Born Yesterday (15 page)

It had been a controversial decision to go big on the defect in Madeleine’s eye and make this her distinguishing mark, the one certain way of identifying her. Because what follows from that, if the kidnapper wants to disguise the fact that the girl with him is the girl in question? Answer:
damage the eye in some way; commit violence against the eye, maybe even remove the eye altogether, gouge it out. This was what the Policia Judiciara warned the parents could quite conceivably happen if they ignored their advice and mediafied in this way, as the father acknowledged. ‘The iris is Madeleine’s only true distinctive feature,’ he said. ‘Certainly we thought it was possible that this could potentially hurt her or’ (here the interviewer noted that ‘he grimaces’) ‘or her abductor might do something to her eye … But in terms of marketing it was a good ploy.’

In one of those coincidences which would never be believed if they were to happen in a novel, the man singled out by the police and – more lip-smackingly – the British media as the number-one suspect in the disappearance of Madeleine, had as his single distinguishing feature an injured eye. In folklore and popular mythology, glass eyes have had more than their share of freak appeal. And when it came to fingering Robert Murat as the Bluebeard figure in the McCann tragedy, the papers went for the noir angle with unfettered abandon.

Only Georges Bataille could write, of an eyeball removed from a corpse, that ‘the caress of the eye over the skin is so utterly, so extraordinarily gentle, and the sensation is so bizarre that it has something of a rooster’s horrible crowing’. But the British tabloids, writing about Murat, came close.

‘A one-eyed estate agent, former car salesman and turkey-farm worker … Creepy oddball and obvious suspect
… While friends and relatives portrayed suspect Robert Murat as a devoted family man, a darker picture emerged of an irritating oddball who loves to be the centre of attention … the one-eyed Briton … an underfloor chamber at Murat’s home’. He was obsequious, sweated heavily, his wife had left him suddenly for reasons nobody knew, he lived with his mother, had a glass eye …

‘With his big glass eye, vaguely uneasy manner and injudicious outbursts of self-pity’ – this was one of the papers on Murat. But it was Gordon Brown’s misfortune that it could just as easily have been one of the papers on the country’s new partially sighted, ‘psychologically flawed’, Bella Lugosi-like PM.

Tony Blair’s bonkers, aniseed-ball eye, as drawn by Steve Bell and other cartoonists, had always been good for a joke. Getting a laugh out of Blair, Simon Hoggart suggested on the eve of his departure, had always been ‘like trying to open an oyster with a plastic fork’. So the Blair eyeball – ‘the one mad staring optic’ – which he seemed to have inherited from Mrs Thatcher, was a godsend: ‘The bonkers eye complements the sane one, which roves around the room in a friendly way; meanwhile the angry one is taking names. Alarmingly, the eyes change places; sometimes it’s the right which comes at you like a dentist’s drill, sometimes the left.’

Brown’s eye was not a joke. The accident which caused it was at the time catastrophic for him and it took six months lying immobile in a darkened room to save the sight of what is now considered his ‘good’ right eye. But
being blind in one eye has proved to have serious personal and political consequences.

On television, when photographed in left profile (something his media handlers try to avoid) it can make him seem cold and unresponsive. And because his notes have to be printed in large type, it means that when he answers ‘yes’, for example, to a question about whether he can truly put his hand on his heart and say that bad polls had nothing to do with his decision not to call an election, he can be seen to be lying, because the words ‘saw polls’ on his notes are being picked up by the TV cameras and highlighted for reproduction in the morning papers.

Seven: the number of openings to the human head – two ears, two nostrils, mouth, two eyes.

‘I remember once getting really terrified that I could only see out of my eyes. I realised I am trapped in the dark inside my own body with only these two small holes to see out of,’ Damien Hirst, the shark man, the cow man, the brains behind the skull, once said.

A narrative. A story. It is this, historians, political theorists and leader-writers agree, that, more than anything, a government must have if it is going to succeed. A story. A narrative to inspire supporters and enthuse the electorate.

Before a loss of the plot became the story of the Brown government as it entered only its fourth month in office, a modestly diverting storyline that had been floated was the prime minister’s intention to be the head of a ‘government of all the talents’.

