#11 Twenty-year Orbit, part 2B

Concluding my look at the London Orbital film, and my examination of the L.O. project as a whole.

You’d think a country man would understand
The devil makes work for idle hands

The Fall, ‘M5 6-7PM’¹

Essex boys

Of the various things M25 ‘navigator’ John Sergeant darkly whispered about (see part 2A of this essay), the underworld slayings, at least, were real. Following the book’s example, a section of the London Orbital film is given over to discussion of the December 1995 Rettendon murders, aka the Range Rover murders.² Three drug dealers, Tony Tucker (38), Patrick Tate (37) and Craig Rolfe (26) were the victims, shot dead in a Range Rover on a small farm track in Rettendon, Essex.
Petit, described by Sinclair as a conspiracy buff, seems willing to entertain the notion there was more to such gangland violence than met the eye:

Ecstacy formed part of the invisible triangle of Thatcherism, along with covert government arms deals and Essex gangsters. Sergeant offered Bernard O'Mahoney, author of Essex Boys, as a perfect illustration of the thesis. O'Mahoney had helped build the motorway and in the ecstacy club scene he was a key figure: the man on the door. And several years later, he was at the wrong end of an emerging surveillance technology, the man in the picture [we see his grainy, black and white image on screen], later acquitted.

In London Orbital, the book, Sinclair provides some context omitted from the film:

After the ecstasy-induced death of Leah Betts, known to O’Mahoney from her visits to Raquels, the Basildon scene imploded: prison-toned crazies, with their cartons of loose cash, their runs to Holland, their big nights at the Epping Country Club, started to rip each other apart. Paranoia was the starting point. Drug psychosis. Bent associates. Bent cops. Bent landscape. Who did what to whom seemed less important than where they did it. Which motor they were driving. ‘Paranoid?’ said O’Mahoney. ‘I felt fucking quadraphonic.’³

O’Mahoney is on hand to give his take on things thanks to a meeting set up by Sergeant. The gangster continues with an explanation of why the M25 is important for the Essex men:

The M25's useful for all sorts of people. Y'know Essex: surrounded by ports, motorways, M25, A13. Jump on the M25 and you're up the M1 and you're in Liverpool, d'you know what I mean? M1, M60.. Essex is well connected y'know, for getting stuff shifted round. I haven't even got a licence to drive an articulated lorry but we used to run stolen lorryloads of gear round the country, up to Liverpool. Coffee beans for a relative of now-deceased train robber Buster Edwards. Down to Bristol, doing debts. Bash people up in Birmingham. We were always on the move. The more people you reach, the more money you make, d'you know what I mean?

According to O’Mahoney the three dead drug dealers of Rettendon, Tucker, Tate and Rolfe, had been out of control. They’d been ripping off associates. They’d been hitting the drugs themselves. As O’Mahoney sees it, someone in the business said enough was enough and decided to cut their careers short. The three men were supposed to meet an associate in that quiet Rettendon spot, but it was of course a set-up:

I've seen the photographs. Their heads were obliterated. Three times in the head with a shotgun, there's absolutely nothing left, d'you know what I mean? Absolutely horrific. Everyone was telling them, You're gonna get it, you're gonna get it. But because they're so full of drugs and self-belief they never thought anyone would do it, d'you know what I mean? And uh, they were wrong.. [laughs].

Petit and Sinclair meet another man, John Whomes, brother of Jack, one of the two men gaoled, in 1998, for the Range Rover murders (the other being Michael Steele). Both John Whomes and O’Mahoney are adament the two men sentenced to life imprisonment for the murders are innocent. Whomes:

Those three men was shot by a marksman, an absolute precise marksman. I've seen every bit of evidence in the case, I've seen all the photographs and they're horrific, absolutely horrific. You have nightmares about the photographs. But you have to look because it's your own brother there, and I look at the photographs and I think, I know my brother, and there's no way my brother could've carried out that. He wouldn't even kill a sparrow.

