On a poetically sloe-black, slow black night in Wales, the young people of
Newtown are herding into the pubs. One of them is the local MP, 42 years old
but somehow still a boy in his baggy jeans and short-sleeved shirt, his arms
pale and beefy on a cold winter’s night. Lembit Opik is playing pool in his
local, the Grapes, with friends no older than their early twenties. They are
snogging and joshing as their MP takes his shot next to the television where
they let him watch Question Time on Thursdays.
Home is a short walk down a narrow hilly street. We fight our way into his
sitting room, which is stuffed with boxes and stacks of old newspapers. A
Hello! spread featuring Opik peeks out – saved but not lovingly conserved,
thank goodness. There is a framed photo of the single-engine plane in which
he has a share. He will offer to fly me “some of the way” home to London
(would I be bailing out over Dudley?),
a treat I will forgo thanks to a gathering storm. There is also a boxed
remote-control aeroplane, a Christmas present for his girlfriend, the Cheeky
Girl popster Gabriela Irimia. “She wants to take flying lessons,” he says
proudly.
He gestures apologetically, hopelessly, at the chaos – he never gets time to
sort it out. A few miles away is the gracious country home he once shared
with his former fiancée, Sian Lloyd – now all hers. She is probably there
this evening, putting the finishing touches to a book due out in spring
which is predicted to splatter Opik with acrimony. He veers between panic
and self-reassurance about this: what more can she reveal other than their
sex life? She has said it all already: his irresponsibility, his boozing,
his wandering eye. Out of discretion and honour (and trepidation too, I
fear) he is unhappy discussing her; he has been offered money for his side
of the story but so far has declined. In the time we spend together it
becomes apparent, however, that he was unhappy with Lloyd and her “social,
Welsh and sexy” gang of friends.
If recently he has seemed wired with a loopy exuberance – carousing,
paparazzo-teasing – it is the relief of deliverance into a second youth. And
yet… Seemingly absorbed in a rapturous love affair, he still has the look of
a recently separated man, sprung from the comforts of the marital home, too
many late nights, too many social pints, no proper food. He is touchy about
the drinking, because Lloyd painted him as a barfly. When we first meet he
stresses his wholesome lifestyle, telling me that he hasn’t had a cup of
coffee for eight years. “I’d rather overdo it on rollmops,” he shrugs. Hmm.
The “human anagram” has been looking forward to showing me the bright lights
of Newtown, heart of his Montgomeryshire patch. The next pub is heaving with
drinkers. Cordial and glassy-eyed, they bowl up for a chat while he radiates
his force field of bonhomie in a sort of impromptu disco surgery. He
introduces various young people as “the vicar” or “Rhian’s daughter”,
telling the girls they look “very lovely this evening”, his eyes wandering
off from our conversation as a pretty miss sashays past. A little group
behind us begins to chant jovially: “Who’s your girlfriend?” He turns to me:
“It’ll be all around [the town] by tomorrow.”
Once upon a time he was a nerdy MP banging on about asteroids, the Lib Dems’
Northern Ireland and Welsh spokesman, who was grateful for the happy
accident of Welsh questions taking place on Wednesday mornings before PMQs,
so that as he spoke the chamber would be filling and the cameras poised.
That, and the occasional outing on Have I Got News for You. Now he is a
personality with an agent. Actually, the agent, a friend of his ex, has
gone, but he is seemingly in the market for a replacement.
Does he pay for his tabloid fame with diminished political cred? It’s
something he ponders more than he admits. After a meeting with Centrica,
owners of British Gas, who are advocating domestic smart meters (measuring
energy consumption), he suddenly asks the two representatives: “Would you be
less inclined to work with me if I appeared with my girlfriend in Closer or
Hello! magazine?” One of them answers carefully: “I think having a strong
character makes you better defined than a grey suit.” Lembit turns to me:
“See – I told you!”
