MoD Confident Taleban Will Agree To Attack Only On Saturdays

The Ministry of Defence has high hopes that the Taleban can be prevailed upon to leave British bases and convoys in Afghanistan alone from Mondays to Fridays, opined Dr Liam Fox today as he unveiled plans to close down Britain’s increasingly unaffordable army and replace it with the weekend warriors of the Territorial Army.

There may be a few savings on equipment, too

“Thanks to the Labour government, not only do we lose an investment of tens of thousands of pounds in training every time a British soldier is blown apart, we now have to pay their WAGs a bloody fortune,” complained the swivel-eyed defence secretary. “Even if the buggers spend their entire tour of duty just lying there in their tents playing with themselves, we’re paying them double combat pay. Well, sod that for a game of soldiers - or ‘Join The Territorial Army’, as we call it.”

Dr Fox stressed the advantages of part-time warfare as being particularly suitable for hideously-unqualified single parents now being forced into Jobcentres once their youngest child turns 8, as well as the self-obsessed karate kids at Currys who have traditionally formed the core recruitment of the TA.

On other fronts, the RAFVR will give French pilots the weekend off as they bravely soar their gliders over Libya, looking up the symbol for a bunker on their Thomas Cook maps, while the Royal Naval Reserve will heroically steer Britain’s nuclear hunter/killer submarine fleet on sightseeing trips round Plymouth Sound.

Giant New RAF Plane Has Exits Here, Here And Here

Squaddies will be able to play Call Of Duty all the way to the war

The RAF proudly unveiled its largest-ever aircraft to the world’s media today, insisting that it was a starship called Voyager and certainly not a bog-standard Airbus A330 airliner with a couple of spare fuel tanks bolted on.

The fleet of 14 Airb- Voyagers will replace the RAF’s knackered old VC10s and Tristars - which had to be retired due to the soaring cost of string - and will be paid for by you and your children on the never-never, or PFI as it is jokingly referred to in government circles.

“On behalf of Group Captain Janeway, let me welcome you aboard the Airb- Voyager, which is 58.6m long with a wingspan of 60.3m, has a range of nearly 6,000 miles and is capable of carrying almost 300 troops in economy class or 120 air vice-marshals in business first,” enthused busty Flight Lieutendant Seven Of Nine, as reporters eagerly crowded aboard the Airb- Voyager looking for the duty-free trolley and hoping to cop a quick feel .

The Airb- Voyager then took off from RAF Gatwick for a short flight around the Delta Quadrant, from which it is expected to return in about 75 years.

BBC Press Release Distribution System Completely Unaffected By Journalists’ Strike

This is the news from the BMW

As BBC journalists mount the first of their 24-hour walkouts, viewers have so far been unable to discern any difference between the steady stream of straight-to-air corporate press releases and the hard-hitting investigative insights for which the broadcaster is world-renowned.

“I never knew BMW was such an environmentally-sound manufacturer, until the BBC vouchsafed their green credentials this morning,” said viewer Starchild Moonflower, of Glastonbury. “With its impressive 63 miles per gallon of diesel and emissions of only 119 grammes of carbon dioxide per kilometre, it sounds like the 2012-model BMW 320d is definitely the car for the eco-warrior of tomorrow. Thanks for the heads up, BBC.”

Many viewers have also had their notions of Rupert Murdoch utterly reversed this morning, thanks to extensive BBC coverage of his vigorous denial of all the accusations of corporate hacking and corruption levelled against him in the last two weeks.

“It just goes to show that, standing head and shoulders above the opportunistic bottom-feeders of the global media industry, only the dear old BBC has the guts to go against the flow and report the truth, showing a commendable disregard for the dead hand of ill-informed and ignorant popular opinion,” read a secretary hastily pushed in front the BBC Breakfast autocue. “Is it for sale? Signed R.Murdoch, J.Murdoch and R.Brooks.”

Alastair Campbell: ‘Strap Me To An Apache And Point Me At Gadaffi’

Lock and load

After being identified by a senior MI6 officer as “an unguided missile”, Tony Blair’s former spokesman Alastair Cambell has called on the government to attach him to one of an Apache helicopter’s hardpoints, fly him over to Tripoli and unleash his deadly, exploding warhead on the pariah leader of Libyan government.

The unnamed witness from MI6, which prefers to call itself the Secret Intelligence Service, told the Chilcot inquiry into Britain’s reasons for invading Iraq: “We found Alastair Campbell, I think, an enthusiastic individual, but also somewhat of an unguided missile … That's not to say that we didn't engage to the extent that we could, and I think that Alastair Campbell found us a useful organisation to work with, simply because SIS was actually an organisation that was very focused on delivery.”

