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Without prejudice

Ev'rybody must get stones

The New Age crankiness of the Prime
Minister and his wife could be a blessing in disguise

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this

Nick
Cohen

The
Observer, Sunday 8 December 2002 14.55 GMT

'The most accessible entrance into the Blairs' spirit
world of paganism, spiritualism, pseudo-science and quackery is through a chat
with Cherie's 'homeopathic dowser healer' - one Jack Temple, aged 86. Temple is
the possessor of a 'Neolithic stone circle', which, he assured me, captures the
healing energies of the stars, sun and moon and holds them for the benefit of
his paying customers. He discovered the 'magic' stones in Pembrokeshire and
transported them in two lorries to his home in Pyrford, near Woking, Surrey.

'I'm sorry,' I interrupted. 'The local authority and the National Trust
allowed you to run off with an ancient stone circle?'

'The stones weren't in a circle,' he explained. 'They had been cleared so the
field could be worked. They were dumped in a ditch and a farmer sold them to
me.'

'I see. A farmer said a load of old rubble was once a Stone Age religious
site and you paid ready money to get your hands on it. How did you know the
stones were genuine stones, so to speak?'

An irritated note entered Temple's voice. 'I dowsed them with my magic
pendulum, of course. I made the amazing discovery that each of the 16 stones
relieved stress in different parts of the body - the muscles, the brain and so
on.' After he moved the stones to Surrey, Temple went to the garden centre and
used his pendulum to divine the aura of the herb and alpines section. The trial
of the plants was merciless. He found only wild strawberries had the strength to
'contain nature's energy generated by the stone circle'.

Temple duly planted his circle with strawberries. He will sell you a small
packet of their dried leaves for £10 (plus £1 p&p). It's a bargain, as
Cherie Blair knows. Temple said in his autobiography Medicine Man : 'I believe
I've helped the lame to walk, the barren to conceive, and the sad to smile. I've
been able to reflate the lungs of children previously condemned to a life
constricted by asthma. I've even seen the bald pates of middle-aged and elderly
men begin to spring hair growth again.'

Don't mock him. Fergie and, inevitably, the late Princess Di have acclaimed
him as a healing genius. Temple is happy to allow everyone to share the inner
harmony of royalty and the Blairs. For £85 he will sell you a pile of stones and
instructions on how to lay them out in the garden. (This time he doesn't mention
the cost of the post and packing, which I suspect will be steep.)

Cherie Blair was introduced to the doddering dowser by Sylvia and Carole
Caplin. Sylvia, 67, is a former ballet dancer turned spiritualist. On 11
November, the Daily Mail published an extraordinary piece. According to a former
client, Caplin Senior 'can bring the light down' and open channels with the
dead. Mrs Blair regularly visits the mystic's £500,000 house in a gated park in
Dorking. It, too, is filled with stones. 'There was a particularly active period
in the summer when Sylvia was channelling for Cherie over two or three times a
week, with almost daily contact between them,' the Mail reported. 'There were
times when Cherie's faxes ran to 10 pages.'

This can't possibly be true, I thought. I phoned Downing Street and asked if
they denied the story. The press officer promised to call back, but never did. I
checked if the Mail had received a complaint. The paper hadn't heard a squeak of
protest. I think we can take the silence as a confirmation.

Caplin's daughter is the former soft-porn model who became Mrs and Mr Blair's
style guru and confidante in 1994. She has been a lady in waiting at the New
Labour court since. Her boyfriend is Peter Foster, an Australian fraudster with
a criminal record that goes back to 1983. After a week of stupendous lies, the
Blairs admitted Foster had somehow secured them two flats in Bristol at £69,000
off the market price - or about three times the annual pay of a fire officer.

The mother is as alarming as her daughter's crooked lover. Cherie evidently
believes Caplin senior is in touch with the other side, and Caplin may well
believe she can natter with the dead herself. None of her clients has suggested
she played on their fear and credulity. But, so what? Whether she is a sincere
fool or a sly fraud doesn't matter. A con's a con whatever the mental state of
the con woman. What spiritualists say is a lie whether they know it or not.

