Unlawfully Killed

We all know clairvoyance is just a magic act, a branch of showbusiness – how could there be such a thing as psychic power? 


18 years ago I was at a dinner party in London when I noticed the lady opposite staring at me a little too intensely. When she caught my eye, she leaned forward and whispered, “You’re going to marry an American”.  Such impertinence, and totally inappropriate, because, having recently divorced my first wife, I was rather publicly in love with an English television presenter, who was sitting next to me at the dinner. 


“And you will have six children,” she went on. This was too much. No way would there be any more children: three was quite enough. I told this story at my wedding at Jo’s parents’ home in Laguna Beach. Baby Izzy was there with my four other children. Everyone laughed, especially at the prospect of my American wife bringing me yet another child. 


But what I didn’t reveal was the rest of what the clairvoyant said that night. It’s been parked at the back of my mind all these years, but was chillingly recalled last week by the coroner’s verdict on the bizarre death of MI6 employee Gareth Williams. 


After dinner, the clairvoyant took me aside. She had something very important to tell me. “Your friend didn’t die the way they say, you know. They said it was sexual and perverted, but one day the truth will emerge.” 

Stephen Milligan MP

I knew immediately she was talking about one of my closest friends.  A respected member of the community, we’d been on holidays together and spent long evenings arguing about politics in his little house in Chiswick. He’d been engaged to a delightful journalist called Julie. He’d been foreign editor at the Sunday Times, a senior BBC journalist, then finally an MP. One day his body was discovered in scandalous circumstances. He name was Stephen Milligan. 


All this I knew, but didn’t breathe a word to the clairvoyant. “There’s a dark, evil force,” she went on. “ and a faraway country. Oman. He went to Oman, or somewhere near there, Yemen maybe, and when he was there he found something out. So they killed him. One day it will all come out and your friend’s honour will be restored.” 


Then she mentioned a name – a famous name. Apparently there was a connection to spying. He had been involved in my friend’s death. It was all weird and nonsensical. 


The police hadn’t investigated Stephen’s death beyond confirming the ghastly details: he was found on his kitchen table, a black plastic bag over his head, a cord round his neck, naked but for a woman’s stockings and suspenders, a small piece of satsuma in his mouth. They called it auto-erotic asphyxiation. In one mad moment, the life and reputation of a brilliant, witty, utterly moral friend, journalist, politician and godfather of my eldest son, had been completely destroyed. 


Cross dressing, auto-erotic asphyxiation: sounds familiar? Stephen Milligan’s inquest may have ruled out foul play, not so Gareth Williams’ coroner this week. 

Williams couldn’t possibly have put himself into the red bag in the bath and there were no fingerprints. Why did MI6 wait a whole week to report him missing, by which time any small scratches on the body would have gone? The verdict: he was “probably killed unlawfully”. 


According to last week’s Independent on Sunday, there have been 17 mysterious deaths linked to the defence or intelligence services over the past 50 years, a third featuring bizarre sexual practices or asphyxia. Men like Stephen Drinkwater, the GCHQ clerk, found choked with a plastic bag over his head; journalist Jonathan Moyle, hanged inside a tiny wardrobe while working on a story about a dodgy arms deal; ex-MI6 agent and writer James Rusbridger, discoverd in a gas mask surrounded by bondage pictures; and Stephen Milligan MP.  


It all reads like a spy thriller, I know. And yet you don’t need to be psychic to know that one day the true story behind all these cases will emerge. But I am quite sure my friend will be vindicated. Because a clairvoyant told me.

If I Were Jeremy Hunt

A few weeks ago I was invited to speak at a conference in Salford where our esteemed Secretary of State for Culture and Media gave the opening keynote address. I was booked to reply the following day in a panel session called “If I Were Jeremy Hunt…”

You have to hand it to Hunt: he’s is a tough act to follow. The packed audience of hardened television and radio professionals rather warmed to his wit and assured confidence. Standing centre stage and tieless in a dark suit (it was a media conference, after all), he spoke without notes or autocue, demonstrating the superior, charming, permasmiled demeanour that can only have derived from a proper boarding school education.  Head boy at Charterhouse School (fees £30,534 per annum), first class degree in PPE at Magdalen College, Oxford, president of the university’s Conservative Association, he's the perfect Tory politician. Before last week’s revelations many spoke of him as Cameron’s natural successor.

