I, Maybot Read online

  The Maybot shook her head. She’d just spent 90 minutes trying and failing to convince the house that she was a fair and serious prime minister, and was out on her feet. Fair and serious is the new strong and stable.

  ‘This deal is in the national interest,’ said Green, hesitantly. The national interest as in the Conservative party’s interest. He tried repeating ‘national interest’ but it didn’t sound any more convincing second time round, so he adopted another tack.

  Think of it this way. The deal was just a happy coincidence. An alignment of stars. The Tory party had been looking to spend some more money on public services and the Maybot had realised that, though Northern Ireland had already been getting more than its fair share, it was probably due another £1 billion top up just for the hell of it.

  And if, as a result of the extra dosh, the DUP kept the Tories in government for a few weeks longer, then everyone was happy. Apart from the Scots, the Welsh and large parts of England.

  Labour’s Emily Thornberry remained unconvinced that risking the Northern Ireland peace process was a price worth paying and wondered where the government had found the money from. Having accused Labour of having a ‘magic money tree’ throughout the election campaign, how come the Tories had now managed to find one of their own?

  At this point Green began to appear severely out of his depth. The deal was so far above his pay grade, all he could do was to refer everyone on to his superiors. He didn’t have a clue if the money was contingent on the Northern Ireland executive reaching a power-sharing agreement, but even if it wasn’t, he was sure the DUP would be more than happy to spread the windfall equally among the republicans because that’s the kind of easy-going hippies they were. Peace and love and all that.

  As for the extra money, that was easily explained. By maintaining the triple lock on pensions and abandoning plans to scrap the winter fuel allowance, the Tories had freed up more cash for Northern Ireland. The Maybot gently broke it to him that he appeared to have got the wrong end of the stick on the financial implications of those measures and invited him to have another go.

  ‘We can afford this because we have a strong economy,’ said an increasingly desperate Green. The government had looked down the back of the sofa and just happened to find £1 billion. And if the Scots and Welsh played their cards right and stopped whingeing then they could expect to be on the right end of a bung the next time the government found it had some spare loose change.

  Yvette Cooper and Stella Creasy wanted to know what trade-offs the Tories had made on equalities with the DUP. In particular, what the government was proposing to do about women from Northern Ireland being made to pay for abortions in England.

  Green hadn’t a clue. This was a matter for the Northern Ireland assembly, he said. It wasn’t but he’d been wrong on so much already, one more thing wasn’t going to hurt.

  A few loyal Tories did their best to defend the deal with supportive interventions handed to them by the whips. Though Crispin Blunt’s suggestion that buying a stay of execution for £1 billion was cheap at the price, and everyone should be popping the champagne corks at the government’s negotiating skills, was laced with rather more irony than Green would have liked.

  Throughout all this, the five DUP MPs in the house could barely contain their excitement.

  ‘This is a good deal for everyone,’ said a grinning Nigel Dodds. Especially the DUP. Green clutched his head. The DUP could at least have tried to look as if they hadn’t won the lottery. To rub salt in his wounds, Ian Paisley Jr gently reminded the house that the actual figure the DUP had been promised was £1.5 billion. Sod it, thought Green. The magic money tree could probably run to it.

  Corbyn scoffs as Theresa tells tall tales of G20 glory

  10 JULY 2017

  It’s debatable whether any of the other world leaders would have recognised her account of the G20, but as none of them were in the Commons the prime minister was free to make it up as she went along. ‘Once again we set the agenda,’ she began, to loud laughs from the Labour benches. The Maybot looked hurt. The opposition could at least have given her a chance to say what she had set the agenda in. It had taken a lot of time and effort to organise the seating plan for dinner.

  The summit had gone brilliantly. Far better than anyone could have expected. She had been the life and soul of the party and several people had said how much they were looking forward to seeing her again. Though not too soon, they hoped. Everyone had also agreed it would be a great idea if they could do a bit more trade with Britain if everything worked out OK. But if it didn’t, no worries.

  Her success wasn’t greeted with quite the acclaim the Maybot had been expecting. Even her own backbenchers appeared indifferent. After all, when was the last time a world leader had said they weren’t interested in furthering trade ties with another country at a G20 summit? The whole point of these things was that very little should happen at them, so everyone could agree a bland communique. As long as no leader badly fell out with another then any G20 could be counted as a success.

  Realising she was losing her audience, the Maybot was unable to prevent herself from defaulting to factory settings. ‘We are building a global economy that works for everyone … As we leave the EU we will be negotiating bold and ambitious trade deals …’ The familiar mindless slogans slipped off her tongue at random until her batteries ran down.

