Dear Roger
Thank you for your letter of 25thMay, which has been passed to me. I appreciate your empathy.
I have to say that you don’t know the half of it. Most of my cabinet were either trying to shoehorn me out of the job, or treating me as if I was the token girl coming in simply to help the government meet its diversity targets.
You referenced that old soak I had to go over and see in Brussels, and you are right to do so. But you omitted to mention the perfumed French windbag we had to negotiate with, who just sat there for hours with a protruding bottom lip and occasionally saying, ‘mais, madame, c’est normal’ in an unbearably pompous way. In my darkest hours, I just had to imagine what it would be like to be his wife, and suddenly my job seemed a small price to pay. And the jumped up Spanish PM who kept voting us down in public, and then ringing me up in private afterwards and asking if I wanted to come in on a timeshare property just outside Marbella. And the unspeakable Varadkar, who just endlessly muttered about ‘hard’ borders in a way that insinuated he found something funny in the word ‘hard’. I wouldn’t let him run my bath. And let’s not even name the perma-tanned Florida misfit, who could somehow manage to issue six contradictory personal threats within the same day without ever coming close to creating a coherent sentence. I love that someone has written a book about him cheating at golf.
Equally, I couldn’t have done it without the help of the British people on both sides of the argument, who know everything about what they don’t want, and precisely nothing about what they do. The swivel-eyed racist thinly disguised as a patriot, who would rather see a million jobs go South than reach a compromise with a foreigner; the damp-eyed media folk who simply refused to believe that this country could get up off its arse and do something useful on its own account; the students who didn’t even bother to turn out to vote but suddenly announced that their futures had been stolen. And the people somewhere in the middle, possibly like you, who don’t seem to know what they want, other than a quiet life. Oh, and the press, who have not passed up a single opportunity to make their government look idiotic in the middle of the most important negotiations we have had since 1815. In this game, my friend, you get who you deserve and for the last three years, that seems to have been me. Worst Prime Minister in history or not, I’d like to see the next person do better.
Where now? Well, for you lot, I really don’t know. Probably Boris, piffling around the capitals of Europe thinking his Etonian classical double-entendreswill make people think of him charming, and as anything other than a rootless liar. Or Jezza, whose sole contribution to national life, apart from wrecking the economy, will be to make his brand of subversive anti-British masochism our foreign policy. Or possibly someone from the next generation, who actually has a plan, and some guts. Who knows?
As for me, I will be heading off for an extended walk in Switzerland with Philip, where I will read something dystopian, like J.G Ballard, to make me feel better.
Thank you, again for your good wishes
Theresa
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