Hello, this is the Webbox Podcast, I'm Matt Cholli, coming up on today's episode,

Dave Margaret Beckett. She's announced she's going to quit Parliament at the next election.

She's been in politics for half a century. She's served in the government of Wilson and Callahan,

then of Blair and Brown. She's been there and done that and seen it all through a really

fascinating chat coming up with her on the podcast. Before, as ever, we kick off with our

columnist panel and on Thursday, it is of course night at the Marriott, India night and James Marriott.

Well, let's talk about your column in the Times today, James. Fading to make a decision is

no failure at all. What do you make as normally? People not making decisions are quite annoying.

Well, I mean, yeah, I suppose I was going for a bit of a contrarian stance on this. Surely not.

But I saw last week this film the worst, the worst person in the world, which I thought was

really good and was about a woman in her sort of late 20s, turning 30, who sort of fails to make

her mind of butt life. I think she starts out as a medical student, then she switches psychology,

then she decides that she's a visual person and becomes a photographer. She thinks she might be a

journalist and I just thought, I don't know, I was sort of thinking I'm not sure there's anything

necessarily terribly wrong with that and being super intensely focused on one particular career,

one particular path in life, which I think it kind of takes to be successful in the modern world.

I'm not sure that's necessarily miles better than not knowing what you're doing, being uncertain

about stuff, not necessarily feeling like you have a huge kind of passion or you're filled with

focus or drive, which I think sort of everyone's required to have for jobs that are often sort of

quite quite sort of, not necessarily the most exciting jobs in the world. I always think about

these quotes, people always got these quotes by Gandhi or Martin Luther King about like never giving

up and always conquering failure, which I was sort of thinking is all very well if you are

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