Saudi Arabia’s grand boxing project is going global. At London’s Wembley Stadium tonight, British fighters Anthony Joshua and Daniel Dubois face off in the first European showdown organised by Riyadh Season. It follows last month’s fight night in Los Angeles also under the Riyadh Season brand, which began life as a programme of cultural events in the Saudi capital.

This is a sign of things to come. Unlike golf, those leading Saudi Arabia’s sporting push have found a rhythm in the world of boxing, bringing rival promoters together under the Riyadh Season umbrella so that fans and broadcasters get the fights they’ve been craving. Boxers and promoters, meanwhile, get bumper paydays.

Boxing is one of the most biddable sports with a global audience, but the Saudis have had recent success in tennis too. Perhaps this is the big lesson drawn from the expensive LIV Golf experiment — it’s much cheaper to join forces with the establishment than to upend it.

This week we’re looking at the latest big news from Nike, where the chief executive is out. And we ask if football fans are reaching breaking point in the face of rising prices. Do read on — Josh Noble, sports editor

How outgoing Nike CEO John Donahoe lost the plot

On June 27th, Nike chief executive John Donahoe presided over one of the bleakest earnings calls in the history of the sportswear maker. Not only was the company still trying to find its level between online and brick-and-mortar sales, he said, but consumer demand for the brand’s trainers and athletic apparel was slowing.

The company made its name outfitting world-record runners, but the swoosh earned a dubious distinction of its own that day: the worst stock drop in Nike’s nearly 44-year history as a public company. So swift was the market reaction that co-founder Phil Knight issued a rare statement saying “I am optimistic in Nike’s future and John Donahoe has my unwavering confidence and full support.”

Barely three months later, Knight yanked that support away. On Thursday, the board of directors announced Donahoe will retire next month, to be succeeded by Nike veteran Elliott Hill. 

Donahoe, 64, leaves a mixed record at the world’s largest athletic brand. He ably steered the company through the pandemic, despite only taking the helm in January 2020, accelerating a push towards higher-margin online sales that padded profits. He pulled the company to its overdue revenue goal of $50bn just last year. But while Donahoe proved adept at tech and sales — he was poached by Nike from software company ServiceNow after a career spent at consultancy Bain and online retailer eBay — he lacked an essential component for a shoe brand: knowing what’s cool.

Several of Nike’s shoe “drops”, or limited edition releases, either missed the mark or reeked of desperation, such as an announcement this summer of the commercial sale of a once, collector-only Wu Tang dunk. Partner retailers which sell Nike shoes like JD Sports and Foot Locker praised rival brands like Adidas, New Balance, and On, for “newness”. 

In selecting Hill, 60, as the next CEO, Nike’s board is going back to the future. Texas native Hill was once an assistant athletic trainer for the Dallas Cowboys and later started at Nike as an intern after business school. He has 32 years experience at the swoosh, including five years at European HQ in the Netherlands, and oversaw all of Nike’s commercial and marketing operations before his retirement in 2020.

“I couldn’t be more excited to welcome Elliott back to the team. His experience, understanding of Nike and leadership is exactly what’s needed at this moment”, said Knight in a statement issued on Thursday. “We’ve got a lot of work to do but I’m looking forward to seeing Nike back on its pace”.

Price hikes: have football fans lost patience?

When the European Super League launched (briefly) in 2021, one of the main arguments for tearing down football’s status quo was that fans were being deprived of exciting matches between elite teams.

Evidence this week suggests that argument was built on sand. When Liverpool visited AC Milan in the opening game of this season’s Champions League, one of the main talking points was of empty seats inside the San Siro. While the Italian club had an average home attendance for league matches last season of just under 72,000, local estimates put Tuesday’s turnout at around 60,000. So what’s going on?

Milan have started the season slowly — and lost the game against Liverpool 3-1. But more than 71,000 showed up a few days earlier to see the Rossoneri host Venezia in an Italian league match.

The main culprit for Tuesday night’s empty seats appears to be rising ticket prices — seats in the lower tier of the San Siro began at more than €120.

The issue of rising costs for football fans has been creeping up the agenda across Europe in recent months.

This year 19 of the 20 English Premier League teams announced increased season ticket prices, while some did away with certain discounts for concessions.

At Nottingham Forest, for example, a child’s ticket in one part of its home ground more than doubled. Fans of Wolverhampton Wanderers urged the club to reconsider price hikes in order to “preserve the very lifeblood of this famous old club”. Fulham supporters held up yellow cards to protest against the £3,000 rate for a season ticket in some sections of the new Riverside Stand.

“Ticket prices are a ticking time bomb and club executives have their hands over their ears. Something has to give”, the Football Supporters Association said last month.

