I, Maybot

by John Crace

  ‘I’m. Whirr. Determined …’

  ‘Stephen Phillips, the MP who resigned last week, said that the Conservative party is becoming more like UKIP. How do you feel about that?’

  ‘I’m. Whirr. Determined,’ the Maybot clunked.

  ‘You’re determined to be what?’

  ‘I’m. Whirr. Determined. To be. Clunk. Determined to focus on the. Clang. Things that the British public determined …’

  At this point the Sky reporter cut his losses and left. There was no point in trying to deal with a severe Maybot malfunction.

  With the Maybot temporarily on idle, Theresa frantically hammered at the control-alt-delete keys to crash herself, in a last-ditch attempt to return to her factory settings.

  ‘Please ask me about my holiday in India,’ she begged.

  ‘Er, no,’ said a BBC reporter. ‘The Institute of Fiscal Studies is forecasting a £25 billion slowdown. Is that a price worth paying for greater controls of immigration?’

  ‘I’m. Whirr. Determined,’ the Maybot laughed, thrilled to have survived the reboot. ‘Brexit offers a. Clunk. World of opportunities. I’m determined to be here in India determinedly delivering. Clang. On a determined global Britain through some determined trade deals. Whirr …’

  ‘Is an economic slowdown a Brexit price worth paying?’ the reporter repeated, generously giving the prime minister the benefit of the doubt that she had not heard the question properly first time round.

  ‘Do you want to see my snaps?’ the Maybot whirred. ‘There’s a great one of me in the hotel lobby with Geoffrey Boycott. Such a sweet man. I’ve always been a huge fan of his. Who is he again?’

  ‘Thank you, prime minister …’

  ‘India is a lovely place. Whirr. And we’ve been determined to do some. Clunk. Good deals that are not worth the determined paper they are. Clang. Written on as nothing can be determined. Clunk. Before we determine how determined we are to be in a determined customs union …’

  ‘What about the slowdown?’

  ‘I’m determined to be. Whirr. Determined …’

  Theresa knew she was determined. But what about? Slowly it came back to her. Whirr. She was determined to take back control. And she would start by taking back control of her own brain. The Maybot laughed. Some hope.

  Hammond warned against Brexit and no one listened. Now it’s payback

  23 NOVEMBER 2016

  ‘The economy is strong and resilient,’ Philip Hammond began. Lurch’s face then cracked into a half smile. He’d been only kidding. The economy was actually in a complete mess and he couldn’t have been happier. He’d warned his colleagues of the dangers of Brexit and no one had bothered to listen. So now he was going to spell out the consequences to them and they’d just have to sit there and suck it up. The 10 cabinet members sitting alongside him all looked pretty pleased about it too; then they had also all voted to remain in the EU. Coincidence? Hardly. This autumn statement was to be a day of reckoning for the Brexiteers.

  First in line was Boris Johnson. ‘I suspect I will be no more adept at pulling rabbits from hats than my successor as foreign secretary has been at retrieving balls from the back of scrums,’ he sniggered. Lurch knew it was just gratuitous sadism to openly mock Boris’s hapless effort to become prime minister, but he was having too good a time to stop himself. Besides, Johnson had managed to annoy just about everyone in the cabinet over the past few months, so giving him a kicking now counts as a team-building exercise in the Tory party.

  Lurch then went on to list a litany of failure. Sterling depreciation. Growth slower than expected. Everything the last chancellor had done binned. The budget deficit up to £120 billion. The cost of Brexit an extra £60 billion. Tax receipts lower. Even the lazy French and Italians were more productive than us. ‘Members of the house may be interested to know …’ he said. But they weren’t. At least not those on his own benches. They just wanted him to sit down and shut up as soon as possible. This occasion was meant to be an opportunity for the chancellor to boast how brilliant he had been. Not an excuse to admit that everything had gone badly wrong.

  Having got most of the really bad news out the way, Lurch moved on to the merely bad news. Old infrastructure schemes that had already been announced got re-announced. The minimum wage was increased by less than the last chancellor had promised. People on welfare would still probably die, the only saving grace being that it might take them a little bit longer to do so.

