“How in the hay did she become prime minister in the first place?”
Rarity had some sympathy. That was certainly a sensible question, and one that would have sounded ridiculous to anypony who hadn’t been keeping up with events along the way. Even to many of those who had. “She was on a panel show a couple of times a while ago, and people found her funny.”
“And that was enough?”
“Thank you,” Rarity said to the guardpony, accepting her silk scarf back after the body scanner and juggling her overpriced coffee-to-go to the other hoof. Then she turned back to Applejack. “They thought she was a buffoon hopelessly out of her depth, but that she was at least honest.”
“Were they right?” Applejack placed her familiar hat, far more worn than when they’d first met all those years ago, into a container and stepped through the scanning arch herself.
“Half.”
Applejack grunted, but there wasn’t much surprise in it. Hat back in place, she followed Rarity into the hallway, where they walked side by side but with Rarity, as the one who knew the way, clearly leading.
“So they made her leader of the entire country?” Applejack looked around as they strode through twists and doorways, hitting a good balance between taking in her surroundings but not being distracted by them. Impressive, given how far removed the setting was from her usual haunt at Sweet Apple Acres, but unsurprising if you knew her.
“They did.” Perhaps sweeping through corridors of power as they were should have phased Rarity more, but she’d been around princesses for so long that the offices of a ‘mere’ civilian government hardly registered. “Although before that they made her Mayor of Trottingham for a while.”
“How’d that go?”
A scurrying secretary clutching a clipboard hurried past them in the opposite direction, not even seeming to notice them as more than a travel hazard to be avoided as she rushed to the next crisis. “Well, it didn’t burn down.”
They reached a junction, barreling straight on and ignoring the mare shouting across them about how urgently she needed memos, meeting minutes or something similar, prompting a flurry of activity. And, ahead of them, a tall mare in a polyester suit talked quietly to the cluster of aides around her on all sides. A minister, then, Rarity surmised.
“Wait a minute,” Applejack said, frowning and looking sideways at Rarity, “weren’t there something about riots and arson in Trottingham around ten years ago? It was in the paper. Was she in charge back then?”
“Hmmm.” Rarity took a sip of her coffee. “I take it back.”
The vestibule was just around the next corner, and the prime minister’s office just beyond. The secretary showed them in without a moment’s hesitation.
The room was paneled in leather and dark wood – mahogany, unless Rarity was mistaken – and it managed to be simultaneously underwhelming and understated. Just an office, and on the small side, too, but this was a room where momentous decisions had been made over the centuries. Tradition, reserve, authority and others hung in the air like the different notes in the aroma of a fine wine.
None of which could have been more at odds with the pony behind the desk.
“Rarity! Applejack! I had no idea you were coming!” Pinkie Pie was on her and hugging them both before Rarity had even registered the movement.
Hugging them. In the middle of a pandemic. Rarity might’ve known.
“How’ve you been, Pinkie?” Rarity asked. Two chairs stood in front of the desk. Rarity removed her scarf and draped it over the back of one, then lowered herself into it.
Applejack was a few moments slower, and Rarity knew how much sitting without being invited to must have bothered her. Perhaps the simple manners of a farm pony were those drilled deepest of all. But sit she did, because they both knew how important this was.
And then Pinkie must have started to pick up on the mood, because she returned to her own seat behind the desk, just as they’d intended. “I’ve been super! Well no, not really, because running a country is actually pretty hard, and there’s this pandemic and they’re saying I’m not handling it very well, and, every time I think everypony just needs a big party to cheer them up, it just gets worse.” Pinkie gave a heavy sigh and stared down at her desk. Almost immediately she perked up again. “But one time I got to hide in a fridge!”
Clasping her hooves in her lap, Rarity cleared her throat. “I’m sorry to hear things haven’t been going so well.” She looked down, gathering her strength for a moment, then up again. “But I’m glad you bring up the issue of your parties.”
“Yeah,” Applejack said, shifting in her seat, “that’s kinda why we’re here.”
Pinkie’s eyes turned the size of dinner plates. “Ooh, you guys want a party? I’m just the pony for the job!”
“But that’s just it.” Rarity bit her lip. “You’ve been elected to do a different job now.”
Applejack leaned forwards. “Look, you can’t… you gotta stop this. It ain’t right.”
“But they’re just parties,” Pinkie said, cocking her head on one side. “They’re not hurting anyone.”
“They might,” Rarity snorted, unable to help herself for a second. “I really think they might. We’re in a pandemic. We’re supposed to be limiting our exposure to each other.”
“That’s why we canceled the Apple family reunion this year,” Applejack chimed in. “Didn’t wanna go turning our get-together into a superspreader event.”
“Don’t worry,” Pinkie waved it away, “our parties were outdoors, nopony got sick.”
Rarity frowned. “Except for the ones that were in the basement, with little ventilation.”
“Nopony got sick,” Pinkie repeated in the same tone, as if Rarity hadn’t said anything.
