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The gasp-making follies of an artless adventuress
There are many of us who like to think we are too high-minded for reality television and the down-and-dirty roustabout of confessional chat shows. We imagine that we have a proper respect for privacy and for the distinction between people's private and public lives.
In fact, most of us have the same low tabloid tastes as everyone else. I admit that I do, no matter how hard I struggle against them, occasionally. However, on this occasion -the emergence of the astonishing story of the affair between Kimberly Quinn and the former home secretary -there is no need to struggle against our better natures. We are all free to indulge our tabloid tastes because they went public, both of them.
They have been manipulating the media. Whatever their reasons for going public (and none of them seems very nice) they chose to involve us, the media, to recruit our sympathy and our political influence to their own ends -a nasty aspect of this nasty story.
So gloves may be taken off. Admittedly it isn't easy to know what is true and what has merely gone undenied. And it is very likely that the most important things, that might make some sense of this mesmerising drama, are the things that the public will never know.
There are few certainties in life but one is that other people's marriages are always an unfathomable mystery. For instance Stephen Quinn may, for all anyone knows, be that rare but convenient character, a mari complaisant -a husband willing to turn a blind eye to the antics of his wife.
However, some things do appear to be facts. In June 2001, Kimberly Fortier, the 40-something-year-old American publisher of The Spectator, took as her second husband a powerful media man, but kept her first husband's rather classy name and, only weeks after her wedding, took a powerful politician as her lover. She ended the affair last summer.
That led by a very acrimonious route to the home secretary's tearful resignation last week, amid bitter paternity claims to her son and her unborn baby and some rather forlorn comments from her husband about biological details being unimportant. Perhaps they are, but one would need to have quite a strong stomach to sleep with two men at the same time with the prospect of getting pregnant by either.
That is not exactly an unimportant biological detail; it's rather startlingly biological and one of the few things left that might shock even the sophisticated. Fortier has now taken on Quinn's name and he is standing by her.
What a woman. One can only gasp.
The only times I have been in the same room as both -indeed all three -of them together were in Conrad Black's drawing room at some of his wonderful parties, and I have met her elsewhere. She is, as everyone says, charming, pretty and funny but she is -or at least she was then, before the sad finale of those dazzling parties -quite obviously and transparently a hugely ambitious operator. She didn't or couldn't hide it. Stories abound among journalists of her almost artless determination to get ahead. And why not? The world that means so much to her is full of extremely ambitious and ruthless people. The only difference is that most of them disguise their cynicism rather better. The tragedy is that David Blunkett couldn't see it.
I can't imagine what she thought she was doing ensnaring Blunkett. She denies the story that she told him that she had always wondered what it would be like to sleep with a blind man. But she can hardly deny that she encouraged him -a man does not easily make uninvited advances to a bride of a few weeks -and she is a formidable flirt.
I have watched in awed admiration of her technique -excessive by English standards but highly effective. A friend in that world whose judgment I value tells me that she thinks Kimberly Quinn is the victim and will be seen as such. But I don't agree, although it is true that Blunkett has behaved very badly as well.
For if she did not in fact make a dead Exocet at Blunkett, she clearly accepted his advances extremely quickly and managed to weave a powerful erotic web around him. But one wonders why. In all the accounts I've read and all the gossip I've heard, it has almost never been suggested that she was in the throes of an ungovernable passion for Blunkett and it hardly seems likely. Yet he strikes one as an unpromising choice for an affair of ambition, home secretary or not, and little suited to her glitzy life. Perhaps she simply did not have a very clear idea of what she was after, beyond star bonking. It would be unpleasant to think that she was combining star-bonking with extra fertility treatment.
Perhaps she simply didn't understand what an affair might mean to him, still less a pregnancy or a child. There are plenty of men in her world, more sophisticated than Blunkett, who can take such adventures lightly and can just as lightly dump or be dumped. Perhaps she did not realise how powerful Blunkett's feelings would become. Perhaps she is not troubled by such powerful feelings and takes such things lightly herself. Perhaps that is what, in the old-fashioned phrase, a light woman means.
But for some people, perhaps for a passionate, lonely and damaged man like Blunkett, such lightness is unbearable. I remember meeting Quinn at lunch years ago and enjoying her company and telling her -all too pompously I am afraid -that the reason why she was having such a big success over here and so much fun was that she didn't take any of it or us seriously. She laughed and I think she agreed.
I have wondered recently whether there isn't some truth in it, for all her serious ambition. However, she appears to take retribution seriously. If Blunkett deliberately went public on the affair, whether to lay claim to the children or to finesse her out of her marriage, he has certainly been horribly punished for it.
Quinn is being compared with various adventuresses and courtesans in literature, like some of the heartless Balzac heroines or Becky Sharp in Thackeray's Vanity Fair. But Sharp, although similar in some ways, was strikingly -and unusually - lacking in malice, which is not something one can say of Quinn and her implacable revenge upon Blunkett.
More to the point, the great adventuresses of French fiction usually had a clear idea of what they were up to. By contrast, Quinn's miscalculations at every stage have been startling. She is left with an enraged and ruined lover, a humiliated husband and children who will grow up to discover that their births were surrounded by betrayal and vengeance.
