MONDAY
I’m just inside the front door, tapping my fingernails on my heavy Kevlar vest. I have camouflage paint across my face and night-vision goggles resting on my forehead. I have a Mace spray and a rape alarm in one hand and my keys, bunched into a knuckleduster, in the other.
“That gun,” I say to my senior protection officer. “It is loaded?” “Yes, ma’am,” he says, and he makes it click. “And you,” I say to my junior protection officer. “You have a gun, too?” She pats the bulge on her hip. “For God’s sake,” says my husband, into whose hand I have pressed a large meat cleaver. “Get on with it.” “Right,” I say, and take a deep breath. And I open the front door and take out the bin bags. Pah! Afraid to go out at night, indeed.
TUESDAY
My colleague Jack Straw calls early in the morning. He’s Justice Secretary and I’m Home Secretary, so we have to work together pretty closely. There’s a lot of trust.
Advertisement
“Hello, Jacqui!” he says over the sounds of sirens, helicopters and screeching brakes. He’s calling to say that, what with the world being particularly scary today, I needn’t go on the Today programme to talk about stop and search. He’ll do it.
“Gosh,” I say. “That’s very kind of you. It certainly sounds terrifying out there. Was that . . . an explosion? And . . . a machinegun? All that shouting! In . . . American accents? What is that man saying? A nuclear bomb? In Los Angeles? Jack? Are you . . . holding up the telephone to the television?” Jack tells me not to be ridiculous and hangs up. Although, just before he does, I’m sure I hear Kiefer Sutherland tell him that this is the longest day of his life.
WEDNESDAY
Jack has been very kind to me this past week. After I said that I was afraid to walk down a road alone at night, most people queued up to mock me. Not him. He said I was absolutely right. He keeps telling me stories about people who were murdered by strangers for no reason at all. Buying kebabs, walking from the bus stop, even in the office. And sometimes at night, when I can’t sleep, he’ll phone up and tell me about people who were murdered in their beds. He’s a real friend.
THURSDAY
Advertisement
I put myself in considerable danger while leaving the house. There was a little girl in the front garden next door, playing with a bouncy ball. I think she might have had a knife.
FRIDAY
Bumped into Jack in the Commons. “Morning,” he said, sounding annoyed. “Sleep well? Not kept up all night by the marauding gangs of feral youths that are a particular problem in your area?”
“Not at all!” I told him. “Anyway, I’m safe in Westminster now.” Jack agreed that I had nothing to worry about here. So he’d have been just as shocked as me when, ten minutes later, a figure burst into my office wearing a mask like in the film Scream and wielding a huge axe! I ran to his office to tell him, but for some reason he wasn’t there.