MONDAY
THAT’S a day I’ll never get back. All the junior spads were ordered to assemble at 6am in the Downing Street bunker. The Standards wallahs are expected any day, and so we were ordered to bring our scrapers to get the gold-embossed paper off the walls tout sweet. Word is that it actually came from the Saudi Royal household as a gift for looking the other way over that business with Khashoggi in Istanbul. The £58k soft furnishing row was a ruse to mask the real story. Fifty eight big ones wouldn’t get you a single roll of this stuff.
Carrie fell in love with it and wanted to turn the flat into a casbah-themed gaff, complete with 10ft ivory amphorae and snake charmers with real snakes. Someone pointed out that was how the bloody pandemic started in the first place, but she still insisted on keeping the wallpaper. Apparently it’s reduced camel-hide, sautéed in molten gold and rolled on the backs of 20 naked virgins, or something like that.
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By the way, there’s a few decent Persian rugs going out the door too. Plus a regiment of rare Japanese bonsais and some purple and crimson Koi Carp for the indoor pond Carrie wanted. The Turkish bath had to be dismantled but I managed to salvage some pine. The car boot sale is on Clapham Common at midnight tomorrow. Mum’s the word as the press would salivate over this.
TUESDAY
IT gets worse. As we were finishing up last night Davenport at Transport discovered a broom cupboard full of silk PPE gowns with gold trimmings and boxes of silver surgical masks. Seems Carrie wants to throw a fundraising Covid Toga bash for her “friends” who’d pay 10k each for the ticket, with 1% going to the NHS and the rest to the “Restoration Fund”. “The Kindvall & Van Hanegem gold taps in the new bathroom don’t just pay for themselves,” she told Cummings. Apparently, this was what finally tipped the mad scientist over the edge. That and her insistence on buying in lots of decorative mirrors after Cummings had had every single mirror removed after he moved in.
WEDNESDAY
I HAD to spend another day with the IT crowd getting rid of those emails about BJ’s true observations on the Covid. Shouting “let the bodies pile up” is explainable: we could say he was talking figuratively or that he was referring to public bodies. But that stuff about rounding up the oiks in places like Burnley, letting them drink themselves silly on free Boddingtons and then letting the Covid loose on them through the water supply would have been more difficult to explain.
Meanwhile Sleepy Hancock’s going around grinning like the silver name-plate on a coffin lid. He thinks the PM is for the long walk and his people have been telling him he’s as good as got the keys for No 10 already. But he drew up a list of all those that would be given access to the bunkers if the pandemic turned out to be apocalyptic. The red line on the last page would end his career: “PREFERENCE MUST BE GIVEN TO THOSE WITH A PUBLIC SCHOOL EDUCATION.”
Cummings thought he’d tracked down and destroyed all copies. But Samantha at the Home Office handed me one after getting a little sparkly with the Pimm’s at The Spectator bash when I said I’d try to get her away from Patel. Apparently Sleepy thinks that if the species were to meet near-extinction Britain would be best placed to lead the apres-apocalypse if all the right sort survived.
THURSDAY
WE need ideas for the VC parade (Victory over Covid). The boss wants this brought forward to coincide with anything nasty the standards committee might conclude in their report. There’s to be a week of celebration and the Queen has agreed to confer the title Salvator Empirii on Boris after he got Biden to thwart any further investigations into Andrew. Dopey Williamson wants it to be a Greek-themed affair in honour of Prince Philip with a re-enactment of the “legendary Greek triumph at Thermopylae” with Gerard Butler dressing up as the Duke to lend some authenticity. We had to point out to Dopey that all the Greeks got slaughtered in that particular battle.
FRIDAY
DISASTER: the Sun have got a picture of the mysterious chap in the balaclava and trackie bottoms who turned up at the midnight car-boot sale. It was the PM trying to retrieve some of the gold leaf wallpaper and scented sandalwood to sell on Ebay and defray the cost of the £58k he had to pay back. I’m officially worried.
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