Most of Opik’s life is the thankless slog of opposition politics. He is now
the Liberal Democrats’ spokesman on business, enterprise and regulatory
reform (BERR), meeting the bigwigs of the CBI and the Federation of Small
Businesses, whom he loves in a libertarian, small-state, Gladstonian way. He
is not one of those Lib Dems who have assumed the mantle of socialism
discarded by new Labour, though he has an adorable ultra-leftie called Pete
running his diary. “If you can’t be uncompromising at his age, you never
can,” says the boss, who is liberal to his core. He is in the game for the
pick-and-mix agenda of civil liberties, redistribution through income tax,
rolling back regulations. He came up with his party’s target for a
zero-carbon Britain by 2050; and he wants to rethink nuclear power, though
they are set against it. He campaigned for an independent review on the
deaths at Deepcut barracks, and for the families of the victims of the Omagh
bomb to sue the Real IRA for damages. He’s your man for protecting post
offices, and campaigning against the closure of local abattoirs because of
overbearing regulations. Facts are his thing rather than ideology. He got
into trouble when supporting fox-hunting, as a member of the All-Party
Parliamentary Middle Way Group, because the data tell him that dogs are not
the worst way to kill a fox.
On a Friday afternoon in November, he attends a meeting at Shrewsbury general
hospital, where he tells the board his party “wouldn’t do much to change the
NHS”, that his old colleagues at Procter & Gamble would never have tolerated
the ceaseless restructuring imposed by past governments. The board members
ask for his help in their application for foundation-hospital status. “You
should nudge me,” he says. “I’m not proud. Send me the words. As long as
they don’t say ‘Vote Cameron’ I’ll say them.” This is the hospital where
they put him back together after a paragliding accident in 1998 (he broke
his back in 12 places), where he went cold turkey on the diamorphine they
gave him for his pain, having walked – walked! – to find help. It was walk
or die, apparently.
That near-fatal trauma probably underpins his reluctance to settle down: since
death can catch you unawares, why edge towards it in a waking slumber of
middle-aged domesticity? The flying and daredevil motorbikes, the pub
crawls, the friendships with twentysomethings, the giggling, camp Opik who
attended the 2002 Eurovision Song Contest in Tallinn at the invitation of
its mayor… These are not just distractions from a grey world, but ways of
feeling alive, of cheating the Baltic depression that trots doggedly behind
him. He courts excitement, risk. Cuddly he may look; cosy he isn’t. A year
ago his split from Lloyd and the start of his relationship with Irimia was
not viewed kindly by colleagues. The same cabal of party elders who saw
Charles Kennedy as “a little engine puffing up a slope” saw Lembit as a
liability. “I was told to hide my relationship by one person. How could they
say that, as a liberal?” He was also advised that any drop in the party’s
ratings in Christmas 2006 was his fault. “Actually, they went up 5%.”
Compared with his peers, he is not crazed with ambition. Neither a
conspicuous thinker nor a pamphleteer, nor an anointed future leader; he has
found his own way of being noticed, which matters deeply to him. “I’m
flattered that people are so interested in my life. My recognition has gone
up – I’m a serious politician with a serious agenda and people listen to
what I’ve got to say.”
Were Opik to become party president next year – taking the job from Simon
Hughes, as is his plan – it is hard to imagine that Gabriela wouldn’t be an
asset rather than an embarrassment. They will do joint interviews,
discussing the “act of providence” that brought together the bespectacled
techie with the nubile Romanian ingénue. At a recent reception for civil
engineers, Opik joked to one mogul that he wished he had his salary. “And I
wish I had your girlfriend” was the riposte, which pleased him.
He is a sucker for attention, enjoying the popping flashbulbs when the couple
are socialising, as he did when the cameras (less eagerly) captured his
former relationship. Weather girl, Cheeky Girl: it’s all good publicity.
Limelight is a hard drug to forsake, especially for a politician gaining a
reputation as an entertainer. To understand why he relishes his celebrity,
you have first to grasp how much of an outsider he is.
