War In The Cabinet

The unexpected surprise attack had flooded the country with a wave of fear. Demands were threatened, threats demanded, and a Minister of War appointed, whose first policy decision was to declare a state of open warfare with the offending nation. This was, the papers stated, exactly the kind of response the public had been crying out for, though the fact that the offending nation(s) had yet to be identified was something that needed immediate attention. Riding a wave of new found popularity, the PM appointed yet another cabinet minister, whose task it was to head the Office of Surprise Attack Detection; and deployed spies the world over to try and get to the bottom of who had been responsible for the explosion that had decimated a two-up-two-down in suburban Hull. Naturally, it was the French who were the first to suffer the scrutinising examination of Her Majesty's Secret Service, and when 5 spies vanished without a trace whilst tailing the French president through downtown Paris, fingers were pointed and missile hatches oiled. Denying responsibility was all well and good, the PM observed, but the fact remained that British spies had gone missing on French soil and if the slithy toads didn't produce double "Os" one through four ("nine" was seen as an acceptable loss) within the next 48 hours, swift and terrible vengeance would surely follow. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Surprise Attack Detection was doing a stand-up job. No attack had been made without them getting wind of it first, and civil servants began discovering the joys of a "sure thing" as they bet their mortgages on a car-bomb on the fifth at Doncaster.

When a British holiday maker was found dead in the water off the coast of Nice, the situation took a decidedly ugly turn. Desperate to avoid conflict, the French police insisted it had been natural causes, but the PM, to cheers and applause, insisted that two bullets in the back of the head was not, never was and never will be considered "natural". The discovery that the body had once been the property of a notorious drug smuggler sent a ripple of PR-panic through Whitehall, which transformed into a tsunami of pure terror when OO's 2 and 3 were found face down in a gutter in Amsterdam, a strain of an extremely toxic poison in their bloodstream. Carefully spinning it as dime-a-dozen drug-overdose, a vote-winning drive to raise narcotic awareness took the heat off No. 10 while the government continued to vilify the French, secretly adjusting their sights towards Holland. "Conclusive" evidence was discovered when photos of the two spies surfaced showing them being tortured and drugged for information. Proudly, the Cabinet released them, praising their heroes for their resilience in the face of suffering, and pledging to launch a relentless bombing campaign on the Dutch. Fortunately, the revelation that the images weren't depicting a torture session, but a Nazi fetish party came just in time to prevent the spies' posthumous knighthoods, but in terms of international relations the damage was permanent and the government bungle over the photographs developed into a very nasty headache as the papers and the people began to loose faith in their leaders abilities to deal with the anonymous - but no less real - threat.

Desperate to recapture some of the popularity that he had generated towards the start of the ordeal, the PM instructed the Minister of War to launch several small wars in impoverished, extremist countries. Promising the voters that this would root out the evil that had left citizens scared to leave their homes, the Minister of War, chest swelling with dignity, deployed troops into countries that had been chosen through the time-honored means of launching a dart at a globe. Even the initial praise that the Ministry of Surprise Attack Detection had enjoyed was starting to waver. With the bookies wise to the ruse, all bets involving terrorist activities were prohibited and the people, unable to profit from the department began seeing it for the first time through the cold, steely eyes of the taxpayer; and noticed flaws. While it was certainly true that the Ministry had succeeded insomuch as there had been no surprise attacks since it was formed, the general public couldn't help but question why this hadn't then led to all attacks being prevented. The observation was ruinous. In a hastily drafted speech, a nervous Minister for Surprise Attack Detection vehemently defended the work of his office, claiming that they had been instructed simply to detect surprise attacks (a task that had been routinely performed with success), but not to stop them. In a clever twist of logic, he also pointed out that once the attack had been foreseen, it ceased to be a "surprise" attack and as such extended beyond the responsibilities of his Ministerial duties. Seething, the public demanded action, if the MoSAD was not responsible for preventing un-surprise attacks, who the Hell was? The Cabinet the next morning was a sea of pointed fingers as the Minister of SAD sat calmly in his chair and lit his pipe, beaming. The Minister of Defence, whilst the obvious choice, removed himself from the proceedings, stating that he was already swamped enough with the attacks they already had to deal with, and that any more would bring them to their knees. The Foreign Secretary declared that it was the Home Office's job to take care of all events within the United Kingdom, while the Home Secretary furiously insisted that, as the attacks were coming from overseas, it was first and foremost the Foreign Office's responsibility. The Foreign Secretary retaliated, stating that no-one had a clue where the attacks were coming from, and the possibility that it was the work of terrorist forces within British Isles had yet to be disproved. For all anyone knew they could have been living here for years, they could even, he realised in a flash of inspiration, have been taught at our schools. Upon hearing this the Minister of Education, fearing the worst, struck out pre-emptively, insisting that no school under his charge was capable of teaching its pupils how to construct an explosive device of any kind, and that if the Foreign Secretary thought he could offload the burden with a cheap trick like that, he had another thing coming. A brief attempt to place it upon the shoulders of the Minister of Global Warming - on the basis that the attacks were destroying trees and therefore damaging the environment - was thwarted when it was pointed out that the welfare of vegetation was, strictly speaking, the business of Agriculture. Sensing an opportunity; the Cabinet rounded. Did the Minister of Agriculture not have a duty to British soil? Were the attacks not directly threatening that soil? Most importantly, could he find a loophole to wriggle out of? To these questions the Minister could only provide a weak, sickly smile; and the speech that he offered the expectant media outside Downing St. caused such confusion amongst journalists that no paper could bring itself to make it front-page news. Instead, they opted for the discovery of the missing spies, whose cover had been so deep that the MoD had lost track of them. However, the arrival of tractors into London along with a small army of farmers from East Anglia the next day did manage to crack the headlines. Not since the Home Guard had British Military looked so shambolic.

To the relief of the Minister of Agriculture, it took mere hours before the Prime Minister realised that a mistake had been made and it was not long before the Ministry of the Prevention of Discovered Surprise Attacks was created. In other circles, The Minister of War faced increasing criticism for his actions. To his name he had but a few small victories, each of them coloured by vast, devastating losses.