Among the high-profile, non-Labour figures that he had recruited were TV’s
Apprentice
star and business tycoon Sir Alan Sugar, who was to sit on the new Business Leaders Council, and a onetime head of the Confederation of British Industry (who, it emerged, had already discussed a possible peerage with the Tories). Brown had also signed up former deputy secretary-general of the United Nations Mark (now Lord) Mallach-Brown, and ex-naval chief Lord West as his security minister.

Getting the Swedish sporting tycoon and Tory treasurer Johan Eliasch to agree to be his ‘special representative’ on
climate change and deforestation was regarded as a particularly bitter blow to the Conservatives, to whom Eliasch had also been a major donor. (His just-divorced wife of twenty-one years, the ‘photographer, socialite and art collector’ Amanda Eliasch, had just set up the love-advice website Dear Doctor Cupid, and was herself seeing ‘London’s Botox king’ Jean-Louis Sebag. Johan Eliasch, meanwhile, was with ‘the full-bodied but high-minded Ana Paula Junquiera, a plugged-in UN worker and girl-about-town from Brazil, based in London and New York’.)

There was going to be room for both high and low in the Brown ‘big tent’: bling as well as hair shirts, household faces as well as grandees. But not everybody the new prime minister approached agreed to join.

Among the refuseniks was Fiona Phillips, the breakfast TV presenter and possibly the most arrhythmic celebrity contestant ever to appear on Brown’s favourite Saturday-evening family viewing,
Strictly Come Dancing
. It was Phillips he had faced over the untouched tumblers of Sunny Delight on the morning his GMTV appearance was overshadowed by the tantrums and tears of Heather, Lady McCartney. Fiona Phillips was reported to have been tempted by the offer of a job as a health minister and a seat in the House of Lords, but the £400,000 salary she would have to wave goodbye to meant she had to say no.

An attractive young tellyworld personality he did manage to coax on-board, however, was Tanya Byron, who had recently made a name for herself in the new niche area of
TV parenting shows, first with a programme called
Little
Angels
and later with
The House of Tiny Tearaways
. Described as ‘the responsible face of media parenting’, she was a clinically trained psychologist with seventeen years’ experience in the NHS and was appointed to lead an investigation into the impact on children of violent or sexual media imagery. Like Kate McCann, she was thirty-nine; also like Kate McCann, she worked at a GP practice, treating children with behavioural and emotional problems, which was the job Kate McCann had said, when the time was right, she wanted to retrain to do.

(Again like Mrs McCann, and her husband, Tanya Byron was having to learn how to straddle being both a clinician and a celebrity. One newspaper profiler noted ‘the lavish airbrushed publicity shots’, the convertible outside her house with the personalised number plate DR TAN, and marvelled at a world ‘where fame and glamour sit so easily alongside ordinary life’.)

By far the most interesting thing about Byron, though, as far as much of the press was concerned, was the fact that her husband Bruce played DC Terry Perkins in
The Bill
.

And thus continued a tradition going back at least as far as Elsie Tanner and Harold Wilson in the 1960s, when Wilson was hitching his star to all things popular (populist) and northern in the heyday of the Fab Four and Beatlemania. Bill Roache, Ken Barlow in
Coronation Street
from day one, now the
Street
’s longest-lived character, used to do warm-ups for the Conservatives and Mrs Thatcher. (And Tanya Byron’s soap roots even predate Harold
Wilson to the Fifties, when her father, for years head of drama at ATV, worked on
Emergency Ward 10
, forerunner of
Casualty
, and
Z Cars
, gritty black-and-white northern predecessor of
The Bill
.)

Going over the published accounts of Brown and Blair’s fabled meeting at the Granita restaurant in Islington in May 1994, at which they either did or did not agree that Blair would hand over power halfway through any second Labour term, he kept returning to a footnote to one of them which mentioned that the actress Susan Tully, Michelle Fowler in
EastEnders
and one of the great British tabloid staples at that point, the Pat Phoenix of her day, had also been having dinner in Granita on the night of the Blair-Brown ‘deal’.

