The Telegraph Broke showed her for an Aisha, CIBC investors' edge while at the carnival. Aisha thinks gut rudging ups and downs should be for rollercoatsers, and not her investments. Now, with CIBC investors' edge, she has all the tools to invest confidently. Fairside news today, Tim, the confirmation that the body of Mike Lynch, the technology entrepreneur, has finally been recovered and identified off the coast of Sicily.
After his luxury yacht sank, his daughter Hannah still missing, also presumed to have died along with four others. It's an awful story that has gripped the country and will be speaking to Albert Tate, our reporter in Porticello, and a salvage expert on how a yacht can sink so quickly. We're also going to talk about GCSE results, and as private schools pull ahead, we ask, does this prove that private education works? Welcome to the Daily Tea with me, Kamal Ahmed.
And me, Tim Stan. It's an appalling tragedy, and it just seems remarkable that a £30 million yacht could sink 500 metres to start the coast of Sicily. But before we get into how that might have happened and what happens next, let's talk about the man at the centre of this tragedy, Mike Lynch. Kamal, I believe you've met him.
Yes, a few times when I was business editor here at the Telegraph, in the 2010s, this was just the time that he'd sold his company, Autonomy, a technology company, which was a very early adopter of how to sift lots and lots of data, voice mail, emails, texts, and be able to see themes and particularly sometimes be able to spot fraud. So it was a technology company which many, many businesses use to be able to make sense of the huge amounts of technological information they were producing. That was Autonomy. And he sold that business to the huge American computer giant Hewlett Packard for £8 billion.
And he was a hugely significant player in the technology world. And I interviewed him and spoke to him about the UK's technology industry. Why hadn't a Google being invented out of the UK? David Cameron had famously said, why is there never been a UK Google?
And Mike Lynch was actually someone who was a mathematician, a computational expert, who was very obsessed with this idea of how do we build a real technology business in the UK? And I told Autonomy, and obviously it made him very, very wealthy. He started a fund called Invoke, which was all about supporting young entrepreneurs in the United Kingdom. So he had a big role in building his own very successful businesses.
He also was very important for supporting entrepreneurs in the UK and therefore supporting our economy. So his importance went beyond his businesses. But he was also controversial. Yeah.
When Hewlett Packard bought Autonomy is about a year later, what's called a write down, they said that what had been sold to them was not as valuable as what they thought they were going to yet. And this led to this huge legal battle between Hewlett Packard and Mike Lynch and other senior former executives from Autonomy. And to his extra dishes? Yes.
Exactly. It led to his extra dishes. And to the United States. He went there, he faced 15 criminal charges along with other former executives from Autonomy.
And it was very recently that all of those, he was found not guilty on all of those charges. So the tragedy of the events of Monday morning was sort of compounded by the fact that this is what he had called his sort of second life because he had become from his position when I interviewed him. And he's a very polite, quietly spoken, as I say, a mathematical expert. He was partially deaf.
So he had to lip-read you very carefully. And so that he came across as almost quite introverted, although incredibly, obviously incredibly smart. He then went through this 13 year battle over his reputation over Autonomy itself and then suddenly to be found not guilty of these 15 charges. That release, he said it was like a near-death experience that he'd come back.
And this was a celebration. He had got friends and his lawyers and his supporters together on the Bayesian, his boat. And that was what was made this tragedy, not more poignant because all tragedies are desperate and harrowing. But it gave an extra gloss to it because he had just seen how his future could be much more positive.
Having met him, I met him a few times through the extradition work that he was doing about why he shouldn't be extradited and how he was going to defend himself. And speaking to him, he was crushed that this had become the way he was going to be remembered was this. So being acquitted was such a moment of positivity for him, his family just brings a sharper focus into the events that we're now talking about. And his death was so incredibly random.
Whatever happened would have happened very quickly. And the people who made the boat incest that this was an unsinkable vessel. It is the speed and the drama and the mystery around it that I think has captured so many people's attentions. It is very similar, isn't it, to the Titan submarine that went down and obviously disappeared with the loss of life.
