Snowflakes, big as crisps, floating like goose-down after an expensive pillow fight, clung to the Prime Minister’s greatcoat as he wended his way – and there was nothing for it but to wend, there were so many folk – through the jolly crowd of costermongers, merrymakers, carol singers, chestnut-roasters, beadles and robed acolytes in the courtyard of the Palace of Westminster. A beaming portly gentleman handed him a penny bun: “God bless and keep you, Prime Minister.” He smiled wanly and made his way to the great oak door, past the serjeants-at-arms, past more crowds on the stairs and in the corridors. People called his name but he scurried on, heedless, upwards into the tower, to the office of the Minister of Magic.
In the ante-room he removed his top hat and coat, tried to stamp the snow off his boots, grimaced. When this winter season began – in September, for crying out loud, most of the country was still in shorts – he’d stuck out his tongue to catch a flake, in a rare moment of abandon. A special adviser had quickly dissuaded him; the snow, she explained, contained beef. Not something a pescatarian prime minister should ingest. She had pointed to the machines from which the flakes wafted, floating through the warm air to settle on Augustus Pugin’s delicate stonework, and explained that you could only get snow like that by whipping together rendered cattlefat – hogfat would also do, but it melted more quickly – with solvents and acrylate resin. Not something anyone should ingest, to be honest, although in the sewers beneath Westminster it formed into greasy clumps that the rat population apparently found very nourishing.
The PM realised he was still holding his penny bun. He turned it over in his hands and sniffed, caught a whiff of industrial polymers arranging themselves into a simulacrum of baked goods. On the base, a message: DO NOT EAT. He threw it into the fireplace, where logs glowed in the grate. It rested on them without melting, warmed only by the light of the hidden LED bulbs.
“I want to see him – now,” he told a young man in a robe that was decorated with stars, crescent moons and the occasional broomstick. The young man opened a great dusty ledger, squinted at columns of appointments written in a sloping, elegant hand.
“Oh for pity’s sake,” growled the PM. “Will you please just use your iPad.”
Such pleas were often ignored by the staff these days, but this acolyte was a government employee; he retrieved the tablet from the drawer, swiped at it briefly and motioned, as mysteriously as possible, to a door painted a deep green and patterned with gold filigree. “He’s expecting you, Prime Minister.”
The new ministry was part of the deal. The PM now viewed the deal as he viewed many of the decisions he’d made in power. On the one hand it was necessary, important, crucial to the job of revitalising the country. On the other hand he regretted it with every fibre of his being. The deal had been made necessary by two events. The first had been when a meeting between MPs and lobbyists (fire safety lobbyists!) had ended with an unscheduled demonstration of the kind of fire that can spontaneously occur in a wood-panelled building in which the electric lights were installed in 1883. The second incident took place while two of the people from that meeting were still being treated for smoke inhalation: a large piece of masonry fell from the ceiling of the Central Lobby directly behind a BBC journalist – who was unhurt – live on air. Yet another of the problems the Tories hadn’t bothered to fix was now Keir’s to sort out. The Palace of Westminster was uninhabitable without renovation.
Something had to be done, and quickly, but the thing that needed to be done was so grotesquely expensive it made the Ministry of Defence look efficient. The most recent quote: £22bn for a job that would be done in, oh, 75 years. The Chancellor, when asked, became a shard of ice. There was no chance whatsoever, she said, that she was going to spend the country’s entire fiscal headroom on nicer offices for the rebel MPs who had prevented her from fixing the country’s finances.
“Sell it,” his Director of Attack and Rebuttal had said. No one had been sure, in that meeting, if it was a joke; they puffed their cheeks and shrugged. Maybe that was all you could do. So that’s what he did.
The team put together a list of possible buyers. It leaked, of course; another bucket of effluent poured over his personal ratings – “Now Keir plotsto sell BIG BEN,” fumed the Sun – but the headlines brought bidders to his door. Donald made an offer, of course – great property, could be the greatest hotel in England, we’ll get you the guy who did the ballroom – but he didn’t really have the money. The serious bid came from a consortium led by Merryman Entertainments. They had finance in place and a plan already written, a sale and leaseback arrangement in which Merryman would take on the full cost of refurbishment. The MPs wouldn’t even have to move out. They could carry on as normal.
Well, not entirely as normal.
