Eight Grand And Your Doolally Parents' House Is Yours, Promise Tories

A Conservative government will allow you keep your rightful inheritance when you drag your babbling old mother off to a granny farm, shadow death secretary Angela Lansbury promised middle-aged voters in Middle England today.

"Just a small one-off payment of £8,000 to my entirely trustworthy, caring friends in the private insurance industry will guarantee not only that your tiresomely barmy parents get a spoonful of cock-a-leekie shovelled into their gaping mouths twice a day and their pissy bloomers changed once a week by a resentful chav on a care apprenticeship," smiled Mr Lansley, "But, more importantly, that you get your mitts on their fully-paid-for des. res. in the stockbroker belt."

"Of course, they will only be able to make the payment when they reach the age of 65," he continued. "So those who have passed that age already - or, for that matter, are such unutterable oiks that they don't have two pennies to rub together - will be catered for by the installation of a stench detector in their homes, which will send an urgent alarm call to the nearest funeral parlour when their neglected corpse starts seeping through the floorboards, minimising the damage to be put right before you sell the place. Unless it's a horrid rented property - in which case you should take comfort from the knowledge that their long-overdue demise is helping to reduce Britain's chronic housing shortage."

"And they'd probably have voted Labour anyway," he added, "So it's no great loss to the world."

When asked how the insurers were to make themselves a respectable profit on the £8,000 payment when average residential care costs for the elderly weigh in at £26,000 a year, the white-haired Tory detective pointed out that many elderly people would make the payment in good faith, and then obligingly top themselves in a variety of tragic but cost-saving accidents before the onset of dementia.

"The more their friends and neighbours slip in the bath, tumble down the stairs, keel over with a coronary in the excitement of a bowls tournament or waddle out in front of an eighteen-wheeler, the longer your silly old nan can linger in a care home, spouting her annoying twaddle about all the coloureds, bringing back national service and the birch and how spry Bruce Forsyth is looking for his age," he explained cheerfully.