“No, something worse than that Prime Minister.”
“A backbench revolt?”
“Worse even than that.”
“A leadership bid by one of my rivals?”
Johnson shook his head.
“Well, that’s reassuring,” said the PM. “The one thing I wouldn’t be able to stand is one of my colleagues ousting me from power and crowing that he’d got one over on me. I can take anything but that. Well, anything but that and physical pain. What’s happened, exactly?”
Johnson tightened his upper-lip, British Public school-style.
“It’s Banner, prime Minister. Flagg Banner. He’s dead.”
“What?” asked the PM. “Banner dead? Why didn’t anybody tell me about this before?”
“We’ve only just found out.”
“Fuck me pink. What about the bloody zomcat?”
“That’s the good news, Prime Minister. Banner destroyed the zomcat before he killed himself.”
“Killed himself? You mean he committed suicide?”
“Yes, it’s tragic really. He blew out his brains in a toilet cubicle in the Leicester Forrest services just off the M1. As far as we can see, he’d been drinking a black coffee then he just went and blew his own head off. There’s a theory that the cat bit him and infected him with the zombie virus, and that’s why he took his own life. He was a brave man. He did the right thing.”
“He did. And we’re going to do the right thing.”
“What do you mean, Prime Minister?”
“We’re going to give him a bloody good send off and make sure that everyone has a bloody good knees-up. You know the sort of thing I mean. Get one of the civil servants to organise it.”
“Very good Prime Minister.”
“You know, I’m quite relieved Johnson. For a minute there I thought you were going to tell me that the zomcat was still on the loose and that I’d have to re-think the President’s visit. But now I know it’s been destroyed, the presidential visit can go ahead just as planned. Happy days.”
Johnson turned to leave.
“Wait a minute, I’ve just had a thought.”
Johnson paused.
“In order to make absolutely sure that nothing goes wrong, let’s get the wonks on it. Bring them in here right away, will you? I want a word with them.”
“Very good, Prime Minister.”
“Hang on, there’s something else!”
Johnson raised his eyebrows surreptitiously and turned to face the P.M.
“On second thoughts, don’t get them all in here; just get the ones who I’ll be able to talk to without needing an interpreter to explain what they say.”
The wonks were the super-intelligent people who’d all got first-class honours degrees from Oxford and Cambridge, and gone straight into politics without first experiencing anything remotely resembling real life. They were at the forefront of originating and implementing government policy.
“Very good, Prime Minister.”
Johnson rounded up the dozen or so wonks from Whitehall who, unlike their colleagues, could speak in something that resembled the English language and herded them into the PM’s office. The PM had never seen a wonk before; he was startled by their alien appearance. They were to a man (and woman) thin and spotty, with thick spectacles and ridiculously high foreheads. Amongst their number there was one of black descent and one of Asian descent. Both of them conformed to the wonk stereotype.
The PM stood up and adjusted his tie. Then he jutted out his jaw, as he thought it gave him gravitas and authority, and he began to speak.
“Right then,” he said. “You lot probably know that the American President is paying our country a visit in a few days’ time. We’re going to have a fantastic shindig for him here at Westminster then we’re going to take him up to Huddersfield for the centrepiece of his visit: a northern zombie clog-dancing festival. Nothing can be allowed to go wrong, or we’ll all have egg on our faces, and there’s nothing worse than getting egg on your face, unless it’s getting it on your best shirt and your wife finds out. Right Johnson?”
“Right, Prime Minister.”
“So I want you lot all to leave your normal duties for the time being, and concentrate on the Presidential visit. What I want you to do is to make sure that there is no scope whatsoever for anything to go wrong with the President’s visit. If anything did go wrong, heaven forbid, he’d be gloating about it at my expense, and I want to be the one who’s gloating at his expense. Is that clear?”
One of the wonks picked his nose. Another squeezed one of his many zits. The rest of them seemed to be looking at the ceiling or the floor.
The PM raised his voice.
“HAVE ANY OF YOU LISTENED TO A DAMNED WORD I’VE BEEN SAYING?” He asked.
The wonks looked at him as if they’d noticed him for the first time, and nodded in unison.
“All right, clever dicks. What did I just say?”
They put up their hands.
“Right,” said the PM, looking at each one in turn.
“You, you boy,” he said. “The spotty one in the front row with the spectacles.”
All the wonks in the front row immediately stuck their hands up.
“Bloody hell, this is no good, no good at all. Let’s try again. Er, the spotty one with the spectacles who picked his nose.”
All the airborne hands except one were lowered.
“Please sir,” said the wonk who’d picked his nose. “You said you want us to leave our normal duties for the time being and concentrate on the Presidential visit. You want us to make sure that there is no scope whatsoever for anything to go wrong with his visit. If it did, heaven forbid, he’d be gloating about it at your expense, and you want to be the one who’s gloating at his expense.”
“Very good,” said the Prime Minister. “Now I want you all to go back to your office in Whitehall and get to work.”
The wonks filed out.
“That went rather well Johnson,” said the PM after they’d left. “In fact, I feel as if I’m on a roll. I’ve wiped out the zombies, I’ve got rid of that pesky zomcat, and now I can enjoy being Prime Minister and lording it over my rivals. Best of all, I can be condescending to the American President while he’s over here. Life doesn’t get better than that.”
CHAPTER 12
The wonks were a hard-working lot. They got busy drawing up policy proposals, guidelines, regulations and directives, which they compiled into fifty spiral-bound A4 sized folders, each of them several hundred pages in length. These were boxed up and despatched to Huddersfield to provide guidance to Kirklees Council to make sure that nothing could go wrong during the presidential visit.
The wonks had thought of anything and everything, up to and including interference from zomcats, and had put in place measures to ensure that nothing, not even a plague of zomcats, could possibly derail the President’s sojourn.
CHAPTER 13
Snark Hunter went home just as dawn was breaking. It was six o’clock in the morning and he’d been up all night beast-hunting, but he didn’t go to bed. He went straight to his PC.
Hunter was a fifty-year-old loner who’d spent the last two decades of his life in pursuit of the Beast of Bodmin Moor, the legendary animal that is said to live on remote moorland in Cornwall, England.
Some said that the Beast was like a large cat, while others compared it to a panther. Only one thing was certain: that apart from the odd paw-print and grainy photograph, no-one had produced any concrete evidence that the Beast actually existed.
Hunter had made it his life’s mission to get hold of hard evidence of the Beast’s existence and proudly show it off to the world.