The boy’s gone to jail. Isn’t that enough?
I was watching the news on the evening of 10 December, some follow-up reports about the student protest the day before, and saw a clip of a young man wielding a mannequin’s leg — shod in a lady’s wedge-heeled boot — as he declared that he and the other protestors were ‘very angry’. He didn’t look that angry; actually he looked extremely placid and was obviously in a chemically altered state. My first thought was: Charlie! And then: you haven’t hidden that leg very well.
Charlie Gilmour is now in prison for his activities at the protest. But when he was two, I had just left school and had a gap-year job as his childminder. We spent our days making cars out of piles of leaves while his mum (then a single parent and a journalist at the Sunday Times) was at work. He was a remarkably sweet-natured child and is still, I swear it, a nice boy. I last saw him in November, round the time of his 21st birthday, about a month before his big day out. He always did have a streak of mischief, and it got disastrously out of hand on 9 December.
I hadn’t seen the papers, but it turned out he was on the front of most of them, pictured dangling on the Cenotaph. Not good. A deluge of photos followed. He’d been everywhere that day. He was so busted. He was in the Daily Mail wearing a scarf Zapatista-style and juggling a rock. He was running away from a pile of pamphlets in the doorway of the Supreme Court, which he had, it was reported, tried to set on fire. Anyone who knows Charlie at all, is familiar with his wayward sense of humour, could see this was pure anarchistic posturing — a joke.
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