by Gordon Burn
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.
Gordon by then, however, had made a marvellous new friend who would protect him in the playground and had provided him with an ingenious solution to what until then had appeared an intractable image problem. The attempt to ram a car bomb into the arrivals hall at Glasgow airport had thrown up SuperSmeato, an instant, home-grown hero. And SuperSmeato – working-class, Scottish, plain-talking man of the people (‘This is Glasgow! We’ll just set aboot ye!’) had quickly been drafted in as Gordon’s secret weapon: his cursing, sweating, horny-handed sharer-self.
*
‘Now John has a message for any would-be terrorist’, says the interviewer in a vo
ice-over. And John says: ‘You come to Glasgow … Glasgow doesn’t accept this, d’you know what I mean? This is Glasgow you know … so we’ll set about you. You know? That’s it.’
‘Nothing, like something,’ Philip Larkin wrote, ‘happens anywhere.’ John Smeaton lives with Mum, Catherine, and Dad, Iain, on a pleasant, nothing estate in Erskine on the outskirts of Glagow. He had a going-nowhere job as a baggage handler at Glasgow airport, overseeing the loading and offloading of thousands of bags a day. It was a job he had been coasting along in for twelve years. He was now thirty-one. So since he was nineteen he had been in the same routine of getting up, going to work, grafting inside the aircraft, clearing the bags out, grabbing a sly smoke and then waiting for the next load to put in, at the beginning forever cracking his head or his back. At school he was a dreamer and had failed to apply himself. He left school at sixteen and started an apprenticeship as a joiner. He left at nineteen with a belief that he was being exploited and was taken on as ‘hold fodder’ at the airport.
The day he became the Smeatonator started as a day like any other. It was a Saturday, Gordon Brown’s first in office. On 30 June Gordon Brown had been prime minister for seventy-two hours. In the early hours of Friday a green Mercedes primed with petrol and nails and cans of propane gas had been parked outside the Tiger Tiger nightclub in central London. A second car, similarly primed, had been discovered in a side-street, just around the corner. On the Saturday, just after three, the flaming Jeep Cherokee had been aimed at the main terminal building at Glasgow airport.
Smeato had done something unusual for him: he had screwed up. Saturday is always a busy day, but this one was even busier. It was the first day of the school holiday in Scotland. The arrivals hall was mobbed, his gang were working flat-out and, because he was working so hard (all those golfers, all those sets of clubs, forty or fifty sets to deal with on some flights) he managed to misread one of the screens showing departure times. Either the flight is going to have to be delayed or the golfers’ plane is going to have to leave without their clubs. He feels such a jessie. It’s a no-brainer job but he takes pride in doing it. He feels so peed out. So he has a cigarette. He goes outside and has a wee ciggie. When that’s finished he flames up another one. And that’s when, after two or three draws, this fucking fuckbag of a terrorist cunt – something Allah, something Allah – these bastards, doctors mind, turn their car into the terminal building which is packed with families off for their summer holiday.
There is a sort of screeching, a lot of commotion, a big bang. He looks around to his left and sees a four-by-four that’s on fire. As he runs to help, he sees one of the men in the car get out and hit a policeman – he’s been a lot of years at the airport, these policemen are his friends, and besides which you can’t stand back anyways and see the law fall: the law falls, we all fall – he sees a man of Arab appearance egress the vehicle and start whackin this polis in the face. And so what are you going to do, he’s going to get the boot in – he wears the steel toe-caps to work – and some other guy banjoes him, banjaxes the cunt nae bother. Then he sees another man, on fire on the other side of the Jeep, bits of his flesh peeling away, blackened flesh, the smell of burning, the intensity of the heat, a taxi driver hosing him down. A man turning to charcoal. A human ember. But still throwing punches, his skin on fire and still fighting, very, very determined. You’re nae hitting the polis mate, there’s nae chance … Boof! Take that home to Allah. You have a duty to care. That’s what you’re told in the airport.
Of course it fucking all went fucking off then, the T-shirts and the websites, the world and its granny wanting him to give them high-fives, the folks going through Paypal to stand him thousands of pints at the airport Holiday Inn which he passed on to the lads at Erskine hospital back from Iraq with fucked-up heads and broken bodies and shattered families, the real heroes.
For a while right after 9/11, New York City firemen attained authentic hero status: the generic ‘FDNY’ secured a position analogous to the one individual heroes used to occupy. But then there was the marketing of ‘Calendar of Heroes’ showing real firemen decked out in their gear but stripped to the waist and invitingly posed for their admirers. Real heroes today, wrote Thomas de Zengotita, must become stars if they are to exist in public culture at all. That is, they must perform. But as soon as they do that, they can’t compete with the real stars – who are performers.
