‘Hang On, What Did You Just Say?’ Tory Conference Asks Osborne

This wining yummy mummy could be forced to cancel her monthly case subscription

Enthusiastic cheering at the Tory conference in Birmingham suddenly faded to deathly silence this morning when, amid a welter of crowd-pleasing attacks on the welfare state, chancellor George Osborne mumbled something about axing child benefit for families in the upper income tax band.

“Did that little squirt up there just say he was going to stop my wife’s wine budget?” whispered a concerned stockbroker from Cheam to the pensioner sitting next to her. “I must be a bit deaf from all the hollering and clapping.”

“I am at the right conference, aren’t I?” he grumbled, when his neighbour confirmed the proposed cut. “I could have sworn the trots held theirs last week.”

A spokesman for the Independent Schools Council later warned that, with many top earners already feeling the pinch from last year’s brief hiccup in the bonus culture, the universal child benefit payment of £20.30 for the first child and £13.40 per addendum was all that was stood between the nation’s most gifted children and a knife in the kidneys at some hideous state-sector child dump.

“Britain’s valuable public schools are cutting their own throats by pinning fees down to, in some provincial cases, as little as double what some ghastly jobseeker receives in a year,” he announced. “If this essential educational supplement were to be withdrawn in a shortsighted fit of parsimony, why, our members would simply have little choice but to restrict entry exclusively to the offspring of well-rewarded government officials from overseas.”

Mr Osborne later apologised for his overzealous mistake, and promised to make some suitable adjustment, probably in the tax system, in his next budget.

“Er, I was aiming at all those fat oiky breeders on council estates, obviously,” he stammered. “Rest assured, ladies, by the time the budget rolls around, I’ll have arranged something for you in the form of some sort of tax break. Don’t worry, we’ll fill your husband’s accountant in on the details.”