Mark Carney is a man of taste. His Davos speech laid bare the truth of our ruptured world order

Mark Carney likes Big Issue. This is a fact I don’t tire of repeating. It came to light some time ago, while he was still governor of the Bank of England and before he started duking up to Donald Trump. He was being honoured by Canada’s Public Policy Forum in 2018. In his speech he discussed key elements of inspiration for him. He said this:

“I was walking in Edinburgh and there was a guy selling the Big Issue. It’s a magazine that’s sold by the homeless for the homeless. My favourite feature in the Big Issue is Letter To My Younger Self. These letters tend to have a wistfulness to them; a sense of lost opportunity or good fortune that wasn’t appreciated at the time.”

It was an interview in there with will.i.am that really got to him. He quoted this line: “When your knees are about to buckle, crawl. Do not give up.”

“The issue with these letters is because time doesn’t move backwards it’s too late for those authors to take their own advice,” said Carney. “These letters can still be useful, they’re useful for the young.”

Now, aside from everything else, Carney clearly is a man of taste. He likes Big Issue, he values Big Issue and he quotes Big Issue as a source of wisdom. His understanding of the wistfulness at the heart of the younger self interviews, of the raw reflectiveness that means the subject is open and the public are shown what is many times an unvarnished and exposed glimpse of previously hidden realities, it’s on the money.  Frankly, more leaders should quote Big Issue in significant speeches. I can think of one lad specifically…

Read more:

• How Canada’s next prime minister Mark Carney came to be inspired by Big Issue
• Starmer ties the UK’s Greenland stance to the cost of living crisis. Is it a false choice?
• The Trump administration has declared war on homelessness – the fightback starts now 

I thought of Carney and his Big Issue link when he delivered his key speech last week in Davos. With precision pressure he choked Donald Trump’s clumsy cod-gangster global shakedown. It is time to stop the rituals of avoiding calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality, he said. 

“You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration, when integration becomes the source of your subordination.”

It was a speech that drew a line and will embed and endure. The world order is not changing, he said, it has ruptured. We must get used to that. It left Trump angry – he called it out in his rambling Davos speech the following day. That was Trump’s second long speech in two days, incidentally, each as incoherent in places as the other. While there is a growing sense of a dear leader addressing a cowed politburo Trump does seem to go on for an impressive length of time without any need for a toilet break. That is quite something for a man of his age, especially considering the amount of Diet Coke he’s rumoured to take on board. It’s only a matter of time before he says he’s the best in the world at this.

As the Greenland farrago continues, and the uncertainty in global affairs echoes down into our own day-to-day lives, Carney is a steady, reassuring presence. Who wouldn’t want a leader of clear human empathy, who authentically backs an organisation who are about busting poverty and lifting eyes up to what is possible rather than closing them to anything except what is personally desired. There is some irony that it is a former senior global banker who is challenging the world to ask questions of the financial reality it accepted for so long and seek a better way.

A new paperback of Big Issue’s Letter To My Younger Self: Inspirational Women is published on 12 February. A collection of 75 wise women who have appeared over time in Big Issue. Mark will no doubt have ordered a copy already. Perhaps he could send it to his estranged pal…

Paul McNamee is editor of the Big Issue. Read more of his columns here. Follow him on X.

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