There was one exception to this rule, however, and that was Harvard Law School dropout Monty Gaspachio, twenty-two year-old founder, owner and CEO of the newly emergent BlabberMouth, estimated on Nasdaq to be worth upwards of $56B. For it was Monty who was the only one to spot not only the big bucks angle in this latest outburst of furious tribalism, but also its political ramifications. It was on the very evening Maurice’s teaser hit the global sites that Monty, relaxing in a Lay-Z-Boy lounger beside his San Jose pool with his newest girlfriend Jennifer, experienced the sudden epiphany in which he sensed how these outpourings of glee and rage eerily mirrored the current radical division in American society between the left behind rednecks, hillbillies and Rust Belt workers who worshipped the psycho in the White House and the liberals on the West and East coasts who loathed him.
“You see where I’m goin’ with this, Jenny?” he said, jerking bolt upright in his Lay-Z-Boy lounger and verbalised his flash of insight.
“Not rilly,” said Jennifer when he’d finished. Hollywood movie star wannabe Jenny was busy drying in the sun from her latest dip in Monty’s pool.
“Ookay. So I’m gonna spell it out to you, hon’,” said Monty, launching into an exegesis of how the White House had been hijacked by a psychotic megalomaniac grifter who, with the help of Russia’s Igor Ripurpantzov, had secured the presidency through deceit, lies and appeals to the basest instincts in human nature.
“This is the guy,” he continued while Jennifer applied unguents to her breasts and legs, “who has torn up the consensus that kept America more or less in one piece for the most part of a hundred and fifty years. The guy who stands a good chance of causing civil war two.”
“And you’re gonna do something about that, Mont, am I right?”
“Sure as hell is hot I am, babe,” said Monty, leaping from his lounger and belly flopping into his pool.
“Ouch,” remarked Jennifer but, rolling onto his back and kicking his legs in the California air, Monty was laughing.
“Hey, babe,” he called. “You wanna do me a favour?”
“Sure I do, Mont.”
“Go in the house and dig out my music compilation gizmo. You know where that is?”
“On the bedside table?”
“Right in one. Then you hook it into the outside loudspeakers and the songs I’ll be wanting to hear are Dylan’s ‘The Times They Are A Changin’’ and Lennon’s ‘Imagine.’ You can do that small thing for me?”
“Honey, for you anything,” said Jenny, who knew Monty was owed serious money by the kinds of wannabe movie directors in LA he might just persuade to find her a walk-on part in their latest blockbuster.
“Great. Thanks,” said Monty, climbing out of the water and hitting the button on his Lay-Z-Boy armrest that would enhance Maurice’s teaser and blazon it all across BlabberMouth, along with undisguised editorial comment reminding folk of how much the madman in The White House would have disgusted John Lennon and urging them to hit the streets en masse in sympathy. If he lost his BlabberMouth empire and all his money as a result of a covert White House smear campaign, well so be it. Money wasn’t the only thing in life. This was the time for Monty to make a stand. He punched air when out came the sounds of Dylan and Lennon singing their songs. Jennifer had done a good job. The neighbours would hate it, but Monty hated the neighbours, so that was okay. Maybe tomorrow would be a very new day. He sure hoped so.
Thirty-one
Things gathered pace at the Shepherd’s Hut once Clarissa had agreed to Maurice’s plan and hailed a fresh helicopter to take her and PCs O’Brady and Chaplin back to London. En route she phoned RAF Air Marshal Sir Roderick “Biggles” Ramsbottom, insisting that under no circumstances should her Fanbury destination be divulged to anyone, an agreement she’d already secured from O’Brady and Chaplin without much difficulty, given their embarrassment at having been tied to trees.
“Top secret, Biggles,” she’d said. “Anyone ever finds out where I’ve been, and your job’s down the toilet along with your pension rights. Understood?”
“Loud and clear, ma’am. Roger that,” said Biggles, not one to waste words.
“Roger?” said Clarissa, but Biggles had already disappeared into the ether.
However, Clarissa had more to worry about than the bizarre lingo of a mere Air Marshal. Prime amongst her concerns was the growing fear she’d been an idiot to accede to a la-la-land plan cooked up by people very possibly out of their minds even if they counted amongst their number Muriel “The Maggot” Eggleshaw and Mister Clever Pants OO17. But it was too late now. She’d signed on the dotted line. On the other hand, what if the bally plan worked and she hadn’t signed on the dotted line? Where would that have left her? Out in the cold while others gloried, that was where. Oh, how confusing life was.
“Buggerkins,” she mumbled as the Puma HC2 banked for a landing on her private helipad close to St James’s Park.
The further question that arose in her scrambled mind, however, was, “who am I going to tell about this?” None of the ministers in the bally cabinet, that was for sure. They couldn’t be trusted to keep a secret between themselves, never mind maintain corporate confidentiality in face of the press hordes. Bunch of loose-lips they were. And not a whisper to the commie leader of the opposition, who seemed to have a soft spot for Ripurpantzov… soo, as Muriel insisted, this was a secret Clarissa would just have to keep to herself.
“Mind you,” she reflected as she climbed out of the Puma, teetered down the steps, met her personal policeman and marched back with him to Number 10, “I’m pretty damn good at keeping secrets. ‘The submarine’ is what they call me, isn’t it? Which is probably why they never understand what I’m saying.”
“Everything OK, ma’am?” said PC Tom (no second name), the PM’s personal policeman.
“Fine, Tom, fine. Have a nice rest of the day,” said Clarissa, stepping across the threshold where her butler Billy was waiting to take her coat.
“Good trip?” said Billy, rumoured by many to be the second major source of leaks from No 10 after the fractious cabinet.
“Trip, Billy?” said Clarissa. “Oh that trip. Just been off at Chequers overseeing the new sapling plantings… cedars, silver birches, Japanese cherry blossoms and so on.”
“Ah. And I hope they grow nicely, ma’am” said Billy, an early and enthusiastic recipient of Maurice’s Lennon teaser. “The Foreign Secretary is waiting in the antechamber.”
“Jolly good. Splendid,” Clarissa lied, thinking, “What does foot-in-his-mouth Fat Slob want now?”
“Show him through when I’m ready,” she told Billy. “Which won’t be for at least an hour. Meanwhile give him a cup of tea.”
“Just the one, ma’am?”
“As per normal, Billy. And offer him no biscuits.”
Billy smiled and said, “With pleasure, ma’am.”
What Billy would have liked most was to kick Fat Slob in the goolies, but for all the pleasure it would have afforded, it would clearly also have signalled the end of his No 10 butlership.
Anyway that was what was happening to PM Clarissa in Westminster.