Barney Thomson & The Westminster Christmas Massacre - Episode 2

by Douglas Lindsay - 10:33 on 02 December 2009

 The story so far: 

Barney Thomson, renegade barbershop legend, has been summoned to London to cut the Prime Minister’s hair. Meanwhile, an old MP, caught up in the expenses scandal, is planning to take a horrible and bloody revenge on the rest of parliament...

0857hrs  London, England

The Prime Minister was sitting in his chair, head bowed, the Financial Times in his lap. However, the FT was only there as cover, in case someone should walk in, and he was currently reading Kinky Sex Shock For Pete in the Daily Star, shaking his head and muttering sadly about how he wished he could get that much publicity.

As he heard the door open he quickly folded the FT and tossed it dismissively onto the floor.

‘Bleacher!’ he barked at the two men who had just entered, ‘I have to be out of here in fifteen minutes. Where’s the ruddy barber?’

‘We’ve got confirmation, Prime Minister, that the five sailors have been released by Iran,’ said Bleacher.

Barney Thomson stood idly by, looking at the paintings on the wall, and was struck by the large portrait of Margaret Thatcher which hung behind the PM’s desk.

The PM sighed heavily and nodded.

‘Well,’ he muttered, lest a positive word ever leave his lips in truth, ‘I hope the Foreign Secretary’s not going to take all the credit.’

He glanced harshly at Bleacher, who decided to move the conversation on and indicated the man standing next to him.

‘This is Barney Thomson, Prime Minister, he’s agreed to take on your hair.’

The PM glared round at him, grunted again, and sat back in his chair.

‘I don’t actually think you had a choice,’ he said to Barney, as Barney approached.

Barney Thomson stood behind the Prime Minister and looked down at his thick head of hair. From where he was standing, he could see what the Labour backbenchers in the Commons could see; that it was starting to thin, and the cover-up involved some amount of legerdemain.

‘Blair said you won him the last election,’ said the PM abruptly. Barney raised an eyebrow. ‘Not that you could believe anything he said,’ added the PM darkly, then he barked out a laugh.

Barney glanced at Bleacher who had his head buried in the day’s programme.

‘What would you like?’ asked Barney, turning back to the head of hair before him. He felt jaded already. Missed the island and the smell of the sea, the cry of the gulls. After his previous trip to London, he would have been happy never to return. Some strange sense of duty had made him answer the Prime Minister’s call.

‘I want a cut that makes me look wise and aged, yet youthful and in touch with young voters. I want to look sage and statesmanlike. I want to look like a king, but, you know, a king that you’d vote for. I want to be someone the voters can respect, someone they can trust. I want to be a combination of Churchill, Obama, Bob Dylan and Alan Hansen. I want to be all things to all people. I want to stand before the British People, with the finest hair that any man has ever seen, and say boldly to them, Follow me, and I shall lead you to the new Jerusalem.’

Barney stood looking at the head of hair before him.

‘Can you do that for me, Mr Thomson?’ asked the PM.

‘Sure,’ said Barney. ‘Just give me five minutes.’

1302hrs   House of Commons London, England

Prime Minister’s Questions, the highlight of any week in the Commons. There was a time, before the microphones and television cameras were allowed into the building, when people had thought of PMQs as a serious affair, where important questions were asked and answered. The modern era has revealed that generally proceedings start with a rousing exclamation of My cock is bigger than your cock! and very quickly descend into name calling and handbags at five paces.

As he sat a few feet across the chamber, the Leader Of the Opposition was troubled. He could tell that there was something different about the Prime Minister, yet he couldn’t quite work out what it was. The PM had his usual lugubrious yet smug look on his face; he hadn’t plucked his eyebrows, and probably never would again after the “Carla Bruni” incident; there was just something about him. Suddenly, rather than a sepulchral Scotsman who constantly looked on the verge of telling you that the world was about to end, and that he personally could take all the credit for it, he now had a certain air about him.

The Leader Of the Opposition leant over to the Shadow Foreign Secretary, while the PM answered an absurdly obsequious question from his own benches.

‘There’s something different about him,’ he said. ‘What is it?’

‘Not sure,’ replied his colleague. ‘Suddenly he’s like a cross between Churchill, Obama and... I don’t know...’

‘Bob Dylan and Alan Hansen?’

‘Yes, absolutely.’

‘The Right Honourable, Leader Of the Opposition,’ announced the Speaker from the chair, and the LOO looked slightly startled and rose to his feet.

For a few moments he stared at the PM, still hypnotised by the change in the man. As the murmurs grew around the chamber, he finally found his voice.

‘As a previous Home Secretary in this Labour government once famously remarked, his department was not fit to pish in. Is it not time that the Prime Minister admitted that his entire government is not fit to pish in?’

He sat down again to robust cheers from his side, and boos and raspberries and a flying egg from the government benches.

The Prime Minister rose to his feet, looking imperious, feeling fantastic, with the hair of the Gods on his head, great words of state on his lips, ready to crush the LOO with his astonishing rhetoric.

‘I think the Leader Of the Opposition knows,’ he said, turning to take in the adoring looks of his own party, ‘that the only pish around here, is his pish!’

Doesn’t take much to raise a cheer in the House of Commons.



The PM slapped Barney Thomson robustly on the back, then clapped his hands together and rubbed them heartily. Turned and faced the room. He didn’t quite stand with his hands on his hips to address the crowd, but he wasn’t far off. He had been followed in by Bleacher, the cabinet secretary and his diary secretary.

‘Did you see that?’ he said. ‘Did you see that? I crushed him. In my iron fist. He was like Plastecine and I was, I don’t know, God or something. Ball-breakingly good, and it’s all thanks to this man.’

