Added to these widespread woes, there were two other specific factors causing the PM increasing angst. These were:
1) The ignominy of her hubris in calling a general election to boost her majority in parliament to hundreds, and instead seeing her government finishing up with a majority of only two.
2) The debâcle of the Brexit negotiations with Brussels, which, by any definition, were at best faltering and at worst fucked because the Brit negotiators were considered by bemused Europeans to be historically deluded gung-ho Brit prats to whom they were unprepared to offer any concessions whatsoever. Yet more embarrassingly, there remained the suspicion that the 2016 Brexit referendum itself had been compromised by interference from Russian president Igor Ripurpantzov and his team of Internet hackers in St Petersburg. In short, the UK government was pretty much on its knees, in the light of which it’s not hard to imagine how keen the PM was on the creation of any media story, however mythical, to deflect the public gaze from the morass of sewage through which she and her government were currently wading.
In a blessed moment one sleepless night, however, what the PM thought of as her “super-acumen” was catalysed. It was while watching re-tweets of the madman in the White House that she suddenly spotted light at the end of this awful tunnel. “Switch the story and find a worse one with a real BAD guy to blame” was the essence of the madman’s messages, which, albeit attributed to a madman, didn’t seem so mad at all.
“Mmm,” she mused as the woes reverberated through the few neurons still functioning in her ditsy brain.
And then, bingo, just like that, she had it. Of course, of course, the Trotskyite megalomaniac bonkers banker with links to the Kremlin! That should do the trick all right. Nothing the nation would love her for more than a spot of mudslinging at the old Ruskie enemy, especially if it involved one of the nation’s much-hated City bankers. A win-win situation, no question about it. All she needed on board now was the latest model 007 from MI5 or MI6 to hunt down the demon and haul him up before the courts to validate her tale. From zero to hero she could go overnight.
“YESSSS,” she yipped, punching her pillows and, by accident, her snoring husband who said, “Oh, for fuck’s sake, Clarissa.”
That was what all this had to do with Jeremy Crawford, who had been chosen yet again.
It was the following morning that the PM addressed an emergency meeting of her twitchy cabinet with her new brainwave idea.
“What we need at this historic juncture in our proud history, chaps and chapesses,” she told them, “is a dose of true British grit to steer Mister and Missus Joe Public’s attention away from all the smears and fake news threatening to envelop us. Instead we shall have the true story of roguery, treachery and international intrigue undertaken by the Trot megalomaniac bonkers banker chappie—only to be thwarted at the critical moment by the sang froid, suavity, sharp-shooting skills, and dare one say it allure, of the Secret Service’s top agent who will be answering directly to… me.”
“Jolly dee, tip top, Pee Em,” barked the home secretary, Janus facedly, seeing as she nurtured aspirations of ousting the PM and becoming PM herself.
“Great, triff, brill,” echoed the foreign secretary. Also Janus facedly, given he had exactly the same ambitions as those of the home secretary.
And, to her gratification, the rest of the ministers happily trilled along to the same song sheet, praising the PM with statements such as “genius,” “gosh,” “super,” and “go for it.” That was the measure of the hypocrisy of the British cabinet, all of them, unbeknownst to either the home or foreign secretaries, running covert campaigns to unseat the PM and replace her with themselves. And this latest batty idea looked the perfect means of achieving just that, a classic case of hoisting herself by her own petard, thus leaving the path wide open for any one of them to succeed her.
“Righty-ho, then,” said the PM, as oblivious to such internecine plotting as she was to practically everything else. “I’ll get right on it. Cabinet dismissed.”
At which the fractious bunch trudged out of the chamber swivel-eyed and muttering to each other behind their hands, while the PM picked up the phone to a top secret joint line shared by Dame Muriel Eggleshaw at MI6 and Sir Hubert Humphreys at MI5 to demand they appoint to the case the newest and most improved 007 they had on their books to serve up the head of the megalomaniac bonkers banker on a platter.
Initially when the PM got “right on it,” her call to MI5 and MI6 went unanswered as the result, so a recorded message told her, of a “temporary but catastrophic failure in the communication system caused by government austerity cuts.”
“Fuck,” said “Phoebe.” That was the Clarissa’s codename when calling the Secret Services.
But then she had another of her brilliant ideas and surprisingly this one worked.
“I know what I’ll do, I’ll call Milly on her smartphone,” she muttered, dialling the super-encrypted number. “Milly” was Dame Muriel’s secret codename. Sir Hubert’s was “Hubby.”
And, sure enough, the boss of MI6 answered on only the second replay of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, portentously the winter one.
“Yes, Phoebe?” she whispered, seeing the PM’s also super-encrypted number on her screen.
“A small favour I have to ask of you, Milly.”
“Hrrmph,” said Milly, who’d never liked Phoebe, and not only because of her fatuous politics. While they’d been undergrads at Girton College Cambridge together, Phoebe had stolen away Milly’s targeted inamorato, Nigel Jeffreys-Joynson, and had flagrant sex with him on a punt. “Flagrant” because the episode had been caught in delicto on camera by the punter, fellow undergrad Simon Snodgrass, and published across the university in the very next edition of Varsity.
Uncharacteristically for her, Phoebe intuited this lingering opprobrium and responded with what she thought of as Prime Ministerial gravitas.
“Listen, Milly. We’re both big girls now. I’m Pee Em and you’re head of Em-I-bally-Six, so let’s draw a line under the past, shall we?”
“Hrrmph,” repeated Milly, frowning meaningfully at Sir Hubert “Hubby” Humphreys with whom she was again sharing an intimate conversation at her club in the hinterland of Park Lane. That wasn’t all she was sharing with Sir Humphrey these days, but neither her current husband nor Hubby’s current wife needed to know anything about that.
“What we’re talking about here is a national crisis,” Phoebe continued.
“Your job on the line again, is it?”
“You can be a real bitch, you know that?”
“So I’ve been told. It’s more or less why I was appointed to MI6. Now, this ‘national crisis’ you spoke of?” said Milly, switching the phone to super-hushed speaker mode so Hubby could listen in. “Care to elucidate?”
Thinking she’d made a little progress, Phoebe explained—as long as you could equate lengthy specious periphrasis with “explanation,” which Milly couldn’t. Reckoned it to be the usual half-arsed politicospeak, the next best thing to lying.