The Prime Minister dismissed her security council with a simple “thankyou, gentlemen” and was in her chambers within moments. She rolled up her skirt and ripped the patches off her thighs. She lit a Marlborough Red with one deep draw, put a disposable glove on her right hand and removed the cigarette. With her left she turned on the extractor fan. Her mind raced in a calculated fashion. That affair with John Jackson needed dissection. She went along with his intervention during the meeting, as it suited her purpose. But really?
He was probably a mole. They probably all were. Her Partners would already know. So too the Russians. She didn’t see options, and that concerned her greatly. John Jackson had enabled her to pass this manoeuvre off as someone else’s brain child. And that was far too convenient. The special relationship’s days were numbered, but how she went about extricating her country from the bastard’s parasitic grip was key.
She didn’t give a fuck about ‘democracy’, ‘women’s lib’. They got her where she was today, but as principles they fell way short. Look at the Chinese. Look at the Iranians and Russians. They manufactured their coup unhindered by these concepts. Of course, outright rejection would never work in the West. The Saudi’s reaped the whirl-wind of their self-righteous bigotry, even as she smoked. ‘But if ideology gets in the way, it’s flawed.’ ‘That’s why The West was going down; they took their eye off the ball; too much out-sourcing; decadence at the top, and the rest left to fuss over crumbs. Damn shame. They could have ended history and dictated a new future. But they believed their own propaganda. Classic mistake. Fatal error.’
How was she going to play it? With a record approval rating she was going nowhere without a fight.