Bertie and the Kinky Politician by Mike A Vickers Page B

of heavily armed, pumped-up, glassy-eyed and hairy-arsed Scotsmen wearing skirts and waving their woad-tinted testicles at you!
    James followed the taciturn man up the stairs, the portraits of former prime ministers staring down at him in frosty silence. He wondered how many of them ever had their backsides striped like a stick of Blackpool rock once the bedroom curtains were pulled.
    Probably quite a few.
    His guide knocked and gravely ushered him into the prime minister’s spacious study.
    James took a deep breath to steady his nerves and stepped through the door. This was it …

Chapter Four
    â€˜James, have a seat, I won’t be a minute.’ The PM sat alone at his leather-tooled desk surrounded by a clutter of files, laptops, and open despatch boxes. James waited in silence, glancing around at the choice of art on the walls. Each premier who lived in the grand old house could decorate to their own personal taste. None of the paintings were permanent fixtures but were selected by the current PM from the Government Art Collection, a stately and dignified body which cared for thousands of paintings, sculptures, and other sundry works of art, all for use in official buildings and embassies across the globe. Getting to hang a few genuine masterpieces on your walls instead of cheap prints from John Lewis like the rest of the country was a real perk of the job, even though it was widely suspected the finest paintings were quietly put to one side whenever a prime minister came shopping. James discovered the PM had a diverse taste; there were classical portraits of Walpole, Nelson, Gladstone, and Sir Isaac Newton, a very fine bust of Charles Darwin, several dreamy Turner landscapes, a surprisingly racy Russell Flint, and a bright, cheerful Hockney. Not bad at all.
    The PM ignored James for a full minute. He waited patiently, watching his leader scribble. Having already experienced one of the premier’s pathetic psychological tricks that morning, the second proved merely tiresome. Eventually, the files were shuffled into order and dropped onto the floor beside his chair.
    â€˜You wanted to see me.’ Cool and collected. James was a good actor when occasion called.
    â€˜Yes.’ The two stared at each other for a moment, then the PM stood and walked slowly around the desk, hands in pockets and looking down at the floor. He was a very tall, solid man about ten years older than James, heavy in the shoulders and arms, who’d once played in the pack for Wasps. The famous broken nose was easily the most prominent feature of his face. Dramatic white eyebrows underpinned a broad forehead, their exaggerated bushiness compensating for the very few silver hairs still stubbornly refusing to decamp from his lofty crown. His lips were thin and firm. Decisive. A massive intellect lurked behind those guarded grey eyes, precise, sharp, and formidably penetrating, yet despite these advantages the PM was widely perceived as grey and monodimensional. ‘This is a delicate matter, James. As you know, we’ve suffered from a run of extremely bad luck over the last few months and can ill afford to be subject to media scrutiny again.’
    James thought it unwise to correct the PM. For months read years . Actually, things had started to go spectacularly pear-shaped with the last election, which had reduced the PM’s previously comfortable majority of fifty-eight to a worryingly tiny nine. He’d soldiered on, however, as politicians addicted to power always do, but it was hard going. Several unexpected and frankly disappointing by-elections had eaten into that disastrously inadequate number. Then came a massive financial scandal in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, resulting in a dozen arrests when the money was finally traced back to organised criminal gangs. This was followed in short order by the exposure of several MPs who had invested in a dubious Russian casino and its associated