I, Maybot Read online

  ‘Let me introduce you to Britain’s next prime minister,’ said Sarah Champion, Labour shadow minister for women and equalities, keeping her fingers firmly crossed. Better to travel in hope and all that. The audience had no such doubts. These were the faithful and they roared their adoration. A chant of ‘Corbyn, Corbyn’ filled the hall and Corbyn let it linger for several minutes before raising his arms for silence. He had waited a lifetime for this.

  Opinion was shifting towards Labour, he insisted. Imperceptibly to the naked eye maybe, but shifting nevertheless. ‘Our manifesto will be radical and responsible,’ he said, ‘and I would like to personally thank everyone who has contributed to it.’ There were too many to name by name as it had been through so many drafts and he was still none the wiser about who had managed to leak several versions to the press the week before.

  No matter. He was determined to proceed as if everything was coming as a total surprise to the audience. He had managed to find a way of raising £48.6 billion in tax revenues and he was going to spend the exact same amount on improving public services and raising people’s standards of living. Perfect symmetry. No one could call his plans uncosted because John McDonnell and Diane Abbott had gone through the figures with a calculator several times.

  The Labour government would get the extra £48.6 billion by asking the wealthiest individuals and businesses to pay a little bit more. Quite a bit more, come to think of it. But never mind, they could afford it. Especially that Philip Green. Anyone earning less than £80,000 wouldn’t have to contribute a penny more.

  Corbyn knew many people might think they would one day be earning £80,000 a year and could be a bit put off at the thought of paying a higher rate of income tax. But now was the time to get real. That really wasn’t going to happen, was it? Even if Labour raised the ‘national living wage’ to £10 an hour by 2020, most people were still going to be fairly broke. Only Labour could guarantee that people would be marginally less broke than under the Tories.

  Corbyn was fairly hazy on some of the details of his nationalisation proposals, though he had been reassured they wouldn’t cost anything and he didn’t appear entirely sure if he would lift the freeze on welfare payments, but his plans to abolish tuition fees, build 1 million homes and create four extra bank holidays got loud whoops.

  Brexit got the briefest of mentions. Labour was committed to scrapping the Tories’ Brexit white paper even though it had gone to great lengths to support it in the last parliament. Though it was possible that its own new Brexit bill might still end up looking much the same as the Tories’. But this was all fine detail. A need-to-know basis.

  Much of the speech was delivered in a minor key, almost as if Corbyn was going through the motions and had long since reconciled himself to the inevitable. Come the questions at the end, the faithful tried to pick him up. A question about immigration numbers was loudly booed. A man from the Morning Star blamed the strongly biased media for Labour’s poor showing in the polls and was rewarded with an ovation. Even a reporter from the Daily Mirror copped it for asking if it was possible that Labour’s problem was Corbyn and not his policies.

  Corbyn tried to pick himself up. ‘This is not a personality cult,’ he said as dozens of his supporters shouted out his name. He had been elected as Labour leader by a very large number of people and he had felt their love. All it would take was a little time. Time was something very few of the shadow cabinet seemed to have. The moment the event concluded, most beetled off before anyone had a chance to quiz them. For some of them this would be the first and last time the manifesto got a hearing in the entire campaign.

  * * *

  The Lib Dems bizarrely chose to hold their manifesto launch in the evening in a hip night club in London’s East End at a time that guaranteed almost no television coverage.

  After a few warm-up acts, Tim Farron took the stage. The Tories may have accused Labour of taking the country back to the 1970s, with Labour countering that the Conservatives were heading back to the 1950s, but he was unapologetic about his desire to go back in time. To this time last year, when Britain was still in the EU. But first he wanted to talk a bit about Malcolm, the man he had had a dust-up with in Kidlington the week before, and let everyone know that the two of them had kissed and made up. Not a gay kiss, though it would have been fine if it had been, as Tim was perfectly OK with that sort of thing these days.

  Guardian Soulmates out of the way, Tim got down to business. The Lib Dems had a new radical vision of politics. Far too many people in the past had made the mistake of voting for the party they wanted to be in government. Now it was time to vote for the opposition.

  Only the Lib Dems could stand up to the Supreme Leader’s hard Brexit. Yes, he accepted the result of the referendum – will of the people, yada yada – but come on. Someone had to stand up for the liberal metropolitan elite Remainers. Besides, did those who voted Leave really know what they were doing? Surely they deserved another chance to come to their senses once they had seen how crap everything was going to be?

  After a quick promise to be nice to children, the climate and sheep, Tim was off. Bugger it. He’d been having such a good time, he’d forgotten to mention the manifesto.

  * * *

  Close your eyes and believe in your strong and stable Supreme Leader

  18 MAY 2017

  A woman dressed as a Dalek with a Theresa May face mask joined the protest outside the converted mill in Halifax as the Supreme Leader’s five-car motorcade pulled into the parking lot. She didn’t look much like the original. The Maybot has far less personality. And is all the more terrifying because of it. Head down and expressionless, she dashed for a side entrance.

