Exasperated God Calls Press Conference

Supreme being God today took the unprecedented step today of holding a press conference, to angrily denounce Chancellor George Osborne’s efforts to blame Britain’s woeful economic performance on the weather.

Smiting the nation’s leading financial journalists with heart attacks, God led each of them through a tunnel of light to his heavenly press suite, and promised that paramedics would revive them in time to file their extraordinary copy.

“OK, so every so often I light a little volcano or shake the ground a bit, just to see if you’ve started loving one another yet,” he admitted. “Hey, if you’d existed from before time began, you’d get a bit bored too. But I want to make one thing crystal clear: I don’t run the weather. That’s part of a complex, self-regulating ecosystem which I designed to run itself. And it ran itself perfectly well, thank you, until you buggers came along.”

Cameras capture the moment God struck

“So now that little worm Osborne tries to wriggle off the hook by claiming that your toytown state’s economy has suddenly thrown itself into reverse entirely because of a little bit of cold weather - and you fell for it!” God laughed scornfully. “Oh, for My sake - I gave you free will. Use it! Up to the end of September, your economy was recovering slowly. Now it’s collapsing by half a percent. Osborne pulls the weather out of his hat and blithely tells you it accounts for exactly a suspiciously-convenient half a percent, and you all clap like bloody seals and miss the blindingly obvious point that, even if his desperate conjuring trick is real, your precious little recovery has just flatlined.”

“OK, so let’s put to one side the rather strange inconsistency in his argument, i.e. that this terrible weather seems to have prevented people from buying stuff, but somehow not from going to work to make stuff,” he explained, as His Son held up a helpful diagram showing a rise in manufacturing output. “It got a bit nippy – that’s all that happened. It’s happened before - the only difference is that, instead of the contingency plans your dull little officials with their bowler hats and umbrellas used to dust off every few years and put into action, these days your tacky little island is run by a gang of thieves in Armani suits exclusively for the benefit of an even bigger gang of thieves in Armani suits, and the only ‘plan’ they have is to shrug and point at me, then go back to counting their loot.”

“Well, they can piss right off, because I’m not standing for it any more,” roared an angry God. “When you wake up, tell them I’ve got their bloody cards marked. Watch Osborne closely from now on. Because I promise you he’s going to be frantically scratching his sorry, boil-infested arse raw whenever he thinks nobody’s looking.”

The BBC later apologised.