Jacob Rees-Mogg does Mills & Boon

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. And she had – foolish woman! – contrived to be away when he had called, personally, in person. She reread his beautiful note: Sorry you were out when I visited. I look forward to seeing you in the office very soon. Heaven! Bill Greenwell

Heart skipping, cheeks colouring, Nurse Nightingale struggled to compose herself as Doctor Putin took charge in theatre. The excitement of being the only nurse assisting in a special operation for which his dunderhead international colleagues saw no justification coursed through her veins. She put herself entirely at his disposal: though the physique of a man who had bested Siberian bears in combat strained against his scrubs and a mind of inscrutable decisiveness throbbed behind that puffy brow, he was endearingly clumsy at work and bashful about the physical intimacy necessary for its completion.