in Praia da Luz, had fought West Dorset for the Lib Dems in 2005 and come second to the Conservative front-bencher Oliver Letwin.)
By the summer of 2007 Esther McVey was the managing director of her own company Making It (UK) Ltd, as well as the founder of Winning Women, an organisation described on her website as being ‘about Fun, Information, Infrastructure and mixing with Influential People, capturing opportunities that come your way in life’. Her biggest scalp and the most impressive IP she had met so far that year, she blogged, was Barack Obama, the man chasing Hillary Clinton for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. As somebody who had followed Obama’s ‘political fairytale’ and watched ‘his mesmeric performances’ on the news, she had jumped at the chance to have lunch with him – ‘I flew out at the weekend to meet this political phenomena [sic]’ – when an old friend left a message inviting her to meet up in Washington with him ‘and a couple of guys’.
‘Billy and a couple of guys turned out to be: the chairman of NBC, the publisher of People magazine, various senior CEOs of business, all very successful business people and family people, Kelly Rowlands of Destiny’s Child who provided us with some beautiful acoustic songs before lunch, myself and Barack Obama!’
Invited to review the papers on Andrew Marr’s Sunday morning politics programme on BBC1 some months after becoming one of the seven directors of the fundraisingcompany Find Madeleine: Leaving No Stone Unturned, as well as its official spokesperson, she reprised her Obama encounter: ‘He exuded a calm warmth. If he’d been a musician he’d have been a laidback jazz singer – not pop, not punk, but steady and worldly, not singing the blues but he knew what the blues were and wanted a way out of there. He was tall and slim, athletic long-distance-runner physique – no doubt a discipline he’ll need in the presidential marathon to come.’
A rumour ran around the online forums and chat-rooms for a while that Gerry McCann’s father had been a leading light in the Labour party and that this explained his access to Gordon Brown and, through him, to the Browns’ good friend in Scotland, J. K. Rowling. Jo Rowling was among a number of public figures who had quickly come forward with offers of rewards totalling two and a half million pounds for information leading to Madeleine’s safe return; she also asked booksellers to put up posters of Madeleine when the seventh and last in the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows , went on sale at the climax of a global publicity push at midnight on 21 July.
The chatter and twitter about Gerry McCann’s father wasn’t true. It was a minor squall in the blizzard of rumour that blew through that summer. But Gerry – somebody used to riding the high of sleep deprivation, dressed day and night in surgical scrubs, banks of beepers on his belt, pockets cluttered with pen-lights, EKG calipers, haemostats, stethoscopes, seven-gauge, seven-inch needles,with a twelve-inch trail of tubing carried casually in its sterile packaging, ready, should he be the first at a cardiac arrest (a CODE BLUE) to slide needle under collarbone and into the great subclavian vein, feeding the serpent tubing down the vena cava in a cathartic ritual that established medical mastery over the human body – Gerry was increasingly featured in the papers ‘striding purposefully between meetings with senior politicians and religious leaders, zealously banging the drum for missing children’. To his supporters, he was an inspiring example of somebody who (in the well-known alliterative of the self-help mantra) was turning adversity to advantage, transforming personal tragedy into something positive and finding in his own catastrophe a cause.
Like their friend Esther McVey, it did seem to be the case that Gerry was able to command access to famous and powerful people such as Rowling and Richard
By the summer of 2007 Esther McVey was the managing director of her own company Making It (UK) Ltd, as well as the founder of Winning Women, an organisation described on her website as being ‘about Fun, Information, Infrastructure and mixing with Influential People, capturing opportunities that come your way in life’. Her biggest scalp and the most impressive IP she had met so far that year, she blogged, was Barack Obama, the man chasing Hillary Clinton for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. As somebody who had followed Obama’s ‘political fairytale’ and watched ‘his mesmeric performances’ on the news, she had jumped at the chance to have lunch with him – ‘I flew out at the weekend to meet this political phenomena [sic]’ – when an old friend left a message inviting her to meet up in Washington with him ‘and a couple of guys’.
‘Billy and a couple of guys turned out to be: the chairman of NBC, the publisher of People magazine, various senior CEOs of business, all very successful business people and family people, Kelly Rowlands of Destiny’s Child who provided us with some beautiful acoustic songs before lunch, myself and Barack Obama!’
Invited to review the papers on Andrew Marr’s Sunday morning politics programme on BBC1 some months after becoming one of the seven directors of the fundraisingcompany Find Madeleine: Leaving No Stone Unturned, as well as its official spokesperson, she reprised her Obama encounter: ‘He exuded a calm warmth. If he’d been a musician he’d have been a laidback jazz singer – not pop, not punk, but steady and worldly, not singing the blues but he knew what the blues were and wanted a way out of there. He was tall and slim, athletic long-distance-runner physique – no doubt a discipline he’ll need in the presidential marathon to come.’
A rumour ran around the online forums and chat-rooms for a while that Gerry McCann’s father had been a leading light in the Labour party and that this explained his access to Gordon Brown and, through him, to the Browns’ good friend in Scotland, J. K. Rowling. Jo Rowling was among a number of public figures who had quickly come forward with offers of rewards totalling two and a half million pounds for information leading to Madeleine’s safe return; she also asked booksellers to put up posters of Madeleine when the seventh and last in the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows , went on sale at the climax of a global publicity push at midnight on 21 July.
The chatter and twitter about Gerry McCann’s father wasn’t true. It was a minor squall in the blizzard of rumour that blew through that summer. But Gerry – somebody used to riding the high of sleep deprivation, dressed day and night in surgical scrubs, banks of beepers on his belt, pockets cluttered with pen-lights, EKG calipers, haemostats, stethoscopes, seven-gauge, seven-inch needles,with a twelve-inch trail of tubing carried casually in its sterile packaging, ready, should he be the first at a cardiac arrest (a CODE BLUE) to slide needle under collarbone and into the great subclavian vein, feeding the serpent tubing down the vena cava in a cathartic ritual that established medical mastery over the human body – Gerry was increasingly featured in the papers ‘striding purposefully between meetings with senior politicians and religious leaders, zealously banging the drum for missing children’. To his supporters, he was an inspiring example of somebody who (in the well-known alliterative of the self-help mantra) was turning adversity to advantage, transforming personal tragedy into something positive and finding in his own catastrophe a cause.
Like their friend Esther McVey, it did seem to be the case that Gerry was able to command access to famous and powerful people such as Rowling and Richard
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