I, Maybot Read online

  Meanwhile, a topic that was unexpectedly dominating the airwaves was gay sex, after the Lib Dem leader Tim Farron had dithered for five days before saying he didn’t think it was a sin. Thereafter it became inevitable that every party leader would be asked to clarify their views on the topic.

  * * *

  Kim Jong-May awkward and incredulous as journalist asks question

  30 APRIL 2017

  Kim Jong-May clutched her left arm tightly. She was out of her comfort zone. Surely the whole point of being the Supreme Leader was not having to go on television to answer rude questions. Still, too late to back out now. She smiled awkwardly. It was always good to try to appear friendly towards one’s subjects.

  ‘Don’t the voters deserve better than to be spoken to in soundbites?’ asked Andrew Marr.

  Don’t be silly. What this country needed above all were strong and stable soundbites. ‘I believe it is in the national interest to have a strong and stable leadership because only a strong and stable leadership can deliver a strong and stable economy.’

  Marr reached for the pistol. Him or her? This wasn’t the interview he had been hoping for. It was the one he had feared. ‘That does sound rather robotic,’ he observed. The Supreme Leader began to relax. Robotic was good. Robotic was strong and stable.

  With the Maybot fully activated, the Supreme Leader went on to insist that she wanted nothing more than a country which worked for everyone and not just the privileged few. She’d said that hundreds of times before so it must be true. What about the nurses? Marr asked. They were poorer than they had been for years and many of them were going to foodbanks.

  ‘There are complex reasons why people go to foodbanks,’ the Supreme Leader said tetchily. And what people had to remember was that many nurses were just plain greedy and chose to scrounge off foodbanks when they had spent all their money on super-sized meals at McDonald’s.

  Sensing she might be straying slightly off message, Kim Jong-May returned to her default settings. Strong and stable leadership. Strong economy. Strength through being strong. Security through being secure. No, she didn’t feel it would be a failure if inequality rose under her Supreme Leadership. And yes, she did want to reduce taxes, but the best way of ensuring she could do that would be to give herself the leeway to increase some of them. The power of dialectics. Stability through fragility. Integrity through deceit.

  The Supreme Leader fidgeted and looked around anxiously, willing the interview to end. ‘Jean-Claude Juncker is reported as saying that you are in a different galaxy in the Brexit negotiations,’ Marr remarked.

  That was an insult too far for Kim Jong-May. Just because she was on another planet, it didn’t mean she was from another galaxy. She was very proud to be the Supreme Leader of the planet Zog. And what the people of planet Zog needed was strong and stable leadership, which is why they needed to give her a mandate to strengthen her hand in the Brexit negotiations. Once the EU realised how much everyone in the UK hated it, Brussels would be bound to give us a brilliant deal.

  ‘Do you think gay sex is a …’

  The Supreme Leader had been expecting this one and she jumped in before Marr had finished his sentence. ‘NO, NO, NO.’ She absolutely loved gay sex. Nobody liked gay sex more than she did. Nothing was more strong and stable than gay sex providing it was done strong and stably. To be on the safe side, she crossed herself. She could work out later whether it was more of a sin to say something wasn’t a sin when you thought it might be.

  A few minutes later, the Supreme Leader found herself in the ITV studios being asked much the same questions by Robert Peston. Might as well kill two birds with one stone. Strong and stable, stable and strong. Strengthen our economy by strengthening her own position. Read her lips. She wouldn’t be raising any specific taxes. Though she might be raising some unspecific taxes which she wasn’t prepared to specify.

  By now Kim Jong-May was displaying some nervous tics. Her eyes twitched as they darted in different directions and her fists clenched and unclenched. Desperation was kicking in. ‘One last question,’ said Peston, thoughtfully opting to put the Supreme Leader and the country out of their misery. Why would she not be doing the live TV debates?

  ‘Because I want to get out into the community to meet some ordinary people,’ she replied. Why, only the previous day she had been up to a forest in Scotland where she had met this awfully nice woman, Ruth Davidson, along with seven of her closest friends, who had all told her that what this country needed was the strong and stable leadership which only someone as strong and stable as her could deliver.

