I much enjoyed reading Stuart Kirk’s column “Politicians and bosses need to prioritise beauty” (Opinion, FT Weekend, September 7).

On the subject of housing and beauty, as an architect I feel new developments are not just lacking in performance, spatial quality and energy efficiency but originality, contextual appropriateness, and also aesthetic merit and “soul”.

This is depressing. Many buildings constructed today will be lucky to last a few decades — mainly because of the poor quality and the fact no one will want to save them. There are many complex reasons for this — but a lot of it is because today “form follows finance”, as opposed to Le Corbusier’s dictum that form follows function. Housing is seen more as an investment than as a place to live or a long-term contribution to our environment.

Despite the fact that only about 5 per cent of new homes in the UK are designed by architects — the rest being the handiwork of volume housebuilders — many people would categorically assert that architects do not build beautiful buildings! My father would — and he would agree with King Charles’s attack on the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1984, when as Prince of Wales he described the designs for the National Gallery extension as a “monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend”.

What’s missing today is a collective notion of beauty and a way to implement it to a high standard. Buildings and streets are of extreme importance to the future of our country as they are what we will leave to the next generations.

So yes to more arts funding! But as William Lethaby, the English architect whose ideas had a major influence on the Arts and Crafts and Early Modern movements, said: “Bad plays need not be seen, books need not be read, but nothing but blindness or the numbing of our faculty of observation can protect us from buildings in the street.”

Amelia Hunter
London EC1, UK

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The US Secret Service on Friday said the country was in a “hyperdynamic threat environment”, as it admitted “complacency” during the first of two apparent assassination attempts against Donald Trump in recent months.

The agency, which is charged with protecting presidential candidates, identified communication flaws in its handling of Trump’s security at a rally in July in Butler, Pennsylvania, where a gunman shot at the Republican candidate and killed a spectator.

The scrutiny on the Secret Service intensified this week after agents halted an apparent second assassination attempt on Sunday in Florida.

“In today’s hyperdynamic threat environment, the mission of the Secret Service is clear: we cannot afford to fail,” Secret Service acting director Ronald Rowe said. The “threat is not going to evaporate anytime soon”.

Rowe said that since the shooting in Pennsylvania, presidential candidates have been receiving the same level of Secret Service protection as US President Joe Biden.

The apparent second assassination attempt on Trump this week “demonstrates that the threat environment in which the secret service operates is tremendous and under constant threat, and we’ve been in this heightened and increasingly dynamic threat environment since July 13”, the date of the Butler rally, Rowe added.

Trump’s ear was injured by gunfire while he was addressing supporters at the open-air event in western Pennsylvania. The former president was rushed offstage by agents shortly after the shooting.

Rowe acknowledged there had been “communication deficiencies” between law enforcement officials on the ground.

“There was complacency” among some members of the agency’s advance team that “led to a breach of security protocols”, he said, as he unveiled the findings of an internal review. These included not giving “clear guidance or direction to our local law enforcement partners”. The agency relies on local police to help shore up security when people it is protecting travel.

Rowe said an “overreliance” on sharing critical information on mobile devices, rather than the agency’s radio network, resulted in “information being siloed”.

The acting director’s comments come just days after Trump was the apparent target of another alleged assassin while the ex-president was golfing at his own club in West Palm Beach on September 15.

Secret Service agents spotted the rifle of the alleged gunman, Ryan Wesley Routh, before he could shoot, and opened fire. Routh fled the shrubbery bordering the golf course, but was detained on a highway shortly after. An FBI-led investigation is ongoing.

The Secret Service has bolstered protection of people it is guarding, but Rowe called for more resources for the agency, including personnel, to get the service from “a state of reaction to a state of readiness”.

Biden has signalled his support for getting Congress to allocate more funding for the Secret Service.

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Steven Eisman, best known for betting on the collapse of the US housing market, has been put on indefinite leave of absence by his employer Neuberger Berman after saying he was “celebrating” the destruction of Gaza.

A managing director at New York-based Neuberger Berman since 2014, Eisman featured in the Michael Lewis book The Big Short. His character was played by actor Steve Carell in the 2016 film version. In the adaptation, Carell’s character was given the name of Mark Baum.

His comments on his X account, which included the Neuberger Berman logo, responded to a graphic post showing burning buildings, with people shouting in agony, apparently as a result of an Israeli attack.

The video was posted with comments about the lack of international concern over such incidents and said: “The world is silent.”

Eisman replied to the post on Thursday: “We are not silent. We are celebrating.”

