Ex PM: Sacks’ wisdom is still relevant

SACHA Baron Cohen has been nominated for an Oscar for his supporting role as flower power activist Abbie Hoffman in The Trial of the Chicago 7. The 49-year-old British actor stars alongside Joseph Gordon-Levitt in the courtroom drama directed by West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin. The film has been nominated across five categories, including for best picture. Other notable nominations include those for Mr Baron Cohen’s Borat Subsequent Moviefilm , which received multiple nods, and Mank, a biographical drama about Jewish Citizen Kane screenwriter Herman J Mankiewicz.

VTHE TEACHINGS of Lord Sacks have “enduring relevance” for dealing with a post-Covid world, former Prime Minister Gordon Brown said on Sunday.

Paying tribute to the late Emeritus Chief Rabbi, who died in November, in a discussion of freedom at the London School of Jewish Studies’ Super Seder Day, Mr Brown said: “Every day I still think of what we have lost.”

He explained that when the financial crisis hit in 2008, “it was to Jonathan that many of us turned to remind people of what too many had forgotten; that markets need morals.

“Markets may be value-free but they can never be values-free.”

He added: “And I recall too of him warning us of the dangers of an overmaterialist, consumer culture which neglected the bonds of family and community and of an obsession with buying goods we did not need with money we did not have in the breathless pursuit of a happiness that could not last.”

Mr Brown was taking part in a digital panel with the philanthropist Stuart Roden and Lord Sacks’s daughter, Gila, who is director of public health reform at the Department for Health and Social Care.

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