The Idler

Stewart Enquiry: 2

Part 2: RACING DEMON

Jock Scot continues the shocking tale of racing’s most debauched acolyte, Stewart Enquiry

Just as Stewart was explaining to landlady Queenie Stormont his reason for napping Sibton Abbey for the Gold Cup, (”he has damn pretty eyes!”) the snug door slid open and the eccentric lady of the Manor entered. She barely had time to order a box of Slim Pantellas before Stewart was upon her. “My dear Charlotte, I was just about to give you a tinkle and here you are, a vision of loveliness!” he trumpeted beerily. She had no time to reply as he immediately started diddling the surprised chatelaine on his bony knee. They were ex-lovers, but their torrid affair had ended abruptly the Cheltenham before last when Stewart had foolishly punched her father’s horse, Bottle of Smoke, after it narrowly failed to win the Festival Bumper. All this was now forgotten as he groped her shamelessly. Lady Charlotte quickly sized up the situation, ordered her cigars and guided the glassy-eyed Stewart to the waiting Mercedes.

Back at her Jacobean pile, Severe End, just outside Sudden-under-Blanket, an Eve-of-Festival house party was in full swing. House guest Orlando Campbell, takes up the tale. “Lady Charlotte arrived back from the pub with a very drunk individual. I took him for an estate worker or, at best, an itinerant poet. The chap was in sparkling form and treated our party to the most outrageous display of public drunkenness it has ever been my pleasure to witness. Boy, could he put it away! At one point he was instructing my girlfriend, Fenella Fieldsports, on the correct way to present one’s mount at a fence, when he tripped on a pouffe, lost his footing, and tumbled into the fireplace! I jumped to my feet and dragged the poor fellow out, his flared trouserings ablaze. I extinguished the conflagration with a soda-siphon. He seemed blissfully unaware that anything untoward had occurred and suggested a game of cards. We played vingt-et-un for hours, he lost heavily. He refused to go to bed, eventually collapsing behind a sofa and falling fast asleep. In the morning there was no sign of him. Extraordinary behaviour really.”

The next we hear of our correspondent was from International Financier and Playboy, Ali Irvani. “I arrived at the racecourse by helicopter with my friend Anna Chancellor, the actress, and as we disembarked I noticed a figure in a heavily stained overcoat trapped beneath the aircraft! I thought we’d killed someone, however, it was this Enquiry fellow. He was mumbling ‘Get this fucking thing off me.’ We freed him and I proffered him my hip-flask. He greedily drained its contents as I tried to restrain him. Anna and I assisted him to the weighing room where they fixed him up with a mug of tea and a fresh pair of trousers. I revealed to him that my hip-flask had contained a medicinal draught, known in showbiz circles as a “Percodan Perambulator”. Dean Martin put me onto it. You can get blind drunk on it and still walk, but you only need a sip. He failed utterly to comprehend the meaning of this news, and in fact spoke lucidly to me about his childhood for ten minutes or so before dropping the mug of tea and keeling over. It was then I think that he banged his head.”

Mr Irvani also revealed that his companion, Anna Chancellor, is suing Stewart Enquiry for suggestions and moves he made toward her as she attempted to give him the “Kiss of life”. Enquiry claims in his defence that he “must have been got at” and that “anyway, she made the first move”. Dashing Euro MP, Scott Lennox spoke with Enquiry in the gents: “I could hear someone singing an old Bob Dylan song, it was Stewart. I recognised him as he clambered over the top of my cubicle. I tried to calm him down, but he began chopping out lines of cocaine! I stopped that right away, the stuff was everywhere. I hurried him to my private box where I poured black coffee down him. To no avail. He quickly became objectionable and launched into an anti-Irish tirade, claiming the IRA were after him with helicopters because he knew what really happened to Shergar! Incredible stuff. I’m sure he was concussed. The last straw was when he unzipped his fly and pissed over the verandah onto the crowd below. It was chaos, they were throwing bottles into my box I had to ask him to leave.”

His whereabouts for the rest of the day remain a mystery. Unreliable reports include a drunken appearance outside Wells Cathedral, where a verger saw a “religious maniac” whipping the great oak door with a Long Tom.

Later that night a man answering his description was seen attempting to scale the wall of Cheltenham Ladies College.