Monday: Operation Shutdown is now well underway. All enemies under close surveillance. We’re on alert in case anyone tries to derail The Gove’s Shining Path - or whatever it’s called this week. The notional Opposition’s easy enough to keep tabs on. Labour’s Education Team is just clueless Scouse muppet Bifter Burnham and his Mam, Shona. As her chief “policy idea” is that Bifter got lumbered with schools when he should have been Prime Minister, Labour is now officially Threat Level Minimal. Teachers, like pre-Chartist millworkers, are being kept in line by the ambient threat of job cuts. The union people have been marginalised and demonised, routinely Photoshopped in newspapers with extra-starey eyes. Civil servants are, of course, acquiescent. That’s their job. All covered. Apart from what Scary Paula calls The Enemy Within. And she’s not talking about her lunch.
Tuesday: To a briefing at Conservative HQ. Scary Paula stresses that this in no way seeks to sideline our highly valued Lib Dem partners, none of whom have actually been invited. No, far from ignoring them we need to monitor them, she says. “The way you would monitor a vulnerable infant. By eavesdropping on them via remote listening devices. Likewise, for their own good, we need to keep certain outspoken members of the Coalition team very sharply in focus. As if observing them through a sniper rifle’s powerful nightsight ...” She doesn’t laugh so much as purr. I reckon she used to be in Mossad.
Wednesday: I’ve been assigned to the Lib Dem Education Thinking Unit to liaise and gather intel. Some hope. They seem to spend half their day on Farmville and the other half racing each other to the coffee machine on expensive swivel chairs. Their latest ponderous position paper, like all the others, is about Reducing The Deficit. Interest payments of more than #163;40 billion a year, they say, are the equivalent of “a new primary school every hour, or a new Chinook helicopter every day ...” As if you can compare ... oh, wait.
Thursday: Casually mention to Lib Dems that they might get traction upstairs for their interesting Deficit Calculator. They’re thrilled. So is Scary Paula, as far as I can tell. Her face goes all weird and sneery and sadistic. Her George Osborne Look.
Friday: Genius. Paula leaked the “1 Chinook = 24 primary schools” equation to the Ministry of Defence. Now they’re “on the warpath” - was that a smile? - and want “I quote, these twatty Lib Dem Oompah Loompahs at Education sat on. Hard. Until they burst. We live in dangerous times. You can’t defeat the Taliban with schools can you, unquote”. Poor Chicken Libdems, their blue sky is about to fall on their heads.
As intercepted by Ian Martin.