This idea that one moment in this sense, literally, you're bobbing on a calm sea in the beautiful sunshine. And a day later, there is horror and death. And that does touch something, I think, in all of us about the fragility of life. And then, of course, what has happened?
And in these types of situations, you're only going to know over time what has happened. We're going to dig into this in this podcast. We're going to be joined by a salvage expert in a few minutes. But first of all, let's speak to Albert Tate, our reporter from the Telegraph who's been in Waticello in Sicily where all these events have been unfolding.
Thanks so much for joining us, Aldo. Just to kick us off, take us through your week and the unfolding story. I mean, I arrived here on Monday. So around 12 hours after the first reports came in that the boat had sank.
Everything just sent around here in Port of Jell-O. And just to sort of pay tribute to very small fish and village, not very touristy. But it's been completely transforming the last few days, sort of, as it's been completely taken over by emergency services, divers, please, everybody involved in the search. And also hundreds of journalists, photographers, because the guests were from all around the world.
In terms of what we've been doing over the last four days, it's only about trying to get any signs to have the search been going. We've been hearing about the difficulties they've been having about accessing the cabins. We've been constantly communicating with the firefights on the coast guard who are leading the search operation about how it's been going. Albert, I think it's always surprising, isn't it, in the Mediterranean, off an island where many of us will have been on holiday, that's a rescue mission.
It's so difficult. The boat has gone quite deep. It's 15 metres down. And that has meant that the rescuers are only able to spend a very short amount of time down there.
And also, I think, have been hampered by the floating furniture and obviously very difficult conditions. It's been clear that the rescue mission, and now, as you say, the recovery mission, has been very, very hard. How did the coast guard, do they do a sort of daily press conference? How have you been kept in touch with all that?
And what details can you furnish with? So, there's no sort of daily press conference. They're not particularly communicative with the press out here. But you're absolutely right.
It has been a search of really being hampered by difficulty. They can only spend 14 minutes down there. These divers, four of those minutes they've got to spend going down and going up. So, really, they've only got 10 minutes at a time to search.
They're also having to rotate and team the three. So, it's really understandable why it's taken so long to find the bodies. I think what we've seen changing the last few days is more divers have come in. We've had a remote control vehicle that's coming as well, which have been able to search for much longer periods, which is now yielded the discovery of five bodies.
Have you been able to speak up with 20 maritime experts there? Or people who know that bit of coast well. There's obviously been pictures of boats being buffered around. There's been suggestions that the very bad weather was predicted of any local people there or experts who have flown in, but able to give you any information about what may have happened to cause this boat, which as you say, is being described by the boat builders as more or less unthinkable to go down with such tragic results.
So, at the moment it says, just theories, we have to wait for the prosecutors to speak to all the survivors, all the witnesses, and come up with their conclusion as to why the boat did sink. One of the suggestions is that the port holes. One of those is going to perhaps be open and that if the boat tilted it could have taken on water, which has an unconcerned port, one of the port holes was open. Another theory is the keel, sort of like a flat, that's stabilised this in the water.
And if this was a trap that some Italian media have reported, it could have been the boat was a lot less stable. We know that the prosecutor spoke to the captain yesterday around two hours. But what about again, we're unsure of those details. Nothing's confirmed.
Yes, there are a lot of unanswered questions about how this has happened. Do we know if any of the boats sank in the boat at the same time or in the same area? No, no, for as far as we know none, it was just about Asian. So we've got a boat, the rescue them, it was a Dutch captain.
He talked about coming across them on the life boats. He's mentioned it was very stormy conditions, but none of the other boats seem to have been affected, which has led to questions about why was it the why was it the bi-Asian? It's got to be a second largest mass in the world about saying what it's going to do with it. This is why the suggestion of human areas would have been thrown around about whether they didn't see the storm coming, whether they weren't prepared for it.
Again, these are the questions we just don't know at this point. Thanks so much Albert for reporting there from Porte Cho. We're now joined by Bertrand Sippers, who is a marine salvage and diving expert at the French company, Cérez. Bertrand, how does a boat like this so expensive, so modern, so apparently unsinkable?