  On the way back to No. 10, the Supreme Leader asked the Even More Supreme Leader if he thought the morning had gone well. Lynton Crosby nodded approvingly. She had been more mediocre than even he had dared hope.

  * * *

  At times it felt as if Labour was trying to match the prime minister’s metronomic mediocrity step-for-step with uninspired interviews and events of their own. As with the Tories, most of the election heavy lifting was left to the leader, with occasional cameos from trusted shadow cabinet ministers such as John McDonnell, Emily Thornberry and Diane Abbott. All the other Labour MPs went back to their constituencies to run their own private campaigns that highlighted their local appeal and distanced themselves from the Labour high command. Vocal support for Jeremy Corbyn was kept to a bare minimum.

  Nor did Corbyn do much to convince that he wasn’t the electoral liability the polls suggested. His main idea seemed to be to introduce an extra four bank holidays a year and the more he tried to convince interviewers that he was really fired up for the campaign, the more he sounded like a blissed-out yoga teacher. Time and again he also struggled to make a coherent case for his position on nuclear weapons. Unsurprising really, as he gave every appearance of disagreeing with Labour’s own policy that had been agreed at previous party conferences. Suggesting that Britain might maintain its nuclear submarine fleet while failing to provide it with any weapons was a compromise that did little to convince anyone that the Labour leader was a man who could be trusted with the nation’s security.

  And when Corbyn did come up with the potentially vote-winning policy of creating 10,000 extra police officers it seemed like he had caught his own shadow home secretary on the hop. Left hand, meet right hand. The interview that Diane Abbott gave to Nick Ferrari on LBC Radio to explain this new promise was one of the low points of the entire campaign. She began by claiming that recruiting 10,000 extra police men and women would cost just £300,000.

  Ferrari sounded sceptical that a Labour government could get away with paying police officers £30 per year and invited her to have another go. Abbott then arbitrarily upped the number of recruits to 25,000 before suggesting that £80 million should more than cover the costs of the programme. A starting salary of £8,000 was more than enough for anyone.

  ‘Has this been thought through?’ asked Ferrari. Yes, of course it had. Just not by Abbott who now went on to propose recruiting 250,000 police officers. ‘The figures are that the additional costs in year one when we anticipate recruiting about 250,000 policemen will be £64.3 million,’ Abbott replied, before going on to throw out other possible recruitment targets of 2,500 and 250 along with several other cost predictions of £139.1 million and £217 million. Who knew? One of these figures might even have been right.

  Abbott later explained that her apparent confusion was caused by her diabetes, but the voters did not appear to be in a particularly forgiving or understanding mood. When the snap general election had been called, there had initially been some speculation that the local elections scheduled to take place on 4 May might have to be postponed but they went ahead as planned.

  Local elections taking place midway through a general election cycle usually spells bad news for the party in government, as extravagant promises made in the heat of the moment run aground on political and economic realities. Limiting losses to an acceptable level are generally about as much as any government can hope for in s
uch a scenario, but the polls indicated that the Tories were so far ahead of Labour they were on course to make widespread gains.

  The results went pretty much to form, with the Conservatives gaining overall control of 11 councils and winning 558 seats. Labour lost 320 seats and UKIP were all but wiped out. Corbyn tried to console himself that the election could have gone worse and his party lost even more seats, but that was rather clutching at straws. For most people, the local elections merely confirmed what they had hitherto only suspected: that Theresa May and the Tories were on track for a large majority on 8 June.

  * * *

  Labour’s hint of a pulse leaves Theresa May unsated

  5 MAY 2017

  Shortly after 4 p.m., Kim Jong-May stepped out of her bunker to deliver a three-minute victory speech to a few members of the media in a factory in Brentford, west London. Not that it was a victory. Not by the Supreme Leader’s demanding standards.

  The annihilation of UKIP had been no more than she expected, but there was still the hint of a pulse in Labour. Winning councils in the Labour heartlands of north-east England along with everywhere else in the country was all well and good, but she wouldn’t sleep easy until all opposition was ground into the dirt.

