“Wow,” said Jeremy.
“And all this even before we’ve released our final product, when one hopes to stir up yet further interest,” Maurice was saying as Maggie and Dennis returned from tying policepersons to trees—a task Dennis had particularly enjoyed—and Clarissa finally began to respond to Julie’s ministrations, albeit rudely.
“Where am I and who’re you?” she said, knocking the teacup from Julie’s hands, springing onto her pogo stick legs and peering about.
“Excuse me,” said Dame Muriel to Maurice. “A certain lady looks as though she needs to be taught some manners,” she added before marching over to Clarissa and telling her to sit down and shut up if she knew what was good for her.
“Don’t worry, love,” I can handle it,” said Julie. “I’ve got an auntie just like her.”
“Only your auntie isn’t a prime minister.”
“No. There is that to it.”
“What kind of a madhouse is this?” squawked Clarissa. “And what are you doing here anyway, Muriel?”
“My job, Clarissa. Now sit down.”
“Your job? Your job is to protect national security, which does not include sequestering a dangerous madman, who…”
“You need as a cover story to deflect attention from your fumbling attempts to govern a country?”
Julie smiled. She was starting to like this MI6 boss lady. “Do like the woman says and sit down or I’ll kick you behind the knees,” she said. It was a tactic that had worked wonders on Auntie Gertie.
“Flibbertigibbet! Northern strumpet!” said Clarissa, so Julie did kick her behind the knees and Clarissa was left with no choice but to sit down.
Maggie and Dennis raised appreciative eyebrows. Especially Maggie, who, as Sir Magnus Montague, had twice been fêted at Downing Street for his contributions to “The National Welfare,” aka the Tory Party.
“How nice to meet you again, Prime Minister,” he said, proffering an ironic hand for shaking.
Clarissa’s eyes widened and she looked as though she might faint again.
“Who’re you?” she said, gazing at the unkempt person who claimed to know her.
So, at considerable length before Barry intervened, Maggie took to explaining exactly who he was with particular emphasis on his transition from City banker to happy hippy, thereby causing Clarissa to wobble on her seat.
“Another cup of tea for the lady, perhaps?” said Barry with a knowing nod at Maurice who, reading the runes, linked an arm through one of Maggie’s and led him gently away.
“Blurg? Phlut?” said Clarissa. Understandably. After all, nothing in her previous existence had prepared her for this sort of treatment. Yes, there had been the daily barrage of jibes from the media and fellow members of the House of Commons at every fumble she made, but never before had she been kicked behind the knees and then faced with an evident lunatic burbling about the joys of self-reinvention.
Jeremy smiled, sat down beside the prime minister and recounted his story. Well, not all of it, just from the part where he could stand his old life no more and went to live in a barn with a pig called Pete.
“That’s him over there,” he said, pointing at Pete who preened, winked at Clarissa, and said “oink.”
“Then Barry here came and rescued me.”
Barry bowed slightly.
“And the next thing I knew, I’d been branded the bonkers banker and the rest is history. Some of it of your making, ma’am.”
Clarissa blinked and edged away from Jeremy, who edged closer to her saying, “But let bygones be bygones, eh? Turn the page and begin a new chapter?”
“Quite sure you wouldn’t fancy another cuppa?” said Barry. “On the house.”
“Wuh-where’s muh-my wuh-whirlybird?” Clarissa gurgled, casting her eyes this was and that.
“Migrated,” said Dame Muriel.
“You’re all alone, your bird has flown,” sang Julie to the tune of Lennon’s “Norwegian Wood,” one of her dad’s favourites.
“Pretty harsh treatment even for a prime minister as doolally as Clarissa,” I hear you object. But, you might reflect, how else were the Shepherd’s Hut gang of seven to reduce to a modicum of compliance the woman in whom nobody in the land had much faith when it came to flexibility? By saying, “There, there, we’ll sing to your song sheet, my dear? I don’t think so. Anyway, like it or not, that was the treatment Clarissa got. Pro tem she was a prisoner and, with a little kindness thrown in here and there, she might eventually listen to their reason.
It was Dame Muriel who explained this rationale.
“A shame it has had to come to this,” she said as Clarissa’s head lolled. “But what is, is. And your job now is to make the best of it. You may or may not recall Girton’s old motto ‘better is wisdom than weapons of war,’ but it is precisely in harmony with that philosophy that you needed to be reduced to your current impasse, for impasse I’m afraid it is. Unless of course you are prepared to have a little wise re-think.”
Clarissa raised her head with difficulty and peered at Dame Muriel.
“You see, my dear, these chaps, all of whom you believe to be bonkers, have an interesting strategy up their sleeves that might just help you and your suffering government to a better place.”
“Heaven?” said Clarissa.
“Not heaven, my dear. We’re not planning to kill you.”
“Good,” said Clarissa, gazing around the Shepherd’s Hut at Barry, Maurice, Jeremy, Julie, Maggie, Dennis and their animals.
“Just help you along the road to the better place. So, d’you want to hear our plan or don’t you?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“Not really.”
“Okay then, let’s hear the bally thing.”
Which was when Dame Muriel called Maurice over to outline to the prime minister the cunning plan he’d developed to improve her status her from zero to hero by taking the credit for making Igor Ripurpantzov’s governance of Russia a tad less comfortable than it had been to date and possibly unseating the madman in the White House. Equally it would be bound to raise her clout with the beasts of Brussels.
“You don’t mean?” said a newly alert Clarissa when Maurice’s shtick was over.
“That is precisely what we mean,” said Dame Muriel. “Should you lend your approval to the idea, you may well find yourself becoming a credible world leader and, doubtless to your immense satisfaction, get the media off your back for the foreseeable future. Would you care to observe some recent responses to Double O Seventeen’s initial foray into the Internet?”
And, although at first aghast, Clarissa was soon gazing on in wonder as Maurice replayed the clips from Lewes, St Petersburg and so many other places.
As noted, amongst those other places was San Francisco, specifically the Santa Clara Valley area better known as Silicon Valley and home to such super-hi-tech giants as Apple, Google, Facebook, Yahoo et al. Yet never in their illustrious and/or infamous postmillennial histories had the bosses of such companies witnessed outpourings of glee and rage on such a scale as those experienced at the announcement of John Lennon’s sudden reincarnation on the world stage. The glee came from elderly ex-hippies just like the ones in Lewes East Sussex, and the rage from the bible-bashers who’d never forgiven Lennon for his comments on the relative popularities of The Beatles and Jesus, but either way it was good for business, thought the gazillionaire bosses.