Sarah Ferguson, Princess Di and verrucas; Matthew McConaughey and bongos; Bill Clinton and chicken nuggets – for me, public figures are always defined by ridiculous objects
Before the infected shoe incident … Sarah Ferguson and Princess Diana at the Epsom Derby. Photograph: Ken Goff/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image
Here's a sentence I'm fairly confident nobody has written before: I have recently become obsessed with Sarah Ferguson and Diana, Princess of Wales, after discovering their friendship is believed to have come to an abrupt end when Fergie told everyone she got a verruca from one of Diana's shoes. Fergie wrote in her memoirs that she and Diana were so close they would even share their heels, in true gal‑pal fashion, but that this once led to Fergie contracting a plantar wart. Allegedly – and this comes from Tina Brown's unauthorised take on Diana's life – the comical indiscretion was so humiliating to the princess that she never spoke to the duchess again. That was it – their friendship, all because of an infected shoe. A year later, Diana was dead.
It's not the two individuals who fascinate me so much as the idea that empires rise and fall, alliances begin and end, over something as ridiculous as a pair of slip-ons with a virus nestled in the toe. For me, public figures are always defined by the ridiculously random objects they inevitably end up associated with. Every celebrity has one.
The band All Saints admit they split up because of a row about a jacket. "I would never, in a million years," said band member Shaznay Lewis some years later, "have put money on the group ending over a jacket." Jamie Oliver apparently sold his house in Hampstead after he got sick of drunken idiots coming out of the pub next door and shouting up at his window for a bacon sandwich. When I interviewed the actor Matthew McConaughey, I was delighted to learn he had once been arrested for causing a public disturbance after sitting on the roof of his house late at night, stoned and playing the bongos. Bongos! And I'm not saying that I've got too much time on my hands, but I did once become a quite active member of a Facebook group called "The day that Brian Harvey ate 47 baked potatoes then ran himself over", even though Harvey himself has claimed his intake at that fateful pre‑crash luncheon was a mere three jacket spuds – with tuna mayonnaise on, since you asked.
Once you've linked a celebrity with a silly object, they stay like that in your mind's eye for ever. David Miliband walking down the street with an awkward grin, clutching that banana. David Cameron has been entirely cunning at avoiding any object association – until his breadmaker, that is. I have American friends who always want to ask me about Prince Charles and his intercepted phone call to Camilla that led to tampongate. These objects come to trail alongside the celebrity, like a puppy who refuses to leave their side, or a daemon in a Phillip Pullman novel. When confronted by the monolithic narratives that prop up our state, institutions such as the royal family and Westminster that seem to have been there since the dawn of time, built of wealth and stone, I find it rather cheering to remind myself that they are just as vulnerable as the rest of us.
I've never been convinced that Philip Larkin was right when he wrote that all that remains of us is love. After Bill Clinton is dead and gone, it's not love that I'll remember him for. It's an object – and I don't even mean that cigar that went on holiday somewhere in Monica Lewinsky's nether regions. The object was brought to my attention in Alastair Campbell's diaries, in a story where Tony Blair, Kevin Spacey and Bill Clinton are all sitting in a McDonald's restaurant. In Blackpool. "So there we were," Campbell writes, "drinking Diet Coke and eating chicken nuggets as he [Clinton] poured forth on the theme of interdependence and the role of the Third Way in progressive politics." Obviously, it is the chicken nuggets that get me.
Campbell also mentions that Cherie Blair wore a magic pendant – a bioelectric shield, apparently – to ward off evil rays during their time at No 10. And for her part, Cherie has spoken of an amazing night out the Blairs enjoyed on an Italian summer holiday with that lovable old goat Silvio Berlusconi, who arranged a surprise fireworks display. Much to the Blairs' delight, the words VIVA TONY came to light, spelled out in rockets in the sky. This anecdote will always stay with me. In fact, I often struggle to concentrate on our former prime minister's face without seeing the words VIVA TONY beaming through his intergalactic eyes.
But back to those chicken nuggets that the most powerful man in the world enjoyed, perhaps – and I do like to imagine this is true – as part of a Happy Meal, or at least a meal deal with a fizzy drink thrown in for the price of the chips. In a burger bar lit by primary colours and over-enthusiastic plastic, in a rain washed seaside northern town, circled by gulls. Perhaps, all that remains of any of us is this.
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