  The Supreme Leader tried to keep the anger out of her voice. The results were definitive proof that the Evil EU Empire was manipulating the British electorate. Not only had it prevented her from winning by an even larger margin thanks to a dirty tricks campaign, it had forced enough people to vote Tory to lure Britain into a false security that the Supreme Leader would get a landslide victory on 8 June. Left to their own devices, the voters might then be tempted to think it was safe to come out and vote for Jeremy Corbyn. She alone had the power to outwit Jerry.

  ‘The results are encouraging,’ Kim Jong-May said. ‘But I am taking nothing for granted.’ The local election results were neither here nor there, really. All that mattered was her coronation on 8 June. We must not fall into Jean-Claude Juncker’s trap. If the country relaxed for even a second then Corbyn’s coalition of chaos would take power, all our expats would be left stranded on the beaches of Dunkirk and the EU flag would be flying over No. 10.

  Now was not the time for triumphalism. The country craved strong and stable leadership and she was the only person strong and stable enough to deliver it. Her sword would not sleep in her hand until she had smitten every Brussels bureaucrat. The general election was too close to call. The whole future of the country was at stake. If she closed her eyes, she could almost believe she was telling the truth. Besides, what kind of Supreme Leader only got a majority of 100?

  John McDonnell was much happier. It had been a challenging night, the shadow chancellor admitted, but Labour had responded magnificently by not being totally wiped out. When you thought about it properly, Labour could potentially have lost every single seat in the country. So to have retained control of councils such as Cardiff, that they had only held for several decades, was a brilliant achievement. One that could only have been possible under Corbyn’s remarkable leadership.

  McDonnell also spoke of plots. There had been a widespread conspiracy by the mainstream media to accurately report that most voters thought Corbyn was a bit of a liability. So for Corbyn to have only lost hundreds of council seats was a total triumph. Once the Labour leader had had a chance to get his message across personally – all visitors to the allotment welcome – he would march to glory in June. People were just going to love the real Jeremy once they really got to know him.

  As the news for Labour got progressively worse as the day went on, with the Tories even making massive gains in the Labour heartlands of the north-east, Stephen Kinnock dared to suggest the results were disastrous. Diane Abbott was appalled by this. Like McDonnell, she could hardly have imagined the day going any better.

  ‘So how many seats have you lost so far?’ asked an ITV reporter.

  Abbott thought about getting out her calculator, but then decided against it. This was a sum that even she could deal with. ‘About 50,’ she announced, confidently.

  ‘Erm … You’ve actually already lost over 125,’ the reporter pointed out.

  ‘Oh,’ said Diane, not quite sure what the problem with that was. ‘When I last looked we had lost about 100.’ 50, 100, whatever … They were basically much the same number. They both had noughts in them, after all.

  On her way out of the ITV studio, Abbott received a text. Corbyn had gone missing in inaction and every other senior Labour MP had retired to a darkened room with a large scotch. Would she mind going on to the BBC as well? Abbott was only too thrilled. There was nothing she liked more than being given another chance to make an idiot of herself in public. ‘It’s not a matter of leadership,’ she told Daily Politics. ‘Everyone I have spoken to thinks Jeremy is marvellous.’ There again, she had only talked to his close relatives.

  Supreme Leader produces pure TV Valium on The One Show

  9 MAY 2017

  Behind every successful Supreme Leader there’s a very rich successful investment banker. Or, for their joint appearance on The One Show, beside her. Philip looked relatively happy to be on the sofa chatting to Matt Baker and Alex Jones. Theresa could hardly have appeared more awkward if she tried.

  Baker broke the ice with a gentle loosener. How hard was it being the husband of the Supreme Leader? Here was Philip’s moment to reveal all. To say it was a complete misery spending hour after hour with a woman whose only conversation was ‘strong and stable’. Instead he chose to remain loyal. ‘There’s give and take,’ he said. ‘I get to choose when to put the bins out.’ Philip is clearly a man whose sense of humour doesn’t get many chances to shine.

