A Not-So-Jolly Old England: From Hellmarsh With Love Ep. 2

Editor’s Note: This is the second installment of Scott McKay’s new novel, From Hellmarsh With Love, which is being released exclusively at The American Spectator each weekend in September and October, before its full publication on Amazon later this fall. From Hellmarsh With Love is the sequel to King of the Jungle, which was serialized at The American Spectator in Spring 2024. You can purchase it on Amazon here. And you can pre-order a signed copy of From Hellmarsh With Love at this link.

In Episode 1, our intrepid hero, conservative podcaster and web publisher Mike Holman, married the love of his life, former Secret Service agent and president-saving heroine PJ Chang. Following a joyous celebration of their nuptials at Liberty Point, the personal and corporate Shangri-La of Mike’s multibillionaire friend Pierce Polk, Mike and PJ hopped on a jet for a honeymoon in London — where all is not as it should be.

PJ tells us what happened next…

London, August 27, 2024

I’m not saying I’m psychic. I’ve actually dealt a little bit with people who said they were psychics — I’m from San Francisco, after all — and most of them were psychos. So I don’t make any such claim.

But what I will say is that I’m quick. I pick up on things. Not all of the time, but a lot of the time. I can be intuitive, and it can get irritating for people who don’t believe me when I’m right.

Yes, you say, but if you’re so quick then explain Terre Haute.

Fine. That’s fair. That was my detail. I was the site commander. I ran security for Trumbull’s rally in that basketball arena, and so it’s my fault that Shirley Sterling — no; I’m not going to call him Shirley, his name was James — was able to walk right through the security checkpoint with a Glock and position himself right in front of the stage where Trumbull was speaking, pull out his gun and shoot Trumbull — breaking his collarbone and damn near killing him — and then turn the gun on himself and blow his head off before my agents could do anything.

I’m quick, but I wasn’t that quick. And it was the end of my career in the Secret Service.

But let’s remember the extenuating circumstances here. For some reason that neither I nor anybody else who’s been asking can uncover, two of my agents were pulled off the detail a half hour before Trumbull’s speech. Agent Greg Eddard was supposed to be supervising the checkpoint at which weapons like the one Sterling had would have been caught, and Agent Jerry Cole was supposed to be manning the exact spot where Sterling stood as he shot Trumbull.

Not only was I not told that Eddard and Cole were pulled off the detail, but on the security camera view I was looking at as the site commander, two people who looked and dressed like them were there.

In other words, this whole thing was set up to make me utterly oblivious to what was happening.

The thing was, and I never told anybody this, I had a really awful feeling in the pit of my stomach that entire day before Trumbull got shot. I just knew something terrible was about to happen. So I was double- and triple-checking everything, halfway harassing my agents, the whole thing. It was all I could do to not get sick.

And then Trumbull was shot anyway, miraculously survived, proceeded to fire the Secret Service as his presidential security, and went all-private with an outfit that has managed to keep him alive while he tries to get back into the White House.

The day he fired the Secret Service, I resigned, hired a publicist, and did some interviews blowing the whistle on what happened in Terre Haute. Because in the aftermath of that mess, I realized that despite my best efforts, my intuition was spot-on.

There was good and bad in going public. The good was one of the interviews I did was with Mike, obviously, and the fact that when he heard I was going public, Trumbull sent me a message giving me props for being “gutsy.” In fact, it was Trumbull who suggested to Mike that he approach me about an interview. He knew pretty quickly what had happened and how dirty it was.

The bad was that horrific phone call with The Great Peter Chang in which he berated me about going public. He said the “system” would cover for me and exonerate me for any direct blame, and then I’d be moved up in the Secret Service as soon as the coast was clear. I knew he was telling the truth about that, because I’d been given the same assurances by a couple of government figures — one was an assistant secretary from the Department of Homeland Security, another was a member of the White House staff — prior to my resignation.

I was so furious with being told about my shining future, that would be dependent on the goodwill of some Deep State benefactor or other who would surely be guilty of treason for having plotted Trumbull’s murder, making me guilty of treason as well if I acceded to this horror, that I told those two where they could get off.

And like I said, then I told The Great Peter Chang to get bent.

And there was a cost to that, because they suspended me indefinitely without pay and then I went under investigation for — get this — divulging classified information in the interview with Mike.

Which was … I’ll call it BS because I’m not a swearer. Too much more time with Mike, and I’ll spell it out.

Not only was nothing I said classified, but it was all protected under the whistleblower laws. And everything I said was pre-checked through a very expensive attorney.

But when all this blew up and my name started appearing in the Washington Post and New York Times for all the wrong reasons, I got a call from a total stranger.

That was Pierce.

“How’d you like to take a vacation?” he asked.

“That would be lovely,” I told him. “But I don’t know how at this point.”