And it’s not just ticket prices. The cost of replica shirts has also been rising fast. The new Manchester United home shirt starts at £85, but will set you back over £100 if you want a name and number on the back, or if you want an exact copy of the match-worn version. (Although that’s still some way off the £900 options outlined in this weekend’s HTSI.)

Price rises are being propelled by various factors. Inflation across the globe has driven costs for everything from electricity to wages and food. Ticket prices are a quick and easy lever to pull in response — effectively passing on rising costs to the end consumer.

But there are other pressures at work. Tighter spending rules both at European and domestic level are pushing clubs to focus relentlessly on maximising revenue.

The globalisation of the game also means there is a growing pool of football-mad tourists only too willing to pay whatever it takes for a chance to see a top team in the flesh, especially in holiday hotspots like Rome, Paris and London.

In the Milan example, it’s hard to ignore the influence of institutional investors. After private equity firm RedBird Capital Partners bought the club in 2022, revenue generated on matchdays rose to €73mn from €33mn a year earlier and €34mn pre-pandemic. Commercial, TV and sponsorship income all rose considerably too — helping the club to its first annual profit in 17 years.

Tuesday night’s empty seats may prove a one-off. The issues could also be specific to club and competition.

But as the pull from new regulation and the need to generate investment returns leads more clubs to raise prices wherever they think they can, executives will face increasingly tough choices — and less forgiving supporters.

Highlights

• Cricket has been booming thanks to the Indian Premier League gold rush. But are we reaching saturation point? And is there now a bubble? Those are some of the questions we look to answer in this Big Read.

• Lord Sebastian Coe is one of seven candidates to replace Thomas Bach, president of the International Olympic Committee who steps down in March next year.

• Adrian Wojnarowski, veteran NBA journalist for ESPN who single-handedly transformed sports reporting for the social media era, announced his retirement from the industry and will become the general manager of the men’s basketball team at his alma mater, St. Bonaventure University.

• Glasgow has agreed to stage a slimmed down Commonwealth Games in 2026, which will be partially funded by Australian taxpayers. The state of Victoria had previously been lined up as hosts, but pulled out after deciding it was too expensive.

• Raj Sports has paid $125mn to bring a new WNBA team to Portland, Oregon, the latest step in raising the total number of teams in the league from 12 to 15. Raj Sports also owns the Portland Thorns women’s football team.

• The Diamond League has announced an increase in prize money, the latest salvo in the battle for the future of athletics.

• Qatar Airways has replaced Turkish Airlines as a main sponsor of the Uefa Champions League. The six-year deal is worth up to €500mn, according to SportBusiness.

Final Out

Shohei Ohtani had the single best game by a baseball player in the history of the sport on Thursday night: three home runs, two stolen bases, ten runs batted in for the Los Angeles Dodgers in their 20-4 rout of the Miami Marlins. Even wilder, he became the first player in more than a century of Major League Baseball to hit 50 home runs and steal 50 bases in a single season, establishing the so-called 50/50 club. (Non-baseball fans may be familiar with the 40/40 club, the previous benchmark of a power player, as it inspired the name of Jay-Z’s exclusive Manhattan lounge.)

“That has to be the greatest baseball game of all time”, Ohtani’s teammate Gavin Lux said Thursday night. “I’ve never seen anybody do that even in little leagues.”

Watch the incredible performance here.

A few years ago, the UK’s National Theatre staged an exceptionally moving Christmas show. Among the characters were a pregnant woman and her partner, searching for a place to rest. So far, so seasonal. But Love, by Alexander Zeldin, wasn’t set in Bethlehem 2,000 years ago — it took place in a temporary accommodation hostel in modern Britain.

One of three plays — The Inequalities trilogy — focusing on those sorely affected by austerity, the government’s programme for cutting public spending in the 2010s, Love used painstaking naturalism to envelop the audience in the world of the drama. Key to it were the quiet dignity and compassion Zeldin accorded his characters. The ending, in which a middle-aged man tenderly washed his elderly mother’s hair in the communal kitchen sink, would have made a concrete slab weep.

Now Zeldin is back at the National Theatre with a very different project — at least on the surface of it. The Other Place comes with the subtitle After Antigone, so you might expect an updating of Sophocles’s great tragedy. But Zeldin, 39, has barely arrived in a small room in the theatre before he’s emphasising that that is not the case: there’s no Theban princess — or modern equivalent — facing down her royal uncle over the burial of her disgraced brother. Instead, he has gone back to what he feels is the engine of the original and reworked it in a contemporary domestic setting.

“Antigone is a play about the aftermath,” he says. “It’s not about someone resisting arrest or something: it’s [about] two forms of grief.” In his version, a man who was left looking after his two nieces following his brother’s suicide has, 10 years later, decided to remodel the house, move his new wife and child in and scatter his brother’s ashes — thereby going back on his promise to his niece, Annie. That and Annie’s fragile state prompt a family crisis. “So it’s a modern tragedy around one person wanting to erase the past and one person wanting to preserve it,” says the playwright. “We have radically different ways of dealing with grief.”