  ‘I have deliberately avoided giving a long list of projects,’ Lurch declared, apparently unaware he had just done so. Quite a lot escapes him.

  Half an hour into his speech, most of the house was nodding off. Lurch is one of the few politicians dull enough to make a death spiral sound boring, and vain enough not to notice. After ploughing through a particularly turgid passage in total silence, Lurch thought to interrupt himself. ‘That bit was complicated,’ he said. ‘But it was actually good news.’ Theresa gave him an embarrassed nudge. Lurch’s empathy skills have often left a little to be desired and he’d mistaken sleep for incomprehension.

  By now the few Tory backbenchers who were still alive were getting desperate. They wanted something to cheer. Anything. So when Lurch announced he was going to hand over £7.5 million to save Wentworth Woodhouse, an old pile near Rotherham, they became ecstatic. Getting over-excited about the survival of a stately home wasn’t really what they had had in mind, but it was the only orgasm on offer.

  Too bad the ‘just about managings’ wouldn’t have enough spare cash to go to visit the place when it was finally done up. There again, they probably wouldn’t want to anyway. ‘It is said to be the inspiration for Pemberley in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice,’ Lurch had said. Only it wasn’t. Lurch had just gone and saved the wrong palace.

  Lurch lumbered slowly on, enjoying the looks of horror on his own side of the house. It was all going even better than he had planned. Most chancellors choose not to leak all their good news stories in advance and save one or two for the speech itself. But Lurch had out-thought everyone. For him the bad news was the good news. The country had voted for Brexit and the country could pay for it. For the next 10 years or longer.

  ‘I do have one last cunning plan,’ Lurch said as he came to the final page. Some Tories perked up. Maybe there was to be salvation after all. ‘My cunning plan is to rename the autumn statement as the autumn budget and the spring budget as the spring statement.’ Genius. Not with a bang but a whimper.

  * * *

  With most EU countries not really in the mood to talk to Britain until after Article 50 had been triggered – and even then only if they really must – Theresa May had found herself short of countries willing to indulge her desire to shoot the breeze about foreign policy. So when Poland indicated it was willing to have a bilateral meeting, May was only too keen to roll out the red carpet. Schmoozing a right-wing, xenophobic government might not have been the best of looks when Britain was trying to reposition itself as open and friendly to Europe, but beggars can’t be choosers.

  ‘We’ve had an excellent and historic first summit,’ said Theresa at her most Maybotic, frantically racking her brains for anything memorable that had been discussed. After saying she was sorry for all the attacks on Poles in the UK since the EU referendum, the conversation had rather dried up.

  The Polish PM, Beata Szydło, had looked on impassively as the Maybot ran through her highlights package of the day’s events. She recalled it all rather differently. ‘Great Britain doesn’t have summits with countries like Poland very often,’ she observed. And she was looking forward to many more in the coming months. Starting in Warsaw next year. The Maybot looked startled. Had she really agreed to that? The Polish interpreter whispered into her earpiece, assuring her that she had.

  Still, at least meeting the Polish PM had taken her mind off the fact that the government was fighting what was clearly a losing battle in the Supreme Court to overturn the High Court ruling on Article 50. If the first day of the
hearing hadn’t gone badly enough for the government barrister, James Eadie, the second got off to a shocker.

  ‘I think you’ve just given two diametrically opposed answers to the same question in the last five minutes,’ observed Lord Sumption. As Eadie, aka the Treasury Devil, had only been back on his feet for less than 20 minutes, this wasn’t the best of starts.

  ‘We’ll have to look back through the transcripts and see which one we agree with then,’ Lord Carnwath added, not altogether helpfully.

  ‘I see,’ said Lord Neuberger, trying to be kind. ‘We had better let you proceed with your argument.’

  ‘I will try not to give two inconsistent answers in the next five minutes,’ Eadie said dolefully. He’d never wanted this appeal and just going through the same points that the divisional court had dismissed last time out was doing nothing for his self-esteem. Trying to make the best of a bad job wasn’t his usual style.

