Laurence Fox, The Distance

The bus named Laurence Fox is parked outside Waitrose in Harrow, idling in exquisite metaphor: a new assault on, or corrective to, conventional politics, called Reclaim. The man Laurence Fox wears a long sort of cashmere bat cape and is surrounded by advisors. They are older than he, and male, which explains the bat cape. They don’t know that it is not relatable, but he is a trained actor: he seeks a costume. He is tall and gaunt, and he seems uneasy and distracted. We drive to the party stall on a necrotic shopping street. Most of the few volunteers are female, old to young, a piano scale. They look coyly excited. He eyes a younger one. “Aye-aye” he says. (He knows.) “We’ve been using pears as paper-weights,” she explains, indicating pears on leaflets, but the stall is in a wind tunnel, and the leaflets scatter.

Fox is famous for two reasons: because, on Question Time in January 2020, as the novelty fifth guest, he called a black woman a racist for calling him a “white, privileged male”. “It’s so easy to just throw your charge of racism at everybody and it’s starting to get boring now,” he said. He seemed filled with anger, and he could not stop. The same month he called the appearance of a Sikh soldier in the film 1917 “forcing diversity” but Sikhs, it was pointed out, did fight on the Western Front. It was race baiting. He apologised, but he seemed aggrieved.

The second reason is the insatiable desire of British people to watch the murder of Oxford dons. He played Sergeant James Hathaway of Thames Valley Police in Lewis, the successor to Inspector Morse, for nine seasons. Beyond this, his work on film is thin. Few directors have exploited his anger, and that is why he is here. I have watched every episode of Lewis, and Hathaway is the most interesting character by default. He is a sometime Christian, an occasional intellectual, and a committed depressive. Fox’s acting career is summarised as a Inspector Morse tribute.

Fox’s internal motivations are not so clear, but he has not had nine seasons to reveal them. His father, the superb actor James Fox — the best in a dynasty of actors — fled drama for a decade for a Christian cult. Was Laurence, when playing Hathaway, playing his father James? The only thing he tells me about his family is that they tease him. A burglary at his home was caught on CCTV and they mocked his appearance in the video for not being convincing enough. He suffered at Harrow School, where he was expelled before his A levels for a sexual misdemeanour, which ended his chances of university. He worked as a gardener, applied to RADA and appeared as an aristocrat in Gosford Park and a fascist in Foyle’s War. He was married to and acrimoniously divorced from the actor Billie Piper, with whom he shares two sons. At the end of season nine of Lewis, he walked away in a long, black coat, not to a series of his own but to this, and it is sillier, sadder, and infinitely riskier.

He is more courteous in life than on Twitter, but he could hardly fail to be, and that makes me distrust him. There, he uses the phrase “All Lives Matter” and incites others to break lockdown rules to combat authoritarianism, which he claims to fear while dressing, sometimes, in quasi-military dress. He is at heart a chaos-maker and for this he was given £5 million in funding, mostly from former Tory donors, to deny his charisma to others. (He voted for Jeremy Corbyn in 2017.) Reclaim’s aims are freedom of speech, the reform of institutions to ensure it, and the realisation of Fox’s personal definition of national pride. His campaign leaflet is a photograph of a muzzled Winston Churchill and a promise to “Scrap plan to tear down London’s statues”. Now he stands for the London mayoralty, where he is currently polling level with Count Binface (“campaigning for justice, lasers, Lovejoy and the return of Ceefax”) on 1%. He says he doesn’t mind about Count Binface, and I believe him, so I wonder if he actually cares about victory or is surfing a wind that appeared to him; the next gig. “I love his work. In Binface we trust.”

His campaigning here, meanwhile, amounts to awkward, and slightly pitiable, flirting: “I have a bag of bunting at home, I forgot to bring it.” It’s the fashion; almost everyone flirts when campaigning, especially the Prime Minister, so Fox can’t be blamed for that. Like every populist showbusiness has created — the obvious comparison is Russell Brand — Fox isn’t interested in details. (Two weeks later I watch a man dressed as a member of the Village People ask him if he would decrimalise drugs. He said he didn’t know.) He prefers to dress up, rant, and flirt. “I don’t do political particularly,” he says, “so whenever I commission a bit of work they [the staff] go, ‘how do you want it to look?’ I say, ‘I don’t care how it looks’”. Instead, he says things like: “What is my mayoral cigarette strategy? ‘Bring back menthol’?”

