by Gordon Burn
After his obsession with secrecy and his wealth, the other best-known thing about Studzinski was the depth of his religious faith. He devoted time to prayer and meditation in the morning and again at night. He was a devout Catholic who had had a private chapel built in his house. Pride of place in the chapel was given to two candlesticks which had once belonged to the founder of the Jesuits, Ignatius Loyola. He was made a Knight of the Order of St Gregory for a record of good works, including thirty years working with the homeless, and the Catholic church in Britain was said to be so beholden to him that Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, the Church’s leader in England and Wales, would change his diary to fit in with John Studzinski’s.
At the beginning of the summer, the house abutting Mr Studzinski’s was sold and a team of builders moved in. The builders were mainly Polish and at lunchtimes and cigarette breaks they would gather as a group at the front of the house. He grew used to seeing them, lounging round chatting and smoking, gathered around a radio playing Polish music. It was something new in the street, new music, the smells of different foods and cigarettes, but a scene familiar in every part of London, where house prices in some areas – this area was one of them – had been increasing by as much as 30 per cent a year.
When the work on the house was nearing completion – the appearance of two women among the workforce suggested they had reached the stage of making good and skimming, and the house was close to being liveable in again – he bumped into a neighbour from his block who told him that earlier that evening (it was a Sunday, her first back from Bernard Arnault’s yacht on the Côte d’Azure) he had spotted Cherie Blair and another woman coming out of the house adjoining Studzinski’s.
Were the Blairs considering a move to Chelsea, into the house next door to what had once been known as the Follett house, the house that they had had to stop visiting twelve years earlier because it placed them too close to what the papers called ‘luvvie-land’? There had been reports of them being shown over a country pile called Winslow Hall in Berkshire and of Tony becoming ‘the local country squire’. (The former Conservative leader Ian Duncan Smith had performed the opening ceremony at the local pub, the Betsey Wynne; his wife is called Betsy). Tony had apparently recently been spotted looking for a possible headquarters for his Blair Foundation to promote ‘inter-faith dialogue’ in Manchester Square, where he inspected the former Spanish Embassy at number 23.
But money was thought to be an issue. Cherie had interrupted the family holiday at Sir Cliff’s Barbados villa in the early part of the summer to fly to the US to give three speeches. In the early autumn it would be announced that she had agreed a rumoured £1 million deal to write her memoirs. A month later Tony would at last announce that he had signed up to write his. The contract was brokered by a Washington lawyer called Robert Barnett who had secured the $12 million deal for Bill Clinton’s My Life. Among Barnett’s other clients were Barack Obama, Alan Greenspan and Benazir Bhutto. Blair’s contract was thought to be worth around £5 million. The publisher was Random House; its UK wing is headed by Gail Rebuck, who is married to Tony’s close ally and former pollster Lord Gould.
But in early September, according to some of the papers, Cherie was still ‘tearing her hair out’ over her husband’s decision to resurrect his battered reputation by attempting to negotiate peace in the Middle East ‘rather than make the millions she craves’. His envoy role was backed up with a substantial budget drawn from a UN-administered trust fund: his fourteen-strong multinational team were in the process of taking over the entire fourth floor of East Jerusalem’s lovely old American Colony Hotel; an exercise treadmill had been installed, and ornate and gilded Ottoman-looking sofas; there was a shaded terrace screened with newly planted olive and fig saplings. But his peacemaker role was unsalaried. The various foundations carrying his name were going to distribute money, not bring it in. The registered domain name blairfoundation.org remained unused.
Cherie’s ‘go-getting American manager’, Martha Greene, was said to be considering offers for her to appear in adverts to endorse products, Fergie-style, in the States. With close to £5 million of mortgages on the properties they already owned, and work on their post-Downing Street home in Connaught Square still incomplete, it seemed unlikely that a move to Chelsea was on the cards.
Far more likely was that Mr Studzinski, a prominent Catholic like Cherie herself, a man with an excess of money – a man with the magic of always being able to make more money, of the type of whom the Blairs had always been in awe – had annexed the house next door to his own with the idea of the former prime minister using it as the headquarters of one of his charities. (Myrobella, the Blairs’ house in Trimdon – opened up to the light, security barriers removed, police gatehouse demolished – was slated to become the home of his sports foundation for local young people, run by Blair’s constituency agent, John Burton, a retired PE teacher.)
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 o
nly 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.
Chapter Five
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-manne
red, 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.