It was Wednesday again. Sir Kia Stammer hated Wednesdays. Wednesdays were Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons. He was a used-car salesman with a very problematic speech defect that made it impossible for him to tell the truth. For years now he had resorted to waffling. His wife, the rather attractive underwear model, Victoria, dreaded Wednesdays too, because Kia was boring on the other six days but on this day she was forced to listen to him, and inevitably he expected her to tell him how witty his ripostes had been. The problem was that at first she knew it wasn’t true, and now even he knew it wasn’t true. Victoria’s secret was out.

He knew what he was going to be asked today. Who was responsible for the Royal Navy fiasco? He had wanted to send one of the Navy’s aircraft carriers to the Gulf, to show British naval power to the world, but he was reminded that there weren’t enough ships left to form a carrier strike group. And in any case, only one carrier, HMS Prince of Whales, was actually in working order. The other one was in dock having some of its aircraft hangers converted into prayer rooms for the new Muslim crews. He wasn’t sure about the wisdom of this, but his Defence Secretary said it would hide the fact that the Navy didn’t have enough planes to put in the hangers, so it made sense. Kia found himself agreeing. They hadn’t finished the hire purchase payments on the F-35s that had been delivered so far. The government had announced they would be buying more planes, but he knew they couldn’t afford them. The Americans had been kind enough to lend the Navy some of their F-35s, but when the war in Iran started they had to ask for them back.

That just left the Prince of Whales. Under pressure from his back benches, he had finally given in and ordered the ship to sail for the Gulf, escorted by destroyers and submarines of the French Navy, which was embarrassing enough, but when the ship broke down in full view of the Isle of Wight and had to be towed back to Portsmouth there were guffaws of laughter from the Opposition benches at PMQs. The situation wasn’t improved when he ordered HMS Dragon, the Navy’s last working destroyer, to head for Iran and the satellite navigation system suffered a catastrophic software error. The ship was last seen sailing for the Isle of Arran.

Lady Victoria wasn’t in a good mood this morning and was disinclined to give her husband moral support. AI-generated pictures of her in her underwear were going viral online and she was being inundated with text messages from men, and while Kia was a disappointment she instinctively knew not to go there.

As she left 10 Downing Street an hour later for a hair appointment she was greeted by a new police officer at the entrance. He wore a long beard and for a second Victoria’s instinct was to take cover inside. Then she remembered the Home Secretary, Mahmood Shebana, has said he was going to post a Muslim officer there to show solidarity with British Muslims, who were suffering an intolerable level of Islamophobia. Victoria asked her husband if that was true, and he said if his Muslim Home Secretary said it was it must be. He would know, he said, because he was a Muslim. Victoria pondered the logic of this. She had already upset Sir Kia when he appointed Shebana to the Home Office, in charge of policing. She wasn’t sure, given the large-scale fear of Islam in the country, about the wisdom of that. Aha, he said, that’s why I’m the PM and you’re not. It’s a clever move to show the government has complete faith in the impartiality of Muslim politicians. Victoria expressed some doubt about this. Was he sure, she asked, it didn’t just show the government was so afraid of Muslims that it was doing whatever they wanted? You don’t understand, he replied, and she dropped the subject. She had a suspicion that she understood more than he did. Still, as he said, he was the PM and she wasn’t. She didn’t think they were going to be in Number 10 for long anyway.

Sir Kia soon put his wife out of his mind. There was a lot of work to do. The answers to this afternoon’s questions were already printed out for him. All he had to do was read them out, but he was very conscious that the country saw him as boring and he pondered, as he was driven to the House, how he could spice up his answers a bit. He practised a few jokes in the back of the car, but when his driver raised the glass partition he took that as a vote of no confidence. No, joking wasn’t his thing. His thing was seriousness. If it was jokes the public wanted, the Jungle Book Mayor of London, Shia Khan, could always be relied upon for a laugh. Mind you, not everyone saw the funny side of the Mayor’s new ULEZ (Ultra Low English Zone), backed by facial recognition cameras, to charge white drivers for entering roads reserved for immigrants. On reflection, he thought, maybe it wasn’t meant to be funny. You never could be sure with that little man. Kia thought Khan’s plan to close the bus lanes five times a day for Muslims to use them for their prayers was going too far, but still the Labour Party Election Committee had prioritised the Muslim vote, and the bus lane thing did seem to be popular with Londoners, who were mostly Muslim now. Yes, he muttered to himself as his car swerved to avoid a group of people inexplicably glued to the road, it’s a new world.

The right-wing Press were never a friend to Labour, but this morning they had gone too far. The Daily Telegraph had featured a picture on its front page of the King in Muslim dress. Was it real or AI? If the former, Kia would be unable to prevent the inevitable fallout. On the other hand, just in time he remembered he represented a Labour government and Labour was supposed to have antipathy to the monarchy, so the fallout was not his problem. He quite liked the bloke, even if he couldn’t stand his former mistress, now known as the Queen. There was a huge ruckus over the social media post of her in a full face covering, It had got over half a million ‘likes’, the gist of which was that it was a great improvement.