Suggested reading

Life on the Cornish breadline

By Tanya Gold

His fans, though, are hopeful. “He articulates what a lot of people are feeling right now,” says one. “They [he means “we”] have to watch what they say. Almost as if we have a point where everything is called racist or offensive. That isn’t to say some things aren’t.” The next is an ex-Benedict Cumberbatch fan, who has transferred her allegiance to Fox, and is obviously here for fun: “When he stood up on the stage and said, ‘Fuck the Tories,’ I finished with him. I couldn’t watch him again.” Actors as leaders rather than leading actors: what could be more decadent? He has left drama, but he remains a vessel.

A new fan appears: “Alright Laurence, I follow you on Twitter.” They do an arm bump. “You look good,” he adds, indicating the bat cape. “You too mate,” says Laurence. “Gotta go, mate,” says the fan. Fox talks instead to the former Cumberbatch fan, who moans that she looks like an “old bag”. “You don’t look like an old bag. I look like an old bag. Can someone set up a jacuzzi?” It is possible; it wouldn’t even be that weird nowadays. The media is irresponsible: the Question Time appearance was cynicism by the BBC and Fox should be grateful to the corporation he loathes, though it isn’t a contradiction he would acknowledge. I wonder if the staff will summon a jacuzzi for the photographs.

“Great aubergines,” he says politely at the fruit stall, as if at a cocktail party.  He has to be encouraged to discuss politics with the owner: “I don’t like imposing myself on people.” An emissary is sent. “The fruit guy won’t talk, he’s too busy,” comes the answer. Instead, we peer through the windows of Foxtons. There is nothing else to do. Then we board the bus for a local golf club. He is guarded — the media feed his paranoia, and he mentions an article in the Guardian, suggesting obsession on the writer’s behalf — but jocular, if in an exhausted manner.

“Laurence first [off the bus],” says a handler at the golf club. They discuss whether he should wear a mask: “I’m not partial to masks,” he says. (He was recently present at an anti-lockdown protest where policemen were injured.) “Put one on if they ask you.” “You are now allowed to play ze golf,” he says, in a German accent, to emphasise the potential for tyranny. We follow him to the driving range. He takes off the coat, takes a swing and the ball flies away. He does it perfectly. “There’s not much of him, is there?” says the former Cumberbatch fan.

Now he wants to find his old matron from Harrow because “she was always on the boys’ side. She liked us.” I wonder if his obsession with his school mirrors that of Lord Voldemort, who also returned to his school, though not in a bus with his name on. He fiddles with his telephone, presumably texting her: “I never see her!” He insists we drive to the bluff on which Harrow School sits. It was vast, red and pompous; it must have been painful when they betrayed him for being who he was. He sees the former school chaplain, Father Power, in the street. “Father Power!” he shouts from the bus, and a man dressed for Little Waitrose swivels. Then he sees Matron.

Suggested reading

How restaurants ate themselves

By Tanya Gold

“Mates,” he shouts from the bus. This is real emotion: it is his best scene yet. He flies out, and to her. Matron is tiny and ancient. She wears a beige coat and looks worried. She asks him: “How are you?” His head bows to her. He looks sad, and young, and slightly bashful: “I’m alright.” She says to the campaign manager: “Will you look after him?” Then, to me: “He was the star of the show [at school].” Is that what he came to hear? Is this encounter the real purpose of the day?

I ask her – has he changed? “Not one bit”. “Don’t say that,” he pouts at her, “Say I’m grown up”. (He is 42). She says, soothingly: “you are. But you always were”. She  thinks he will be a good mayor: “He knows all the nooks and crannies.” Are you going to vote for him? “I think I’ll have to. Good luck!” He replies: “Love you, Mates”.

Now Father Power asks: “What are you hoping for?” “To lose gloriously,” Fox replies, and this is the most interesting thing he says all day. He told The Times he was quite a self-destructive actor. Perhaps he is quite a self-destructive politician. “Say a prayer for the campaign,” says the campaign manager, who might agree. I think he means it.

Now Fox has seen Matron, he is more relaxed. We attempt a semi-formal interview, which is not easy with a man who is vicious on Twitter and polite in life, and whose followers gabble around him. Between these, I cannot fix him.

