The Special Relationship (#8 of the Pride Series)

Part Eight of ‘Pride, More Pride and Quite a Lot of Extreme Prejudice’ (see previous part):

The Cojones Crisis – as the Red Tops immediately christen it – limps on past Hour Sixty-Seven.  President Frussterer would like to close airports and put army on standby, but he has been advised that this might put his remaining testicle in jeopardy, so he refrains from signing the order.
He has instead contented himself with despatching the navy and sizeable portion of the air force (the portion with the big bombs) in the general direction of the East. He wants to be sure that as soon as the UN says it’s OK, he can start creating the humanitarian crisis by which he hopes to get control of a desperately-needed chunk of the world’s remaining oil.
His foreign advisors advise that Russia will, as usual, block the necessary resolution to make his action legal, but the French will do pretty much anything for anybody who promises help when Germany stops underwriting their debts; the Chinese will be on board so long as there’s still someone to whom they can sell consumer electronics and branded sports goods. That just leaves the Brits and the Germans. These two nations are like the Ying and Yang of Europe. They’ll never swing the same way on anything. Germany says Euro; Britain says Sterling. Germany does making stuff; Britain does Financial Services. Britain is usually more tolerant of butchery in far away countries, having been the master of it for so many years. Germany’s only experience of genocide was more home-grown. On balance, says Frussterer’s Secretary of State, Britain is your port in a storm. Their air force can pretty much kick the shit out of everybody when it comes to hitting a barn door with an air-to-surface missile. Not only that they have some cool older buildings, an even older queen and Shakespeare. Shakespeare is an important cultural reference. You can never go wrong with a war ally that eulogises medieval warlords usurping rightful Kings. They have the same positive attitude to ambition that made America great. Have you seen Lear? Jeez, all that eye gouging makes Guantanamo seem like Saturday detention with the Breakfast Club.
Thus, the no-name British Prime Minister is invited over for a visit, just to cement the deal.
The no-name Prime Minister’s name is Neil Dimenoe, a red-haired Welshman, one of the last conservatives to come from the Rhondda, and blessed with the sweet mellifluous baritone of a Richard Burton when pressed into public speaking. By the WWF’s own definition, he is a critically endangered species, since there are now less than 250 of his kind in the wild.
It’s rumoured that he swung to the right, only after being bullied by Plaid-Cymru schoolmates over a childhood stutter that –for many years – left him medically incapable of rolling his Rs or accurately announcing the delivery of a rugby ball into a scrum (he used to play Number 9). Of course, even the greatest of Great British Prime-Ministers have been similarly abused for their youth deficiencies, though most of them by public school housemasters and prefects, and most of them anally rather than by the verbal slap of lyrical insults that would have made Dylan Thomas blush.
Anyway, here he is taking tea in the Oval Office.
“There’s going to be a humanitarian crisis and we’re going to have to go in and fix it,” says Frussterer.
“What the hell is this?” says Dimenoe, staring at the discoloured water he’s just been given. It’s barely warm and there appears to be a bag of something green floating in it.
“Tea,” he’s informed.
“Really? Are you sure this isn’t another of those language mix ups, like when we use rubbers to erase our mistakes, and you guys use them to stop the mistakes happening in the first place?”
“Yeah, well,” says Frussterer, looking for a conciliatory tone, “the last time we had decent tea, someone dumped it in the harbour. Then the Englishness of it kinda went out of fashion.”
“My chaps tell me you need some oil.”
“Indeed.”
“You should’ve said. We had some, up in Scotland, but my predecessors used it to close down our manufacturing industries and pay off the debts from the previous balance of payments crisis that was caused by us being incompetently bad at manufacturing. I think it’s all gone now. I could check.”
“As a matter of fact, I’ve already decided where to get some oil,” says Frussterer.
“You have?”
“The Middle East.”
“Weren’t they selling to you anyway?”
“Only some of them. I’m going to need a lot more, so I’m going to go over there, with our armed forces, and … well… you know… explain what’s what. Do you know those guys don’t have democracy?”