The audience in Salford were left in no doubt about Hunt’s unerring conviction that, like the rest of Cameron’s cabinet, he is absolutely right about everything he says. He and his colleagues clearly believe that government policy shouldn't be influenced by people who know what they are talking about: industry experts or doctors or the armed forces, or, God forbid, the lifetime's experience of a cabinet minister’s own civil servants.

Being something of an expert myself – if working within the television industry for 40 years counts as accreditation – I felt justified in disagreeing with some of Hunt's policies, particularly his crazy initiative for local television. This was a man whose first task in Government was to tear up Trinity Mirror's fairly won pilot contract to supply a groundbreaking multi-media news service here in the north east of England and replace it with his own barmy plan to hand out television channels to a load of community groups who are bound to go bust in the process.  Trinity Mirror is, of course, the newspaper group that is Murdoch's biggest competitor in the UK.  A coincidence, I'm sure.

Of course the views of people who could be expected to know what they are talking about have never really been taken into consideration when formulating any of this government's policies, which is why most of them are lying in tatters: instead, the cabinet have relied on “special advisers”, and the tittle-tattle of their exclusive clubs and cocktail parties. This is a government that listens to no one but themselves.

The head of a very large media organisation, who is not called Murdoch, recently told me that their senior editorial team was invited to tea at Downing Street for an informal “consultation”, but ended up listening, sandwich-less, to Dave hectoring them for an hour about his plans. Not one of them was asked a single question.

Back in Salford, I’d written myself quite a formal speech in response to Hunt's comments but, having seen the master in action, I stood in the centre of the stage, took it out of my jacket pocket and quietly ripped it to shreds.  This, I think, got me brownie points and quite a few laughs, after which I attempted to restore some balance to the debate about the future of media in our country. I knew exactly what I’d do if I were Jeremy Hunt, and I told them.  Wasting time on hyperlocal television stations wasn't part of my proposed agenda as the next Secretary of State;  listening to the industry and the viewers most definitely was.

But I confess I was utterly upstaged by the wonderful veteran journalist Gillian Reynolds, who rose to her feet and performed a glorious parody of Hunt himself: she portrayed a man who loves himself more than he’ll ever love the electorate, preening, smiling, perfect, who neither cares nor understands the common man, a professional politician who, like all his cronies in this Coalition, is utterly out of touch with reality. She brought the house down.

What a contrast to see him in the House of Commons last Wednesday: embarrassed, halting, his head buried nervously in a carefully constructed statement, Cameron and Osborne squirming uncomfortably behind him. Here was their own firewall self-combusting in front of them, caught out by his deviously fawning “special adviser” and his own closeness to the Murdoch dynasty, any pretence of “quasi-judicial” impartiality utterly busted.

I guess he’ll try to wriggle out of it to the very end, but I know what I would do right now if I were Jeremy Hunt: I'd resign.

Joining The Mickey Mouse Club

Izzy stabbed another chip into the ketchup, held it high in the air, then paused and frowned. Suddenly she exclaimed, in a voice so shrill the whole restaurant turned to look: “Mummy when are you going to speak proper English like me and Daddy?”

A moment’s silence, then an eruption of laughter. Izzy was surrounded by her American uncles, cousins and friends. Despite 7 years in the UK, any slight British twang in Mummy’s voice had been erased the moment we stepped off the plane in Los Angeles two weeks ago. 

Since then, Izzy, Jo and I have been filled with Californian hospitality. With a different set of friends and family to visit every day, and scores of much-missed restaurants to patronize, I managed to add 10 pounds to my already overpadded waistline in as many days. 

The problem with Southern California, our home from home, is that it’s all so perfect. People are complaining because petrol (“it’s not gas, silly Mummy”) has hit $4.50 a gallon (60 pence a litre); the supermarkets are packed with cheap, local produce; the temperature hovers between 75 and 85 degrees every sunny day; whales and dolphins swim past the beach restaurants; cheap and cheerful Mexicans are there for nasty jobs like cleaning homes and digging gardens.