Mr Campbell immediately unscrewed his wig to reveal an armed fuse protruding from the top of his head, and told reporters he was willing to detonate himself in any way which might help to erase his tarnished reputation as a cynical, scheming manipulator whose lies dragged the nation into an illegal and unwinnable war of attrition against a sovereign nation.

MI6 later issued a statement from the officer, which read: “I apologise for not making the views of SIS absolutely clear to the Chilcot inquiry. What I meant to say is that Alastair Campbell is a cynical, scheming manipulator whose lies dragged the nation into an illegal and unwinnable war of attrition against a sovereign nation.”

“Having said that,” he added, “SIS has no objection to dropping him on Tripoli from 2,000ft.”

Murdoch Now Even Less Popular Than Arse Who Led Us All Into Lifetime Of Penury

Admit it - you loathe him slightly less now, don't you?

Even the gormless, arse-headed Gordon Brown - whose perversely pig-headed refusal, as both chancellor and prime minister, to regulate the City of London led to global ruin - is now held in higher esteem by the penniless public than Rupert Murdoch, it emerged yesterday, after the charm-free backbencher broke his self-imposed vow of silence in the House of Commons to accuse the tarnished mogul’s media empire of a “lethal combination of illegality, collusion and cover-up”.

All over the country, people were leaping from their sofas, punching the air and cheering wildly as the hatchet-faced incompetent droned on for half an hour.

“Even allowing for the fact that 29 minutes and 57 seconds of Gordon Brown’s speech were nothing more than a shameless, self-pitying attempt to offload the blame for his appalling mismanagement of the nation’s finances onto what he apparently, in all seriousness, believes to be misrepresentation in the Murdoch papers,” said a typical dewy-eyed viewer, just one of millions glued to BBC Parliament, “The words that will remain forever seared into my memory long after senility robs me of the ability to remember my own children are his stirring summary of News Corp’s methods as ‘lawbreaking on an industrial scale’.”

Meanwhile, MPs on parliament’s Culture, Media and Sport Committee have asked Mr Murdoch, his equally loathsome son James and their mysteriously limpet-like sidekick Rebekah Brooks if they wouldn’t mind dropping by one afternoon, if they haven’t got anything else planned, and entertaining them all with an improvised comedy routine.

0.01mm Tsunami Reaches Sussex Coast

The terrifying horizontal wall of water facing Brighton

Millions of potential tsunami victims across the south-east are speaking of little else but their miraculous deliverance from almost certain death today, after an earthquake with a magnitude of almost 4 threatened to hurl the entire English Channel inland at 7.59 this morning.

“When my teacup momentarily rattled in its saucer, all that awful footage from Japan flashed before my eyes,” gasped white-faced futures trader Rob Blind, who was waiting for the 0803 from Haywards Heath. “But that was caused by the 0716 from London Bridge rattling in. Thirty seconds later, though, there was a brief ripple in my tea and I found out when I got to work that it can only have been caused by the most devastating earthquake to hit the south coast since 1734.”

“That’s the year 1734, by the way,” he added earnestly. “I don’t mean the train I caught home from work yesterday, although that was a fucking disaster in its own right.”

All over the south-east, emergency services reported the same appalling news - an enormous wall of water was not crawling relentlessly towards a defenceless London, tall buildings were providentially left standing and millions had somehow escaped a terrible death by drowning.

On hearing the dreadful news, the homeless thousands of Japan’s Fukushima province swiftly organised a collection for their fellow survivors on the other side of the globe. The first package of aid - a pair of threadbare Speedos and an old snorkel - is expected to arrive in the post on Monday.

Iain Duncan Smith Joins Magic Circle

Just like that

The Magic Circle – the world-famous society of stage magicians – today announced the induction of work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith into its hallowed ranks, in recognition of his jaw-dropping performance of the old Disappearing Unemployed Trick.

Legendary for his clumsy presentation, Duncan Smith selects volunteers from his captive audience of unemployed, and pushes them into his deviously-constructed Flexible New Deal, a large empty box. He then mumbles the nonsense word, “Helpingyoubacktowork”, spins the box, and only those who have been out of work for less than 18 months come staggering out - unless they’re under 25, of course, in which case any of them who have been unemployed for more than six months also vanish into thin air.

The bumbling comic magician then stumbles into the stage curtain, which collapses to reveal them all jumping through amusingly-shaped hoops - held by his prancing assistants from the employment-agency sector - to get to their Jobseekers’ Alllowance.

