Researchers ‘Don’t Need Research Skills,’ Say Lapdancers

Researchers no longer need research skills because vice-chancellors prefer academics who are better at ‘hustling’ their university’s name into the tabloids, rather than expanding the frontiers of human understanding, a study has suggested.

University administrators have compensated for falling profits in the academic downturn by demanding more media-friendly sensation from their performers, according to leading frottage specialists Jade and Nikki from Leeds’ prestigious Red Leopard Club. They told the British Sociological Association's annual conference that universities had relaxed standards and increased the fees students pay to dodge the Jobcentre for three years, in order to remain buoyant.

The University of Leeds' peer-review process is well underway

The expert cock-rubbers said: "It was unnecessary to have any intellectual skills whatsoever, let alone the ability to do mathematic tricks with a poll. The core skill necessary shifted from analysis to hustling for column inches."

One PhD student complained about what she said was a fall in standards. She told the lapdancers: "You'd see some girl who wasn't very bright, couldn't study, had a crap degree, making a lot more headlines than you because she was there to hang around ass-pits, not to advance the frontiers of knowledge and be intelligent."

"Overall,” concluded leading tug job authority Nikki, 36D, “There was a consensus that the cost to human knowledge of working in a university was increasing, in order to cover its overheads – such as all those shiny, soon-to-be-redundant PFI halls of residence they’ve scattered across campus on the never-never - and ensure their establishment makes a profit even when its academic reputation is non-existent."

“I can show you an unforgettable in-depth explanation in my private study area round the back of the library if you like, big boy,” she added.

Convenient Amnesia Outbreak Spreads To Blair

Former prime minister Tony Blair has become the latest victim of the terrible Convenient Amnesia epidemic which is striking so many establishment figures dumb, after tragically failing to remember why he told the British public that his government was absolutely opposed to extraordinary rendition, while his security services were cheerfully kicking anyone who looked a bit shifty to the Americans onto the next unscheduled flight to Diego Garcia.

Mr Blair genuinely has no idea why this matters

Convenient Amnesia was first diagnosed in the US in 1986, when Lt Col Oliver North developed the symptoms after a trip to Nicaragua - or possibly Iran, as he was unable to recall his travel arrangements - and quickly infected then-president Ronald Reagan. The deadly disease rapidly spread, and is now endemic throughout the elites of the world.

“Not so long ago Tony was perfectly capable of running out a superb line of self-justifying bullshit whenever he felt like it,” explained a brain surgeon. “When he was on form, he could effortlessly pull a rubber terrorist out of the top of his head and wave it threateningly in your face until you ran away, or give his credibility a good stretch by claiming that God had told him it was OK. Now he just sits vacantly in front of a microphone on The World At One, trying desperately to remember a single excuse.”

Scientists are working hard to discover a cure for this awful affliction. Meanwhile, for sufferers like Tony, their only hope is to pray that they don’t.

Movie Review: The Osborne Show

In an world addicted to contrived voyeuristic TV, ratings are dominated by the ultimate reality series – in which an innocent child unwittingly grows up surrounded by hidden cameras and millionaire actors who are only pretending to pay their taxes. Welcome, viewers, to The Osborne Show.

Lovable everyman George Osborne (played by rubber-faced goofball Jim Carrey) enjoys his job and likes everybody inside his artificial bubble until, on day 10919, a strange bundle of used tenners suddenly drops from the sky in front of him in an airmail package addressed to ‘The Cayman Islands’. Later, at his desk in the Treasury, an intrigued Osborne delves into the files – only to find that no such place appears to exist. However, when he checks the tax records, he is shocked to learn that neither he, his friends and family nor anyone else in his entire world has ever contributed a single penny to the economy.

His whole life has been a carefully-constructed illusion

Although the cynical executives who really run the show are initially alarmed, they quickly realise that the fickle viewing public will be easily distracted by Osborne’s emotional turmoil as he descends into fear and paranoia, driven to rebel against everything he has ever known and tormented by the gnawing suspicion that he may be the lifelong victim of a cruel deception.

The film succeeds because, from the very start, the audience knows what Osborne does not, seeing the scheming executives controlling everything for their own purposes, and longs for him to escape his comfortable bubble and break out into the real world.

