The little things that will show Putin who he’s up against
Our country is walking a tightrope. On the one hand, we want to show Russia that the British are not a people to trifle with. On the other, we don’t want war. What we need, therefore, is a series of subtle but effective countermeasures that will demonstrate to Putin that Britain means business – without recourse to military action.
The balance is difficult to strike, but after in-depth consultation with leading intelligence experts, I believe I’ve managed it.
I propose the following:
Hide every single one of the Kremlin’s pens, so that Putin can never find one when he’s on the phone.
Every time he orders himself something nice from Amazon, post a “Sorry, You Were Out” Royal Mail notice through his letterbox, even though he’s taken the whole day off work to receive the parcel.
Replace all his shirts with ones that are the next size down, so that he thinks he’s put on weight.
Use up all of his milk from the Kremlin fridge, even though he’s stuck a Post-it note on the bottle in big capital letters saying “PRESIDENT PUTIN’S MILK, GET YOUR OWN”.
Edit his Wikipedia entry so that everyone in the world becomes convinced that his middle name is Marjorie.
Send him an anonymous email revealing the big plot twist in Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, just as he’s about to read it.
Flip his loo roll round, so that if he normally pulls the paper down, it’s up, and if he normally pulls it up, it’s down.
Delete his series link to Mcmafia, which he’s been looking forward to bingewatching this weekend, and replace it with 200 episodes of Loose Women.
Change his ringtone to It’s Raining Men by The Weather Girls, then phone him in the middle of his annual televised media conference.
When he is waiting in the “10 Items or Less” queue at M&S during his lunch hour, stand in front of him holding a basket that clearly contains at least 15 items.
Whenever he is in a hurry to catch a train, walk slowly in front of him, all the way through the station, pulling a massive wheeled suitcase.
Tear out the last 10 pages of his copy of the latest Harlan Coben, so that he doesn’t know how it ends.
While he is asleep, scatter his bedroom floor with pieces of Lego, so that when he gets up in the night to go to the lavatory he stands on them barefoot.
Post him an envelope filled with glitter, so that when he opens it, it spills all over his hands and suit, and then it gets on to his face as well, and he can’t get it off, and he has to spend the whole day looking as if he’s just come from a 10-year-old girl’s birthday party.
Get Gavin Williamson to send him 30 emails a day requesting to add him to his professional network on Linkedin.
Follow these simple steps and Mr Putin will soon see exactly the kind of people he’s dealing with. A relief to hear that the 1p and 2p coins won’t be scrapped. Not that they aren’t a nuisance. On top of our bookshelves I have whole mugs of the things, which I can never quite bring myself to count, scoop into bags, and convert into about £4 at the bank.
Coppers do have one vital use, though. Without them, we could no longer play the 2p machines at seaside arcades.
I love those machines. An hour can drift happily by as you feed in coin after near-worthless coin, in the hope of winning a Simpsons keyring or a Star Wars eraser. And all around, the merrily hissing jingles of the arcade games, and the tirelessly beckoning lights of the fruit machines, orange and yellow and red, flashing away all night like a miniature Tokyo.
But I never play the arcade games or fruit machines. Only the 2p machines. That’s the way to gamble: the stakes are so low that you don’t become addicted, and lose very little. By the time you’ve had enough and decide to go for an ice cream, you might walk away, say, £3 down.
Without 2p coins, I’d have to play the 10p machines. But I wouldn’t. Instead of 50 goes for a pound, only 10. What a rip-off. No point.
Remove our coppers, Chancellor, and you kill an old and tiny pleasure. No doubt who wears the trousers in our house. It’s not me. But it’s not my wife, either. It’s our son, who recently turned four years old.
He barks commands at us like a two-foot-tall general. And not just during the day, but during the night. At 2am we’ll be woken by a bellow from the next room of “MY LEGS ARE TOO WARM!” or “PULL MY DUVET UP!” or, if he’s got a cold, “TISSUE!”
He refuses to tidy away his Duplo or his Transformers or his cars (“No, Dada, you have to do it! I’m tired!”), and when he’s on the sofa watching TV he intermittently shouts “WARM MILK!” or “COLD MILK!” or “SANDWICH WITH CHEESE AND BUTTER ON IT!” Remind him to say “the magic word” and he’ll shout “PLEASE!” in a way that makes it sound like a term of personal abuse.
Yet the curious thing is, he’s only like that with us. In the presence of every other grown-up he acts like the most blameless little waif since Oliver Twist. At nursery, to our mystification, the staff regularly award him stickers for his enthusiasm for tidying up. And something even odder happened last Saturday. My parents were to babysit him while my wife and I went out for the evening. As we were about to leave, I was confronted by the startling and entirely unprecedented vision of our son tottering from the kitchen to the dining table armed with a little stack of plates.
“Did you see that?” I hissed to my wife. “He’s actually laying the table for them!”
God knows what he got up to while we were out. He probably did the washing-up and then polished their shoes for the morning.