Drawing at the Leveson Inquiry

Court official

When grandees such as Tony Blair were on, people queued from 4am to get into the public gallery. Today there's no queue to speak of.

'Who's on?' I ask.
'Just journalists. And Jon Snow.'

'What was the best day at the inquiry?' I ask a cameraman.

'Max Mosley.'

There's chitchat among the tricoteuses in the public gallery:

'Rebekah Brooks...'
'If she's charged...'
'Can't stand that woman.'
'She came in and looked several people straight in the eye.'



Lord Justice Leveson

'Jay [Robert Jay QC, lead barrister to the Inquiry] has reputedly earned half a million pounds for this. He's worth it. It's public money. My money.'
'I wanted to say to Jay, why don't you really attack Blair?'
'Because Blair's got a legal background, that's why.'
'I need a small child to gnaw. I'm starving.'



Peter Riddell, formerly
of the FT and The Times

My optician says I'm top gun standard. And today I need it because I'm a long way from my targets across Courtroom 73.
I'm messing around with a portable, court-friendly but inadequate drawing kit and reduced to sharpening pencils into my pencil case.







'Will the court rise,' says the clerk, and a mouse's nest of pencil shavings falls on the floor. Sorry.

Court official

Now for a bit of glamour. The harsh fluorescent light bounces off Jon Snow's cheekbones. They are as defined as scimitars. No wonder he's on the telly.



Andrew Grice, The Independent

' "What is truth, said Pontius Pilate",' says Jon Snow, almost quoting Francis Bacon.

'Jesting,' growl two pedants in the public seats, one of them me.

We can hear a helicopter and seagulls.

Simon Walters, Mail on Sunday



Lord Justice Leveson

Philip Webster,
The Times

A glance back at the Occupy London camps

Me

A wraith from Occupy removes the ice-pick from its skull just long enough to rebuke the others for not rebuking me. My crime is to write about what I see, rather than what I am told I am seeing.

'Tell her that Occupy is a horizontal movement,' whispers the wraith. (Horizontal in this context means leaderless, with nobody aspiring to have power over others inside the organisation.)

Occupy is a horizontal movement. As am I.

While I was visiting the Occupy camps, I recorded what I saw but I left some things out because people worried about their mothers:
'You won't draw the cigarette, will you.'
'You're not going to write that you can smell dope, are you.'

At the Finsbury Square camp, Ella (see previous post) made a drawing on a scrap of newspaper for me.

Ella's drawing

Rupert drawn by me

After I drew Rupert at the St Paul's camp in December, he drew me. The fag was his idea. It tasted horrible. Despite the smoke in his drawing, it was unlit. 


But the tears of blood for Occupy are accurate.

Me drawn by Rupert

And Amy (8) drew me in the crypt of St Paul's. She called her drawing 'The Happy Artist.'

Mud and beauty: the last of Occupy London at Finsbury Square

E and Lee

In the High Court on Tuesday, bad-glamour-boy E tried to clamber into the judge’s empty seat and was ejected from the court.

I make a final visit to the camp. E has only ever been in a haze in my company, so he says we’re getting married. He asks me for a double portrait of him and Lee.

Double portraits are hell. You have to get both faces right. E giggles at the result: ‘I look like my dad.’ We go through an entire relationship in the few seconds it takes to hug goodbye.

Harjeet has her bright proselytising eyes on local communities: ‘What a great discussion to have, about how we want the world to be in the future.’

Harjeet

Roaring-boy blond-bombshell Johnny Teatent, aka Tom, dropped out of a philosophy course and won’t be going back. ‘Teatent’ in this context isn't about cucumber sandwiches: it’s the Occupy hangout for the homeless, the disaffected or the alienated.

Tom is wearing jeans decorated with scarlet spray-paint. He glares at his phone: ‘More emails. I want more emails.’

He’s built a barricade out of inner-city detritus, aspiring to a glorious last stand against the bailiffs. I think of Peter Pan and the Lost Boys without a Wendy. Two Portaloos, a bonfire in a brazier, a mains water pipe, adrenaline and testosterone are inside the barricade.