In July Smeato appeared at the Edinburgh fringe as himself in a comedy chat-show. Many in the audience wore their slogan T-shirts – ‘We’ll Set Aboot Yi’, ‘Proudly Banjoing Terrorists Since 2007’ – which they got him to sign afterwards in the bar.
A week or two later Gerry McCann flew in to make what was described as a ‘very uncomfortable’ appearance at the Edinburgh Television Festival, using a media jolly-up to appeal to the media he had used to keep Madeleine’s face in the papers to back off and leave his family alone. It was becoming the ‘Kate and Gerry Show’, he told a mesmerised audience, and that wasn’t going to bring Madeleine home. (‘Madeleine’: what was it about the way he said this word, the Glaswegian intonation, the pugnacious three syllables – Muh-duh-luhn – so far from the softer, feminised French pronunciation, staunin’ up for himsel’, the ‘Wha daur meddle wi’ me’ jutting jaw? Gerry the hard man, Smeato the hard man hero.) He was wearing the yellow Madeleine ribbon pinned on his jacket, along with the green ribbon which was the Portuguese symbol of hope; he had the yellow Madeleine wristband on his wrist. (People would still want the Madeleine bands even if she was found, policeman’s son Calum MacRae, eighteen, responsible for the campaign’s website and distribution network for Madeleine merchandise, will tell the local press. Her face is a mark. It’s everywhere.)
The first call from Downing Street came at the beginning of August. On 2 August Smeats had been booked to appear on Richard and Judy and, because it was his first time, he brought to the sofa a scalding flush and perspiration that boiled the make-up clean off: perspiration streamed down his face, his eyes screwed against it and the strong light.
From the studios he was driven straight to Number 10. After a brief wait the prime minister himself appeared, urged him to call him ‘Gordon’ and showed him into his favourite Thatcher Study, where it was just the two of them alone with the dying light and the most traditional of posh paintings, all dating from the seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries and selected by the prime minister personally from the Government Art Collection: the Portrait of Edward Montagu, First Earl of Sandwich has pride of place above the mantelpiece; above the door is Thomas Hofland’s Warwick Castle, on the right are John Wooton’s Italianate Landscape and, below this, John Laporte’s Welsh Scene, Pont Aberglaslyn.
Richard Branson got in touch and kindly offered Smeato a first-class seat to New York when he was invited to attend the sixth anniversary ceremony of 9/11. At the end of the month, Number 10 were in touch again, extending an invitation to the party conference in Bournemouth, although he was to keep this to himself and tell nobody where he was going. This was to allow Gordon Brown the coup de théâtre of ‘unveiling’ him a few minutes into his keynote speech at conference, his first as prime minister. ‘When the terrorists tried to attack Scotland’s biggest airport, they were answered by the courage of the police and the firefighters – and a baggage handler named John Smeaton.’ Rapturous applause. ‘That man, that hero John Smeaton is here with us today – and on behalf of our country, John, I want to thank you.’
The standing ovation was led by Sarah, the prime minister’s wife, who had been seated beside him. And a month later Sarah Brown was one of the judges, along with Fiona Phillips of GMTV, of the Daily Mirror’s ‘Pride of Britain’ Awards which recognised Smeato’s bravery with a statuette. Smeato in the kilt and sporran, Carol Vorderman making the inevitable crack about his legs (‘Get a loada those legs, girls!’). The Browns were there in person to present the award to him, and the following morning he joined his fellow heroes on another visit to Number 10. ‘I’ll b
e able to show them round,’ he joked, although the pictures would show him looking hot and embarrassed and blushing to the roots of his red-tinged hair.
On his first visit the prime minister had asked him whether he had been born in Glasgow and, when he said he had, he told him that he had been born in Glasgow too. The Smeatons lived in Bishopton, near a farm. In the summer it was two-man tag in the woods and in winter it was snowball fights between the neighbouring roads. You didn’t play on computer games, you played outside. Now most kids are just into The X Factor and ‘let’s be famous’. But he’d had a wee touch of what’s it’s like to be famous, and it’s not particularly great.
‘I think we’re moving from this period when celebrity matters, when people have become famous for being famous,’ Gordon Brown said in an interview a few weeks before he became prime minister. ‘I think you can see that in other countries, too, people are moving away from that to what lies behind the character and the personality. It is a remarkable culture where people appear on television and are famous simply for the act of appearing on television.’