Branson and the owner of TopShop, Sir Philip Green, who put his Learjet at the McCanns’ disposal for their tour of European capitals in early June.
The appointment of Michael Caplan, QC, and Angus McBride of the fashionable London firm of Kingsley Napley as their legal advisers set tongues wagging and sparked a whole new chain of real and frenziedly Googled-up connections. The results showed that Tony Blair was reported to have contacted Kingsley Napley at the beginning of the year over the threat of arrest in the cash for honours scandal. Other recent high-profile clients included the England football captain, John Terry, over analleged nightclub brawl, and the self-styled ‘rogue trader’, the dodgy banker Nick Leeson.
Michael Caplan (described in Chambers legal directory as ‘the weapon of choice for battleship cases’) was best known for two things: his obsession with secrecy, and for representing the repressive Chilean dictator Pinochet who was arrested just after having tea with his friend Lady Thatcher and faced extradition to Spain. When he was freed on the grounds of his deteriorating health, Caplan personally saw Pinochet onto the plane back to Santiago and made sure the General took with him the inscribed plate that Margaret Thatcher, having made it clear that he was the only person she trusted to carry out her wishes, had placed in Caplan’s safekeeping.
The Blairs spent the summer at their friend Sir Cliff Richard’s villa in Barbados. Around the time Caplan and McBride were photographed stepping through the front door at Orchard House in Rothley for the first time, Cherie was snapped on the Côte d’Azure with her best new friend, Bono. It was the dog days of the summer, and the Blairs were by then staying as the guests of Bernard Arnault, the billionaire owner of Louis Vuitton, Dior and other luxury brands, on his yacht on the Riviera.
For a long time – for much of the last century, in fact, wrote Richard Schickel – social commentators have been decrying the steady erosion of our old sense of community. In this context, the celebrity community, which has about it aspects of the extended family, offers a kind of compensation. There is a widespread belief that there is asmall and seemingly cohesive group of well-known individuals who share close communal ties with one another at the high centre of our public life – ties that are enhanced by the fact that they share the pleasures and problems inherent in their celebrity status, no matter how disparate their routes to that status have been.
‘We’re normal people,’ Kate McCann protested when her family’s transition from being unknown to well known, and the perks that come with the transition – a hotline to senior members of the government, for example – were just starting to raise resentments: the first signs of a backlash were beginning to become apparent in eruptions of public volatility and paranoia. ‘We don’t have amazing contacts or anything, we just have strong friends. Everyone brainstormed and became very creative. They did what they could and if that meant asking well-known faces, celebrities, it was done. They are normal people too. They wanted to help.’
*
The house, backing on to fields, surrounded by countryside used by the local hunt, so close to the properties the Sunday Times had singled out as the most expensive in the East Midlands, their private pools and tennis courts screened behind dark bosks and bushes at street level but clearly visible from the air, downloadable on Flash Earth, zoom in, zoom out, the burglars’ bible, was a statement of what they had achieved.
Gerry had spent three weeks building a climbing frame in the long back garden, an expanse of lawn laid by thedevelopers where forested orchard had once stood, all trace of that old part of the village erased, before they left for their holiday in the Algarve. Along with a children’s slide, the coloured Jungle Gym frame was just visible in the
The appointment of Michael Caplan, QC, and Angus McBride of the fashionable London firm of Kingsley Napley as their legal advisers set tongues wagging and sparked a whole new chain of real and frenziedly Googled-up connections. The results showed that Tony Blair was reported to have contacted Kingsley Napley at the beginning of the year over the threat of arrest in the cash for honours scandal. Other recent high-profile clients included the England football captain, John Terry, over analleged nightclub brawl, and the self-styled ‘rogue trader’, the dodgy banker Nick Leeson.
Michael Caplan (described in Chambers legal directory as ‘the weapon of choice for battleship cases’) was best known for two things: his obsession with secrecy, and for representing the repressive Chilean dictator Pinochet who was arrested just after having tea with his friend Lady Thatcher and faced extradition to Spain. When he was freed on the grounds of his deteriorating health, Caplan personally saw Pinochet onto the plane back to Santiago and made sure the General took with him the inscribed plate that Margaret Thatcher, having made it clear that he was the only person she trusted to carry out her wishes, had placed in Caplan’s safekeeping.
The Blairs spent the summer at their friend Sir Cliff Richard’s villa in Barbados. Around the time Caplan and McBride were photographed stepping through the front door at Orchard House in Rothley for the first time, Cherie was snapped on the Côte d’Azure with her best new friend, Bono. It was the dog days of the summer, and the Blairs were by then staying as the guests of Bernard Arnault, the billionaire owner of Louis Vuitton, Dior and other luxury brands, on his yacht on the Riviera.
For a long time – for much of the last century, in fact, wrote Richard Schickel – social commentators have been decrying the steady erosion of our old sense of community. In this context, the celebrity community, which has about it aspects of the extended family, offers a kind of compensation. There is a widespread belief that there is asmall and seemingly cohesive group of well-known individuals who share close communal ties with one another at the high centre of our public life – ties that are enhanced by the fact that they share the pleasures and problems inherent in their celebrity status, no matter how disparate their routes to that status have been.
‘We’re normal people,’ Kate McCann protested when her family’s transition from being unknown to well known, and the perks that come with the transition – a hotline to senior members of the government, for example – were just starting to raise resentments: the first signs of a backlash were beginning to become apparent in eruptions of public volatility and paranoia. ‘We don’t have amazing contacts or anything, we just have strong friends. Everyone brainstormed and became very creative. They did what they could and if that meant asking well-known faces, celebrities, it was done. They are normal people too. They wanted to help.’
*
The house, backing on to fields, surrounded by countryside used by the local hunt, so close to the properties the Sunday Times had singled out as the most expensive in the East Midlands, their private pools and tennis courts screened behind dark bosks and bushes at street level but clearly visible from the air, downloadable on Flash Earth, zoom in, zoom out, the burglars’ bible, was a statement of what they had achieved.
Gerry had spent three weeks building a climbing frame in the long back garden, an expanse of lawn laid by thedevelopers where forested orchard had once stood, all trace of that old part of the village erased, before they left for their holiday in the Algarve. Along with a children’s slide, the coloured Jungle Gym frame was just visible in the
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