I arrived in London – along with Boy George, his favourite feather pillow to hand, and with the entire Air Force One entourage at his command – just in time to see Jeffrey Archer being conveyed in a Black Maria to Pentonville Prison. Well, not exactly: that’s what I would have seen when I last lived in Britain nearly 12 years ago, but this is exactly the kind of change you notice when you are a visiting expatriate. This time, private-enterprise Securicor guards swept Archer away in a huge white truck, prominently labelled with their trade name, heading for the Dickensian-sounding “Belmarsh” Prison; and, instead of finding himself incarcerated in Brixton or Wormwood Scrubs, say, Archer was banged up in an institution whose very bogus name is a symbolic legacy of the Thatcher regime. I gather that Britain – in its everlasting quest to be just like America – now has more prisoners per capita than any other country in Europe. Will you now reverse this trend, David Blunkett?
Poor Boy George did not even make the front page of the Times the day after his lunch with the Queen (she was “neat”, he thought), amid all the Archer dramas. He had gone to a great deal of effort, too. American presidents and secretaries of state invariably travel across the Atlantic like most of us: overnight on the eastbound portion. It helps, naturally, to have your own private bedroom and bathroom aboard Air Force One, and to be able to order the exact times of take-offs and landings. But Dubbya forsook a day in the office on Wednesday in order to fly to RAF Lyneham from Andrews Air Force Base during the day, thus ensuring his head would hit the feather pillow only on unturbulent British soil. You could see the razor-sharp wit that resulted next day when one earnest 11-year-old boy asked him what the White House was like: “White!” came back the staggeringly fast riposte.
By the time I was back on my way to DC, I learned that Archer had already been placed in the category “D” classification of prisoner – the ones requiring the least draconian prison vigilance or discipline. And we had already seen three days earlier that a besuited Archer was allowed to attend his mother’s funeral in Grantchester without so much as a handcuff or leg shackle in sight. This, I think, is yet another example of Benign Britain vs Brutal America: here, Archer would almost certainly have been led away from court in handcuffs and leg shackles, and equally likely would not have been allowed to go to his mother’s funeral. My friend Webb Hubbell – a former crony of the Clintons who rose to become number three in the Justice Department, before falling foul of Inspector Starr over his law firm’s charges and expenses – tells horrifying stories of his 19 months’ imprisonment. On his first night, he was put in a cell with five young black men, who regaled him in gruesome detail, all night, about what they intended to do to him as soon as he fell asleep. Then, one Christmas Eve, he was abruptly told to get ready to move – and hoped that, just possibly, he might be heading to a prison closer to home, so that he could see his wife and children. Instead, he and five or so other prisoners had their hands and ankles shackled to the seats on a prison plane – which took off without any of the prisoners being any the wiser as to their destination. Then, Webb suddenly noticed there was a crisis unfolding among the pilots and the prison officers – who, clearly scared, rapidly assumed the crash-landing emergency posture. But Hubbell and the other prisoners were not told anything, and were left to face whatever hellish inferno awaited them while still shackled hand and foot to the plane’s infrastructure. I’m pleased to think that Archer – a man I have met only once – will not face such cruel and unusual punishment at the hands of HMP.
Why are there so many closed-circuit televisions peering everywhere in Britain? This, I suspect, is another of those trends you notice most if you live in another country. Is it because Britain is peculiarly advanced in eavesdropping technology, or because the country is being increasingly assaulted by Big Brother government? Or is it just that some enterprising CCTV makers know how to make a quick bob or two? In some other areas, Britain remains bad: the urinals are smellier and less efficient than those in the US, the traffic is appalling, and diesel and petrol fumes even worse. But, otherwise, it was a joy to visit Britain in the summer of 2001: the food is infinitely better (except at the new Royal Opera House restaurant, unfortunately), and British supermarkets have a much greater diversity of organic foods. Driving down a still-bright Cornish lane well past 9pm, hearing Mozart’s 40th Symphony bursting out, live, from Cheltenham Town Hall: that’s what it means to be English. I am proud to have invented the word “Murdochisation” more than 15 years ago, but the BBC now seems in better shape than I expected then. But why are so many Americanisms entering the British lexicon? Why do British kids now have “sleepovers” and “playdates”? Why is the Tory leadership battle now “too close to call”? Why does even Trevor McDonald refer to the “train station”? And whoever told London Underground employees that they now run something called “the subway”?
I learned of two deaths while I was in England – the most newsworthy being that of Kay Graham, the legendary newspaper empress and my old neighbour. I had last seen her at a dinner party about a month ago when I was shocked by her appearance: she had had two difficult hip-replacement operations, but had seemed to have recovered reasonably well from them. Somebody helped her down a few steps, but she then seemed to be able to reach her table on her own only through sheer will-power; her cheeks were sunken and she had that pallor of one whose death is, somehow, imminent. I have many vignettes of her, but one is of her taking a lone, unrecognised walk in Montrose Park, gazing wistfully at a little girl in pigtails skipping by her; despite her worldly successes, she could seem unutterably sad at times. Now her earthly remains have already been reunited with those of her manic-depressive husband, Phil (who committed suicide almost four decades ago), at the hard-to-get-into Oak Hill Cemetery, overlooking the marital mansion they once shared.
The other death that affected me was that of Martin Wright, a photographer with whom I had worked in Northern Ireland when we were both in our twenties. I once discovered the exact venue where talks between the British government and the Provisional IRA were taking place – talks whose very existence had been denied by the government – and Martin snapped away. Suddenly, we were surrounded by half a dozen or so men in blue tracksuits – all pointing submachine guns at us. That was my first experience of the SAS. Needless to say, Martin’s film never saw the light of day and the Observer made light of such an outrage on our shores. Martin died earlier this month, aged 48 – a fate increasingly unknown among well-off, health-conscious Americans. You notice this in the obituaries: movers and shakers in the New York Times will often have reached their hundreds, while all too many of their British equivalents in the Times barely last their three-score-and-ten. (It’s called preventative healthcare, Tone.)
Even alongside Boy George, Tony Blair cannot seem to help looking like the unctuous new boy, desperate to ingratiate himself with the head prefect. Meanwhile, I’ve noticed a new consensus cropping up on both sides of the Atlantic: that Boy George is actually a whole lot smarter than people think. The real truth is that it is amazing how much a little diplomatic finessing and spin here and there can achieve: fudge the Kyoto Protocol and nuclear missile defence policies and stall dissent, and maybe even toss Vladimir Putin a couple of bones over reneging on the 1972 ABM treaty. This conventional wisdom will be reported as fact before long, I predict. But be fooled not: once a Boy George, always a Boy George.
The last time I crossed the Atlantic, I was fascinated to see how censors had been at work on the in-flight soundtrack of 13 Days; the Kennedy brothers were perpetually angry with “Soviet buzzards” during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Flying back last Tuesday, I was indebted to a young NS reader for telling me that Brad Pitt was repeatedly being told to “flush off” in The Mexican, while a “son of a butcher” featured prominently in The Mummy. Happy summer holidays, as they now say here.
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