Ironically, of course, it is only a fantasy. The Osborne Show ultimately fails to drive home the important issues it raises about wealth, the media and the rich men who control our lives, because the audience is too busy laughing to take it seriously.

Cameron Slated For Flying Dinner Guests To Japan On Non-British Plane

The jet-setting prime minister is facing mounting anger today for not using a British airline to take his friends to dinner in Japan.

Your return flight has been booked, prime minister

David Cameron rode into a storm of criticism as he flew out - along with representatives of 35 British businesses – on a chartered Angolan jet, hoping to put a little Japanese trade their way as a thank-you for their generous party donations.

“We’re bloody furious,” said a spokesman for the British air-travel industry. “All those brown envelopes our members have handed to Peter Cruddas seem to count for nothing. Sure, the pudding was exquisite, but we want a refund.”

The airlines were not mollified by Mr Cameron’s desperate announcement of closer ties between Britain and Japan’s defence industries.

“For fuck’s sake, Cameron, British Aerospace is an arms manufacturer, not an airline,” commented a spokesman for British Airways. “Pull your bloody finger out, or from now on you’ll be flying third-world class until one of the wings falls off.”

Country Obsessed By Weather Still No Closer To Understanding How It Works

As water companies imposed hosepipe bans on the drought-struck south east, a furious Middle England took time out from demanding the immediate return of last weekend’s unseasonal sunshine to turn on all the taps in a spontaneous act of principled defiance against corporate bully boys, prudence and all reason.

This is what Britain should be like, but with a car wash and a jacuzzi

“How bastard dare these profiteering, jumped-up gauleiters from Thames Water tell me I can’t fill up my swimming pool on the off-chance that I might want to freeze my bollocks off in the middle of a downpour?” seethed Rob Blind, a jumped-up senior profiteer at Gauleiter Bank AG’s London office, as he truculently scoured his BMW Z4 convertible down to the bare metal in a maniacal frenzy of repetitive car-washing disorder. “It’s my sodding water, I’m bloody paying through the nose for it, so I’ll do whatever I damn well like with it.”

“If there’s such a desperate shortage, why don’t they just cut off Peckham?” he demanded. “They can put their precious standpipes outside the Jobcentres and the magistrates’ courts. That sort are used to queueing, aren’t they?”

“Damn and blast it, it’s spitting with rain again!” he roared obsessively. “Now I’ll have to wash all those spots off my car’s newly-exposed bodywork before the bloody thing collapses in a heap of rust. Why isn’t the sun shining? Call this summer? How am I supposed to fill a car with water with the bloody roof up?”

“Pass me that goddamned hose again!” he screamed.

Guardian Readers Strangely Muted On Travesty Of Justice Involving Tragic Rich Rioter

Laura Johnson, the millionaire’s daughter convicted today of taking part in last summer’s riots, is reported to be mystified by the ongoing lack of outraged protest on her behalf from Britain’s sympathetic left-wingers.

The rioter even Alan Rusbridger can't defend

“Laura’s future hopes have been cruelly consigned to the scrapheap by this uncaring government,” pointed out no-one at all. “Nobody with a wanky humanities degree from Exeter has a hope in hell of ever getting a job. Employers know it’s a worthless piece of paper which only proves that daddy couldn’t swing her a place at Oxford or Cambridge.”

“Instead of brutally throwing the full force of the law against this poor bewildered mentalist simply for taking her mates for a spin, we should all be asking ourselves how each and every one of us selfishly inflicted depression on her by not making her life perfect in every concievable way,” added nobody else.

Hand-wringing sociologists believe the automatic lefty exoneration which has been universally claimed for every other rioter may, in Laura’s case, have evaporated when the court revealed that she had, unpardonably, acquired a packet of evil fags with the undeniable intention of poisoning a groovy liberal child with her toxic second-hand smoke.

British Animal Lovers Now Welling Up For Panda That Doesn’t Exist

Millions of mawkish fauna addicts are flocking to Edinburgh Zoo tonight to hold a teary candle-lit vigil for a poor hypothetical panda cub, which has cruelly been denied its very existence through the tragic reluctance of its potential parents to give a shit.

