Seventy-Two Virgins

Boris Johnson SEVENTY-TWO VIRGINS A Comedy of Errors

Optimis parentibus

Part One THE TROJAN AMBULANCE

CHAPTER ONE 0752 HRS

On what he had every reason to believe would be the last day of his undistinguished political career Roger Barlow awoke in a state of sexual excitement and with a gun to his head, the one fading as he became aware of the other.

The gun was equipped with an orange whale harpoon, and would have been lethal, had it been more than six inches long and made of something other than plastic.

‘Say your prayers, buddy,’ said the four-year-old. Roger’s eyelid quivered.

If Sigmund Freud had been able to catch this kid’s conversation, he would have been thrilled. Seldom had there been so exuberant and uninhibited an Oedipus complex.

One morning they were lying all three of them in bed, and Roger was trying to persuade the kid to go and watch Scooby Doo. The child turned to his mother.

He spoke prettily, in the kind of voice he might use for ordering another fish finger.

‘I am going to kill Daddy, and then I am going to marry you.’ Today, Roger didn’t want to be rude to the four-year-old, and he didn’t want to exacerbate his complex, but he was damned if he was going to be treated in this way. He grunted, and rolled away, gripping his slumbering wife with both arms.

The four-year-old fired the plastic dart carefully into the back of Roger’s neck.

Barlow’s blow went wide. Ceding his place to his rival, he rose. He tended to wear T-shirts in bed, and this one was a relic of a brief but illustrious former Tory leadership under which he had been proud to serve.

‘It’s Time For Hague’, proclaimed the T-shirt, while the back announced: ‘The Common Sense Revolution’. As a piece of nightwear, his wife claimed that it had anti-aphrodisiacal properties of a barely credible order.

‘MMM,’ said his wife.

‘Mmm,’ said Roger. ‘Back in a mo.’

As he went into the bathroom he heard the flap of the letterbox. Cee-rist! he thought, the papers!

He scooted downstairs and scooped them up off the mat. Quickly he went through the brutal tabloid that was most likely to have done him in, and then the ones that pretended to be more responsible.

Nope.

Nothing.

Nope. Nothing.

Phew.

Just the usual flammed-up load of old cobblers, masquerading as news.

There was allegedly a ‘dirty bomb’ threat to London, or so said ‘sources’ in the Home Office, with an eye, no doubt, to stirring up public alarm, and then introducing some fresh repression of liberty. There were acres of predictable drivel about the security arrangements for the celebrations today.

The police had launched some Al-Qaeda raid in Wolverhampton and Finsbury. But then there was one of those every month.

In other words, there was nothing important, and certainly nothing to feed his ludicrous paranoia. But some guilty instinct told him to purge the house of these bullying quires of paper.

So he stretched down the Common Sense Revolution to make it a kind of nightshirt (common sense, innit?) and zipped outside into the summer morning. He stuffed them into the fox-ravaged bin, and then checked that no one had seen him.

Drat. Someone had indeed seen him. It was that funny woman who was always muttering under her breath, and who had once seen him administering physical chastisement — in fact it was about the only occasion he had ever done so — to one of his other children.

He beamed at her, tugging the T-shirt over his hips.

With a shudder his neighbour hurried about her business, and Roger darted back up the steps to see the door shutting in his face.

‘Oi. You. No!’ he said.

He bent down to look through the flap.

‘Please,’ he said.

The child’s sweet face came closer. He was now dressed in a red crusader’s tabard, and brandished a plastic gladius or stabbing sword.

‘You are not necessary,’ he said to Roger through the letterbox. ‘Mummy,’ he called, looking back over his shoulder, ‘do we know this man?’

Five minutes later, and with the help of his wife, Roger Barlow had regained access to his house, dressed, washed, and was thrashing around the kitchen looking for that …that thing.

‘You know,’ he said to his wife, ‘the thing with the thing in it.’

His wife had been around long enough to know what to do in these circumstances. She got on with drinking her coffee. ‘Ah yes,’ she said, ‘that thing.’

Barlow cast a worried glance at his watch. It was that green folder thing, the one all about poor Mrs Betts. They were threatening to close the respite centre she needed for her son, who had such severe learning difficulties that he had no realistic hope of education. And last night, in a fit of alcohol-induced elation, he had been staring at the autistic Betts kid’s drawings, which were pretty good, and thought he had seen the answer. But he had had had HAD to have the file.

He was going to ring Mrs Betts that afternoon, and it was no use if he …

Maybe Cameron still had it. He looked again at his watch and wondered whether to dial his beautiful, omnicompetent American researcher. It was too early.

He searched again in his office, under the bed, under the sofa, under the doormat, in the stuff being put out for recycling. He had a sudden horror that he had accidentally thrown the folder away with the papers, and went back to the bins. And then he saw something under his son’s chair, where the child was eating his second breakfast.

He had no time to ask how it had got there. He had no time to speculate on the industrial-strength adhesive with which it was now covered, and which is created by mixing Weetabix with milk.

He had no time because he had a speech to prepare, a respite centre to save, and he had to get to the Commons before the whole of Westminster was blockaded by the Americans.

The President was due to start speaking at 10 a.m., and Roger had to be in his seat in less than an hour. He pointed the bike south and started to churn his legs.

As for the President’s breakfast, it differed from Roger’s in almost every respect. It was a leisured and ruminative repast, taken at a round table in a vast bay window in the same vaulted apartments that have been given to every visiting head of state for the last fifty years.

Olaf of Norway had slept there. So had King Baudouin of Belgium. So had the Pope, and come to that, President Marcos of the Philippines and sundry other thugs the Foreign Office had once thought fit to foist on Her