A half hour later, a car was picking me up from my apartment in Arlington and taking me to Dulles for a plane trip. Before I knew it, I was in Liberty Point, and Pierce was asking me if I wanted Guyanese citizenship.

“Sure, why not?” I said.

And that’s why, when the jet landed in London, I pulled out a Guyanese passport at the customs station to enter the UK.

OK, back to the fact that I’m quick.

Maybe it’s woman’s intuition. I don’t know. But when the Gulfstream G700 began its descent into London Gatwick, and I counted no less than four different fires large enough to see from ten thousand feet or so, I told Mike that this trip was a bad idea.

“This is no good,” I said.

“What is?”

“Everything. We shouldn’t be here.”

“Flying private? What?”

“England, Mike. There are riots going on down there.”

He looked at the fires I pointed out to him from the window.

“Hmmm,” he said.

“See? We’re flying into a war zone.”

Before we left, there had been a gigantic march through downtown London, with something like a hundred thousand people, to protest what had become a pretty staggering number of people being arrested for “hate speech” and “disinformation” on the internet. Most of the violators were people angry about two things — the stabbing at the dance class, and the “grooming gangs” in a lot of English cities where there were Muslim men enticing little girls into prostitution. That had been going on for a while, but there was a new scandal about a grooming gang on the east side of London that had hit all the papers, and the people were boiling over.

I had expressed some concern about that, and Mike had mostly brushed it off, doubting that they’d come after me.

“That isn’t the point, Mike. People are angry over there. This is going to make for a volatile situation.”

“Well, you know, may you live in interesting times,” he said, hitting me with an old Chinese saying.

Which, by the way, is a curse. Interesting times are not what you want.

I should have been angry with him, but I wasn’t.

But now that I was seeing those fires, I had the exact same feeling I had in Terre Haute, and I told him.

Mike wasn’t moved by that. I don’t blame him. He hadn’t really known me long enough to understand that my antennae don’t lie. What he knew for most of our relationship, at least before we ended up as lake house bums while he finished his book, was that I was one of the Liberty Point diehards who wanted to shoot Venezuelans if they started to invade the place. Which was a real thing; it’s only through some serious effort and a whole lot of well-applied money that Pierce was able to short-circuit that war before the Venezuelans made it to Liberty Point.

And then at the lake house, I turned into No-Drama PJ. There was nothing for me to intuit.

Still, it would have been nice if Mike had taken me seriously when I went from blushing bride to frantic in the space of only a few minutes as that plane prepared to land.

Interestingly, it turned out that two of the fires we saw from the air were innocent, more or less.

I know, because I checked.

One happened because some guy’s Mercedes EV had a battery fire. And when one of those lithium car batteries lights off, it takes hours and hours to put the thing out, and before it does, it’ll catch everything flammable within a decent-sized radius. And this Mercedes went up in a shopping center car park in West London, which led to a pretty big mess.

The other was a house fire in Fulham.

But the two others were at either end of the Chelsea Bridge over the Thames upriver from central London, and they were set with what I guess I’d describe as a military purpose.

There was a group of “anti-racism” protesters led by a Pakistani imam who were staging a march from Battersea, on the south side of the Thames on the western side of London, through Chelsea on the north side of the river on the way to Westminster. But they never got there, because a “far-right” anti-immigrant group (at least that’s how the BBC and the newspapers portrayed them, though none of the usual-suspect groups took responsibility) had managed to pour gasoline on the pavement on either side of the Chelsea Bridge in advance of the march. As the marchers crossed the bridge, somebody dropped a lighter or something onto that gas, and big fires erupted immediately on both approaches to the bridge.

It didn’t sound like anybody was seriously burned from those fires, but the bulk of the marchers were trapped on the bridge. And the very front and the very back of the march, the people who’d already crossed the bridge and the people who hadn’t made it onto the bridge, were cut off from the bulk of the marchers.

What happened was that the “far-right” people jumped the folks cut off from each side and a whole bunch of folks were hurt. One of the “attackers” was stabbed in the chest and killed.

The cops arrested a bunch of the attackers, most of whom melted away as soon as the police showed up. None of the marchers were arrested, which made for a weird situation; the story should have been that this was a savage attack way beyond the bounds of partisanship or politics and the attackers needed to be condemned.

Which is what was reported.

But popular sentiment had it differently, because there was a literal murderer who was now free because of what they’d come to know as “two-tier” policing. The Metropolitan Police commander wouldn’t even answer any questions about an arrest of whoever killed the “attacker” who died; he turned out to be a 16-year-old kid, and his parents were adamant that he had nothing to do with the fight.

So rather than a sobering moment that should have turned down the temperature, this made it worse.

And there was an additional element, which is that all of the attackers who’d been arrested were quietly let go. That set off a lot of wild speculation about the nature of the attack and whether the government was stoking all of this.