How could a boat like this sink so fast? By the way, it's always the same story. What about sunk is never got one reason. It's a few reasons at the same moment.
To tell you the truth, I don't like to speculate, to put any conjectures. My main job is to work on facts. And we don't have those facts at the moment because most are very good, not sure. What we know exactly is we are the one boat.
What's that mooring? We don't know the moment if you had one anchor or two anchors. This boat was very close, very close to shore. It's 500 meters close to shore in Cérez.
Lights were on and some of people were awake and some were sleeping. That means some people were on the deck or not far from the deck and some of them were on the cabins. We know that the boat has one of them, a big mast of this kind of setting lessons. It was at mooring, which is quite different because you can have to move from the wind.
We can imagine the tornado pushing this boat out of far is lined and going at something like 30 degrees more than 40 degrees. I'm sure as it is a very warm and disappointing military and sea, the windows were open. But also maybe portrons in cabinet. If you make a conjugation for all that things, you can imagine water coming in and then it's very quick.
As a layman who doesn't say a great deal, when I look at images of the vessel, I'm struck by the extraordinary size of the mast. Does this not inherently make a vessel like that more vulnerable to have such an extraordinary gargantuan mast? I wonder why does it have such a tall mast as well? I'm sure this kind of boat and this boat, particularly, have been going through biggest tons.
But we're shipping, we're not at mooring, which is really really big difference, I think, because a selling vessel is made to ship and sell. But at mooring, the cottage shelf sea, everything is quite different. This mast is not made to like wind from the tide by the way. In an event such as this, what can make the difference between getting off the vessel and not being able to get off?
Oh, maybe some people were in a sleep, you know, you don't have time, you know, a hundred of story of people being trapped in the slip. And so if the ship is at 40 degrees, you cannot be scared for sure. It's just like a trap. They're like, people were on the upper deck, most survivors, and people were on the lower deck.
They didn't tell the possibility to really escape from the vessel, you know, because we sell good and stronger and stronger degrees with wind and then sunk. So that's only two H. When it is also like this happens, and the vessel goes to the bottom of the sea, what are the first steps that the search team takes? What will they have done in this instance?
What would be the first things they would have done? When you arrive on just a fresh break, I mean, sorry about the term fresh break, but it's what we say. Just a new rake, you know, just just been seeking a few hours before. The first thing you think is, is it possible to ask people still alive inside?
So you try to hear if you can hear some noise and you have your smack on the hole to see somebody answer you. But it's very, very rare, right? And, you know, I'm pretty sure in those conditions that well, or it didn't take very long, you know, it's finished, you know, just a few minutes. Once it has become clear that people can't be physically rescued, then what is it that search divers are there to do?
Does this move on to recovery and gathering of evidence? Oh, yes, of course, evidence. It's not the first thing. The first thing I want to ship sink is to rescue the bodies.
Rescue the people, of course, but rescue the bodies. It's for the committee, and it's for everyone, you know, to rescue the bodies. And then can start the investigation, program investigation. So when the time of rescuing and salvaging the bodies is finished, they will try to find evidence.
And that is a reason they already got a robot and a rove for with them, you know, and the idea is to prepare the selvage because when you have the first evidence done by divers, it's very important. You have the first evidence always on camera and images. And then you can start thinking about salvaging the vessel will give more evidence when the ship could be of the surface. And who exactly will be in charge of the investigation and who will report on the findings?
The boat is the UK, but the water as Italian. So I suppose Italian was we will do is also investigation for the moment, with the bulk of course of a few characteristics. That's why it's done usually, you know, when you've got a French water in English water or in the inverse, you know, so it's a co-operation between the sauages. But the main authorities for the moment are Italian, Cecilia, by the way.
A lot of people watching this tragic accident will be wondering just how on earth it could have happened. The vessel is so large. It's the kind of thing that one spends a lot of money on to be safe and secure. It was, as you say, moored, other boats haven't sunk.
We in England think of the Mediterranean as being relatively peaceful. I appreciate that it's not, but that's the way that it's perceived. How does one explain to a layman that this could have happened? Because it just looks so unlikely.
