Lucy Vickery

Jacob Rees-Mogg does Mills & Boon

‘Yes, he was old-fashioned, but love, wasn’t that old-fashioned too?...’ [Finnbarr Webster / Alamy Stock Photo] 
issue 21 May 2022

In Competition No. 3249, you were invited to submit an extract from a Mills & Boon novel whose central character is a contemporary politician. The much-mocked pictures of a proudly hirsute, manspreading Macron, looking every inch the M&B hero, gave me the idea for this challenge. But he was nudged aside – in a truly top-notch entry – by the lotharios below. It’s £25 each to the winners.

She thought about him now almost all the time.   Pink moon, dry gin, the delicious drawl, the thin pinstripe. He was all of these, and more, and she knew she was being gradually sucked further into the vortex, the very elegant vortex of his being. Yes, he was old-fashioned, but love, wasn’t that old-fashioned, too? She began to breathe again, breathe properly, like inhaling and exhaling light itself. Oh but his charm!   She pictured him, déshabillé, stretched on her sofa, explaining some arcane regulation or other, with that strange subtlety of his, with those unsullied fingers, with that languor, as if freshly bathed, as if dried in a private steam-room.

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