Michael Spicer - The Secret Political Adviser: The Unredacted Files of the Man in the Room Next Door

First published in Great Britain, the USA and Canada in 2020

by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

Distributed in the USA by Publishers Group West and in Canada by

Publishers Group Canada

canongate.co.uk

This digital edition first published in 2020 by Canongate Books

Copyright Michael Spicer, 2020

The right of Michael Spicer to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

This is a work of satire. Names, characters, places and events are either the products of the authors imagination or used in a fictitious manner.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available on
request from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 83885 314 3
eISBN 978 1 83885 315 0

Contents

INTRODUCTION

Publishers Foreword

In July 2020, Canongate came into ownership of a hard drive, sent anonymously to our offices.

The hard drive contained emails, texts, journal entries, social media messages, fragments taken from notebooks, internal memos, phone transcripts and various other pieces of classified intel, all written by the same man over a four-year period. In all correspondence he is known simply as M.

From gathering the information together, we have established that M is the infamous Man in the Room Next Door, a special adviser employed by a covert organisation to guide western politicians and other public figures through moments of crisis and upheaval.

After weeks of careful deliberation, we have decided to publish the contents of this hard drive. The material on it refers to events that took place between 2016 and 2020, beginning with the UK EU Referendum result and the rise of President Trump, and ending with the emergence of Covid-19 and the demise of President Trump.

We tried very hard to track M down and to find out more about the organisation he works for, referred to throughout the intel as Axworthy. However, our investigations proved fruitless.

What you are about to read is the truth: the truth behind the most turbulent period of British and American history in more than fifty years. No document has been censored. These are the unredacted files of the Man in the Room Next Door.

AXWORTHY GLOBAL

PO BOX 998 ALDINGTON ST KW17 5EH

24 June 2016

The Right Honourable David Cameron

10 Downing Street

Westminster

London SW1A 2AA

Dear David

RE: YOUR RESIGNATION

I am writing this letter with great sadness. Sadness that our working relationship has come to an end and sadness that you were prepared to risk flushing your career down the toilet faster than an exuberant child on a water slide.

Promising to hold an EU Referendum in order to convince a few Eurosceptic, xenophobic knuckleheads to vote Conservative in the 2015 election may, at the time, have seemed like a move of breathtaking genius on your part (after all, you won). But somehow you didnt factor in that you would have to deliver on that promise eventually; it wasnt just some unpaid parking ticket you could squirrel away in the glove compartment with the toffees and tissues.

And now here we are: your legacy is an upturned casserole, seeping into a deep pile carpet, nothing but an irremovable stain by which to remember you. And you have only yourself to blame.

I just had to stop typing briefly to slow handclap you.

During the referendum campaign it was you against former London mayor Boris Johnson, and with whom did the public feel more affinity? Johnson. The very opposite of the peoples politician, a catastrophe magnet who cant tie his shoelace without burning down a school. Im surprised your resignation speech wasnt just a series of sobbing noises in closed brackets.

In the wake of this cataclysmic disaster, my only advice to you is to go as soon as you can. The instigators of the Leave campaign didnt really want this result. They just wanted to fire a warning shot with regards to your premiership, to let you know the vultures were ready to stretch their wings for a little circling in the near future. The mortified faces of Michael Gove and Boris Johnson this afternoon made it abundantly clear that a narrow defeat for them was their ideal outcome. Now theyve got a builders skip of clusterfuck on their gated driveway and no ones going to move it.

Go, and go now. Dont even try to make sense of the chaos that will burden the United Kingdom for the next twenty years. Dont even see out the day. Go home and watch Bargain Hunt. This action wont save your legacy, because that is beyond the capabilities of any historian: your biography should just be a flip book of a man jumping into a barrel as it rolls off a cliff. However, leaving office with bugger all in place to ensure a smooth transition for your successor is the least you can do to those treacherous mealy-mouthed pufferfish who threw you under the bus.

It wont affect me. Im planning on taking a sabbatical myself.

Enjoy that caravan youre going to buy. Thats all youve got now.

Yours,

M.

Diary: Sunday 3rd July 2016

Balls. Double balls.

Axworthy have called me in. Seems theyve been approached by Theresa May for PPD. Dear God, no. The very thought of operating the strings of that particular haunted marionette fills me with dread from my toes to my lobes.

They promised me a break. They said once Cameron was gone, theyd promote someone else; give some other poor soul the toxic shit-shovel and hazmat suit. But no.

The overreliance on me is worrying. Axworthy is the most intimidating and fearsome behemoth of an organisation and yet even they cant find anyone else to manage the ceaseless onslaught of political ineptitude in this country.

I am of course flattered by their faith in me, but the fact is, after six years trying to turn David Cameron into a great statesman, Im a husk. Im a memory of a husk. The man left his daughter behind in a pub, for Gods sake.

Im going to have to set some ground rules this time. Every time she makes a catastrophic error of judgement, I get the next bank holiday off. Something like that.

Public Persuasion Duty

Dear All,

Thank you for sending me Prime Minister Mays speech ahead of her address this afternoon. It is clear from giving it the once-over that you made the rookie mistake all new speechwriters commit: letting the person reading it out have anything to do with it. Bless you.

But let me remind you that when a toddler asks if they can play with the remote control, you take the batteries out first so they cant do any damage. By all means, let the PM believe shes written it, just ensure it is signed off without a single comma in it attributable to her.

I know it sounds like an impossible task but over the years this will become second nature to you. Politicians are not writers. If they were, they wouldnt need writers.

For future reference, always write the PMs speeches when shes not in the same room as you. Keep her at arms length. Perhaps you should set up your writing room adjacent to a room full of distractions like a fancy Nespresso machine or a half-finished jigsaw of a lovely mountain. Whatever. Just stall her.