Authors: Gordon Burn
Madeleine had a plastic kitchen range in her bedroom in Rothley, a present for Christmas 2006. Leo had a plastic kitchen range in his bedroom in Downing Street, a present on his fifth birthday in 2005. Madeleine’s was pink and grey. Leo’s was grey and green. Madeleine had Cuddles, her pink Cuddle Cat – everything pink, her favourite colour. Leo had his cuddly ladybird toy, red with black polka-dot spots that the PM, snuggling up against it, would have to throw out of the bed.
The toy-filled room. The still warm but cooling bed. The man with executive power sleeping fitfully, alone in the narrow child’s bed, twisting the sheets, spilling the blankets.
The political benefits of small wars. In the Reagan years, Dick Cheney was said to speak often, in private, on this topic. The thrusting, imprinting example of Margaret Thatcher had shown the way – standing ovations in Parliament, streets mounded with flowers thrown by ecstatic fans as the waving goddess passed. ‘One of the keys to being seen as a great leader,’ Dubya told his sacked biographer Mickey Herskowitz, ‘is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.’
In Leo’s room: the tomb chamber of an embalmed pharaonic figure, preserved in hope of resurrection. (Made in China, recalled as a potential health hazard in August 2007).
Teflon Tony. The man without a shadow. Stick with that image of Madeleine’s room in the irradiated apartment block in Praia da Luz, visible even in the dark. How exposed a house looks when it becomes a taped-off scene-of-crime. How stripped of sanctity, wrote V. S. Naipaul, when a room, once intimate, becomes mere space.
The apartment is on the ground floor on a corner plot, the road running right past it.
I see what I see very clearly. But I don’t know what I’m looking at.
It is a portrait of no one there.
In the past he used to be able to look out of his window straight into the windows of the Follett house on the Embankment. The millionaire novelist Ken Follett, as the press invariably described him (and as he always liked to be described, as he always liked the raised foil lettering, shiny platinum and silver, the high-echelon credit card-colours on his bestselling paperbacks) lived there with his wife Barbara, the Member of Parliament for Stevenage. (She was one of ‘Blair’s Babes’ who came in at the 1997 general election.)
In the summer there were parties, with pretty pink satin-lined marquees and softly parping riverboat-shuffle-style trad jazz bands, the chink of ice, lazily rising peals of laughter. By standing perilously close to the edge of his roof he was able to spot celebrities such as Sir Antony Sher and Salman Rushdie mingling with media folk and prominent political personalities in the gently terraced back garden.
Before she became an MP, Barbara Follett had been retained as an image consultant for Neil Kinnock and certain
members of his shadow cabinet. This came to be known in the press as ‘being Folletted’: her decision to put the famously untelegenic shadow Trade and Industry Secretary, Robin Cook, into ‘autumn tones’ for his appearances in front of the media was one that came in for particular mockery.
Ken Follett, whenever he ran in to him at the newsagent’s or in the post office, was always very dapper in expensive suedes and cashmere, Jermyn Street rollnecks and blazers with gold buttons and occasionally tartan slacks.
‘The Folletts’. They were a diary-page staple. The buzz was with them through the Kinnock years and John Smith’s brief period as leader, on into the Blair succession. But then it seems their gilded reputation started to tell against them. It didn’t sit well with New Labour.
The turning point came on the night of a dinner the Blairs attended at the Folletts’ handsome house on the river, soon after Tony had reached his accommodation with Gordon Brown about being the most electable face of the new hosed-down, post-ideology, voter-friendly Labour Party. The distancing of the Party from the unions over the previous ten years meant that it now had to find alternative sources of finance, and Ken Follett had been in the vanguard of fundraising from ‘high value’ donors. But the press had been tipped off on the night of the private dinner at his house in 1995 and the pictures of the Blairs arriving resulted in a flurry of stories about Tony and Cherie’s alleged high-living in ‘luvvie-land’. The pop
impresario Michael Levy (later to be known as ‘Lord Cashpoint’) replaced Ken Follett as chief fundraiser, the Folletts were cast out of the inner circle, their garden parties became less frequent and more subdued, and towards the end of Blair’s first term as prime minister the handsome house in Chelsea was sold.
Before he moved in, the new owner, an American so it was rumoured, embarked on a drastic two-year renovation. It is a prestigious property that stands on the site of Thomas Girtin’s late-eighteenth-century watercolour masterpiece,
The White House at Chelsea
. Girtin died in 1802 when he was only twenty-seven. He was a friend and rival of Turner, and it was on this stretch of the river at Battersea Reach that Turner chose to spend the last six years of his life. After Turner, it was the place artists came to live.
Once or twice he had seen Francis Bacon, whose favourite model Henrietta Moraes lived around the corner, waiting by the bus stop outside the Follett house, hair oxblooded with boot-polish, carrier bag in hand. It was the same bus stop that, according to the biographies, T. S. Eliot used to use when he was a resident of Carlyle Mansions to travel to his job as poetry editor at Faber and Faber.