Tom feels sidelined by the Occupy cadre; he's impatient with members whose souls yearn for flip-charts and meetings about the names of meetings [sic]: ‘Occupy’s press strategy is completely xxxxed,’ he says. ‘Look at this fortress. Look over there at London’s big iconic buildings. It’s like Asterix. It’s like a World War Two outpost. It’s got to be on the news. They’re directing me to stop people lobbing bricks when the police come. Why the xxxx should I bother. The camp’s been co-opted by people who want it to be a talking shop. I don’t do that.’

Ella, Johnny Teatent and fortress

He’s also frustrated by the lack of wi-fi. ‘I tried to go to the library but I had holes in my shoes.’

He flops on a muddy sofa, strums a guitar, dries a saturated pair of trousers over the bonfire.  He takes the drawing: ‘I’ll use it for my propaganda.’

A man says, ‘He looks like James Dean in that picture.’

Ella is 18. By the bonfire, at dusk, she and Lynda, aka Dylan (17), make a heartbreakingly lovely tableau as Ella picks nits out of Lynda’s hair. Head lice like clean hair. ‘I’m good at this. They’ve eaten a lot of your blood,’ she says, throwing them on to the fire one by one. 

‘Finsbury Square is beautiful, a gorgeous little catalyst of love,’ says Ella. ‘It’s beautiful in its own way although some people say it’s a pikey apocalypse training camp. I feel incredibly safe here. It’s beautiful. It’s misunderstood.

Ella and Lynda

‘I find education doesn’t teach you anything any more. I did quite well in school but learned more outside St Paul’s in one day than I did in school. They give you a sentence structure and you can’t have a mind of your own. Education is just another tool for training camps. It teaches you to take orders. There’s a beautiful little established community here. Occupy is beautiful. It has become legend. All these communities coming under one name.

‘It’s not going to be the revolution – too many people are half-hearted. We need to be more organised. Finsbury Square isn’t going to promote that. It’s another big spark towards what will become the revolution. It’s nearly happened. It has to come in the next few years. It’s not necessary for people to come out on the streets now but as more people have less of a choice they’ll care more.’

Jan Molenaer: 'Woman at her toilet', 1633
(that's a nit comb)

Meanwhile, a desiccated faction within Occupy tussles for the right to have elections and grab power. 

The campers have turned a public lawn on Finsbury Square into contaminated mud; the camp looks hostile and irrelevant to passers-by; the cooking area is mesmerisingly filthy. This evening, occupiers are saying:

‘This is bad.’

‘We should have made this a sustainable eco-village. But we didn’t.’

‘This is a shit-hole. We could have won awards for this.’

‘Too much talk and not enough action.’

French sixteenth century
(nit comb left foreground)

Charlie

Charlie came to Finsbury Square after the St Paul’s camp was evicted. ‘I couldn’t handle it for the first couple of weeks. After that I quite liked it. But it was a smaller space with too many people.’

Charlie says he had an advertising business in South London: ‘I can start it again. But I like this life, the alternative way of living.’ He looks around. ‘This became a mess. Everything became too dirty. There was too much anti-social behaviour for our people. Mud is the problem. Cold is all right.’

It’s dark. Office buildings around the square are brightly lit. ‘People can play cards using the other people’s lights,’ says Charlie.

Washing my hands in The Master Gunner, the pub over the road, I turn to a young woman and ask: ‘What do you think about Occupy?’

‘What’s that?’

‘The camp in the square.’

‘I didn’t know that’s what it was called.’

Branding: fail.

‘They started to bring their signs in here,’ she says – I learn that she works behind the bar. ‘Then we heard about epidemics breaking out in the camp. We had to stop them coming in. We had to think about our customers. The campers were just coming in to use the facilities. They’re just people who trash things.’

Campaign to win hearts and minds: fail.

Occupy have been evicted from Finsbury Square. Now what?

Not quite the last of Occupy London in Finsbury Square

Unknown occupier inside barricade at dusk

Rainfall. Downfall.

Occupy campers have built a barricade for a last stand against eviction, due any time from midnight. Hooded people hang around in the slippery mud. 'I hope it's tonight,' says one. 'Please come.'

I sit inside the wet barricade on a wet chair in the wet, drawing wetly on wet paper. My watercolour pencils weep. When their tears dry I dip their points in puddles. (The drawings die in the night, colour and line blotted and leached away.)

Rain-sodden sketch of unknown occupier

Occupy is human so it conducted a civil war over land and money - over who gets to govern its dwindling funds and the faecal, feral waste that was once a lawn in Finsbury Square. Who rules in hell? On my last visit campers were being tattooed with a communal blade and nothing but water from random plastic bottles to swab the wounds.

