I absolutely LOVED this story! I was hooked from the first moment. Your waiting is fantastic. I enjoyed every single moment of this story!

This was very good. I just read through til six in the morning.

This fic was brilliant! Thank you so much for sharing! Would have loved to see more from this universe.

Thatcher? Really? You'll always admire someone who fucked over the working class multiple times and smiled while doing so? You're filth and so is your story!

I haven't read this. Surprising and a very good story. Oh Violet as Lady Thatcher! Spot on!

I wonder if you're still out there reading reviews. It has been a while since this was published

Marvelous, wonderful, bravo (brava)! This is a magnificent ending and the quote from Lady Thatcher is SO perfect. I started here because I thought I'd read the story, but never saw the ending. If I hit post review and i've not reviewed previously, I'll get to start all over from the beginning because maybe I haven't read it at all.

All the best to you in your political endeavors!

I'd just like to say how brilliant this fic was. Enjoyed it from start to end.

i really, really enjoyed this fic. i felt like you had distilled what we knew about the characters into an essence and then created something new and different and fun with it, and i loved the political gamesmanship aspects of the story. i enjoyed it so much that i started it yesterday afternoon and when i finished it, i looked up and realized that almost 3 hours had gone by - hours in which i was totally relaxed and absorbed by the story. thank you for that!

Thank you for a most enjoyable story!

This is just a remarkable story, perfect characterisation, perfect idea and perfect writing. Thank you very much.

This was such a great story!
I love all the political stuff in here, and how Mary and Matthew are part of that. I know they do more of the background things, but it would be pretty nice if you wrote a story from like 20 years later about one of them being Prime Minister. I do wish you had written more stories in this universe.

I hope Matthew is somehow a distant relation to the Crawleys. It just would be fun having family in different parties.

Oh I could see Violet as a Prime Minister!

This is a fabulous, fabulous story. You've taken the familiar characters and their undeniable chemistry, and created a fantastic AU setting and plot. Thank you for sharing this!

I enjoyed this story a great deal. I think this is one of the rare stories on this website that succeeds in realistically translating a series's characters and general relationships into a new environment and new plot. Unlike some other stories I've read, it makes perfect sense for Mary and Matthew to be what they are here, to have gotten where they are, and to move forward the way they do. I liked that you gave both of them enough of the baggage that trails them in the series (Pamuk, Lavinia, the war) to add drama without overwhelming it, and that you gave this baggage a new spin, so to speak. It is so tiring to read about Pamuk, Lavinia, and Patrick Crawley in the same ways, over and over again. In particular, I appreciated that Patrick wasn't completely a jerk in the end, because he or Pamuk is always made to be the villain. Having Carlisle be the villain isn't new, but you made that different by giving him the motive you did and by handling it as well as you did. I also appreciated your translation of Robert and Cora, and how their marriage could realistically have turned out, given Jane Moorsum and what happened to Sybil. I also really love that you made Violet and Cora powerhouses on their own terms! It could have been so easy to cast them as society wives or something like that, but you made them a Prime Minister and a high-powered, jet-setting businesswoman. That is fantastic. Additionally, Mary's relationship with Carson was perfect, and the way it played into her leaving Downton was as well. Anna and Bates were both great, and so perfect together. And Mary and Matthew, of course, were perfect, and perfect stars of the story, and the way they came together was beautiful. You highlighted what Julian Fellowes identified as the important underlying theme of their relationship in the series, which is that they were not what they would have chosen before they met-Mary would have married a Patrick or a Carlisle or someone with that kind of clout, and Matthew would have married someone small and safe like Lavinia, but they love each other so much that they can't be apart and have to deal with all of this crap. Essentially, you took all my favorite parts of the series and introduced them to a new world, a world you are clearly so familiar with, and one that is so relevant. At least, it feels incredibly relevant to an American right now, given our hyper-focus on politicians' comments and personal lives. I really loved everything about this story. Finally, last thing I swear, you did such a beautiful job of integrating various quotes and moments from the series into the story while making it feel organic.