) ) ) ) )
He was born and brought up in Bangor, Northern Ireland – not only saddled with
an Estonian name and an exotic background, but also speaking no English on
his first day at school. There is still something essentially boyish about
him – his unlined skin contrasting with his thick, grey-flecked hair –
buoyant with the bouncy enthusiasms you find in priests and scientists, but
almost never in those who broker power for a living. At six he read the
seminal text The Oscillating Universe, by his grandfather Ernst Julius Opik.
The eminent astronomer fled Estonia and the encroaching Red Army at the end
of the war, finding a job in 1948 at Armagh Observatory; as a boy, Lembit
spotted stars with the great scientist, who also composed classical music.
“His language was the language of science; his music was the harmony of the
universe. He was quirky. He wanted to have the living-room door open
different amounts, depending on the day. I never knew why.” Lembit’s
childhood passion was technology, especially Apollo 13 and Concorde; he
wanted to join the RAF but, as the son of two East European immigrants,
wouldn’t have been allowed to fly. Politics at home were right-wing; his
father, Uno, a doctor of physics and applied maths lecturing at Queen’s
University, believed it better to be “dead than red”. He died of motor
neurone disease in 2005; his son is president of the Motor Neurone Disease
Association, which he has just helped to secure government funding of £7m.
Opik grew up terrified of war, specifically of a Russian invasion. “I was
living under the shadow of the cold war. When there were moments of global
unrest, I was always afraid in case there was a war. Even when I was 17
during the Falklands war I was scared, because the Bear was restless in
Moscow.”
At Bristol University he began studying aeronautical engineering, then
switched to economics, then to philosophy – to the consternation of his
father, who feared for his job prospects. He was politically unaligned,
setting up a group called Students for Students. After being president of
the Union at Bristol, he spent a year on the NUS executive, joining the Lib
Dems only after falling under the spell of Paddy Ashdown. He started his
career advertising Fairy Liquid as a graduate recruit for Procter & Gamble
in Newcastle upon Tyne, and trying to sell the complexion-enhancing purity
of Zest soap to a sceptical public. He moved to human resources. “People are
where my real interest lies. Eventually I persuaded them to give me a
promotion. They were worried about the lively guy who didn’t fit the
stereotype. There was a fear that I might bring the company to its knees.”
Two decades later, he has turned the maverick jokiness that worried the suits
to his advantage. In Wales we attend a dinner to honour Lord Livsey, former
Welsh Lib Dem leader, hosted by the Farmers’ Union of Wales. “Nice, nice
people,” he mutters, passing through the crowd. “I want the girls to do a
Cheeky version of The Farmer and the Cowman Should Be Friends,” he tells the
bemused union president. Popularity is one of his most bankable assets.
Earlier, as he queued for a sandwich in the street, a passer-by stopped to
praise the performance of his party’s acting leader, Vincent Cable. “Nice
for Vince to have a fan,” I say. “And me,” grins Opik. “And me.”
He has felt misunderstood in recent months. When he was first seen with
25-year-old Gabriela Irimia, he was assumed to have traded in his older
model for a sexier version. Actually, he has insisted, by way of the PCC and
his lawyers, that Lloyd ended their engagement on October 23, 2006, and he
began dating Miss Cheeky at the beginning of December. They first met at a
Channel Five party, their rapt conversation interrupted by Vanessa Feltz,
who asked pointedly when his wedding to Lloyd was planned for, subsequently
accusing him of “uncontrollable carnal desire”. “The sexist assumption is
that a beautiful Romanian woman can’t be bright,” he says, “but ours is a
meeting of minds.” When the Transylvanian twins had cosmetic uplifts this
year, Gabi’s reported comment was: “We are so proud of our breasts, like a
man would be with a new Ferrari.” But Opik isn’t the teeniest bit
embarrassed by this, or that his sweetheart is best known for inviting her
fans to “touch my bum” (in the Cheekies’ 2004 anthem, The Cheeky Song). She
is a “great celebrity”, he declares with none of the irony he ladles
generously elsewhere. He is gooey about her. Sitting in the house cafeteria,
he is out-sparkling the Thames as it floats by the window, not with wit and
wisdom but literally, his face flickering as he devours a plate of oily
fish. He has acquired Gabriela’s sparkly stage make-up from their shared
pillows. “She uses a lot of sparkly make-up,” he sighs longingly; she could
have been a ballerina; instead she has a new album coming out, and a single,
a (pretty unthinkable) cover of I’m Too Sexy. “It’s a very sexy song. I am
just so proud of her.”
