Pirates May Have Seized Labour Party

The Labour Party was apparently overrun by pirates as it sailed up Britain's garden path, it emerged today.

The desperate gang of robbers - described by officials as "a trio of middle-class professional types, dressed up as socialists, who have never done an honest day's work in their lives" - are believed to have swarmed aboard the party while it was all at sea, overpowered its inept crew while they were asleep on watch, and have been steering the stolen party on a course of their own ever since.

"These villainous criminals armed themselves with a new constitution, then ruthlessly stabbed the old crew in the backs," said a spokesman for the Maritime and Coastguard Agency. "At the time nobody noticed, because everything looked ship-shape. But they couldn't be bothered to look ahead or check the radar, and now they're heading for the rocks at full speed."

The pirate captain is no longer aboard the vessel, having grabbed the loot and jumped ship some time ago, abandoning his incompetent first mate to go down with the ship. The reputed brains of the outfit - a shadowy figure known only to Interpol as 'Mandy' - is believed to have taken to the ship's lifeboat, trusting to his wide experience of sailing around in Russian yachts.

"This seems to herald a disturbing new trend in politics," said an old salt. "It seems that the Conservative Party has now been hijacked by a disreputable bunch of rum-runners known only as the Bullingdon Club. And the Liberal Democrats seem to have sunk without trace."