Zeldin is not the only writer and director grappling with Sophocles this winter. London is about to embrace two high-profile productions of Oedipus, one staged by Robert Icke, one by Matthew Warchus and Hofesh Shechter, while Hollywood star Brie Larson will play Elektra in January. For Zeldin, the tragedian throws down a gauntlet to a modern writer.

“The challenge of a contemporary tragedy is really exciting for a playwright,” he says. “Antigone takes place in less than 24 hours: it’s one action, one place. It’s a real test to write something that has the mechanism of inevitability . . . There are situations in life when there is no resolution possible and acknowledging that has a great value.”

Zeldin, a warm, friendly presence, looks tired but wired after the week’s rehearsals. He leans across the table, intent on clarity, bringing the same restless honesty to the conversation as he does to his work. His new play is funny, he says — “I like laughing a lot in theatre” — but it is also an attempt to face up to difficult questions without flinching.

Is theatre something that can get into the marrow of our world and make stories out of it?

“At the centre of the play is somebody who has been in crisis for a long time,” he says. “The question that is central to it, and to our time, is: what to do in the face of the suffering of others? Because we know about suffering everywhere. It’s very hard to live with. But that’s where theatre has a space. It can bring us into something that we don’t normally see and that’s essential to live — to really live.”

His 2023 play The Confessions turned that eye on his own family, inspired by the experiences of his Australian mother and her generation. But it also touched on Zeldin’s own childhood trauma: he lost his father, a Russian-Jewish refugee, when he was 15. In essence, it was that tragedy that propelled him towards theatre.

“When someone dies you want to live,” he says. “So I lived hard. I had a bit of a rough time as a teenager. Theatre for me was a space where it was possible to say anything. And it still is . . . That’s the purpose of art — to make the unsayable sayable. And inside that it’s an act of kindness, it’s a moral act. We need it.”

Still in his teens, he took a production to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, where it received the accolade of “worst play of the year” from one critic. “It was a real badge of honour,” he grins. But where many might have slunk off, defeated, Zeldin was hooked. He knew he had found something in which he really believed. “I realised theatre was a way of cutting through the bullshit and getting at what is essential.”

That urge to bottle truth came out in his Inequalities trilogy, which he began working on in his mid-twenties. His own time doing temp jobs left him determined to find a way to honour onstage the experiences of people often ignored. The first of that trilogy, Beyond Caring, focused on factory cleaners on zero-hours contracts.

“The question was whether you can carve a story out of just life,” he says. “Is theatre something that can get into the marrow of our world and make stories out of it? I’m interested in empathy. I’m interested in dignity.”

After university, Zeldin travelled extensively, seeking out different ways of making theatre. He worked with the great director Peter Brook in Paris, where he still lives (though he’s considering moving back to the UK), and in 2019 set up the A Zeldin company, partly with the intention of touring. An outward looking theatre culture is “very valuable” he suggests.

Fourteen years after falling in love with the stage, he remains besotted. But, in a sense, it’s a tough love. “I always ask myself the question, why theatre? What do people need to see? What’s useful?” he says. “I remember hearing a Greek director say, ‘I want this play to travel in you.’ I love that.”

September 27-November 9, nationaltheatre.org.uk

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The winds of change blowing through the financial world mean more of us feel under pressure to make big money decisions — yet many feel ill-equipped to make the right choices.

Warnings of painful tax rises in October’s Budget have prompted readers to give away inheritances early, sell shares and property and, depending on their age, pay in or withdraw large sums from their pensions. But have we done the right thing? Added to this is the uncertainty of how our investments might perform in a turning interest rate cycle, what size of cash buffer to hold and when the optimum time to remortgage might be.

Decisions, decisions! So, when I saw that HSBC had researched how more than 17,000 people in 12 countries went about making different calls with their cash, I was intrigued to learn more.

The study found the best financial decisions involved mindset and method. Having optimism about the outcome, an openness to change and the opportunities this might bring, while acknowledging that things might not go to plan was the optimal mindset, researchers concluded. So, a bit different from the Budget-induced panic of recent months.

As for the process, your head, heart and network are all important, the study found. Planning, research and hard-headed analysis of the facts are obviously key. It may be awkward, but talking about potential decisions with a wider network of people — including those who might disagree with us — was vital. And while our emotions should not be the sole guide of financial decisions, imagining how we’d feel if we did or didn’t make a certain decision had particular value.

If you’re grappling with a decision of your own, the researchers told me that a big predictor of having the confidence to act is if your plans are adaptable: I’ve weighed up the risks, I think this is the best option but, if X happens, I’ll do Y.

