Diary

20 January 2007

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And as for newspapers, Brown said: ‘I think papers can still set an agenda. But their editorial influence on people is a great deal less than it used to be, because of the internet. A paper selects information from events that it considers a priority, be that from an editorial or commercial standpoint or otherwise. But then you have Google or Yahoo, where you can tap in a subject or news event and get hundreds of thousands of stories about it in seconds — much of it wrong, much irrelevant, but a lot of it very informative. And newspapers cannot compete with that.’ So who does have power in Britain now, if it isn’t the rulers of Westminster and Fleet Street? ‘Sometimes I think that the most powerful and influential people in Britain are those who run big charities, social enterprises, businesses that exercise corporate responsibility,’ said Brown. ‘They are some of the most powerful drivers of change at the moment. And politics is competing with them.’ When I pushed him to name names, he said: ‘OK, well, clearly some of our leading industrialists like John Browne at BP, and Terry Leahy at Tesco.’ So, with Lord Browne now gone, that leaves Terry Leahy, boss of Tesco, as the most powerful man in the country — according to our next Prime Minister. Food, quite literally, for thought.

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