So convinced of his brother’s innocence was Whomes that he’d staged a protest on the M25, on a gantry at Junction 30. He’d worn a hi-vis jacket painted with the words FREE JACK WHOMES. INNOCENT OF RETTENDON MURDERS. He’d also unfurled a banner: FREE THEM NOW. He’d chained himself, along with a supportive family friend, to the gantry with chains they’d bought in B & Q. The protest had had an effect: that section of the motorway had been closed for some hours and Whomes had given a number of interviews, on his mobile phone, to hurriedly dispatched journalists.
But the protest’s impact didn’t extend further than that. In the event, Jack Whomes served 22 years of his 25-year ‘life’ sentence—he was released early in March 2021, for good behaviour. He was then 59 years old, and according to The Daily Mail, intended to get a job as a mechanic. Michael Steele, aged 79 at the time of writing, remains in prison.

The Widow

What was Petit suggesting with those remarks about ‘the invisible triangle of Thatcherism’? The existence of a conspiracy in which the Thatcher and Major administrations were somehow involved with the Essex drug trade? It seems far-fetched, but unanswered questions remain about the Rettendon murders. The fact that the slayings occured less than a month after the highly publicised death of 18-year-old Leah Betts, herself an Essex girl and from a middle-class family, was noted by many commentators at the time⁴. Leah had taken an ecstacy tablet at home with friends, and—presumably mindful of warnings about the risks of dehydration when taking the drug—had then consumed 7 litres of water in 90 minutes. This had caused her to slip into a coma from which she never emerged. Some publications later speculated that the Range Rover murders might've been revenge for Leah's death, though this seems to me unlikely, given the Betts's middle-class status. It's interesting to note that no drug dealers were arrested in connection with Leah's death. Four of her friends who'd been present with her were charged, but none received a custodial sentence.

What reason might the British state have had for getting involved with Essex gangsters? Conceivably, the ill-gotten gains of organised crime might’ve contributed to the Thatcherite economic ‘miracle’ in counties like Essex. Drug money laundered into Rolexes, BMWs, Range Rovers, Barratt homes. The criminals may not have numbered more than a few hundred individuals (I’m guessing here), but when it comes to the prosperity engine, every little helps. The more ambitious part of the English working class was famously described by Thatcher as ‘our people’: White Van Man was important, if not key, to the election victories of ‘79, ‘83 and ‘87.

Thatcher has of course been a bête noire for the British Left for decades, so perhaps we should take such theories with a pinch of salt. Petit, whose work is not overtly political, has occasionally mentioned her or her regime in interviews and articles—disparagingly, needless to say. See for instance this 2010s interview with Neil Jackson (whose interview with Iain Sinclair I quoted in Twenty-year Orbit, part 1):

NJ: I wonder what your thoughts are on the way content is delivered now. How we access and consume it.

CP: In an odd sort of way there is no content anymore. We did a film about four years ago called Content, and it struck me that if you take television – there used to be quite a lot of content in television. Now there’s barely any. My wife Emma (Matthews) is currently working with Anthony Wall on compiling and re-working old Arena programmes. You look at this stuff and it was unbelievable it was ever commissioned. But back then, there was somebody actually there to commission it. You’d sit around a table and say: I want to make a thing about such and such. And normally they’d say no. The BBC, for years, worked in a fairly high-handed way in terms of patronage, but you were at least discussing content. But then, and I don’t know exactly at what point, no one within television was really interested in discussing anything anymore. It had become about marketing.

Not so much technology, then, but an historical shift in terms of commercialisation. A competition mentality.

It changed in the eighties, when everything became Thatcherised. The internet and the technological revolution came at the end of something that was already happening. Banks are a good example. Forty years ago you had a bank manager. He was a model of probity. His career was to do with insertion into the class system. And then at a certain point banks ceased to be about keeping your money and became selling organisations. That was a big shift in the eighties. Everything moved towards selling – and it changed the whole of the culture.⁵

Petit’s remarks about the content disappearing from television for me recall the predictions of Baudrillard and Ballard with which I opened part 2A of this essay: the future is a desert, the future is boring. It’s something of a left-wing cliché to blame Thatcherism for every negative development of the past forty years, and I don’t think Petit would be crude enough to do that. I think he’d accept that Thatcher, like the internet, came at the end of something that was already happening: the long iconoclastic, individualist revolution of the postwar years (the World War in question being the First, I should point out), which really hit its stride in the Sixties. It was a revolution pushed, in different ways, by both the Left and the Right, but certainly more by the Left. In my view, the changes it wrought eventually made social democracy in Britain untenable, and something like Thatcherism inevitable. Thatcherism, in turn, fostered a money-grubbing philistinism that largely killed off what Mark Fisher called popular modernism. Here’s Fisher in a review of Petit’s Content:

