Mere hours after Theresa May ate a three-tiered Brexit cake, made specially for the Prime Minister by some of her closest advisors and aides, she emerged from the bathroom looking several pounds lighter, her cheeks gently perspiring and rosily aglow. Alas the colour they had taken soon masked an embarrassment, for an untoward piece of tissue paper had fixed itself firmly to the right stiletto of her leopard-print shoe.
While the contents of the cake – constructed and shipped exclusively from a bespoke bakery based near her Maidenhead home – remained a state secret, it was said to have eschewed Francophile butter for good English shortening, and to have been very dense. A photograph sneaked through the kitchen window of 10 Downing Street by one recalcitrant member of the paparazzi showed that the three tiers were artificially coloured, in red, white, and blue.
What came out the other end thankfully nobody dared show, and if May had indeed suffered an importunate accident, it was covered up by her brown leather trousers – proof if any were needed that whatever Nicky Morgan might think, the Prime Minister was prudent in her purchase costing £995.
Amid a fallout over the price of the trousers, Morgan – the former Secretary of State for Education – had been debarred from a Downing Street meeting between May and more moderate Conservative MPs. That meeting went ahead as planned, but even without Morgan present, the pressure of having to explain the inexplicable evidently took its toll. After thirty minutes of attempting to reassure advocates for a less harsh Brexit, May was spotted taking a breather, pacing steadily Downing Street’s famous stones.
Suddenly a call of nature seemed to overtake her, and breaking into a trot she hurried next door. When she emerged some time later, her face reddened and damp, the paper stuck to her sole showed a leader still hard at work. A zoom lens caught some writing which had bled through the discoloured tissue, and beyond notes on the vanilla slice vs. the Victoria sponge, May had spent her potty session outlining her hopes and aspirations for the impending negotiations with the EU.
Among the relevant scrawlings, this most unusual of documents carried the messages ‘Have our cake and eat it’, ‘What’s the model?’, and more obscurely still, ‘Don’t forget to wipe’. As parliament still hungers for some sense of the government’s plans towards Brexit, May’s toilet stop indicates that she and her fellow cabinet members are, so to speak, flying by the seat of their pants. No – this government has but one use for white papers, and it is in their privy chambers, not in any house of law.
