“Excuse me, Prime Minister…”
“This is our finest hour.”
“Quite so, Prime Minister –”
“Let us go forward together.”
“Indeed, Prime Minister. Where to?”
“I haven’t decided that yet, Sir Humphrey. But when I was paying tribute to Churchill today, I suddenly had this blinding inspiration. That’s the way to go, I thought, I’ll be Churchill Mark 2. I’ve always modelled myself on Tony Blair – no one knew how to run a government without heeding the idiot voters better than he did – but that brand is a bit toxic now, and then there’s Chilcot coming… So I intend to fight the election on Churchillian lines.”
“How, Prime Minister?”
“Cannibalise his speeches, for a start. I want you to help me adapt his words for my next speech.”
“On what subject, Prime Minister?”
“Compulsory plain packaging of tobacco products.”
“Er – are we sure that is a cause with which Sir Winston Churchill sympathised?”
“Absolutely. He always removed the manufacturer’s band from his cigar before smoking it.”
“But doesn’t everyone do that, Prime Minister? I’ve never actually met a smoker – apart from cannabis users, of course – but I have seen films where that happens.”
“Then ban them immediately. I want this speech to go on to cover another of Winston’s great causes: Health and Safety.”
“Was he in favour of that, Prime Minister?”
“Of course he was. A man who goes around wearing a siren suit and a steel helmet clearly isn’t taking any chances. Winston’s problem was he didn’t have the enlightened laws we have on the statute book now. Sending 17-year-olds with 12 hours’ flying experience up in Spitfires – it couldn’t happen today. In fact, the War couldn’t happen today, it broke every Health and Safety regulation in the book. We’d just have a new EU treaty, shifting British sovereignty from Brussels to Berlin – in fact that’s happening anyway – and negotiate a derogation allowing us to keep the Queen. Before I put the Battle of Britain into my speech, though, get your people to check that The Few had representative quotas of women, ethnic minorities and gays, otherwise I can’t use it.”
“What else, Prime Minister?”
“I want to stress Churchill’s commitment to multiculturalism. I understand he was half Native American, so that should take a trick with ethnic voters. But I especially want to draw a sinister parallel between the enemy Churchill faced and the one threatening us today.”
“You mean…?”
“Precisely. Listen, I’ve done this Churchill adaptation: ‘From Clacton on the North Sea to Rochester and Strood on the Medway, an Iron Curtain has descended across the country.’ I’m pretty pleased with that. I want to go on, talking about fruitcakes and closet racists, you know the kind of thing. The inference is obvious. The Telegraph will love it.”
“Indeed, Prime Minister.”
“I want to say something in defence of bankers’ bonuses too – the hours those chaps work, for so little appreciation. I can’t even put them in the Honours List now, in case the protests go viral online. I thought perhaps I’d say, ‘Never was so much owed by so many to so few.’ ”
“Prime Minister, I don’t want to sound negative, but I’m really not sure –”
“Well, run it past a couple of focus groups anyway. You know, I’m really getting the hang of it now. Do you think it might be counterproductive to use that ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat’ stuff in the election manifesto…?”
Pygmies ’R’ Us: the political class of 2015 paying tribute to Winston Churchill is not a pretty sight. Their daily endeavour has been to dismantle the nation he helped to save, to wreck the constitution he revered and to hand Britain over, supine and impotent, to the domination of the country whose ruthless drive for European hegemony he frustrated and to the petty bullying of European nations he liberated.
The very people he loved have been demographically ousted by mass immigration. The liberties he cherished and fought for, from the fundamental rights of British subjects to small pleasures such as smoking a cigarette in the local pub, have been extinguished. What would this most outspoken of Englishmen have thought of the PC laws that gag free speech today? How could one explain to him how his people, who rallied to him in the fight against foreign dictatorship, tamely submitted to Brussels diktat and politically correct legislation from Westminster?
What would Churchill have thought of those in contemporary public life, of Blair and Mandelson, Brown and Cameron? What would he have thought of that pathetic Gawd-’elp-us Ed Miliband, queuing with his wreath in tribute to a man whose legacy he aspires to destroy? And of all the other pygmies, mouthing soundbite insincerities? We can only hazard a guess; but at any rate Winston, who epitomised the pre-digital age, had a trademark double-digit sign to apply to them.
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