The battle of Portaloo began after the hiring company confiscated the original toilets, campers having rendered them impossible to clean on site. ('Worse than Glastonbury,' said one.)

Inside barricade perimeter

Should Occupy pay for replacements? Should individuals spend their own money on them?  Or should the campers just continue to do without? Hot, smelly days passed while Occupy agonised over what to do about the jubilee. And what, they wondered, was Finsbury Square anyway - a shiny template for consensus-based activism or a holding bay for lost people and rent-a-mob, trashing the hopes of the couple who own the restaurant in the middle? What, in fact, was Occupy? Camps or campaigns or both?

Portaloos - ghost image on blotter

Into the raging correspondence (between those who had internet access) I'd lobbed a suggestion from the Financial Times which went to the heart of what Occupy said they were campaigning about on our behalf. Occupy ignored it and carried on with its introverted parish-council bickering about whether it should feel embarrassed to be buying a £137 bolt cutter for breaking into potential squats.

Back in the rain, a man peers inside a Portaloo (replacements were ultimately organised in a private, desperate decision against the spirit of consensus) then looks inside the second one. He enters the first.

The overnight blottings from the soaked drawings are better than what survived of the drawings themselves and more symbolic of the fractured mood.

Remains of soaked sketches of  Tom
(peeling clementine, right)

Tom, aka Johnny Teatent, a contemptuous blond swaggerer, peels a clementine with the prehensile fingers of one hand, leaving the peel in a single piece, without looking. Later he emails to the clique: 'Banging castle built. Campfires. If anyone wants to hammer. Slash come down take pictures. it is getting to be an awesome barricade.'

Andria has devoted her resources to helping addicts at the Occupy sites: 'I've fed them when they've been hungry, I've seen to their wounds. I'm like that Mary in the Bible. The other one.' Today she takes a foundling camper under her wing 'because I'm a Mama and he's a baby.'

Andria - ghost image on blotter

Books from the camp library are out in the wet. Sir Winston Churchill: A Memoir. Giardinaggio Senza Problemi, an Italian guide to horticulture published by Reader's Digest. I look at the desultory attempts to grow food in the collectivised flower beds. I think about Stalin and Hamlet.

'Fie on't! ah, fie! 'tis an unweeded garden
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely.'

I take Doctor in the House by Richard Gordon.

My drawing is as unproductive as the contaminated soil. I'm cold. I'm going.

Oh, there's the glamorous profile again. E has abandoned his crutches prematurely and springs/limps/swaggers purposefully towards Moorgate with two other regulars.

'Where are you lot going?' I shout.
'Wait here,' E shouts back.
'I'm going.'
He points at me: 'You're not allowed to.'

The death throes of Occupy London at Finsbury Square

Josh

The Finsbury Square Occupy camp has turned its dysfunctional back on London. On this hot day it smells of human ordure. The Portaloos have been confiscated by the hiring company for reasons best not aired.

My courage fails. Lunchtime and they're still not up. Alone in the desert, I send a bleaty little email to the Occupy group of 350-plus names (the commanding clique, plus the police, plus God knows who). This communal inbox is often clogged with ungrammatical, humourless, sour, distorted rubbish from failed Trots making a last-ditch parasitical attack on Occupy in the spirit of grubs which grow inside host bodies. Some of the more interesting correspondents get themselves banned or opt out. Occupy's faith in inclusivity is why each nest has a cuckoo in it and why I'm allowed to traipse around the camp, sketching.

Andi and Chel

Then I see someone I've drawn before - Andi, being warned by a policeman about a camper who hasn't taken his meds. Andi takes me to see his partner Chel. He has placed a trail of rose-petals on the ground leading to their tent. 'We've been together for seven years and only been apart for three days. One day kind of stretches and then it's seven years. It's a work in progress.'

Chel smiles warmly. 'We got married last Christmas on the steps of St Paul's. We haven't got a picture of us together.' (Sorry about this one.)

'She has so much strength,' says Andi. 'She's so fiery. She's stopped arguing with the world. When she does unleash herself she gets three times as much done as me.'

I'm experimenting with a lighter drawing kit - a new A4 sketch pad and pencils, instead of a heavy agglomeration of charcoals, Conté sticks, fixative and errant sheets of coloured paper in a non-standard size, aka a bastard measure. 

