Humourless Woman Relaxes In Empty Office After Hectic Week Of Third-Party Harassment Complaints

Hatchet-faced office killjoy Rosemary Milquetoast, 51, says she is looking forward to finally getting some work done this afternoon, after a busy but rewarding week in which she has managed to get all of her co-workers suspended for breaches of the new Equality Act which came into force a week ago.

Mrs Milquetoast is looking forward to holding up every claim personally from now on

Mrs Milquetoast, a housing benefits delayer for Reading Borough Council, submitted her first formal complaint at 09.03 on Monday, after irritatingly chirpy temp Martin Green airily blamed his rushed arrival on the time his girlfriend Emma took in the bathroom.

“I’ve never met this Emma person, and frankly I don’t want to,” Mrs Milquetoast told her line manager three minutes later. “Nevertheless, I feel deeply offended on her behalf. Send this evil bigot back to the agency, please.”

“Now,” she added, producing a clipping from the Daily Mail outlining the ramifications of the new law, a legacy of the Labour government which was championed by Harriet Harman.

Before lunchtime, Mrs Milquetoast had instigated disciplinary proceedings against two other colleagues for causing her to take secondary offence on behalf of a teenage son and a neighbour.

“By this morning, there was just Terry Peters on the front desk left to deal with,” grimaced a thin-lipped Mrs Milquetoast. “So I invented an excuse and went downstairs, claiming to be conducting a pencil audit, and instigated a conversation about housing benefit claimants. He chuckled and said that some of them could be a bit stroppy at times. Bingo. I clicked the tape recorder off and hurried back upstairs with the damning evidence. I can’t stand people on benefits myself, but that doesn’t mean I can’t be mortified for them at this uncalled-for assault on their reputation.”

“And there was an unexpected bonus,” she crowed. “When I presented him with yet another complaint form in triplicate, Mr James, the office manager, had the bare-faced cheek to tell me to my face, ‘You know, Rosemary, I’m just a simple sort of chap. I don’t know how I’ll cope, having 26 staff on indefinite suspension.’ How dare he deprecate himself like that, the poor man? I really felt for him. Naturally I was on the phone to Personnel right away, and I was most gratified to see security escort him from the building at lunchtime.”

Mrs Milquetoast’s peaceful afternoon of proceeding unhurriedly through a growing mountain of housing benefit claims was, however, shattered when she went to make herself a green tea and overheard somebody in the parking permits section telling a colleague ‘that bum-faced old trout next door is having a field day, moaning about whatever anybody utters.’

“It’s a disgrace,” she told a cowering personnel assistant two minutes later. “I don’t have to stand there in the corridor and listen to shocking slanders against poor innocent fish.”

“But from now on,” she added darkly, “I’ll do it anyway.”

Young People Now Know Less Than The Day They Were Born, Claims Survey

Young Cody's parents have no idea where he came from

A shocking four out of five young people have not only learned nothing since the day they were born, according to a survey conducted by grown-ups today, but have actually lost much of the instinct they were born with.

When asked where babies came from, a representative group of 18-25-year-olds variously pointed to their bottoms, a picture of Morrisons and a pint of beer, until one gifted adolescent male blurted out “my winky”, after which the group had to be sedated.

Later, when given a multiple-choice question about the cost of a baby’s first year, most of the respondents ate the paper.

A grown-up researcher commented that, with a disturbing one in six 11-year-olds now failing to stop screaming once their immediate needs have been met, the fears of a group of Nobel laureates about the effect of the government’s proposed immigration cap on qualified staff were even more alarming.

“Unless the government relents and allows an exemption for foreigners with scientific knowledge – as it does for footballing primates – nobody in Britain will even be able to spell ‘science’, let alone apply it,” warned Dr Susan Calvin.

A spokesman for the under-25s eloquently rebutted Dr Calvin’s argument by throwing faeces at her.

Commonwealth Games: Health Experts To Inspect Olympic-Sized Latrines

Health officials in Delhi are donning biohazard suits this evening, as they get ready to examine the giant-sized cesspools which Commonwealth Games swimmers believe might be causing their digestive systems to shut down.

Speaking through the door of her bathroom in the athletes’ village, Liverpool’s Fran Halsall told reporters that, after diving through the crust of a giant rectangle of steaming excrement, she nearly lost her life fighting her way back through to the surface.

