Born Yesterday (13 page)

Born Pat Pilkington in Salford, she was part of that first generation of English actors for whom a working-class background and a north-country accent were regarded as bonuses rather than as drawbacks which would exclude them from top-class work. Before landing the part of Elsie Tanner she had appeared in Sandy Powell comedies like
Cup Tie Honeymoon
, made by the Mancunian Film Corporation in a converted church in Dickenson Road, Manchester, and in some of the British kitchen-sink classics of the late-1950s such as
The L-Shaped Room
. (She had narrowly missed out on being cast as Alice Aisgill in the film of John Braine’s novel of the new cut-throat culture of getting and spending in the West Riding,
Room at the
Top
.)

‘Thay’s a lovely big baussant bugger.’ This, from an elderly male admirer fighting through a crowd to get near her at some function, was the sort of thing she was happy to take as a compliment. ‘It was truthful and it had acid in it,’ she once said, condensing the secret of
Coronation Street
’s appeal into a single sentence. She learned to treat the collapse of her private and public personas, and the resulting
confusion among the
Street
faithful, as only understandable.

‘Any more of that flamin’ shoving and I’ll come among you and sort you all out – and don’t think I’m not capable.’ Paul Trippett was amazed by the split-second transformation from sweet smiling Miss Phoenix, doing her bit on the stump, getting the vote out for her Tony’s Cherie’s lovely Tony, to hatchet-faced Mrs Tanner. There had been no public announcement of her appearance at Wingate community centre at West Cornforth, the village always known locally, for reasons nobody alive could remember, as ‘Doggie’, but there were thousands milling around outside by the time she arrived.

The thronging crowd, the TV lights, the perplexing shiver of celebrity, the press scrum. They were the kinds of scenes that operation SCAB was now deliberately consigning to the past. Part of the dedicated process of erasure of TB, whose parades were now all gone by.

For many within the constituency he was just a celebrity. He was on the TV. They wanted to see him. Not over landlord problems or illegal immigrants or the hospitals or schools. They just wanted to step into the glow. They were exercising their democratic right. They had picked up the phone and voted for Jonny Regan from Trimdon and seen him come in as runner-up ahead of that lardarse Jade Goody, useless fucking object, in
Big Brother
3
. Jonny the fireman, man, canny lad, you’d knaa ’im, bit of a rough diamond, deein’ panto an’ aal that now thi reckon, yid recognise his mam, smart little woman, dad gets in the club, played there in his group with his brother
a couple times for Blair and his cronies at some bliddy a-dog-is-not-just-for-Christmas-save-some-for-Boxing-Day bliddy chequebooks-on-the-table, snouts-in-the-trough shitehawk fucking function.

‘We got it in people’s minds: “Local man …” Man?’ Paul suddenly remembered his PCs. ‘I mean … a local
person
.’

The erasure of Blair and Camelot culture was just another erasure in an area whose history was full of erasures, wipings-out, disappearances. The decorative pulley wheel, painted baby blue, that stands at Trimdon Grange now, on Jonny Regan’s doorstep, ever a favourite of TB’s for sessions with the press, is a reminder of the black-on-black landscapes and the lives that were once lived in the dark, underground; a token of the mining past whose deep scars have been landscaped and reclaimed; swarded over; attractively concealed. Huge shafts crammed with plastic rubbish.

The Martyrdom of the Mines – an ancient image. Militant masculinity. Blood on the coal. ‘Grimly honest’ realist dramas in which, as Greene once noted, the colliery winding gear, silhouetted against the sky, the pit disaster and the warning siren became as cinematically familiar as the Eiffel Tower or the Houses of Parliament. Powerful symbols of the ‘old Labour’ heartlands from which Tony Blair had so successfully extricated his party.

The false teeth which could be pawned on the Monday and taken out on the Friday since there would be no fresh meat to chew on before Sunday roast came round. ‘Nay,
Christ, bloody ’ell,’ Jack Gillam, famous outspoken northern impresario, once cautioned the future Elsie Tanner, ‘you can’t go touring round the provinces with a name like Pilkington. They’ll think you’re selling sausages or summat. Now, what can we call you?’