He says he was hounded out of acting and, because he is a free speech absolutist, he cannot mind: “People are free to do what they want to do,” he says. “I have to stand up for their right to say what they want to say. I’m sad that we live in a culture where those sorts of things happen [but] I was surprised. I thought you could accuse me of quite a lot of things — being naive or sensitive or whatever — but I was blown away by that the way it was turned into a race issue. There have,” he adds, “been many people who have tried to destroy me since. But I feel pretty good.”

He says he is glad he left drama: “I can’t fake emotion. If you play a part of a crazed lunatic, you become a crazed lunatic, so it affects the way that you think.”

He insists politics is “much more creative than show business, because you can actually do things and say, ‘look here’s a problem, shall we change it so that our children don’t hate each other for no reason?’” This is frustrating because he too enables hatred. He calls his enemies “race baiters” but what is he? A typical stump speech is: “I want to reclaim your freedom to speak. To cherish your history rather than rewrite it. And to teach our children to be confident, not ashamed of who they are and where they come from.”

He has some good instincts — he complains that the Labour Party doesn’t speak enough about class and that the Conservative Party is barely Conservative. Both are true, but he is dominated by his hatred for the “the nasty religion” he calls “wokeness”. “Due to cancel culture and lack of freedom of speech, half of the debate has been removed,” he says, but his emphasis on this small minority removes the rest of the debate, even if they did chase him out of drama.

It was a strangely depressing day, if you are not his enemy; if you liked Lewis. He is childlike, dissatisfied and vulnerable: his campaign is amateurish; he will fail.

The first to fall is laughter.

This article has been amended. Originally the statement incorrectly attributed to Mr Fox on Twitter was “White Lives Matter”. We are happy to correct this to “All Lives Matter”.

Instead, the man gazing out is Brian Rose.

Rose, 49, would certainly make an unusual boss at City Hall. He is, after all, a former Wall Street stockbroker who has spent the past year hosting Covid-19 conspiracy grifters on his YouTube channel and website. He is also Britain’s first post-truth political candidate.

In Rose’s self-created fantasy world, his campaign is proving a roaring success: he is running in second place to be Mayor, he has the “largest outdoor campaign in British political history” and his raft of glossy films calling out Mayor Khan have racked up millions of views.

Yet in the consensus-based reality occupied by the rest of us, this version of Brian Rose doesn’t really exist. Why? Because all his metrics of success have been systematically distorted — and in the one that really matters, the polling for London mayor, he doesn’t even register, not even breaking 1%.

So how has Rose managed to craft such a fabricated narrative of success? The answer, I suspect, can be traced back to the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, when San Diego-born Rose first made a name for himself after hosting the conspiracy theorist David Icke — most famous for claiming that world is controlled by a secret lizard Illuminati — on his show “London Real”.

In the frantic early days of the pandemic, the interview hit a nerve and went viral. Unchallenged by Rose, Icke spun a grand narrative, that the “Covid pandemic” was fake, was really caused by 5G and  was a cover for a murderous global cult who were determined to create a fascist state. He said that 5G was designed to cause a mass cull, and that if humanity didn’t “get off its knees” then “human life as we know it is over”.

Suggested reading

How paranoia drives politics

By Daniel Kalder

In an environment where 5G masts were already being destroyed, and engineers threatened, YouTube took the video down. All of which allowed Rose, never one to miss an opportunity, to turn himself into a free speech martyr; a victim of Big Tech censorship. Whether or not he knew it at the time, his Mayoral campaign had just begun.

In the following days, Rose went into overdrive, claiming that he had been censored by Big Tech and that he was determined to fight back. He launched a crowdfunder for what he called a “Digital Freedom Platform” to host another interview with Icke. It would, he said, be “of the people, by the people and for the people”. More importantly, it would be fully independent of London Real.

What he didn’t say, however, was that it would also be fully owned by Longstem Ltd, the company that owns London Real and has one shareholder: a Mr Brian Rose.

Still, in the early days of the pandemic the crowdfunder hit a nerve among those frustrated with Big Tech’s heavy-handed attempts at censorship. Rose hit the initial $100,000 target in less than a day — so, over the course of a few days, he added new features to the crowdfunding campaign to justify increasing the target, including unspecified “blockchain technology” for $200,000, and a promise to take YouTube and other tech companies to court for another $200,000. In the end, the crowdfunder maxed out at over a million dollars.

