London Calling - James Craig [3]
‘… but we have a DNA match,’ Valcareggi continued. ‘It is definitely the right man, and he is very worth catching. Pozzo has links to the various crime clans in the ’Ndrangheta syndicate. He has been a fugitive for almost two years now, and this is his second round of liposuction. We almost caught up with him the first time, at a clinic in Nice, but he left it about an hour before we arrived.’
‘It happens,’ said Joe sympathetically.
‘This time,’ Valcareggi beamed, ‘we’ve got him. No problem.’
‘Anaesthetic always slows them down,’ Carlyle quipped. ‘I don’t know why we don’t use it more often.’ Reaching down, he picked up another magazine and quickly flicked through the pages until he came to a large picture of two well-dressed men hovering on the cusp of middle age. The pair beamed at him as if they had just won an Olympic gold, taken the casino at Monte Carlo for ten million dollars and fucked Scarlett Johansson all ends up, all on the same day.
The strapline read: Better than you, and they know it.
Tossers, Carlyle thought. But he started reading anyway.
THE GOLDEN TWINS TAKE CENTRE STAGE
The Carlton brothers will be running the country soon; Eamonn Foinhaven profiles a new political aristocracy in the land.
One is known as ‘the Sun King’, the other ‘the dark prince’, nicknames they picked up on their fabled journey from the playing fields of Eton, the forge of leaders down the centuries, through Cambridge University to the House of Commons, and now on to the very gates of power, in front of No 10 Downing Street itself.
If the perception in Westminster is that Edgar Carlton is the prime minister in waiting – the odds on him taking the top job shortening every day, after every new fumble and misjudgement by the current incumbent – his younger sibling (by two minutes), Xavier, is hardly living in his shadow.
The political classes are now agreed that Edgar Carlton has all the necessary skills for great office: the charm, the drive, the appetite to lead from the front. Xavier, on the other hand, who is as likely to be found in the gossip pages as in parliamentary reports, has more doubters. Already handed the post of Shadow Foreign Secretary by his brother, it seems increasingly certain that he will get the chance to prove these doubters wrong. It is even whispered that the twins have agreed a secret pact, with Edgar promising to stand down as PM in favour of Xavier once a second term is secured.
The Carltons fit perfectly with the mood of the moment, the country’s new taste for austere glamour. Their story is now well known: the sons of the celebrated union between Hamisi Michuki, the Kenyan model who stormed London society in the 1960s, and Sir Sidney Carlton, a rakish tycoon who rose to the heights of Paymaster General in successive governments in the early 1960s, before his political ambitions were derailed by an unfortunate incident with a pair of strippers from the Cowshed Club, a notorious haunt of gangsters and other pre-Swinging Sixties lowlifes.
Happily for the boys, the best genes of both parents have been passed on; they acquired their mother’s stunning looks and their father’s political nous. Now, they are poised to sweep away both the gloom of the ‘new austerity’ and also the soul-destroying cult of the working-class rapscallion, or ‘cheeky chav’, both of which have plagued the country in recent years. In the class-ridden twenty-first century, the Carltons are the ultimate ‘anti-chavs’, standing against everything that is common, vulgar and ugly. Surfing a popular wave of optimism and glamour, they have, quite simply, left routine politics behind. ‘They are so in touch with the zeitgeist, it’s frightening,’ declares Chelsea-based style guru Sally Plank. ‘Their peers are footballers, pop stars and royalty, rather than other politicians. They realise that becoming a credible celebrity is ninety per