Born Yesterday (8 page)

In early June, shortly after the McCanns had their photo of Madeleine blessed by the Pope at a public audience in St Peter’s Square, Tony Blair had had a private audience with Benedict XVI as part of his ‘European farewell tour’. It was rumoured then that he had been received into the Church during his visit to the Vatican. That wasn’t true. But by September and Cherie’s viewing of the house on Cheyne Walk, Blair was taking instruction – ‘formal doctrinal and spiritual preparation for his reception into full communion’ is how it would be described in the official confirmation of his conversion to Catholicism, when it came just before Christmas – from Msgr Mark O’Toole, private secretary to Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor.

Boris is a dachshund whose belly is about two inches off the floor. He’s a miniature rough-haired. He often stops to chat to Boris’s owner while both their dogs take it in turns to mark the gatepost of the Studzinki house. This usually happens around midnight, about the time the night buses are starting to run.

Boris is owned by a short, stout young woman with a distracted, eccentric Hattie Jacques sort of personality; scattiness with hints of depth. She hadn’t said she was an actress (he hadn’t said he was a writer) and so he didn’t know what she did until, after he had already known her for two years, he turned on the television and was sure he had spotted her buried in the body of somebody who looked very like Ann Widdecombe and nothing like herself.

The programme was
The Thick of It
, a satire on the Blair government (‘a foul-mouthed piss-take of Britain’s politics of panic’, in the words of one reviewer), and she was playing one of the central figures, some sort of flak-catcher or spin-doctor, disguised by a blonde wig and a nubby business suit and without the glasses she normally wore.

The setting for the series is the fictitious Department of Social Affairs and Citizenship (DoSAC). The main characters are a pathologically aggressive and domineering Number 10 enforcer, obviously based on Alastair Campbell; and ‘Hugh Abbott’, a blundering minister heading the department, who is continually trying to do his job under the jaundiced eye of the abusive spin-doctor-in-chief. But by the time he caught up with the programme, the minister had been written out because the actor playing him, Chris Langham, was due to be tried on charges of indecent assault and downloading indecent images of children. At his trial in August the jury were told that the video clips, which ranged in length from three seconds to six minutes, included the torture and rape of a teenage girl, the sexual abuse of a seven-year-old and an assault on a bound-and-gagged child of about twelve.

Langham was represented by the ‘celebrity lawyer’ Angus McBride of Kingsley Napley and in September was sentenced to ten months in prison (reduced to six on appeal). Less than a fortnight later, McBride and his partner in the firm, Michael Caplan, QC, were being retained by Kate and Gerry McCann who had said they were committed to raising public awareness of child torture and
abuse and the international trafficking of children.

While working, successfully, to prevent General Pinochet’s extradition to Spain to face torture charges, Michael Caplan’s only comment on defending a man accused of such acts was: ‘I have a duty to a client, just as a surgeon does to a patient’.

Mr Studzinki’s rock-star guests don’t have to travel far to his networking salons at his house. Both Bryan Ferry and Eric Clapton live only a street away, close neighbours of Kate Middleton.

Bryan Adams lives in a fag-ash and sticky-carpet pub he used to use, modernised and minimalised now, presenting a blank face to the world, fifty yards further along the Embankment. In the early days, the seventy million who clicked onto findmadeleine.com in the first month saw the Madeleine eye logo, the defect in the right eye incorporated into the two O’s of ‘Look’ in the slogan ‘Looking for Madeleine’ and heard Bryan Adams singing ‘Look into my eyes/ You will see what you mean to me …’, the first lines of his multi-platinum, chart-topping single ‘(Everything I Do) I Do It for You’. They had asked and he had agreed that the McCanns could use it as the soundtrack to the official website dedicated to collecting donations from the public and to bringing home the little girl.

The start of the summer saw a new rock-star arrival – or, rather, the return of one who had done more than most to establish Chelsea’s raffish reputation in the Sixties. Mick
Jagger had been living with Marianne Faithfull in a house on Cheyne Walk when he was arrested with Keith Richard and the art dealer Robert Fraser and tried for possessing heroin (in Fraser’s case) and marijuana. Now, forty years later, he was back, as Mr Studzinski’s next-door-neighbour-but-one, and he immediately ruffled feathers with a planning application to cut down a long-established set of magnolia trees in the back garden of the £10 million property he was about to begin renovating. The idea was to house a swimming pool in a building resembling a Georgian orangery, its roof supported by neoclassical pillars decorated with Roman-style engravings, and the trees would have to go.

He learned all this when the buzzer went one afternoon and it was a photographer from a national paper wanting access to the roof. He wanted to get onto the roof to train a lens on Jagger’s back garden, zoom in on the offending trees, fire off a few shots. Millionaire rock giant versus the little people. Kind of thing.