Given what I’d gone through, Terre Haute and everything after it, maybe I was the wrong person to dig into the Chelsea Bridge fiasco.

I was in our room at the Savoy chattering on and on about everything that had happened at the bridge while poring through the Daily Mail on our first full day in London. Mike just looked at me.

“What?” I asked him.

“PJ, this is our honeymoon.”

“I’m well aware.”

“No, honey, what I mean is, these aren’t our problems. We knew going in that it’s weird here now. So, it’s weird. There is no reason to get wrapped around the axle about the stuff the locals have to deal with.”

I reached out and put my hand on his forehead like I was trying to see if he had a fever.

“You’re the world’s greatest newsman,” I said, which made him scoff instantly. “Are you seriously telling me you’re not interested in what’s going on here?”

“It’s got nothing to do with me,” he said in his best cockney accent. Mike is a big Guy Ritchie fan. Especially the old movies, like Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, and Snatch. He sounded like a less-than-perfect imitation of Jason Statham.

“OK, stop,” I said. “I get it, a honeymoon is a honeymoon. But what if we get caught up in something?”

He kissed me.

“We won’t,” he said. “Now will you go take a shower? We’re doing Piccadilly Circus and Buckingham Palace today, and then tonight…”

“The Spaniards Inn. And I get to sit in Taylor’s chair.”

“Exactly. Let the rioters have their riot. We have better things to do.”

And he was right.

That day and that night were peaceful, and we had a wonderful time. I was even able to forget about that pit in my stomach.

But I didn’t get to sit in Taylor’s chair. There was a very large, very drunk woman who had occupied it and declared that she was “taking on all comers” rather than give up that seat.

After three glasses of wine, I didn’t care. Mike even got me to drink Guinness, which wasn’t something I thought I’d ever do. It looks like motor oil. But it was surprisingly light on the taste buds.

I didn’t remember Mike getting me back to the hotel. All I remembered was that he was right, and that the Spaniards Inn was a magical pub to hang out in. It turns out that Keats and Dickens, who it pained me to admit to Mike were greater artistic figures than Taylor is, were regular patrons. Which was pretty cool.

I also remembered — he’s probably never going to let me forget — that I’m in way over my head if I’m trying to match Mike Holman glass for glass. Even though he’s middle-aged, I guess, and even though he hadn’t come across as a drunk or anything the whole time I knew him, the man has skills in this regard.

“At least I never turned professional,” he joked when I whined the next morning about my hangover and how iron his stomach had to be.

He nursed me back to health with a big room-service English breakfast, and then he dragged me off to see Parliament.

Which was where I met Neville Savage for the first time.

You know Neville. He’s probably the most famous politician in the UK right now, or at least he’s the most famous British politician among Americans. He’s been a bit of a gadfly for more than a decade, appearing on TV shows all over the world to trash the British “globalist” ruling elite and especially the Conservatives who had been running the country for the last several years. Neville started a movement that won a vote to get the UK out of the European Union, though the implementation of that vote was less than vigorous.

And in the elections that had bounced the Conservatives out of power a few weeks earlier, Neville had won a seat in the House of Commons after multiple times trying. His Renew UK party had only won a handful of seats, but they had pulled away enough votes from the Conservatives in so many districts that the Labour Party had taken over a big majority without getting even 34 percent of the vote.

That made him sort of a villain, but on the other hand, Neville was seen as the most vigorous critic of the new Labour government — and maybe the next prime minister at the end of the five years Piers Stormer would be in charge.

When we were walking with a tour group through one of the public halls, he happened to be walking the other way. He recognized Mike and stopped in his tracks right in front of that famous statue of Winston Churchill; you know, the one where Churchill is leaning forward with his hands on his hips.

“Well if it isn’t my old friend Mike Holman!” he exclaimed, which set off murmuring among our fellow tourists, including an old lady next to me who told her friend, “I thought that’s who he was!”

“How are you, Neville?” Mike said, shaking Neville’s hand and introducing me.

After a couple of minutes of small talk as our tour group stopped in its tracks and everyone milled around the two celebrities, Neville invited us to his club for dinner the next night.

“You’ll have to put on a coat and tie,” he told Mike. “I know that’s not your bag.”

“I think I can manage,” Mike said.

“Oh, I’ll make sure of it,” I threw in.

“Good,” Neville said with a laugh. “I’m looking forward to getting to know you, PJ.”

And then he made his excuses, and our tour continued.

But I noticed that there was something of a half-and-half split in the looks we were getting from our group. Now that they all knew who Mike was, it was clear a lot of them weren’t happy to have him along.

Others were friendlier. Which was at least something.

But it was striking — not that I didn’t already know it, but I hadn’t seen it up close like this before — to realize that my husband was “divisive.”

