12/05/2004|||110227719690226841||||||

A SMALL WORLD

I'm not normally a fan of Cristina Odone, but her article about the tight-knit social network involved in the David Blunkett affair makes fascinating, if dizzying reading. In her patch of London, everyone knows everyone else:

"A cry of 'What!' greeted the news that Geoffrey Bindman was the lawyer acting for David Blunkett. One of the country's best known civil-liberties lawyers working for the man whose agenda includes the suspension of trial by jury, detention of prisoners without trial and ID cards? Ah, but scratch the surface and you will find that a partner in Geoffrey Bindman's firm is one Katherine Gieve, wife of John. The penny drops: John Gieve is none other than David Blunkett's permanent secretary.

"Playing the same game of connect the dots links another liberal luminary, Baroness Helena Kennedy, the QC who heads the British Council, to the illiberal Home Secretary: Helena's husband, noted surgeon Dr Iain Hutchison, is cousin of Julia Hobsbawm, Kimberly Quinn's close friend and daughter of noted Marxist philosopher, Eric. Julia was also for a long-time best friend and business partner of Sarah Macaulay, now Mrs Gordon Brown. Hobsbawm Macaulay, until the two partners split acrimoniously last year, was new Labour's favourite PR firm. Its clients included the best known left-of-centre outfits (including the New Statesman ) and its fashionable parties were attended by everyone from Peter Hain and Gordon Brown to Rory Bremner and... Kimberly Quinn.

"Quinn's domestic life puts her at the centre of another tangled web: second husband Stephen Quinn works for, and is a great friend of, Nicholas Coleridge, head of Condé Nast. Coleridge, in turn, is bosom pal of Charles Moore (ex-Telegraph editor and still one of its main columnists) and Ed Stourton (presenter of Today ). Another presenter of Today is John Humphrys, whom Kimberly (as she told me when she learned that John had escorted me long ago to a couple of parties) had a 'huge crush on'. (No, John didn't reciprocate, but he was invited to her wedding, along with practically all of the above, plus Boris Johnson, editor of the Spectator, and Petronella Wyatt, his lover.)

"Kimberly advised Eve Pollard, former editor of the Sunday Express, where daughter Claudia Winkelman could find a nanny, because Claudia has just had a baby with Kris Thykier, who works for Matthew Freud. And Freud is married to Elizabeth Murdoch, Rupert's daughter."

Odone draws an interesting, but probably over-optimistic conclusion:

"Many argue that the Profumo affair in the Sixties ended Britain's climate of deference forever by exposing the goings-on of aristocrats to ordinary people. The Blunkett scandal could have a similar fallout; the inner circle to which David and Kimberly and Stephen belong stands revealed as an incestuous group of networkers who, between them, carve up our world, even as their own caves in around them."

PS: I've always thought it a delicious irony that Eric Hobsbawm, having spent a lifetime denouncing capitalism, should be the father of London's most celebrated PR. Is this definitive proof of God's existence?

|||Clive|||http://clivedavis.blogspot.com/2004/12/small-world-im-not-normally-fan-of.html|||12/05/2004 08:01:00 pm|||||||||

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