Last week I gave a talk to an audience of four dozen colleagues plus two teddy bears and a rabbit with one eye. The subject was: Who reads the Financial Times? And my thesis was that our readers are odder than you’d think.
We now know, following the storming of his compound in Tripoli, that Colonel Gaddafi was a keen reader of the FT’s How to Spend It supplement. But what about the daily paper?
Judging by my own archive of e-mails, the FT is regularly read by a nine-year-old girl in Malaysia, a young man from the Netherlands who recently wrote in asking me to help him name his dog and an elderly artist living in sheltered accommodation in the UK who sent me a troubling drawing he’d done in the style of Picasso of a woman in a hat.