Dear Theresa
Sorry about yesterday. I hope Philip took you out for a good curry last night. Forget the tissues and cuddles; what a girl needs when she’s had a really shit day is a good, eye-watering lamb biryani, preferably washed down by about seven bottles of Cobra. It just puts everything in perspective.
Personally, I think you could just as easily have stuck around and offered your deal to Parliament half a dozen more times. The maths were going your way, after all. If you connect the 230 votes you lost by in January with the most recent one and extrapolate the line, you could have had it all nailed by March after next. Probably all you needed to do was bung a few more quid at that Ulster woman who looks disconcertingly like an old baby sitter we had who used to drink the gin after my parents had left for the evening. That, and keep changing Brexit secretaries until one of them had an actual plan. Never mind: that January vote gives you a place in parliamentary history, which is always nice.
I’m not sure your heart was in it from the start, but whose would be? The cocky one with the small chin who buggered off to his caravan to write his priceless memoirs didn’t exactly give leave you the crown jewels did he? And the bearded allotment keeper with the Lenin hat and the Islington chip, he didn’t help either. I think he slightly missed the point about what was going on, and I’ll bet he’s got rotten breath, too.
Also, I think it would have helped if you had studied history and not geography when you were at Oxford. Granted, it’s nice to have a working knowledge of glaciation and what Nigerian children do at school, but a modern European history course would have shown you some really useful stuff. Like there being more chance of witnessing the second coming than an Irish Taoiseach helping out a British politician; or of that Frenchman with the sharp suits and confused Mrs really being an ‘honest broker’; or of Spain not banging on about Gibraltar; or of people generally not getting bored of the subject. Just saying.
I’ll say this for you, though: if you throw in Mark Francois, Nicola Sturgeon and the floppy-haired buffoon who thinks he’s Winston, you have kept your dignity remarkably whilst dealing with some of the world’s weapons grade tossers. I suppose that the posh one with the round glasses, cut glass voice and a platoon of children with silly, Roman names must have at least come as light relief. At least he was polite, in some Victorian, constipated way.
Ultimately, though, your downfall was probably predicated on simple medical fact. If you are trying to do business with a roaring alcoholic, anyone will tell you that late morning is the time to get at them. This makes it hard to understand why all your meetings in Brussels were scheduled to be afternoon and evening ones, by which time your old mate must have been eye-wipingly smashed, and close to incoherent. The fat Belgian with the floppy hair must have been a pain, too; personally, I would have smacked him, and I’ll bet he cheats at golf.
But as you draw back the curtains on a strong and stable Maidenhead morning, there will be compensations, too, of which the key one I could mention would be not having to be polite any more to the pompous and oleaginous small bloke who is in charge at your workplace. You probably wanted to slap him, too, and I think the nation would have got much more behind you if you had. And just imagine: you can switch on the news and listen to Laura Kuenssberg banging on about someone else’s incompetence, and you can watch Chris Grayling’s next million dollar fuck-up with a sense of detachment that has not hitherto been available to you.
My mum used to say that you only regret what you didn’t do, but I’m not sure you will agree with that at the moment. But for now, take some time off with a good book and look after yourself. You probably weren’t at your best, but you are a human being, and you kept your purpose and dignity right up to the end. For that, when so many others abandoned theirs, I applaud you.
Sincerely
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