Modern spiritualism began in 1848 when two sisters from New York State
announced that they had received coded tapping messages from the ghost of a
murdered peddler. The scam was a great success. For 40 years Margaret and
Katherine Fox made a good living from a fraud which inspired mediums the world
over. At the end of their lives the Foxes admitted that the knocking sounds
seance-goers had heard were made by Margaret - who had mastered the knack of
snapping her toes. Their belated honesty did no good and spiritualism continued
to flourish.

Given its history, why does Cherie believe it? Well she is a Catholic and her
husband is an Anglo-Catholic, and if you can believe that wine and a wafer are
the blood and body of Christ you can believe anything. Or, indeed, everything.
Until now, there has been an averting of well-bred eyes from the superstitions
of our creepy PM and his gullible wife.

A year ago, the Times printed the following account of what they did on their
summer holidays at the luxurious Maroma Hotel on Mexico's Caribbean coast. The
Blairs visited a 'Temazcal', a steam bath enclosed in a brick pyramid. It was
dusk and they had stripped down to their swimming costumes. Inside, they met
Nancy Aguilar, a new-age therapist. She told them that the pyramid was a Mayan
womb in which they would be reborn. The Blairs saw the shapes of animals in the
steam and experienced 'inner-feelings and visions'. They smeared each other with
melon, papaya and mud from the jungle, and then let out a primal scream of
purifying agony. No one followed-up the Times's scoop - deference is not as dead
as some people would have you think.

When the Blairs moved into Downing Street, a feng shui expert rearranged the
furniture at Number 10. Cherie wears a 'magic pendant' known as the BioElectric
Shield, which is filled with 'a matrix of specially cut quartz crystals' that
surround the wearer with 'a cocoon of energy' and ward off evil forces. (It was
given to her by Hillary Clinton, another political spouse who combines the
characteristic Third Way vices of sharp prac tice and bone-headedness.) Then
there have been inflatable Flowtron trousers, auricular therapy and acupuncture
pins in the ear.

New Age Labour has spilled out of Downing Street and blighted public policy.
In January 1999, for instance, the Government recruited a feng shui consultant,
Renuka Wickmaratne, to discover a magical way to improve inner-city estates
without raising taxes.

'Red and orange flowers would reduce crime,' she concluded, 'and introducing
a water feature would reduce poverty. I was brought up with this ancient
knowledge.' Three years later the Government announced that, for the first time
since the creation of the NHS, 'alternative' remedies could be granted the same
status as conventional treatments, despite the absence of evidence that they
might cure the sick. According to the Sunday Times, 'The inclusion of Indian
ayurvedic medicine, a preventative approach to healing using diet, yoga and
meditation, is thought to have been influenced by Cherie Blair's interest in
alternative therapy.'

The Blairs' interest, along with that of Di and Fergie (in mystics as well as
allegedly neolithic circles), of Prince Phillip (a subscriber to Flying Saucer
Review since the magazine began publication in the mid-1950s) and of Margaret
Thatcher (in electro-shock bath therapy), show that superstition isn't always
the preserve of the hopeless poor. It can appeal to the feeble-minded
everywhere, from the 'anarcho-primitives' of the anti-capitalist movement to the
supposedly tough Tories who turn from the exposés of the Blairs at the front of
the Mail to friendly discussions of how the Bible Code predicted whatever
happened last week at the back.

Nothing worth having can come from their babblings, and not only because 10
Downing Street is beginning to look like a tsar's court filled with shamans and
holy-rolling petty criminals.

At the heart of New Age crankiness is a deep selfishness. The treatments
favoured by the Blairs and so many from their natural constituency in the
upper-middle class promise to release the true self, heal the abused self,
pamper the stressed self and reassure the doubting self that deep down inside
there is good. Others don't get a look in.

The only possible benefit is that at least I will stop hearing Labour MPs
saying that Cherie will keep Tony's feet on the ground and make him stick to
socialist principles. What's left of the Labour movement is going to have to
face the weirdness of its leading couple without illusion and, I hope, purify
itself by colonically irrigating the Blairs out of the system.

More on the Cherie Blair rowwww.observer.co.uk/politics

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Nick Cohen: Ev'rybody must get stones
This article was published on guardian.co.uk at 14.55 GMT on Sunday
8 December 2002. It was last modified at 14.55 GMT on Tuesday 10 December 2002.

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