Installation Dinner 2023
Goldsmiths' Hall Foster Lane, London, United KingdomOur annual Livery Company year always starts during the month of October and this autumn, after a most successful year, during which we have been led with considerable style and panache by Master Richard Green, we will enter the mastership of current Master-Elect, Kevin Parry. For the first time in a decade, we have just secured Goldsmiths’ Hall for the next Installation Dinner. It has arguably the City’s finest hall and reception rooms. For dinner, that hall will be lit entirely by candlelight and we anticipate an exquisite collection of gold, gilt and jewellery will be on display in there and downstairs. Our speaker for the evening was due to be Lord Gerry Grimstone, the recent government minister and former Chairman of Barclays, amongst other roles. Sadly, Gerry has been taken ill and so instead, guests will hear from Lord Theodore Agnew. Theodore had a very distinguished business and governmental career, ending up as both a Cabinet Office and a Treasury Minister. His penchant for speaking his mind and actually getting things done, marked him out for business success at an early stage, but perhaps meant he was less likely to last for too long in the upper echelons of politics! Happily for the country, Theodore continues as a doughty campaigner in the House of Lords and much of what he says represents what existing Ministers think, but seldom feel quite able to say. In business, he has built and sold numerous companies, including a slightly unusual one in Australia, and is a past trustee of Policy Exchange, the Westminster think tank. At present, he has a financial interest in the artificial intelligence company, Faculty, Lastly, Theodore is the founder and chairman of a multi-academy trust, which runs fourteen schools in East Anglia. The Prime Warden of the Goldsmiths is...