The prescient iconoclast

MEGHNAD Desai is a polymath of the social sciences. He has been a professor at the London School of Economics. He has also been a politician, affiliated to Britain's Labour party and a member of the UK House of Lords since 1991. He has published widely on a variety of topics, ranging from Marxian economics to Islamic ideology to Indian history. He has also written a novel and a biography, and is a prolific newspaper columnist. He is a natural iconoclast, sceptical of received wisdom, unafraid to express views that startle and shock.

Currently, Prof Desai is the chairman of the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum, which describes itself as "an independent think tank for central banking, economic policy and public investment". An informal forum for central bankers - the only one of its kind in the world - it is headquartered in London and has an office in Singapore.

One of the things Prof Desai has become famous for is his political prescience - his uncanny ability to predict political events in defiance of popular and expert opinion. He famously predicted that Donald Trump would win the 2016 US election long before it happened. He predicted the British electorate would vote for "Brexit". In 2012, a full two years before he was elected and was not a front-runner, he forecast that Narendra Modi would become India's prime minister. In our interview, which was conducted just before the UK election of June 2017, he predicted that British Prime Minister Theresa May would do badly and could lose her parliamentary majority.