BUCKINGHAM PALACE - 7 MAY 2025, 16:30 BST

• Profile: Mauritian Femme Fatale
• Watch: Panthère de Cartier, Art-Deco limited edition
• Reference: WF3162HV
• RRP: Discontinued, available on secondary for $25k

“Another delay?! That’s it: He’s crossed the line. Send in the rent-boy arsonists.“

Élodie de Marans dug her thumbnail hard into the red ‘hang up’ icon, ruining her manicure and nearly cracking the screen of her iPhone.

She wanted to snap the device in half and throw the pieces away like she used to with burner phones. But that kind of behaviour wouldn’t do at the Buckingham Palace Garden Party.

She glanced to ensure she was still alone, and snatched her third Dunhill cigarette that minute from an Hermès clutch.

They were close. So close. The British government was about to pay them billions… to seize an irreplaceable piece of prime real estate worth billions more.

It would be the greatest heist in history. Not just money for nothing: Land for nothing. Land that could be ransomed again and again, to anyone with naval interests in the Indian Ocean. The great prize, the holy grail - just one signature away.

But Starmer, the weak bastard, was wavering. Again. His immolation in the polls was making him squirm.

More pressure she thought, incinerating a third of the cigarette with a Dupont blowtorch lighter and hoovering the smoke into the pits of her lungs. More pressure.

Smoking wasn’t allowed on Palace grounds, but there was no way she was abiding by that rule on a day like this.

They wouldn’t catch her anyway. Identifying blind spots in CCTV coverage had become second nature back in field training. The skill was a life saver for a smoker in Britain.

“You still out there Ellie?“ A posh Edinburgh accent (is there any other type) called from behind a topiary hedge of Prince Andrew’s face.

Robbie, her fat dumb husband emerged in a cloud of sickly sweet raspberry vapour. His brick sized vape was proportioned like a mobile phone from the 90s, plated with sterling silver and proudly engraved with the arms of his guild, The Worshipful Company of Management Consultants.

She flashed him an apologetic smile.

“Yes darling - sorry, lots of drama in the groupchat today. Charlotte from the Home Office just caught her boyfriend cheating on her with a woman in a migrant hotel. Can you believe it? I didn’t know you could even get those - she must have been staff.”

Robbie nodded sombrely, sucking hard on his vape. The device was connected via Bluetooth to his Apple Watch 10, allowing him to select the colour it glowed as he fellated it.

He had selected red this evening to match his scarlet tartan kilt, a garment that signalled his status as a distant scion of the Walkers Shortbread dynasty (12th in line for a directorship).

It was his motion of nodding while sucking the vape, rocking back and forth like a baby with a milk bottle, that caused her mask to nearly slip. Her utter contempt for the imbecile she had married to get this job done suddenly bubbled so sharp and vicious she almost drove the lit cigarette up his nostril.

Instead she bit hard into the filter, draining the remaining third of the Dunhill in one hot draw through gritted, smiling teeth.

Just a few more days. A few more days.

Robbie, or as his business card proudly displayed beside an enormous QR code, Robert Macallan de McDonalds von Famous Grouse Kincaid, could barely believe his luck when he was first approached by Élodie at the ConsultForward 2021 conference.

The minted Scottish boomer had been monopolising the event buffet when he felt a hand on his shoulder, and turned to find the Mauritian beauty thirty years his junior breaking social distancing guidelines to ask him for ‘career advice‘.

She said she’d heard of him by reputation. That he was known on LinkedIn as ‘passionate‘. That a Glassdoor review had described him as ‘results-driven‘. A natural leader.

“And I just want to do some good in the world… you know?“ she had asked, moulding her face into an intense façade of innocence. (Men over forty could never resist that one, she’d found.)

Right on cue, he’d shyly invited her for drinks at The Ned to discuss her aspirations further. And over vodka martinis he’d performatively told the barman to shake and not stir (“They say I look like Sean Connery, y’know? Yeah, no actually haha”), he asked her what issues she really cared about.

A cosmopolitan liberal of the 90s, he listened rapt and tender as she described the enduring struggle of Mauritius against European imperialism.

It was quite simple, she explained. If the UK didn’t pay Mauritius billions of pounds to annex the Chagos Islands, an archipelago in which Mauritians have never lived some 1,300 miles from the Mauritian mainland, Britain would never be free of the stain of empire.

“Aye, it’s only right“ he had nodded earnestly, lost in the dark brown pools of her eyes, wondering if the viagra gathering dust in his bathroom cupboard since his last marriage five years ago still worked. (It didn’t as it turned out, but strangely she seemed relieved.)

He had thought his friends would judge him for the age-gap, but they couldn’t seem to get enough of her company. She seemed to get on especially well with Hamish, his old schoolmate from Fettes College who was now a trusted legal advisor to the Prime Minister after a long career in the International Criminal Court (ICC).

One of the few remaining men keeping The Guardian solvent with weekly contributions, Hamish was moved to tears by her heartrending story of being denied access to US naval base Diego Garcia as a teenager. He assured her he’d keep the prime minister keenly aware of the need to surrender British territory to a tax haven aligned with China, and to invoice them billions of pounds for their trouble.

“The bigots won’t like it, but the PM knows it’s the right thing to do,“ he had nodded earnestly. “Turning legacy to leadership. Restorative justice, with global impact. It’s got Keir written all over it.”

