Gotta Get Theroux This

by Louis Theroux

  The strange sense of the stakes involved gave the car ride a surreal quality. I wondered how long they’d known about the allegation. Whether they had or hadn’t done it, both options struck me as horrendous. The heightened reality of the occasion meant I thought I could feel them both improvising the drama in different keys: jolly and serious and sad. Neil kept making off-colour jokes. They had been at Lord Longford’s funeral earlier in the day.

  ‘Perhaps they’ll be accusing us of necrophilia next,’ Neil said.

  ‘Neil, will you stop,’ Christine said.

  At the police station we split up. Will and I waited outside while the Hamiltons went into the station to be interviewed. For a while all was quiet. I wondered whether the story would be kept hush-hush. Then, slowly, a few reporters appeared, followed by a few more, until a full orchestra of camera crews and paparazzi were arrayed, as though tuning up for a big performance.

  A few hours after they’d gone in, the Hamiltons emerged. Michael Coleman gave a statement.

  ‘It’s said that Mr and Mrs Hamilton were in a flat when a young woman was raped,’ he said. ‘It’s also said that Mr Hamilton was masturbating onto her whilst another man, as yet unidentified by the police, was also masturbating onto her and Mrs Hamilton was squatting on her face.’

  As he said this, Neil and Christine flanked him, both looking impassive.

  ‘I take it, Mr Hamilton, you deny this?’ asked one reporter.

  ‘We deny this absolutely categorically,’ Neil said.

  Christine put her arm around Neil. ‘I’m very happy to put my arm around my husband,’ she said. ‘The whole thing is an absolutely monstrous fabrication and a lie . . . You can all get your photos.’

  After the press conference, surrounded by a scrum of press, we climbed back into Michael Coleman’s car. Christine put the car window down, and I leaned back so the photographers could get a couple more shots of the unhappy couple. Then we drove off.

  In his statement, Michael Coleman had said that during their interviews the police had brought up the name Max Clifford, the celebrity publicist famous for brokering kiss-and-tell stories with the tabloids.

  ‘The whole thing’s an absolute nightmare,’ Christine said. ‘As we thought, Max Clifford! Why would the police ask us about Max Clifford? Course he’s behind it. He’s got what he wanted. Whatever happens now, if we never hear another thing about it, we’ll be all over the papers . . . Six policemen are combing our house! Opening every door, every cupboard. They’re searching in all my clothes for a blue dress . . . It’s absolutely monstrous.’

  She became weepy. Then, noticing Neil was on the phone, she said, ‘If that’s the Guardian, just put it down, darling. Don’t even talk to them!’

  ‘Sorry, I can’t talk any more now,’ Neil said into the phone.

  ‘The only identifying characteristic she could come up with was a blue dress?’ I asked.

  ‘She doesn’t even know if I’m circumcised or not,’ Neil said.

  ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake!’ Christine said and put her hand over her face.

  ‘We asked that question of the police,’ Neil said. ‘Needless to say they hadn’t thought to ask it.’

  ‘Do you know, at one stage they were going to lock us each in a cell?’ Christine said. ‘Can you believe it? Just because Max Clifford and some tart have invented this allegation!’ She started crying again. ‘We’ve had enough to put up with in our lives without all these lies.’

  Trying to be helpful, Michael Coleman said, ‘Take it in your stride.’

  ‘Oh Michael, it’s just a game for you. It’s my life. It’s my reputation. What a ridiculous thing to say. “Take it in your stride.” ’

  Her voice was quavering and she covered her face again as Neil stroked her forearm with the tips of his fingers in a stiff up-and-down gesture.

  Back at Michael Coleman’s house there were drinks. Christine had several fortifying glasses of wine. Then the four of us – Neil and Christine, Will and me – continued on to the Battersea flat. Neil was driving. Christine was feeling the effects of the alcohol.

  ‘I think we need to have something to eat,’ Neil said. ‘I hesitate to say you need to get something inside you.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Christine said. ‘Will, if you broadcast that I shall come round personally and stab you.’

