Lunch with the FT: Ken Costa

Some extracts from Lunch with the FT.
Ken Costa and I take in the pink marbled splendour of The Ritz Restaurant in London. The winter sun streams through the window behind us. In the distance, a pianist tinkles away at “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”. “So you bought this place?” I say. “My very good friends and clients did,” he says – his very good friends and investment banking clients being the Barclay twins, Sir David and Sir Frederick, who bought The Ritz in 1995. “I rather like supporting clients. I think it’s always useful, you know.”
…The restaurant is filling up now. Our starters are excellent. Costa keeps an eye on the new arrivals. Let us talk about your years as a student leader in South Africa, I say. “Ah, you jog me with nostalgia for those days,” he says. Costa was president of the students’ council at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, a hotbed of white student radicalism. “Being a young 20-year-old, I had a burning passion for justice, and the injustices of the apartheid system were horrible in every way, mostly because of the dehumanising effect – curiously, not only on the recipients but also on those who were meting it out. We, the students, became the vanguard of agitation against the government.”
They were exciting times, but frightening ones, too. “You’d hear knocks on the door from strange policemen.” Did that happen to him? “Yes.” Friends were locked up. One, Ahmed Timol, died after falling from a 10th floor window while under interrogation in Johannesburg’s notorious John Vorster Square. “There were some very brave and courageous people,” he says. His associates included Steve Biko, the black student leader, who also later died while in police detention. “He was the outstanding leader of our generation,” Costa says.
…Costa’s family, farmers of Lebanese origin, were not political. What turned him against apartheid? He boarded at an all-white Christian Brothers school in Pretoria. One day the students heard that a Chinese boy would be joining them, but he never turned up because the law did not allow it. “I was deeply offended by that,” he says. With this came the “realisation that we were an entirely privileged group of people and that we never had normal contact with black people”.
…Costa is, today, not just a Christian. He is chairman of Alpha International, an interdenominational programme that has spread around the world. More than 10 million people have attended Alpha’s relaxed meals and introductions to Christianity. What convinced him of Christianity’s rightness? He pauses to turn down a waiter’s offer of another drink. “Well, it was a case of being persuaded. Claims that were made by Jesus were, in fact, true.”
It is unusual in Britain to find people talking openly about religion. Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s press spokesman, said: “We don’t do God.” Blair himself, who recently became a Catholic, said he never discussed his faith while in office because people would have considered him a “nutter”. Costa insists this is changing. “There is a greater openness than ever before for people to discuss the issues of religion. We do do God. We talk about it.”
Costa last year wrote a book called God at Work, examining workplace issues such as ambition, disappointment and money from a Christian point of view. As he talks, he draws on business terms. The Bible is “the prospectus”, as in, “That’s what the prospectus sets out, from Genesis to Apocalypse.” City work puts family life under stress, particularly when you are in the middle of a bid, but “it’s the trend that matters” – in other words, you can give your family more time when the deal is done.
…Is it true that he has read the Financial Times and the Bible every morning for over 30 years? It is true, he says, adding: “The only question is: which comes first?” And which does come first? The FT? “I know.” He gives a naughty giggle. “Awful.”