‘Studz’ has a chapel for the sake of his spiritual well-being. He craned in a stand of trees. Jagger wants a pool to stay in shape. He wants to fell the magnolias. Their pastoral welfare.

Mr Studzinski has a private chapel for daily prayer and meditation, a refuge from the day-today of cutting deals. He has a hotline to Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, the leader of Catholics in England and Wales. He has found solace in his Catholic faith.

In the immediate aftermath of Madeleine’s disappearance, Kate and Gerry found sanctuary in the pretty little Nossa Senhora da Luz church at the edge of the sea. The priest gave them a key to the church to allow them to be able to go there at any time of the night or day and be alone with their thoughts. They felt cosseted, Gerry said. It was about challenging the negatives, banishing the blackest and darkest thoughts. They were surrounded by the Ambassador, the consul, PR, crisis management, journalists, the police. The church was a refuge; a place to get away, to be with Madeleine again, to escape. The priest kept a flickering image of Madeleine thrown from a projector onto a wall, a beautiful gesture. Late at night, and in the middle of the night, when they sometimes went, waves crashed on the beach. Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor’s Westminster office arranged for them to travel to see the Pope.

Kate said: ‘I wish I could roll back time and go back to the day before Madeleine was abducted. I would slow down time. I would get a really good look around and have a really good think. And I’d think: Where are you? Who are you? Who is secretly watching my family? Because someone was watching my family very, very carefully. And taking notes.’

The collective memory of any recent generation, wrote Howard Singerman, has now become the individual memory of each of its members, for the things that carry the memory are marked not by the privacy, the specificity
and insignificance of Proust’s madeleine, but precisely by their publicness and their claim to significance.

The generalised sense of loss that pervaded the summer.

‘Praia’ meaning ‘beach’. ‘Luz’ meaning ‘light’.

Wishing it all undone, healed again.

Gordon and Tony. Tony and Peter. Gordon and Charlie. Ally and Tony. Peter and Gordon. Charlie and Ed. The PM and David B. Gordon and Ed. Ed hates Tony. Tony complains that his treatment by Ed with Gordon’s smirking connivance is like being an abused and bullied wife.

When the Kennedy court historian Arthur M. Schlesinger’s
Diaries
were published in the United States in the summer, eyebrows were raised at a quote from Henry Kissinger about Richard Nixon: ‘He was unquestionably a weird president, but he was not a weak president. But everything was weird in that slightly homosexual, embattled atmosphere of the White House.’

What could Kissinger have been driving at, commentators wondered? What did he mean?

The millions of devoted fans of
Little Britain
already had a clue. One of the most popular of the cast of regular characters in the BBC comedy was Sebastian, a predatory, protective, queeny gay aide to a good-looking young prime minister who bore a strong resemblance to Tony Blair.

Peter Mandelson was the only ‘out’ homosexual at the heart of the New Labour project. (‘I know he’s … that way,’ Neil Kinnock said to Roy Hattersley at the conclusion of the 1985 interview that saw Mandelson appointed as Labour’s director of communications, ‘but why does he have to flaunt it?’) But there was an unmistakeable homoerotic inflection to many of the key relationships which defined the Blair governments.

A number of critics identified this as one of the most surprising revelations to emerge from Alastair Campbell’s ‘Diaries’. ‘It’s not a gay thing exactly, but it’s not the opposite of a gay thing,’ John Lanchester wrote in August in his review of the
The Blair Years
in the
London Review of
Books
. The book was ‘full of dark-haired men shouting at each other … bursting into tears, having make-up heart-to-hearts, saying bitchy things about each other behind each other’s backs … The cover picture is part of this, [Blair] looking up at [Campbell] with an expression of submissive yearning that verges on the pornographic.’

Another reviewer wrote teasingly about what she interpreted as Campbell’s ‘crush’ on Bill Clinton. ‘If
Brokeback
Mountain
was set in Westminster and starred Rock Hudson and Judy Garland,’ wrote Nirpal Dhaliwal of the
The Blair Years
in the London
Evening Standard
, ‘it still wouldn’t be gayer than this.’

It had long been a convention among political correspondents to describe the heterosexual bond between Gordon Brown and Tony Blair as a ‘marriage’. ‘The intimate story of a political marriage’ was the subtitle of James
Naughtie’s book
The Rivals
. The section headings of the crucial chapter devoted to Gordon Brown in Anthony Seldon’s biography of Blair are titled, with a nod towards the true-romance magazines, ‘Perfect Union’, ‘Seven-Year Itch’, ‘Living Apart’, ‘Marriage of Convenience’, ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’, and so on.

The relationship between the two men had to be described as a marriage, wrote Naughtie, because there was ‘no other way of explaining the deep mystery of how their moments of political intimacy are often disturbed by tensions and arguments that seem to well up from a history in the partnership that only the two of them can feel fully or understand’. Seldon chronicles ‘the exceptional regard they had for each other’, how they were variously described as ‘joined at the hip’ or ‘the brothers’. He writes about ‘the joy, laughter and indeed love in their relationship’ between 1983, when they both entered Parliament as young MPs, and 1990, when the balance within the relationship began to shift in Blair’s favour.

