Time of Lies by Douglas Board

Author:Douglas Board
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Eye Books
Published: 2017-05-01T18:49:29+00:00

24

London, Thursday 21 May 2020

The first dinner anyone can fix between Angela and me is weeks away, so I’ve given the Bills a bollocking, basting the offending parts of their anatomies with piri piri sauce. Annabel had a good tip to make up for the wait – get Angela round late one evening for a glass of bubbly in the Cabinet Room. So that’s what we’ve just done, the two of us alone, me in the Prime Minister’s chair (the one with arms in front of the clock), her opposite with her stockinged feet up on the table. We compare notes on how yesterday’s Prime Minister’s Questions from the Red Lion came over. A fortnight into the BG government and the ratings haven’t dipped yet. What’s on Angela’s mind is drones, and Europe.

‘Zaf is totally clear on our drones policy. Trust me, he and I went through it ten days ago. He’ll be announcing it in a couple of weeks. For three years we’ll only allow two big commercial fleets – Shock News for media and news, and Gargantua for deliveries.’

‘We think it should be five years. We discussed five years.’ Angela’s wearing a white jacket and trousers and a black shirt buttoned low. Tonight her orange curls are tight and high.

‘We did, but Zaf has got to make the policy stack up as a trial period, balancing new services with the public’s safety. Three years is the most that the civil servants can come up with, to work out safe new rules of the air. Then we let everybody compete. But by then you and Gargantua should be so far ahead of your competitors – imagine, three years with no other media organisation allowed to use drones! Not even the Beeb.’

‘OK, but until you get the policy out there, we can’t move. Until then that’s staying top of my commercial agenda. Top of my viewers’ and readers’ worry list is Europe.’

‘I hope you’re not worried?’ I ask. ‘We’ve ripped up the single market rule book already and no-one’s done anything about it. Result!’

‘Up to a point. But everyone knows a showdown is coming.’

I begin, ‘After the Tory Brexit fiasco we haven’t come all this way to bottle it…’

‘That’s for sure. That’s so for sure.’ She’s distracted now, speaking as if to one of her five hundred best friends.

It’s tough to have better information than Angela but sometimes I do. ‘The Polish prime minister and Ducros will be in Toulouse tomorrow. Airbus will announce moving wing manufacture from Broughton to Katowice in Poland, and R&D from Filton to Toulouse. That’s ten thousand jobs gone directly, a multiple of that in the supply chain.’

‘What’s Ducros doing there? Airbus is supposed to be an independent company.’

‘He’ll announce big infrastructure works to move the wings. The A380 wings are huge motherfuckers. Plus some European Defence Corps contracts. He’s been pushing European defence hard ever since Britain got out of the way.’

‘Your plan?’

‘Arrests at dawn tomorrow for the CEOs of our major banks. They’ll get bail, but still.

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