He later apologised for his remark, writing that he had intended to refer to Israel’s attacks on Hizbollah in Lebanon. He has since deleted the account involved altogether.

Eisman became famous for shorting collateralised debt obligations backed by US housing mortgages before their collapse in 2007 and 2008.

Eisman’s future at the firm remains uncertain, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The company, which on Friday evening said Eisman had been put on indefinite leave of absence, had said earlier that his “personal comments on social media are his alone and he does not speak for Neuberger Berman. Even though Mr Eisman has acknowledged that he mistook the content of the post he responded to, his actions on social media were irresponsible and objectionable”.

Eisman has taken a strong pro-Israel stance on X and issued posts on the subject regularly against those who have criticised the country.

His strident commentary has extended to politics as well. Earlier this week he stated that if Kamala Harris won the US presidential election and the Democrats took control of both houses of Congress he expected the US market to go “straight down”. He has predicted that Donald Trump will win the election.

A Harvard lawyer by training, Eisman gave up the profession to become a financial analyst at Wall Street investment bank Oppenheimer. He later moved to the Connecticut-based hedge fund FrontPoint Partners, eventually focusing on the mispricing of subprime residential mortgages. He left FrontPoint in 2011 and set up his own fund, Emrys Partners, the following year. He joined Neuberger after Emrys closed.

Neuberger Berman, once owned by the collapsed Wall Street investment bank Lehman Brothers, spun off as an employee-run investment firm in 2009. Since then the company has prospered. The investment company at present has $481bn of assets under management with 739 employees, according to its website.

Nike’s outgoing chief executive, John Donahoe, is an Ivy League-educated former tech executive and Bain consultant. The man who will take his place, Elliott Hill, started at Nike as an intern and spent his entire career at “the swoosh”, bar a brief stint as an assistant trainer for the Dallas Cowboys football team.

The difference in profiles is stark, and one that Nike hopes will reassure shareholders while energising staff for the monumental task ahead — shaking off an existential crisis that has threatened its position as the world’s biggest sportswear maker and one of its most recognisable brands. Sales have been slowing, its products have fallen out of fashion and its retail strategy has been out of step with consumer preferences.

To regain its authority in the industry, the board decided, Nike needed an experienced insider rather than a professional executive to lead it. Despite his history with Nike, however, Hill will have his work cut out for him.

Current and former employees, people familiar with the executive transition and initial readouts from Wall Street analysts signal that Hill will receive a warm welcome from staff when he takes the helm on October 14. The reaction to hiring back Hill — who is coming out of retirement — was overwhelmingly positive within Nike, according to one current employee. “Elliott is truly a revered leader at the company,” they said.

“I worked with so many people during my three decades at Nike, and Elliott was by far one of the most inspirational, most supportive and most down-to-earth colleagues I ever knew,” Scott Reames, Nike’s internal historian who retired in 2021, said in an email. “Judging by the way my phone has been blowing up since the announcement I am FAR from alone on this!”

The abrupt executive transition comes after months of speculation on Wall Street about Donahoe’s future at Nike. At the time of his appointment, in late 2019, the company had already articulated goals of hitting $50bn in revenue and ramping up online sales directly to consumers — benchmarks that an experienced executive with stints at Bain and eBay would be well qualified to achieve. 

Donahoe met those demands ably, steering Nike through the Covid-19 pandemic and even managing to return to sales growth by the end of 2020, less than a year into the role. As diversity, equity and inclusion became a focus of large companies, he won early praise from staffers for listening to their concerns.

But his downfall was his known weakness: unlike previous Nike leaders, such as his predecessor Mark Parker, Donahoe was not a “product guy”, someone with their finger on the pulse of design. Retailers from JD Sports to Foot Locker spoke freely in recent months of hotter sneakers from Adidas, On, New Balance and Hoka. 

Nike’s decision to vacate shelf space at partner retailers in favour of its own direct-selling strategy — which predated Donahoe but accelerated under his leadership — only opened the doors for competitors to take market share.

Even Donahoe’s management style marked him as an outsider. From the start of his brief reign, he told employees he wanted new ideas presented in black-and-white, bullet-pointed PowerPoints, rather than colourful, creative pitches.

Board members were actively discussing succession plans this summer, one person said, and also considered two other internal Nike candidates, Craig Williams, president of geographies and marketplace, and Heidi O’Neill, president of consumer, product and brand. But Williams, who joined in 2019 from Coca-Cola, and O’Neill, who came to Nike in 1998 from Levi Strauss, could not match Hill’s decades of experience.