What I noticed was that there was nothing different that you or I could see in the [good or bad] classes of decision

It all sounds so easy. However, the current climate of uncertainty is making financial decisions so difficult, we might risk putting them off for even longer. That also carries a cost.

A conundrum that’s occupying UK financial regulators is why Britons are hoarding an estimated £430bn of “excess cash” rather than investing it in the stock market.

So, what mindset would get more of us investing? And what lessons can those who are invested but nervous take from this?

“The key thing about making decisions under uncertainty is that you have to accept that you cannot know [the outcome],” says Professor David Tuckett, who acted as an academic adviser to HSBC on the project.

In his 2008 book Minding the Markets, he asked more than 50 active fund managers to list three examples of investment decisions they were happy with, and three they were not.

“What I noticed was that there was nothing different that you or I could see in the two classes of decision,” he says. An equal amount of research, discussion and tyre-kicking had gone into both. “The only thing that was different was the outcome. And that is because, fundamentally, the outcome is uncertain.”

Even managers who had made the right investment calls admitted that sometimes their outperformance was powered by a factor they hadn’t originally considered.

However, when he asked managers why they thought certain investments had failed, they tended to blame themselves: “They said things like I didn’t work hard enough, that’s why I didn’t succeed.” Interesting — though you can be sure they were still rewarded handsomely for trying.

For retail investors, accepting that not all of our investment decisions are going to work out can be hard to do (especially when we start out). Experience, taking a long-term view, being diversified and having a strategy in place to regularly review your portfolio all help. And as every index investor knows, while some active managers beat the market, it’s virtually impossible for them to outperform consistently.

Feeling remorseful undermines confidence and adds to the self-limiting belief that you are bad with money

We’re all finding it hard to make financial decisions but the HSBC study identified one group who found it even harder — the neurodiverse. Some readers might dismiss this as just the latest buzz term but, if you or a family member have autism, ADHD, dyslexia or dyspraxia, then you will know the struggle is real.

Nearly two-thirds of neurodivergent respondents felt ill-equipped to manage financial decision-making, and more than half often regretted decisions they’d made about money — significantly higher than the neurotypical respondents.

Clare Seal, the author of Real Life Money, uses the term “the ADHD tax” to describe how being neurodivergent has had an impact on her own finances. She says being indecisive about money management has a cost — such as late fees if you don’t pay on time, and higher interest rates on debt if you damage your credit score.

Plus, impulsive spending is a very common issue. If you can’t budget effectively, there’s less chance of having so-called “excess cash” to invest. She has introduced more friction in her own finances to counter this. “If all you need to do is tap or click one button to buy something, you’re much more likely to give in to that impulse.”

Harbouring regret about poor decisions is the flip side of this coin. “Feeling remorseful undermines confidence and adds to the self-limiting belief that you are bad with money,” she says. This can contribute to what’s called pathological demand avoidance, which she describes as feeling like “a concrete barrier” has prevented her from engaging with her finances in the past.

We are both hugely encouraged that banks are finally showing more interest in this very under-researched issue. What’s more, some are developing new services to help neurodivergent customers.

Monzo, the digital bank, promotes a suite of digital budgeting tools to customers with ADHD, including its automated salary sorter, plus the ability to opt out of borrowing entirely and set custom daily limits for ATM withdrawals and card transactions. Its business account offers the ability to set up a “tax pot” to automatically hive off a set percentage of payments and save towards future bills.

Of course, you don’t have to be neurodivergent to make use of these features. But thinking about the needs of different customers is what’s resulting in the kind of innovations that can help everyone feel more confident managing their money.

As the financial regulator moves closer to enabling simplified financial advice and targeted support, I’m hopeful that much more will follow in the investment world too.

Claer Barrett is the FT’s consumer editor and the author of ‘What They Don’t Teach You About Money’. claer.barrett@ft.com; Instagram @Claerb

The trail of head torches twinkled between cloud and rock above us, slowly gaining height, disappearing one by one into the pre-dawn darkness. They were on their way to the summit of western Europe’s highest mountain, and I longed to follow.

The previous evening in the Refuge de Tête Rousse, the first overnight stop on the usual route up Mont Blanc, there had been an army of Gore-Tex-clad men, recounting summit stories while comparing the latest technical gear. Huddled in the corner, mountain guide Karen Bockel, filmmaker Grace Taylorson Smith Pritchard and I, the only women in the room, were weighing up our options. A storm was rolling in.

“We will need to skip the second night in the hut above, continue straight to the summit and come all the way back down before the storm hits at lunchtime,” said Karen. “I’m sorry Lise, but I don’t know if you’ll be fast enough in those hobnail boots and that bonnet . . . ”

The history of adventure has mostly been written by men, and still today the narrative is mainly told in male voices, whether through books, television or social media. My project, Woman with Altitude, aims to highlight women adventurers from history who achieved astonishing feats but whose lack of visibility continues to have knock-on effects for women in the outdoor world. Only around 2 per cent of fully certified mountain guides are women; our guide Karen, who teaches at Chamonix’s renowned École Nationale de Ski et d’Alpinisme, told us that out of the 44 students who graduated this year, only two were female. All too often we still find ourselves the only women in a hut full of men.