Applejack looked around the room like she must have missed something, catching Rarity’s eye for confirmation. “Then they were lucky,” Applejack spelled out, “not safe. They could have gotten sick.”
“That’s why, after all,” Rarity interjected before the same insistent denial could be repeated, “you banned gatherings of more than six ponies. Including outside.”
Pinkie scrunched up her nose and scoffed. “How could I have known throwing parties was against the rules?”
Applejack scratched the back of her head, and there was a genuinely concerned look on her face. “How could you have known it was against the rules… that you set?”
“The policies you put in place as the central thread of dealing with the issue that’s dominated the last year?” Rarity added. “The most dramatic, life-altering laws passed in decades?”
“And, uh,” Applejack said, “even if somehow you did forget, wouldn’t somepony have reminded you? You’ve got a whole government supporting you.”
“Nopony warned me that it was against the rules,” Pinkie said. “I would have remembered that.”
Rarity blinked. “Like you remembered the rules in the first place?”
“Yepperoni!” Pinkie bounced in her seat. “Anyway, those were the rules we made for everypony else. Not for us.”
A long breath through her nose was required before Rarity felt able to reply. “The ponies tend to be rather angry when that sort of thing comes out.”
Pinkie laughed, but there was a dazed look in her eyes. “Oh, they are so angry!”
“That’s why it’s awfully important that you follow the rules you set. Nopony likes double standards, darling. And they especially don’t like being asked to sacrifice things by those who aren’t doing the same.”
“Right,” Pinkie winked. “That’s why we mustn’t get caught.”
Again Rarity took a breath, not daring to look at Applejack. Then she held up a hoof. “Two points. One: you did get caught. Repeatedly. In ways that were entirely predictable. And two: …it’s called moral integrity.”
Pinkie blinked, then smiled. “Hm?”
And that broke the dam with Applejack. “You shouldn’t need the threat of getting caught to make you do the right thing!” She turned her hooves up, but looked by no means done. “You should be better than that. You should lead by example, and stick to that example whether anypony is watching or not!”
There wasn’t any visible sign of Pinkie taking it to heart, be that in a good or bad way. “I just wanna throw parties and make all my friends happy.”
Rarity took a long drink from the coffee she was still cradling, giving everypony a moment of reflection before she responded, quietly, matter-of-factly, but not unkindly. “Then you are in the wrong job. And you were wrong to take this job.”
“But the ponies here neeeed parties! They’ve been working so hard!”
“They’re running the country,” Rarity said, nodding, “they should be working hard, that’s expected.”
“Wait,” Applejack interjected, “I ain’t been working hard?” An eyebrow raise said she meant war. “I’ve gone out and put my back into it every day through this thing. No holidays, no days off. So has every farmer here, while you’ve closed the markets so nopony buys our crops. You’ve closed the bars, so the cider has to be poured away. We haven’t been working hard? Your staff deserve parties but I don’t? It’s like your whole notion of who deserves what doesn’t stretch further than the confines of this building.”
Bless her, because she’d never realise it, but there was a righteousness when Applejack got going that none of them could compete with. That was why Rarity had invited her along as wingpony for meeting Pinkie, just as she had on a fashion judging panel decades before.
“Not to mention,” Rarity said, “that ‘we’ve been working hard’ is a line you should only pull out when you have a list of great achievements you can stand behind, so we can see what your hard work has wrought. Not when you have your track record.”
Pinkie’s mouth dropped open and her eyes went wide. “I have a great track record! We were one of the best countries for getting ponies vaccinated.”
“The early vaccine response was excellent,” Rarity agreed. She took a sip of coffee. “But you have the seventh-highest pandemic death toll in the world. And, of the six above you, five of them have populations at least double yours, if not significantly higher. Per pony, you’re doing very badly.”
“Pffft!” Pinkie waved it away. “Even if you take all the pandemic things out of it, we have a great list of achievements. We got Wrexit done!”
Rarity let a long silence stretch. After a few moments, she even stretched it further with a slow sip of her drink. “Ah yes. I wondered if that might come up. Are you sure you want to list that as an achievement?”
Pinkie put on an earnest face that was almost convincing. “Wrexit is very important to the ponies. And to me.”
“Mmm. So important you came out in support of it a whole four months before the referendum, when it had been a debated issue for decades? Announcing you were in favour of it just when it looked like doing so might make you prime minister?”
“I am the prime minister,” Pinkie said, puffing up her chest. “The prime minister who got Wrexit done!”
“And it’s brought you a fuel crisis, a driver crisis, a care workers crisis, a hospitality staff crisis, and you needed a special deal just to get food for Hearth’s Warming. And that’s just the last six months.” She could feel her eyebrows making her position clear all by themselves, too. “Your hospitals, in this pandemic, really could have used the £350 million a week you promised them Wrexit would bring and then basically never mentioned again. And then there’s the border protocol…”
It was Applejack who intervened, delicately, and before Pinkie could. “Is it possible a couple of those things have been more down to the pandemic than Wrexit, though?”
