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 voice-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,
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 voice-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,
Similar Books