Will she break his heart? Maybe. She wants him to get a better car. “If we
arrive together at a party in my Vauxhall Cavalier, she thinks it doesn’t
look so good,” he tells me (ominous, I note to myself). When he sought to
inquire on her behalf about problems with her visa (through perfectly proper
channels), there were whispers about a threat of deportation. In that event,
or if she got a parking ticket, one suspects he would move heaven and Earth
to help.
My first impression of Lembit Opik was that he was a bit of a twit. I thought
this without having met him. It wasn’t the asteroid warnings, nor the geeky
style, nor the serial backing of duff candidates for his party’s leadership
(Kennedy, Oaten, Hughes…): it was those Hello! spreads of his “engagement”
to Sian Lloyd, nestling by roaring fires into which you just wanted to push
them both for their smugness. He looked like a pet poodle, found as a stray
but groomed for popular appeal, redeeming himself only by looking vaguely
uncomfortable. Actually, he is anything but a dolt. “I’ve come out of a
difficult time stronger,” he says. “I don’t take shit from the media, I have
a profile, I have things to say… If I split up with Gabi I will survive, I
know I will.” There is something slightly mad-professor about him, and he
can be, well, strange. He talks about the transference of psychic energy,
how his crossness that our Virgin train was late had put a spring in the
step of the woman who later showed us to a meeting at Shrewsbury hospital.
When events get really weird, he vibrates the theme tune from The Twilight
Zone, tapping his throat with his index finger. He made me laugh more than
any other politician I’ve shadowed. As we walk to a meeting on funding to
the regions, he says: “Forty minutes in here and you’ll be committing
suicide… And it will be regarded as an interruption.” He doesn’t mind being
seen as odd. His Westminster walls are decorated with headlines on his
asteroid scares, a benign mocking he seems to enjoy. “I knew the science on
the asteroids was sound. I could see the actuarial risk was high and that no
one else in parliament would take it on.” (The government set up a task
force on his advice, which delivered 14 recommendations, only one of which –
a donation of money to highlight the threat of a comet – was taken up.) The
issue was serious, but as ever he couldn’t resist the joke, starting his
speech with “Mr Speaker, I have a problem with asteroids.” He was deluged
with intimate creams, but doesn’t mind as long as he raised awareness.
Through his darker times he has found solace in his place of work. The House
of Commons is not a just a backstabbers’ symposium; when its members stumble
publicly, it can resemble a field hospital for the emotionally and
professionally wounded. There is warmth for a popular chap in a scrape.
Beneath the fig trees of modern politics in Portcullis House, our flow is
interrupted by a parade of friends (party immaterial) and he has a little
ribbing for each one. “Go on, do your Charles Kennedy impersonation!” he
tells a lobby reporter. He goes into an amiable huddle with a frail Norman
Tebbit. The cheeky-chappy Labour MP Stephen Pound walks past and chuckles:
“Hello, Tripod.” Opik blushes like a choirboy. I must look in
the Daily Sport if I want to understand his nickname.
Without the networks of the bigger parties to nurture him, he strikes me as a
little lonely in both London and Newtown. Lloyd provided a place to belong,
though he felt trapped in it. Besides, spend more than five minutes with him
and you see that Lloyd must have been too old, not in the sense of providing
offspring or looking glamorous, but because he is such a juvenile spirit:
flirty, larky, solid and then suddenly mercurial. To be pushing 50 and be
with him would drive you nuts. She called him “incapable of an adult
relationship”; in truth, he is simply not ready for a middle-aged
settlement. Gabriela is his lifeline to an upbeat youthfulness he feared
he’d missed out on. It’s what he wants. Is it what he needs? Could I speak
to Gabriela, I ask. “You’ll have to talk to the Cheeky Momma,” he replies.
