Love and No. 10 Downing Street
It looks like being another nightmare for our Prime Minister and his advisers.
How they're going to handle this scandal, only one man knows. You see, the Prime Minister has fallen in love, with the lady who serves him tea at Number Ten Downing Street.
They've been spotted together by the press and you know what the British press is like. This unlikely love affair that cuts across the class divide is going to be splashed everywhere, and the spin doctors are going to have their work cut out fixing this one.
It's a great story, but sadly it isn't true, well, not as far as I know. In fact, it's the plot for the next big British movie coming your way this Christmas, with Hugh Grant as the Prime Minister, a star in waiting by the name of Martine McCutcheon as the tea lady, and Billy Bob Thornton as your President. Well, I did say it was fiction! And the man who knows how it turns out is the man who wrote the script and directed the movie, 'Love Actually'.
His name is Richard Curtis. Now Richard is maddeningly nice and irritatingly perfect. He looks and talks like everyone's idea of a succesful British author.... but with added charm and spectacles. He wrote the movies "Four Weddings and a Funeral," "Notting Hill" and "Bridget Jones' Diary." He's happily married to a beautiful woman with a brain the size of Mars, and he knows everyone, I mean everyone, in the business. He just works the phone, uses the charm and gets anyone he wants to work with him. I've been on the recieving end and trust me, you find yourself agreeing to do exactly what Richard Curtis wants within seconds of taking a call from him. Which is how I guess he got Liam Neeson and Emma Thompson to play supporting roles in "Love Actually."
"Notting Hill" made four hundred million dollars at the box office. How much this new movie will make, I don't know, but as Tony Blair gets his head down for a fitful nights' sleep ahead of the bashing he'll get in the British papers in the next few hours, I wouldn't blame him if he found himself wondering if a fling with the tea lady might have been less troublesome than a war with Iraq.
By Simon Bates