I just thought he was really good at his job, and he happened to come from a philosophical perspective that wasn’t the same as my dad’s. It didn’t strike me that people should be scowling at him; they’d never met him. They’d probably like him if they gave him a chance.

I tugged on his wrist.

“What’s up?” he said to me under his breath as we passed a little exhibit about Parliament during World War II.

“People are staring at us,” I whispered in his ear. “Like not in a friendly way.”

He shrugged.

“They’re going to do what they’re going to do,” he said quietly. “It isn’t important what they think if they want to be dicks to us.”

I scowled at him for the language, and he gave me a cute smile, which made me laugh.

And not long after, we were off to a great little bistro for an early dinner.

Mike hailed us a cab to head back to the Savoy. It should have been a short drive, but it wasn’t. We sat stuck in traffic for a long while, and finally Mike got out to see if he could find out what was causing the holdup.

“It’s a fight,” he said when he came back to the cab.

“What does that mean, a fight?” I asked.

“The Alternative, mum, I should think,” said the driver, who looked like he’d come straight from recording with Bob Marley but whose accent was more cockney than Caribbean. “They be fighting clubs for young men, and now they in the streets.”

“It looks like they’re fighting the police,” Mike said. “And I think they’re winning.”

The driver laughed. I couldn’t understand why.

“Yes, bruv. The Bobbies ain’t used to yobbos pushin’ back.”

“Why are they fighting?” I asked.

“Because of Tom Northcutt. Him arrested for a meme he post online.”

“Wait, what?” Mike asked.

“Stormer say he pass a ban on smoking outdoor at a pub, bruv,” said the driver. “Gonna kill the pub business if he do. So Tom, him own an establishment in Paddington, posted a meme on Facebook about de kind of smokin’ at a pub Stormer don’t mind.”

Mike burst out laughing.

“Wait,” I said, and then I understood exactly what he meant, which I thought was gross, and the San Franciscan in me sighed about these guys making fun of gay people like that. “Oh, I get it.”

Then it hit me that inappropriate rudeness wasn’t the issue here. “Hold on,” I said. “So they put him in jail for that?”

The driver turned and looked at us. His face grew serious.

“I know you,” he said, looking at Mike. “You that American on de internet. You do good. Mike Holman, yeah?”

Mike nodded.

“We need your help here, mon. It bein’ almighty providence that you be with us now. This not a free country no more. But you can speak, bein’ you.”

That pit in my stomach grew.

Mike looked at me.

“I brought camera gear and microphones,” I said anyway. “We can set up in the hotel, or…”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’d have to think about this. We really just wanted to have a honeymoon, you know?”

“I see,” said the driver, politely hiding his disappointment. “You t’ink about it, though, huh?”

“Maybe we can talk it over with Neville?” I asked Mike.

Just then, the traffic finally loosened and we were moving. And as we drove past the scene, I could see that ambulances had shown up and paramedics were treating police and the fighters alike — with four buses being filled with arrestees. There were police cars everywhere and hundreds of cops covering the streets. Lots of drivers were shooting the bird at the cops as they went by, there was lots of yelling, and people were waving flags with a red cross on a white field, which is the St. George flag. Mike was saying that’s the flag of England and has been since Richard the Lionheart, and it was becoming a symbol of the people fed up with the police and the government and the suspect treatment the ordinary folks were getting.

“You mean the white folks,” I said.

“No, mum,” said the driver. “It ain’t just the whites. There’s refugees in boats every day, and the government takes them in, puts ‘em on the dole, gives them housing in hotels and they get space in council houses.”

“That’s basically housing projects back home,” Mike interjected.

“Yeah,” said the driver, “but there’s no housing for British, and this mucks it up right, innit? Also, they get health care, which makes us who get sick have to wait, and then they sort themselves where they take over an area and the coppers give them the kid gloves, yeah?”

It was the same story lots of Americans could tell, or at least it was similar. I found it striking that our driver, who said his people had come from Barbados but that he was a second-generation Londoner, was saying all the things a white working-class Brit would say.

“Still,” I said. “Is violence the answer?”

“No, it ain’t. But it’s what happen when a man got no voice, innit?”

“That’s right,” said Mike. “People who can’t talk will scream. People who can’t scream will throw down.”

“That’s it, bruv,” said the driver. “You could help us, hey?”

“Like I said,” said Mike as we finally pulled into the Savoy’s famous front alcove, “I’ll have to think about it.”

London, August 28, 2024

Mike emailed Kayleigh back in Atlanta and told her to look into booking interviews with three sides of the British … whatever it was. Unrest? Controversy? Civil war in the making?

He wanted somebody from the Labour government, preferably somebody who could speak to the immigration issue and/or the “two-tier” policing problem that seemed to be closest to the apex of the disturbances. Then he wanted somebody from the opposition, which we both assumed would be Neville. When Neville called and said there was a problem at his club, Mike suggested we eat lunch at the Savoy instead, and Neville enthusiastically agreed. We were going to pitch him the idea of an interview over lunch.