Everything had been going to plan.

The National Security Service (NSS) of Mauritius had been running Operation Brain BIOTsy for twenty years. It had started as an influence campaign to popularise the idea of giving away British Indian Ocean Territory - the Chagos Islands - amongst senior members of the British establishment.

Expectations had been low. They had assumed that lords or silk lawyers would require enormous bribes or credible threats to their lives to betray their country.

But they were shocked to find many of the British elite would do anything you wanted if you subtly implied that doing anything else would make them a racist. Others seemed ideologically committed to destroying their own country.

The most easily bent to their will were the white cosmopolitan boomers. Consumed by self-loathing, driven mad with guilt over their private education/skin colour/accent/parent’s property portfolio, they bristled at the sight of their own flag while exhibiting fetishistic deference to the words ‘international law‘.

Élodie suspected many of the idiots her team were manipulating would shoot their own mothers if the order was printed on ICC stationery. On days when Robbie made her sick with scorn, she consoled herself with the thought of sending the letters out herself, complete with postage stamps from The Hague.

She often wondered what the point of the subterfuge was. Why bother with the secrecy? Half the gormless suckers they exploited would gleefully collaborate with them if they knew this was an intelligence op by an ‘underdog’ from the ‘Global South‘.

Threats and bribes were barely needed. Foreign Office personnel objecting to Mauritian demands could be silenced immediately by questioning their commitment to Windrush. Sir Keir Rodney Starmer, the Manchurian Candidate around whom the entire Operation had revolved for years, was over the moon with a £400 Tissot PRX they bought off eBay.

Élodie was only a decade older than the Operation herself. This was her first job since graduating university, and if she had her way, her last as well.

Of all the personal sacrifices NSS agents had made to seize Chagos, she saw her marriage to Robbie as the greatest. And she was going to make damn sure her cut of the loot was as well.

But even the most pliant of their dupes would cower away if they felt their careers were at stake. And that was why, after years of hard work, the Operation was at risk - only a signature from the finish line.

British politicos had been preaching the importance of ‘sustainability‘ to the public for well over a decade.

But the unwashed masses had impertinently begun applying this new word to subjects outside their remit. They were supposed to apply it to recycling, and Ed Miliband’s heroic crusade to reduce living standards.

Instead, they had foolishly begun to wonder if increasing the UK population by over 1% every year through mass immigration was a good idea.

The Labour Party and Keir Starmer’s premiership - both innocent victims of the affair - had taken the brunt of the xenophobic, uninformed, and un-British backlash.

“We’re a nation of immigrants, Ellie“ Robbie had said, watching BBC News 24. “When a curry in the Cotswolds can match Brick Lane, that’ll be the time for a national conversation about immigration. Not before.”

His polling in the gutter, Starmer feared the Chagos deal would push his administration into irretrievable territory.

It was time to force his hand.

A deeply private man, the British public knew Starmer little; his persona was hidden behind an unconvincing mask of curated statements. Authentic convictions, natural reactions and expressions of instinct were nowhere to be found, even if the subject was his beloved Arsenal Football Club.

It wouldn’t take much to get the public to question what secrets were hidden behind his creaking wooden exterior.

Secrets the NSS had come to know intimately through their years of surveillance.

Secrets that would be alluded to when a group of young male ‘models’ and ‘masseuses‘ committed a series of arson attacks on his former homes and car.

The Eastern European background of the hot-handed young men perfectly masked their Mauritian masters. The British establishment had blamed everything from inflation, mortgage rates, even the Nord Stream sabotage on Russia - why not add a few rent-boy arsonists to the list?

Starmer would know who it was though. And he would be informed that such events would continue to occur, so long as he failed to do ‘the right thing‘.

It was five days after the Palace Garden Party when Starmer buckled. The third arson attack had pushed him over the edge. He rang the Foreign Office to arrange delivery of the grand prize.

He had wanted an elaborate hand-over ceremony on Chagos itself with a lowering of the flag and a military parade, just as Tony Blair had done with Hong Kong.

But there was no longer time for that, he was told. The signing of the deal would be performed ten days later over Zoom, with all the prestige of a lockdown webinar.

Élodie barely slept in the days leading up to it. She watched the seconds tick down to the culmination of the robbery on her Cartier Panthère. Her handler in Port Louis had sent it to her as a wedding gift - his idea of a joke. It had originally been intended as a bribe for Starmer’s wife, until they realised a £200 Kooples gift card would be just as effective.

She joined the Zoom call as a muted observer on her MacBook, and slammed the lid shut in triumph the moment Keir solemnly clicked ‘Finish‘ on DocuSign.

The Chagos Job was over. The heist, complete. She took the victory call in the living room, smoking a Dunhill. The only time Robbie had shouted at her was when she had smoked inside. But that didn’t matter any more.

“Park the Gulfstream in Biggin Hill, I’ll be there in an hour.“

Robbie lay dead on the floor. His obituary in Management Consulting Monthly would later describe it as a tragic vaping accident.

“…And you’re bringing the drinks. Loot the High Commission if you have to. Three crates of Phoenix for the boys, two cases of Amour for the ladies. And some Pink Pigeon too.“

Her gaze lingered for a second over Robbie’s corpse. Her lip curled.

“…And tell Macron we’re reducing his cut. Thank him for the help, but he’s getting 3% max.“

Until next time,

Jim Hawkins
The Treasure Island Times