In a post on X, former Nike marketing staffer Kyle Stack wrote that “to have a 30-year Nike vet lead the company is reassuring . . . Hill experienced Nike’s frenetic growth in the ‘90s as part of the sales org. He understands the business as well as anyone.”

Hill, who turns 61 on October 2, will become Nike’s fifth-ever chief executive, and the third Nike lifer after co-founder Phil Knight and Parker. The only Nike CEO before Donahoe to join from outside the company was William Perez, a former SC Johnson executive who lasted in the top job for just over a year.

Nike has hired back other executives with ample internal experience over the past year, including Tom Peddie, former vice-president of North America, who will help the company rebalance its wholesale partnerships.

Nike’s efforts to turn itself round are entering a crucial stretch. The company is expected to report quarterly earnings on October 1, detailing the important back-to-school period that analysts look to for indications of demand for basketball shoes and hoodies. Nike has also set its first investor day in nine years for November, where it will lay out a vision in greater detail for shareholders who have grown worried about the recent stock slides. 

Shares of Nike are down more than 20 per cent in 2024, though the stock rose 6 per cent on Friday.

Jay Sole, managing director at UBS, wrote on Friday that “Hill is an experienced, effective leader who could put Nike back on a growth path.” However, that “sentiment could turn more bearish as the market realises Nike’s fundamentals likely aren’t great and there are probably no quick-fixes to Nike’s issues”, he added.  

Sole pointed out that Hill’s experience in sales, rather than product development, could be a weak point for the company that has been slow to introduce compelling new sneakers in recent months.

Changes atop Nike will not stop the tide of competitors eating into its popularity. “What is unchanged is the heightened competitive environment framed by emergent brands and certain resurgent legacy brands,” wrote John Kernan, managing director of TD Cowen.

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Reform UK leader Nigel Farage said the Conservative brand was “bust and broken” as the party’s leadership pledged to fight the next general election bashing believers in the green transition and “net zero” policies.

Addressing over 3,000 people gathered at a conference centre in Birmingham, Farage declared: “This weekend is when Reform UK comes of age.”

With a huge union jack hanging over the stage, Farage entered the auditorium on Friday afternoon doing US presidential candidate Donald Trump’s signature move of pointing at the audience, many of whom were wearing caps emblazoned with the words “Make Britain Great Again”.

Farage announced this week that he was ending the arcane corporate structure the party has had since its inception in 2019, and would therefore be relinquishing his majority shareholding. 

The existing company would be dissolved, and a new “limited company with guarantee” set up. “You the members will own this party, not me,” Farage said on Friday, to rapturous applause.

The MP for Clacton in Essex also vowed to model the party’s strategy going forward on that of the Liberal Democrats, by building a strong base of local campaigners and ruthlessly targeting seats where the party came second in the last general election on top of its five wins.

Earlier in the day, deputy leader Richard Tice told the Financial Times the party planned to fight the next election against the “extreme cult of net zero”.

“In the same way that immigration for us was a big battleground, I want to make the next general election about net zero,” he said on the fringes of the conference.

“Both main parties are completely obsessed with it, they’re both completely wrong and it’s already killing our jobs in steel, automotive, oil refineries.”

Tice said the party would focus its campaigning where they saw Labour as most vulnerable, in the North East, coastal cities and the industrial Midlands, where “traditional socially conservative working-class [people] are being shafted by a high-tax, no-growth environment and by high energy bills”.

The party came second in 98 seats in July, of which 89 were won by Labour.

Tice said senior business people were approaching him regularly to say: “Thank god you’re speaking out [on green policies]. Privately I’m with you, publicly I have to pretend I want to buy green steel; I don’t.”

During his conference speech, Tice described energy secretary Ed Miliband as “the most dangerous man in Britain” for the economy.

Miliband wants to quadruple offshore wind capacity, double onshore wind and triple solar power to meet the target of cutting UK emissions from electricity generation to net zero by 2030.

The target is five years faster than the goal set out by the former Conservative government.

Reform UK is banking on the view that government investment in renewables will drive up energy prices over the next few years, an issue it would be able to capitalise on ahead of the next election.

Tice said he hoped the party’s membership would swell from 80,000 today to 150,000 next year, buoyed by hoped-for momentum from local elections in May where the party is targeting the new Lincolnshire mayoralty.

Tice said he was still a strong proponent of moving to an electoral system of proportional representation.

