From : Reggie@toptory.lidl.com
To : Desmond.Swayne@dfid.gov.uk
Subject: Confederates and Unionists
Dear Dessie,
How sensible of you to go on a great trek round your overseas empire for the next fortnight handing out HMG largesse to worthy supplicants. So we have four months of stirring up apathy before the great EU vote, and you and I are on opposite sides, with you an outer and me an inner.
It reminds me of that paper on the American Civil War for the Staff Promotion exam, with you going off to join the Confederacy and me staying with the Union – and we know how that ended!
Despite pleas on all sides to have civilised debate, it largely seems to be a political version of the Eton Wall Game between Conservatives with other parties as onlookers. My grandson asked me whether it was just a punch up between Old Etonians or could any other public school men join in?
Of course the Confederacy has been stimulated by the outing of Boris J after much soul-searching and leadership calculation. You will know that his appearance in the spotlight has seriously enraged the “Outer” veterans such as Cash, Redwood, Chope, Fox and Jenkin who see him as a johnny come lately. It certainly caused the PM to lose his rag and swap insults with the worst of them.
Both sides have been persuading/arm twisting colleagues to declare. The Chancellor’s Vicar on Earth, G.Hands, and His Cup Bearer, M.Hancock, have been bringing in penitents to the Presence where, like Ignatius of Loyola, he reveals to them the prospect of eternal love – or at the very least appointment as a PPS – or torture and damnation: no foreign trips and permanent membership of the European Scrutiny Committee.
The Outers have that strange cove D Cummings who emails Association chairmen suggesting deselection for those colleagues refusing to declare for the true faith of outers.
Most of the Tory press appear to support the Confederacy as does that blog Conservative Homeland. I see its founder Brother Timothy Montgomerie has attacked Cameron and resigned from the Party. No great loss as he appears to reside across the Pond. Remind me, Dessie, is he any relation of B.Montgomery – late Field Marshal, and a serious “happy clappy” Christian? Monty lost it after he retired and became more “clappy” than “happy”.
All’s not well on the home front as Lady Mary was flirting with becoming an Outer. All about her uncle Wilfred who was “killed by those awful Boche” during the Rhine Crossing in 1945. Actually, he was pissed as a newt on looted Hun Schnapps and fell off a landing craft and drowned. But she’s now an Inner having watched sundry colleagues appear with Messrs Galloway and Farrago. Then there is that awful club tie they are all wearing – slime green, which Soames says looks as if they have collectively had a nose blow.
When the inners launched their campaign it was from some night club off Pall Mall. Soames and I arrived to be shown the tradesman’s entrance (“Don’t you know who we are?” from Soames) and were ushered into a large cavern-like cellar full of colleagues past and present. We had to sit at the back (old men not wanted by the camera crews) and clamber up over rows of chairs. With his old war wound, Soames wouldn’t have made the first fence if he hadn’t been literally carried by Amber Rudd, Nicky Morgan, Claire Perry and Anna Soubry all singing the Eton Boating song. Not necessarily the image the PM wanted.
Meanwhile the Comrades are pursuing their Marxist strategy of self-destruction. Comrade Corbyn has been out on a CND march with other lefties and pensioners form the ‘70s and now we learn he has appointed that former Bolshevik Greek finance minister, Zorba Variousfakirs, as his financial adviser. Based upon the aforementioned Greek’s custody of their national finances last year which ended in tears.
I’ve had a busy social calendar, having been invited by my son-in-law and the teenage grandchildren to the Brits. I thought it was a concert but found out it was more like a All Ranks Smoker, with a lot of metrosexual types hugging and kissing and some very loud music. I had a selfie taken with some buxom blonde called Adelaide. Much booze was consumed, and at the end I saw Therese Coffey carry out young Gavin Williamson, the PM’s ADC, who was tired and emotional, in a fireman’s lift. He hasn’t been seen since and the Whips have him down as AWOL.
Soames and I then went on to a memorial bash at the Turf Club (“Bubbles” Bingley had collapsed dead at a race meeting having lost his shirt on some broken backed filly), and the boys at the bar quizzed us on the referendum since Soames, thanks to his twittering, is regarded as something of a sage. Majority were Outers until Soames described the consequences – economic collapse, end of farm subsidies, Kent overrun with Romanians and Putin’s navy docked at Portsmouth. A slight exaggeration, but it made them all gulp. No 10 want Soames and I to do a double act round the country, rather like those old codgers Waldorf and Statler in the “Muppets” – could upstage Boris J and his impersonation of Bertie Wooster.
I see that scribbler Julian Fellowes, who we enobled and wrote that drama “Downtown Abbey”, is adapting some of Trollope’s novels. Marvellous literature much read by H Macmillan during stressful times as PM – just the literary fodder for D Cameron who needs it after a session here listening to Cash, Jenkin, Rees-Moggie et al.
I am just off to Sir Simon Burns’ gaff for a boozy supper and to watch those US Primaries called Super Tuesday. Soames and I are appalled by the likely choice of that weirdo Trumpers and the virago Clinton: none of the above. Perhaps a lesson for our own leadership election before 2020.
Look forward to exchanging war stories at “The Whistling Leper” for the regimental reunion.
Yours till Appomattox,
Reggie