  Jeremy Corbyn expressed surprise that she had found so much to do at the G20, given she had openly admitted she had run out of policy ideas at home and had asked the Labour party for input. Several Tories winced at that. The Maybot’s desperate appeal to the opposition to prop up her government hasn’t been well received in many Conservative quarters.

  The Labour leader then tried to pin her down on some details. Just what sort of trade deals did she think she was going to do with the US? Not least because several countries appeared to have come away from the G20 thinking they were Donald Trump’s newest best friend and were top of his birthday invitation list. The Maybot made a note not to answer those particular questions.

  While Corbyn was on the subject of Trump, he wondered just how hard she had tried to get him to change his mind about withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement. The Maybot wasn’t going to take any more of this. ‘We have a strong record on climate change,’ she said. Andrea Leadsom nodded her head vigorously, though no one knew why – when she became environment secretary she didn’t even know if climate change was real. We never did get to find out what the Maybot had or hadn’t said to Trump. Perhaps she had just muttered something under her breath.

  The more loyal Tories used the time to read out the scripts handed out by the whips on how brilliant the prime minister had been on modern slavery – it was the first inkling that the G20 had actually spent time discussing this at the weekend. Labour MPs were more interested in trying to ascertain the government’s position on Euratom. The Maybot had that covered. We would be both in it and not in it at the same time, and we would be bound by the European Court of Justice provided the EU did away with the word European. Simples.

  It was left to Labour’s Chris Bryant to ask the one thing everyone wanted to know. How was it that Ivanka Trump had managed to wangle a seat at the G20? Was it true she was a great deal brighter than her dad and had she had work done? Not for the first time, the Maybot missed the gag and chose to take the question seriously. It had been utterly appropriate for Ivanka to take her father’s place because the G20 had been discussing her pet subject only that morning. Pet subject as in Take Your Daughter to Work Day.

  Bryant sniggered and the Maybot was quick to remind him she had been in Hamburg and he hadn’t. What was left unsaid was that she almost certainly wouldn’t be at the next G20.

  You call that a relaunch? The Maybot’s broken record is still not fixed

  11 JULY 2017

  Imagine that someone had never been daft enough to call a general election. Imagine you’re heading a government with a clear majority in parliamen
t. Imagine you’re still well ahead in the polls. Imagine a world shaped to your own desires.

  The Maybot could. ‘A year ago, I stood outside Downing Street for the first time as prime minister, and I set out the defining characteristics of the government I was determined to lead,’ she began her speech at the launch of the Taylor report into modern working practices in central London.

  ‘I am convinced that the path that I set out in my first speech outside No. 10, and upon which we have set ourselves as a government, remains the right one.’ Nothing had changed.

  But everything has changed. The Maybot’s operators looked on aghast. This was meant to be her big relaunch. Only it was looking very much like the previous relaunch. Maybot 3.0 was the same as Maybot 2.0, which was the same as Maybot 1.0. She was supposed to be sounding a note of contrition, a willingness to adapt to changed circumstances and yet here she was still insisting she had been right all along. It was just everyone else who had got things wrong.

  Her operators tried a quick reboot but only succeeded in getting her to speak in passionless, mindless soundbites. Still it was marginally better for her to say nothing than to say the wrong thing. Besides which, meaningless soundbites weren’t an altogether inappropriate response to a report whose main findings were that workers should be renamed ‘dependent contractors’ and that everyone should be encouraged to believe they could have a good job even if all those in good jobs relied on there being enough people prepared to do the crap jobs to make their lives good. Perhaps some might even think that the Maybot was doing a subtle pastiche of the Taylor report. Then again, perhaps not.

  While her system administrators were still busy reprogramming her, the Maybot pressed on. This was a good report. A very good report. Such a good report, in fact, that she was going to take it away and study it very carefully over the summer so that when parliament returned in September she could quietly ignore most of its recommendations. To implement any of the proposals would be to do a disservice to the blandness of the report.

  Halfway through her speech, the empathy function briefly kicked in. The Maybot knew what it was like to be on a zero-hours contract. She knew what it was like to be stuck in a job you hated and for which you didn’t have the relevant qualifications. She felt the crippling insecurity of knowing you could lose your job at any time. She shared their pain. ‘I want people to be able to go as far as their talents will take them,’ she sobbed. Or a great deal further in her case.

  ‘We will always be on the side of the hard workers,’ she continued, momentarily forgetting that only the previous day she had confirmed that teachers would effectively be getting a pay cut. Still, most teachers were probably a wee bit lazy at heart. Just like the doctors and nurses. Most of them didn’t know the meaning of a proper day’s work.