The recession, for more people, hardly happened: the economy is growing again, the plants in the perfect gardens never stopped. Sure, the underbelly of America has problems as severe as the poorest parts of the UK, but you’d never notice it in California’s manicured, gated, comfortable life.

Not that I want to give the impression that I’ve been on holiday for the past couple of weeks. It was actually quite tough work. Twice I had to drag myself up at 3am to watch Newcastle United cruise towards Champions League glory in high definition; every night I had to endure a marathon wine-tasting from my very generous brother-in-law, determined to convince me that great California wine is as good as its French counterpart; and you wouldn’t believe how hard it is to remember to bring enough change for the valet parking.

One morning I felt so bloated and indolent that I donned a pair of swimming shorts (“Daddy’s wearing trainers, not sneakers, Mummy”) and set off to run my own London marathon round the block of neatly grassed front lawns.

I swear I got a cheer from the neighbours – or maybe it was a suppressed scream of horror.

My nephews cruelly photographed me and posted the result on Facebook: apparently I reminded them of Borat.

Izzy, meanwhile, found Paradise: she met Mickey Mouse at Disneyland.  Not the EuroDisney or Florida fakes, but the original rodent in his actual home.

She even saw his gloves going round in his washing machine. 

Jo met him too: I was stabbed with jealousy as Jo threw herself into the arms of someone even older than me. Izzy just melted with excitement.

Sadly all that’s behind me now. This morning, I braved the icy rain to put my Californian beet seeds into the sodden ground of my Northumbrian vegetable garden; back at my mother-in-law’s house, the roses are in glorious full bloom. I turned up the central heating to full, just as I had the air-conditioner two days ago. I filled our cars with fuel in case the tanker drivers go on strike: for the same price I could have driven halfway across America.

Jo, who’s decided to stay over there with Izzy till the weather gets better, has just rung to say they are eating burgers and fries by the sea. I can’t blame them staying on: it is another world. But I’m making the best of it. Yesterday at St James Park I helped cheer Newcastle to victory – so much more exciting than watching them on television; I’ve filled the house with daffodils and tulips from the garden – there’s nothing like an English Spring, even a wet one; now I’m off to the pub with friends for lunch – roast beef and a pint of bitter is nicer than any burger.

Meanwhile, Izzy, please remember you are eating chips, not fries.

It Could Be You

By late Friday afternoon, there was only one question on everyone’s lips: “How will you spend it?”

You’d have to take a lot of holidays, buy quite a few houses and a stack of diamond rings to make a dent in your Mega Millions Lottery fortune. Here in America, 640 million dollars worth of anticipation had erupted into full-scale lottery fever.

My twin nephews were arguing about which type of Porsche to buy. When I pointed out that the winner could buy 5,000 of them, or maybe just 50 plus a mansion in Beverly Hills with a 50-car garage to house them, they began to get as excited as the rest of America.

The TV news was full of interviews with people looking forward to their new-found wealth. A taxi driver was going to drive his cab to the busiest intersection in town and leave it in the middle of the road to be impounded; downtrodden manual workers were going buy their businesses and sack their managers; Mexican maids were buying Caribbean islands and never coming back.

I’m writing this in a leafy, comfortably well-off town a few miles to the north of Los Angeles. Even here there were queues for tickets outside convenience stores on Friday afternoon. Meanwhile, 2,700 miles and a whole world away to the East, someone walked into a 7-Eleven store in a tired street of rundown shops in the small Maryland community of Milford Mill (average per capita income $20,195, 8% of the largely black population below the poverty line) and bought a single $1 “quick pick” ticket chosen randomly by the computer. Just 46 minutes later, in an embarrassingly brief televised draw in Atlanta (with a frantic presenter rushing through his few seconds of fame), that mystery person became $233 million richer, one of three winners in the United States.

