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plastic and the ‘nets’ put up at them are also white with occasional lime-green or bubblegum pink detailing.
    The front of Guappo’s barber’s shop which stands in a sort of fork in the road shortly before the main rundown shopping street in Trimdon Colliery – the sign outside says ‘Hair design for men’ – is jazzily black-and-white and has nothing about it to indicate that it is the near-neighbourof the big house where, until recently, the prime minister lived.
    Myrobella is approached along an uneven narrow track with a terrace of half a dozen miners’ houses running down one side. The police have taken over the house nearest the Blairs. There is a heavy round-the-clock police presence and a series of barriers ringing Myrobella. There is a wooden barrier with an urgent caution notice on it and then a brick gate-house where evidence of some of the duty officers’ home comforts – a radio, some washing-up liquid, an electric kettle – can be glimpsed through a window. Police armed with sniper rifles patrol the perimeter. The house itself has been screened from the public with close-planted perennials and tall box hedges, creating a dark and rather oppressive atmosphere. This is amplified by the dank patch of municipal playground full of nursery-coloured rides and brimming with deadly negative potential – the inch-thick subaudible rubber tiling squelches underfoot – that has been carved out of quarter of an acre of what was originally Myrobella’s either front or back garden.
    The uncertainty arises from the fact that none of the house’s doors, certainly none of its windows, is visible. The process of concealment has been so well achieved that all Myrobella’s particulars – homeliness, openness, availability of natural light, original features, true wear and tear, stability, renovations, orientation, everything about the house – is subject to speculation, and has to be guessed at rather than known. Many people would argue that inthese respects, Myrobella is emblematic of Blair himself, ‘the man with no shadow’: a formidable building that appears, no matter how many times you circle it, to have no doors.
    In the early years, before the era of ‘celebrity government’ had been inaugurated under Tony Blair as prime minister, he used to hold his regular Saturday-morning surgeries at the house. There would be complaints towards the end that it was impossible to get in to see him; that the nearest you ever got was his Sedgefield agent, John Burton, and that Blair himself didn’t know the full name of anybody in the village. Even in his years as a fledgling MP, though, from 1983 on, for somebody committed to simple Christian principles of charity, equality and good intentions as Blair was, his receiving of constituents at Myrobella on Saturdays must have had something uncomfortably Thomas Hardy-like about it: a tableau of the halt and the poor huddled against the rain and the biting wind, carrying their problems to the grand house.
    (No telling of the tale of Gordon Brown can be complete without reference to his standing as a ‘son of the manse’ and the effect it had on him as a boy growing up in a house which was often the place of last resort for many of his father’s hard-up Kirkcaldy parishioners. Dr Brown, who was considered a saintly man, believed it was his duty to help feed, clothe and encourage those at the bottom of the heap. ‘Living in a manse,’ Gordon Brown later said, ‘you find out quickly about life and death and the meaning of poverty, injustice and unemployment.’)
    Just before the barber shop on the road that leads down into Trimdon Village, visitors are given a subtle clue that they could be within striking distance of the former prime minister’s house. ‘Premier Court’, a sign announces at the entrance to a new cul-de-sac development of what the brochures generally describe as ‘executive homes’. The cul-de-sac of double-fronted, pale brick houses where Kate and