Fran Halsall finally surfaced after three minutes

“From then on it was a matter of who could drag themselves along the lane guide-ropes the fastest, yeah?” retched the 100m freestyle competitor, adding: “It doesn’t help that you're desperately trying to hold your breath for the entire race, believe me.”

Indian officials pointed out that conditions were the same for every competitor, however.

“Oh yes, everybody has been seeing the doctor,” smiled chief organiser Suresh Kalmadi. “He is telling me they are very stinky persons indeed, with every digestive ailment known to medicine. He is wondering how such diseased stinky persons ever qualified in their home countries. I have sent him home to have a bath, the poor fellow.”

Meanwhile, metre-wide bacteria carrying get-well-soon cards have been oozing out of the games’ swimming latrines and asking passers-by for directions to the athletes’ village.

Nevertheless, said English team leader John Adlington, any apologies would come too late for gold medallist Rebecca Adlington – sole survivor of the harrowing 800m freestyle tragedy - whose empty skin had just been found draped over a reeking lavatory bowl.

‘Your Country Needs You,’ Says Cameron, ‘To Shut The Fuck Up And Do As You’re Told’

Echoing Lord Kitchener’s historic call to the British people to volunteer for a pointless sacrifice on the Somme battlefield, PM David Cameron today told the public: “Your country needs you.”

“Your country needs you,” he announced to cheering crowds at the Tory conference, “To shut the fuck up and do as you’re told. Your country needs you to step up onto the firestep, climb over the parapet and march steadily forward into no man’s land with nothing more to protect you than a touching faith in the wisdom of your betters.”

In just a few years, promised Mr Cameron, Britain would surely become a land fit for heroes. Unfortunately, he warned, the intervening period would necessarily involve human suffering and sacrifice on an unprecedented scale, with the survivors emerging from their squalid holes, shell-shocked and bitter, to pick up the threads of their former lives as best they could.

“Already I hear the voices of a few RMT cowards urging you to march in the opposite direction, i.e. to the TUC Centre on Tottenham Court Road on the 23rd,” he sneered. “If their consciences are really so bothered, give these shirkers a white feather – to be printed in tomorrow’s soaraway ‘Sun Bull’, courtesy of that great patriot Horrupio Botmurdley – and ask them what exactly they think their objectionable friend Gordon Brown would have done if, God forbid, he was still prime minister.”

“Rest assured,” he promised, “The sacrifices demanded of you today will be regarded by future generations with unmitigated horror, ensuring that such futile carnage on an industrial scale will never be allowed to happen again. These will truly be the cuts to end all cuts.”

“If our lord Cameron is not a great man,” commented one blue-blooded Tory delegate later, “He is, at least, a great poseur.”

Man Killed By Unmanned Drone Was Definitely Blofeld, Say Intelligence Sources

If this is filling your sights, do you wait for an ID check?

A British man blown apart by a robot plane in the middle of nowhere on Pakistan’s border last month was undoubtedly the notorious criminal mastermind Ernst Stavro Blofeld, according to a man in a dark overcoat wearing a black fedora and sunglasses and holding a copy of Racing Post.

“As CIA joystick expert Felix Leiter peered into his VGA screen – hey, y’gotta believe me on this - he clearly saw the target open a drawer in his Vegas-size desk an’ take out one sour-lookin’ cat,” whispered the source, as he stepped away from the lamp-post’s glare. “The target stroked the cat for a few seconds, then reached for a big red box in the middle of the desk. Well, what would you have done, huh?”

“Right then Agent Leiter had no way of knowing if that box would detonate a stolen Limey H-bomb, activate a laser satellite, push China into startin’ World War Three or unleash biological warfare on England’s spud crop,” he explained. “So he let rip with a coupla Hellfires, see, just to be on the safe side. Turns out the box was a humidor and the guy was just after a cigar, but hell, better safe than sorry - that’s the first thing they teach ya. I tell ya, pal, any dude with a desk that big in the middle of a dusty goddam field’s gotta be upta somethin’ heinous.”

“Say, did I tell ya we found traces of white fur floatin’ on the breeze durin’ the mop-op phase? What more d’ya need, f’chrissakes?” he added, before disappearing silently down a manhole.