As I write, no one knows the identity of the ticket holders, but all the newspapers and talkshows are full of advice for how they should spend their money. Meanwhile the owners of the 7-Eleven store that sold the winning ticket, an immigrant couple from Ethiopia called Abera and Mimi, were shocked to find they were $100,000 better off themselves – a thank-you from the lottery company.

Of course, behind the winners’ stories are the losers: 100 million of them. And you, and me, and everyone who’s ever bought a lottery ticket. For there’s only one real winner in a lottery, and that’s the taxman.

The real “mega millions” are those earned by the state, even if the distribution of some of the revenue is to what they primly call “good causes”. If government and state-sponsored lotteries were made to issue health warnings like they have on cigarette packets, I doubt they’d sell a single ticket: “This is a voluntary tax – half your money is snatched away for causes you’re most unlikely to benefit from, like opera and the Olympics; and you’re 20 times more likely to be struck by lightning in your lifetime than get your hands on the top prize. Enjoy.”

In the UK, someone buying five tickets a week - £260 a year – may as well simply write the government a personal cheque for £130. You won’t get a thank you note.

Of course, that’s not what I said back in the early 90s, when I was part of the original winning Camelot lottery team – my job was to write the part of the bid document that dealt with television. I remember sitting in Saatchi’s London office in in London as they unveiled the “It Could Be You” logo for the first time. “It could, but it almost certainly won’t be”, I muttered under my breath.

But at least when you watch the Olympics on television this Summer, and read about the theatre companies that have gone bust because their lottery-funded grants have been cut to pay for it, you can feel real pride for all that cash you’ve invested to make it happen. And maybe one of you will be watching the action from your Caribbean island with your 50 Porsches lined up on the verandah. Good luck to you.

Ratings Wars

[Last night the BBC's new talent show The Voice went up against the ITV juggernaut Britain's Got Talent.  Was it one reality show too far?]

Well, who would have thought Britain had so much talent? Saturday evening has been turned into the long night of the wannabe.

This morning the TV trade press (Broadcast Magazine) announced that Britain’s Got Talent had “triumphed” over the BBC’s new talent show The Voice. Nothing could be further from the truth, for during the 20 minutes period that the two shows went head to head, the BBC actually won convincingly, by nine million to ITV’s six and a half, even though the average ratings for the whole of Britain’s Got Talent were rather higher.

Take it from me (as one who has spent quite a portion of his career supplying shows to the BBC for the traditional Saturday night battle), getting nine million to switch on (and stay watching) your first show is a more than a success, it’s a barnstorming, miraculous, champagne-popping triumph. I can’t recall another debut that came anywhere close: even shows that have gone on to become hits, like Strictly Come Dancing, had less than 5 million on their first airing.

But despite this talk of ratings wars (and I promise, Britain’s press will be full of it for the next two months, so we’d better get used to it), this wasn’t a battle of equals at all. In fact, when most of us thought the talent show market had been saturated, both networks managed to come up with surprising twists on the tired old genre.

The Voice really is what it says on the tin. Four judges sit with their backs to the singers, so the contestants perform in front of four impenetrable chair backs, willing them to swing round before they finish their performance. Influenced neither by looks nor backstory, the judges’ decision is based solely on the voice they hear. If a judge does turn to face a contestant, then that judge becomes their coach for the rest of the series.

Several failed: Phil the delivery driver with his grey-haired Nan sobbing in the wings, who undoubtedly would have had the Britain’s Got Talent judges begging for more, went home emptyhanded.

But where it gets clever is that when two or more judges pick the same person, then, for the first time I’ve ever seen in a talent show, all the power goes to the contestant. Several singers were chosen by all four celebrity judges, who then turned into groveling lackeys as they tried to woo the candidate to join their team. It was like watching real recording industry pitches: they promised the earth – world tours and endless riches; they name dropped without shame (producer and rapper will.i.am mentioned “Mike” Jackson every third sentence, whilst Tom Jones dragged up an anecdote about Elvis). Meanwhile the wannabe, who frankly would have been quite happy with just another glass of beer in the BBC green room, had to pick a judge to entrust with their future. My favourite moment was when one candidate completely turned the tables by putting in an X Factor-long pause in the middle of the announcement of his choice, throwing judges, audience and even the TV producers, into confusion.

