Steaming

If revenge is best tasted cold, then we could be tapping our fingers for quite awhile. Ian has provided precisely the evidence I never wanted to see. It would be enough to save me from a murder charge in a French court but The Telegraph may yet assassinate Nick first, by publishing evidence of his creative accounting. We’ll see. It seems entirely possible that Nick could meet a sticky end before angry dupes like me eviscerate him. And I can’t quite decide how to handle any of this. Should I ambush him? Am I strong enough? Bad enough to confront him with his duplicity, but how much worse if I cried or whined or showed any weakness.

You know what makes me incandescent with rage? If I were to the catch him in his office now, to lay out the photos that so clearly betray his betrayal, with not just one but two other women, he’d almost certainly brush my accusations aside. After all, he’s the victim at the moment, the leader Britain hasn’t yet had, his final moves towards his vocation interrupted by a silly Westerminster kerfuffle over expenses. The last thing he needs is me.

Which is ironic, because I need him. Still.

Help me

There’s no point in pretending to normalcy, in eating or drinking or having conversations. This morning I went to work and sat at my desk and focused on the matter in hand: how to change his mind, rewind, reset. I remembered what a friend told me about his long-suffering mum, who effectively put her philandering husband under house arrest by informing the health authorities that he may have contracted a notifiable disease. I wondered if I could use the same trick on Nick by claiming exposure to swine flu, and checked on the internet to see if my holiday resort had been afflicted. No such luck. Then I considered staging an accident at work. It would have to hospitalise me, be pretty scary. He’s made the decision about terminating the relationship, it’s in his gift, so he hasn’t in any way confronted the reality of losing me. I need him to understand, viscerally, what life without me would be like. 

For the moment it’s so easy for Nick. Every government department is in chaos, ministers are openly plotting. After Smeargate and a budget that even Gordon’s cheerleaders find hard to spin, Gordon is toast. So open is the disrespect that one of his own cadre sent Nick a musical mashup of the PM’s YouTube video on MPs’ expenses. Rats deserting a sinking ship, and their instinct is to head for the apparently unsinkable Nick.

With all this going on, politics, Nick’s great passion apart from passion, is keeping him fully occupied. He’s even been doing the media rounds, smooth as ever. I have to jolt him out of this. I have to find a way to make him stop, take stock, feel. 

For the moment I’m doing all the feeling for both of us, and it’s literally killing me. Even so, I have given up drink. I will not text Nick or importune or do anything that gives him reassurance that he can come back to me at any time. This is a time for superhuman strength. I am tough enough for both of us. I will rescue our love, by whatever means necessary. Nick, I am doing this for you.

Parallel universes

In the end, it wasn’t hard to get into the spirit of the day. The man really has something special. That speech was beautifully pitched, not too grim but not fatuously cheery either, and it was great to hear him skewer the previous administration so elegantly. I don’t think Bush even knew he’d sustained a wound, much less a mortal one.

So I’m braced to stand my ground against the cynics and the dinner-party bullies of London who have already proclaimed the Obama project doomed. But there’s one dirty little secret I’ll keep to myself: I’m succumbing to the Michelle O phenomenon. Certainly I’d kill for her cast-offs, although they’d swamp me. Lucky Michelle. I wish I had “back” like that.

How sad and bedraggled do our politicians look compared to the new Camelot? That business with MPs’ expenses was unbelievable. How does Gordon so unerringly aim his rifle at Dave and shoot himself in the goolies?