It became a commonplace during his decade as prime minister for people to remark on Blair’s acting skills and marvel at his ability to emerge from political and personal meltdowns weirdly unscathed. He appeared charming, relaxed, well-mannered, always smiling; he seemed gifted with an innate sense of knowing that it’s not what’s
there
that counts, it’s what’s projected. (What his mentor, Mandelson, famously referred to as ‘creating the truth’ and the former Labour chancellor Denis Healey publicly called ‘merde de boeuf – bullshit, bullshit and nothing
else’.) His chancellor, on the other hand – ‘a nail-biting, badly-dressed hermit’, as somebody once described him, ‘with the social skills of a whelk’ – had presentational difficulties.

‘He looks like somebody hung him in a cupboard overnight and he jumps out in the morning with his suit all bunched up and starts running around saying, “I want to be prime minister”.’ After celebrity-PM Tony, with the permatan and the TV smile, it had come to Brown to be the embodiment of piety, careerism and a darkling soul.

But the gods seemed to be with him when he took over from Blair at the end of June. The crises that piled up around Gordon Brown in his first weeks in office – the attempted terrorist attacks on London and Glagow, the summer floods in the midlands and the north, foot-and-mouth: fire, flood and pestilence, a marvellous start for a son of the manse, as a number of people pointed out – these gifts from the gods required him to be thunder-faced, decisive, dogged, statesmanlike. The one thing they didn’t require him to do was the thing he had always had a problem with: they didn’t require him to smile.

Watching Brown struggling to uncloud his countenance with a sunny smile – his former Cabinet colleague Robin Cook once described him as having a ‘face like a wet winter’s morning in Fife’ – became the recurring bad sight of the year; a car-crash moment waiting to happen at each and every photo-op.

A couple of months into his premiership, Brown and Ed Balls, his close political ally and newly appointed, still
learning-on-the-job Children’s Minister, visited a factory where neets and youths on asbos were being shown how to dismember a chicken. The camera pulled round behind the white-coated figure doing the dismembering, panned from the tallow yellow skin of the chicken along the butcher’s hairy arm to the faces of the bored and bolshy apprentices, before pulling slowly back to reveal the prime minister and his faithful Cabinet colleague grinning their grins of commitment, confidence and compassion. The report contained flash photography. Brown’s grin was fixed, as always, as a grimace; there was some gurning, a movement that suggested chewing, the clearing of a shred of tomato skin maybe from in front of his bottom teeth; a hint that if anything upset his rather delicately balanced equilibrium he could at any second and without warning revert to being Bad Gordon – the Gordon of kicking the furniture and control-freak tendencies; meanspirited, domineering; the Gordon of the shaking hand, the clouded mien, prone to sudden and terrible rages.

It was a terrible summer and a peculiar time. It was a time that found its symbol in the prime minister’s anxiety-shrouded, tortured, tombstone grin. It hurt to smile. He lost the sight of his left eye as the result of a school rugby accident: a bang on the head caused both retinas to become detached and one of the four operations he underwent meant that a smile no longer triggered the appropriate facial muscles. It pained him to smile. It was hard. It was painful to watch. But it was necessary if he was going to dispel his stubborn image of being grumpy, cold and
aloof (and stubborn). An analogue politician in a digital age. Old Gordon. The cracked countenance was meant to betoken a transformation. No longer damaged in some unspecified way; no longer ‘psychologically flawed’ as his many enemies, taking their lead from Alastair Campbell, had long spun against him. ‘Not flash, just Gordon.’

The task was to rebrand him as a politician. To reposition him in the market. To re-enchant the commodity by tapping into the same hankering for a grainy tangibility to the artefact that had seen the fetishisation of other antiquated analogue formats like vinyl and tape cassettes. Up-front depth in a world of fake surfaces. Urgent seriousness in frivolous times. The analogue and artisanal, wrote Simon Reynolds, are equated with a sort of spiritual integrity. Back to the future. Turning his pathologies into assets, his deficits into advantages. That had been the plan.

The smile was meant to be reassuring. He was a man with a reputation for reading spreadsheets, surveys of the immediate and long-term trends in small corporate manufacturing, IMF reports, for relaxation. Favourite author, Alan Greenspan, former head of the Federal Reserve Board: ‘I have always argued that an up-to-date set of the most detailed estimates for the latest available quarter is far more useful for forecasting accuracy than a more sophisticated model structure.’ Words to live by.

