YOUR agents say there’s nothing I can do to make the situation worse and I should sit tight, Sir Keir. But they don’t know me like you do.
I’m a major asset. I’ve got a skillset beyond their comprehension. There’s nothing I can’t ruin if I turn my mind to it. I’ve even turned Rees-Mogg against me.
It takes a lot to be on the Luddite side of an argument with Jacob, but by banning solar farms for no reason whatsoever I’ve wound up the farmers in his Somerset seat and the investors in his hedge fund.
‘What exactly is the issue, prime minister?’ he said, pushing his glasses up on his nose in a way that in Leeds would be guaranteed to get them stamped on. ‘Why are we interfering with landowners’ right to earn money from their own land?’
‘It’s against nature,’ I said. ‘Power? From the sun? Power comes from deep beneath the earth, where it’s extracted by multinationals. Taking the profit out of energy is anti-capitalist.’ That shut him up.
Great seeing you at PMQs, by the way. Hope I wasn’t too impressive, effortlessly turning every question against you by making it about the energy guarantee. You didn’t seem rattled.
And the 1922 Committee meeting went well, by which I mean terminally badly. An hour of almost total silence. I repeated the same performance using the same energy line, and they had no answer for it.
Afterwards I popped to the tearoom to reassure MPs there’d be no U-turns, that Kwarteng had my full confidence, that we’d still be making all our tax cuts while not touching spending. They looked just about ready to shit.
Oh, and we’re still on course for a massive battle with the EU and US over Northern Ireland and I’m officially labelling China a threat for the first time. But I dunno. I still feel I could do so much worse.