“This brilliant deception was originally dreamt up by the late-unlamented Tony Bongo donkeys’ years ago, and when he passed into the Great Unknown the straight-faced illusionist Gorren Brown incorporated it into his act,” pointed out veteran magician Paul Daniels. “But Iain’s enormous, fumbling hands have brilliantly transformed the old ropey trick into high farce. Now that’s magic.”

Lucky Eurobillions Punter Wins Greece, Portugal, Ireland and Italy

Somewhere in the UK a lucky Eurobillions ticket holder will be looking forward to seeing Greece, Portugal, Ireland and Italy come tumbling through his letterbox after winning the European rollover jackpot outright, it was announced today.

You jammy git

The four bankrupt countries - which have been rolling over for months, in addition to playing dead and begging – are said to be eagerly looking forward to being let off the leash by their overjoyed new owner and playfully running down the high-street banks of London.

As nobody has so far stepped forward to claim their enormous prize, British gamblers are being urged to check and see if their numbers are up.

“4 – 8 – 15 – 16 – 23 – 42,” repeated a muttering wreck of a man locked away in a lunatic asylum.

BBC Boss Just About Keeping Body And Soul Together After Pay Cut Of 8½ Times The National Average Wage

This is how much poor Mark Thompson has lost. Happy now?

Friends say BBC Director General Mark Thompson is managing to bump along somehow, despite seeing his annual salary plummet from £838,000 to a meagre £615,000.

“So far, Mark’s kept his figure by shopping at Iceland and making himself lots of burgers,” said a neighbour. “But with food prices rising the way they are, pretty soon he’s going to be needing some string for his Armani trousers.”

Meanwhile, fears are growing for the BBC’s increasingly impecunious roster of talent, with Stephen Fry looking disturbingly pinched around the cheeks - while close friends are concerned that the strain of making ends meet may be affecting the balance of Jeremy Clarkson’s mind, after he made an uncharacteristically fair and balanced assessment of Salford.

“I don’t care if Mark Thompson did apologise,” said little Richard Hammond. “His apologies are automatically generated by computer nowadays, whenever the big man opens his mouth.”

Meanwhile, wildly optimistic Dr Who fans innocently asked if the BBC’s payroll savings meant there might now be more than the meagre four threadbare outings for their hero in 2012 - which are rumoured to feature a cost-effective Sherlock Holmes crossover episode, a fight with a hastily stitched-together Ood/Cyberman mutant, a desperate hunt for enough parts to assemble a complete Dalek and the convenient appearance of Doctor’s strangely hitherto-unmentioned identical twin, the Dentist.

Owl With No Sense Of Direction Briefly Manages To Lever Rupert Murdoch Out Of The Media Spotlight

Twit, tw-at

The unrelenting torrent of stories about the unravelling of Rupert Murdoch’s seedy media empire was finally interrupted today, albeit briefly, thanks to an owl which providentially slapped its stupid face into a window in Cumbria.

Haggard members of the British public, worn out by days of unremitting Murdoch-related gloating in the papers and on the TV and radio, immediately offered to buy the owl 61 million pints if they met it.

Later tonight, Jeremy Paxman will host a Newsnight special on BBC2 in which Bill Oddie will go into unnecessary and frankly disturbing detail about the mechanics of the owl/window interface, a government minister will promise to look into the possibility of imposing a ban on windows and professional rat Paul McMullan will hide under the table.

Did Distraction-Seeking Rebekah Brooks Deliberately Induce Birth Of Little Blake's Seven Beckham?

Guns don't come much smokier than this

Speculation is mounting that evil Rebekah Brooks may have cynically tickled an unsuspecting Victoria Beckham’s flaps with a feather duster until innocent little baby daughter Blake's Seven popped out, in a desperate attempt to distract the British public from her increasingly-endangered position at the top of Rupert Murdoch’s crumbling Scum International empire.

Meanwhile, as the ripples from the hacking scandal spread around the world, some of the greatest news stories of the last 30 years are being re-examined for traces of illegal Murdoch handiwork.

Questions now being asked include:

- Has Rupert Murdoch greedily swallowed up all the world’s cash, hurling the global economy into chaos, just to run endless stories blaming the poor, the sick and the disabled?

- Did cynical New York Times reporters secretly plant giant airliner-attracting magnets in the World Trade Center in 2001 in order to get the story of the millenium?

- Was the populist collapse of the Soviet Union hastened by mass airdrops of unputdownable Western-style scandal sheets full of lurid stories detailing the Politburo’s secretary-shagging exploits?

- Did sleazy Sun hacks don ponchos and droopy moustaches and occupy the remote penguin colony of South Georgia just to engineer the Falklands war so they could run their notorious ‘Gotcha’ front page?