‘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.”

Don’t Look At Us, Hiccup Britain’s Bankers, We Don’t Know Where It All Went

Britain's bankers have been searching tirelessly for the taxpayers' money

As a think tank warned that Britain may be on course for a second round of costly bank bailouts, the nation’s banking community shrugged their shoulders and tucked into their third courses at the City’s top restaurants.

“You know, I think I speak for the entire financial community when I tell you I honestly couldn’t say where all the money the taxpayers gave us has gone,” belched Sir Win Bischoff, chairman of Lloyds, as a simpering waiter at The Square brought him several large, fresh green asparagus tips, lightly garnished with Parmesan and tenners, and accompanied by a lightly poached egg cunningly set in a delicate £50 note.

Over at Rhodes Twenty-Four, Northern Rock CEO Gary Hoffman was equally at a loss to explain why, after £1.2 trillion was pumped into the industry, there was still a £25bn shortfall as he tucked into dessert, an iced peanuts mousse with caramelised pineapple topping.

“I was just saying the exact same thing to my boatbuilder at the weekend,” he gulped. “We’ve done the best for ourselves that we possibly can with the government’s rescue package - and yet there still seems to be so much missing.”

“So I ordered the gold bathroom fittings to be upgraded to platinum,” he added. “And do you know, I felt so much better knowing there’s still plenty more stuff in the list of optional extras that the taxpayer will fork out for.”

Hopes Fade For American Survivors In Rubble Of Europe

Still want that Rhodes scholarship, buddy?

A White House spokesman for the US tourist industry solemnly informed reporters that there was little chance of finding any Americans still alive in the shattered wreckage of Europe.

The crisis began this morning, when the Florida Commission on Tourism flashed a text warning to all US passport holders in Europe to “Act natural, but when I say run - you run. RUN!”

A few seconds later, the California Travel & Tourism Commission tweeted them with: “Get the fuck outta there! The whole goddam continent’s gonna blow!”

Then, seconds after the Yellowstone National Park Rangers posted “Save yo’ ass, mofos!!!” to Facebookers in the Old World, Europe exploded.

“The last communication received prior to the European disaster was a desperate message from the British saying, ‘Yes, perhaps France and Germany might seem a trifle iffy,’ then all the lines suddenly went dead,” explained the spokesman. “Satellite images we’ve analysed subsequent to the incident clearly indicate two crazed Islamists trying to cram a 500-megaton thermonuclear warhead onto a crowded bus in Prague, slap bang in the centre of Europe, just a split-second before one God-almighty bang.”

Orbital scans reveal absolutely no signs of life in the desolate thousand-mile-wide crater, which is rapidly filling up with magma, he added - pointing out that a travel advisory warning would be in place for the next ten thousand years.

“No point fretting, though, folks,” he concluded brightly. “Still plenty of things to see and do in the good ol’ U.S. of A.”

Government Rolls Out National Indentured Service For Teenagers

As a triumphal Conservative party conference got under way, cabinet office minister Francis Maude proudly took the wraps off a pilot scheme of indentured service for Britain’s young people, in which school leavers will be invited to volunteer for enslavement in the hope that a willingness to work for nothing will make them irresistible to future employers.

“There will be 10,000 places initially,” Mr Maude told cheering supporters. “We reckon that’s roughly the number of youngsters sufficiently lacking in insight and self-respect to step forward and degrade themselves in this way.”

Later, he promised, the scheme would be expanded to forcibly volunteer all school leavers for an eight-week programme of soul-destroying labour, culminating in a character-forming open-ended outdoor challenge in which the youths will be blindfolded, dumped on a tropical island miles from anywhere, and encouraged to settle down and develop a rudimentary tribal hierarchy for themselves and their children, if they survive long enough to have any.

Get lost

"The National Citizens Service will be a rite of passage to adulthood for young people - ultimately, we hope, for all of them,” he smiled. "No one expects this to be an overnight transformation, but you have to start somewhere. Over the years and the decades ahead, this programme will gradually help to build a bigger, stronger society - more cohesive, citizens with a stronger engagement with their communities, with a deep sense of social responsibility.”

“Then we can send raiding parties across the seas to capture and carry off the most docile ones for any menial jobs that need doing," he concluded to wild cheers and a standing ovation.