“It is a sunny Sunday in June and I am sitting in a Porsche with a man I recently matched with on Bumble, two Spanish sighthounds, an intersex DJ and Curtis Yarvin. “Let’s go Team Fascist!” shouts my match as he pulls away from the grand Georgian terrace in Pimlico where Yarvin has spent the morning chatting about Austrian economics with 86-year-old crossbench peer and Keynes biographer Lord Skidelsky.”
This is how Jemima Kelly’s recent Financial Times longread opens and it only gets crazier after that. The last time Jemima came on the show she talked about her visit to Mar-a-Lago, court of the then ex-president, Donald Trump. After reading her entertaining account of a garden party thrown by the UK branch of the Very Online Right, in honour of Curtis Yarvin (J.D. Vance’s pet intellectual), I knew had to have her back. Jemima is a brilliant storyteller and a shrewd judge of character. In this conversation she offers an eye-popping account of the party along with acute insight into the nature of this increasingly influential political movement.
In Part Two, which will be released shortly, for paid subscribers only, I ask Jemima what it’s like to report stories in which she’s surrounded by weird people with unsavoury views. How does she get them to reveal so much to her, while maintaining her integrity?
Don’t miss this one!
