Queen Camilla Read Free Page B

of brand management consultants had deliberated for months, at an estimated cost of three million pounds, on the wisdom or otherwise of giving the party a new name. A 402-page report was produced, which almost nobody read in full, but instead turned to the executive summary,which said that, yes, a new name was called for due to constant confusion with the American Republican Government, underlined when Jonathan Ross called the Prime Minister ‘Mr Pwesident’ on Ross’s Friday-night chat show. Another firm of fantastically clever consultants was contracted to think up a new name and logo. This team retired to a country house hotel where they brainstormed for five consecutive days and nights before coming up with the Cromwell Party.
    Jack was now married to Caroline, who had fine bones and was the eldest daughter of a baronet, but Caroline found politics ‘tiresome’ and had recently started to criticize the way he held his fork. Jack was slightly afraid of Caroline, her vowels intimidated him and her pillow talk was formidably intellectual. Last night she had thrown Voltaire’s
Dictionnaire Philosophique
across the bedroom, shouting, ‘Lightweight!’
    Jack had looked up from a report on phone tapping (161 Members of Parliament were currently having extramarital affairs), and said, ‘Who’s a lightweight? Me?’
    ‘No, fucking Voltaire,’ she had said. ‘Enlightenment, my arse!’
    Jack had looked at her lovely profile, at her angry, heaving breasts, and felt a twinge of desire, but the last time they had made love, Caroline had said, after they had peeled away from each other, ‘Jack, you make love like a laboratory rat; your body’s there, but your brain is elsewhere!’
    If Caroline had a weakness it was her inability to pass a handbag shop. She currently had her name on awaiting list for a black Italian handbag, costing £2,000. When Jack grumbled that she already had eleven black handbags, she screamed, ‘I can’t be seen with last season’s handbag. I’m the wife of the Prime Minister.’
    Jack’s mother had used the same navy-blue handbag for forty years. When the handles had become frayed she had taken the bag to a cobbler, who had repaired the handles for one and sixpence. When he told Caroline this, she said, ‘I’ve seen photographs of your mother. She made Worzel Gummidge look positively elegant!’
    Caroline had a pale beauty that mesmerized the picture editors of the English newspapers. She appeared on the front pages of most of them on a daily basis, often on the flimsiest of pretexts: ‘CAZ BREAKS NAIL!’ had been one recent headline.
    Big Ben struck eleven times. A statement was issued to the press that the Prime Minister was ‘indisposed’. The pound fell against the dollar.
    Jack’s Government was sometimes accused of being totalitarian, which made him laugh. He was far from being a Stalin or a Mao; it wasn’t his fault there were no viable opposition parties. He had been forced to detain some of his potential opponents, but only because they had been stirring up trouble. He could not take chances with the security of the country, could he? He was hardly responsible for the political apathy that hung over England like a fog, was he?
    A little crowd of agitators, Republican purists, had stirred themselves enough to hold an unlawful protest outside the Palace of Westminster, accusing the Governmentof revisionism. They had been dealt with but Jack could not help feeling that the tide was about to turn and cut him off from the shore. Perhaps he should not have put Stephen Fry under house arrest. It hadn’t done any good: Fry had continued to mock the Government on the Internet, from his Norfolk home. He should have sent Fry to Turkey to have his cuticles seen to by one of their security forces’ crack manicurists. That would have wiped the smile off Fry’s satirical face. Jack laughed briefly under the duvet, but soon resumed his gloomy thoughts.
    His workload was unremitting,