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
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 author’s 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
Publisher’s 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 didn’t factor in that you would have to deliver on that promise eventually; it wasn’t 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 people’s politician, a catastrophe magnet who can’t tie his shoelace without burning down a school. I’m surprised your resignation speech wasn’t 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 didn’t 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 they’ve got a builder’s skip of clusterfuck on their gated driveway and no one’s going to move it.
Go, and go now. Don’t even try to make sense of the chaos that will burden the United Kingdom for the next twenty years. Don’t even see out the day. Go home and watch Bargain Hunt. This action won’t 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 won’t affect me. I’m planning on taking a sabbatical myself.
Enjoy that caravan you’re going to buy. That’s all you’ve got now.
Yours,
M.
Diary: Sunday 3rd July 2016
Balls. Double balls.
Axworthy have called me in. Seems they’ve 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, they’d 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 can’t 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, I’m a husk. I’m a memory of a husk. The man left his daughter behind in a pub, for God’s sake.
I’m 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.