Previous trips have included following in the footsteps of Alexandra David-Néel in Sikkim and Jane Inglis Clark in the Scottish Highlands, but from the hundreds of adventurous women I’ve researched, I was particularly drawn to Henriette d’Angeville. In 1838, she became the second woman to reach the summit of Mont Blanc — and the first to do so unaided (Marie Paradis reached the top in 1808 but was carried some of the way by guides).

Mountaineering was not an activity for women in the early 19th century, and in her memoir My Ascent of Mont Blanc, Henriette writes that news of her planned attempt caused “a general outcry of amazement and disapproval, followed by, she must be prevented from such madness”. In The Summits of Modern Man (2013) Peter Hansen calls her a “gender radical” who challenged the status quo — “by making the ascent at all, she occupied a transgressive position”. Yet, she did it anyway, setting off to “a chorus of good wishes from a disapproving crowd”.

In the footsteps of . . . 

This is the latest in a series in which writers are guided by a notable earlier traveller. For more, see ft.com/footsteps

To understand what Henriette and women like her would have gone through, I recreate their expeditions using clothing and equipment available to them at the time. This is how I found myself down a cobbled London street in early August, collecting boots from Tricker’s, which was founded in 1829 and made boots for some of the first explorers and alpinists. Its master shoemaker Adele Williamson expertly crafted the leather sole for my boots, including a metal horseshoe heel and hobnails hammered in for grip.

In the early 19th century, outdoor clothing for women didn’t exist, so Henriette created her impressive outfit herself, carefully documenting it in her journal. Controversially, it included a pair of trousers — though these would be hidden by a Scottish woollen dress. The complete outfit weighed 12kg and “everyone declared, feeling the weight of it in their hands, that I could not walk for even half an hour so caparisoned!”

With only notes and pencil drawings from Henriette’s expedition to go on, I took some artistic licence with the colours for my own version, opting for a Scottish tweed of yellow, red and green, all common colours of the 1830s. To finish the ensemble, I added a matching bonnet, silk-and-wool stockings, a black feather boa like Henriette’s, and even Victorian undergarments with a buttoned crotch (very useful indeed).

Henriette also packed 24 roast chickens, 18 bottles of wine and a carrier pigeon, to deliver the good news of her reaching the summit. Her only piece of “technical” equipment was her alpenstock, a traditional staff with a sharp metal point, adorned with a chamois horn for hooking on to rocks. Without the luxury of porters chiselling foot holes for me in the ice, my only modern kit was crampons, which I felt justified using where necessary.

As our train pulled into Chamonix on August 29, the weather was far too hot for a 12kg woollen outfit. More seriously, it was too hot to climb Mont Blanc. When Henriette arrived here in September 1838, snowstorms threatened her summit attempt. Now, we had the opposite problem, a series of warm summers melting the permafrost and prompting increased rockfall — particularly in the Grand Couloir, across which climbers must dash on the main route to the top.

We started with four days of training in the mountains around Chamonix, tackling peaks such as the Aiguille du Tour and getting used to crossing glaciers and navigating deep crevasses. In the pink morning light, I teetered out from the Refuge Albert Premier on to the Glacier du Tour, dressed in my outfit for the first time. The hobnails scraped on the rocks, so I drove the sharp point of my alpenstock into the hard ice, steadying my balance. It was a surprisingly effective replacement for a modern ice axe.

The next day, while hanging off a rock overlooking the Pèlerins glacier near the top of the famous Aiguille du Midi, I found myself doing battle with the bonnet. Its oversized brim caught on the rock faces as I looked up or down, knocking me backwards and making it impossible to see my feet. On steeper sections I had to hitch the dress to my waist to avoid stepping on the hem as I pushed upwards.

A sudden drop in temperature allowed us to take our chance with Mont Blanc. Initially, I wanted to walk from Chamonix on Henriette’s original route, but with a short window of opportunity we couldn’t afford the additional eight hours. Instead, it was into the cable car at Les Houches with the rest of the climbers on the modern route, then the Tramway du Mont Blanc to the Nid d’Aigle at 2,372 metres, where we’d begin our ascent.

After days of training with heavy crampons, my feet were a state. It was harder to trust the hobnails on the sharp rocks and steeper ledges, and my steps were slow. It should have only been a two-hour climb, but it was four weary hours before we slumped into the Refuge de Tête Rousse at 3,167 metres.