  Belatedly, the rebooted Maybot flickered and remembered she was supposed to reboot. Now she came to think of it, the election hadn’t gone entirely to plan so she would quite like the Labour party’s help to get through a government agenda she couldn’t get past her own party. Then the memory faded. The election had actually been a great idea because it had got more women into parliament. Mostly Labour MPs. She ended by insisting her government had an unshakeable sense of purpose. Even though everyone in it thought it was on life support.

  As the event drew to a close, the BBC’s Kamal Ahmed stood up to ask a question. ‘Camel, Camel,’ the Maybot said absentmindedly. ‘I’m sorry, I was thinking of something else.’ Some of her operators started openly weeping. The Maybot hadn’t even been able to maintain her concentration for the 30 minutes of her own relaunch. Press control-alt-delete.

  Maybot’s ‘little tear’ interview: a masterclass in robot ethics

  13 JULY 2017

  The preparations had gone on all the previous night. Installing an empathy function into the Maybot’s operating system had proved a great deal trickier than the administrators had imagined. Time and again, the update had appeared to load satisfactorily only to end with a spinning circle of doom. Finally, just minutes before the Maybot was about to begin her first broadcast interview since the general election, an engineer had found a way to bypass the glitch. It wasn’t perfect but it would have to do.

  ‘I’m very pleased to be joining you,’ the Maybot told Radio 5 Live’s Emma Barnett. She didn’t sound particularly pleased, but being pleased was what she had been told the occasion demanded. Being pleased also conformed to Isaac Asimov’s second law of robotics. A robot must obey orders given by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the first law.

  Barnett did not sound entirely convinced by the Maybot’s expression of pleasure, but let it go. When did she realise the election campaign wasn’t going to plan? This question threw the Maybot into some confusion, as she still wasn’t entirely sure that the election campaign hadn’t gone to plan. Yes, it hadn’t gone perfectly, but she couldn’t put her finger on anything she had actually got wrong. All the incoming data she had received up until the exit poll was published had indicated she was on track for a resounding victory.

  ‘Did you shed a tear at the result?’ asked Barnett, going for an early money shot. Proof that the Maybot had some human attributes would make headline news.

  Had it been a tear or had she just sprung an oil leak? The Maybot hesitated. She couldn’t quite remember. But never mind. ‘Yes, a little tear,’ she said. A tearette.

  ‘Was there any moment when you thought about stepping down?’ Barnett continued.

  The Maybot looked confused. What kind of idiot question was that? Hadn’t Barnett studied the third law of robotics? A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the first or second laws. Of course she hadn’t thought about stepping down. She had won the election and it was her duty to form a government, otherwise she might self-destruct and be scrapped.

  Even though the result had not turned out anything like she had been led to expect, she would still do everything the same all over again. Apart from the bits she would change. It hadn’t been her fault that some of the messaging of the Conservative campaign had been a bit off, as she hadn’t been in charge. She was only the prime minister, after all.

  ‘Aren’t you out of touch?’ an incredulous Barnett observed. Not at all, the Maybot insisted. She definitely didn’t regret calling the election because the Tories had gone on to win Mansfield. No Tory leader had managed that in years. And now she was back in No. 10 she had proved her humility, by showing she had listened to young people’s concerns about the lack of housing by putting absolutely nothing about social housing in the Queen’s speech.

  Although Barnett had teased out some flickering signs of personality, she still had doubts about the Maybot’s humanity. She gave it one last go by asking if she was a feminist.

  ‘Er … I have said that before,’ the Maybot replied unsteadily, as her circuits began to overload and fail. She was soon back on restored factory settings. Lifeless, deadbeat and only able to talk in the most mindless generalities.

  The deal with the DUP was worth it because it gave the country a strong and stable government and, besides, the £1 billion wasn’t that much because the economy was growing so fast it appeared to be contracting. Brexit was going to be a success because if you closed your eyes and hoped for something hard enough it invariably came true.

  Everything she had ever done had definitely been the right thing to do, because doing the right thing was what she was programmed to do. The first law of robotics made that clear: a robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

  ‘What would you say now to your 16-year-old self?’ Barnett concluded. The Maybot struggled with this. ‘Gosh,’ she exclaimed. ‘Believe in yourself? Do the right thing?’ Wrong. The correct answer was ‘be careful what you wish for’.

  About the Author

  John Crace is the Guardian’s parliamentary sketch writer and author of I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. He writes
the Digested Read for G2.

  Copyright

  First published in the UK in 2017

  by Faber & Faber Ltd

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  This ebook edition first published in 2017

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  © The Guardian 2017

  Cover illustrations © Morten Morland, originally produced for the Spectator

  The right of John Crace to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–1–783–35144–2