Authors: Gordon Burn
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, clearing the bags out, grabbing a sly smoke and then waiting for the next load to put in, at the beginning forever cracking his head or his back. At school he was a dreamer and had failed to apply himself. He left school at sixteen and started an apprenticeship as a joiner. He left at nineteen with a belief that he was being exploited and was taken on as ‘hold fodder’ at the airport.
The day he became the Smeatonator started as a day like any other. It was a Saturday, Gordon Brown’s first in office. On 30 June Gordon Brown had been prime minister
for seventy-two hours. In the early hours of Friday a green Mercedes primed with petrol and nails and cans of propane gas had been parked outside the Tiger Tiger nightclub in central London. A second car, similarly primed, had been discovered in a side-street, just around the corner. On the Saturday, just after three, the flaming Jeep Cherokee had been aimed at the main terminal building at Glasgow airport.
Smeato had done something unusual for him: he had screwed up. Saturday is always a busy day, but this one was even busier. It was the first day of the school holiday in Scotland. The arrivals hall was mobbed, his gang were working flat-out and, because he was working so hard (all those golfers, all those sets of clubs, forty or fifty sets to deal with on some flights) he managed to misread one of the screens showing departure times. Either the flight is going to have to be delayed or the golfers’ plane is going to have to leave without their clubs. He feels such a jessie. It’s a no-brainer job but he takes pride in doing it. He feels so peed out. So he has a cigarette. He goes outside and has a wee ciggie. When that’s finished he flames up another one. And that’s when, after two or three draws, this fucking fuckbag of a terrorist cunt – something Allah, something Allah – these bastards, doctors mind, turn their car into the terminal building which is packed with families off for their summer holiday.
There is a sort of screeching, a lot of commotion, a big bang. He looks around to his left and sees a four-by-four that’s on fire. As he runs to help, he sees one of the men in
the car get out and hit a policeman – he’s been a lot of years at the airport, these policemen are his friends, and besides which you can’t stand back anyways and see the law fall: the law falls, we all fall – he sees a man of Arab appearance egress the vehicle and start whackin this polis in the face. And so what are you going to do, he’s going to get the boot in – he wears the steel toe-caps to work – and some other guy banjoes him, banjaxes the cunt nae bother. Then he sees another man, on fire on the other side of the Jeep, bits of his flesh peeling away, blackened flesh, the smell of burning, the intensity of the heat, a taxi driver hosing him down. A man turning to charcoal. A human ember. But still throwing punches, his skin on fire and still fighting, very, very determined. You’re nae hitting the polis mate, there’s nae chance … Boof! Take that home to Allah. You have a duty to care. That’s what you’re told in the airport.
Of course it fucking all went fucking off then, the T-shirts and the websites, the world and its granny wanting him to give them high-fives, the folks going through Paypal to stand him thousands of pints at the airport Holiday Inn which he passed on to the lads at Erskine hospital back from Iraq with fucked-up heads and broken bodies and shattered families, the real heroes.
For a while right after 9/11, New York City firemen attained authentic hero status: the generic ‘FDNY’ secured a position analogous to the one individual heroes used to occupy. But then there was the marketing of ‘Calendar of Heroes’ showing real firemen decked out in
their gear but stripped to the waist and invitingly posed for their admirers. Real heroes today, wrote Thomas de Zengotita, must become stars if they are to exist in public culture at all. That is, they must perform. But as soon as they do that, they can’t compete with the real stars – who
are
performers.
In July Smeato appeared at the Edinburgh fringe as himself in a comedy chat-show. Many in the audience wore their slogan T-shirts – ‘We’ll Set Aboot Yi’, ‘Proudly Banjoing Terrorists Since 2007’ – which they got him to sign afterwards in the bar.