At 3.30am the next morning, as we prepared to leave in the cold pre-dawn hours to avoid rockfall, Karen assessed the latest updates on the approaching storm. Reluctantly, we accepted that it would be foolish to push on, though it was tough to watch the other climbers head out in their modern gear as I sat alone in my woollen outfit, the very thing that had ruined my chances of summiting.

Following a disheartening descent, Karen and Grace convinced me all was not lost. After her success on Mont Blanc — on the summit the guides interlocked arms to make a platform so that she could climb on top and thus reach “a height which, pace masculine pride, was never attained by my predecessors” — Henriette became a dedicated climber for the next 25 years, a career that culminated, aged 69, on Switzerland’s Oldenhorn. We decided to head there, driving from Chamonix over the border to the village of Les Diablerets. From there, a cable car takes tourists up to the Glacier 3000 ski area in the shadow of the lonely 3,123-metre peak, but unfortunately for Karen, Grace and my feet, I insisted we walk up, just as Henriette did.

Away from the busy car park, late Alpine flowers were in full bloom, filling the mountainside with patches of hazy pinks and purples. As we followed the path, feasting on wild raspberries, I thought of Henriette’s description: “Nothing spoke of the earth as we know it. I felt I had been transported into a new world . . . A voice spoke to me from the sky and said: Do what is right, and follow your path with confidence.”

To the hum of machines building a new ski lodge, we buckled up our crampons and crossed the glacier. The storm that ended our chances of Mont Blanc caught up with us just as we tackled the last rocky section of ascent, four hours of climbing on slippery granite. We reached the summit in a cloud of mist, unable to see our surroundings, but I didn’t mind. Maybe none of this was about the glory of getting to the top and gorging on the views.

In the past two weeks, four more climbers have lost their lives attempting to summit Mont Blanc. It’s a stark reminder of how unpredictable high mountains are, even with the latest technology to guide us. And it underlines the achievements of early alpinists like Henriette, the risks they were taking and their bravery in pushing boundaries, not only physically and mentally but, for women, culturally too.

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This is an audio transcript of the FT News Briefing podcast episode: ‘Swamp Notes — Misinformation as a campaign strategy’

Sonja Hutson
Springfield, Ohio, is a city of around 60,000 people. For a long time, it was perhaps best known as the birthplace of Grammy Award-winning musician John Legend. But since the US presidential debate earlier this month, Springfield has been in the news for a very different reason.

Donald Trump’s voice clip
In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.

Sonja Hutson
This is Swamp Notes, the weekly podcast from the FT News Briefing, where we talk about all of the things happening in the 2024 US presidential election. I’m Sonja Hutson. And this week we’re asking do American voters care about the truth? Here with me to discuss is Joshua Chaffin. He’s the FT’s New York correspondent. Hi, Josh!

Joshua Chaffin
Hello.

Sonja Hutson
And we’ve also got Ed Luce, the FT’s US national editor and co-author of The Swamp Notes Newsletter. Hi, Ed!

Edward Luce
Hello.

Sonja Hutson
So, Ed, I want to start with you. We’re talking about misinformation today. Can you tell us a little bit about the conspiracy theory about Springfield and how it ended up as one of Donald Trump’s talking points during the presidential debate?

Edward Luce
Sure. This is the cats and dogs one that originated as so many of these things do with a random Facebook post. But it got picked up by one of the sort of heavily followed influencers on the far right and then quickly became a meme. People like Elon Musk then sort of rocket-boosting it with their own endorsements. And JD Vance, who is, you know, of the generation of online Republicans we should never forget the guy’s 40. He’s really been an active online Twitter conservative then, you know, turning it into an even bigger meme and then it finds its way into Donald Trump’s mouth. Donald Trump believes in truthful hyperbole. Truthful hyperbole being his description for strategic lying. And there something sounds like it might be true, you know, and that some people might believe it, then treat it as if it is true. And that is his modus operandi and has been for many years. This is just one example of it.

Sonja Hutson
Now, Josh, you visited Springfield after this theory started circulating. How has the town been impacted by all this new attention?

Joshua Chaffin
Springfield is like a small town, kind of every town that is in the grips of hysteria. And there is an element of it that is almost like The Simpsons, where the fictional town is called Springfield. But you can you know, it’s almost comical in some ways. The sight of it that’s not comical is you see these Haitian immigrants and there is real and legitimate fear. I mean, there are bomb threats that have been called into the city. There are people shouting things out the window of pick-up trucks as they go by, menacing things. And there’s a real fear that somebody will do something terrible.

Sonja Hutson
So I want to leave Springfield for a minute and talk about this on a wider scale. I mean, there are certainly lots of impediments to voters finding out the truth. We talked about some of them in our episode about America’s fractured media ecosystem that’s really developed over the last several years. But Ed, I want to go back to the question that I posed at the beginning of this episode, which is and you know, this is somewhat cliché in the Trump era, but does the truth matter to voters?