He needed to be warmed up. To smile is to be human. A sense of humour – he really needed to get one of those. The Gordon grin. It was supposed to offer warmth and
reassurance. But it repeatedly misfired. Not once, or sometimes, but all the time. ‘Liberty is the first and founding value of our country. Security is the first duty of our government.’ Paint-stripper grin. ‘A system of this kind seems to have the potential to close the aching gap between the potential benefits of transplant surgery in the UK and the limits imposed by our current system of consent.’ Stony gargoyle smile.

The separation between what he was saying and what his face was doing added up to a disturbing disjunction. The result was sinister. Pathological. It was something new and unwanted loosed to roam unchecked in the culture. Gerry started to think when he made his 9 p.m. check on the twins and Madeleine, her abductor must have already been in the room, lurking in the shadows behind the bedroom door, waiting, watching. A new sense of apprehension and unsettlement seeping through into everyday life. A smile like the brass plate on a coffin.
Wheeeere is he? I
love Tony Bair! … No, I don’t like Gordon Brown!

Norman Mailer remembered Richard Nixon as ‘a church usher, of the variety who would twist a boy’s ear after removing him from church’. And as the months ticked past – the Brown bounce in the polls crashing by November into a 14-point deficit; the honeymoon souring, the smile hung on the damaged face muscles growing ever more berserk, ever more pleading; hair colour warmed up and toned down, hair newly volumised and shingled – Nixon is the politician Brown came to increasingly resemble.

Nixon was the first politician of the television age to consciously recognise that political success had come to depend almost entirely on the presentation of a pleasing personality. The issues merely provide the occasions for testing the personal appeal of the contenders: everything hinges on the tremble of the hand or voice, the slick of sweat on brow or upper lip, the general air of ease or unease under performance pressure. (‘Body language’. That was what all the commentators said they would be looking out for at Gordon’s Camp David meeting with George Bush in July. Gordon’s graphic body language, its stammer and stutter). The presentation of a pleasing personality thing was not news that Nixon revelled in, noted Richard Schickel, because he had enough self-awareness to recognise that a pleasing personality was precisely what he did not possess.

Nixon’s problem was himself. Not what he said but the man he was. The camera portrayed him clearly. It showed a man who craved regulation, who flourished best in the darkness, behind clichés, behind phalanxes of young advisers. But to his amazement, Nixon discovered that a candidate no longer needed a personality of his own in order to stand for public office. There were people now who could make one up for you.

Nixon survived, despite his flaws, wrote Joe McGinnis in his account of the 1968 US presidential election, because he was tough and smart, and – some said – dirty when he had to be. Also because there was nothing else he knew. A man to whom politics is all there is in life will
almost always beat one to whom it is only an occupation.

It wasn’t a new Gordon Brown that was at the top of the polls halfway though his first hundred days. It was the old Gordon with his strengths looking stronger and his negatives blurred by the firm, mature, no-nonsense way he had reacted to the car-bomb scares and the floods.

Then, early in August, the third major crisis piled in: pestilence. An outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease was confirmed at a cattle farm in Surrey and a national ban immediately imposed on the movement of all livestock. It happened on the first day of Brown’s bucket-and-spade holiday with his wife Sarah and their young sons John and Fraser in Dorset. There had just been time for a photo opportunity on the beach at Weymouth (the PM in dark suit and polished black leather Oxfords: he only has two outfits in his wardrobe – one is a suit, the other is a suit without a tie; not wearing a tie is as informal as he gets) when he had to rush away to listen in to a meeting of Cobra, the government’s civil emergency committee. The following morning he again had to deny himself a day at the beach buying 99s and building sandcastles and travelled instead to London to chair a full Cobra meeting. He was not seen on Chesil beach the next day, or the day after. The buckets and spades were packed and the holiday abandoned.

It would later emerge that he had slipped away, back to Scotland, and was spending August, the deadest month in politics, bunkered in his constituency office in Cowdenbeath High Street, close to Kirkcaldy where he grew up.
Kirkcaldy was once famous for the smells of the linoleum factory which was one of the chief employers in the town. Cowdenbeath used to be dominated by a pit, whose extensive workings were adjacent to Central Park, the football ground. The area is now landscaped, beautified, and almost completely open. Cowdenbeath is hardly more than a village, in which Central Park seems disproportionately large and looming and, ominously, since the death of the coalmine, quieter, cleaner, more alone.

The rumpled suit, the dusty box files, the calcified kettle, the tottering piles of yellowing papers. The stones marking the entrance to the old pit, which was finally exhausted in 1960; the shop-front office, the silent stadium, his minders yawning, kicking their heels.

It resurrected images of Old Gordon, the bedsit swot, got a briefcase for Christmas and loved it, forty-two years old the day he was born. The Gordon who often seemed to bristle with displeasure when surrounded by human beings rather than Treasury reports and breakdowns of costings, given to brooding, introspection and suspicion. He’d always have his homework done and he’d never let you copy.