“Does it makes a difference?” Rarity waved her coffee cup in Pinkie’s direction. “She led the Leave campaign for Wrexit, and she led the poor pandemic response. Whatever’s at fault, she’s behind it.”
“Ok,” Applejack said, “but some of those things might still have happened even with the best pandemic response anypony could put together.”
Rarity made sure she spoke calmly and didn’t snap, because Applejack was there on her side even if this was a very unfortunate time for the close relationship between honesty and fairness to arise. “And we’ll all just smile and pretend New Zeaponyland doesn’t exist as an example.” She shook her head. “It is rather sadly ironic that the party pushing Wrexit, with its immigration control, were also the ones far too slow to close the borders during a pandemic.” She turned up her hooves in a small shrug. “They let it in. Delayed reacting until too late at every juncture. Knowingly, spinelessly, and with far more focus on the illusion of normalcy than on stopping ponies getting sick. Pandemic response or Wrexit – although it really is much more down to the latter – generally none of those crises I mentioned were duplicated in other nations.”
Was there any sign of guilt from Pinkie? Contrition? The slightest recognition of the colossal damage she’d caused? Of course not. “But it’s when things are bad that we most need parties to cheer us up. I was just trying to help, and now everypony is attacking me.”
That was when Rarity decided a change of tack was needed. She directed a tight smile at Pinkie and finished her coffee. When the cup was empty she set it on the desk in front of her and folded her hooves in her lap. “The country you’re ruling is very fond of the royalty, yes?” She said it calmly and conversationally, with all the appearances of being perfectly reasonable. She waited until she received a nod, then continued. “And your political party in particular, and your voting demographic, is very attached to the princesses, and gets upset when they’re slighted?” Another nod. “And Princess Luna, after a long life, passed away last year?”
The nod Pinkie gave at that was a little slower and more suspicious.
Not without cause.
“And Princess Celestia,” Rarity said more pointedly, “who had been at Luna’s side for longer than anypony in this room has been alive, had to grieve alone because of pandemic restrictions?”
Applejack’s eyes widened, and Pinkie’s narrowed.
Rarity ploughed on. “And when she attended the funeral of her sister of so many years, alone and isolated, and photographed like that so everypony knew it… you thought the best thing to do the night before that funeral was to throw a party?”
Applejack’s jaw dropped, so, just to remove all doubt, Rarity rephrased and elaborated. “You sent a staffer to a shop to fill a suitcase with bottles of wine so you could party into the early hours the night before the sovereign monarch buried her sister?”
“Of course not!” Pinkie snapped, lip trembling. “That’s not true at all, and it’s a very hurtful accusation. We absolutely did not throw a party that night.” She sniffed. “We threw two!”
Rarity looked at Applejack. They both looked at Pinkie. Then back at each other.
After several seconds of silence, Rarity pushed herself up from her chair and gathered her scarf and empty cup. “Ok, I think we’re done.”
“Yeah,” Applejack said, more to herself than to anypony else, “I guess that’s it then.”
Pinkie said nothing and they headed for the door.
At the last moment, Rarity turned back. “If I could leave you with one question to ponder, though? Sassy Saddles has already had to resign after that video of her at the podium laughing about the whole thing. The health secretary resigned when he was caught breaking restrictions. Why don’t the same rules apply to you?”
Pinkie’s only answer was to turn her head away from them.
Rarity and Applejack left without another word, a wave of thanks to Pinkie’s secretary on their way past.
“I hate having to do that to her,” Applejack said once they were in the labyrinthine corridors.
“Did we have to?” Rarity snorted. “We didn’t change anything either way.”
“I guess not.” Applejack took a long breath. “Think they’ll get rid of her?”
“No. The story about the party the night before the funeral broke two weeks ago. If she’s clung on that long already, it won’t shake her.”
They stepped aside for two ponies carrying legal briefcases. A tabby cat trotted past like he owned the place.
“Possibly,” Rarity said, “she’ll be replaced as party leader just before the next election. But I’ve seen who runs their newspapers. There’s every chance her party will win again, despite everything. And when she dies, she’ll be hailed as a hero.”
“Well, it’s not like she’s gone mad with power or changed since getting into office. Same Pinkie Pie she’s always been.”
Rarity nodded. Sometimes it was still hard to believe. “They saw who she was, and they made her prime minister.”
“If anything, she’d be betraying the voters if she got responsible now and took it serious.” Applejack shrugged.
“I really wish that weren’t true, but you’re absolutely right.”
Once they were past security, the front door and the huddled press outside, Applejack aired her reply, as well as her summary of the events. She opened her mouth, presumably to speak, but after a moment only sighed instead.
Rarity had never agreed more.
Author's Note
Ponies aside, all the events listed here are real. Nothing has been exaggerated for comic effect. The dialogue has been invented, but the facts behind it have not.
I finished writing this approximately 40 hours ago. Since then, news of two further parties during lockdown have emerged, which the prime minister most definitely attended. They were in fact celebrating his own birthday.