  Later than planned because the Conservative battle bus had broken down – someone, somewhere would pay heavily for that – the cabinet filed into the front two rows. The men were identically dressed in white shirts and blue ties and had the rictus smiles of the condemned. Boris Johnson and Philip Hammond took up the rear and sat closest to the aisle. Last in, first out. The campaign slogan of Forward Together, which had been nicked from Margaret Thatcher’s 1980 Tory party conference, didn’t necessarily apply to them.

  David Davis, one of the Supreme Leader’s trusted lieutenants, took the stage first to make the introductions. He kept to a simple, approved script of ‘strong and stable’ before quickly sitting down. Careless talk costs lives at the higher echelons of the Tory party these days. Within seconds the Supreme Leader appeared and the cabinet competed with one another to be the first to their feet.

  ‘Today, I launch my manifesto for Britain’s future,’ Kim Jong-May began. Not the Conservative’s manifesto. Her manifesto. Hers and hers alone. In truth, she couldn’t quite work out why she had been even asked to produce a manifesto, but as some of the other parties had already done so she had felt rather obliged to write one herself. Not that it was really a manifesto. She wasn’t about to tell people what she would like to happen. She was going to tell them what was going to happen.

  The country was facing its gravest crisis since the Battle of Britain and what it needed was a strong and stable leader with a strong and stable plan. She was rather hazy about what that plan might be, because that was on a need-to-know basis. And the country didn’t need to know. It just needed to close its eyes and put its trust in the strong and stable leadership of the Supreme Leader. She alone could get the best Brexit deal, even if that deal turned out not to be to have a deal. Because no deal was better than no deal.

  ‘I do not believe in ideology,’ she insisted, sounding every bit the deranged Mayist. Her ideology wasn’t an ideology because it was the right ideology. She was going to lead the Great Leap Forward of the Great Meritocracy. A country where the most deserving got their proper rewards and the unbelievers were left with nothing. This was her country and she could do what she liked with it. If she felt like intervening in areas of social policy then she would and if she didn’t then she wouldn’t. The people would hear of her intervention
s as and when she decided to make them. And not before. She might raise taxes and then again she might not. Wait and see.

  There were one or two things she was prepared to put right. Right here, right now. There were far too many immigrants and she was going to reduce their numbers to the tens of thousands. Whatever the cost to the economy. Yes, she knew that the Conservative party had promised and failed to deliver that before, but that had been when she had only been Theresa May, the home secretary. Now that she was Kim Jong-May anything was possible.

  It had also been brought to her attention that old people weren’t dying in the right kind of way. So she was going to make it much more cost effective for people to croak from a heart attack or cancer than to suffer from dementia. People with dementia had no one to blame for their condition other than themselves and their families should pay accordingly. As for children, she was going to abolish free school lunches and introduce free breakfasts instead. Just because. Children had to learn that Breakfast meant Breakfast.

  From time to time, the Supreme Leader glanced towards the supplicant faces in the front two rows. Who were these people? Why were they looking at her so piteously? What did they want, these useless apparatchiks? ‘Let us go forward together,’ she concluded. Quoting Churchill always went down well even if the man was a bit of a loser compared with her. Queen of all she surveyed. Top of the world, Ma.

  Forward together, the Supreme Leader left alone in her five-car motorcade. The cabinet were left to fend for themselves in the broken-down bus.

  Dim and Dimmer: two Tory car crashes for the price of one

  21 MAY 2017

  Damian ‘Nice but Dim’ Green looked miserable before the interview with Andrew Marr had even begun. Of all the TV studios in all of the world, he had to walk into this one. After spending four weeks hidden away from the public on the orders of the Supreme Leader’s High Command, the work and pensions secretary was finally being let out at the very moment when there were signs things were going a bit wrong for the Tories. His one chance to prove to the world that he really did have a fully functioning brain was certain to end in failure.

  Marr smelt blood and went for an early kill. Why were there no costings in the Tory manifesto? ‘It’s a realistic document,’ said Dim. It hadn’t been the Tories’ fault that the Tories had called a snap election and, under the circumstances, this was the best they had been able to come up with in a couple of weeks. The manifesto was clearly a document. It was printed on paper. Therefore it was a realistic document.

  ‘There’s an £8 billion hole in your plans for NHS spending,’ Marr pointed out. Dim twitched nervously. There wasn’t, they were just reallocating £8 billion of existing NHS funding, Dim said. ‘That’s not true,’ said Marr. Dim wisely chose not to contradict this.

  Things quickly turned worse when Marr moved on to winter fuel payments. These were completely uncosted as no one knew at what level they would be means tested. ‘They aren’t uncosted,’ Dim said defensively. It was just that they hadn’t yet been properly costed. Or rather they might have been but it just wasn’t the right moment to let everyone know what the costings were. There was no point bothering voters with loads of numbers just before an important election.

  Dim was equally out of his depth when asked to justify the government’s social care proposals that targeted those suffering from dementia, rather than adopting those published in the Dilnot report. He struggled to do the sums on what the changes might mean to someone with a £250,000 house in Ashford, rambled about there not being the right financial products in place and implied that we should stop being so negative. Rather than focusing on all those with dementia who would be left with £100,000 – and face it, they would all be too far gone to notice – why didn’t we concentrate on all those lucky enough to die of cancer who would be able to pass on £1 million to their relatives tax-free?