A week or two later Gerry McCann flew in to make what was described as a ‘very uncomfortable’ appearance at the Edinburgh Television Festival, using a media jolly-up to appeal to the media he had used to keep Madeleine’s face in the papers to back off and leave his family alone. It was becoming the ‘Kate and Gerry Show’, he told a mesmerised audience, and that wasn’t going to bring Madeleine home. (‘Madeleine’: what was it about the way he said this word, the Glaswegian intonation, the pugnacious three syllables – Muh-duh-luhn – so far from the softer, feminised French pronunciation, staunin’ up for himsel’, the ‘Wha daur meddle wi’ me’ jutting jaw? Gerry the hard man, Smeato the hard man hero.) He was wearing the yellow Madeleine ribbon pinned on his jacket, along with the green ribbon which was the Portuguese symbol of hope; he had the yellow Madeleine wristband on his wrist. (People would still want the Madeleine bands even if she was found, policeman’s son Calum MacRae,
eighteen, responsible for the campaign’s website and distribution network for Madeleine merchandise, will tell the local press. Her face is a mark. It’s everywhere.)
The first call from Downing Street came at the beginning of August. On 2 August Smeats had been booked to appear on
Richard and Judy
and, because it was his first time, he brought to the sofa a scalding flush and perspiration that boiled the make-up clean off: perspiration streamed down his face, his eyes screwed against it and the strong light.
From the studios he was driven straight to Number 10. After a brief wait the prime minister himself appeared, urged him to call him ‘Gordon’ and showed him into his favourite Thatcher Study, where it was just the two of them alone with the dying light and the most traditional of posh paintings, all dating from the seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries and selected by the prime minister personally from the Government Art Collection: the
Portrait of Edward Montagu, First Earl of Sandwich
has pride of place above the mantelpiece; above the door is Thomas Hofland’s
Warwick Castle
, on the right are John Wooton’s Italianate Landscape and, below this, John Laporte’s
Welsh Scene, Pont Aberglaslyn
.
Richard Branson got in touch and kindly offered Smeato a first-class seat to New York when he was invited to attend the sixth anniversary ceremony of 9/11. At the end of the month, Number 10 were in touch again, extending an invitation to the party conference in Bournemouth, although he was to keep this to himself
and tell nobody where he was going. This was to allow Gordon Brown the
coup de théâtre
of ‘unveiling’ him a few minutes into his keynote speech at conference, his first as prime minister. ‘When the terrorists tried to attack Scotland’s biggest airport, they were answered by the courage of the police and the firefighters – and a baggage handler named John Smeaton.’ Rapturous applause. ‘That man, that hero John Smeaton is here with us today – and on behalf of our country, John, I want to thank you.’
The standing ovation was led by Sarah, the prime minister’s wife, who had been seated beside him. And a month later Sarah Brown was one of the judges, along with Fiona Phillips of GMTV, of the
Daily Mirror
’s ‘Pride of Britain’ Awards which recognised Smeato’s bravery with a statuette. Smeato in the kilt and sporran, Carol Vorderman making the inevitable crack about his legs (‘Get a loada those legs, girls!’). The Browns were there in person to present the award to him, and the following morning he joined his fellow heroes on another visit to Number 10. ‘I’ll be able to show them round,’ he joked, although the pictures would show him looking hot and embarrassed and blushing to the roots of his red-tinged hair.
On his first visit the prime minister had asked him whether he had been born in Glasgow and, when he said he had, he told him that he had been born in Glasgow too. The Smeatons lived in Bishopton, near a farm. In the summer it was two-man tag in the woods and in winter it was snowball fights between the neighbouring roads. You didn’t play on computer games, you played outside. Now
most kids are just into
The X Factor
and ‘let’s be famous’. But he’d had a wee touch of what’s it’s like to be famous, and it’s not particularly great.
‘I think we’re moving from this period when celebrity matters, when people have become famous for being famous,’ Gordon Brown said in an interview a few weeks before he became prime minister. ‘I think you can see that in other countries, too, people are moving away from that to what lies behind the character and the personality. It is a remarkable culture where people appear on television and are famous simply for the act of appearing on television.’