He gestured emphatically towards Barney, while Barney looked at the others with a degree of scepticism.

‘You could just see them all looking, see it in their eyes. What is it about him, they were asking. But they felt it, they felt the ruddy Force.’

‘Prime Minister,’ said Bleacher, when he was finally able to interject.

‘What?’

‘We need to talk about Copenhagen.’

The air seeped out of the PM’s puffed up chest. He breathed a long sigh, which sounded heavy and unattractive.

‘God, all right. But look, I’m going to have a wee something to celebrate. Tell you what. Lucy, can you get that thing I was given in Port of Spain last week. Rum, I think. I think it was rum. Should be a bit different. Join me Barney Thomson?’

Barney lowered himself into a seat and shook his head.

‘Suit yourself. Bleacher, give me the one-page and I’ll have a quick look, then we can talk.’

The room settled down. Barney wondered what his position was going to be. Would he just be attending to the PM’s hair, or would he be advising on government policy? If it was the latter, he had a thing or two to say about Afghanistan.

Lucy returned with the rather plain bottle of rum and poured the Prime Minister a glass. The PM raised it to the room, and smiled broadly. ‘This is going to be magnificent,’ he said, and no one was quite sure whether he was talking about the drink, his hair, the forthcoming election, or the prospect of the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica melting and everybody drowning.

1843hrs London, England

It was almost time to do the deed. Sir Leon Worthington-Worthington had no qualms, indeed had barely given the matter a second thought. The afternoon in the Commons had only cemented his desire. More grumbling about expenses, more hollow words from hollow people too quick to bow down to the media. As if they owed the tax dodging newspaper owners, and expenses-grabbing journalists any apology.

The natural order of things was being turned on its head; and while even Sir Leon expected that eventually everything would return to money-grabbing normal - if not quite with the alacrity with which the banks had managed to pull it off - when it happened it would be too late for him.

He had briefly contemplated taking some of his fellow MPs down with him in the expenses scandal, but a decent lawyer here and a helpful bribe there, an old school network in the right position, and they’d get away with it.

However, none of these escape routes were for him. He was the poster child of the expenses abomination, and the system had already decided that he was the one who was going to be buried up to his neck in the desert with his eyelids sliced off, food for the ants and the camel spiders.

So he had decided that newspaper headlines weren’t going to be good enough for the rest of them. Blood had to be spilled.

There was a knock at the door. Sir Leon looked up sharply, quickly placing a file over the knife with the eight inch blade, which had been lying quite openly on his desk. The knife with which he intended going about his dastardly and murderous business.

‘Yes?’ he said. The door opened and a man he did not recognise entered, closing the door behind him.

‘Sir Leon,’ said the man. ‘I’m glad you’re still here. My name’s Trelawny, I’m with the PM’s office.’

‘Haven’t heard your name before,’ said Worthington-Worthington warily.

‘I’m new. We’re setting up a new climate change task force.’

‘Not another one. Bloody hell.’

Trelawny smiled. ‘Yes, I know what you mean. What are you hiding under the file?’ he added abruptly.

Worthington-Worthington’s back stiffened. He hadn’t fought in India and Burma, and served his country for over seventy years so that some young over-paid idiot from Number 10’s office could come in and ruin his plan even before it had started.

‘You’re not fiddling your expenses again, are you, you old goat?’ said Trelawny, a wicked smile on his face.

Worthington-Worthington spluttered in indignation, some spit dribbled from his aging lips and came to rest on his chin.

‘Look here!’ he barked.

‘I am looking here,’ said Trelawny. ‘And I’m curious what it is you’re hiding under that there folder.’

Worthington-Worthington hauled himself unsteadily to his feet.

‘This is extraordinary,’ he said, using the favourite adjective of the well-heeled.

‘No, said Trelawny glibly, pointing out the window, ‘that’s extraordinary.’

Worthington-Worthington, falling for the oldest trick in the book, turned and looked out at the featureless, dark night sky. Trelawny quickly moved forward, lifted the folder and, with his eyes lighting up, picked up the knife.

His smile broadened.

‘This is an outrage!’ barked Worthington-Worthington. ‘I’m calling Margaret.’

Trelawny took a step back and laid the knife on the desk; although he kept his fingers resting lightly upon it.

‘Go on, then, Sir Leon, pick up the phone.’

The old man stared at the phone. They both knew he wasn’t going to do it. Suddenly, and desperately, Worthington-Worthington saw his life collapsing even more quickly than he’d imagined. Ruin and shame were to come much more precipitously than he’d ever thought.

‘What do you want?’ he said quietly, slumping back down into his chair.

It seemed obvious what Number 10’s office would want. He had to be out of there, office and everything else vacated by the end of the day, more than likely. It had been coming to this, and now he had failed in his extraordinary plan to equalize before they’d scored.

‘Nothing,’ said Trelawny.

Worthington-Worthington looked up in surprise.

‘What?’ he said.

As last words go it was pretty poor.

Trelawny grabbed the knife, and with one athletic movement had jumped up onto the desk. Worthington-Worthington looked up in horror, but had neither the time nor the wit to shout anything. And then Trelawny brought the knife sweeping down, and with one swishing movement, he sliced Worthington-Worthington’s neck, and blood shot out from the severed artery.

Trelawny leapt out of the way of the pulsing blood, and hopped gently down onto the floor. He looked down at the slumped head of the dead Sir Leon Worthington-Worthington, and then casually dropped the knife on the carpet and turned and walked slowly from his office.

Worthington-Worthington had planned a grand massacre of MP’s, and that massacre had begun. Sadly, for the pusillanimous and corrupt knight, he had become the first victim, rather than the perpetrator...

Next exciting episode: Thursday 3rd December 2009

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