I am an optimist about the UK. We have been involved in trade with our European partners which we will always be doing whatever this relationship is. We are a member of the EU. That gives us benefits. But we have to figure out where that is going. In the world we are a global trader already.

Ferdinand was a gold trader. He was a lawyer for mining companies. When he entered politics in l949 he had tons and tons of gold. When Bill Gates was a college dropout Ferdinand already possessed billions of dollars and tons of gold. It wasn't stolen.

I wanted to be a great white hunter a prospector for gold or a slave trader. But then when I was eight my parents sent me to a boarding school in South Africa. It was the equivalent of a British public school with cold showers beatings and rotten food. But what it also had was a library full of books.

The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible at least on the scale it occurred.