MEMO TO TEAM 2014:

STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL

AS you may know, Nicola Sturgeon seems to be preparing for another referendum on Scottish independence. We had hoped to see the last of her and her woad-begone rebels, but this Brexit business has got their blood up once more, what. Thus, I propose we start putting the old Better Together gang back together.

By Jove we had some great times during the last campaign and of course I must say that most of us did rather well out of it. Dear Alistair fulfilled his dream of a seat in the House of Lords and even managed to bag a jolly nice little earner in the City. Jim’s adventures on his milk crate eventually got him the leadership of the Scottish Labour Party. I know that didn’t work out too well Jim, but this time around let’s see if we can get you a Lordship and perhaps even a nice quango. Remember chaps, there are plenty of juicy little non-execs up for grabs if it all goes to plan and Theresa has assured me that she’ll be generous with the gongs on the birthday Honours List.

Nevertheless I can’t stress too much the importance of holding the line that we were all thoroughly sick of the referendum and felt intimidated by the beastly and barbaric behaviour of the painted hordes. Last time around we came up with the phrase “nasty and divisive” and I was pleased that our dear chums in Scottish Labour all paid heed to our advice. I know they’re not the fizziest of pop in the old picnic basket but if you keep it plain and simple most of them soon catch on.

Our friends and allies among the press and at the BBC in London are all primed and this, of course, will save us spending too much on advertising. Our favourite novelist (she’s magic you know) is planning some more gatherings of her Morningside Glee Club. This time around I’m proposing a new slogan to hang around the necks of the separatists. We’ve convened a few focus groups for this purpose and so far we’ve got Foodbank Fantasists; Oil And Trouble and (this is my own favourite) the Buckie Stops Here. I know a few of you were eager to do something around Silly Billys but this time we’ve got Arlene on board and we wouldn’t want her getting the wrong idea and taking umbrage.

Now, the first issue we must address is finance and here I must salute the efforts of our friends in Scotland in Union who have made a few hefty deposits thanks to their successful fundraising nights. The auction for a week with seven friends in a Swiss chalet waited on hand and foot by local maidens went down particularly well. And my apologies to those of you who misheard the auctioneer and thought it was a week in a chalet with seven local maidens. The PC Brigade would have a field day with that one if it ever got out, so mum’s the word.

Now let me be the first to tell you that I’ve received the offer of a prize which will go down in history as the best that’s ever been offered in global fundraising. My dears, the first prize in our Christmas masked ball is: Edinburgh. Yes; you read that correctly. For seven days and nights you and your friends will have the entire centre of Edinburgh from the New Town to the castle all to yourselves. Arrangements have been made to transport the local hoi-polloi to Burntisland for the week and to obesity camps in Livingston and Armadale. The city fathers have already made the centre of Edinburgh a no-go area for most locals by adroitly raising the price of tickets to their annual Hogmanay bash. So it’s basically an extension of the same principle.

And there’s more exciting news. I’ve just come from a meeting with their young royal highnesses and reminded them of their duty to do their bit in maintaining the constitutional status quo. “Your futures and your palaces may depend on this,” I told them. So without, you know, getting into too much detail, I told them that I wanted to hear the pitter-patter of more tiny royal feet. “The Union depends on your fecundity,” I said. The Queen also said that she’d do all she could to persuade Beatrice and Eugenie to bag themselves a couple of suitable swains and that perhaps we could have a double royal wedding. There’s nothing like a right royal occasion to get us all full of the Union.

Meanwhile, Boris is also keen to play his part. “Perhaps I could organise a geopolitical contretemps somewhere,” he volunteered to me over kedgeree at breakfast last week. “Spain’s getting a bit uppity over Gibraltar,” he added. “I could get the spooks to organise the poisoning of one of our double agents on the Rock and hang it on the Spanish. Then we could maybe invade the Canary Islands. The Spanish haven’t seen much action on their own since they evicted some revolting Moroccan fuzzy-wuzzies at Perejil Island back in 2002 so I don’t think we’d face much resistance.”

We’ve also got a few other wheezes up our sleeves. As long as we keep them supplied with bombs and missiles and turn a blind eye to the stoning of adulterous women, the Saudis have promised once more to squeeze the oil markets. And you all saw what the promise of building a wall to keep the Mexicans out did for Donald Trump’s popularity. So if the numbers get tight again Theresa has promised to threaten the re-building of Hadrian’s Wall to keep the Scots out. The Donald himself has also assured us he’ll threaten to make an independent Scotland part of the Axis of Evil when MI5 accidentally stumbles upon a secret nuclear enrichment programme at a fish processing plant on the Ayrshire coast. And I’m sure we can use future free movement arrangements as a bargaining chip during Brexit negotiations to ensure Scotland is denied entry to the EU.

There’s also the Catholic problem. In the first referendum they came out in their thousands for independence. We must stop that happening again. So dear Jacob Rees-Mogg, uber-Tim and Sacristan-in-chief of the Half-Shut Tabernacle Door, has promised to have a quiet word with old Pontifex at the Vatican. In exchange for His Holiness making a Yes vote a mortal sin, Jacob will propose tax breaks for couples with six children or more. That should do the trick, pip pip…