It's always like that. You know, last year I've been working on the Titanic project. The Titanic himself was supposed to be unthinkable. And the submarine was also supposed to be safe, but it wasn't.
And this year we've got to, and this boat somebody says it wasn't sinkable, but every vessel is sinkable, you know, for any reason. You know, it's of course it's a coincidence because the weather was pretty good. Everything was pretty okay. It's a big boat.
It's a safe boat. And nobody can predict such a tornado there in this place, you know. It's no one can predict. When you will work, you know, when I work for the courts for the justice, you know, we, our mission is to be the closest possible from the truth.
So I think it will be the same, you know, in this case, that we need for that, you know, to have all the regards, all the witnesses of survivors, the information from divers, all the information from the ROV, the robot. And then once it will be subject because he has to be subject to deal with the international law anyway. When all the blind surveyors will have all the information, they will try to speak together and then some solution to say, look, we are pretty sure it's done like that. Sometimes you have seen some mystery, but sometimes you can say, look, okay, we know at 100%, what ever, in its event like that.
And I open the stories to it and like that, you know. On the tragedy of the Concordia, the ferry that sank, it was two years before the vessel was eventually salvaged. How long does this process take? Oh, it's quite different.
Here's a cockroach. I was a very big ferry. And he was a elf sunk, by the way, it was not cockroach sunk. In this case, it's cockroach different.
But the boat is cockroach sunk, is that 50 meters. And again, the mast is 70 meters. So I suppose, there will be certainly some different method. But for myself, I think I would try to first the boat on his keel with the rope of the mast, you know.
And what about his on his keel, then you can keep it with slings underneath and a big bow to the big crane can salvage the thing. But if the mast will ever help at first, it will certainly be a program later. So we'll have to cut the mast, I suppose, before salvaging the old thing. So do you think it will be months before we get anywhere near what might be the truth of what has happened?
Or is it a process that takes counting into the years rather than the months? No, no, no, it can be done in months. But you imagine that would cost quite a lot of money. And as all the meteors of the world are looking at this sinking vessel, and as I suppose with all those rich people, of course, you've got an army of lawyers going on the thing as well, you know, plus your sorities.
I think all those people will have to speak together to find the right company you can salvage it, and then to accept the right method to keep the boat mostly intact, to give them to the surveyor. I mean, for myself, when I work for the justice or for insurance, and when we have some kind of tragedy or traumas, you know, with people die, I always need to have more intact possible for the vessel when it's salvaged. So then we can start the proper survey of the sync and wisdom. But sorry, sorry for that, but just to answer to your question, the longer, I think we'll be to make calls those people together to be to be okay.
But the salvage itself will take certain few weeks, but not not in 12 years. Thank you so much for joining us. Well, I think we learned a lot there from Bertrand Siboss. There is a process.
He seemed to think that we would get to answers that there wouldn't be answers that we'd get to in years, but in months. And that almost it would be relatively straightforward. I was fascinated that he also said that this is now going to be a discussion between lawyers, between the authorities, and they have to come to some agreements about how the boat is salvaged. All these things are always so much more complicated than you imagine.
Well, coming up next, let's talk about the GCSE results, which expose the perpetual North-South divide, but also an actually growing divide between private and state education. And I want to ask if if private education is doing so well, why does Labor want to tax it so hard and drive middle-class families away from it? Well, Tim, let's have a little look at those GCSE results that have been announced today for England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Of course Scotland has a different exams system.
Three big areas. The ones you pointed out, private schools versus state's education, the North-South divide, and I think a third one, which is the male-female split. So in terms of the gap in top grades between private and comprehensive schools, that's widened to 29 percentage points up from 28.2 percentage points in 2023. Let's look at the North-South divide.
28.5% of peoples in London were awarded the top grades. That's just a little higher than last year. Let's compare that with the North-West of England, where it remained on 18.6%. And if you look at the North-East of England, it's 17.8%.