But it was unclear from the start what the point of the platform was, or even whether it was necessary. Several tech commentators have noted that he could have used any number of free video services, such as Bitchute, to host the videos, if YouTube took them down. Needless to say there have been no court cases brought against the big tech platforms — though Mr Rose’s spokesman assures us that they “plan to proceed” — or any introduction of “blockchain technology”. Instead, he seems to have dedicated all his energies to his Digital Freedom Platform, and hosted a slew of interviews with other controversial conspiracy figures, from Infowars‘s Alex Jones to anti-vaccine activists Judy Mikovits and Robert Kennedy Jr.

Suggested reading

Whose Great Reset is it anyway?

By Gavin Haynes

In fact, at the time, the only tangible development was the sacking of nearly all of London Real’s video production staff, and the hiring of political advisors for his mayoral bid. Today, the homepage for the “Digital Freedom Platform” takes you through to a campaign site of “Brian For Mayor”. When I pointed this out to Rose’s campaign, his spokesman said that the Digital Freedom Platform “is in the process of being set up as an entirely separate commercial entity”. He also emphasised that none of the money raised through the “Digital Freedom Platform” fundraiser has been used to fund this mayoral bid.

After raising $1m, Rose was flying high, but then he managed to push his luck just a little too far. Shortly after the crowdfunder was completed, he announced that he needed to raise running costs for the platform to $250,000 per month. Within hours, the penny dropped for his supporters; the comment threads under his video turned into a bear-pit. Overnight, he became an online pariah, and finally got the media attention he craved — but not the headline he wanted: “The YouTuber Accused of Using Coronavirus to Scam His Followers”.

And yet in many ways, Rose’s fall from grace was a long time coming. Before he set up his Digital Freedom Platform, the main source of income for London Real was their expensive online courses. Indeed, at one point these courses were the business’s main source of income; eight-week courses titled “Business Accelerator” or “Podcast Yourself” were, for example, on offer for $3,000, while those who wanted to join his exclusive “Inner Circle” – for personal mentoring – could do so by coughing up $15,000.

Predictably, many of Rose’s “customers” felt they had been scammed: the website Scamguard has 28 scathing reviews of the courses, and a Google search for reviews shows up multiple unhappy customers. A Facebook group set up to advise unhappy customers on how to get their money back has nearly 300 members. In fact, many of those who signed up for London Real’s courses managed to get their money back from credit card companies, after they were able to prove that the courses were such poor quality that they were covered under the credit card company’s guarantee against mis-selling.

Suggested reading

Whose weird world are we living in?

By Mary Harrington

The $15,000 “Inner Circle” fared even worse. A few months ago, a letter signed by nearly every single person from the “Inner Circle” was sent to Rose, asking for their money back and complaining about the lack of value from the course. One of the signatories told me: “We had no mentorship whatsoever, it was a joke, we would have three minutes with him every 15 days and he would just talk about himself. The whole course rebelled against him.” When they eventually complained, the member said, Rose lectured them about how lucky they were to speak to him, as “people queue just to shake my hand”.

“Like many businesses, we receive occasional complaints,” Rose’s spokesman admitted. But, he said, “the reality is that this is from a handful of people amongst the thousands of satisfied graduates of our academy”.

It’s a bold claim in the face of such criticism, yet such self-confidence informs much of Rose’s myth-making today. From the start of Rose’s mayoral bid, he has claimed to be the “second ranked candidate” in the mayoral race, because he was second favourite at the bookmakers. At one point, before any polling data was collected to burst Rose’s bubble, he was rated at only 3-1 to beat Sadiq Khan.

How did he achieve this? Well, a number of political pundits have questioned whether Rose may have bet heavily on himself to distort the odds. In a flattering interview with the Times last month, he confirmed that he has bet on himself. His spokesman told me: “Mr Rose has staked a small amount on himself in the mayoral race, which wouldn’t be enough to influence even a single bookmaker’s odd”. As it stands, he is still around 20-1 at many bookmakers, ahead of the Conservative Candidate Shaun Bailey.

