![]() ![]() “They were proper globetrotters,” says Frances Petterson, a partner at Newton Kearns law firm who worked closely with Rae for over a decade. Haworth and Rae, unsurprisingly, loved to travel and had spent much of their retirement criss-crossing the world and eschewing sun loungers for exploratory trips to China, Borneo, South America and India. “It’s unbelievable if you really think about it – one died in the very far north and one in the very far south, and both were taken ill at sea.” “Maggie wasn’t ill and so the coincidence was just too strange for me to process,” says Hodge. So when details of Rae’s death emerged last week, Labour grandees were not only saddened by the unexpected news, but shocked by the tragic parallels between the last few days in the lives of this husband and wife team who had meant so much to them. In his diaries, Alastair Campbell, who attended the event with his wife Fiona, revealed that Diana had told Blair over supper that she would like to help him if she could. The two remained very close and Rae was responsible for introducing Diana to the Blairs when she and Haworth hosted a dinner party in their Hackney home in January 1997. Rae had first become involved with Labour politics when she lived in east London with her flatmate, Cherie Booth. But she and Haworth, who served as secretary for the Labour party for over a decade and was later appointed a life peer, were also key supporters of Tony Blair and – despite being famously unpretentious themselves – had contacts in that period that were almost unparalleled. Rae had become a well-known figure in Britain in the 1990s after acting as the divorce lawyer for Diana, Princess of Wales. ![]() So I just kept assuming they had made a mistake and meant he had died on a cruise, not her.” Because he had died in Reykjavik, and because it is so difficult to bring bodies back, we couldn’t have a funeral, so we decided to focus on a memorial service, which was happening in early December once Maggie was home. “Her lawyers rang my office because I was organising Alan’s memorial. “I was incredulous when I heard,” says Labour MP Dame Margaret Hodge, a close friend of the couple’s. Preston, who had been a friend of hers for almost half a century, told their mutual friend Alastair Campbell that both on the cruise ship and at the hospital, Rae had nothing but good things to say about the kindness and skill of the doctors and nurses she encountered.Īnd yet the coincidence remains extraordinary. She died shortly afterwards at the age of 74. Flying south in early November with her close friend Roz Preston, who was also a widow, she boarded a similar-sized cruise ship – no doubt carrying a bag filled with the same all-weather gear she had used back in August.ĭays later, they docked at King Edward VII hospital in Port Stanley on the Falkland Islands because Rae was feeling very unwell. ![]() The ship’s doctor found a helicopter to fly him to hospital in Iceland, but even under specialist care, Haworth didn’t recover and in his final hours made his wife (renowned divorce lawyer Maggie Rae) promise that she would still go on their planned cruise to the Antarctic later that year.įor weeks, Rae negotiated ways to repatriate her husband’s body back to Britain from Reykjavik, but once the immediate administration was over, she decided that she would keep her word and once again travel around an untouched polar wilderness by boat. After they had crossed into the Arctic circle and sailed along the coast of Greenland during that brief summer window when the world’s northernmost land mass is easily accessible by boat, Lord Alan Haworth, 75, was suddenly taken ill. As a result, in social media and marketing, authentic has become the gold standard for building trust - andĪuthenticity, ironically, has become a performance.First, he died. “The line between ‘real’ and ‘fake’ has become increasingly blurred. “The rise of AI helped drive interest in the word,” said Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster’s editor at large, in a statement. The dictionary says that interest in AI, as well as “celebrity culture, identity, and social media” drove readers to the word. Amid a boom in generative artificial intelligence technology and continued interest in how people present themselves on social media, Merriam-Webster says that “authentic” has been named its 2023 word of the year.
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