‘Radio On,’ Petit said in a recent interview, ‘ended with a car ‘stalled on the edge of the future’, which we didn’t know then would be Thatcherism.’ Ahead lay a bizarre yet banal mix of the unprecedented and the archaic. Instead of accelerating down Kraftwerk’s autobahn, we found ourselves, as Petit puts it in Content, ‘reversing into a tomorrow based on a non-existent past’, as the popular modernism Radio On was part of found itself eclipsed by a toxic-addictive confection of consumer-driven populism, heritage kitsch, xenophobia and US corporate culture.⁶

While Petit has been critical of Thatcher, Sinclair has been postively scathing. In his early 90s novel Downriver she appears as a central character, and of course the portrait is withering. To be more precise, he presents a grotesque fictionalised version of Mrs T called ‘The Widow’, who is secretly ‘as bald as Mussolini’:

She was a couple of years into her fifth term in what was now effectively a one-party state and a one-woman party–what could be wrong? True, there hadn’t been a photogenic disaster for several weeks, a crash, a bombing, some dark débris-scattered location she could avoid–only to appear, phosphorescent with concern, a Marian blue manifestation, primed, lit from her good side, serene and comforting among the bedpans, eager to press the wound with a white-gloved hand: or again, severe with grief in tailored black, stilting on four-inch heels, at some well-guarded memorial service. Never, never (she had been advised), at the graveside: there must be no subliminal associations with mere mortality. ‘Rejoice then!’ she quoted the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh with unironic relish. Ambulance chasing was a thing of the past. (There were no ambulancemen left to drive them.)⁷

In that 2014 interview with Neil Jackson, Sinclair raised the spectre of shadowy, esoteric goings on in the Thatcher inner circle:

In Downriver we had a fictionalised version of Margaret Thatcher, ‘The Widow’.

Not as fictionalised as it first seemed. By the end, she was drifting off into a very strange twilight of whiskey hallucination and flashback. She’d become self-hypnotised by the malignancy of the battle. And then all these amorphous, creepy, marine creatures who were swimming around her, they turned her court into a Jacobean drama. You touched on this idea of a magical aspect or an occulted aspect to the Thatcher era, and I certainly worked those channels early on. In the same way that Derek Jarman summoned Dr John Dee to join the punk parade. There is a lot of darkness around Thatcher.

..

Transient England

I’m absolutely thrilled! I’m in love with Mrs Thatcher!–I want her to be my mistress!

J.G. Ballard, reacting to the Conservative victory in the 1979 General Election⁸

Ballard’s enthusiastic support for Thatcher isn’t explicitly mentioned in the London Orbital film, but is hinted at near the beginning of a section in which Sinclair recounts a meeting with the revered novelist in Shepperton. The younger writer attempted to tell Ballard what he’d found out about Thatcher’s dealings with Pinochet: British arms to Chile; P advising T on how to privatise the buses; a meeting in front of the TV cameras at a Barratt showhome in Wentworth: ‘the courtship dance of crane birds, the first nibbles of penpals who were about to become vampire lovers’; the gravitas-seeking, pseudo-RP tones of Thatcher: ‘I'm also very much aware that it was you who brought democracy to Chile.’ But Ballard, still enamoured of Mrs T perhaps, wasn’t interested:

Ballard smiled, he didn't need to know. He was a man with no spare memory. The cubbyholes were full.

To learn just why Ballard was a Thatcherite (apart from the sexual attraction) you have to turn to one of the very many interviews he gave over the course of his career, the bulk of them collected in Simon Sellars’s and Dan O’Hara’s book Extreme Metaphors. In 2006 Ballard spoke to writer Toby Litt about his latest novel Kingdom Come (which would turn out to be his last). Litt asked Ballard if he were an anti-capitalist:

No. Not really. I mean, I was a great supporter of Margaret Thatcher. I thought economic freedom was the one thing this country desperately needed. I think her economic policies were right, almost to the end. I think her social policies got out of hand, and she paid the price.⁹

Some years prior to this, Ballard had declared himself a libertarian, saying he was all in favour of ‘maximum freedom—within the law’¹⁰.