So quite a gap there. And then the boy-girl, male-female, split. This year, 24.7% of entries from girls were graded at least a 7 or a. That's come down slightly from 24.9% last year.
But for boys, the proportion failed from 19.1% to 19%. So a gap of nearly 5%. Let's kick off though with a private schools point. I feel like I have sat at GCSE.
By the end of those. Let's kick off with private schools. And your argument, Tim, which I believe will be able to discuss robustly, that given that private schools are doing so well in exams, why would they want to tax them more? It's worth pointing out that both comprehensive and private schools have done slightly better this year.
It's the gap between their performance that is troubling. Well, is it troubling though? If something's working, why break it? If there's a bit of the education system which is flourishing and which gets such excellent results, rather than taxing it, shouldn't we be thinking how do we emulate it and copy it?
Let's definitely keep it because it's obviously helping a lot of people. But also how can we do what they're doing in state schools? Well, we could kick off by spending much more per pupil in state schools. And that might mean more tax.
You want to emulate the private sector. You would have many, many more teachers ratio for the ratios for pupils. You would spend much more per pupil and you would spend much more on what are described as extracurricular activities for students to be able to take part in. If you did want to emulate that, but surely, Tim, to do that, you need more funding and to get more funding.
One way to do that is to tax more. And so therefore, by the VAT change on private schools will help state education emulate just the successes that you are lauding today. I mean, one thing on the extracurricular activities, I don't believe they make any difference to academic performance. I mean, the fact that a private school might have fencing doesn't mean people are going to do better at geography, GCSE.
But on the finance question, you may well be right that it is about the money that goes to the individual people or the school. But first of all, does it logically follow, therefore, in order to finance that you have to take money away from the private system to put it into the public? Why not take the money from some other sphere of the taxing take? Why should it be representative within schools?
That sounds punitive rather than simply, if they were just arguing we just spend more money on teachers and state schools fair enough. But there's a punitive element to this, isn't it? Which is that we're going to take that money from parents who would otherwise send them to private schools. I suppose the idea is that are these really charities, and therefore you have to make choices.
And if the other choices are less palatable, well, it's for private schools to find ways of managing their money more successfully, and actually, parents having to pay more of the full cost of the rather wonderful education. As you say, look at the outcomes, the rather wonderful education you get in private schools is just going to become more expensive. I think if you look at London, and this takes us into the second point, which is about this North-South divide, what happened in London, I think, is a microcosm of how education policy in the state sector should work. Blair famously said education, education, before 1997, a huge amount of reform and funding went into London schools.
I was actually a parent rather fortunately through a lot of that period in London with young children. The schools were revolutionized. They were rebuilt, focused on standards, was much clearer. Many, many middle-class parents who may well have sent their children to private school no longer needed to.
Your local comprehensive became excellent. And just like in France where private school is not done because of standards and is not seen as a way of giving your child a head start in the educational race, I would love to see here, private schools of course should be a choice. Parents should be able to take the choice of private schooling. But it should be a choice where the state system, which is much more where we are in London now, is properly funded and is rigorously regulated so that standards are as high as in the private sector.
But it was that injection of money that allowed the revolution in London schools, which should be the blueprint for what we have in the rest of England. And clearly, because it hasn't been, and that funding has not been done and promoted in the same way in other parts of England, we have this gap. It is a disgrace that if you are a child outside London, the education, service you receive from the state is poorer. Or leads, sorry, to be clear, leads to poorer outcomes.
I couldn't agree more. And it's because of, yes, the player era, followed by a categorization. That's one reason why private schools now cost so much money, because they had to compete with the state sector now, because the state sector was getting so good, which is why they had to give all these ridiculous add-ons. So that I know one person who, I'm told a one person who goes to a private school where they have personal trainers on the site that just walk around with clipboards observing the children and asking them if they want to do any sports or work out or check their health and nutrition.
I mean, this is insane. So partly because state schools are so well that the others became so expensive. But there are two other things that factor into the London story. One is immigration, which is that a lot of the people who are doing very well in London schools are born abroad, and they bring with them the immigrant work ethic, which is not here at present, unfortunately, in Britain, particularly among the working class.
