Born Yesterday by Gordon Burn Page B

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 andabuse and the international trafficking of children.
    While working, successfully, to prevent General Pinochet’s extradition to Spain to face torture charges, Michael Caplan’s only 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’.