George Cage’s house in Soho was tall and narrow, in an alley off Wardour Street, sandwiched between a film-cutting studio and a walk-in brothel offering Russian, Oriental and black women. “Even the brothels are multicultural now,” Henry noted.
Despite its location, George’s house had a luxurious hush, as though it were soundproof. The decor was white; Oriental staff offered trays of drinks and sushi. Expensive dogs sniffed the guests’ crotches. There were good prints on the walls. Be-ringed queens from the East End mingled with upper-class young men in priceless suits, pop stars, painters, Labour Party researchers and, to my surprise, a couple of black Premiership foot-ballers-one in a white fur coat-who stirred more excitement than the pop stars.
George Cage introduced Henry and me to Alan, his “future wife” and boyfriend of five years, the man he was intending to “marry” when civil partnerships became legal. In his late forties, Alan was wearing a sleeveless tee-shirt and shorts, with white socks and sandals. He used one hand to carry, at all times, a glass of wine and a thin joint. He was muscly and wanted you to acknowledge it. He was good-looking, with a seductive decadence that stated there were few experiences he had eschewed.
I learned almost immediately that he’d been a fascist, a tube driver, a junkie alcoholic and drug dealer; he’d done his “bird.” As a consequence, he seemed to suggest, he was suspicious of “con men” like us, who seemed to survive in a talky, false world whose violence was unacknowledged. When he told me where he was from, I was pleased to tell him I’d been brought up a couple of miles away. Miriam and I, as kids, would go on the bus to Ladywell Baths and spend all day there.
“What do you do, then?” he asked. “You in the politics too?”
“I’m a therapist.”
“I got a therapist,” he said. “An aromatherapist. Do you use scents?”
“Nope.”
“Not even vanilla candles?”
While I wondered whether Freud might have had a view on vanilla candles, Alan looked at me sceptically, as though he’d been about to recommend several people to me for therapy but was now thinking better of it.
He and Mustaq had met in a bar, he said. They still sometimes went to bed at ten and got up at two to trawl rough gay bars in the early hours. One place they’d gone to at four in the morning, only to be told they were “too early.” Alan had always felt at home in these places, with what he considered to be his “people,” the aimless, lost, unfulfilled and “perverted,” and Mustaq had found a place there too.
There didn’t seem to me to be any reason why Alan should feel alienated in Mustaq’s world, but as more of Mustaq’s friends came over, Alan would suddenly start into an upper-class accent, pinched, absurd, superior; a stoned Lady Bracknell. Mustaq seemed used to it, and no one else took any notice, aware perhaps that this was always the risk you ran with rough trade.
Mustaq said he was keen to introduce me to another of “our people.” I wasn’t sure what he meant; it turned out to be a plump Asian in a Prada suit with a lot to smile about. This was Omar Ali, the well-known owner of laundrettes and dry cleaners, who’d sold his flourishing business in the mid-90s to go into the media.
Now, as well as being a stalwart of the antiracist industry, Omar Ali made television for, by and about minorities. The “Pakis” had always been considered socially awkward, badly dressed, weirdly religious and repressed. But being gay, Omar was smart enough to know how hip and fashionable minorities-or any outsiders-could become, with the right marketing, as they made their way up the social hierarchy.
After Blair was elected in 1997, Omar had become Lord Ali of Lewisham, which was the raw part of town he was from. His father, a radical Pakistani journalist who’d been critical of Bhutto’s various deals with the mullahs-a man who had, it turned out, known my own father as a student in India-had drunk himself to death in a dingy room there. As is often the case in families, it had been the uncle who’d saved Omar in those Thatcherite times, letting him run one of his laundrettes and telling him, despite his father’s fatal integrity, to run out of the ghetto in pursuit of money, which had no colour or race.
Omar’s lifelong penchant for skinheads, childhood friends who’d kicked him around, had got him into less trouble than it might have done at an earlier time. It was ironic to think of how Omar meshed with his times. His commendable antiracism had made him into the ideal committeeman. Now, as an Asian, gay millionaire with an interest in a football club, he was perfect leadership material. He was disliked by Muslims for his support of the government’s fondness for bombing Muslims, and hated by the Left and Right for good reasons I was unable to remember. But he was protected by a political ring fence. No one could bring him down but himself.
If Lord Ali was smug, it was because he had long been ahead of the game. He’d never had any scruples about combining cunning business practices with Labour Party socialism. Now, of course, many ex-leftists were turning-or trying to turn-towards business and the Thatcherite enterprise culture they had so despised. It had become acceptable to want more money than you could sensibly use, to enjoy your greed. With retirement coming up, the ex-leftists saw they had only a few years to make “proper” money, as so many of their friends had done, mostly in film, television and, occasionally, the theatre.
“Still supporting the war?” Henry asked him. Henry had been drinking champagne quickly, as he did when he attended such functions. By the time we came to leave, he’d be ready for a monologue. “You must be the only one left.”
Omar was used to this. “But of course. Removing dictators is a good thing. You want to argue with that?” He looked at me. “I know who you are, though I find your stuff difficult to read.”
“Excellent.”
“We both have Muslim backgrounds, and wouldn’t we agree that our brothers and sisters have to join the modern world or remain in the dark ages? Haven’t we done the Iraqis a favour?” I could see Henry becoming annoyed, and so could Omar, who had a cheeky face and liked Henry’s annoyance so much he went on: “As a gay Muslim, I believe other Muslims must have the opportunity to enjoy the liberalism we do. I won’t be hypocritical-”
Henry interrupted. “So you urged Blair to kick the shit out of as many innocent Iraqis as he could?”
“Look, these Iraqis, they have no science, no literature, no decent institutions and only one book. Can you imagine relying on just that?…We must give them these things, even if it means killing a lot of them. Nothing worthwhile was ever done without a few deaths. You know that. I told Tony, once you’ve done Baghdad, you can start on some of those other places. Like Bradford.” Omar made a camp gesture and said, “I don’t know why I’m saying all this. I’m a moderate, and I always have been.”
Alan, who was standing nearby, said, “Only politically.”
“All I’ve ever wanted was to relieve the condition of the working class.”
“Oh yeah, that’s all we need-someone who came up the hard way.”
Henry said, “Blair’s problem is self-deception. It doesn’t help that he’s surrounded by people like you who only tell him what a good guy he is.”
Omar said, “You old Communist lefties, you can’t let it go, can you?”
Later I would remind Henry that he hadn’t always been as anti-Blair as he-and many of our friends-liked to make out. In fact, Henry and Valerie had been invited to Chequers, the prime minister’s country place, early on in his first term. It had said “casual” on the invitation, and Henry wore a suit and open-necked shirt. The other guests included a well-known but dull ex-footballer, a female newsreader and either a runner or a rower, Henry wasn’t sure. Blair, who to Henry’s surprise told him he’d once considered becoming an actor, was wearing what looked like overtight Lee Cooper jeans and an unbuttoned purple shirt, with ruffles, and shiny black shoes. Henry had expected a tribune of the working class, not a tribute to Brian May.