I’ve been sacked more times than I can exactly remember. It teaches you nothing

The Oldie magazine — of which, until otherwise advised, I appear to be the editor — runs an occasional article about someone’s experience of being sacked. When I was young, this used to carry something of a stigma: other people found it hard to believe that you could be sacked without having somehow deserved it. But since then so many admirable people have lost their jobs for no good reason that nobody thinks any the worse of them for it. And now we are told by Anna Wintour, the editor of American Vogue and queen of the fashion world for 27 years, that to be sacked is actually a good thing. ‘I think everyone should be sacked at least once,’ she told Alastair Campbell in an interview for his new book Winners: And How They Succeed. ‘It forces you to look at yourself.’

It was in 1976, when she was still in her twenties, that Wintour underwent her one and only sacking.