So we appear to have a clear picture before us: Ballard from the late 70s to some time in the 90s was a Thatcherite (lefties on suicide watch). For a period after that his politics continued to be neoliberal: he supported Tony Blair in the early days of New Labour, though as he told Litt, ‘I knew he was a con from the word go…. I think we wanted to be conned’. By the turn of the millennium Ballard’s politics had apparently changed somwhat, moving leftward—I go into this in post #9, Read Against the Machine.

Fascinating though they are for fans, Ballard’s politics, whether right- or left-leaning, have never been one of the main reasons for his popularity. Introducing the filmed Shepperton interview, Sinclair muses on the writer’s continuing status as a cult figure:

S: Ballard, working the same patch for so many years, had become an icon, the inspiration for a motorway cult, a new religion. He even had his own creed:

(he and Petit then go on to quote from JGB’s ‘What I Believe’, a sort of mission statement first published in the 1984 Re/Search volume:)

P: I believe in the limitless geometry of the cinema screen, in the hidden universe within supermarkets, in the loneliness of the Sun, in the garrulousness of planets, in the repetitiveness of ourselves, in the inexistence of the universe and the boredom of the atom.

S: I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen. I believe in my own obsessions, in the beauty of the car crash, in the peace of the submerged forest, in the excitements of the deserted holiday beach, in the elegance of automobile graveyards, in the mystery of multi-storey car parks, in the poetry of abandoned hotels.

P: I believe in the light cast by video recorders in department store windows, in the messianic insights of the radiator grills of showroom automobiles, in the elegance of the oil stains on the engine nacelles of 747s parked on airport tarmacs. I believe in the non-existence of the past, in the death of the future, in the infinite possibilities of the present.

S: I believe in the death of tomorrow, in the exhaustion of time, in our search for a new time within the smiles of auto-route waitresses and the tired eyes of air traffic controllers at out-of-season airports.

Eight years before Fukuyama’s legendary pronouncement, Ballard already foresaw the End of History—but the lineaments of JGB’s End were somewhat different to the Japanese-American’s. For Ballard the End of History, that is, the future, ‘can be summed up in one word: boring.’¹¹ Yet this bleak aspect of his vision is counterbalanced by a belief in ‘the limitless possibilities of the present’, which the ‘death of the future’ and the ‘exhaustion of time’ leave us no recourse but to explore. As ever with Ballard, it is the imagination and only the imagination that can provide the key that will unlock those possibilities.

Ballard appears to be saying ‘It’s over’ and ‘We’re back’ at the same time. Readers familiar with his work will not be wholly surprised by this ironic seeming-contradiction. As for the futureless future he envisages, that perpetual-present-to-come, paradoxically both deathly dull and pregnant with possibility—what form does it take in those landscapes where key aspects of it have already arrived? Places like the M25 corridor for instance. JGB as interviewee in London Orbital:

What you find out on the M25 and in the sort of 'motorway zone' is that there's no past, there's no future… …Out on the periphery of Greater London, there have been huge developments. Not just in motorways and science parks and industrial estates and so on but also in a kind of diffusing airport culture that involves CCTV cameras, dual carriageways, video rentals, marinas, endless low-cost executive housing. A new kind of England, often with quick access to the nearest airport. This is the world where, out on the M25, a new transient England has come into being.

Ballard’s obsessive focus on what he sometimes called the ‘visionary present’ finds parallels in certain passages of Michel Foucault’s text What Is Enlightenment?, unpublished in the philosopher’s lifetime but included in The Foucault Reader. In WIE, Foucault first engages with Kant’s text Was ist Aufklärung?, before going on to draw upon Baudelaire for a consideration of what constitutes ‘the modern attitude’. I will touch only briefly on this here, as such an expansive topic deserves an essay of its own:

Modernity is often characterized in terms of consciousness of the discontinuity of time: a break with tradition, a feeling of novelty, of vertigo in the face of the passing moment. And this is indeed what Baudelaire seems to be saying when he defines modernity as "the ephemeral, the fleeting, the contingent." But, for him, being modern does not lie in recognizing and accepting this perpetual movement; on the contrary, it lies in adopting a certain attitude with respect to this movement; and this deliberate, difficult attitude consists in recapturing something eternal that is not beyond the present instant, nor behind it, but within it. Modernity is distinct from fashion, which does no more than call into question the course of time; modernity is the attitude that makes it possible to grasp the "heroic" aspect of the present moment. Modernity is not a phenomenon of sensitivity to the fleeting present; it is the will to "heroize" the present.

