Mummy's boy and the bank robber: Charlie Gilmour shares a tiny cell with a crook... but at least Elton John's sending him presents

 

Charlie Gilmour's sentence for 'violent disorder' has divided public opinion

Even on a bright summer’s day, Wandsworth Prison is a forbidding place. The huge double-fronted wooden entrance is situated beneath a gothic arch and flanked by 30ft walls topped with barbed wire.
The building, dating back to 1851, casts a long, almost malevolent, shadow over this corner of London.
Not for nothing was the Victorian-era jail featured in the film A Clockwork Orange. The kind of nihilistic violence portrayed  in the movie is, of course, the stock-in-trade of many of those incarcerated at Wandsworth. Only a handful of the country’s 139 prisons — those that house terrorist suspects — have a higher security status.
Nevertheless, to the list of 1,600 inmates at HMP Wandsworth — among them murderers, rapists and paedophiles — can now be added the name Charlie Gilmour, former public schoolboy, Cambridge undergraduate, part-time model and, most famously, the adopted son of guitarist David Gilmour.
At 21, Charlie Gilmour has become the youngest member of Wandsworth’s unsavoury population.
He earned that dubious honour for his part in last year’s student riots in London, when, fuelled by a cocktail of drink and drugs, he swung from the Cenotaph and climbed on the bonnet of the limousine taking  the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall to the Royal Variety Performance.

Gilmour, said Judge Nicholas Price, who gave him a 16-month sentence, had shown ‘ultimate disrespect’ to Britain’s war dead.
But, three weeks after his imprisonment, public opinion has it that Charlie Gilmour has been treated unfairly. Yes, his actions were callous, insensitive and grotesquely stupid, but is his punishment too harsh?
Charlie Gilmour’s sentence for ‘violent disorder’ has divided public opinion, and triggered a national debate over its apparent severity compared to the soft punishments often handed out for far worse offences (a report last year, for example, revealed that around a quarter of sex offenders who prey on children are let off with a caution).

Charlie with his adopted father Dave Gilmour and his mother Polly Samson. Judge Nicholas Price said he had shown 'ultimate disrespect' to Britain's war dead

A ‘Free Charlie Gilmour’ campaign, with the names of more than 500 fellow students and friends, has now been launched on Facebook, and a group of Cambridge dons have added their support, writing an open letter expressing their ‘disquiet’ about the case.
Even Martin Narey, the former director general of the Prison Service, this week weighed into the argument, arguing in a national newspaper that the sentence meted out to the student protester was excessive and that a non-custodial sentence would have been more appropriate.
But what of Charlie Gilmour himself?
We last saw him being led away from the dock at Kingston Crown Court.
The clean-cut, softly-spoken defendant in suit and tie, with uniformed guards either side of him, was almost unrecognisable from the long-haired, wild-eyed protester who appeared on front pages following the tuition fees demonstration.

 

This is the Charlie Gilmour (the ‘real’ Charlie, say his friends) who is now being detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure for the foreseeable future.
His cell measures 10ft by 6ft and has two bunks. One for him, the other for his cell mate — a bank robber, as it turns out. They are locked up together for up to 23 hours a day.
Although ‘slopping out’ may have ended some years ago, facilities are still basic. There is a lavatory in the corner, hidden behind a flimsy sheet for a semblance of privacy.
Could there be a more wretched culture shock for someone who attended £9,000-a-term Lancing College, has just completed the second year of a history degree at Girton College, Cambridge, and was brought up on a £1.4 million estate set in 130 acres in the heart of rural West Sussex?
Gilmour spends much of his time in jail reading. A box laden with books, including works by Leo Tolstoy and historian Niall Ferguson, has been sent to him by Elton John, who knows the family. They are on display on shelves in his cell.
The shelves were made for him by his cell mate, the bank robber. The pair, it seems, have struck up an unlikely friendship.
‘So far, all the prisoners have been great towards him,’ says a family friend.

Charlie has apologised for climbing the Cenotaph during last year's student riots in London

With the help of a psychotherapist, Gilmour, it is claimed, has turned his back on drugs (he was ‘off his head’ on Valium, whisky, and LSD at the time of the student riots).
He is also said to be coming to terms with his own troubled past —specifically being rejected by his biological father, a controversial anti-establishment figure.
His defenders insist this rejection precipitated his wild behaviour during the student demonstration. Those same supporters argue that the real Charlie Gilmour is at odds with the image of a ‘spoilt’ young man from a privileged background.
Friends of his parents are at pains to stress that rather than being bankrolled by his multi-millionaire father, he had to take out a student loan to cover his university fees at Cambridge (not to mention, presumably, the purchase of copious amounts of recreational drugs) and he will be expected to repay it himself.
They also point to the fact that he spent much of his gap year working for the homeless charity Crisis. The charity’s chief executive was a character witness at Charlie Gilmour’s trial.
Working with the homeless was not his only job. One recent holiday was spent waiting on tables, albeit at the capital’s fashionable and ultra-expensive River Café.