He claimed that PR would have prevented July’s Labour landslide and would have led instead to a coalition government that was “much more steady”. He claimed that politically the “most stable period in the last 15 years” had been the Tory-Lib Dem coalition of 2010 to 2015.

Tice would not be drawn on whether he would go into coalition with the Tories in the future.

“Until there’s a massive mea culpa, we’re going to go to war with them,” he said.

Speeches from Reform UK’s MPs and celebrity supporters leaned heavily on rightwing tropes on immigrants and trans people, with arguments that British culture and identity were being “eradicated”.

Lee Anderson, its MP for Ashfield, returned to targeting London’s mayor Sadiq Khan. Comments earlier this year that the Labour politician had “given our capital city away to his mates” led to him losing the Conservative whip before he changed parties.

“I will never apologise to that man.” Anderson told the conference.

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UK foreign secretary David Lammy has been accused of a diplomatic blunder after he suggested that Azerbaijan had “liberated” the disputed Caucasus territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.

The remark was made by Lammy on Monday in a new blog on the Substack website, where he plans to write more long-form pieces about world affairs and UK foreign policy.

“Azerbaijan has been able to liberate territory it lost in the early 1990s,” he said in the post. The sentence had not been removed or altered by Friday, despite sparking a wave of criticism.

The territory he was apparently referring to was Nagorno-Karabakh, an interpretation that has not been disputed by UK officials.

In September 2023, Azerbaijan launched a short but bloody military operation to seize the tiny mountainous enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.

In some 24 hours of fighting, the Baku government restored its control over the territory, which had been held by Armenia or local Armenian leaders since the collapse of the Soviet Union, when a devastating war between the two historic enemies left it under Armenian control.

Though Baku seized territory that had been internationally recognised as part of Azerbaijan, the military action forced the entire Armenian population of the enclave — more than 100,000 people — to flee within a few days. Refugees spent days making a gruelling journey down the mountainside from Karabakh, leaving their homes and lives behind.

Many Armenians, who traditionally consider Karabakh a national and spiritual heartland, known to them as Artsakh, accused Baku of ethnically cleansing the region, something Lammy’s comment — and use of the word “liberate” to describe Baku’s military action — failed to reflect.

Britain has urged Azerbaijan and Armenia to engage in negotiations to end their long-standing conflict.

Conservative MP Alicia Kearns, former chair of the House of Commons foreign affairs committee, said on X that Lammy’s comments on a “vanity blog” appeared to be “contradicting long-standing UK policy” in a way that was “totally inappropriate and throws into question the foreign secretary’s judgment”.

The Foreign Office was forced to clarify on Friday that Lammy’s comment did not mark a change in the UK government’s stance on Nagorno-Karabakh.

Nonetheless, the Armenian government is formally seeking further clarification from the UK in the wake of Lammy’s post, an Armenian official told the FT.

US congressman Brad Sherman also weighed in on X, saying the remarks were “a stain on UK foreign policy”, as he accused the UK foreign secretary of having “endorsed ethnic cleansing”.

Laurence Broers, an associate fellow at the international affairs think-tank Chatham House, said: “It’s a real gaffe by the foreign secretary.”

Accusing Lammy of the “simplification and conflation” of developments in various post-Soviet states, Broers said the foreign secretary was “misreading the situation” regarding Azerbaijan, and “reinforcing the talking points of an autocratic regime”.

The EU parliament accused Baku of undertaking ethnic cleansing in the disputed territory last year. Azerbaijan has denied the claim.

Elin Suleymanov, Azeri ambassador to the UK, said: “I don’t understand why there’s so much response to this blog by the foreign secretary, because what [Lammy] said is absolutely true . . . It reflects the longstanding position of the UK government, which has always been supportive of the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan, and Armenia.

“For 30 years the territory of Azerbaijan was occupied by Armenian forces, and in 2020, Azerbaijan did liberate its territory.”

After the ceasefire in the region last September, Lammy urged on X that “Nagorno-Karabakh Armenians must be guaranteed safety and dignity”.

The title of the new Substack account is Lammy’s name rather than his ministerial title, but the blog was written by the foreign secretary in an official — rather than personal — capacity.

However, the Foreign Office refused to confirm if it had been reviewed internally within the department before it was published.

A Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office spokesperson said: “There has been no change in UK policy. The foreign secretary supports the territorial integrity of both Armenia and Azerbaijan and is encouraged by both sides engaging in meaningful dialogue. The UK will continue to support their commitment to lasting peace in the region.”