I'm struggling with the unresponsiveness of the anaemic paper, but I don't want to let Chel and Andi down. When I've finished the picture - or just stopped drawing, which always comes first - I discover that I've been drawing not on a creamy sheet of cartridge but on the reverse of the paper cover of the sketch pad. 

I confess to them. My mother used to quote a neighbour from her childhood saying: 'I could have crope into a nutshell.' But Chel and Andi are forgiving.  

Brian

Tigger looks up from treating the ringworm on his feet and discreetly warns Chel not to answer my questions; I could be an agent provocateur. 

Brian's skin has purple and ochre in it. That's the last time I come here without more colours.

Then - a shock - E, the Clint Eastwood of Occupy, hobbles out of a tent, reluctant to use his crutches. I'd recently been told he wouldn't walk for a year, having broken the balls of his feet jumping from the Paternoster Square Column.

Leila

We stroll to a communal tent with grains of expanded polystyrene on the dusty earth. For a few hours time is meaningless, which is why I return to Occupy. Whenever I march towards the camp I feel like telling Occupy to wash its face, eat up its carrots and stop being intellectually lazy - but then it looks up at me with it big brown puppy eyes and I go into a trance. Which is a betrayal of the intimidated couple who own a restaurant in the midst of what is now a latrine. Guys, it's time for the defilement to stop. You should never have started it. Your rat-ridden, destroyed kitchen tent is the backdrop to your offers to run the restaurant for them. And you are in court this Friday.

Alex

'Romeo y Julieta,' says Alex, reading the label on his Havana cigar. 'I'm too sexy for my spliff,' he growls.

Andrew, stoned out of his mind, is fascinated for about an hour by the leopard spots on my dress, shoes, belt, cardigan and spectacles. I'm wondering if he's counting them. Gusztav, who is Hungarian, has a beautiful face but I don't capture it.

Gusztav

Josh, from Glasgow, is being tattooed above his left nipple by a Frenchman who learned how to do it in prison. 

Then Lee lets Leila, a French girl, tattoo his arm with the same unwashed blade.

People are hungry. There's loose talk of a dine-and-dash (a term new to me; it means what you think it does) in Pizza Express or Subway. 

Lee

E limps off with his backpack to catch a coach to Glastonbury. 'Oi, come back and get your crutches,' shouts Lee. 

At Occupy London, Finsbury Square, with another artist

Fern (by me on the left,
by Richard on the right)

I ask Richard Cole to draw at the Occupy London camp in Finsbury Square. I have invited other artists to join me but he is the only one prepared to take on the squalor and the mud.

There is no one about when we arrive at 10.30am. The vegetable plots, formerly civic flower beds, are suffocated with weeds. A metal bowl of half-eaten cold lentil something is on a table in the front of the devastated kitchen tent.

A few occupiers emerge from tents in search of sausages. Richard sees how agitated souls are supporting each other and is quietly aghast but compassionate: 'It fulfils a social need, I suppose, and gives the people here something to do,' he says.

Spyro by me

Finsbury Square, although laid waste by the campers' incompetence, indifference and sloth, remains a village of mutual support in the face of destruction wrought by addiction and mental illness. The Pilion Trust is trying to help homeless people move on. Once the campers have gone, the land will be cradled back to health by the taxpayer.

There are some altruistic and motivated individuals in Occupy who have endured ghastly camp conditions: 'The mud is worse than the cold,' says one. Tammy, who was the named defendant in the lawsuit to evict the Occupy camp from St Paul's, is still not fully aware of her instinctive powers of creative leadership, and would be running something rather important if she'd had Richard's or my education opportunities.

Spyro by Richard 

But Occupy London has dwindled over the last six months from an eye-catching movement to a self-destructive clique. In the time-honoured tradition of major corporations, rival internal factions are blaming Occupy's lack of appreciative press coverage a) on media bias and b) on their own PR support.

Mark

A flock of clean, freshly dressed young people arrive. They pause on the outskirts of the camp as if waiting to be admitted through a non-existent portal. They stick together, reluctant to separate. They are students from Central St Martin's College of Art, despatched on a mission to draw. One of them brightly asks me what I think of Occupy. 'Read my blog,' I say, wishing it didn't sound quite so much like 'Kiss my arse.' Apart from the Doc Martens brigade, they are inadequately shod and pick their way like exotic birds through the slippery mud. We don't see any of them drawing. 'I blame their teachers,' mutters Richard.



