Free Born Yesterday by Gordon Burn Page A

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.

Chapter Four
    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 certainmembers 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 popimpresario 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