A huge, cloying air of smarminess covered Central London today, as Lord Mandelson spent the day smugly congratulating himself on the impeccable timing of his announcement of a swingeing £398m cut in university funding, now that all the lecturers are on holiday abroad and the students are too busy feverishly stacking supermarket shelves to notice.
"You know, I'm not normally one to blow my own trumpet - Modest Mandy, that's me to a T - but I am living proof that a proper university education brings out a person's native intelligence," oozed the Business Secretary. "Isn't it absolutely brilliant of me to make sure that this assault on the citadels of learning happens when there is absolutely no one around to kick off about it? Clever, clever Peter."
Lord Mandelson also berated the universities for their naïvety in taking at face value the government's meaningless platitudes about increasing student numbers, especially from less-privileged areas.
"All these chavs from council estates - I don't want to cast aspersions, of course, but very, very inferior types - are now swanning around our educational centres of excellence, lowering the tone terribly," smiled Lord Mandelson. "And some of them, would you believe, actually think they're as good as nice, middle-class children! Costs a pretty penny, between you and me, building all those new lecture halls on the never-never - not that the off-the-books borrowing of PFI is anything but a masterly stroke of sheer unadulterated genius from Gordon, of course, and I'm sure that in ten or twenty years time we'll all give him credit when the interest's due."
The slimy peer also urged universities to cram more three-year courses into two, in order to ensure that going to university was only financially viable for students whose parents were comfortably able to support them when they had no time to spare for a part time job.
"And, of course, nobody will have time to waste on fripperies like extra-curricular activities, such as sports, volunteering or, God forbid, their loony students' union," he beamed. "Middle-class people shouldn't fill their heads with any of that 'well-rounded-human-being' tripe. They should come out of university imbued only with a single-minded craving to make as much money as they can, by whatever means necessary, and devil take the hindmost. Sound Labour principles which my grandfather would approve of with all his heart."
Meanwhile, Herbert Morrison's mould-covered corpse has been sighted wandering the snowy streets of North London, heading in the general direction of Westminster and gurgling Lord Mandelson's name ominously.
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