Clifford, un-flappable as ever!
Dear reader, we’d like to say things were looking up for our heroes, but as fate would have it, they’re doing about as well at the UK post Brexit, or maybe a bit better as with their death sentence they at least know they’ll die a fast death rather than an agonisingly protracted slow one. And besides with an official Death Warrant, signed and authorised by Her Majesty the Queen, they knew that at last they were ‘people of significance’ and in that they were almost as famous as Julian and ‘Benny Boy’. This gave them a source of some reassurance, that in years to come, their unmarked grave sites will become an object of pilgrimage for those who wanted to pay homage to the last of the ‘ old Australians’ who still believed in equity, tax reform, a fair go, and a ciggy and beer during the footy. We return to our heroes, briefly soliloquising on life as Gina, Clifford and their side-kick Nev watch on from the shade of the verandah at Barnaby Downs.
For Valor… and a bit of vanity helps..
It was when Clifford returned to instruct them on their imminent execution that the reverie was broken.
‘Well then Cliffy you’ve done your work, I spose you’ll piss of back to Pommy-land, get a promotion and sort out some other poor bastard who’s gonna get slotted for making the ‘FIRM’ look shonky. You’d think after Prince Andrew you’d pretty well hit rock bottom, why can’t you go and chase real bad people, like Jimmy Saville of Rolf Harris or Boris or his side-kick Chris Arse- Pincher’?
Nev and Twig, ‘Mateship uber alles’!
‘And you!! Ces turned his invective to Nev, ‘look at you? You’ve been skewing energy policy for your rich mates for decades and now you’ve got your filthy mits on our execution. How does that make your feel? What dignity is there in that? Have you any moral fibre apart from naked self interest’?
Jamie proves that no matter how shonky the business is you can always prove the regulator WRONG!
Nev wouldn’t have a bar of it, as leader of the gas led recovery he just sneered, “Loser’ and followed Gina back into the shade of the veranda. We could hear the three of them Cliffy, Nev and Gina laughing about our fate over a daiquiri, and it seemed to us that we were just entertainment. ‘I spose’, said Terry; ‘if you’ve got that much money even execution gets to be a bit of a bore. This is probably the best time they’ve had in ages, like Jamie Packer fronting the Crown enquiry, they know that no matter what happens they’ll always emerge richer, unscathed and with power reinforced by suck- holes like’,…. Terry searched for a focus to his short soliloquy and sure enough he stood barely six feet in front of us; ‘Suck holes like you’!!
Brendan Nelson give a nervous flinch. He pretended not to hear as he was admiring the de Havilland dragon rapide and the Focker triplane, (on loan from the ‘AWM’s Glorious Demonstration of Valor in the Air Exhibition‘) and pretending to be dis-connected from the other rogues. ‘Well Brendan, is this all part of your sanitized version of Anzackery’?
‘Did Kerry have a hand in this as well?
Brendan turned to us, and with a conspiratorial wink, not a Tony Abbot wink, He smiled and said; ‘I’ve got it all sorted, Gina was just keeping up appearances, she wants a peerage and a seat in the Houser of Lords’.
‘Why would she want that’?
Well it’ll help her, she’s offered to help Prince Charles pay off his debt from one of his failed neo- Georgian housing estate projects and unlike the Saudi Prince who paid in Aldi bags he’ll accept Gina’s largesse with the ordination of ‘Lady Gina of Hampstead’ with just a suitcase of gold ingots’.
‘How many gold ingots does it take to get that much largesse?
Oh about fifty. Each one worth about half a million, and it way cheaper than going through Fergie, who has lost some of her cachet recently as the informal go- to for Windsor Inc. money laundering’
Too BIG to FAIL! Fer Chrissakes! He’s bigger a legend than Zach Rolfe!
‘But why you telling us this’? All of us felt tarnished , tainted by this admission that the Royals were in on ‘ the Game”! Windsor Inc just sounded cheap and low- rent. Almost as if the glorious house of Windsor was nothing more than a sham pawnbroker in Chapel Street. Nelson looked slightly embarrassed. ‘I’m telling you this because you’re more valuable to me alive, I need you to tell me what happened to Benny. I need to be sure he’s absolutely dead so I can proceed with one of my greatest projects.’
‘Greatest? So there’s more for you at the AWM’?
At that Brendan’s eyes lit up. ‘More, there’s a project bigger than Gallipoli, bigger than Singapore, Vietnam, even bigger than Afghanistan as another chapter of victory and valor, it’s the ‘Ben Roberts Smith interactive tour of duty exhibition’. It’ll tour across Australia, with a hologram of Ben recounting all his famous victories so that school kiddies and grown- ups alike will understand how war is always more important in the long run than diplomacy. And with Gina putting up the cash it’ll be bigger than Star Wars! But I’ve gotta prove that Benny is really dead, cos if he turns up out of the blue the entire project, my stake in it, and Gina’s peerage is rooted’.
The Windsor’s, always an eye to the main game!
Will this be the seventeenth chance, or will they still be ‘Harold Holted’? Find out in the next Royal Command episode, “A tiara in the sand’ or, ‘I was Prince Charles bag-man till I got the sack’.