A gentleman in a dark trenchcoat has just handed me this minute. I am not going to check the veracity of its contents at all, but I am rather going immediately to publish it.
Mr Carlton-Browne,
I had a phone call from that Peruvian Johnny. No idea what he was saying, some kind of foreigner talk apparently. Anyway it turned out that young Olga the cleaner could speak the language so she translated for me. She is a marvel, Olga. She even takes copies home of everything for me so that if I lose something she’ll have another copy safe and sound.
Anyway, apparently this Peruvian chap had been in Scotland and met up with Alex Salmond, who used to be some sort of local official. He thought that I would like to know that Salmond said he wasn’t big on canapes and despite his name didn’t like smoked salmon. Rather wry that, I thought.
He went on to say that Salmond said he had enormous respect for Nigel Farage, who was very macho, and he would be delighted to see a UKIP government in power after the general election, preferably in coalition with Pegida. Salmond added “thank God nobody knows about this, or they would lynch me. Of course I haven’t told anybody, but I feel perfectly safe revealing it at random to a passing Peruvian I just met.”
The Peruvian chap said before he hung off that of course he was telling me as everybody knows that all foreign ambassadors must by protocol give details of all their transactions to their host governments and that anybody who denied this was a dirty liar, particularly smart-arsed ex-diplomats from Edinburgh. He also added clearly that nobody at all should believe him if he himself denied these conversations had ever taken place.
I thanked him very much for this information. This is a very proper and official government memo, oh yes. It even has acronyms – we shall have to tell R2D2 and SPECTRE before the meeting in Rio about climate change because we are all genuine government people doing important government business, oh yes.
I shan’t put my name on this as it is all jolly secret. If anyone catches us out, just say Olga got lost in translation.