  At their flat a gauntlet of press – six or seven camera people with top lights on – swivelled in unison without saying a word. They were like alien creatures or robots. Upstairs we watched the news of the arrest on television. I had a glass of red wine to alleviate the stress and strangeness of the day’s events. Then I had a few more. By now we’d been joined by a journalist from the Mail on Sunday called Paul Henderson, who declined to go on camera and lurked in the kitchen. I had the impression he was ‘babysitting’ the Hamiltons, with a view to landing their exclusive story.

  ‘Paul’s on side,’ Christine said. ‘Paul’s helped us a lot.’

  I had a whispered conversation with Paul outside the kitchen. I was – to use the technical word – slazzered at this point and feeling magnanimous.

  ‘It just seems so unlikely,’ I said. ‘I mean, I really don’t think they did it. It would take such brazenness on their part if they had done it to then go and invite our camera in. I mean, who is capable of that kind of sangfroid?’

  ‘Well,’ Paul said, rolling his eyes, ‘anything’s possible. I’ve been doing this job so many years, seen so much. I’ll tell you, nothing surprises me any more. Nothing.’

  A little later I went to the loo. Will came in to have a covert conference and then, possibly feeling a little emotional himself, he did an impression of Neil Hamilton masturbating onto someone at a swingers’ party.

  It being August, news was in short supply. The allegations against the Hamiltons were a sensation. The story was across all the news channels and in the tabloids, quickly mutating into a meta-story about the ludicrousness of the ‘media circus’ itself. This struck me as a little unfair: if anyone was responsible for turning the story into a media circus, it was surely the media.

  My feelings at this point were complicated. I suppose I should have felt grateful that the Hamiltons had allowed us to continue filming, though I was also conscious that it was potentially helpful to their case to be seen cooperating with press. It could be taken as showing that they had nothing to hide. At the same time, many people regarded the Hamiltons’ appetite for coverage as a further example of their supposed shamelessness and another count against them. But mainly I was confused by the turn of events and bothered by the strangeness of finding myself now a part of the story (as I increasingly was). In almost all the coverage there was a photo of me with the Hamiltons as we drove from the police station, with a reference to me as ‘wacky TV personality’ Louis Theroux, the fact of us making a documentary prefaced with the phrase ‘in a bizarre twist’.

  Among my friends and colleagues the prevailing attitude seemed to be that I should feel lucky to land such a scoop, a few going so far as to suggest I’d been part of making up the allegations to help our story along (as if). But I was also struggling with a sense of self exposure. One of my impulses in making documentaries had always been an urge for invisibility and escape. This time my escape route had led out into a spotlight on the main stage.

  I was also surprised at how many people thought the Hamiltons actually had taken part in the rape. It was fairly clear to me early on that the case against them didn’t add up. Whether or not they went to swingers’ parties, they didn’t go to them in small flats in Ilford. And in fact, within a few days of the arrest Neil had found several receipts placing him at Waitrose and witnesses to support his contention that they’d been hosting a dinner party on the night in question.

  Still, there was no question of not continuing, and so, two days after the arrest, after a day off from filming, Neil, Christine, Will and I drove up to the Hamiltons’ Cheshire pile. There we stayed for three days while the media camped o
utside. It was a little like The Masque of the Red Death. We drank and talked and Will filmed while a contagion of irrationality rampaged outside.

  Forced together with them in the surreal circumstances of the media siege, and having lost my bearings as to what exactly my journalistic role was, I found myself enjoying the company of the Hamiltons in a more or less straightforward way. Neil’s robot-like exterior belied a droll sense of humour. I would slip into my own robot-like mode, and we would compare notes about subjects we were both interested in: the American anarcho-capitalist philosopher Robert Nozick, the historian Thomas Carlyle, and Nietzsche (of whom Neil was a great fan and had done a line drawing which hung framed on the wall). Given the accusations made in the Panorama programme, I was on the lookout for evidence of far-right leanings, noting the many books by Enoch Powell. Neil would do impersonations of the famous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in Black Country tones. ‘Like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood.’ He was knowledgeable about minstrelsy and enjoyed talking about various dubious blackface vaudevillians of the belle époque. In a sublimated attempt to derail Sacha Baron Cohen’s then-flourishing career, I encouraged Neil to write a piece about him and whether he could be said to occupy a place in the minstrel tradition for the Daily Mail.