But Mike also wanted to do an interview with somebody representing the anti-immigrant protesters.

“Do you want to get somebody who represents the immigrants, too?” I asked.

“I’m not against it,” he said, “but I’m a little concerned about that.”

“Why?”

“Well, if we get somebody who’s really terrible, like some jihadist imam or somebody who’s with a grooming gang or whatever, then this thing turns super sensationalist and then there’s more people in the streets, and I’ve actually made the problem worse.”

“Have you? Maybe you just exposed how bad it really is.”

He looked at me in surprise.

“I’m just saying,” I said. “I mean, if we had a daughter who was, I don’t know, 12 or 13, and some man enticed her somewhere with candy or whatever and the next thing we knew she was knocked up and hooked on drugs and traumatized…”

“I’d want to kill the bastard,” Mike said.

“Right. And it sounds like that’s happening a lot here, and the people it’s happening to don’t have much recourse.”

“Here’s the thing,” he said. “I’m going to assume, and I think I’m almost certainly right about this, that most of the immigrants in the UK are solid folks who are here for economic reasons and aren’t a threat to the culture or to the safety of the community. And what I don’t want to do is to make their situation worse. I don’t want to be some Ugly American who comes in and feeds off the mess here to get clicks on the internet.”

“Then why don’t we interview some law-abiding immigrants?”

“Well, I don’t want to post a podcast that gets zero clicks, either,” he said.

“What does that mean?”

“Nobody wants to hear a bunch of interviews with people who have nothing to say. Even fewer people want to hear a bunch of immigrants whine about racism when there are white girls getting raped and stabbed by Asians.”

“Excuse me,” I scowled at him. “Asians?”

“Sorry. They do that here and I’m letting it into my head.”

The BBC and the other TV channels, on their news reports, kept talking about “Asians” when what they really meant were Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, in crime reporting and other things. It was a big ethnic catch-all which, I guess, kept them safe from getting accused of racism.

But here I was half Chinese, and they’d been calling me Asian my whole life, and I felt like I was getting lumped in with some machete-wielding lunatics trying to behead cops and soldiers on the street in places like Luton and Telford. It was a really weird experience.

At least Mike recognized that.

“Plus,” he was saying, “I’m guessing that if we get somebody from this government, they’re going to spend the entire interview trying to give us the immigrants’ perspective anyway.”

“I’m just saying,” I told him, “this probably works better if you’ve got the immigrant and native perspectives from both the political class and the regular folks.”

“OK, how about this? See if you can find us somebody who’s actually interesting to talk to that we can interview from the perspective of an immigrant. Not radical, and not the obvious, boring, ‘I’m just here to better myself’ sort of perspective.”

“On it, boss,” I said, smiling at him.

But as I spent the next hour scouring the internet in hopes of finding somebody who would suit our purposes as an interviewee, I didn’t do very well. Finally, Mike, who had been on the balcony talking with Pierce over the phone about some other project they were conceptualizing that I didn’t know about, came back in the room.

“Sweetie, don’t you think you ought to get ready?” he said. And I looked at the clock and almost had a heart attack.

My hair was still wet and my shoes — I had brought two other pairs but had literally worn nothing but the pair of white Tretorn sneakers Mike was beginning to get irritated with on this trip — weren’t even tied when we got into the elevator to meet Neville at the Savoy Grill.

“I like the dress,” he said, as I bent down in the elevator to tend to the shoelaces.

I looked up at him and gave a smirk. “Not the shoes, though, huh?”

“Oh, I just about gave up on you and shoes a long time ago.”

“I know. I just don’t have the shoe gene. That’s one reason I fit into the Secret Service. I could totally get away with wearing basically men’s shoes every day.”

Mike grimaced.

“I think we’re going to have to take you shoe-shopping this afternoon,” he said.

“OK, but what do you know about women’s shoes?”

“Probably more than you do, but that’s not what’s going on. They have sales people at these stores.”

“Yes, boss,” I said.

“You gotta up your game if you want to be Mrs. World’s Best Newsman,” he said.

I gasped.

“Oh, I should have known! That went straight to your head, didn’t it?”

“I thought it was very sweet.”

“Uh huh.”

“Seriously, though, we’re about to have lunch with the guy who might run this place in about five years and you’re wearing sneakers.”

“Is it that bad? Should I go back up and change?”

“Nah. He likes you. He’ll just think you’re quirky.”

“But I’m not actually quirky. Oh, man, now I’m self-conscious about this.”

“Relax. I shouldn’t have said anything. PJ, you can pull off a t-shirt dress and sneakers. If you weren’t so hot you probably couldn’t, but that thing shows off your figure and you’ll be the sexiest woman in the place.”

OK, that worked. I can handle it now.”