Edward Luce
Not that much, no. The reassuring sort of coda to that is it’s never matter that much, you know? It’s just that because of things you’ve discussed on recent podcasts and that brave new technological world wherein that has been this disintermediation not just of legacy media, as it’s called, but also the disintermediation of the parties. You know, you’ve now got a situation where the combination of gerrymandering and the sort of discrediting of the Republican establishment means the more outrageous you are, the more likely you are to get nominated. That’s why there are more Marjorie Taylor Greene in this world. There were just as many in the last world, but they just didn’t tend to become quite so easily. Republican lawmakers, elected Republican lawmakers.

So I suppose my answer to your question comes in two parts: No, in fact, truth is an actual obstacle to career advancement in the Republican party nowadays. But I believe it still matters at some degree in a general election where there is a non-gerrymandered-minded electorate. And that is true in states and it’s true in presidential elections. You cannot gerrymander states or presidential elections. I do believe this will matter and is mattering. And remember, in this presidential election — which is already under way — there are people voting in many early voting states, and some of those are the really critical states. So what’s happening now is influencing votes now, today.

Sonja Hutson
Yeah, it’s interesting that you mentioned the discrediting of the Republican establishment. You know, people that might otherwise try to hold someone like Trump accountable for lying, because we have actually seen some mainstream Republican officials — including Ohio’s governor — try to disabuse people of the Springfield conspiracy theory. Right, Josh? I mean, and has it had any effect from what you’ve seen?

Joshua Chaffin
You know, certainly less than I would have thought. And this is something that I find fascinating. It doesn’t really matter. Somebody had observed to me when I arrived in Springfield, you have the mayor and the police chief have very quickly kind of pointed out that this is not true. And it’s almost like this pernicious weed once it’s out there, that you just can’t get rid of it. And they’re sort of frantically trying to pull it up. You know, every place it pops up and it just keeps growing and spreading.

I’m amazed, I guess, that the many Trump rallies that have gone to, the power that Trump has had just repeating messages over and over and they become a kind of truth for people, even if they start out without any basis. And I guess that the deeper truth behind all this is Trump invents are saying, do you want black Haitians in your community? Do you want them coming to where you live? And I think politically, that’s the message that is getting through, at least to the people who are susceptible to that message.

Sonja Hutson
So I want to play a clip from a recent CNN interview with JD Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate, about Springfield.

JD Vance’s News clip
The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes. If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m gonna do. Dana, because you guys are completely letting Kamala Harris . . . 

Sonja Hutson
So Ed, is this the truthful hyperbole that you were talking about earlier? And how do you think this all fits into the Trump campaign’s electoral strategy?

Edward Luce
Vance It’s not stupid. I mean, he’s on record as saying before he became the nominee, a lot of stupid things. But what he just said isn’t stupid. It’s really cynical. Which is why, you know, if it serves our purpose doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not, it gets at some deeper underlying truth. He’s not just doing his boss’s bidding, which would be enough in itself to explain him echoing these lies. But I think he has a sort of darker, visceral hint about what impact this might be having on some voters. And if there is whatever the opposite of a silver lining is a dark lining to the exposure of this cats and dogs lie. It is that well, at least from Trump’s point of view, we are talking about immigration.

Immigration is an issue on which Trump leads by quite a lot. And even if it’s, you know, it’s the same principle. Better to have bad publicity than no publicity. They are on Trump’s turf. And as Josh rightly pointed out, the real issue here is really, do you want black Haitians living in your community? And so we could be underestimating the degree to which this is at some level beneficial to Trump-Vance.

Joshua Chaffin
I would add that in terms of the mainstream media is neglecting Springfield. You go back through the clips and I saw some really rich, deep reporting about the plight of Springfield. This is before the dog and cat story. About the plight of a rustbelt town that has tried desperately to make a comeback. And actually, the Haitians’ arrival is, perhaps, unexpected consequence of the town’s success. You know, all of that, which I think is fascinating, hopefully for FT readers, is not the kind of thing that you would probably hear about at a presidential debate or on the campaign trail.

Sonja Hutson
Just to wrap up, I want to ask kind of a big picture question, which is, does this phenomenon of politicians so brazenly spreading misinformation? I mean, you have JD Vance going on CNN and talking about how he knows he’s spreading a lie and feels good about doing that. Does that feel like something that can be at all put back into the bottle? You know, Ed, you said earlier that this is nothing new, but could it get worse or could it continue even after Trump leaves the political scene?

Edward Luce
No, I think I mean, I’ve always thought Trump has a very, very specific and sort of irreplaceable symptom of a sort of deeper malaise about or loss of confidence in American. The American creed that you’ve seen in parts of the population. And therefore, I think forms of that will outlast Trump. And I mean, at the moment, I am expecting Trump to lose in November. I mean, very marginal expectation, which could easily flip the other way. But should he lose . . . 