This could have been a panda. But it isn't. And now it never will be

“I’m afraid there is now very little hope that this cute widdle baby panda will ever come into being,” sobbed a red-eyed Sir David Attenborough, after the zoo’s valiant attempts to draw male panda Gang Buang’s attention to his potential mate Tin Can’s erogenous zones met with tragic failure when it was discovered that pandas appear to lack any form of erogenous zones.

“We built a ‘love tunnel’ shaped like an enormous fuzzy Aunt Jemima from his enclosure to hers,” wept head keeper John Morris, “But all the dozy bugger does is sit there, obstinately reading intellectual journals, deconstructing the zeitgeist and dreaming up new theories about dark matter. Now she’s got a major strop on and she’s started writing a feminist blog for the Guardian.”

Devastated zoo managers expressed the hope that every heartbroken animal worshipper will buy a cuddly symbolic memento from its gift shop, take it home and lovingly bury it in a sunny corner of their garden to honour the memory of the panda baby which, tragically, never had a chance to live.

Meanwhile - unnoticed on the unimportant parts of the planet such as Mali, Somalia, Greece, Sudan, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Russia, Texas and California - members of a common species of ape continue to die violently, as nature intended.

James Murdoch Has ‘No Recollection’ Of Resigning

Confusion reigns at BSkyB tonight, with ex-chairman James Murdoch barricaded inside his office whilst resolutely denying ever having seen the resignation email he wrote this morning.

“Re: My role within the BsSkyB management structure,” observed Mr Murdoch through the keyhole. “A water-cooler meme of what must be seen as entirely subjective accuracy has lately crossed my awareness threshold, viz.: I have resigned.”

James Murdoch wonders where his desk has gone

“Whilst it is neither my desire - nor indeed my role - to belittle the inherent value of grape-based data distribution networks as a vehicle for dynamic mission-related interchange,” he droned, “I consider it vital - for reasons of ongoing corporate integrity - to categorically state, according to the degree of authority associated with my status within our organisational hierarchy, that I have absolutely no recollection of ever reading any such communication.”

“This memo, it should be noted, constitutes neither confirmation nor refutal of the undeniable evidence that I am clearly the originator of the document in question, namely my resignation,” he acknowledged. “The key issue at stake here is, naturally, that if I say I have not read the message then it must be understood that I can neither be a) held to account for it nor b) expected to act upon it.”

Mr Murdoch then instructed his former PA to explain to visitors that he was in a very important meeting, and went on with his normal routine of staring at a blank screen whilst trying to open a doughnut.

Miliband Publishes List Of Working-Class People He’s Had Dinner With

Mr Miliband will have whatever you're having

As pressure mounts on David Cameron to tell the whole truth for once, Miliband Two added fuel to the fire by releasing an exhaustive list of every ordinary member of the public with whom he has ever shared a table but not the bill.

“I am proud to say that my dinner parties clearly show that, unlike Mr Cameron, I keep my feet firmly on the ground by only dining with typical members of the general public,” droned the Labour leader. “Lord Sugar, for example, is as common as muck and taught me a lot of rude words. And my gosh, I laughed so hard I nearly choked on my pasty when cheeky chappie Sir George Iacobescu was telling me about all the attractive ladies he’d wolf-whistle as he was building Canary Wharf with his own two hands.”

Meanwhile, deputy PM Nick Clegg earnestly invited anyone at all to dine with him, adding that no donations were necessary but it would be nice if they could bring along a bottle of Lambrini.

Government To Employ Everyone To Read Everyone Else’s Emails

Unemployment will soon be a thing of the past, with the government today guaranteeing jobs for life for everyone in Britain as it announced plans to spy on everything you say, do and think.

Welcome to your new job

“Not everyone is a terrorist or paedophile, obviously,” acknowledged home secretary Theresa May. “But everyone might be, which is all the excuse we need to do what Labour had the bare-faced cheek to suggest when they were in power.”

Under the Home Office proposals, everyone will be required to spend at least five hours a day monitoring and transcribing your calls, emails, text messages, social networking ,browsing history, facial expressions and body language, then pass it round until somebody eventually decides to send the police round to arrest you.

The Queen is expected to formally announce the plans to turn her country into China when she opens the next session of Parliament next month, if she knows what’s good for her.

“I heard that,” snapped Mrs May.