After 15 months of lockdown, the calibre of my virtual meetings has suddenly improved. On Friday, June 11, from London, I stepped into the meeting of G7 leaders along with Dr Denis Mukwege, a Nobel laureate gynaecologist based in Congo. Then, on Saturday, I virtually attended my son’s wedding in Hong Kong. It’s a funny old world, both connected and disconnected.
The invitation to the G7 leaders’ meeting was to speak on behalf of the Gender Equality Advisory Council, a group of globally distinguished women including our own Dame Sarah Gilbert, who led the development of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, Fabiola Gianotti, director-general of Cern, and Ritu Karidhal, a leading figure in India’s Mars Orbiter Mission. Spot the scientist. Science is especially relevant for the G7 challenges of pandemic preparedness, the climate emergency and a green economy.
If girls and women are to be part of the green recovery, many more need to be encouraged to follow scientific careers. At the moment, only 22 per cent of AI professionals around the world are women. They could be erased from the architecture of the future. I was delighted that the final communiqué, which attracted little notice, possibly because it was issued during the England-Croatia match, did pledge to address this imbalance.
I stoutly read out one of GEAC’s recommendations to G7 about the need for more women in decision-making roles. The president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, answered ruefully that I was right but it was hard. Meanwhile, Boris Johnson announced a determination to make the world “more feminine”, by which he perhaps meant having more women around.
He did not take the issue of gender equality as personally as the predominantly male group of sherpas at a preparatory meeting a few weeks ago. Afterwards, one of them offered to resign to make way for a woman.
I have learnt through this process that there are many routes to change. Governments can only do so much. The proposal from our French council member was for a charter on the portrayal of women in the media. The use of language is so important in all communications. And it has become a big issue in recruitment. If you advertise for a “driven individual in gaming”, women will tend to shrug. If you ask for “a reliable individual with an analytical mind”, they might apply. Language can be unconscious as well as conscious.
Sitting in the virtual lobby at the G7 meeting, I had time to observe the body language of the leaders, without sound. The UK prime minister naturally uses zoological gestures. Joe Biden had a more fireside manner, folding and unfolding his arms or putting his hands together, part prayer, part emphasis. Justin Trudeau is emotive in his gesticulation: he could be holding a rose beneath a balcony. Emmanuel Macron performs as if he were conducting a military band.
Interestingly, the two women in the room were the most physically restrained. You might call their manner task-based rather than vision-based. Briefly unmuted, Angela Merkel used the phrase “unfathomable debt”. No amount of fraternal backslapping can disguise the scale of the economic challenge we face.
The pandemic made many press pause on their wedding plans. But lockdown limps on and we can’t wait forever. I have a son in Hong Kong, a city that is still demanding three weeks’ quarantine for visitors from the UK; I have not even bothered to look up returning restrictions. There is no end in sight.
So our son and his girlfriend finally tied the knot in Hong Kong Cathedral at 7am on Saturday, while his family gathered in their various boxes at the bottom of the screen, forming a virtual congregation. I wore a hat. Other guests dialled in from bed. The church link went down, so the rest of us were left in limbo shouting hymns at each other and then, to pass the time, holding up pets. It was comic and stoical and the couple looked blissfully happy in the screenshots sent over afterwards. They are all set for their honeymoon — in Hong Kong.
My daughter said it was as if we were all spirits, looking back at a life that no longer belonged to us. The disembodied wedding has been the strangest moment of lockdown for me and I have never longed more for physical presence.
The emotions of joy and sadness found their greatest expression in Bach, so it feels right that he should be the composer to lead us out of lockdown. I went to watch a rehearsal the other day of a new play by Nina Raine, Bach & Sons, soon to open at the Bridge Theatre.
It is directed by Nicholas Hytner and Bach is played by Simon Russell Beale — the role of a lifetime. The composer had been described as the sum of humanity, a flawed husband who had to bury 10 of his children and yet was capable of expressing the sublime.
Hytner conceived the idea of a play based on an encounter between Bach and Frederick the Great, discussing the nature of existence. Bach believed in a divine, mathematical order. Frederick argued for random chaos.
Hytner commissioned Raine, who wrote the family drama during the pandemic, not knowing when or even if it might be performed. “I was writing the play and thinking, what is the point? What is the point of art?” she remembers. Hytner said that reading the play left him in tears. “Because what this play is about, is what we have not had any of.” Russell Beale cheers: “Live music!”
The great unlocking, when it finally comes, will be emotional. Add Bach’s cello suites and there will not be a dry eye in the house.
Sarah Sands is chair of the Bright Blue think-tank and a board director at Hawthorn Advisors
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