Paddy Bostock - Chosen

“And this is one of your sunny days?”

“One of my sunniest. As they say, learning never ends. Just so long as we keep open our eyes to see. In answer to your original question, Jeremy, it has been a great pleasure for this old man to welcome you and your friends to my humble shack and, because of you, also to have attracted my most promising alumnus to it. And, as for the adventure we’re all embarked on, how could I ever have foreseen that ? No, no, I regret nothing. I am after all no more significant in the grand scheme of things than a butterfly or a wasp. Another drop of the dandelion brandy?”

Jeremy passed his glass.

“I’ll have to remember the Piaf song,” he said.

“Ah, the petit moineau —or little sparrow to the non-francophones,” said Barry. “How about a toast to her?”

And so it was that Barry and Jeremy touched glasses and, clearing his head of Lennon-esque Scouse, Jeremy stood and launched into a barely recognisable reprise of “ Non, je ne regrette rien ’s” first verse.

Barry laughed and clapped. “Possibly not quite nasalised enough and a little light on the syntax, but nonetheless an excellent rendition. You’re a fast learner, old chap. Now, do you not think we should turn in for the night? Tomorrow promises to be another busy day. One wonders what Beatle trickery Maurice will have up his sleeve this time.”

Back at No. 10 Downing Street, Clarissa/Phoebe was feeling a whole lot less relaxed than the occupants of the Shepherd’s Hut, her mind aflutter, aflurry and afizz with discrepant inputs to which it could find no coherent answer. After becoming prime minister she had expected all those beneath her—her cabinet, her MPs, Mister and Missus Pleb of the general population—to kowtow, bow, scrape and defer to her wishes. After all, apart from the queen, she was the top woman in the land. But had there been any kowtowing, bowing-and-scraping, let alone deference from any of those parties? Like hell there had. The opposite in fact as daily she faced carping from all sides, including aspersions she didn’t even have what in human terms might have been thought of as a mind. “Robotic” was the description she was becoming increasingly infuriated by. Mind you, “wishy-washy U-turner who doesn’t know her arse from her elbow” wasn’t pleasing her much either. Such slights were endemic, even from the bally foreigners in Brussels who kept on and on and on wanting to know what exactly she meant by “Brexit” because none of the explanations she’d given them the previous week tallied with the one she was giving them this week. Worse still even her own people, the valiant Brits who had voted by the victorious margin of 4% to tell foreigners where they could go shove themselves, were champing at the bit, unhappy at her persistent doublespeak. As, even more worryingly, were the far right of her own cherished Tory party whom she knew she had to keep on board while she tried to steer a steady middle course through choppy, some said tsunami-ish, waters. Not even Sir Stanley Michaelson, Head of Armed Forces, was apparently onside. All he had offered by way of a march-past up Whitehall was a couple of battalions of Territorial Army recruits and one tank. No nukes, no squadrons of saluting full-time army, navy and RAF officers, just the TA guys and gals and the one (obsolete) tank.

“Take it or leave it, ducky,” Sir “Six Gun” had texted.

“ Men ,” Clarissa/Phoebe spat in response, wondering as she spat how good a plan it would be to implicate Sir “Six Gun” in an inappropriate behaviour towards female—and possibly male—officers scandal. It had worked with Hollywood producers and with the bosses of international aid organisations, so why shouldn’t it work with the boss of the British armed forces?

But, as usual, Clarissa/Phoebe couldn’t make up her mind on that.

“Oh, for the love of Christ on a bike ,” she screamed instead. “Where is the megalomaniac bonkers banker when I need him? He’s got to be some where.”

Which was a perfectly understandable assumption. As Spike Milligan replied when walking into a room and being asked what he was doing there, “Everyone has to be some where!” Clarissa/Phoebe’s problem was she didn’t know where Jeremy’s somewhere was. Time and time again she had called Milly, only to be sent straight to a cryptic voicemail reply saying: “Due to unforeseen circumstances Milly is unavailable. Do not leave a message.”

The head of MI6 una vail able for a conversation with the prime min ister, what in tarnation was that all about? Clarissa/Phoebe toyed with accusations of absence without leave, desertion of post, treachery and even treason but, as with her potential sex pest “Six Gun” allegations, couldn’t make up her mind on this case either. Instead she merely smashed a few smartphones by throwing them on her office floor and stamping on them. For a fleeting moment, she considered calling Hubby at MI5 to see if he had any idea of the whereabouts of either Milly or the bonkers banker or both. The Secret Services were meant to be in constant communication with each other, weren’t they? Also she’d heard whispers on the Westminster rumour mill that Milly and Hubby were an “item.” But Clarissa didn’t call Sir Hubert because she had never liked him much. And liked him even less when he’d been quoted in a Daily Grunt article as referring to her Brexit performances to date as, “Much like a headless chicken ice-dancing in wellingtons.”

So where was Dame Muriel when Clarissa/Phoebe placed her last despairing call, you will be asking.

At number thirteen Oakshot Street Tooting is the answer. Watching on with Terpsichore/Tiddles/Cat as Maurice OO17 Moffat sat before his bank of computers morphing The Reconstructed Beatles into an Internet weapon capable of competing with Igor Ripurpantzov’s IRA cyber troll farmers in St Petersburg. And with any luck raising the American public’s resistance to the tweeted delusions of the head case in the White House, the latest of which had proposed arming teachers as the best way to protect students from being shot to death by crazed gunmen, using the tired old wild west cliché, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

“And you honestly think we can make a difference here, Double O Seventeen? With just a dead-but-not-dead person and a few songs?”

“And the alternative is what, ma’am? We declare a military war against the Ruskies and the Americans? No, no, in my humble opinion cyber subterfuge is a much more cost effective strategy with the possibility of much higher returns. It has its risks, of course it does. What in human history doesn’t? But an interesting way of puncturing the balloons of the crazies in both the White House and the Kremlin would be to turn their populations against them, do you not think?”

“Through electoral revolution you mean?”

“Who knows? That’s how the trick was worked in the US election and indeed in the Brexit nonsense. You may also remember Florida’s hanging chads during the George W. Bush election. But a better alternative would be direct action. After all where did the French revolution come from? Radical ideas generated by largely bourgeois thinkers to begin with and only then the trickle-down mass reaction from les citoyens . After that goodbye monarchs. Similar situation in the American revolt that robbed us Brits of our cherished slab of God’s chosen country. What was the slogan again? ‘No taxation without representation,’ if memory serves.”

“Mmm,” said Dame Muriel.