  He began to fumble and lose his way. When he reached the point of double taxation in his submissions, he just decided to give up the unequal. The justices might understand the law but he didn’t and he’d only end up giving more wrong answers. ‘Because of time,’ he said, ‘I’ll pass on this.’ It wasn’t quite the slam dunk finale he’d been hoping for.

  Lord Pannick, Gina Miller’s barrister, only had to open with the observation that ‘If the government is right, the 1972 European Communities Act has a lesser status than the Dangerous Dogs Act,’ and the case was all but decided.

  Things weren’t looking any better for the government on any other front. In an appearance before the treasury select committee, Robert Chote, chairman of the Office for Budget Responsibility, had been questioned by Conservative Jacob Rees-Mogg on his gloomy economic forecasts. How could the OBR be so certain about the levels of uncertainty?

  Chote had raised an eyebrow. He had expected to be grilled on the numbers rather than metaphysics and ontology. ‘The thing about uncertainty is that it’s uncertain,’ he said certainly. It was now Rees-Mogg’s turn to look puzzled. Chote tried to help him out. It was like this: though he couldn’t be quite as certain about the levels of uncertainty as the Bank of England, he was still certain enough about the uncertainty to be confident in the uncertainty. Or to put it another way, uncertainty + uncertainty = certainty.

  ‘We’ve had to make some assumptions based on government policy even though we and the government know that some policies are never going to be implemented,’ said Chote. ‘On other matters we asked the government to explain its policies but they didn’t seem to have any.’

  Nor had David Davis’s appearance before the Brexit Select Committee gone much better for the government. David had admitted he couldn’t say when the government would have a plan, other than it definitely wouldn’t be within the next month as he had 57 sectoral analyses to complete. Some of which were barely under way. Nor could he promise a white paper, nor how many pages the plan would be. It all depended on the font size. ‘We just want everything to run smoothly,’ he said, hoping that platitudes might be mistaken for thoughtfulness.

  ‘Do you worry about going over a cliff edge?’ enquired committee chairman, Hilary Benn.

  Davis closed his eyes. He wasn’t really sure if he was meant to be that bothered about going over a cliff edge or not. Obviously it wouldn’t be a great idea to rush headlong off the cliff but if everyone was to line up in an orderly fashion and then jump off the cliff, surely that couldn’t be too bad?

  And yet despite all this, the Tories still held a commanding double-figure lead over Labour in the opinion polls. Something not even Theresa May’s toe-curling embarrassment at the European Council meeting, in which she was ignored by almost everyone, could dent.

  * * *

  Theresa May feels the love from her cabinet after unhappy Eurotrip

  19 DECEMBER 2016

  As away days go, Theresa May’s trip to the European Council last week was right down there. The other EU leaders were either ignoring her or laughing in her face. Instead of getting an invitation to the evening’s dinner, the prime minister found herself picking at a cold Unhappy Meal on the Eurostar on the way back to London. Even the Maybot has feelings and it had taken intensive work with her therapist to persuade her to come to the Commons to give a statement on her abject failure.

  ‘Try to reframe the experience,’ her shrink had said. ‘I know it felt like your first day in the school playground when nobody spoke to you, but there’s no need for such a primal regression. It wasn’t that everyone else thought you were a total loser, it’s just that they were too shy to talk to someone with your charisma. And if it’s any consolation, your cuffs did look fantastic after you spent 10 minutes anxiously fiddling with them.’

  The Maybot had only been slightly reassured by her therapist’s intervention and was still in an extremely delicate state as the clock ticked round to 3.30 p.m. on Monday afternoon. So to make sure she did not back out, all the senior members of her cabinet – Boris Johnson, Philip Hammond, Amber Rudd, Michael Fallon and David Davis – were drafted in to sit next to her. Seldom has so much moral support made a prime minister appear quite so vulnerable.