Is he joking? He is not. It seems that the word of the Cheekies’ mother,
Margareta, is law. On the telephone she sounds like a souped-up Zsa Zsa
(“Hello, darlink!”), asking if I’m sure Lembit hasn’t breached his
exclusivity contract with Closer magazine by talking to me. She likes to
keep the media appraised, however, telling a journalist last January that
the lovebirds had only spent one night apart in two weeks. Things have
changed since then; the pair have holidayed in Tenerife and taken a trip to
Romania, but the girls live in Rye, Sussex, and apparently he still begs
leave to visit. This is charming but it doesn’t fill me with hope for his
life as a Cheeky son-in-law. While we are in his Welsh constituency, the
twins are returning from switching on the festive lights in Colwyn Bay;
you’d think the lovers might have conspired to meet but, no, her schedule
precludes it. Her girls are so busy that Momma suggests I e-mail my
questions. I want to write: “Miss Cheeky, what attracted you to the
soft-hearted MP with contacts in the Home Office and Hello! magazine?”
Instead I ask what she loves about him. Her reply is pert and pat: “He was
polite, charming and totally different to most of the people I’ve met in the
entertainment industry, not that I’m saying that parliament is theatre!”
On a dusty pile in his sitting room is a book called Happiness: A Guide to
Developing Life’s Most Important Skill, by the Buddhist monk Matthieu
Ricard. A friend gave it to him last year, concerned about his mood. With
his career progressing, and delivered from an unhappy relationship into the
arms of a beauty, his Montgomeryshire and Westminster lives peopled with
grown-up mentors and baby admirers, he ought to be euphoric. But young
Lembit, as I will always think of him, the gaiety-of-nations candidate,
isn’t quite there yet. There are little clues when he says Portcullis House
is “very lonely in recess and in the evenings”, and you wonder how many he
has spent there.
We first meet on the anniversary of his brother Endel’s death from pneumonia
at 37, and he has yet to telephone his mother, whom he credits for making
him a big softie “when I really ought to be a hard man”, he says, beating
his breast and performing a strangulated little Tarzan call. The travails of
the Lib Dems, their sizzling sex lives and search for a leader, are nothing
against his quest for a meaning in life. He is emotional. He cries. He
giggles. He puts his head in his hands and shakes it. Unwise confidences
spill out of him in a torrent before he checks himself with a plea of
“Please don’t use that.” He is kind, dealing gently in his surgery with a
young Indian man and his father who have immigration problems – “Please
don’t worry. We’ll try to sort it out together” – turning up at Newtown
station early in the morning because he fears my train won’t arrive,
offering to drive me. Left-handed and colour-blind, he is both independent
and sorely in need of looking after. It is tempting to see him as a
post-modern Candide, an innocent abroad in a citadel of egos, through whose
naivety we can see the complexity of political aspiration. But he is savvier
than his party’s mandarins think: a politician who grasps that celebrity is
a life force in politics, just as it is in hairdressing or professional
darts, and that however it derives – even from snuggling up to a novelty pop
act – it validates the formerly anonymous with swift efficacy. During his
tabloid pasting, when he read the headline “My Lucky Escape from Lembit”
over an interview with his ex, he was actually chuffed. “I thought, ‘I’m on
first-name terms with the media. I’m really well known.’” He stops and
laughs. “How shallow am I?”.
As ‘Don’t mention the war’ is no longer mandatory other more targeted taboos have been introduced, for example: -
• New Labour’s - ‘Don’t mention nationalisation, data protection, donations, dead Iraqi’s or Peter Hain’
• Tories - ‘Don’t mention grammar schools, tax cuts, nuclear power or the EU’
• Lib Dems - ‘Don’t mention Ming, leadership, Lembit Opik, alcohol or rent-boys’
Brian Christley, Abergele, UK