The slow queen

Posted: July 19, 2014 at 5:46 am


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"I've failed a lot on the way": Arianna Huffington. Photo: Kim Badawi/Contour By Getty Images

Arianna Huffington, founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post website, is late for our lunch date at an exclusive London hotel, the Chiltern Firehouse.

Huffington, the former spouse of a Ronald Reagan-era Republican, was once a leftish writer, then a right-wing commentator, then a supporter of the Democratic Party. She now propagates "mindfulness", and "the third metric" of success, "well-being, wisdom, wonder and giving". (The first two metrics, if you didn't know, are money and power.)

But nobody would much care if Huffington believed Barack Obama was a drop bear or wombats built the pyramids, if she hadn't figured out how to make money online from something that looks a lot like a newspaper. Huffington founded The Huffington Post in 2005, and in 2011 she sold it for $US315 million to media corporation AOL, although she remains its editor-in-chief. The website is a news aggregator - that is, it includes links to stories from around the internet, assembled under Huffington headlines with a liberal spin. But it's also a source of original journalism, such as its 2012 Pulitzer Prize-winning series about the lives of severely disabled war veterans, and a platform for a vast number of non-conservative bloggers.

A move to mindfulness: Huffington in 2009, two years after she collapsed from exhaustion. Photo: Michele Asselin/Contour by Getty

So Arianna Huffington is very rich - actually, she was very rich even before she sold the website - and I'm waiting for her in a fabulously expensive pub where Bill Clinton, David Beckham, David Cameron, Kevin Spacey, Chris Martin and Lindsay Lohan have all been seen, possibly in the very spot where I'm sitting, but probably in another bit.

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I'm receiving texts from John from the London HuffPost (as we insiders call it) saying Huffington's stuck in traffic, and suggesting I order something to eat from the bar. A barman who looks like Ricky Martin tells me there is no bar menu, but I can get food on Huffington's room-service account. I choose a chicken sandwich, excited by the idea it is the most exclusive chicken sandwich in London. I will bite into it and know what it is like to be rich. This is, I admit, a high expectation to pin on a chicken sandwich.

The sandwich arrives before Huffington. It is brought to my table by a waiter who also looks like Ricky Martin. The filling is trapped inside a hopelessly unfashionable focaccia (What's up, rich people?Never heard of sourdough?) and has that faintly fishy hint of reheated poultry. For some reason, this makes me very happy.

Chill seeker: Arianna Huffington. Photo: Jeff Lipsky/CPi-Syndication.com/Headpress

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The slow queen

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July 19th, 2014 at 5:46 am

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