  Christine was up and down – stern and fierce one minute, dissolving into tears the next, which to be fair, seems a reasonable reaction when accused of rape. ‘I’m having a bit of a dip,’ she’d say. In her up moments, she was reminiscent of dominatrices I’ve met, especially when she’d had a drink. If you interrupted her train of thought she’d snap ‘Shut up!’ or slap your leg.

  In many respects, their match-up was of the classic Mars-and-Venus variety: him, stoical and underplayed; her, buffeted by emotional turbulence.

  I began wondering why anyone might possibly fixate on the Hamiltons as the object of fantasies. I recalled that, before any of the rape allegations, a colleague at work had said, ‘There’s something about that couple’, implying by her tone that she thought they might have unusual sexual interests. The first night in Cheshire, over a dinner – for which Christine made the same Bloody Mary jelly as she had for the alibi-providing party – I put it to them that people felt there was a mystery at the heart of their relationship.

  ‘For some reason you have a hold over the public imagination,’ I said. ‘And there is a sexual dimension to it.’

  ‘Why do you think that?’ Neil asked.

  ‘When I mention “the Hamiltons” people say, “Oh yes, there’s something funny about that couple.” ’

  ‘I simply don’t believe it,’ Christine said. ‘Tell me anybody who’s said that.’

  ‘I think there’s a belief that there’s a secret at the heart of your relationship that no one knows,’ I continued.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Neil said.

  ‘May I ask a sensitive question? Are you sexually quite normal?’

  ‘Yes, completely, a hundred per cent normal,’ Christine replied. ‘We have no deviations. Absolutely nothing. Very happy with each other. We have no problems, we’ve never had any problems. A great life, thank you very much.’

  Meanwhile the media frenzy continued, hitting ever higher levels of absurdity. On the first morning in Cheshire, a man turned up, a one-time TV reporter who was now a truck driver and the creator of the website neilhamiltonisinnocent.com. He had brought a banner with the website name on it and was intent on using it to give the website a plug on national TV – he persuaded Neil that he and Christine should carry it while marching out to the waiting reporters in a kind of procession. I counselled against this. I was aware that – as a journalist myself and supposed disinterested party – it wasn’t really my place to advise but I couldn’t help myself. For a while it turned farcical, with Christine freaking out that the banner was lying crumpled out on the drive in view of the cameras. In the end, they made their statement with no banner. In the live coverage Will and I were just visible lurking in the background, like a couple of shabby stagehands who have strayed into shot.

  That night, after supper, I was reclining in a sofa when Christine came and sat next to me. Neil was out of the room. She began stroking my cheek.

  ‘You haven’t shaved,’ she said.

  She must have been aware Will was filming and I wondered if she was doing it for the camera.

  ‘You do like to flirt, don’t you?’ I said.

  ‘Who doesn’t like to flirt? I mean, if you can’t have a little fun, come on!’

  I felt a familiar sort of doubling: immersed in a weird situation but aware that it was probably helpful for the documentary. I hope I am not being unkind to Christine when I saw it was a little reminiscent of being hazed by the wrestlers at the Powerplant.

  Neil returned from the kitchen and, noticing us, did a comical double-take.

  Later, after a couple more drinks, Neil decided he should go up the driveway and deliver a statement to the waiting cameras. Will and I followed him. No one was there.

  ‘I’ve got a statement,’ Neil shouted into the darkness. ‘I love Will Yapp!’