Oh dear, it was all getting so complicated, remembering who was far right and who was far left. He had never understood what the expressions meant before, but now it seemed everyone was one or the other. Which was he?

He pondered, just for a moment, if it was too late for him to cross the House and join the Conservatives, but the thought didn’t last for long. It would mean political suicide. On the other hand, he thought, he committed political suicide every time he opened his mouth. He couldn’t do anything right. No, he didn’t mean he couldn’t do anything right, he meant he couldn’t do anything right in the eyes of the country. His thoughts were now wandering freely as the car swerved again to avoid a bus lane. It wouldn’t do to get one of Khan’s ULEZ fines. No, that would look bad. The horrid little man would never let him forget it.

In the event, PMQs could have been worse. A Backbench Opposition MP asked if he supported the proposed Private Member’s Bill to allow the abortion of children up to one year old. It was impossible to check in his briefing notes to see if he did, so he took a Churchillian look around the chamber, which gave him the opportunity to marshal his thoughts, and took a guess. It turned out to be the right guess and he breathed a large sigh of relief. Tomorrow’s newspaper headlines had flashed in front of his eyes: “Prime Minister supports infanticide”. It had been a close call, and he felt a strong need to sit down and take a sip of water. He hoped no-one noticed that he was sweating.

There was the usual question about small boats. This was easy. He had been saying for two years that the government was going to stop the boats, and he said that again now. Everyone knew it was nonsense, but he had been saying it for so long the question, and the answer, were pretty well expected. No-one actually thought he was going to do it, and no-one asked how he was going to do it, because there was no point. He knew they weren’t going to and the Opposition knew they weren’t going to, so the question, and the answer, didn’t get any MPs ruffled. Kia knew Labour Has a Plan, but he also knew they did have a plan once but no-one could remember where they put it. He made a mental note to ask someone to look for it, just in case.

The rest of the questions were pretty routine stuff, and he was able to read out the answers that had been prepared for him. Some Members on the other side of the Chamber wandered off rather than waste any more time listening to him, which he didn’t mind. He minded more that some of his own Members also disappeared, and he made a mental note to have the Chief Whip reprimand them. They needn’t think he hadn’t noticed. It was time to show some authority.

……….

He didn’t feel very authoritative, though. Lady S knew what was troubling him, but she avoided saying anything. It was the President of the United States. Yes, he knew Trump was quite barmy, but boy did he get things done! Kia was acutely aware people compared the two of them and found him wanting. He knew he was making bold statements about Labour’s plans but he also knew it didn’t mean anything. He knew that and he knew the country knew it. Trump didn’t do everything he said he was going to do, but when he did act the world took notice. Kia couldn’t remember the last time anyone even in Britain had taken any notice of him. Trump made him feel small. (If he was being completely honest with himself, which he never was, feeling small was actually nothing to do with the American President. Trump was increasingly ignoring him, and people in the UK were so used to ignoring him they didn’t even notice when the President did the same. Ignoring Kia Stammer was the state of the nation.)

He racked his brains to think of a Big Idea that would galvanise the country, but in his heart he knew the time for big ideas had come and gone. There had been a time when people, well, some of them anyway, listened to him, but now he ranked about on the same level as the Pope. The media reported everything he said but no-one was actually interested.

In his more fragile moments he wondered if he should call a General Election, but that was ridiculous. Labour had a big majority in the House of Commons, giving his government the ability to get any big idea through. The problem was, there were no more ideas. His Cabinet were a useless bunch. The Muslim Home Secretary was making community relations worse, not better, the Foreign Secretary was the dimmest politician the country had seen in living memory, and the Energy Secretary was running the country into the ground in the pursuit of some crazed notion about saving the planet. How had he come to be surrounded by incompetents? Who appointed all these people?

Oh yes, he did.

……….

These days, he couldn’t do right for doing wrong. He had tried cutting school lunches over Ramadan, to avoid offending Muslim pupils, but when a million angry mothers marched up Whitehall with an image of him wearing a burqa, he knew he was beaten. Oh dear. It had seemed like a harmless enough idea.

His plan to ban bacon sales in Muslim cities like Birmingham had seemed harmless enough as well, but when farmers drove into central London on their tractors and dumped tons of pig shit at the entrance to Downing Street, he had to concede defeat.

As for the Reparations Tax Bill, well, anyone could have said that was going to be a disaster. After the Church of England had foolishly claimed responsibility for slavery and offered reparations, black people had clamoured for the UK to take on the responsibility, and he had been persuaded, against his better judgment which for once was working properly, to put it to Parliament. The Daily Mail had run a front-page splash every day for a week showing him with Muslims with devilish pitchforks on one side and black people with the same pitchforks on the other. The Telegraph ran a sensible piece about Muslim slavery of black Africans, and a scholarly piece about how Great Britain had been instrumental in ending slavery, but these days no-one actually read the Telegraph. Now black Britons were up in arms demanding compensation for harms done to their ancestors by millions of people whose ancestors hadn’t lived in Britain, what with them being immigrants. It got very confusing. Who was going to pay whom, and with whose money? Private Eye magazine did a long piece accompanied by a chart showing how much you were owed if you had two black parents, and what the reduction was if you only had one, or one black grandparent. It was all descending into farce, and the final nail in the coffin when it was exposed that Muslim gangs were running ads online for black couples to have more babies, for a share of the profit.