Should he call her to try to persuade her to see him?

It was easy enough to get a number for an agent. But what did he say? How did she know he wasn’t one of the rabid tribe of lurkers and watchers, the whip-and-chain collectors and morgue attendants who pursued her and pestered her with crank mail while she was a schoolgirl (still the schoolgirl she had played in
Grange Hill
), on the cusp of turning into a sexually aware young woman, one of the core ‘journeys’ in the early days of the show? Or part of the smaller group who routinely track her now through Flickr and Popbitch and TrashTalk, through YouTube and Google?

‘Ever fancied bein’ in novels? I can get you in a novel, ’Chelle.’ How did
he
know he wasn’t one of their kind; that anorak breed?

(Pat Phoenix recorded that, even in earlier times, meeting your public could sometimes prove to be a perilous undertaking: ‘It sometimes happens in a crush when people press close to you that your arms literally disappear into the crowd as people grasp your hands. The majority are lovely, loving people but you get the occasional nutcase in the frantic crush that bends your fingers back till you think they’re going to break.’)

He did have a large autograph collection when he was very young, and once made Helen Shapiro cry.

‘Actually, there was a guy standing in that doorway over there just before you got here,’ she said, indicating a shadowy recess next door to the Red Fort Indian restaurant in Soho. ‘Telephoto lens, poppin’ off some shots. Thought I couldn’t see what he was up to, but I could. I met Anita Dobson for lunch here the other day an’ there was half a dozen of them crawlin’ all over in no time. Word went round we must be goin’ back in the show.’

At her suggestion, they had arranged to meet at the Soho Theatre in Dean Street. Outside the Soho Theatre, that is, at a pavement table on the other side of the window from the bar, where she could smoke. It wasn’t especially warm, and it meant they were easy meat for the addicts and beggars and the large population of street-dwellers in the area. ‘But,’ she said, holding up a cigarette, a voice that sounded like it had never left
’Stenders
, a rich wave of smoke rip-curling over the mouthpiece of the phone which she was checking for messages, ‘gotta have
these.’ Doop-doop-beep, speed-dial call, no answer, a ‘fuck it’ under her breath. ‘So gwawn then, what’s it all about, this novel? Howds’it s’posed to work?’

She no longer acts. She has built up an alternative career as a director. (Her apprentice work included directing Dr Tan’s husband, Bruce Byron, in many episodes of
The
Bill
.) She went to school in Islington, close to the fleetingly popular Granita restaurant (now long-gone), and is a product of the Anna Scher children’s theatre, which is where a lot of the lively kids from her area went and got fast-tracked into children’s TV and commercials.

It was her conviction that she was only any good at playing herself - that she had really only ever played herself, first in
Grange Hill
, and then as TV’s most famous single mother, Michelle Fowler – that prompted her to throw in the towel at
EastEnders
after ten years. She was one of the soap’s original characters, appearing in the first episode in February 1985 and remaining central to the series until 1995.

So now she was a director. She had stopped appearing in front of the cameras. But every so often her past – that person she used to be – will leap out and mug her. It had happened just the week before while she was watching Andrew Marr’s television history of post-war Britain. One minute it was prime ministers and affairs of state, and the next minute there
she
was, with her mullet and her bad complexion, a fag on, the mouth going, giving it ’Chelle. It used to be that, even as a performer, your image receded as you grew older. But now the uniquely twenty-first-
century experience is that it just replicates and multiplies in accordance with that law of the digital realm that states that anything digital will be copied, and anything copied once will fill the universe.

She filled the universe. A colleague had logged her onto to YouTube for the first time that very afternoon and the fact that just tapping the words ‘Michelle Fowler’ into the thing could bring so many moments of the past crowding back – a pandemonium of fragments (an aggregation of fragments is the only kind of whole we have now) – was like …
Pfffffffffffff
. Jeeezus. You know? Can you imagine? Back from out of where was this? Sorry? Creeped her well out. F’sake.

