The lady's not for turning

Published on Monday 31 May 2004 01:19

THE PERFECT background music would have been A Whiter Shade of Pale.

Lady Catherine Meyer replaces the phone, and the smile, and slides into an acid yellow Chanel jacket. She is so very sorry but this chap had just phoned up offering help and money...As they apparently do in South Kensington. Since I already feel like Charles Kingsley’s chimney sweep tumbling into the white bedroom, I refrain from mentioning that people almost never phone offering help and money where I come from.

But the wife of Britain’s former ambassador to Washington is utterly at ease with promises of assistance. And the reason is rather darker than a life spent air-kissing other socialites might suggest. Ten years ago, having separated from her German husband and returned to London, her two sons, Alexander and Constantin (then aged nine and seven), were abducted by their father. Until Alexander’s 18th birthday last year, when he and his brother came to Britain to visit her, she has had virtually no contact with them.

How did she cope with this trauma? Like the mother who discovers the strength to lift a bus to free her crushed child. She was a woman possessed. She abandoned her high-flying job as a commodities broker, she sold her house, she focused every spark of her dazzling energy on the task of forcing the German judiciary and her ex-husband to return her sons. The ten-year trail through the courts cost her more than 200,000 and achieved absolutely nothing.

But she never gave up. She founded a charity (PACT - Parents and Abducted Children Together), she wrote a book They’re My Children Too. This week, she launches a website for missing children in Scotland.

When she went to beg the intervention of the British ambassador to Bonn, Sir Christopher Meyer, he was so impressed that he married her. This is one determined woman. Hence her ability to assess the potential usefulness of a new encounter within moments.

Does she still feel mangled by the experience, I wonder? "Of course," she says. "When you lose your children your whole world disintegrates. Nothing else matters. And the effect is not only emotional, it’s physical. For the first two years I just couldn’t sleep. There is a physical ache of not being able to hold and touch your children. Those moments when they would creep into your bed for a cuddle, the thousands of times you would stroke and touch and reassure them. And as soon as you let yourself feel your own need, you wonder how they will be coping with it all."

Lady Catherine was born Catherine Laylle in Baden-Baden in 1953, where her French father was serving in the occupied zone. Her mother was Russian, but the accident of her German birthplace did not give her dual nationality or any preferential treatment by the German courts. Germany, despite being a signatory to the Hague convention which governs contested custody cases in Europe, enjoys a cosy legal loophole whereby children can be questioned in court about whether they wish to leave the country. Most, like Catherine’s elder son Alexander, decide they do not.

"I met an American father early on in Germany whose case was similar to mine and who told me that it was all hopeless. The German courts always backed the German citizen. And I thought then, ‘That’s not going to happen to me. I have custody. My children have been made wards of court in Britain.’ But he basically told me how it was going to be. He had been trying to see his daughter for four years and had repeatedly travelled to Germany to find her.

"When he did trace them at last, and was refused again, he got a gun and killed his ex-wife and himself," she adds. "There are similar cases in America and in Britain. Fathers gassing their children in cars rather than let ‘that bitch’ have custody. It’s not a nice side of people. It’s all about revenge and pay-back. So my charity is not primarily about parents, it’s really about children."

IT’S EASY TO imagine the impact Catherine Laylle would have had on Sir Christopher when she was finally granted her audience with the ambassador back in 1997. Not a handkerchief-wringing, distraught and tearful mother but an articulate charmer informed about every aspect of the politics surrounding her case. Perhaps wearing the black stockings and high heels which are her trademark today. She has said in the past that "Christopher saved me. Without him God knows where I’d be. Dead maybe". Certainly, he helped her re-focus her energies, encouraged the start of her charity and her book.

But a few months after they met he was offered the jewel in the crown of diplomatic jobs - Washington. They married the day before he left for America, and she instantly moved to the centre of a very glittery stage indeed. Was she over-awed? I very much doubt it. Within a few months, the US gossip columns declared she had made embassy parties sexy again and had "the best legs in Washington". Not only that, she acquired the very best-connected sponsors for her charity and her campaign for access to her sons. Bill Clinton approached German chancellor Gerhardt Shrder on her behalf. But nothing, and no-one, could alter the leaden mechanism of German law.

"I think that’s what stunned people the most," Lady Meyer says with a sigh. "You know - ‘If she, who has spoken to the president, can’t get something done, what hope is there for the rest of us?’ Now I do think, I do like to believe I have influenced governments to take more notice of children’s issues, that this is something they have to concentrate on. But the problem is, children can’t vote."

She waves her hand and suddenly looks completely French. A chic study of urbane success, impatient with the failures of others. Her parents brought her from Paris to London in the early 60s and she has considered it home ever since. "I am 1,000 per cent a Londoner," she says, with a distinctly European accent. Does she miss the buzz and glamour of Washington? "Not really. We did both love it. But it was every night. You’re on show the whole time."

She and Sir Christopher have been "home" for a year, and she now admits to being at something of a crossroads. "I’m so full of energy. I feel I need another project. But where next? Politics fascinates me. In Washington, it’s the only industry in town and I became really activated, really engaged by it all."

She put herself forward for the Kensington and Chelsea seat but got short shrift from the Tory selectors who did not appreciate her friends-in-high-places approach. "I am a Conservative. A soft sort of Conservative. I think the core base of the party needs a bit of modernising and a lot more women and I felt I had a lot of ideas. But then I got to the real politics which has nothing to do with ideologies. It’s just a system. If I was 30, then yes, I’d go for it. But at 51, no. And it’s probably better that I remain independent of any party where children’s issues are concerned.

"You know there has been a 45 per cent increase in abduction cases in the last year, according to a Home Office survey?" she asks suddenly. "And the problem will continue to increase as there are more and more international marriages." Hence her involvement in the launch of the UK Missing Kids website in Glasgow on Friday, which will allow details and pictures of missing youngsters to be circulated throughout the world. Already launched in 14 countries, the US website receives 2.8 million hits a day, with one in six children featured recovered as a result of someone recognising a photograph and calling the authorities.

LADY CATHERINE cites more statistics. An estimated 9,000 children missing in Scotland last year. A UK figure estimated at more than 60,000. She swings back into the crisp syllables of her campaigning persona and, as she clips each statistic neatly, she bears a sudden, unmistakable resemblance to Hillary Clinton. A neater, slimmer version, certainly, but with the same briskness, the same locked-on focus. She tells me the details of a new documentary on the emotional damage suffered by abducted children; she speaks with mayoral enthusiasm about the police force. She is every tightly-packed inch the politician.

"Christopher calls me a terrier," she admits. "If I want something, I stay with it till people get so tired of me they just say yes." Well, Nancy Reagan tried it the other way round, with rather less success. People have asked Catherine Meyer about "her struggle to emerge from her husband’s shadow". I find it hard to believe that he and his famous red socks dared cast a shadow into the steely pool of glamour which surrounds this extraordinary woman.

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