The nightingales sang in Berkeley Square. Clock-faces wilted and then melted, folding themselves gracefully over the branches of chestnut trees. From the Prime Minister’s Private Office the sound of Big Ben striking thirteen could be heard. Reginald, the PM’s consigliere, faced the Great Man and braced himself.
“So, Reg. How are we looking now?”
“Well, Dave, as you know, the photo was a major ball-ache”
“Tell me about it! And now we’ve bloody well u-turned!”
“With respect, Dave, we haven’t. All you’ve done is say we’ll take a few thousand more. There is absolutely no substantive change on the policy.”
“But it looks like it, damn it. Those 1922 Committee fucks are gonna tear me a new one!”
“Relax. It’s cool. We’re on top of it. A nine-day wonder. Besides, until that bastard Corbyn gets in Labour are with us. Plus, on the bright side, the BBC are still calling them migrants, not refugees”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Peter Allen on 5 Live was awesome, today. He was very grudging about these people being refugees and fleeing war and then he said – you’re gonna love this – he just kinda brushed it all aside and said that the whole issue had now become ‘entrenched behaviour’ among the darkies”
“He actually said that? Really?”
“Yup. Well not the ‘darkies’ bit, obvs, but the rest of. Absolutely”
“Top man. Have we got him down for a gong?”
“Dunno. I’d need to check with Bernard”
OK, what else do we have?”
“Twitter’s a bit bleak. Lots of proles moaning. Lots of the great unwashed calling you a ‘silver spoon-faced bastard.’ ‘cunt’ ‘wanker.’ The usual, really”
“Fucking Twitter. Tell me again why I can’t just close the fucking thing down, Rupert doesn’t own it, does he?”
“No, but it’s complex with social media”
“Whatever. We’ll come back to it later. What else?”
“Well, this is a bit awkward, really…”
“Spit it out, Reg”
“Well, you remember that intern you were looking for? We’ve got a candidate but it’s a bit awkward”
“Go on…”
“Well, he’s Muslim, for starters…”
“For fuck’s sake!”
“And he’s Syrian. An actual migrant”
“How the fuck did he get in?”
“Home Office twats, again. Another clusterfuck. To be fair Theresa’s got a lot on, currently, as you know; what with the peados and everything”
“This just gets better. Tell me the worst”
“A proper cheeky little shit, he is. He came on with all this ‘shirker striver’ bollocks that Ian started and a lot of nonsense about our ‘core values’ and ‘aspiration’ and ‘hard-working families’ and so on. Basically, his pitch was that if he’d managed to cross entire war-torn continents, using none of the official channels, with those IS nutters chasing his arse, dragging his missus and brats with him, then he’d proved in spades a couple of things. One, that he was clearly resourceful, good at thinking outside the box and was a man who could work well under pressure and relished a challenge. Two, that if he could do all that it didn’t even matter if we rejected his claim for asylum. He was as ‘aspirational’ as fuck and wanted to ‘get on’ like no cunt we’ve ever seen”
“I see. A fucking chancer then?”
“And then some but, again, it could work well. We spin it as the PM giving a sand-wog a job near the seat of power. Good old British fair play and all that. All those diversity points etc. It’s win/win, Dave”
“Christ on a bike, fucking immigrants, immigrants, immigrants! Everything’s about fucking immigrants!”
“Yes, but it does shift the spotlight from our kiddy-fiddlers for a bit so, you know, not all bad, is it?”
“Fine, OK, whatever, but I want people back where they were; hating the brown-faced fucking freaks. In fact, there’s an idea; can’t we get Katie to do another ‘cockroaches and gunships’ thing? To help get things back on track?”
“No, ‘fraid not. She’s got her head well down and, in the current climate, it would backfire badly. Defo. Trust me. Besides, she’s more into Nigel than you, these days, mate”
“Fucking Farage. Treacherous wanker”
“But he and his mates are shooting their own feet off left, right and centre on this one so, again, like I keep saying, not all bad”
“If you say so. We done now?”
“We are”
Waves lapped against the sand. The white cliffs of Dover, craggy sentinels of empire, glared at Calais. From a nearby guest house the muffled thwack of willow on a young boy’s buttocks could be heard.
Harry Paterson 