The Third Way. The recognition that mass politics was becoming middle-class politics. A politics that abandoned the old ideologies and claimed none of its own. ‘If the man hadn’t been Labour,’ Paul Trippett told him, ‘he wouldn’t have been with us.’ 10 Years, 3 Elections, 1 Great Britain.

On the last Monday of the by-election campaign Jacqui Smith, the new Home Secretary, dropped in to show her support for Phil Wilson. A retired couple on the council estate at Trimdon Grange had been teed up to tell her about their worries with regards to the rowdy behaviour of local young people and she was going to be able to reassure them and the local press who were present that this was just the sort of anti-social behaviour that she and the government of Gordon Brown were determined to come down on like a ton of bricks.

This was all going to happen over a relaxed cup of tea and biscuits at 14.40 hrs. By 14.30, the press and police and officers of the Special Branch and a mobile unit and uniformed staff of ‘Streetsafe: fighting the fear of crime’ bristling with CCTV cameras and radio masts were all in place, and the lady and the elderly gentleman, Mr and Mrs Churchill, stuck their heads tentatively out of their
door just in time to have two youths with the England three-lions legend tattooed on their chests (they weren’t wearing shirts), and who just happened to be passing, scowl aggressively at them and splat out gobbets of spit from between their front teeth in unison.

Jacqui Smith was new in the job. The first-ever female Home Secretary, the youngest since Churchill nearly a century before, she had been in place almost exactly two weeks. In the first 48 hours she had had the fluffed terrorist car-bomb attacks in London and Glasgow. There had been the row over whether she had shown too much cleavage while making a statement in the Commons, miscalculating the angles of the overhead cameras.

In Trimdon she seemed nervous. She was wearing trousers and expensive-looking suede stilettos. The trouser-suit had become creased through sitting and the creases emphasised the curves of her belly and her bottom. She was wearing a pendant necklace that he became fascinated by, the play of light through the purplish glass droplet onto the chaffed-looking, slightly reddened skin of her chest. (She had stepped up to the plate, as everybody seemed to keep saying about everything that summer. This was the level of scrutiny now. Get used to it.)

Did this look like a woman who would give Morrissey’s
You Are the Quarry
as her favourite album? He wouldn’t have said so. There was perspiration on her upper lip. She was speaking as if she was reciting from a script.

Her discomposure, it turned out, was because the papers had a story. ‘Home Sec. Smoked Dope’. This on
the day Gordon Brown was due to announce his intention to toughen the law on cannabis and reverse the 2004 declassification of it from a Class B to a Class C drug. ‘Smiths’ fan Home Sec. is tit-flashing stoner’. How very far from the days of R. A. B. Butler and Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller!

‘JJ’ (Jacqueline Jill) was part of the 1997 intake. She was one of Blair’s Babes. Standing behind her in the famous picture of the beaming young prime minister surrounded by a crush of most of his 101 fragrant female MPs, smiling, waving at the camera from the steps of Church House, is Fiona Jones, the newly elected Member for Newark.

The papers had had a story on her just two months into 2007. How she had died. Drunk herself to death. How she had had some kind of fall from grace, been shunned by the Party fixers, and disappeared into the bottle (vodka at home because it didn’t smell, whisky at work where nobody seemed to mind drink on your breath). By the end, the former television presenter, a staunch Liverpool Catholic, was just drinking and sleeping, nursed by her husband and her two sons. ‘It sounds odd, but sadly we had got used to that kind of thing,’ Chris Jones, who blamed the heavy-drinking culture at Westminster for his wife’s alcoholism, told journalists.

The troubled life and lonely death of a New Labour MP.

One day Paul Trippett was kind enough to offer him a lift to Spennymoor. He was in his new job. Phil Wilson was the new MP. This was Phil’s car, Paul said. It was a grey
VW saloon, a heavy layer of dust settled on the dashboard, a fair amount of rubbish floating about. Phil let him use it during the week when he was in London. His own car was a clapped-out Vauxhall Omega with 42,000 miles on the clock. What he had to show for all the years spent close to the red-hot beating heart of power. He still lived in the same house, ex-council stock. ‘I’ve never been one for a diary or owt like that.’

As they went along he talked about how the Trimdon Labour Club was going through bad days. He had been in danger of losing his job there till the Party bought it. A lot of the pubs up this way, he said, clubs and pubs, were on their arses. He blamed the smoking ban and all the outlets for cut-price booze and the rise of dinner parties – people eating in each other’s houses, a recent phenomenon in the north-east – all of this trying out Jamie and Nigella recipes on each other and all this.