  ‘There are boys’ jobs and girls’ jobs,’ simpered Theresa. Immediately we were right back in a 1960s chat show. A world where men were boys and women were girls. She didn’t specify what the girls’ jobs were. Other than being Supreme Leader.

  Jones then asked about why the Supreme Leader had changed her mind on her walking holiday in Wales about holding an election. Theresa couldn’t really come out and say, ‘What would you have done if you found yourself 20 points ahead in the polls?’ so she muttered something about doing the country a favour. ‘What was the drive back to London like?’ asked Baker. The Supreme Leader gave this some thought. The traffic had been quite light on the A5 all things considered but there had been a bit of a snarl up on a contraflow on the M1 outside Luton.

  With the interview dying on its feet and most viewers thinking it a pity Philip wasn’t the prime minister, Baker announced he was going to stop talking about politics because he wanted to get to know the Supreme Leader a bit better. ‘Will we be leaving Eurovision?’ he asked. The Supreme Leader was momentarily blindsided as Lynton Crosby hadn’t given her a script for this. ‘No,’ she said eventually. ‘But I’m not sure how many points we will get.’ She didn’t appear to be aware that it was a longstanding tradition for Britain to get next to none.

  After a short break, the Supreme Leader went on to say she had met lots of different people from all walks of life while she was growing up in the vicarage but despite that had set her heart on being a Conservative MP. ‘It’s been said you wanted to be prime minister from a very young age,’ Jones observed.

  ‘I don’t recognise that,’ the Supreme Leader replied.

  ‘I only heard her saying she wanted to be prime minister when she joined the shadow cabinet,’ said Philip, not altogether helpfully. The Supreme Leader shot him a death stare. Revealing she had had her eyes on the top job since 1999 wasn’t necessarily the look she was hoping for.

  To compensate, the Supreme Leader went full Maybot. ‘The country needs strong and stable government. The country needs strong and stable leadership. I came from a strong and stable family. The country needs stability.’ A look of quiet desperation crossed Philip’s face and several million people at home felt his pain. They really didn’t know how he did it.

  ‘We’ve found some old footage of Philip from the
1980s,’ said Baker. Had anyone at The One Show bothered to turn up the volume it could have been TV gold as the camera had caught Philip delivering a personal hymn to the European Union. But the moment passed silently and both Theresa and Philip breathed a little easier.

  By now, Baker was looking at his watch. Even by the anodyne standards of an early evening magazine show this was desperate. Philip tried to liven things up but the Supreme Leader somehow managed to kill every exchange stone dead. Yes he had thought she was a lovely girl when he first met her. The Supreme Leader had felt much the same. ‘Very stable, very stable,’ she said.

  ‘This is turning into an episode of Mr and Mrs,’ said the helpless Baker. It wasn’t. It was even worse. Did the red box ever make it into the bedroom? The Supreme Leader didn’t think it had. Though she couldn’t rule it out coming into the bedroom at a later stage. As long as it was strong and stable enough.

  ‘I do like ties. And jackets,’ said Philip, trying to fill dead air.

  ‘That’s all we’ve got time for,’ sobbed a relieved Jones, as Theresa and Philip scuttled away, pleased to have got off relatively unscathed.

  Five years previously Baker had made a name for himself by asking David Cameron the killer question, ‘How do you sleep at night?’ There was no need to ask it tonight. The answer was obvious. By playing back recordings of her TV appearances.

  Cries of ‘Corbyn, Corbyn’ filled the hall. He had waited a lifetime for this

  16 MAY 2017

  No one could ever say that Jeremy Corbyn would die wondering. The same couldn’t be said of many of his shadow cabinet colleagues who followed him on to the platform in the atrium of Bradford University student union for the launch of the Labour manifesto. Some attempted a fixed grin and tried to remember to applaud in the right places; others could barely manage that. The shadow defence secretary, Nia Griffith, didn’t even make it to the starting line. For them this was an ordeal to be endured rather than enjoyed.