She was sixteen when she went into
EastEnders
, and twenty-six when she left. Being sixteen, and earning silly money, she’d bring all her friends into the West End every Friday night, chatted up all the bouncers, got them all nodded into everywhere free, had a great old falling-about caper. She went on like that for three years, until she was nineteen. But then when she turned nineteen it all stopped. ‘I knew the day would come when the bouncers didn’t recognise me any more, and I wanted out before that happened.’ End of.

Same thing seven years later, same abrupt termination, when she decided to get out of
’
Stenders
after ten years. She was terrified of becoming a Ken Barlow. Or, alternatively, of hanging on until the programme-makers decided to kill her off. She made the decision and got out, much as Blair didn’t, until the circumstances made it obvious he
had to go. ‘As a former-celebrity’ is how he said he expected to be remembered, just weeks before he finally packed up and went. But this flippancy had only been arrived at after the working through of what some of those closest to him (they were rumoured to be Alastair Campbell and Philip Gould) had described as a ‘psychological problem’ about turning his back on Number 10.

On the night of the big Granita pow-wow in May, 1994, Sue Tully was top tabloid totty, less than a year away from chucking it all in. Brown and Blair were two men in suits wrangling over who would get the cowboy outfit and who would get the Meccano set when/if they ended seventeen years of Conservative government in three, maybe four years’ time. In other words, all eyes were on her, which is why she was sitting (as she always sat in those days) with her back to the room. It took her friend Mark, who she had been at Anna Scher with, to draw her attention to the Blair–Brown bozos looking conspiratorial at a table next to the exposed-brick rear wall.

She reached across for his notebook and drew him a diagram – door here, bar in the far corner where they were, a narrow room, tables just so, another Upper Street restaurant, she’d zigzagged her way down all the halfway-decent restaurants in that road.

But then for some reason – she’s never been able to quite say why – when Mark tipped her off they were leaving, she threw herself at the door. She squeezed past the people at the other tables and stood and watched the two of them walking together past the King’s Head in the
direction of Highbury, Tony and Gordon, at swim in the delicious uncertainties of their fate, apparently relaxed and on good terms.

The next day, or maybe the day after, there was a diary item in the
Evening Standard
getting it all arse-backwards as usual, saying that the Labour rivals Brown and Blair had taken time out from juking each for the vacancy created at the top of the party by the untimely death of John Smith ten days earlier, to have dinner with outspoken
EastEnders
star Susan Tully at the fashionable Granita restaurant on Islington’s trendy Upper Street.

Were they having a laff? The confusion, she has come round to believing, stemmed from the fact that a couple of years earlier she had done a turn for Neil Kinnock on the eve of the General Election of 1992, which Kinnock had gone into as favourite but ended up losing dismally to John Major, the man who replaced Thatcher.

The event she agreed to appear at was held in Kinnock’s constituency in Wales. It was a week or so after his rock-style stadium rally in Sheffield, which had been ill-judged and rubbished enough to make him lose the election just by itself. And now, just a few hours before the polls were due to open, he was welcoming the motor-mouthed, lurex-suited one, Ben Elton, and the lovely twenty-three-year-old coping lone-parent from
EastEnders
into his own back yard.

She was picked up at her home in London by an old Labour hand and practised her speech on him all the way: he encouraged her to add references to Labour being the
protectors of the NHS and providers of new schools and so forth, and it seemed to go down well with a partisan audience (an audience that believed Labour was about to be swept into power in a matter of only 24 hours); it seemed to hit the spot as far as she could tell, from the reaction she got. And, even though she found out later that Kinnock himself knew that night he was going to lose and that his nine years as leader were over – he had been shown the figures and knew three days before the vote that John Major was going to win – still he elbowed through the throng to the bar where she was queuing to buy a vodka and tonic, shooed them all out of the way and brought back the vod-ton himself. Afterwards she sat next to him on the top table at dinner – her, then Neil, then Glenys, then Ben Elton – and all he had wanted to know about was herself. This little man with the knowing wink and the laddo smile and the freckled head like a linnet’s egg who had suspected he was done for when they got rid of Thatcher, the woman Sue blamed for her father’s redundancy from his job as a watch-case maker in Hatton Garden in 1979, the year Thatcher came to power.