The deal had run to several hundred pages, most of it fine print, but for the PM it asked one simple question: do you want us to take this £22bn problem off your hands?
The summit to conclude the deal had been hosted at Wizard World, one of Merryman Entertainments’ top theme parks and a prime example of brownfield redevelopment (the Warlock’s Quarter had previously been a military prison). The civil servants scrutinising the deal were given the freedom of the park, so they could see how a Merryman property functioned. Happily for the Merryman team, this also meant those same officials spent more time riding the Phoenix of Destiny and solving puzzles in Wugworth’s Cavern than they did reading every single clause. After a week of meetings, rides and restaurant-quality catering, the deal was done, and everyone just hoped it would be fine. It couldn’t be as bad as Brexit.
“This is worse than Brexit,” declared a junior minister when the finer details of the deal began to leak. “We’re absolutely fucked. They can order us around in our own parliament! We will never live this down. And we have to create a new government department?”
The deal had indeed stated that a new department, funded by Merryman Entertainments, would be created to negotiate between the government and the new owners of the parliamentary estate. For fun, they said – and then insisted – they would call it the Ministry of Magic. They wanted an existing cabinet minister to fill the position so they could be sure it was being taken seriously.
Fun! Surely it was time for some fun? Other governments had Ministries for Happiness. Britain already had a Minister for Loneliness. They had a National Bee Unit. In the past they’d had a British Potato Council and a Wine Standards Board. Was a Ministry of Magic so odd?
There was a political opportunity in there, too. The post was just right for someone who needed taking down a peg, someone who needed to learn a thing or two about loyalty. Someone he had to keep around, even though he didn’t want to. He knew just the man for the job.
Wes had remained calm when he was given the news. It was a shame – he had enjoyed his brief stint in the Foreign Office – but he was able to contain the glittering, white-hot rage that ignited as the PM told him to choose between the new job and the back benches. He noted the surprise on the PM’s face: not long ago, that rage would have leapt forth and torched everything in the room, including Wes’s career. Now he put his hands around the flame. It was not painful to do so. It warmed him, helped him to see. He had been seeing things quite differently recently.
At the conference in Budapest – as Keir had accepted Britain’s place in another deal that seemed at once inescapable and inexcusable – Wes had gone to dinner with a political theorist who had played a part in the building of modern Russia. He enjoyed the feeling of knowing the security services were combing the restaurant, looking deep into the lives of every sous-chef and plongeur. He was a little deflated when the man arrived by taxi, wearing a tracksuit, carrying a plastic bag from a high-end Moscow department store.
But then they talked, and talked, long into the evening. “You understand the true nature of power,” the man told him, “because you watch reality TV.” Wes knew he was being flattered, but he could not help also being interested. Was this true? Assuredly it was, the Russian said: politics and reality TV were the same show. It was more evident in the US, which favoured the traditional, obvious, semi-scripted format in which moments of drama were clearly telegraphed to the viewer. In Britain the show was formatted as stretches of tedium broken by moments of outrage. British life, in his experience, seemed also to be like this.
Wes laughed. “And who are the producers of these shows? The Deep State?”
The man smiled, shrugged, wagged his chin. He was on his seventh glass of Champagne. It did not seem to affect him at all. There were no producers. The shows were improvisations in which the players conformed to roles that had been familiar to audiences for centuries. He patted the plastic bag, which had been returned to the table after thorough inspection by MI5; it contained books, in English, on the history of theatre, including a volume on the commedia dell’arte of 17th-century Italy. “You will read these,” the Russian said, “and you will understand how the carnival is directed.” He belched comfortably, thanked Wes’s security guards for looking after him, and left. The following day, as the plane lifted off, Wes began to read.
And so when he was given the news, he saw it not as a demotion but as a new role in the most literal sense. The problem with modern politics was that people thought they were doing real things. It was ludicrous, when you thought about it, that any one person could be said to be running the NHS, or the economy, or the country. It was a comforting and obvious fiction, contrived with the help of a media unequipped to explain the real structure of power. The truth was that they were making reality TV: improvised, hammed-up theatre in the tradition of the commedia, the troupe playing characters that had been familiar for centuries. Keir was Il Dottore, the learned buffoon in the robes of a lawyer; the new leader of the opposition was Il Capitano, the macho coward. The Russian had explained that these were “system” characters – the vecchi of Italian masqued comedy – whose role was to be tormented by the “non-system” characters, the zanni: the harlequins, the clowns.
