The Bleak Midwinter Messages: a Conservative ghost story for Christmas | Stewart Lee

“Gentlemen,” began the Baron to his two companions, faces flickering in the guttering coals, “I beg your indulgence on a very peculiar matter, and I would ask you not to mock me, nor worse, to think me quite mad, until you have considered fully the whole of my sorry tale. For if what I am about to say is true, then I am of the mind that it has the capacity to be the ruination of all of us.”

It was the evening of the winter solstice, and time once more for the quarterly meeting of three somewhat awkward acquaintances, bound by shared shame to a secrecy they regularly reassembled to reaffirm. Before falling upwards, as men of his birth do, their host Lord James, the 5th Baron of his line, had managed a nightspot in the stews south of the river named the Ministry of Sound, in a foreshadowing of his belatedly discovered vocation. For during the Great Pandemic, the Baron was to be appointed minister for a short-lived medical novelty called Test and Trace, by the then prime minister, Letterbox Turds of Brightwell-cum-Sotwell, himself also present, tousled-haired and trousers stained as usual.

But that night the harsh winter cold bit into baronial bones, as frostily it would into peasant flesh, and as he poked the dying embers, the Baron knew what had to be said. “Tell me, gentlemen,” the Baron continued, casting his eye over the aforesaid Turds, and his diminutive prime ministerial successor, referred to only as the Banker, whose short legs dangled childishly over the edge of the armchair like worms, “do you think, in your wildest imaginings, it could be possible for an object so commonplace as a phone… to be haunted?”

Turds and the Banker were in no mood for Christmas parlour games. It had been a difficult week. During the pandemic certain monies had journeyed ambiguously through the companies of certain people. One, a common lingerie seller from the slums of Glasgow, who had been chosen, accommodated, rewarded and subsequently ennobled, precisely because she had seemed unlikely to attract suspicion, had made a fatal error, the Baroness conspicuously spending the sidelined sums quite publicly, disporting herself on a yacht in revealing swimwear and becoming the belated subject of no small amount of controversy. “I simply sought to distance myself from the Baroness,” began the Baron, “by sharing a message in which she did not make clear her financial links to the company we were publicly funding, but…”

“But…”, exclaimed Turds, suddenly realising the full implications of the Baron’s words, “the message you have shared dates from the period where the three of us agreed we had lost all our messages.” “Yes,” replied the Baron, ruefully, “that’s about the shape of it, Turds,” and he stoked the dying fire again, more in hope than expectation.

“But Baron!”, shrieked the Banker, hysterically, kicking his tiny legs furiously, “they know the messages aren’t lost now. We’re ruined! You fool!” And with that the Banker buried his little head in his soft hands, sobbing. “You can’t talk, Banker,” snapped Turds. “When you were questioned, you forgot the statement we’d agreed on – ‘It looks as though it’s something to do with the app going down and then, aaah, coming up again but somehow, ah, not it, it, it automatically erasing all the things, ah, between that date when it went down and the moment when it was last backed up, so I, I can’t give you the technical explanation but that’s the best I’m able to do’ – and just kept saying: ‘I don’t recall’ over and over again. But what I don’t understand, Baron, is how you accessed the messages. We agreed to put them, ah, so to speak, beyond use.”

The Baron’s face turned ashen and he drank deeply from a crystal glass of whisky, staring hollow-eyed into the last flickering flame, as the traffic at the junction of Theobalds Road and Gray’s Inn Road outside grew uncharacteristically silent for the hour. “That’s just it, Turds, old man,” he muttered, “I did. But they keep popping up on to my phone.” “Let me see!” snapped Turds, snatching up the offending item and turning it on, his fat eyes suddenly widening in horror as he scrolled the screen. The messages! Thousands of them! Thousands of deals! Thousands of deaths! Billions of pounds! “Destroy this phone, Baron, destroy it!” shouted Turds.

“That’s not the end of it, Turds, old boy,” gibbered the Baron, like a man witness to a horrific vision of such virulence he is no longer accountable to reason, “they’re everywhere.” And with that, the Baron flipped up the lid of his laptop and Turds saw those same swathes of incriminating texts rolling endlessly past, Saint Peter’s Book of Life aflame. The final flicker of fire in the grate suddenly died and the Banker burst into tears in the darkness, but as he did, the Baron’s television exploded into life, the flatscreen filling with disputed litanies of funnelled funds and the expendable dead.

“The dead!”, squealed the Banker, as Turds tried to slap the fear out of him, “The dead will not be silenced! The dead will speak and we must answer.” Then, with a crackling surge of arcane power, each of the Baron’s three devices burned out and the room went black. Turds smoothed out his shivering successor’s crumpled jacket and straightened his tie. “Probably a simple connectivity issue, Baron,” he suggested, unconvincingly. “I’ll have MI5 send round a sympathetic tech wallah. Toodle-oo.”

His guests hurriedly departed, the Baron stood alone at the window of his mansion block apartment, the whisky untouched in the glass he clasped in his cold and frozen hand. The sun began to climb over the Wren spires of the City, spires that rose like fingers, coming out from the damp earth and pointing for ever, fingers rising from the damp earth and pointing forever at him.