Elton John has sent Charlie a box laden with books

Spoilt or not, Charlie Gilmour’s extraordinary upbringing is indeed at the heart of his problems and current notoriety — that is the view, at least in private, of his mother, the novelist Polly Samson.
Samson was working in publishing in the Eighties when she met Charlie’s biological father, author Heathcote Williams. She was in her mid-20s; he was in his 40s.
Heathcote Williams (who was born John Henley Jasper Heathcote-Williams in 1941) had set up an anarchist ‘state’ — a squat called Frestonia — in the middle of London back in the Seventies, which proclaimed itself independent of Britain, with Williams himself serving as ‘ambassador to the UK’.
Later, he would declare war on the car (which included a call to arms to his compatriots to vandalise vehicles by ‘slashing their tyres’, ‘shoving potatoes up the exhaust’ and ‘slashing brake-fluid on to the bodywork’).
Needless to say, he also caused havoc while a student at Oxford —  turning up to his law finals in an SS uniform, a stunt that resulted in him being kicked out of the university.
And these were not the only entries on Heathcote Williams’ colourful CV. He worked briefly as a professional fire-eater.
When he met Samson, he already had two daughters with another woman, Diana Senior. Williams and Samson weren’t together long, but she got pregnant almost immediately.
In fact, Heathcote Williams, who also wrote poetry, walked out on her and the baby after little more than a year, and returned to Diana Senior.
Samson has written that when he left, he quoted literary critic Cyril Connolly’s dictum to her: ‘There is no more sombre enemy of good art than a pram in the hall.’
His departure left Samson, now 49, bereft.
‘I was utterly miserable,’ she later said.
‘When I saw Heathcote (in 2002) we had a conversation about it. I told him: “I was never going to stop you working, you know.”’
Not long after they split, mutual friends introduced Samson to David Gilmour. They married in 1994, had three children of their own. ‘Charlie Samson’ became ‘Charlie Gilmour’.
Broadly speaking, that’s how things remained until last year, when Charlie had an initial reunion with Williams after learning that his father was ill.
Williams agreed to attend his son’s 21st party in November, only to cancel at the last moment.
‘He sent Charlie a largely incomprehensible email,’ says a friend.
‘The gist seemed to be Heathcote’s heart could not take a relationship with his son. Charlie was devastated.’

'Receiving hate mail is such a bad start to the day,' Polly recently wrote on Twitter

One can only speculate that Heathcote’s long-term partner Diana Senior, the mother of his daughters China and Lily, would have been less than thrilled at the prospect of her husband forging a relationship with his ‘love child’.
The couple live in a white brick terrace house in the Jericho suburbs of Oxford, where Williams, now 69, continues to write political tracts.
Answering the door in dark green button-up shirt and suede waistcoat, he shook his head and his hand to indicate that he did not wish to speak about his son.
At the time of the riots, however, he publicly distanced himself from him, saying: ‘I don’t take responsibility for his actions.’
This rejection, according to Charlie’s family, was the catalyst (‘not an excuse’) for his shameful behaviour during the tuition fees protest.
‘The wild behaviour was part of a binge that began when he was rejected yet again by his biological father,’ said a family friend.
In other words, it was born more out of unhappiness than hedonism.
Either way, Charlie Gilmour was certainly out of control that day. His Tarzan impersonation at the Cenotaph, where he swung on the Union flag, caused justified public outrage — and he added insult to injury by suggesting he didn’t even know what the Cenotaph stood for.
His mother insists, both on Twitter and in an email to the Mail this week, that her son had been made an ‘example’ of because of his privileged background.
She said Charlie was charged with violent disorder for two incidents: for kicking the window of the Oxford Street branch of Topshop, and for throwing a bin in the direction of the royal convoy.
But she wanted to make it clear that ‘there was no charge in relation to the Cenotaph incident’.
She also insisted that Charlie knew what the Cenotaph meant but was unaware of its location in Whitehall and ‘therefore it was not a deliberate act of desecration’.
Her son, she said, had issued a public apology for his behaviour.
‘All I can reiterate,’ his mother told us, ‘is that he has been abject ever since’.
Before he entered the dock to receive his sentence, Charlie turned to his family and said: ‘See you when I see you.’
He then handed his mobile phone to his adopted father David Gilmour.
Unlike ‘white collar’ criminals, such as MPs convicted of fiddling their expenses, he has not been moved to a ‘softer’ open prison because he was convicted of a violent crime (even though no one was hurt) and, in the eyes of the law, is considered to pose a potential threat to the public.
So, is his sentence an over-reaction — or a well-deserved comeuppance?
The point remains moot.
Figures released by the Ministry of Justice under a Freedom of Information request revealed that 1,405 offenders received a caution — the legal equivalent of a ticking off — last year. Among them were 22 rapists and 129 arrested for the offence of wounding or ‘carrying out an act endangering life’.
Both Charlie Gilmour and his parents have also been subjected to a hate campaign both on the internet, and through the post.
‘Receiving hate mail is such a bad start to the day,’ Polly Samson recently wrote on Twitter.
When asked why she had been targeted, she said: ‘Apparently for accompanying my son to court instead of having him aborted 21 years ago.’
Whatever your thoughts on this troubling story, doesn’t this say as much about the country we now live in now, as the stupid and inexcusable behaviour of Charlie Gilmour himself?