  After a few days the story ebbed away. The accuser, who went by Nadine Milroy-Sloan but whose real name was Emily Checksfield, turned out to be a troubled young woman from Grimsby. A fantasist, she had been visiting sex chat sites and became convinced that two of the people she conversed with – ‘Lord and Lady Hamilton’ – were Neil and Christine. Smelling a financial opportunity, she’d visited Max Clifford, who’d told her she could sell a sex story about the Hamiltons for six figures but would need proof. In short order, she arranged a visit with her online correspondent – a pensioner in Essex called Barry Lehaney. It was on an evidence-gathering trip to see Barry Lehaney that she said the sex party and the rape took place.

  Lehaney’s account of the visit differed markedly from Milroy-Sloan’s. In his version he’d picked her up in his Ford Granada and taken her on a tour of London sites. They’d bought some food and wine at Tesco’s then watched Trigger Happy TV at his flat. He’d offered her the sofa but she’d asked to sleep in bed with him. The following morning, unprompted, she’d masturbated him.

  The detail that strikes me now is that Milroy-Sloan complained of feeling woozy after drinking a glass of red wine brought to her by Lehaney. Police found a strip of Rohypnol at Lehaney’s flat, though Lehaney claimed it was planted. In any case, having made up the tale of the group rape, Milroy-Sloane’s allegation of being drugged was thereafter unlikely to be believed.

  On 13 July, Nadine Milroy-Sloan was convicted of perverting the course of justice and given three years. The judge commented: ‘It’s becoming all too easy for people to sell fake allegations about well-known people to the press, and the courts have to deal with it firmly.’

  When Louis Met The Hamiltons marked a kind of weird high-water mark of my professional fortunes. Other people may have different barometers, but for me you are too famous when your image and likeness are thrust into the consciousness of people who don’t like you. There is a lot to be said for being avoidable. But for a couple of months, for those who read papers and watch TV, I was hard to miss. One night at home, stoned, I was watching a dating show. The young woman said she didn’t want to go on another date with the specky bloke. ‘He looks too much like Louis Theroux,’ she said. Had I become a byword for a certain kind of unattractive man with glasses?

  With Neil and Christine Hamilton.

  What felt especially untoward was to have achieved success with a programme that hinged on nothing I’d done. A bizarre piece of happenstance – a lightning strike of misfortune that zapped Neil and Christine Hamilton – led to events that we were lucky enough to be around to document. All the excitement it created – at the BBC, among my exec and his higher-ups – felt to me like a prison sentence. David was in ecstasies over the success of the show. Nearly five million viewers. Stories in all the papers. But it worried me since there was almost nothing to be learned from making the d
ocumentary in terms of process – you can’t choose your subjects based on whether they might be accused of rape by a deluded young woman. Meanwhile, I had an unfamiliar sensation of being in demand. Offers of ‘at home with’ photo features in magazines. GQ invited me to be their TV personality of the year, which I politely declined. In Edinburgh for the TV festival, the channel controller of BBC1, Lorraine Heggessey, fell into step beside me in the lobby of the Caledonian Hotel.

  ‘So tell me about the Hamiltons,’ she said. ‘I think we might want that for One.’

  All the attention and the sense of approval had a paradoxical effect, making me wonder about before. Did people not like the shows then? I began feeling morose, sensing that I was completely out of sync with what everyone else seemed to think I should want. My appetite for the sort of programmes I was doing, already in decline, dipped precipitously around this time. But I was a success, creating impact, and so there was no getting off the bus. And besides I had a ton more shows to make, and no sense of how I was supposed to make them.

  Chapter 18

  Jimmy Links

  ‘Well, yet again we are destined to speak by machine,’ said the message in familiar northern tones. ‘Greetings from the Glen. The mountains are high, the snow is good and everybody is huddling together, which is very social, to stay warm and not freezing, and it’s woooooonderful, and you’re down there in that sub-tropic south where nothing means anything – up here everything means something and it’s ten to ten and it’s Wednesday morning and of course we will speak together eye to eye, face to face, or whatever probably before the next millennium, but who knows?’ Beeep!