By his second visit to Number 10 in October, SuperSmeato was wishing he could just stay at home and play on his Xbox for a week. Have a few nights in his own bed. Even better, he would be up in the north of Scotland, fly-fishing. His mobile would be back at home, switched off, and nobody would know where he was. ‘At first you want to hide,’ he said, ‘but as the applause grows, you realise that you’ve got to take it in good grace. It would be rude to complain, wouldn’t it?’
John (‘That man, that hero’) and Gordon (‘What a guy’). Gordo and Smeato. The only real touch he had on things. One of the few. They were coming from the same place.
*
A month after taking over from Tony Blair, Gordon Brown flew to Washington for two days of meetings at Camp David with President Bush. It was his first trip abroad as prime minister, and there was high anticipation
to see how Gordon-and-George would play as a follow-up to the long-running but universally panned, increasingly reviled, George-and-Tony show.
In the run-up to the trip, hardly anybody, in print or on television, failed to mention Blair’s own first visit to Camp David after Bush had been elected in 2000, or to re-run footage of it. Tony had decided to dress casual for the occasion and had turned out in too-tight blue Wrangler cords (‘bollock-crushing’ was a description used at the time) which he attempted to wear with an insouciant, bandy-legged cow-poke swagger. Bush meanwhile wore the presidential brown leather bomber jacket and shit-kicker Texan snakeskin boots. The ‘Village People’ sniggers became front-page headlines the following day when, responding to a question about what he believed the two men had in common, Bush memorably replied: ‘Well, we both use Colgate toothpaste.’
‘People are going to be wondering how you know that, George,’ Blair piped up flirtatiously just-like-that after the hilarity subsided. Memories of this earlier encounter seemed strangely to colour the coverage of Bush–Brown – GB–GB – six years later.
Gordon, it was generally recognised, didn’t ‘do’ casual or small talk. He was an Americanist but other than that he usually didn’t ‘do’ abroad. As Chancellor, he never stayed at embassies anywhere. Even on his visits to Washington on World Bank and other business, he shunned the opulence of the British Ambassador’s residence on Massachusetts Avenue in favour of a hotel.
Bush’s people had responded to the problem by inviting him to a ‘sleep-over’ at the presidential retreat in Maryland with dinner
à deux
in the Laurel Cabin with the president on the Sunday night.
Prior to to the trip, Foreign Office minister Mark Malloch-Brown (one of several non-Labour figures Gordon Brown had brought into his ‘big tent’ to counter his control-freak reputation) had warned that London would no longer be ‘joined at the hip’ to the Bush White House. To signal this, at Brown’s request, prime minister and president were to wear suits and address each other formally. This was intended to reinforce the message that the relationship from now on would be strictly business; that Brown did not want to be Bush’s buddy and that the ‘special relationship’ would be between Britain and the US rather than between Number 10 and the White House. Turning pathologies into assets. So what would happen? In the absence of any personal chemistry, the answer, it seemed to be unanimously agreed, would lie in the body language of the two men.
‘Gordon and George spend their first night together’ was the
Observer
’s headline on the Sunday of Brown’s departure for Washington. ‘Today Gordon Brown arrives in America for his first sleep-over with a new leader,’ Andrew Rawnsley’s column friskily began. ‘They have had a brief encounter behind closed doors at the White House before Mr Brown became prime minister … but this will be the first time – metaphorically and literally – that Gordon and George have spent the night together.’
The tone of larky innuendo, looking back nostalgically perhaps to both the Clinton frolics and the days when George and Tony obliged with such lively copy, was kept up by the BBC’s political editor, Nick Robinson, who, in his commentary of the touch-down in Washington, remarked that ‘Gordon Brown was accompanied not by his wife, but by a young man – the new Foreign Secretary, as it happens.’