At Spennymoor, one of the old centres of County Durham’s mining industry, they stopped in the main street opposite the town hall. Its sooty Victorian facade was brightened with many flower-filled baskets and an electronic sign whose red tickertape display advertised the next big attraction: ‘The fabulous UK’s No. 1 magician Paul Daniels and Debbie McGee – full show and dinner’.

‘That’s the entrance,’ Paul said, nodding, ‘but it happened up aheight’.

Soon after he was elected MP for Sedgefield at the 1983 General Election, Tony Blair was invited to a meeting, supposedly being held to celebrate his victory, at
Spennymoor town hall. This was where the selection meeting, at which he had emerged triumphant over the hard-left candidate, Les Huckfield, had taken place, and where the ’83 count had been held. On an otherwise grim night for Labour – it was the Falklands election, the raising up of the Blessed Margaret, joy unconfined – he had made his victory speech there.

On the night of the celebratory Trades Council meeting he was asked to speak first. He faltered in the face of a hostile audience. He was then rounded on by Dennis Skinner, the letters of whose name spelled out on paper even look like bared teeth. Skinner let rip, accusing Blair of betraying socialist principles. The verdict was unanimous: Skinner did him in. ‘The night we got done at Spennymoor’ is still spoken of often among the Blair faithful. Tony had been humiliated, and he was furious, vowing that the bastards would never do that to him again.

‘He had been humiliated one night,’ Paul Trippett said, ‘but for the next twenty years he ruled the roost. That steel down his backbone came from Spennymoor town hall.’

Half a mile up the hill from the town hall lies the home of Norman Cornish. There are pictures in the town hall painted by Norman Cornish up to half a century ago. ‘Don’t call me the pitman painter.’ This quote from Cornish was used as a headline on an article he himself had written at least, what, thirty years go. Oh easy. It was dear to him because it was the first piece with his name on it to appear in a national newspaper. Turned down for a
trainee position on the local paper, he had got on a bus the very next day and travelled to Spennymoor to interview Cornish, whose paintings of pit workers and pit-village life he had seen at the Stone Gallery in Newcastle.

As well as paintings and small, tabletop abstract sculptures, heavily derivative (he now realised) of Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson, the Stone Gallery also sold handcrafted rings and cufflinks and bracelets, the kind of ‘artistic’ jewellery he associated with wine-drinking and sophisticated, metropolitan gatherings. The Mr Stone the gallery took its name from smoked cheroots and wore knitted ties and had an artistic ring with what looked like some kind of pebble in it on his little finger. He wore blue gingham shirts and dusty pink corduroy trousers slung low under his considerable belly.

It was the tension between the world of which Mr Stone was such a colourful and comfortable part and the life of labour represented in the Cornish paintings hanging on the gallery’s hessian-covered walls, brass down-lighters pouring light on to them, paintings whose titles –
Late Shift, The Pit-road, Man Walking Dogs
– spoke directly to what was in them, that he now supposed was what had made him take the bus to Spennymoor all those many years ago. He hadn’t got any of that into the piece, which mainly consisted of quotes, his contribution being merely to mitre them together to make the equivalent of a simple box or stool.

And here he was back again, for the first time since then. Norman Cornish was still alive; he had established
that. And he was still living in the same house, an easy uphill walk from the small, down-at-heel town centre.

The man who answered the door was recognisably Cornish; an old man, of course – he had to be well into his eighties – but still straight-backed and lean, same frank appraising gaze, sharp cheekbones and wary, hawk-like profile.

And his wife Sarah, who he had made many sketches of as a young woman, doing domestic chores, knitting, bathing the children, she was still pretty; she said she didn’t hear so well, but she hadn’t shrunk or spread or taken on any of the characteristics of an infirm old person.

She was still pretty and he was still handsome. They looked like young people who had stood in time for a while and the signs of age were mere prosthetics that somebody from make-up would come in and remove at the end of the conversation. He worked out that he now was a decade older than Cornish would have been on the occasion of their first meeting to do the interview for the newspaper (which they used, but which at the time of the bus ride out to Spennymoor hadn’t been commissioned. He might have lied about that).