I suppose one ought to have some sympathy. Besides, those who live in glass houses ought to beware of throwing stones. And I have defended adultery, under some circumstances, although not for new brides.
All the same, in this case Blunkett and Quinn have constructively renounced their claim on our tactful silence. And what a cautionary tale theirs is.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, December 19, 2004 | Comments (0)
How the carers hijacked an autistic man called Andrew
Last week I received a report I’ve been waiting for on an investigation by the local government ombudsman into a complaint against Bolton metropolitan borough council. It tells a disgraceful story.
It’s about what happened recently to a vulnerable young man, referred to as “Andrew Taylor” to protect his identity. Andrew has Fragile X syndrome, which involves autism, a learning disability and epilepsy. So he has very complex and particular needs and is entitled to continuing care and support from the council.
Instead, it failed to do so, suggesting only placements that seemed unsuitable to Andrew’s parents.
Frustrated by this failure, his parents found a specialist placement in the community, but the council refused to pay for it.
As a result of this uncertainty, Andrew soon became confused and unhappy, showing more and more challenging behaviour (as it’s rather euphemistically called), which is what happens when people with autism feel unsettled and threatened.
Within days of leaving school he was sectioned because of his behaviour and put in a locked adult psychiatric ward in a mental hospital, heavily sedated with a liquid cosh.
There he remained incarcerated and drugged for 18 miserable months, even though he should not have been there. He is not mentally ill and with proper support could have been living calmly and happily. The unit had no facilities for managing patients with learning disabilities and challenging behaviour.
The ombudsman upheld Andrew’s family’s complaint, finding Bolton council responsible for “maladministration causing injustice”. That is a rather cool way of describing many months of bitter anguish.
“It is disturbing to think,” wrote the ombudsman, “that . . . all that stood between Mr Taylor and a severely limited future in a secure facility distant from his home was his strong and determined family and one council officer with enough courage, imagination and willingness to listen to his family.” Disturbing indeed.
Although it was indeed Andrew’s devoted family who constantly stood up for his needs and rights, they were at almost every turn ignored or sidelined by the very people who have a statutory duty to support him and to take his family’s views into account.
When the family’s protests at Andrew’s treatment became tiresome, it was even contemplated cutting them out of the loop altogether. At one case conference, officials discussed the possibility of asking the court to displace “Mrs Jefferson” (Andrew’s mother) and put him under a guardianship order. This wasn’t pursued, but it’s chilling to think it was even raised.
It is chilling to think it needed such courage for one excellent officer to stand up to her colleagues. It is also chilling to think how much confidence, drive, time and money it takes for a family to make a complaint or legal challenge. Few families could do it.
This painful story has a much wider significance. It throws into sharp focus the question of who decides for people who have difficulty deciding for themselves — which is the subject of the Mental Capacity Bill due to receive its third reading next week.
The Mental Capacity Bill has caused a great uproar recently, because of euthanasia. Those fears are extremely important, of course, though I think they’re misplaced, but they are understandable. It is terrifying to contemplate a time when, because of illness, an accident or senile dementia, one cannot make decisions for oneself.
What interests me particularly is not euthanasia nor other problems of capacity, such as accidents or dementia. I’m concerned about the role of families of people with learning disabilities in making such decisions.
It’s clear from this story that Andrew’s extended family cared most about him and understood his needs best. Who better than they to help him decide, or if need be to decide for him, what would suit him best?
However, the role of families in the lives of adults with learning disabilities has been problematic for years. Unfortunately, those who hoped that the new bill might clear up some of those controversies and uncertainties are likely to be disappointed.
Common sense would suggest that there ought to be a strong presumption in favour of the family. In practice there often is, because most people with learning disabilities live with their parents into middle and old age. But in cases where people wish to live more independently, with social services support, the parents’ natural role evaporates, at least in law.
Things don’t always go well.
I have files full of letters from angry and grieving parents whose adult children have been somehow hijacked by officials who are at best indifferent and at worst hostile to family involvement. In a few tragic cases, families have been cut off from their grown-up children, through persuasion and undue influence, when social workers will not accept parents’ or siblings’ views about what’s best.
There is a conviction in disability theory — and the world of disability is highly politicised — which holds that if adults with learning disabilities are to enjoy their right to independence they should, like all other adults, leave the sphere of influence of their families.
Besides, this thinking goes, families tend to be overprotective, risk averse and are to be mistrusted. In any case, it continues, professionals know best (and incidentally, have tight budgets to balance).
In practice this means some social workers and other professionals, educated in such theory, are inclined to cut parents out of their adult children’s lives, particularly when they disagree about important decisions. This antipathy to parents is recognised. It has even been described as “parentitis”.
In many ways people have moved on from parentitis. Yet there is little or nothing in the bill to reassure families of people with learning disabilities that they can expect to have any greater or even clearer role in decision-making than before, except in unusual circumstances. I very much hope that MPs at the debate on Tuesday will consider how central such families truly are and ought to be and why their role does not seem very central in this bill.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, December 12, 2004 | Comments (0)