One afternoon, bringing the dog back from the park, he had come across Peter Sellers and his new wife Britt Ekland appraising the Follett house (although this was several years before it was known as that), craning their necks, admiring a conservatory, speculating (he imagined)
on what it must be like to be sitting in it, drink in hand, sunk into the rattan armchairs covered in the green bamboo-pattern fabric that the then-owners had, held in suspension between misty Whistlerian river and the vast expanse of gunmetal sky, floating in a diorama of changing light. (When, after Sellers’ death, Britt Ekland took up with a member of the American retro rockabilly band Stray Cats and he would sometimes spot them together looking dishevelled and hungover in the rougher pubs and cafés of the World’s End – looking like vintage pictures of an off-the-rails Amy Winehouse and her drug-addled husband that ran like a flicker-frame through the whole of that summer – he would recall that other Britt who was an intimate of Princes Margaret’s, one of Peter Sellers’ best friends, and that other time before the Follett house was the Follett house.)
Summer 2007 was the moment of Russia and China and the new super-rich Asian countries. Under the influence of globalisation, the nature of financial markets had changed. Art, for example, had become ‘monetised’. Art had become an asset class comparable to stocks or real estate. Finance, he read without understanding what he was reading, was now an end in itself. It no longer needed a real economy to function because it had gone off into hyperspace, operating in a virtual world.
It was a changed, and still vertiginously changing, world. The rewards for those who knew and understood how to manipulate money were unprecedentedly massive. And Mr Studzinski, the new owner of the handsome
house at Battersea Reach, was apparently a part of that world.
He had dogs. Three, and then four big dogs, giant Leonburgers which bayed and, when out for walks, loped slowly, like a pack. An elaborate system of security was installed, and a man in a uniform sent round every night to check. A trip-light was set up over the garage to interrogate every face passing in the street. Spiked fences were erected. Security cameras boxed in with metal grilles. Mature trees were swung in over the rooftops and their big rootballs buried in a line along the back of the house so that, even clinging precariously to the chimney and peering over, his view of the garden was now screened off, blocked by the new wall of trees.
The front of the house with the sweeping view of the river was in a red zone. There was no stopping. And so all exchange between outside and inside took place at the side, through the garages. Standing by the bus stop – the same stop where Francis Bacon and, before him, T. S. Eliot (a lifelong anglophile, like Mr Studzinski) once waited – it was impossible to be unaware of the day-long comings and goings of florists and dry-cleaning people, of his driver, his butler, the first-and second-gardener, the Filipino domestics and the husband of one of them, the odd-job man, the men who walked his dogs. But never the man himself.
There were rumours. He read about him in the papers: about the Picasso collection, the Man Rays, the salons reflecting his polymath interests, ‘mixing artists,
authors and musicians with clergy, politicians, royalty and captains of industry … the Duchess of Kent and Sting; Lord Browne of BP and members of the Gucci family’. There had been a £5 million donation that summer towards the new extension at Tate Modern, of which he was a Trustee.
He heard about him from the neighbours: about the black Range Rover with the smoked windows brought up to within inches of the garage door at seven every morning; the papers fanned out just so across the back seat; the rapid acceleration. (This from a woman who lived in the flats directly opposite who struck up a conversation with him at the newsagent’s one morning. ‘You have a little dog, don’t you?’ she said pleasantly. ‘You’re a writer. I see you. I’m straight opposite. You’re from the same part of the world as me.’) The new owner was a kind of phantom created by hearsay and rumour – a virtual owner. In this way he was entirely a creature of his time, a time that had stopped caring what companies produced; they existed now only for buying and selling. Hedge funds. Fungible assets. Private equity. The derivatives market. Mr Studzinski was said to be a master of modern financial engineering; a genius at the new prime minister Gordon Brown’s pet subject, fiscal arithmetic.
These were the reasons the directors of Northern Rock retained Studzinki’s services as an adviser when there was a run on the bank in the middle of September, with savers camping overnight outside branches all across the country to withdraw their money. It was the first run on a British
bank in more than a century, a scandal of mismanagement that was the result (it seemed, although it was initially difficult to work out how) of something called ‘subprime mortgages’ in America. Divorced from the jargon, this turned out to be the practice of lending money to low-income homeowners, many of them black, who could never afford to pay it back.
The Bank of England had to pump £26 billion of taxpayers’ money into Northern Rock to keep it afloat. Studzinski, by then head of investment banking at Blackstone, the private equity group, was among those who had to weigh up the claims of the various groups and conglomerates bidding to buy the bank. Whatever the eventual outcome, Studzinski himself couldn’t lose. The advisers to the consortium led by Sir Richard Branson were known to be getting a minimum £5 million even if the deal fell through. Studzinski’s guarantee was understood to be at the very least double that.
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.)