  ‘The main focus of the EU Council was about how we could all work together,’ the Maybot began. Which wasn’t necessarily the way the other 27 EU leaders had remembered it, but she was fairly sure that none of them were in London to contradict her. If they had not been bothered to talk to her when they were in the same room, there was little chance of them following her back to London.

  NATO. Syria. Holidays in Cyprus. The Maybot scratched her head. She was sure there was something else she had mentioned in the five minutes she had been given while half the room had nipped out for a comfort break, but she couldn’t think for the life of her what. Then it came to her: Brexit. ‘I reassured them all we were looking forward to a smooth and mature Brexit.’ She didn’t care to add that the Polish prime minister had joked about whether this smooth ‘hot tub’ Brexit was the same as a red-white-and-blue Brexit.

  Jeremy Corbyn was not too bothered by the imaginary conversations the Maybot had had about NATO and was keen to press her further on Brexit. How had she managed to become so isolated in Europe? Why was her government in such a shambolic mess? Why did one cabinet minister keep promising one thing only for the others to promise something else? Could she promise Britain wouldn’t be liable for a £50 billion bar bill on leaving the EU? And when would she be presenting her Brexit plan to the parliament?

  The Maybot dabbed her eyes. Isolation had always been one of her key sobbing trigger words in therapy. ‘I’m – we’re – not isolated,’ she said, hastily correcting herself. ‘We may be leaving the group but everyone basically adores us and wants to carry on being friends.’ BFFs. What she had always craved. She managed to forget to mention the £50 billion. Just as well, probably.

  With the opening exchanges over, the Maybot began to relax a little, as all the Brexiteer backbenchers who had been press-ganged into turning up expressed their undying admiration for her genius in choosing not to have a negotiating position for leaving the EU.

  Iain Duncan Smith declared that anyone who wanted to know what the hell was going on was being unpatriotic. Peter Lilley was insistent that every day we stayed in the EU was another day when £250 million wouldn’t be going into the NHS. Boris was about to correct him that the real figure was £350 million before remembering neither figure was accurate.

  May’s mood lifted slightly. The session hadn’t been as traumatic as she had feared. She may have been taken apart by the opposition benches but she had felt some lurve from her own side. It wasn’t real lurve, she knew that. But when you’re desperate, any lurve will do.

  Theresa May stumbles on a question of thought

  20 DECEMBER 2016

  There may have been things the prime minister wanted to do less on the last day of parliamentary business before the Christmas recess than appear before the liaison committee, but none immediately came to mind. Being interro
gated on Brexit by the chairs of all the select committees is no one’s idea of fun. Especially when you don’t have any of the answers.

  Andrew Tyrie, the committee chair, got things under way with a few well-aimed questions on the timing of Brexit and the possibility of extending the negotiation period.

  ‘Our intention is …’ said the Maybot, before answering an entirely different question. It’s always so much easier to answer the questions you’ve thought up yourself, rather than the ones you’ve been asked.

  ‘I’m trying to get some clarity,’ sighed an exasperated Tyrie.

  And the Maybot was trying not to provide any. The Maybot is nothing if not pre-programmed. It’s just the country’s bad luck that she’s been pre-programmed to say nothing. Even her words of empty reassurance only manage to inspire a feeling of panic.

  Hilary Benn, one of Westminster’s kinder and more patient souls, failed to make much headway. Would parliament get to scrutinise the government’s plan before she triggered Article 50? Maybe yes, maybe no.

  ‘What would you consider a reasonable period of time?’ Benn asked, reasonably. The Maybot shrugged. Depends whether you call a quick glance of a yellow Post-it note scrutiny. And what you call a plan.

  ‘The EU parliament will get a vote on the Brexit negotiations,’ Benn continued, doggedly. ‘Why can’t you guarantee that the UK parliament will also get a vote?’ This produced the same non-answers as before. For someone who has been coded in binary, the Maybot finds it surprisingly difficult to give yes and no answers.

  ‘Do I take it the government will have a standstill arrangement?’ Tyrie interrupted.

  ‘I wouldn’t say standstill,’ said the Maybot.