Civil Servants Expecting Long Wait For Public Outcry Over Private Sector Enjoying Awaydays At Customers’ Expense

Civil servants, who are solely responsible for all of the bad things in the world, are settling down for a long wait until it dawns on the British public that they are also paying for the jollies enjoyed by private-sector staff.

The water vole is an expert Prioritiser, it seems

“Last year, I freely admit I was hauled off to a foetid swamp beside the A303 where some wanker called Jeremy bored me shitless with a crock of complete and utter balls - of which my only recollection is that the nonsense word ‘holistic’ was shoehorned relentlessly into every goddamned sentence,” confessed a normally mild-mannered man whose job is to simplify reports until even energy secretary Chris Huhne can understand them. “I think it was a disgraceful fucking waste of taxpayers’ money too, as it happens, but at least you didn’t have to sit through seven life-sapping hours of bollocks.”

“This proves, if further proof were needed, that the civil service should be shut down immediately and the machinery of government placed in the responsible, efficient hands of the private sector,” smiled Mark Spreadsheet, a dedicated, hard-working cost benefit analyst from Serco on a vital fact-finding mission to Longleat, where he is finding out that the yawn of the majestic lion will help him immeasurably when he decides which hospital ward should be abandoned to deadly microbes to cover the cost of discovering such key insights.

But We Need £3500 PCs For Crysis 2, Retort Civil Servants

The computer says your benefits are suspended, mate

Civil servants have defended typical expenditures of up to £3500 on desktop computers, revealed today in a report by the Public Administration Select Committee, pointing out that Crysis 2 looks “the dog’s bollocks” on their awesome liquid-cooled Acer Predator Destroyer 2 PCs with 12Gb of RAM and Alienware OptX 3D-ready 23” monitors - adding that, without their Cyborg R.A.T. 9 gaming mice and Evo gaming seats with built-in joystick and gamepad, then they might as well go back to drawing noughts and crosses in ledger books with quill pens.

Parsimonious committee chairman Bernard Jenkin insists that the minimum spec for the dystopian alien shoot-em-up could easily be met by the simplest £400 laptop. However, the government’s head of IT procurement, Josh Geake, 22, pointed out that the likely frame rate of 10fps and minimal resolution would render the game unplayable, resulting in a serious degradation in morale within the civil service.

“Such ill-advised penny-pinching would inevitably result in a massive increase in pulling sickies, as entire government departments realised they might as well just stay at home banging away at the Xbox and PS3 versions,” he predicted gravely. “If the civil service is to maintain its traditional standards of excellence, then it has to – die, die, DIE you alien FUCKERS!”

End This Failed Democratic Experiment, Urge Top Civil Servants

The way Britain is governed has gone seriously wrong and is in urgent need of reform, according to a group of former Whitehall mandarins.

The 'Bugger Government' Initiative points the finger of blame for ill thought-out legislation squarely at ministers, whom it says are untrained and move on too swiftly to ever get to grips with the complexities of their departments.

"These bloody clowns come and go with the tides," claims the report, whose authors include the former Iraq inquiry chairman Lord Butler, current Iraq inquiry chairman Sir John Chilcot and MPs' expenses auditor Sir Thomas Legg. "They are hideously unqualified to run their departments, and just when you think you've finally got the silly sods housetrained, they go and balls it up by listening to public opinion. Next thing you know, there's been another damn fool election - and in through the revolving door comes another grinning chimp. Where's the continuity? It's madness."

Prime Minister Gordon Brown - who, incidentally, has proved the report's point by his exemplary handling of the economy through ten uninterrupted years as Chancellor of the Exchequer - is studying the report with interest.

"If truth be told, I've never been a great fan of representative democracy," he told reporters, as he was being fitted for a purple toga in Number Ten. "I've barely been prime minister for two years, and in a couple of months some grinning twerp is going to waltz in here and wreck the fruits of all my hard work before I've really even got started. Perhaps it's not too late to wallop a quick bit of legislation through under the Parliament Act, abolishing all this voting malarkey. Then I can hand-pick the most gifted geniuses from the City meritocracy and get the country well and truly back on its feet."

The Last Straw

The Justice Secretary, Jack Straw, is facing further embarrassment after leaked details suggested that the Ministry of Justice staff outing last month turned out to be an utter fiasco.

Every year the hard-working civil servants are traditionally rewarded with a day at a brewery. However, the trip began badly when managers discovered that the USB stick holding all the invitations had been lost by the private contractor responsible for designing the document. The matter was further complicated when the staff list was found to have been stored on a removable hard drive which was accidentally left on a train. Only after frantic calls to Lost Property departments at stations all over London was the drive returned to the ministry in the nick of time.

Organisers then learned that the laptop with AutoRoute Express on it had been sold on eBay for a fiver, forcing them to stop and ask passers-by for directions to the brewery. When they eventually arrived, an hour later than scheduled, the thirsty staff discovered that a temp had mistakenly booked them into a different brewery on the other side of London. After a detour to somebody’s house to pick up a sat-nav, the hapless workforce finally arrived at the right venue – where anger turned to fury when they discovered that the brewers were closing up for the night.

At this point it was realised that - perhaps fortunately, under the circumstances - the Justice Secretary had been left behind in his office.

The dismal outing was finally abandoned at two in the morning - but, thanks to their minibus running out of petrol because nobody seemed to have the departmental credit card, several disgruntled and sober workers were forced to make their own way home using night buses and taxis.

Mr Straw, meanwhile, was said to have been baffled to wake up from his afternoon nap to find the Ministry of Justice completely deserted, and only found out about the brewery trip when in desperation he rang his private secretary’s office and heard about it on the answering machine.

“Why did nobody in the department tell me about this? It makes me look like a complete fool,” he fumed to reporters while ringing repeatedly on the 10 Downing Street doorbell yesterday morning - sadly unaware that the cabinet was in fact meeting in Birmingham.