Alan Johnson Now Fully Conversant With ‘%’ Button

Newly-appointed shadow chancellor Alan Johnson announced today that he is now fully conversant with all of the functions on a basic calculator, including the difficult ‘%’ button, and expressed the hope that Treasury officials will allow him to start learning how to use a big scientific model on Monday.

Mr Milburn says a 10-digit calculator will be much better for getting to grips with the economy

“Mr Miliband says he’s very pleased with my progress,” beamed Mr Johnson, “Especially when this time last week I didn’t have the foggiest idea what an economic was, coming from a trade union background and that.”

The former postman amazed reporters with his grasp of numbers, explaining that you can add, subtract, divide and multiply them as many times as you want to make new ones. The pinnacle of his press conference was Mr Johnson’s slow but determined demonstration of compound interest.

“Apparently you can work it out backwards, too,” he assured hacks, “But my advisors assure me that’s just like really geeky and nobody’s ever found a use for it.”

“What I want now is a really, really good scientific calculator,” he added. “That posh Mr Balls and his wife, Mrs Balls, invited me round to dinner last night and - over a hoity-toity entrée of raw puffer fish and crisps they said they made especially for me - they showed me their really nice one. It’s a Sharp, with a line playback feature in case you get lost in particularly hard sums, and two stats modes – I suppose that’s for if you don’t like the answer you get from one mode, you might get a better one from the other. I like that. I’m going to ask Mr Miliband to get me one.”

“And it’s got a brilliant slidey cover, too, with a slot for a crib sheet,” he added. “So when I stand up in parliament with my shiny new calculator, I bet I can make that smarmy nerd George Osborne look really stupid with that. Or, if I’m like really bored, I can have fun trying to put it on back to front.”

“Excuse me, but I feel just a teeny-weeny bit sick,” he concluded. “When I come back from the bathroom, let me tell you about my really clever idea - which I worked out all by myself - that I can prove the damage the government’s cuts will cause, using something called a cosine.”