It seemed that there were three complete separate communities now in the country, and none was ever going to live in peace with the other. How had this happened? More importantly, which one should he appeal to to win the next election?

There were days when he wondered if he really did want to win another election. 10 Downing Street was a poisoned chalice. Then he remembered, no law firm would ever employ him again, and that only left his first career as a used car salesman, but these newfangled electric cars his energy secretary kept banging on about were a mistake. He knew that. He knew they were never going to save the planet. All they were doing was giving the Chinese control of the car market. Oh dear oh dear, how did it all go so badly wrong?

……….

A Prime Minister can never forget about the next General Election though. Sir Kia had looked on in despair at the success of the Green Slime Party at the recent Gorton and Denton bye-election. The Green Slimes had taught Labour an important lesson. Pussyfooting around Jew-hatred didn’t win elections. What won elections was full-on hatred to get the Muslim vote. Sir Kia had seen the figures: ten times as many Muslim voters as Jewish ones. It was a no-brainer. The war in Gaza had given the world permission to paint hatred of Jews as hatred of Israel. Now, it was electorally permissible to say you hate Jews without saying you hate Jews. The Green Slimes had understood that, and it was time for Labour to take the lesson on board. Muslims in Britain were voting on one issue only – Islam. As long as they kept receiving state benefits from a gullible nation, they had the time to campaign for Palestine. Well, Sir Kia has recognised their state. Wasn’t that enough? No-one actually knew where the State of Palestine was but this was no time to angst over the finer points of international law. All right, the Foreign Office had committed a slight faux pas by addressing the British Embassy to Palestine in the capital of Israel, but since the UK didn’t recognise Israel’s right to say where its capital was no-one seemed to have noticed.

……….

The Church of England, the established church of the kingdom, was ahead of the politicians in the race to adapt to the new demographic reality in the country. Mohammed was officially incorporated into the liturgy, on the grounds that the Church was up to date with the whole DEI thing, and diversity of prophets was now considered an integral part of that. Churches welcomed Muslims to their services, although they had to accept that Muslims didn’t actually take part in Christian services, they just used the church space for their own services. A lot of parishes just gave up and sold their churches to Muslim communities.

The Archbishop of Canterbury issued an instruction for all parishes to offer their churches to Muslims for Friday night prayers, and as men and women were seated separately for these it was just found simpler to keep that seating arrangement for Christian services as well. In time, all Anglican churches were recognised as shared Christian and Muslim places of worship. The works of Francis Bacon were removed from relevant university courses to avoid causing offence to Muslim students, but since Sir Kia didn’t know who he was he felt it was no great loss.

He accepted all of this, on the basis that he was in no position to object to it, or even comment on it. He felt the Synod of the Church of England was going too far when it officially accepted that ‘Death to Jews’ was a normal part of the Muslim liturgy, but again he felt it best to let the Church do its own thing. He had enough problems. For goodness’ sake, he was the Prime Minister. He had a country to govern.

But now he was faced with a constitutional crisis no-one could possibly have foreseen. In his latest audience with the King, His Majesty had informed him of his intention to convert to Islam. The PM was stunned. He had read the rumours on social media, but it had never occurred to him the silly old duffer would actually risk the destruction of the glue that had held the country together for centuries. On the other hand, he said to Lady S over breakfast the next morning, was it as significant as all that? The United Kingdom was only nominally C of E. The monarch as the head of the Church was surely an anachronism. His wife heard the tone of his voice and recognised that on this occasion he was pleading with her to back him up. It has to be said at this point that Victoria Stammer had very little sympathy for her husband. She knew what the country thought of him, and regardless of politics she was broadly on the country’s side. She had long ago decided this gig was only going to last as long as there was a home for her in Downing Street. So she bit her tongue and told her husband what he already knew, which was that he might be the Prime Minister (well, yes, he was) but that didn’t make him responsible for this mess. There were Constitutional lawyers who would be consulted, debates in the House and lots of other stuff no-one could make him responsible for. For a moment he was alright with the idea of all of this turning the United Kingdom into a republic, and he went from that to a picture of Tony Blair’s dreadful face on the front of every newspaper as he was sworn is as the President of the Republic of Great Britain, and suddenly he knew he had to save the country. Yes, unwittingly the old duffer had made Sir Kia Stammer the champion of the United Kingdom and all it stood for. OK, well, no-one knew any longer quite what it stood for, but here was a battle he could fight and, well, maybe even win a General Election on the back of. Now, he saw himself as Saint George slaying the dragon of Islam. It felt good for about twenty seconds, until he remembered that the next General Election was going to depend on the Muslim vote. Dear God, he thought, how the hell do I get out of this one?

……….

And so another day in the life of the worst British Prime Minister ever came to an end. Lady S was in bed before him. He wondered if she was really asleep or he should ….. no, better not disturb her. The danger having passed he reflected on the day. Well it could have been worse. His last thought, as he drifted off, was of his father the toolmaker, and he wondered if that was really true.