..

To designate this attitude of modernity, Baudelaire sometimes employs a litotes that is highly significant because it is presented in the form of a precept: "You have no right to despise the present.”¹²

I believe Ballard would say he was in accord with Baudelaire’s modernist philosophy, at least as Foucault presents it here. In particular, JGB would strongly endorse the French poet’s precept about despising the present. To despise the present is to shut oneself off from its possibilties. However, to do justice to this complex topic would require a whole essay at least—a project for another day.

..

A circle in salt

One of researcher John Sergeant’s tasks was to locate the spot where, in 1986, Thatcher had cut the ribbon in the M25 opening ceremony. When Petit reported to Sinclair that this spot remained unmarked, the latter sent his collaborator a postcard bearing the following:

Being an immortal, Dracula knew that he only had to hang on until there was a bridge over the river, a motorway circuit around London, new grazing grounds. The future M25 was a magic circle, a circle in salt. The vampire couldn't be executed, he was already inside. The Count's fetid breath warmed Thatcher's neck as she cut the ribbon.

Again there is that Sinclair preoccupation with the Thatcher years having an occulted, magical dimension. The ‘blood metaphor’ mentioned earlier is the idea of the M25 as a heart, its four chambers pumping the capital’s lifeblood. Sinclair seems to have arrived at this metaphor after encountering blood as a theme a number of times during his orbital circuit. For instance, at Harefield Hospital, where he learns of a ‘pre-donation’ policy aimed at the well-to-do:

On the level of myth, road and heart were always interlinked. The orbital (going nowhere, being everywhere) motorway sweeps up London’s lucid dreaming. Harefield, with its reserve blood stocks, and Purfleet (with its vampiric traces) confirm the heart as metaphor. Blood is an international commodity, the base trade. Drained arms for asylum seekers and junkies, quality stock laid down by the wealthy. Pre-donation is the advised policy. Leaflets are distributed at all luxuriously appointed private hospitals, suggesting that ‘many people who have to undergo major elective surgery… now choose to deposit their own blood. This removes the risk of infection… Blood can be stored in our blood bank.’¹³

So Sinclair finds his metaphor ‘confirmed’—a journey’s possible meanings suggest themselves, one only needs to pay attention.

Surgical procedures affect the way we picture the M25; ‘clotting’ in Harefield is twinned with sluggish traffic, stalled cars in the Heathrow corridor. Emergency lights flash. Cardiac arrest… ‘Bypass’ is a term common to both sets of initiates. Artery, flow, circuit. Cardiac teams deal with the heart as a malfunctioning machine. Drivers, enduring the grind between Junctions 10 and 17 of the M25, slide through layers of anaesthesia: from panic to yawning detachment, from waking dreams and hallucinations to blackout. Helicopters that ferry roadkill hearts, urgent meat, are now being proposed as the only solution to motorway jams. A rapid response unit will move in on any ‘blockage’, freeing circulation, bringing respite to coronary candidates in their sweating pods.¹⁴

At various points in book and film Sinclair, striking a left-wing note, seems to suggest a parallel between Thatcherism and the vampirism of Bram Stoker’s most famous creation. This is not that implausible from the economic point of view: the 80s saw ‘bloodsucking’ rentier capitalism make a robust comeback, thanks in large part to another far-reaching change that occurred in 1986, the so-called Big Bang, the raft of deregulating legislation that ‘liberated’ The City of London. As Professor Brett Christophers has observed, rentier capitalism continues to go from strength to strength in the UK, with the British economy coming to be dominated (once again) by rentiers of various kinds:

