It’s debatable whether any of the other world leaders would have recognised her account of the G20, but as none of them were in the Commons the prime minister was free to make it up as she went along. “Once again we set the agenda,” she began, to loud laughs from the Labour benches. The Maybot looked hurt. The opposition could at least have given her a chance to say what she had set the agenda in. It had taken a lot of time and effort to organise the seating plan for dinner.
The summit had gone brilliantly. Far better than anyone could have expected. She had been the life and soul of the party and several people had said how much they were looking forward to seeing her again. Though not too soon, they hoped. Everyone had also agreed it would be a great idea if they could do a bit more trade with Britain if everything worked out OK. But if it didn’t, no worries.
Her success wasn’t greeted with quite the acclaim the Maybot had been expecting. Even her own backbenchers appeared indifferent. After all, when was the last time a world leader had said they weren’t interested in furthering trade ties with another country at a G20 summit? The whole point of these things was that very little should happen at them, so everyone could agree a bland communique. As long as no leader badly fell out with another then any G20 could be counted as a success.
Realising she was losing her audience, the Maybot was unable to prevent herself from defaulting to factory settings. “We are building a global economy that works for everyone … As we leave the EU we will be negotiating bold and ambitious trade deals … ” The familiar mindless slogans slipped off her tongue at random until her batteries ran down.
Jeremy Corbyn expressed surprise that she had found so much to do at the G20, given she had openly admitted she had run out of policy ideas at home and had asked the Labour party for input. Several Tories winced at that. The Maybot’s desperate appeal to the opposition to prop up her government hasn’t been well received in many Conservative quarters.
The Labour leader then tried to pin her down on some details. Just what sort of trade deals did she think she was going to do with the US? Not least because several countries appeared to have come away from the G20 thinking they were Donald Trump’s newest best friend and were top of his birthday invitation list. The Maybot made a note not to answer those particular questions.
While Corbyn was on the subject of Trump, he wondered just how hard she had tried to get him to change his mind about withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement. The Maybot wasn’t going to take any more of this. “We have a strong record on climate change,” she said. Andrea Leadsom nodded her head vigorously, though no one knew why – when she became environment secretary she didn’t even know if climate change was real. We never did get to find out what the Maybot had or hadn’t said to Trump. Perhaps she had just muttered something under her breath.
The more loyal Tories used the time to read out the scripts handed out by the whips on how brilliant the prime minister had been on modern slavery – it was the first inkling that the G20 had actually spent time discussing this at the weekend. Labour MPs were more interested in trying to ascertain the government’s position on Euratom. The Maybot had that covered. We would be both in it and not in it at the same time, and we would be bound by the European court of justice provided the EU did away with the word European. Simples.
It was left to Labour’s Chris Bryant to ask the one thing everyone wanted to know. How was it that Ivanka Trump had managed to wangle a seat at the G20? Was it true she was a great deal brighter than her dad and had she had work done? Not for the first time, the Maybot missed the gag and chose to take the question seriously. It had been utterly appropriate for Ivanka to take her father’s place because the G20 had been discussing her pet subject only that morning. Pet subject as in Take Your Daughter to Work Day.
Bryant sniggered and the Maybot was quick to remind him she had been in Hamburg and he hadn’t. What was left unsaid was that she almost certainly wouldn’t be at the next G20.