“Good,” he said with a nod as the elevator reached the lobby.

“I don’t think it’s a good idea, Mike,” Neville said as he sipped Guinness from the fancy goblet the Savoy Grille waiter had brought him.

“What? Why not?”

“Look at it from my perspective. I’m known. I’m the radical who wants to break everything. I’m Mr. Brexit, you know. I’ve been in politics for a long time and I have a brand. I’m hated, but my goal, and that of Renew UK, is to be loved. That means I need to become one of those lukewarm centrists the nice, wealthy old birdies can tolerate and give money to.”

“And doing an interview with me destroys that?”

“So your brand, in your country, is that you take an axe to the powerful and you break their myths. How can I position myself in an interview with you? I repudiate you? Then I’m a fraud and I scupper our friendship. We agree for an hour? Then we’re both lunatics.”

I looked at Mike, expecting him to be furious that his friend was rejecting him for an interview.

But he wasn’t at all.

“All right,” he said.

“I don’t think…”

“PJ,” Neville turned to me, “please don’t take this as a betrayal or anything. In fact, and Mike knows this, any time he wants me to do an interview on ordinary politics, or to pontificate about the special relationship between the US and the UK, or whatever, particularly when the main audience will be in America, I’m his for the taking. But with this pig’s ear of a situation, now…”

“He can’t,” said Mike. “No, it’s OK. I get it.”

“Well then what are we going to do?”

“Ian Douglas,” both Neville and Mike said, and then laughed at their thinking alike.

Douglas was the new leader of the Conservative opposition, and in British parlance, he was a prat — defined, alternatively though not mutually exclusively, as a fool or a…

“Pussy,” said Mike at the table, which made Neville chuckle as I slapped his arm for the bad language.

“OK, but why would you want him for an interview if this is what he is?”

“For one thing it’ll solve your problem with needing somebody from the immigrants,” said Mike to me, “because Douglas is going to parrot basically everything the Labour shill will say.”

“And second, Mike will make me look good by comparison interviewing Sir Ian the Toff,” said Neville, with a mischievous twinkle in his eye.

“I won’t be doing anything. If Sir Ian isn’t capable of delivering a strong performance then…”

I knew what was coming.

“…it’s nothing to do with me.”

That was his Jason Statham accent again. I cringed.

But Neville liked it.

“That ain’t bad there, buddy,” he said, aping a Southern accent.

“Incorrigible, both of you,” I scolded. “And Hollywood is not calling. Sorry.”

“His needs more work than mine does,” said Mike.

Just then Mike looked at his phone. He’d gotten a text from Kayleigh.

“And I’ve got our third interview lined up.”

“Who do we have?” I asked.

“Robby Thomason.”

“The activist?”

Mike nodded.

“Ohhh,” said Neville.

“What? You don’t think he’s a good idea?”

“Well, upon reflection, maybe he is. Since I’m not doing this and perhaps Sir Ian is, this could position us in … yes, you should interview Thomason.”

Neville explained that Thomason, a “working-class bloke” who had become a viral sensation provoking conflicts with the Muslims in the English midlands and northern suburbs of London and ginning up protests that got him arrested over and over again, had become too hot for anyone in politics to handle. Thomason was hated and derided by practically the whole British media and ruling class, but what he had unquestionably accomplished was to bring the problems of unrestricted and largely unassimilated immigration to the fore in his country.

And his thick-as-mud cockney accent was something out of Mike’s favorite movies. Thomason was a very engaging speaker in a way the British upper classes couldn’t stand.

Neville and his party had disavowed Thomason. Neville had publicly said he wanted nothing to do with him. But Mike explained later that while they personally didn’t like each other much, most of the disavowal was theater. It gave Neville cover to chase all of Thomason’s followers as potential Renew UK voters without sacrificing his attempts to steal the more middle-of-the-road Tories away from their party. Thomason, on the other hand, got to maintain that his activism wasn’t tied to any political parties because they were all run by “posh geezers what stuck their grubby hands down the taxpayers’ trousers, innit?”

“Well, if nothing else he’ll be a treat to listen to,” said Mike.

“You Americans. You’re more interested in broken English than the proper kind.”

“Please. Neville, your accent is boring. Every movie villain sounds exactly like you.”

“That’s Hollywood’s fault, not mine!”

Then another text came in, this one also from Kayleigh.

“Isn’t it like six in the morning back home?” I said. “What is she doing up?”

“She’s a workaholic, PJ. Shouldn’t I take advantage of that until she burns out?”

“Oh my God. You’re a tyrant!”

He smirked at me.

“Kayleigh’s my podcast producer,” Mike explained to Neville. “She’s also engaged, and I’ll be shocked if she’s not pregnant and quitting within a year or so.”

He said Kayleigh was telling him the government couldn’t produce Stormer or any of his top ministers but that they were offering Lady Phillipa Burleston, the secretary of state for education, for two days later.

