Brown Pondering Berlusconi's Post-Assault Rise In Popularity

With Silvio Berlusconi's personal popularity soaring after he was smacked in the mouth with a cathedral, Britain's loathsome prime minister is said to be studying a range of possible bizarre assault scenarios in the months remaining before he is finally forced to call a general election.

Many worried Labour MPs, convinced that their marginal seats will be transformed for decades into unassailable Tory strongholds, have filled Gordon Brown's inbox with helpful suggestions for a poll-boosting rearrangement of the PM's gloomy features, including:

- being strapped securely to a post underneath the London Eye, each of whose cabins has been fitted with giant spring-loaded Dr Martens;

- a weekly televised battering live on Newsnight, in which Jeremy Paxman's forthright questioning style is augmented by Emu with a housebrick clenched in his beak;

- Prime Minister's Decking Time, in which Mr Brown is forced into stocks on the floor of the Commons debating chamber with backbenchers queueing up to pelt him with obscene garden gnomes;

- a Christmas Top of the Pops special, with the hapless PM in the centre of a moshpit seething with over-enthusiastic Rage Against The Machine fans whose elbows have been specially sharpened for the occasion, culminating in a well-aimed stage-dive by a rhinoceros with an anvil strapped to its back;

- an unescorted walk through any city centre in Britain.

Veteran political observers, however, insist that nothing short of a Hellraiser-style sundering by thousands of sharp hooks embedded deep within Mr Brown's pallid, podgy flesh would be capable of delivering the massive swing required for the legion of the damned who now make up 99% of the British electorate to reward Labour with a fourth term in office.