One suspects, however, that those odds remain extremely generous. On the face of it, if you visit the London Real YouTube page, it looks like Rose’s recent films, including one criticising Sadiq Khan, are receiving hundreds of thousands of views. Yet many of these videos show the tell tale signs of being paid posts, and the vast majority of his films released in the last few weeks are getting around two or three thousand views, a massive drop off from the heights of his conspiracy content during the pandemic.

As for his claim that he has the “largest outdoor campaign in British political history”, this also doesn’t appear to tally with reality. The non-profit group “Reform Political Advertising” identified this as one of multiple “false statements of fact, or blatant misrepresentations” in his advertising, in a letter they sent to his campaign.

Typically undeterred, Rose has since tried to repeat the trick of the Digital Freedom Platform, and generate controversy by claiming to be victimised by powerful forces. For months, he has been one of the only candidates to be campaigning heavily in person under lockdown, releasing stylised videos of him without a mask and shaking hands and mingling with assorted Londoners.

When the inevitable happened and he was stopped and fined by police while campaigning in February, he attempted once again to turn himself into a martyr, releasing a video claiming that he was being targeted for political reasons. He was given an on-the-spot fine, and tried hard to spin up some notoriety firstly claiming falsely to have been arrested, and then also falsely that he now had a criminal record as a result of the fine.

When I asked Rose’s campaign about this, his spokesman said: “Mr Rose was referring to the fact that he would ultimately be arrested if he refused to comply with the terms of the FPN he received. As he has chosen not to comply with these terms, he anticipates that the next phase of the legal process will commence in due course.”

That, of course, remains to be seen. And in the meantime, faced with the increased scrutiny that comes with any political campaign, his fantasy world could soon be about to come crumbling down. Only a couple of days ago, for example. Dorian Yates, a regular London Real guest, pulled out of an interview and released a statement claiming that Rose had refused to allow him to question on-air what had happened to the money donated to the Digital Freedom Platform.

Suggested reading

Who are you calling gullible?

By Timandra Harkness

Rose is yet to respond to Yates’s claim, instead preferring to release films of him shadow-boxing the camera. But in truth, it is hard to see where he goes from here. The pivot from his glossy interviews via his Digital Freedom Platform to his mayoral bid has alienated his online fanbase, while more and more of his course “customers” are starting to speak out. He now has Facebook groups and Reddit threads dedicated to calling him out and picking apart his claims.

Indeed, once London’s voters deliver their verdict, it is hard to see where Brian goes next. After all, the actual votes counted come May 6th are a somewhat purer metric of popularity. And so far London seems immune to Brian’s reality distortion field.

The first is Bendor Grosvenor, who presents art history programmes on the BBC. He used to be included in the hit BBC1 series Fake or Fortune, as number two to the art dealer Philip Mould, but was regrettably dumped from it in the more recent version. He has since been moved to a more recherché programme on BBC4 called Britain’s Lost Masterpieces, correcting the misattribution of 17^th and 18^th century portraits languishing in public collections.

It’s lovely stuff. Bendor is inescapably patrician — he brings to mind the parson in a Jane Austen novel, missing only the britches — so the BBC has paired him with a lady called Emma Dabiri, a model turned visual sociology researcher at SOAS with a luscious Ulster accent and a vibrant wardrobe. Their genial non-chemistry only adds to the programme’s charms.

Bendor can walk past a portrait of an aristocrat, of the kind that lines every National Trust property in the land, and instead of seeing just another bloke with a big nose, he can identify the artist, the context, the whole long lost language of gesture and pose. To see his excitement as damaged paintings are restored to life, and his appreciation of every brushstroke, is an inspiration.

More from this author

The coming constitutional battle royal

By Freddie Sayers

Another hero is Jonathan Foyle, an expert on Tudor architecture and furniture. His is a less outlandishly period presence, but he more than compensates with deep knowledge and surprising superpowers including climbing buildings and stunning architectural drawing (to watch him recreate the lost Nonsuch Palace by hand in the recent Henry’s Lost Palaces was a particular joy). Mr Foyle’s contribution to the rediscovery of Henry VII’s marriage bed has earned him an unassailable halo in Tudor enthusiast circles.

Between them, Grosvenor and Foyle offer a tiny bat’s squeak of hope in the vast cultural void. Here is connoisseurship of the highest order, a lifeline connection to the past, and a rejoinder to today’s deadening relativism with a powerful reminder that some things really are better than others, and there are still people around who can appreciate them. Bravo BBC!

