‘Shabby!’
Myself, my assistant Miss Blod, and a diminutive figure in Muslim dress, who has just revealed her face with a swipe of a delicate brown arm, are at the bottom of the fire stairs at Number 10 North, beside an alarmed emergency exit.
Miss Blod and I have blagged our way into — and out of — a meeting of the surreptitious Group of Sixteen, who plot an ongoing propaganda war against the British people in general and Reform UK in particular. Mr Burnham was in attendance.
A gentleman feels obliged to make the introductions. ‘Miss Blod, this is an old acquaintance of mine, Ms Shabana Mahmood—erm, the Home Secretary. Shabbs, this is my assistant, Miss Blod.’
I felt an explanation was in order. ‘Miss Shabana and I fell into each other’s arms many moons ago, as the Khyber Mail wound its way through one starry monsoon night. We were young.
‘Earlier that day, a rotter called Mr Tiger Guju fenced me a ticket for the ever-oversubscribed Mail, which found me marooned in single ladies’ sleeping, second class.
‘Not to worry. The rhythmic rattle of the carriages worked its magic, as did the crescent moon and the thin air of the high plateau. The spell having been cast, eyes met, followed by lips, then hearts.’
I cast a glance towards the Home Secretary who, even by the standards of a native of the subcontinent marooned in Manchester on a rainy day, had gone a funny colour.
‘WRONG GIRL, WORTH!!’
Oops.
‘We met at an embassy bash in Riyadh, when Mr Worth was a thinly disguised member of Mrs Thatcher’s Camel Corps, uselessly engaged in trying to con something for nothing out of the Gulfies.’
‘Bit harsh, Shabby.’
‘Daddy was an engineer in Saudi at the time, saving up to buy a corner shop in Handsworth.’
‘One gets mixed up,’ I interjected.
‘Mr Worth’s companion in those days was a chubby Arab girl with a bit of a moustache.’
It was my turn to correct. Although I lost touch with my old intern many years ago, once an Arabist, always an Arabist. One keeps one’s ear to the sand via the English-language print edition of the Al Jazeera Tatler, edited by a chap I went to school with.
‘Fatty? Now Princess Fatima al something al something ben something or other. She married well.’
Miss Shabanna turned that funny colour again and put on her don’t-mention-marriage cross girl’s face.
‘Anyway, how’s the constituency?’
‘Bins haven’t been emptied for a year. Jews are banned from football matches. Place is bankrupt. Bit of a home from home.’
I explained to Miss Blod that Miss Shabana was from Mirpur, in the same way Miss Blod was from a gypsy camp twelve miles and eight chains closer to an unfashionable part of the Black Sea than Blod Junction. Neither of them looked happy at the revelation.
‘Don’t mention the M word,’ snarled the Home Secretary.
‘Marriage?’ I replied, digging myself in a bit deeper.
‘Mirpur. If anyone asks, tell them I’m from outer South Rawalpindi.’
Strange creatures, females.
Miss Blod cut to the current predicament, asking if we might be let out through the alarmed fire doors so that we could make our escape.
The Home Secretary retorted that she shouldn’t, as she was pretty sure we weren’t supposed to be there. It was all beginning to look a bit like compromised hush-hush.
Miss Blod played a trump card, which, in abbreviated form, amounted to: You’re supposed to be in charge of security, dear. If this is a giant security breach, you’ll get the blame, love.
Miss Mahmood huffed.
‘Wouldn’t you rather stay for the rest of the session? We’re up to making factoids. Did you know that, so far today, there’s been a month’s rain in a day?’
I looked outside at the light Manchester drizzle.
‘Sure about that, Shabbers?’
‘Absolutely. Some months there isn’t any rain at all. QED.’
And on to the morphing of factoids, she continued. After a useful few degrees of repetition, by word of mouth or within a media bubble, the fourth-warmest February morning in a remote Spanish region becomes the world’s hottest day ever.
‘It’s called information serialisation. Media incentives meet cognitive biases. Number Nine is going to explain it all. Then it’s my turn — the National Crime Agency’s access to bank accounts weaponised. Supposedly it’s to counter money laundering and organised crime, but my Home Office uses it for a fishing trip against Farage and Reform; then the contractors write it up and pass it to Rupert for a Times byline.’
‘Shabby, please. Is that cricket?’
‘When the Guardian had the contract, it was all racism and Nazis, which nobody took any notice of. Now it’s fiddling the finance. Not going to lie, I think that’s why Mr Burnham’s poll ratings are up to..’, she took a deep breath,’… 25%.’
I imagined a big motivational poster in a perception-management office in Islington: a picture of a smirking Farage, pint in one hand and fag in the other, captioned:
‘Remember, guys: he’s working for himself at public expense. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.’
‘I suppose you’re Number One in all of this, Shab?’
‘If only,’ she replied.
Far from being Number One in the Group of Sixteen, she wasn’t even Number One in her own house.
Out came the sob story. She’d only been elected because she was the acceptable optic for the Mirpur mafia in Birmingham Ladywood. Her father and brothers pull all the constituency strings. And as for her cousins? Ouch.
She was only Home Secretary because she was brown, female and Muslim, and the Labour government needed to pretend it was being strict on immigration.
Even so, everybody hated her. The small half of her constituency voted for the Jihadi, the big half voted for Miss Shabana only because they expected free money.
She began to sob.
She got no sympathy from Miss Blod, nor much attention, as my assistant seemed distracted by something in the stairwell.
‘Please, Worth,’ the Home Secretary continued, ‘come back upstairs and listen to the rest of the presentations. Letting two rogue interlopers from the Department of Departmental Affairs out through the fire doors of Number Ten North would be the end.
‘They’d send me back to the squalor. To the rubbish-strewn streets. To all the poor and the homeless. Back to the Third World. Back to…’ she gagged on the word. ‘…Birmingham.
‘I can’t face it, Worth. A spinster can only put up with so much. All I want is to marry and have a nice little family — six boys and six girls — but the clan, the comrades and Number One won’t let me until I deliver a death blow to Reform.’
She became desperate, grabbing me by the lapels and looking into my eyes through smeared make-up and tear-stains.
‘Please, Worth. Follow me up the stairs. I promise, I promise…’ She paused and gulped, before whispering, ‘Speaking of spinsters, I promise you’ll find out all about Widders.’
But it was too late. Amid the girlie hysterics — were they just a distraction all along? — I’d missed another set of footsteps. An interloper stood above us, three steps up. It was the mascara-ed one.
Jet-black hair and eyebrows. Black jacket and T-shirt. He looked me straight in the eye and, in his fake Liverpool-Cheshire-Oxbridge-Manchester-Westminster accent, uttered the chilling welcome:
‘So… Mr Worth-Saying, lad. We meet at last. I have to say, you know, not going to fib, I’ve been expecting you.’
To be continued…
© Always Worth Saying 2026