What was strange about The Voice, though, was that in a typically BBC way, they only featured attractive, young contestants in the first show – thereby losing the drama of the judges turning round and facing a Susan Boyle. This is a format designed for a disconnect between vocal ability and looks, yet they haven’t exploited it - yet.

Not so Britain’s Got Talent. Incredibly, they found themselves another Boyle in an extremely large teenager called Jonathan, who sings like an operatic angel, albeit with an underwhelming though more attractive girl singer called Charlotte. I wonder how many weeks it will take for Simon Cowell to split them up and give Charlotte the boot. Jonathan is a star in the making.

But the real hit of BGT was David Walliams. He and Cowell are the new Morecambe and Wise. I have never seen Cowell look more uncomfortable and edgy (and, as a consequence, perform better) as Walliams ribbed him mercilessly. That relationship alone is enough to turn me into a Saturday night couch potato.

It's Only A Game

The shocked faces of the 30,000 spectators said it all. This was no longer a game, it was a moment of human tragedy: at stake was not a trophy, but a young man’s life.

One moment the crowd had been shouting at their heroes, groaning at their mistakes, mocking their opponents, then, suddenly, there was a confused hush. A Bolton player far away from the action was lying face down in the grass. The television commentator spotted him and the cameras zoomed in. Had he taken a bad knock? No, he had simply collapsed.

Within moments the commentator’s tone grew sombre. Despite having a bank of high definition closeup cameras at his disposal, the producer of the television coverage held on to a wide shot. In his control van parked outside the ground, he could see on the other cameras how six paramedics were frantically trying to revive the unconscious player. As they tried vainly to restart his heart with a defibrillator, the director pointed his cameras at the crowd: people were clinging to each other in disbelief, weeping powerlessly, willing the young man to get up, not believing the reality of the situation just a few yards in front of them. What should have been a terrible private moment of personal crisis was being enacted in full public display. From time to time, a chant went round the ground, the whole crowd calling out his name: “Fabrice Muamba”.

Just 23 years old, Fabrice was born in Kinshasa, in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. His father fled the country with his family during the chaos following the military coup against the dictator Mobutu. Fabrice was just eleven when he was uprooted to East London, speaking not a word of English. Yet he was incredibly bright, and passed 10 GCSEs as well as A Levels in English, French and Maths. Meanwhile Fabrice’s real passion was football.

He was good – fast, with exceptional control – and was snapped up straight into the English top flight. Indeed, he was so good that he was selected to wear the white shirt of England 57 times before he’d reached the age of 21. At home, he and his girlfriend Shauna were looking happily to the future. They already have a son called Joshua Jeremiah; on Valentine’s Day they got engaged to be married. Then on Saturday, in front of millions, Fabrice’s life was put on pause.

We ask so much of our sportsmen and women, yet we sometimes forget that they are all just ordinary human people, who would be exactly like the rest of us, had not a quirk of extraordinary ability led them into a world where only the best will do. As fans and supporters, we tend to focus only on their few minutes of supreme effort, forgetting just what intense commitment and training goes into every move. The cheers of the crowd can turn to boos with one bad pass. Meanwhile the media whips us up into frenzy with talk of wealth, foibles and failings, while our footballers are expected to walk the very cliff edge of human physical achievement. Our Premier League players now operate at a level of fitness, energy and skill that could not have been dreamt of when Muamba first kicked a ball on the back streets of Kinshasa, let alone when I was a boy.

It’s moments like this when I can’t begrudge professional footballers one penny of their earnings during their painfully short careers. Nowadays we expect feats of physical endurance way beyond the design specifications of the human body. Why are we surprised when, sometimes, and quite unexpectedly, the human body rebels?

Quite why Muamba’s heart gave way at that moment we don’t yet know. But throughout the country every football fan, irrespective of allegiance, is praying for him. At the end of the day, we all know it’s only a game.

How Real Men Bake

My thanks to Valerie Burke-Ward for sending this in response to my latest post.