And then… you follow them on Twitter.

Suggested reading

On Twitter, I too become an arse

By Giles Fraser

Why oh why, throughout the long and painful Brexit years, did these two art experts take it upon themselves to be so loud and confident at the most aggravating end of Remainer obsession? How can it be that two such fine minds, one of whom (Grosvenor) actually has a PhD in History and even some work experience in politics, be so subtle and enlightening in the realm of art and so pat and incurious in a political context?

If I were their brand advisor I would have delicately pointed out that, in the niche fanbase of English renaissance art, there might well be as many Brexiteers as Remainers, so there’s an obvious career disadvantage in getting so ‘stuck in’.

But more than that I would try to persuade them that some of the same élan that they respond to so powerfully in Henry VIII’s palaces, or a perfect van Dyck portrait, was involved in the Brexit movement: cherishing the particular over the generic, a need for a more stirring purpose than only economic pragmatism and a pushback against the dullness of globalised modernity. (And this comes from a Remain voter, but one who has since been trying to understand rather than demonise.)

One of the things I was most looking forward to about the end of the main phase of the Brexit argument was that these important minds could go back to their illuminating expert subjects — but no! Bendor Grosvenor, who has moved to Scotland, has started campaigning for the SNP to fight the Tories’ “hard Brexit” deal, including campaign videos and a New Year’s Day column in The Times.

The SNP! Does he think a post-independence Scotland will be prioritising investment in museums? Or that the inconvenience of Brexit would even compare to the inconvenience and damage of a hard border between Scotland and England?

Suggested reading

Does Scotland resent the Royals?

By Euan McColm

As for Mr Foyle, on the day after the killing of Quasem Soleimani, when the Iranian streets were being flooded with protestors (with disastrous effects and more than fifty dead), he gave us this gem:

Just saying. pic.twitter.com/Q6nnpLRAWn

— Dr Jonathan Foyle  (@JonathanFoyle) January 5, 2020

What wisdom does this comparison, between Donald Trump’s apparently sparsely populated inauguration and the funeral of a known killer and sponsor of political instability across the Middle East, give to the world? Are we to conclude that Soleimani had more supporters, and was therefore the better guy? The crowds are even bigger for the Ayatollah himself — does that mean he wins this competition? Jonathan, I could watch you talk about Tudor buildings for the rest of eternity but, please, make this stop.

I suspect that for lifelong fans of Lewis, the sudden elevation of actor Laurence Fox to anti-PC badboy since his appearance on last week’s Question Time is equally distressing. Gone is the fresh face of Lewis’s loyal assistant Hathaway, and the cosy parochialism of Oxford; a few elections later, the new Laurence Fox has become very cross and transformed into someone you might feel a little uneasy about if stuck in a tube carriage with late at night.

Suggested reading

How I was cancelled by Doctor Who

By Gareth Roberts

I share much of Fox’s frustration at the overreach of identity politics, but I also suspect that the angry man routine won’t convert anyone; it will only rouse the rabble who already agree with him, and put off more cautious listeners from the cause.

Fox’s now famous row with Shami Chakrabarti on Question Time was about the Labour leadership — that it shouldn’t matter what gender the candidates are, it should be about their policies and capabilities. So far so good, but his argument would have been rather stronger if he had mentioned a single one of Keir Starmer’s policies or capabilities as his reason for supporting him. Instead, as he told Brendan O’Neill the next day, he supports Keir Starmer “only because I think he is the one that can go up against Boris — I think they’re both a bit dick swinging and, you know, that’s how it works.”

Lozza. If you’re going to offer yourself as more high-minded than the gender-obsessed wokerati, it’s probably best not to offer “dick swinging” as the main attribute you look for in a potential leader. I know what you’re trying to say, and I probably agree with it, but you’re not making things better here.

Cultural figures are people too, and, in the virtuous parlance of modern celebrity, why should they not ‘use their platform to promote causes they care about’? Well, perhaps because, whether you agree with them or not, they tend only to make things worse.

Watching highbrow brains drop all nuance and get down with political Twitter is particularly painful, but even actors have something precious to protect. Earlier in the same interview, Laurence Fox asked, “What’s the point of an actor?” and answered his own question: “Essentially the only job of an actor is to take a writer’s words and give them life. That’s your only job.” Couldn’t have said it better myself.