“They don’t?”
“Yeah, that one shocked me to. Anyway, I figure it’s a duty to bring that about, and then, when we do, they’ll be happy to sell us all the oil we want at cheap prices. Hell, they might even give it to us out of gratitude.”
“And you want to cut me in on the deal?” Dimenoe suggests.
Frussterer looks aghast. “No, Neil, I just want your support and a few of your planes. It’s my idea, or rather should I say, democracy is our idea, an American idea. It’s as American as apple pie and pop music. Besides, we called dibs on that oil ages ago. No, no, what I need from you is to get the EU on side. There’s some rebels fighting the government out there, and we’d like you and your Euro buddies to declare them to be freedom fighters, so that we can go and give them weapons without causing too much of a fuss. Then when the government retaliates we can point to their human rights record and start bombing the crap out of them. We won’t hit them of course, but the collateral damage will send the same message.”
“What do I get then?” says Dimenoe, slightly confused. “I mean what’s in it for us… Britain?”
“Well, I was thinking we’d carry on using your language. It’s such an advantage to your businesses, don’t you think? And we’re getting the Chinese and Japanese on board with it now. You’ve got to admit that’s a real biggie when your education system’s so lame. You’re struggling to teach your own people English. I know, I know, you’ve got a big immigration programme to cope with if you’re going to hold your pensions provision and sometimes it’s hard when all you can fall back on is sign language. But hell, what would you do if I decided America was going down the Spanish route? I got a growing population of Hispanics, you know? We can’t stop them breeding, or coming over the border, but that’s another story.”
“Just a minute, I believe my bullshit detector is bleeping. I’m sorry, Frussty, but you chaps don’t even use English now.”
“We don’t?”
“You keep dropping the ‘u’ out of O-U-R type words, and dyslexically reversing ‘e’ and ‘r’. And what about aluminium? You spell it a-l-u-m-i-n-u-m, you pronounce it ‘al-ooo-min-umm’. People laugh at you, I hate to tell you. We’ve got lithium, potassium, sodium, magnesium, calcium, thorium, strontium and –most importantly uranium and plutonium. I mean, who the hell is going to be scared of a bomb made out of ‘uranum’, sounds like ‘your anum’.”
“OK,” says Frussterer, thinking fast. “I tell you what. You get the Frenchies and the Huns onside, gag the Wops, Dagos and that other lot, and we’ll swing for ‘aluminium’ next time we’ve got a Senate majority.”
Dimenoe considers his options. Like most British Prime Ministers, he has long since realised that his ability to get anyone to do anything relies on the image of power, and he only appears powerful for as long as he doesn’t attempt to exercise it. When he attempts to exercise it, its vacuous nature will be revealed. People will be yelling, ‘Who’s that guy behind the curtain?’ and no longer looking at the big scary image of Oz (that’s Oz the Wizard, not the former penal colony.)
“I’ll take it,” he says, offering his hand. “But this time you have to go in on a decent post war plan. You need a budget for clean up. You’ve got to something about the humanitarian crisis. Bury the bodies, at least.”
“Oh, yeah, that,” says Frussterer, sheepishly.
“You go into these places, you know there’s going to be kids on the street and corpse shaped shrouds on the sidewalk. Every time it happens, we get pop-stars doing concerts, raising more spare money than we’ve got in the treasury and making us look cheap. It’s just not good enough.”
“Yeah, but Neil, if we had the dough, this whole thing wouldn’t be a problem, right? We’d buy the damned oil. Bottom line: all the folding currency we’ve got is stuff we printed. Fort Knox looks like a bad lock-up on ‘Storage Hunters’.”
“Then, I suggest you do what you guys do best. Hustle! Sell a ticket or two. There must be a big corporate or two willing to step up and sponsor.”
“No one wants to sponsor a humanitarian crisis. It’s not the kind of association people want for their brand.”
“Listen,” says Dimenoe, “if Coke and MacDonalds will put their name behind FIFA and the drug pushers running the Olympics, you’ve got to be able to get takers for sewing limbs back on street urchins, even if it was you who, sort of accidentally, blew them off in the first place.”
Frussterer starts to see the light at the end of the tunnel. His frighteningly white smile opens up like the shark from Jaws. “I’ll give it a go, Neil. I’ll give it a go.”

….. To be continued: on the 30th Dec