By Anton martin Smith antonmartinsmithwrites@gmail.com

(Episode 1. )

A leopard can’t change its spots & a steaming turd like Mayor Twotimer can’t change his flies either – a line overheard from the banter exchanged by labourers in an inner city London building site.

London England 2038 AD POP 17 Million.

Under the seemingly incompetent yet perversely-still-in-power Mayor of London – Harrison Arnold Harrison Twotimer – London has gone from a metropolis mostly on the go to a definite sad tale of woe. Upon Twotimer taking office, London was the first Western country to descend into a poverty stricken, knife crime infused Third world hellhole. Now eleven years into his Mayoralty things have somehow somewhat improved. Temporarily? Permanently? Who yet could tell?. Yes London was & still is, for the most part still full of mean dispirited losers – but the old litany of weekly crisis have suddenly stopped. The everyday London losers (i.e almost everybody in London in AD 2038) are either in the eye of a storm, or some quasi half-pie would-be-paradise.

The most optimistic Londoners are waxing lyrical about a ‘return to the halcyon days of Empire’ – where London was the centre of the World. These wags of course are the most delusional of the clueless inherited wealthy, rose tinted glasses set. But there has indeed been a marked difference in London over the last three years. People have noticed that all of Mayor Twotimers usual typical blunders are now seemingly being reversed from the typical train wrecks they very well ought to be. It is as if there is now a shadow Mayor of London fixing Twotimers massive fuck-ups in expert, clandestine, last nano-second fashion. It’s like a political Superman is swooping in (from the planet Krapton?). With this sudden about face in London’s fortunes, all Londoner’s tongues are all wagging furiously and all agree that the steaming turd of a leader that is Arthur Harrison Twotimer cannot be he who has revived London from a total abject through-and-through shit-hole to a shit-hole-that-is-maybe-on-the-up. This is indeed the case – for it is not him turning grime into gems, it is another man entirely.

Arthur B. Pertwee was a great man. His service to the pale greater spotted grub was something many Etymologists would have been proud of. The problem was that Arthur B. Perwee wasn’t an Etymologist – he worked in Politics. He was the PA to the Wartime Prime Minister – one Harrison Arnold Twotimer. His nickname was “The Grub”. Grub by name, grub by nature. But Arthur served the bastard with aplomb. For that is the nature of Politics. You serve the ones you hate most, while denouncing the opposition, who you only hate half as much.

Twotimer was one of those fools who somehow get foistered into power, in moments when voters’ minds are an equal mixture of disarray, fear, mistrust, & stupidity. He was indeed a useless man, in all practical senses, but he was also a terrible thinker. His biggest accomplishment was that he knew all of his faults, & he played up to them. He also had one trump card – his shrewdness.

Twotimer decided early in his political life that he would court only the biggest losers in society. Using this strategy, he would gain power in a succession of easy victories & eventually be handed the Mayoralty of London on a plate during the fog-of-war of a foreign crisis. His appeal to all of England’s anti-winners was, and has been a masterful winning strategy given the socio-political conditions of the last few decades.

With the traditional never-ending supply of mean spirited backstabby losers in England, coupled with the fact that over the last thirty years a virulent mind virus had broken out, this has meant the numbers of abject forever losers had been rising exponentially for an entire generation. Over the last three decades Twotimer has had them all hanging on his every word, or more truthfully hanging on every empty platitude. He had the losers (he even called them this in private) in the palm of his hands, & he has had their votes stuffed into his many overfilling ballot boxes.

Twotimers ascent to power, & his perch an the top of the mountain of London Politics, was & has been in equal measures both brilliant & utterly disgusting. Twotimer’s success has been brilliant in the a Machiavellian sense – he gained power by whatever underhand means necessary; it was & has been disgusting, in that he was a leader of London, who had actively & knowingly chosen to bottom trawl the worst of the negative aspects of humanity for his own personal gain, and to their own detriment. To call Harrison Arnold Twotimer a bastard would be like calling a blue steak a well done steak. It would be undercooking it in the extreme. There is excrement on many a shoe that if it became sentient overnight, would refuse to have anything to do with Harrison Arnold Twotimer, long term Mayor of London.

Thankfully for England, by some cosmic force – or perhaps it was God – had arranged that Arthur B. Pertwee would be his long-term PA, his personal assistant. This would be the man who was initially invisible everyone, but in the future would be known humorously as, but also reverently as, The saviour of England, the Pertwee we all needed.

This is not just the story of how the brits were led up the garden path by a useless power crazed snob, & then along came a smarter guy who saved us all. That is a gross over-simplification. This is the story of how Harrison Arnold Twotimer led all of England down the garden path to within a hair’s breadth of its totalised destruction, and how Arthur B. Pertwee had predicted the actual time-bomb at the end of Twotimer’s garden path, quietly defused it with ease, & then as if that wasn’t enough – he then planted an actual King’s garden where the void was – all while the embattled but very loser-fied Englanders were all totally unawares of Pertwee’s back of office angelic touch. It is quite the story. Let me begin………(End of Episode one)……