- Will we all have forgotten about this by August?

PM’s Bold Plan To Give Your Library To The WI Set To Change The Landscape Of Britain Forever

Remember, this specky bitch gets paid out of your council tax

Prime minister David Cameron today unveiled his ground-breaking plan to take your useless library away from the council and give it to the Women’s Institute, in a bold plan which will drastically transform the lives of every man, woman and child in Britain in ways we cannot even begin to imagine.

“That your little local library is utterly at the mercy of wastrel librarians in the pay of your wicked, wicked council is a crime against humanity which shames us all,” he announced, to wild cheers from government and opposition benches alike. “Librarians who, it behoves me to add, deliberately wear glasses to look brainier than you, and in broad daylight.”

“Decades of their smarty-panted mismanagement have filled the shelves with all manner of crap that you really don’t want to read,” he warned a shocked nation. “If you don’t believe me, I urge you to work up the courage to step inside a library for the first time in your lives and see for yourselves that the boring non-fiction section has ten times as many books as the bit where you’ll find Catherine Cookson, Danielle Steel, Andy McNab and the Harry Potter series, which are the only books anyone will ever need.”

“Would you believe it, they have an entire section dedicated to politics!” he scoffed. “Now nobody in their right mind would touch that nonsense with a barge pole - yet there it is, bold as brass, staring you in the face and daring you to read it. But don’t worry, I’ve had a word with the WI and they’re quite happy to throw all that dull non-fiction rubbish onto a nice big bonfire, and put in a nice cream tea restaurant instead.”

Mass Outbreak Of Spontaneous Pants Combustion In Nation’s Newsrooms

London’s firemen are recovering from a harrowing 24 hours in which they were all but swamped by call after frantic call from the newsrooms of the Sunday papers, which were hit yesterday by an unprecedented mass outbreak of the paranormal phenomenon known as ‘Spontaneous Pants Combustion’.

“Awwy’d just tawwyped vee laarst fuww stop on a sewwf-roychus op-ed on vee demawwyse uv vee News Uv Vee Wewwd, when awwy cort a whiff uv a tewwibww burnin smeww,” mumbled early victim Janet Street-Porter, an editor-at-large for the Independent On воскресенье, who was lucky to escape with only singed pubes when gouts of flame suddenly erupted from her Victoria’s Secrets.

The conflagration reached a peak at the Mail On Sunday

Soon, media undercrackers all over the capital began smouldering ominously, as hypocritical journos penned smug articles on the absolute moral purity of their own rags, and self-igniting dramatically the moment their sermons were pasted onto the papers’ page templates.

At one point, every single appliance in London was attending ferocious pants fires, frantically directing millions of gallons from the Thames onto screaming hacks’ blazing smalls.

STOP PRESS: Reports are coming in from all over the country of indignant members of the public snapping up the final edition of the News Of The World - ‘purely as a souvenir, of course’ - only to find their own pants exploding in flame as they inevitably succumb to the temptation to look inside for any last items of dirt.

Miliband Boldly Places Labour Party In New ‘Soft Centre’ Of Politics

Ed Miliband, the boy who won the Labour Party in a raffle, today vowed to steer his party into a new ‘soft centre’ of British politics, after millionaire playboy and erstwhile jobbing prime minister Tony Blair took time out from counting his income from two global bank directorships to urge the party not to lurch to the left.

It looks like a nipple - it must be Miliband

To the guitar accompaniment of Andrew Marr playing ‘The Boy With The Thorn In His Side’, Mr Miliband told viewers: “I've had conversations in private which have been good conversations with Tony Blair, with him patting me on the head and giving me a shiny new 50p coin, but let me just say this - it all depends on where you think the centre ground is. Some barmy old folks like Mr Marshall-Andrews and Mr Skinner keep insisting that the left is on one side of the centre and the right is on the other, but that’s a very simplistic way of looking at things.”

“No, the truth is that hundreds of Conservatives are on one side of the government and a few dozen Liberal Democrats are on the other,” he sang. “So the hard centre of politics is obviously somewhere almost exactly in the middle of the Conservatives. But I don’t want anyone to think that supporting Labour is hard, because it’s not. Well, I’m not. Ask anyone in the shadow cabinet, and they’ll tell you I’m incredibly soft. In fact they’re often urging me to take my leadership style even further, by telling me I must be soft in the head. And I’m open enough to take that on board, thank them for their advice and work on it.”

Speculation is rife as to which soft centre best describes the Labour Party under Mr Miliband, with opinions divided sharply between the coffee crème which nobody wants and the vanilla fudge.