“I don’t know what the education minister is going to contribute to the subject of this podcast series,” he groused.

Neville was beaming.

“What?” Mike asked.

“I think you’ll find that Phillipa is just fine,” he said.

My forced shoe-shopping trip ended abruptly, and more or less in failure, at least from Mike’s perspective.

I insisted that the first pair of shoes he bought me had to be a new pair of sneakers. “You can’t stand my Tretorns, fine,” I said, “but I’m gonna wear sneakers. Especially since …what?”

“Trainers,” he interrupted me. “They call them trainers here.”

“Whatever. We’re doing a lot of walking on this trip. I want comfortable shoes.”

Neither one of us would wear Nikes. Mike refused to allow me to buy Chuck Taylors — he said he wasn’t married to Pamela Farris, the vice president, for a reason. There were actually lots of reasons why Mike wasn’t a fan of Farris’, but a major one was that she insisted on going around wearing Chuck Taylors like they made her cool, and he found that to be repellent.

I didn’t disagree, but I actually like Chuck Taylors.

The things you sacrifice for the man you love, right?

I almost talked him into buying me a pair of Alexander McQueens that were incredibly comfy, but when he saw that they were 1,000 pounds, that gig was up. So we settled on a cool pair of Vejas.

Which are almost identical to Tretorns anyway.

“Now we’re going to get you some real shoes,” he said, as the saleslady from Harrod’s beamed in anticipation of a big sale.

But just then his phone rang. It was Kayleigh. And Mike’s eyebrows raised up.

“What?” I asked him.

“Looks like we need to head back to the hotel. Sir Ian will see us at three.”

A little while later we were at the Parliament building being hustled into the office of Sir Ian Douglas, the leader of the Conservative Party in the House of Commons and the representative of the Colindale/The Hyde constituency.

Sir Ian was about my height, five foot eight, except he was taller than me by an inch. Not naturally. I could see he was wearing lifts in his shoes, and of course I had my sneakers on with no heel. Mike and I joked about that later.

He was a porky little fifty-something with an almost pale blue complexion, with a baby-soft face that nonetheless sprouted a bushy little moustache, a big pair of doe-y eyes, and a rapidly balding hairline.

And a pink bowtie with big blue polka dots on it.

He didn’t have the look of a successful politician, but then again, the Tories as a whole didn’t have that look. Douglas was the sixth leader the party had chosen in the past five years, and all five of his predecessors had been disasters.

The word in the papers, and of course Mike and I had devoured as much about him as we could in the short time we had after being summoned for the interview, was that he was the new party leader mostly because of his father, who had held a host of cabinet positions back in the Margaret Thatcher and John Major days.

The point was that he wasn’t all that impressive. Neville had called him a prat, and Sir Ian the Toff, and when I met him and got a slimy, dead-fish handshake from him, all I could think was “Yep.”

But I set up the three cameras and our microphones, got everything plugged into the sound mixer and the laptop, and Mike got started with the interview.

It took more than an hour, because Sir Ian kept saying “cut!” in the middle of an answer and insisting on starting over, demanding that we not use what he’d just said.

I noticed all of the replacement answers were far more mealy-mouthed than what he’d started with.

For example, Mike asked if “two-tier” policing was a real thing and if the protesters had a point. Sir Ian initially said that Labour was absolutely out of control in their pandering to the imams and the radicals in some of the immigrant communities. And then he stopped in mid-sentence, yelled “Cut!”, and then launched into a discussion of how it was unacceptable that so many in the lower classes should be taking to the streets.

“After all, we use our democratic process to settle these issues,” he said, “and then we must have order and cooperation.”

“Yes,” said Mike, seemingly trying to help Sir Ian, “but you have a government in place that only got a third of the vote in the elections in July. And what I’m hearing as an outsider, just talking to ordinary folks, is there’s a sense that none of the main parties are really listening to the people. So are these issues really settled?”

“We cannot have racism in our streets,” Sir Ian said.

“But is this about race, sir? From what I’ve seen it isn’t just white people, or native English, however we want to phrase it, angry about the stabbing of those three little girls.”

“No, you are correct. Though the organizers of these riots, men like Robby Thomason, must be brought to heel so the political process…”

“Again, and I apologize for interrupting you, but it seems like you’re missing the point here. The people in the streets have lost faith in the political process. A lot of them think that in the last election the Conservatives were elected to bring crime and immigration, and particularly illegal immigration, those people coming on the boats from Calais, under control. You had five years to do it and you didn’t, and now this Labour government is openly in favor of uncontrolled immigration. Is there a party that is actually listening to the people?”

“On that last point I certainly agree. This government has criticized our lot for failing to process immigrants and creating a backlog of some hundred thousand, but they’ve shut down the hotels and barracks at the old RAF bases and the other shelters and are now placing immigrants in the council houses. This is unacceptable.”