And the second thing is you mentioned in passing standards, not just money, but also standards. Absolutely. And one thing London schools started to do was become a little more disciplinarian, but more emphasis upon things like uniforms and behavior. And some of them, through things like academies, effectively started internal streaming.
They were imitating the grammar schools, but just not sifting out at the age of 11. So I couldn't disagree with you. I just think that we should be honest about what makes schools work. It is high standards, discipline, and a bit more money.
Yes. But that means, again, I come back to imitating what the private schools do so well. And one thing I didn't go to a private school, by the way, but I did briefly work in one. And one thing that really impressed me was the sense of collegiate identity.
When I was young in the 1750s, state schools did not tend to have that sense of identity. But then when I went and worked in this private, when I was really impressed by how they had a strong sense of pride and of the virtues of going to that particular school. So I'm just copying them. But why finance this revolution from destroying the one bit of the education system is really taking off at the moment, which is the private.
That's the punitive unnecessary entity. It won't destroy it. It just means that we, it's supposed to be on the reach of middle class school fees have gone up considerably without this tax change that is coming down the track. Congratulations is worth saying for everyone who has done well in the GCS.
By the way, what you all think of these conversations, particularly between two journalists is, oh, yes, but here are all the problems or here are all the issues. But actually, we should of course say to everyone who has done so well in the GCS. This generation have had a school career through COVID, which has been absolutely disastrous. And there are many, many schools that have not done enough to get the standards of education back to where they were pre the pandemic.
And there needs to be some focus on that. So given that this generation are the generation who were so hugely affected by the lockdowns, by the closure of schools, by online learning, which clearly disproportionately affected poorer pupils, pupils from less economically rich backgrounds who didn't have the facilities in front of them. Let's some Tim though talk about the male female split and how it is girls now, who are well ahead of boys at GCSE, but throughout the education system. Probably quite rightly, this has been a reversal over a number of decades that has been happening rather slowly.
Education obviously changed towards continuing with more continuous assessment, less reliance on simply exams or more traditional methods of testing. But Tim, is it something we should be concerned about? I must admit, I find it hard to think how do we get changes beyond the point you make, which seems to have affected boys more than girls, the idea of work ethic and what success looks like and why you need to strive hard at school to be successful in the game of life. Well, we've got to be wary of great inflation.
It's actually not necessarily a bad thing. If overall success doesn't rise that high, because it probably means that the grades aren't worth what they used to be. And there is always an any generation, people who are not academic and are not going to thrive. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.
So long as they then have other vocational qualifications and jobs to go on to. I think the obsession with the I'm, but what is the implication of everyone always worrying about these sorts of results? It should be closer to 100% of people getting all A's. That's nonsense.
That's not just how nature or life works. The other thing I'd say is that if there is such a large difference between girls and boys favoring girls, we're talking 24.7% of entries from girls graded at least to 7 or an A compared to 19% for boys. At what point do we stop talking about the disadvantage of girls in education? Because that to me seems to be all anyone ever talks about is how many girls are doing science and things like that.
And our society says sexist and there's so much toxic masculinity out there. At what point do girls just do so well that we eventually admit that, okay, they're doing okay? I don't think it's a zero sum game. I think you can talk still about girls and obviously as they get into the workplace, systemic hurdles still exist.
So it doesn't mean you stop talking about girls and promoting that they have a broad set of career choices ahead of them and they shouldn't constrain themselves because of what some people think girls should do. And that was true, Tim, in my generation. But looking at these stats, it just looks to me like girls have got no problem. They're not facing any kind of prejudice whatsoever because they're beating the boys hands down.
Yeah, so maybe it's time to focus on the boys a little more. Yeah, still, of course, promoting girls. We congratulate them all. You can write to us, of course, about this and any of the other issues that we've touched on today at the dailyt at telegraph.co.uk do connect with us on our socials, ex, Instagram and TikTok at dailyt podcast.
Thank you so much, Tim. It's been an excellent discussion. Join us again for the dailyt tomorrow five o'clock. EQ Bank is here to help you make bank.
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