was’ by the time you read the blog) on September 19th. With the Labour and Conservative conferences respectively scheduled for the last week in September and the first week in October we may not see normal political activity – and hence a mini-Budget – for a while. (Although as I was proofreading this post there were suggestions that the Government was still planning a ‘fiscal event’ in September.)
But in many ways that doesn’t matter. Because I think the events of the last week have illustrated one key point above all others. In the last blog I talked about leadership: ‘a key message that has run through this blog for ten years.’
But what’s the one subject that has surpassed even leadership as a central theme for the blog?
Change.
We’ve seen economic change, political change, social change and – above all – technological change. Now we see constitutional change. ‘Don’t think it can’t happen because it can.’ I’ve written that – in various forms – any number of times. Last week we saw a Prime Minister who’d been in the job for 72 hours meeting a man who’d become King barely 24 hours previously.
Change is a constant, and always will be.
Let me illustrate that in two ways. First of all this remarkable video, charting the most popular sites on the internet from 1993 (just 200 websites available worldwide) to 2022 – when there were 2 billion.
Only one name survives from 1993. Categories that didn’t exist at the start of the video dominate it by the end. Companies that were household names disappear for good.
Secondly, consider football. Not the beautiful game, but American football. The NFL has been a constant in the lives of American sports fans. Thanks to TV it surpassed baseball as America’s favourite sport to watch, and the franchises are now worth billions.
But for how much longer?
As this graphic very clearly shows, younger sports fans are falling out of love (if they’ve ever been in love) with the NFL. You only have to watch a game in The Hundred to see the path cricket will take in the UK. Even the Premier League may discover that fans who go to watch Shrewsbury, Stevenage and Stockport County when the World Cup is on are reluctant to return to VAR and players going down like they’ve been snipered…
It’s a paradox – but the only thing that won’t change is change itself.
So how do we deal with it? How do we make sure our businesses benefit from the inevitable change?
We talk. We sit round the TAB table with our friends and peers every month and we tell them our plans. We talk about the changes and challenges affecting our industry and what we’re going to do about them. We listen. We draw on their experience. And the next month, we report back. And listen again.
There might be revolution happening in the outside world – but round the TAB table it’s always evolution. There may be a new broom – or, as the title now concedes – new brooms. But in TAB UK we’ll adapt. We’ll pool our knowledge and our experience. And in the long run, we’ll prosper.