“Sir, I understand, but why didn’t you send them home?”

“Send them home?”

“The illegals.”

“They’re asylum-seekers. They’re due a hearing.”

“But are they due residency in the UK while they await it? How much does it cost to feed them, house them, clothe them, give them medical care…”

“It’s a great expense, to be certain.”

“Right, but that’s a reason to solve the problem, is it not? I guess what I’m asking is whether your party understands that this is the chief reason you lost power.”

“It isn’t,” said Sir Ian, his feathers a bit ruffled. “That is due almost solely to the ministrations of one Neville Savage and his Renew UK hooligans, who in constituency after constituency sabotaged our candidates by running vote-splitters…”

“Again, I think the counter to that is that if the voters were satisfied with how your party was governing, the Renew candidates wouldn’t have been vote-splitters. There wouldn’t have been any reason to vote out the incumbent.”

“Nonsense!” Sir Ian said. “Renew ran against us, not Labour.”

“Well, and I wasn’t following too closely, so I apologize for my ignorance, but was there ever a discussion between your party and Renew about teaming up when you recognized the threat that Labour represented? It seems like had you conceded some seats to them and they others to you, you might have headed this off.”

“They only won a handful of seats. Why should we have conceded anything to them?”

“So you’re saying it’s better to lose a seat to Labour than to Renew.”

“That isn’t what I’m saying.”

Mike just stopped and looked at Sir Ian, a deadpan expression on his face. He was waiting for the politician to explain.

And … nothing.

“Back to the question of two-tier policing and the street reaction, are there any assurances you can make that Parliament, or the political class generally, will respect the right to protest?”

“As I said, we must have order,” said Sir Ian, who appeared flustered. I don’t think he was prepared for a real interview.

This wasn’t hostile, you understand; it was actually one alley-oop question after another Mike was giving him, but Sir Ian simply couldn’t jump.

Hey, forgive the basketball reference. Mom was a Warrior Girl, after all.

Anyway, the interview just got worse and worse. Mike asked questions about several other subjects, and Sir Ian censored himself from making halfway decent comments a handful of times only to revert to vapid statements blaming everything on the party in power who had been in office for only a few weeks.

I understood why Neville was so eager to cede the microphone to Sir Ian. He knew it would be a Joe Deadhorse–style disaster.

You know what I’m talking about, right? That presidential debate that all but ended Deadhorse’s career and made him quit the race?

I had heard some inside stuff about this from being in the Secret Service, and so far it hadn’t come out, which surprises me a little. Anyway, the background is that they had made a practice of hopping Deadhorse up on stimulants every time he needed to go on TV, because when they didn’t, he kept slurring his speech and nodding off, or saying things that weren’t just untrue but outright weird.

Anyway, there’s a side effect to dosing somebody with enough stimulants to wake the dead — they make the victim have to go to the bathroom. A lot.

And at Joe Deadhorse’s age, the bladder and the bowels are … well, let’s just say he’d lost a lot of his potty training.

So they dose him up with uppers, and they send him to Denver to debate Trumbull, and about 20 minutes into the debate, Deadhorse is in the middle of a rant about what a threat Trumbull is to Our Democracy, and then he just gives what looks like a naughty smile and a shrug and he says, “Anyway.”

And then just holds that smile.

And Trumbull looks at him and he says, “Hey Joe, you all right?”

Deadhorse looks over and nods.

The moderator jumps in and asks Trumbull a question about infrastructure, and Trumbull starts talking, but then he stops, looks over at Deadhorse and he says “Hey, that smell. Is that you?”

Deadhorse gives him a giant smile. If Mike was telling you this story, he’d say it was a shit-eating grin, and then I’d have to yell at him.

So Trumbull says, “I’d like to tell you all about my highway plan, but honestly, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I’m debating a guy who’s dropping a deuce in his pants. I gotta tell you, it’s distracting.”

Anyway, that was the end of Deadhorse.

I’m not saying Mike’s interview with Sir Ian was that bad. But it was bad. It was disqualifying. We were there for an hour and a half, and he didn’t give a single answer that didn’t suck.

I’m sorry. I shouldn’t use that word. But it applies, OK? Sir Ian sucked.

And what was worse, he knew it. Usually when Mike finishes these interviews, it’s really friendly, and there’s a little bit of small talk and quite often there’s an invitation to some sort of social interaction, like a drink or lunch, and he talks to them off the record, and sometimes he’ll help frame the interview with his opening monologue based on those social interactions.

Not this time.

We stopped recording, and Sir Ian all but threw us out of his office. He was fussy and irritable and demanded to know when the interview would be posted and then he insisted he had another meeting, and out we went.

“If he’s the best they’ve got, I understand why they’re out,” said Mike. I couldn’t disagree.

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