He remembered Farage at some magazine party, obviously several pints deep, showing him an old copy of a book about Thyl Ulenspiegel, the merry prankster of 16th-century Germany. At the time he had grimaced and walked away. He saw now that he had been offered a lesson that few were prepared to take. And he saw, in the Ministry of Magic, an opportunity to direct the action, to move the scenery around which the other characters would improvise.
“I’d love to do it,” he told the PM. “Just try and stop me.”
And so, under the deal, the Minister of Magic accepted every new idea the Merryman Entertainments executives put forward for what they decided to call – in billboards that quickly went up around the parliamentary estate – The Westminster Experience. Civil servants were excluded from meetings in which structural changes were agreed – bigger viewing galleries, cameras everywhere, hotel rooms where the offices used to be – and the building work, enervated by commercial opportunity, accelerated beyond all expectations. It was months before anyone realised how things were going to run, and by then it was too late. Ministers found themselves followed through corridors by gaggles of sightseers. MPs would open a door they assumed would lead to a committee session and find themselves playing a walk-on part in an escape game. Sponsored messages were delivered during debates. A near-permanent queue formed on the steps to Wes’s office – by far the nicest in the upgraded palace – of people complaining about the latest commercial indignity.
Each of these people was asked if they had £22bn to commit to the building’s upkeep; if not (it was always no) then a printed copy of the deal was tapped with a knowing finger.
What the plaintiffs in the queue failed to grasp was that Wes was not merely allowing these things to happen. They were his ideas. He had watched Trump (Pantalone, the decadent merchant) say it out loud, after that meeting with Zelenksy: “This is going to be great television.” The secret was open. All that was needed was to pay attention.
The costumes, too, were Wes’s idea. Parliament should help people inhabit their roles more easily, it should look more as it is in the popular imagination. Robes, cobwebs, a stage set. The Merryman execs couldn’t get enough of this stuff. Dare they suggest a crossover with Wizard World? Magical dinners for 600 in Westminster Hall, with trained owls and floating candles? Wes nodded deeply, inspected his new robe. “That’s what this place is all about,” he said. “The magic of democracy.”
On and on it went: costumes, props, fake snow, ghosts. The canteen sold branded potions and the MPs had to sit with the tourists. It was all in the deal, he reminded them at every furious meeting. It was his magic text, his talisman. Not found that £22bn yet? Top hats it is, then. The tourists couldn’t get enough of it. The Merryman people stared at him with a mixture of delight and undisguised greed, like he was a cake full of money.
And now Keir was in his office, fuming again.
“What can I do for you today, Il Dottore?”
Keir frowned for a moment, wondered what he meant, pressed on. “This has got to stop, Wes. It has got to stop. They’re holding silent discos in the lobby when we’re trying to vote. They live stream me eating my lunch.”
“Ah, about that. The Merryman people have had a good idea. On their cruises they have a ‘Captain’s table’. They thought you could invite some of the clientele to lunch with you, every day?”
“Every d— No. Not at all.” Both men looked at the copy of the deal resting on the edge of Wes’s desk.
“I have been very patient,” Keir continued, still looking mournfully at the document, “with the wigs and quill pens and all that. I waved a promotional magic wand at the despatch box during PMQs. That is something I absolutely did not want or expect, but I accept the need for compromise against the fiscal position. But this is ludicrous. The whole Palace of Westminster is full of people who are only here to play games! To take part in rituals that don’t mean anything! They’re just cobbling together a corny, made-up version of Britain’s past that could never possibly have existed!”
Wes raised a single eyebrow and waited.
“No, Wes. This is different. Some of that may have gone on before, I’ll grant you. But that was centuries of protocol. That was real politics. This is a… a Punch and Judy show. This is a pantomime.”
“At last,” said Wes. “I think you’re starting to get it.” He tapped his iPad with his wand (Bluetooth-enabled, £34.99 from the Westminster Experience Grotto). Beyond the window, the new bells in the Elizabeth Tower began to play the chorus from Paul McCartney’s “Wonderful Christmastime”, and a fresh flurry of snow began to fall.
[Further reading: Nigel Farage’s American dream]
Content from our partners
Related
This article appears in the 12 Dec 2025 issue of the New Statesman, All Alone: Christmas Special 2025
Join the debate
Subscribe here to comment