Sonja Hutson
Predicting an election is a dangerous game these days, Ed. (Laughter)

Edward Luce
That’s why I immediately unpredicted my prediction. But, you know, Vance was chosen very clearly with the future in mind. And, you know, there’s a lot of money behind Maga continuing. I wouldn’t write it off.

Joshua Chaffin
I agree with that, that Trump is kind of singular. But am sad to say as a mainstream reporter, I think this is here to stay. And I don’t see it being put back in the bottle.

Sonja Hutson
All right. We’re gonna take a quick break. And when we come back, we’ll do Exit Poll.

[WIRED POLITICS LAB PODCAST TRAILER PLAYING]

Sonja Hutson
And we are back with Exit Poll where we talk about something that did not happen on the campaign trail and apply rigorous political analysis to it. Ben & Jerry’s is a beloved American ice cream brand famous for somewhat eccentric flavours like Goodbye Yellow Brick Road in honour of Elton John or Yes, Pecan — depending on how . . . that’s a very controversial pronunciation — that’s in honour of Barack Obama. And this week they unveiled Kamala’s Coconut Jubilee, named after Kamala Harris and the famous you-think-you-just-fell-out-of-a-coconut-tree meme. It has coconut ice cream with a caramel swirl and star shaped sprinkles. So what do you both think that a Donald Trump-flavoured ice cream would include? And bonus points if you have a name to go along with it?

Edward Luce
Yeah, I mean, there’s a reason why I went into journalism and not marketing. (Laughter) The favourite thing of mine that Trump has said in recent weeks is I hate Taylor Swift. It was just . . . 

Sonja Hutson
In all caps!

Edward Luce
In all caps. After she endorsed Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. And he’s kind of obsessed with her and he’s kind of obsessed with a romantic life, he’s obsessed . . . So I like a play on Taylor Swift, something like ‘Taylor humble pie’. And I would like it to have all the worst ingredients because he’s gonna be forced to eat his ‘Taylor humble pie’.

Joshua Chaffin
Mine would be called ‘Megalicious’. It would be ice cream with kind of gold leaf and it would be full of nuts and it would be served atop a Roy Cohn.

Edward Luce
And that’s good.

Sonja Hutson
All right. Well, I want to thank our guests, Joshua Chaffin, he’s the FT’s New York correspondent. Thanks, Josh.

Joshua Chaffin
Thank you.

Sonja Hutson
And Ed Luce, he’s our US national editor and columnist. He also is the co-author of The Swamp Notes newsletter. Thanks, Ed.

Edward Luce
Always a pleasure.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Sonja Hutson
This was Swamp Notes, the US politics show from the FT News briefing. If you want to sign up for the Swamp Notes newsletter, we’ve got a link to that in the show notes.

Our show is mixed and produced by Ethan Plotkin. It’s also produced by Lauren Fedor and Marc Filippino. Special thanks to Pierre Nicholson. I’m your host, Sonja Hutson. Our executive producer is Topher Forhecz, and Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s global head of Audio. Original Music by Hannis Brown. Check back next week for more US political analysis from the Financial Times.

This article picked by a teacher with suggested questions is part of the Financial Times free schools access programme. Details/registration here.

Read our full range of politics picks here.

Specification:

• AQA Component 3.1.2.3: Political parties: the origins, ideas and development of the Conservative, Labour, and Liberal Democrat parties and how these have helped shape their current policies

• Edexcel Component 1, 2.2: Established political parties: The origins and historical development of the Conservative party, the Labour party and Liberal Democrat party, and how this has shaped their ideas and current policies on the economy, law and order, welfare and foreign affairs.

Background: what you need to know

This article reviews Liberal Democrat policies aired at their recent party conference in Brighton. Proposals to increase taxes on banks, inheritance and capital gains tax indicate that the party is on the centre-left of the political spectrum.

Party leader Ed Davey has proposed increased support for the NHS, to proof it against winter crises, when emergency funding is frequently required. He has also called for improved relations with the EU. The Liberal Democrats have called for a return to the EU as a longer-term objective.

Click the link below to read the article and then answer the questions:

Lib Dems to press Rachel Reeves to raise taxes on banks and wealthy

Question in the style of AQA Politics Paper 1

Question in the style of Edexcel Politics Paper 1

• Evaluate the view that the ideas and policies of the three main UK-wide parties overlap more than they differ.

  You must consider this view and the alternative to this view in a balanced way. [30 marks]

  TIP: Edexcel asks you to look at four policy areas of the main UK-wide political parties: economic, welfare, law and order and foreign policy. A useful exercise to help you plan an essay on this topic is to draw up a grid showing areas of similarity and difference on these policies. These four areas are equally worthwhile to look at if you are following the AQA specification.

Graham Goodlad, Portsmouth High School