'There are ten million xxxxing artists here today,' says an occupier. 'Let's kill them all.'
Another one turns to me. 'Will you draw me for my mum?'

Tigger took part in a group action against banks in the City the previous day, running into the reception areas of glossy buildings to leave stickers or, as one occupier put it, 'We xxxxing terrorised some evil corporations... We want these bastards to be hoping that they don't see us again, to fear us.'

Tigger is dutifully polite about my drawing and very excited by Richard's: 'That's sick, man!' He rounds up his comrades to look. 'Banging!' (Richard's are the drawings on white paper.)

Tigger by me

Tigger needs five pounds: 'I'm going begging now,' he announces.
'What do you say?' I ask.
'Can you spare a few coins,' he says.

He comes back a bit later.
'How much did you get?' I ask.
'Nothing. I think I'll go back to sleep for a bit.'
I wonder if I could draw five passers-by for a pound each on his behalf, but I fall into Occupy torpor and don't do anything about it.

Tigger by Richard 

Richard is light on his feet: he draws standing up with crayon and pad, whereas I'm perched on the only clean-ish flat surface I can find, faffing around with charcoal and Conté sticks and loose sheets of paper, trying to keep my paraphernalia out of the slime and guarding my fixative spray from its admirers.

'Does anyone know how to tie a hangman's noose?' asks Tom, aka Johnny Teatent.
'Ask Charlie or Fern,' responds another Occupier automatically.
'Why do you want to know?' I ask.
He wants to hang bankers in effigy from the trees in Finsbury Square.

I'm hoping to see E, Occupy's answer to Clint Eastwood, but I'm told that he's in hospital: he broke both feet and will be unable to walk without aid for up to a year, having jumped down from the column in Paternoster Square after briefly occupying it. I text him to commiserate and he texts back: 'Yeah my feet hurt but worth it.'

Richard and I sit on a squishy sofa in the sunshine. We are, briefly, the public face of Occupy. A cheerful group of men with paunches shout at us from the other side of the road: 'Oi, gerra job!' Richard has enjoyed a long and successful career as an artist, teacher, cartoonist, caricaturist and illustrator, and has worked for most of the broadsheets; he spends up to three months a year in France, where he has a studio. This autumn sees the publication of his book Portrait of a French Village.

Charlie by Richard

He was the only artist drawing the proceedings at the American courts martial in Baghdad concerning abuse at Abu Ghraib prison. He uses pencil and watercolour for courtroom work. 'I was drawing quickly under great pressure. Runners took my finished drawings to the studio. The pictures were almost animated as the watercolour was still drying in front of the cameras.' Steve Bell, the Guardian's cartoonist, used Richard's images as inspiration: they were the only source material since cameras weren't allowed in.

A drawing can say more than a photograph. 'And it can be a map of time,' Richard says, 'as the drawing takes place over time.'

Richard Cole

Richard went to Baghdad under the umbrella of CBS News. 'I had a couple of ex-SAS guys looking after me. They met me at the airport and said they had to take some burgers back for the guys in the news bureau. I thought, I've risked my life coming out here and you want to take me to a burger bar? This could be terminal. But it was in the terminal, where some GIs were based. They were queuing up with their rifles at Burger King. We left the airport carrying enough burgers for 20 or 30 guys. I had this flak jacket on and I thought, I'm going down the most dangerous road in the world but I don't need the flak jacket as the burgers are sufficient protection.'

Someone brings over an Evening Standard: BANK WARNS OF A EUROZONE STORM.

Richard takes a last look round the camp and says, 'I think I might come back.'

A for Arthur

My father has always made lists. Here is an extract from an unexplained handwritten list, in alphabetical order. Probably from the 1980s, it's fastened with a rusty staple:

abominable snowman
abortion
acid rain
act of God
Aladdin and his lamp
alchemy
alienation
all that glisters is not gold
amniotic sac
ampersand
Ancien Régime
Armstrong, Louis
Augean stables

Now he lists the flavour of each liquid nutrition supplement that he drinks, three times a day, in a notebook. This afternoon he writes down: 'fruits of the forest'.

A nurse puts her hand on his shoulder. 'I love you, Arthur.'