..if the past four decades in the UK have seen not so much the ascendancy of the rentier as the rentier’s return after a period of protracted dormancy, then it has been the return of a figure now displaying much greater diversity than during the earlier, pre–World War I, land-and-finance era of UK rentierism. A two-headed monster has returned as a many-headed hydra.¹⁵

However, according to Christophers, to understand this as a process of financialisation—as many commentators have done—isn’t quite right:

Financialization has been, at most, the leading edge of the economic transformation of the UK under neoliberalism. That overall process can be understood as one not of financialization, but rather of rentierization, whereby, to paraphrase Krippner, one might say that profits have increasingly taken the form of economic rents – including but not limited to financial rents – rather than income from trade or commodity production.¹⁶

In many cases these dominant rentiers don't actually produce anything, they only extract rents from assets they've acquired. Christophers offers as an example Arqiva, a company that’s hardly a household name, yet most Britons will have helped swell its coffers, even if indirectly. Arqiva:

controls much of the basic infrastructure of the UK entertainment and communications landscape: around 2000 TV and radio broadcast transmission sites, around 8000 ‘macrocellular’ telecom towers, and four of the national ‘multiplexes’ through which the radio spectrum is licensed for the purposes of carrying radio and TV signals.¹⁷

As you’d expect, Arqiva makes a pretty penny through fees and charges to use this infrastructure—without having to produce any actual product itself.

The Dracula that haunts London Orbital, then, might be seen as a symbol of resurgent rentier capitalism. However, I think it’s yet more interesting to view the Count as an avatar of a broader development, one that undoubtedly encompasses these changes to capitalism we’ve seen over the past forty years, but that shouldn’t be thought of as limited to those. I’m referring to that troubling development I wrote of at the beginning of part 2A, that remorseless process that appears to be draining the lifeblood out of our societies. Just as Dracula, in Sinclair’s reimagining of the Count’s myth, cannot be slain, this loss of lifeblood seemingly cannot be staunched. Every year our societies become a little more barren, a little more sterile. My hope is that the imaginative strategies pioneered by Sinclair, Petit and Ballard—which I’ve tried to outline, and also to celebrate, in the three parts of this essay—will continue to provide us with ways of resisting the general stupefaction.

Dracula, or rather his creator, returns towards the end of London Orbital’s 77-minute running time, featuring prominently in Chris Petit’s enigmatic coda:

Space and not time, I finally realised, was the key to the M25, just as space and the movement of the camera is the real secret of cinema. The road behind coexists with the road ahead. We are Stoker's undead, see nothing of ourselves in the rear-view mirror. We see the tunnel ahead, we see the vanishing point. We travel on with only the radio for company. We move through space and time. Memory recedes, we become cosmonauts, we become lost.

1. A live version of this song can be found on the compilation Time Enough At Last, Sanctuary Records, 2003.

2. See Wikipedia, Rettendon murders.

3. Sinclair, Iain, London Orbital, Penguin (reprint edition), 2003, p. 499.

4. See Wikipedia, Death of Leah Betts.

5. Film Without Film: Chris Petit in conversation with Neil Jackson, Post-nearly Press, 2015, no page numbering.

6. Fisher, Mark, Grey Area: Chris Petit’s Content; originally published on the BFI / Sight & Sound Website, March 2010; collected in Ghosts of My Life, Zero Books, 2014.

7. Sinclair, Iain, Downriver, Granta Books, 1991, p. 220.

8. Re/Search 9/10, Re/Search Publications, 1984, p. 41.

9. Litt, Toby, ‘Dangerous bends ahead. Slow down'‘: J.G. Ballard on Kingdom Come, collected in Sellars, Simon and O’Hara, Dan, Extreme Metaphors: Selected Interviews with J.G. Ballard, 1967–2008, Fourth Estate, 2012.

10. Seconds magazine, #40, 1996. Quote collected in JG Ballard Quotes, Re/Search Publications, 2005, p. 374.

11. Quote taken from the interview featured in London Orbital (film).

12. Foucault, Michel and Rabinow, Paul (editor), The Foucault Reader, Pantheon Books, 1984.

13. Sinclair, Iain, London Orbital, Penguin (reprint edition), 2003, pp. 202, 203.

14. ibid, p 203.

15. Christophers, Brett, Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It?, Verso Books, 2020.

16. ibid.

17. ibid.