From bed to worse

Here we go again. Public life in England is beginning to resemble a farce with the unlikeliest people embroiled in affairs.

This week, the man in the hot seat (bed?) is home secretary David Blunkett, who has a tough job keeping Al Qaida out of Britain, fiery mullahs in mosques under check, exhorting Asians not to speak Urdu or Gujarati at home, encouraging immigrants to become more British and preparing the nation for the introduction of identity cards. All this would be difficult enough for any politician but for Blunkett, the challenge is much greater since he is blind and has to rely on a guide dog.

However, he is a remarkable man. Despite a busy diary, Blunkett, 57, divorced father of three grown-up sons, is said to have found time for an affair with a married woman, Kimberly Fortier, 43, who is expecting her second child. This sounds like the plot of a bad soap, like Coronation Street or EastEnders, but Kimberly, who has been married before, is now married to 60-year-old Irish-born Stephen Quinn and already has a young child with her second husband (he is a director of Vogue). She is said to be five months pregnant and the baby she is expecting could be her husband’s — or Blunkett’s. Had Blunkett been involved with Faria Alam, the papers would have blamed the Bangladeshi secretary for entrapping an upright Englishman. But Kimberly is white, American and the publisher of The Spectator, a small-circulation but influential magazine.

We all know human relationships can be messy but Blunkett is said to be besotted with Kimberly and is even prepared to risk his career for her (although Tony Blair has declared Blunkett is a fine fellow and doing an excellent job as home secretary).

Recalling recent affairs (John Major’s with Edwina Currie; Robin Cook’s with his secretary, Gaynor, whom he married after dumping his wife, Margaret), the Daily Express wonders, “Why do sex and politics make such bedfellows?”

The article is by Currie, who made a lot of money by writing a book about bedtimes with Major. “So good luck to you, David,” she concludes. “Make the most of it. As long as you don’t, next week, abuse our tolerance by telling the rest of us how to behave.”

Meanwhile, many people find Blair distinctly odd. The prime minister is continuing to sleep with his wife. He even got her pregnant, the first serving prime minister’s wife to have a baby while living at 10, Downing Street, for a very long time.

This is the sort of behaviour which gives sleaze a bad name.

Faria file

The ways of Fleet Street, as Britain’s national newspapers are called (although the offices long ago ceased being in this “street of shame”), are fickle. Faria Alam has been knocked off the news agenda by David Blunkett’s affair. This is not such good news for Kamaljeet Hunjan, a photographer who was sitting on a gold mine without realising it.

“In 1994 I covered three Asian fashion shows and took a lot of pictures in colour transparency of Faria,” he tells me. Only Kamaljeet could not remember that he had so until he saw Faria being interviewed on ITN. “Her face looked familiar,” recalls Kamaljeet.

Then, it struck him that Faria had been among a whole clutch of catwalk models he had covered 10 years ago. He remembers she was in one fashion show at the Hammersmith Palais at an event to find a “Miss Movie” beauty queen, run by a Bollywood magazine, and another two in Wembley. “She was prettier then — now she has put on a bit of weight,” adds Kamaljeet. He had no reason to focus especially on Faria as the models showed off the clothes of Indian outlets such as Creations.

“She wasn’t the prettiest girl there,” he points out. “They didn’t give her the best clothes.” When Faria’s name first came up, tabloid newspapers would have paid a small fortune for exclusive photographs of her.

By the time she appeared on ITN, several weeks had passed. Faria had been photographed (dressed in a “pure white” trouser suit) going into the offices of her PR agent Max Clifford and she had posed in sin purple for the News of the World and the Mail on Sunday.

Though the currency in Faria pictures has been devalued, newspapers and magazines will return periodically to the story in the years to come. Kamaljeet is sitting on a steady earner rather than a fortune.

Over the past 10 years, there has been a change in his own personality, he admits. The driven photographer who came to Britain from the Punjab over 30 years ago has been replaced, he hopes, by a more spiritual and less materialistic man. He has become an ardent follower of the teachings of his Sikh guru, Sant Kripal Singh, who passed away in 1974. “It’s such a wonderful path,” sighs Kamaljeet.

However, should anyone be interested in buying his old pictures of Faria, Kamaljeet tells me he would be happy to talk terms.

Names change

When Indians first came to Britain, some Anglicised their names and/or allowed others to give them nicknames. Even Prince Ranjitsinhji was “Mr Smith” at Cambridge, an insult if ever there was one. In the 1960s and 1970s, Joginder, for example, would become “Joe”, Balwinder “Bill”, Dharamjit “Dick” and so on.

Asians will have instinctive sympathy for James Brandon, 26, the British freelance journalist who was lucky to be released from brief captivity in Iraq last week. The journalist, whose grandfather was part-Egyptian, was born Andrew Nassim but changed his name, presumably because he thought Brandon (the surname of another public schoolboy two years ahead of him at Westminster) would get him further in life, especially as a foreign correspondent, than a Muslim surname like Nassim.

Ironically, the baddies of Basra, hunting for Westerners, might well have considered a “Nassim” less worthy of capture than the more English-sounding “Brandon”.

The moral, if any, is not to be ashamed of one’s heritage.

This England

When a flash flood caused by heavy rains ruined the pretty Cornwall village of Boscastle (“you are supposed to have this sort of thing in Bangladesh, not in
England,” was a comment on TV), some papers ran front page pictures last week of wrecked houses and upturned cars.

Not the Daily Telegraph, which had a picture of Chloe, a rescued 17-year-old Persian cat looking exceedingly cross but safe in the arms of a fireman. “It’s the human angle,” said my wife approvingly, reminding me of the line in Ben Hur when an Arab, angry at the ill-treatment of his beloved steeds, protests, “You are treating my horses like animals!”

Tittle tattle

You get little snippets when listening to Test match coverage on radio. Every batsman, even great ones, has his nemesis, someone he fears, suggested Sir Vivian Richards, the West Indian considered by some to be the most destructive of modern times.

“Who was yours?” he was inevitably asked last week. “Chandrashekhar,” Viv said instantly.

For the Indian spinner, there can be no greater compliment.