Free Born Yesterday by Gordon Burn

of perception excluded? In a room, by a wall. The uncanniness of something excluded, closed off.
    After very many months, a picture of the room in the Ocean Club resort in Praia da Luz from which Madeleine had been subtracted – she had been sleeping in the bed with the twins, Sean and Amelie, sleeping either side of her in their cots at the time – was finally released. The white walls, the wall-length wardrobe, the bare floor, the wooden chair, the narrow bed, the mattress stripped, the sheets bunched, a baby-blue blanket thrown over a pregnant pillow, the little chest of drawers. What was locked and what was open? Was there an abductor? A gauze-like green curtain was it, between bed and chair, lifted on the wind, billowing in? The world’s largest-ever manhunt. The town awash with rumour. The clairvoyants and the diviners. The astral seers. The texters and bloggers and the spitters of abuse.
    Tony Blair announced his intention of standing downas prime minister on 10 May, a week to the day after Madeleine’s disappearance. The 3 May, the day she disappeared, was the tenth anniversary of Blair’s first full day as prime minister. Overnight on 2 May 1997, he flew from his Sedgefield constituency to London; later in the day, he drove past cheering crowds to the Palace to receive the official invitation to form a government. He spent the following day, a Saturday, finalising Cabinet appointments and completing the fine-tuning of the new government.
    Two big publishing events took place in the early summer of 2007. The first was the final instalment of the Harry Potter saga, The Deathly Hallows . (Jo Rowling’s plan to have a bookmark with Madeleine’s picture on it inside every copy was abandoned when it was decided that young readers would find this too distressing.) The other big bookworld push was for Alastair Campbell’s ‘Diaries’ of his years spent spinning for Tony Blair and New Labour.
    Campbell’s diary entries for the summer and autumn of 1999 turned out to be dominated by the event of Cherie Blair’s pregnancy and the birth the following May of Leo, the first baby born to a serving prime minister for more than a century. It becomes clear that the new baby brought Blair great solace through difficult times. But returning to Number 10 at the end of a gruelling foreign trip or a long day dealing with the foot-and-mouth crisis or strategy meetings for beginning the second Gulf War, he would sometimes return to Downing Street to find that the baby had climbed in with Cherie and he would end uppicking his way through the trains and Thomas the Tank Engine toys scattered across the carpet in Leo’s room and collapse exhausted into Leo’s bed.
    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