  ‘You have been touted as the next chancellor,’ said Marr, clearly incredulous at Dim’s failure to grasp basic arithmetic. ‘Do you think Philip Hammond is doing a good job?’ This was one of those questions that didn’t require an answer. Compared to Dim, Lurch is an economic colossus.

  Why stop at one car crash, when you can have two? Having sent Green on to Marr, the Tories chose to double-down by allowing Boris Johnson on to Peston’s show. Dim and Dimmer. If Dim had been hoping to supply some gravitas, Dimmer’s tactic was to go for full-on levitas. His hair was even more artfully dishevelled than usual and all that was missing was the clown makeup. He even tried to sneak a quick peek of the questions while Peston’s back was turned. Not for the first time, his comic timing was off.

  ‘Why are you picking on people with dementia?’ Peston enquired, quite reasonably. Dimmer burbled on, hoping that some vaguely plausible answer might come to him. It didn’t. The best he could manage was that the government had to pick on someone so it might as well start with the demented.

  Peston appeared as startled by this answer as everyone else and asked if Dimmer had been consulted about the contents of the manifesto before it was published. Dimmer was horrified by the suggestion. Why on earth would the Supreme Leader bother to talk to her cabinet about anything? Though he was thrilled that she had promised an extra £350 million per week to the NHS.

  ‘She didn’t say anything of the sort,’ said Peston, who was now beginning to realise he was dealing with someone in urgent need of psychiatric help.

  Dimmer just smirked. When caught telling a blatant lie, smirking is his default response. At which point, a small smattering of self-awareness began to bubble in what passed for Dimmer’s consciousness. He strayed off the strong and stable leader message. Time to mention Kim Jong-May.

  ‘What people have to realise is that the election is a choice between Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn,’ he said. Schoolboy error. Dimmer had just reminded everyone of the clear and present danger to the country posed by him also being involved in the Brexit negotiations. Dim and Dimmer, Dumb and Dumber. But which member of the cabinet is Dimmest? Watch this space.

  * * *

  The Tories hoped that all the bad publicity over social care costs in their manifesto would die down over the weekend. Instead it intensified, with even right-wing newspapers such as the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph, who could usually be relied on to back her up, condemning the dementia tax. Theresa May had miscalculated badly. She – or rather Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill – had believed the Tories were so far ahead in the polls, they could get away with putting policies that alienated the party’s core support of the older middle classes in the manifesto. With every interview now dominated by the self-inflicted wound of the dementia tax, the Tories were forced into an embarrassing U-turn.

  * * *

  Maybot policy reboot ends in an embarrassing interview meltdown

  22 MAY 2017

  ‘Nothing has changed. Nothing has changed,’ the Supreme Leader snarled, her eyes narrowing into a death stare, her face contorted and her arms spread wide, twitching manically. ‘Nothing has changed.’

  Everyone at Conservative party’s Welsh manifesto launch in Wrexham saw it rather differently. They had distinctly heard her say she would be reversing the Conservative party policy on social care that she had introduced in her English manifesto launch in Halifax the previous Thursday. Making it one of the quickest manifesto U-turns in history.

  ‘Nothing has changed,’ the Supreme Leader again insisted, looking increasingly deranged and unstable. Everyone had completely misunderstood her. The manifesto she had written hadn’t been the one that was published. When she had said she was going to make everyone pay all but their last £100,000 on their own care, what she had clearly meant was that she was going to cap the amount they would spend on care. And no, she wasn’t going to say at what level the cap would be set because the fake news media would be bound to misrepresent her again and besides her manifesto was completely costed apart from the bits that weren’t.

  By now the Maybot was shaking so badly that one of her arms fell
off. Roadie Nick Timothy rushed on stage with a screwdriver to reattach it. ‘Nothing has changed. Nothing has changed.’ Except that, in the general confusion, her arm had been put on back to front and was now gesturing obscenely to a sign saying ‘Strong and Stable, Forward Together’ on the wall behind her.

  Were there any other bits of her weak and wobbly manifesto she would like to rip up while she was here, someone asked helpfully. It would be so much easier to get the changes in before the ink had completely dried. ‘Nothing has changed. Nothing has changed.’ The voice was now tinged with panic as well as anger. She hadn’t made a U-turn because she was a strong and stable leader. And even if she had, it would have been a strong and stable U-turn. Not that it was.

  ‘Nothing has changed, Nothing has changed.’ Why were so many people calling it a dementia tax? Just because it was a tax that targeted people with dementia didn’t make it a dementia tax. That was just more fake news. As was the idea that cabinet patsies Damian Green and Boris Johnson had been sacrificed to the Sunday politics shows in a futile effort to defend it. They hadn’t really been there at all. They were just holograms created by the fake news media.

  ‘Nothing has changed, Nothing has changed,’ she repeated, until sound recordist Fiona Hill put her out of her misery by unplugging her. And nothing had changed. Changing her mind was the Supreme Leader’s trademark. She had done it over Brexit. She had done it over the budget. And she had done it by calling the general election. It was her very inconsistency and indecision that proved she was a strong and stable leader.