Darling: Why We Had To Leave The Country In The Hands Of A Raving Lunatic For Three Years

The horse's head was just a friendly hint, said Brown

On the Andrew Marr Plays Guitar Show today, former Chancellor Alistair Darling sensationally revealed the reason why he and David Miliband chose not to topple delusional megalomaniac Gordon Brown when they had the chance.

“At the end point you had say you had to get borrowing down,” explained the traumatised ex-chancellor. “Which is another way of saying: ‘take a sodding great axe to public services, the welfare state, the NHS and all those other things people think are essential’.”

“David Miliband and I met and discussed whether there was any way of getting rid of Gordon, i.e. telling the world about his hour-long ranting fits and his utter pig-headed refusal to recognise an economic disaster even as it came crashing down around his ears,” he revealed. “But then David said to me, ‘Hang on a minute, Snowy - if we punt Gordon into the long grass, then one of us is going to have to fuck the country sideways. Why don’t we just let the Tories do it for us and take all the flak instead? Then we can just shrug and say it was all Gordon’s fault, and coast back into power when the plebs give them the boot in four years’ time?’ So there you have it. It was all Gordon’s fault and nobody else’s, and if he even thought I was looking like I might spill the beans, the psychotic maniac would undoubtedly have kicked my teeth in and handed them back to me as cufflinks. Or told his devoted henchman, Balls, to do it.”

“Vote Labour in 2013, folks,” he added hopefully.

FSA To Impose Playground Bullying Techniques On Greedy Bankers

The Financial Services Authority will be given sweeping new powers to peanut top bankers' ties if they persist in awarding themselves bonuses for throwing money down the toilet, promised chancellor Alistair Darling today.

"It is wrong that irresponsible financiers should pay themselves huge sums of money for the banking equivalent of opening the swear box and blowing all the cash on a three-legged horse with no rider," said Mr Darling. "It's about time the industry watchdog was finally given some teeth to discourage such cavalier actions."

Other punitive measures planned by the Treasury include scribbling all over the bankers' reports, breaking their pencils, throwing their Blackberries over the nearest wall and - in extreme cases - holding them down and writing 'twat' on their foreheads with a biro.

"Now I'm really shitting myself," smiled leading Structured Investment Vehicles gambler Rob Blind.

Regulators' Failure To Notice City's Wild Gambling Spree Proves Infallibility of System, Says Bad Liar

There is nothing at all wrong with a regulatory system that allowed the UK's financial institutions to bankrupt the entire country, saddling two generations of Britons with a mountain of debt, says Alistair Darling.

"The tripartite regulatory system designed by the world's leading economist, Gordon Brown, which comprises the Treasury, the Bank of England and the Financial Services Authority, is the absolute pinnacle of perfect infallibility," explained the red-faced Chancellor of the Exchequer. "The blame for this terrible fiasco lies solely and squarely on the shoulders of the reckless bloody idiots who ran the banks, and no regulator could possibly have observed that the sheer, naked greed of these twisted, avaricious goblins might be leading to fiscal armageddon."

"With hindsight, perhaps, a braver man than me might think that the regulators could have asked harder questions, like 'what the fuck is a Structured Investment Vehicle?' or 'surely you're just plucking big numbers out of thin air, aren't you?' he continued, casting furtive glances over his shoulder. "But you didn't hear that from me. The official line is that Gordon Brown is definitely not some kind of economic fuckwit who couldn't be trusted to watch grass grow without utterly ballsing it up."

As a black cloud billowed into the press conference, denoting the imminent arrival of the prime minister, Mr Darling quickly mopped his sweating brow and gabbled, "And so it was all the fault of Sir Fred Goodwin. Who on earth put that incompetent Scottish arsehole in charge?"

At this point Mr Brown entered the room, glared at the cringing Chancellor - who yelped and cowered behind the podium - then turned and stamped off, muttering "Et tu, Darling?"

Darling Discovers Obscure Economic Theory: Socialism

In a budget speech which sent the last remaining Britons hurrying for the airports with hastily-stuffed suitcases, a desperate Alistair Darling today announced the long-dreaded return of radical hard-left socialism.

"I was just running this speech through the spell-checker this morning," the Chancellor told the House of Commons, "When I heard something about the death of Jack Jones on the radio. Apparently there was a Labour Party long before Tony Blair came along - and even more surprisingly, I remembered that I used to belong to it. I dug out my scrapbook, and found all sorts of stuff I'd long since forgotten, like having a beard. I used to look like Noel Gallagher in a Moss Bros suit, I tell you! Ha ha - er... anyway, I remembered that back in Lothian in the year dot we all used to have a high old time chanting 'Tax the rich!' and I thought - well, why not? It won't make a bugger of a difference to the enormous yawning chasm of debt which the grumpy sod next door's dropped us all into, but it might look good in the Sun tomorrow - after all, it's not like Rupert Murdoch pays tax, is it?"

"The only problem I could see was: where do you draw the line?" continued Mr Darling, as MPs yawned and nodded off on the back benches. "Who can you hit for more tax without the Daily Mail screaming blue murder and calling the middle-class rent-a-mob out onto the suburban streets? Then I remembered that I'm on the standard ministerial salary of £137,579 - which might still go up a bit, if we can slip it through while nobody's looking - and in a moment of inspiration it dawned on me that anybody on more than 150 grand a year is a thieving capitalist bastard who deserves to be hit for half he's worth."

At this point the Prime Minister (salary: £188,848pa) suddenly leapt to his feet with an inarticulate cry and tried to wrestle the Chancellor of the Exchequer from the dispatch box. Mr Brown was swiftly seized and dragged from the chamber, screaming, "You tufty-faced communist bastard!"

As guffawing Tory MPs linked arms and sang the Internationale, sweating members of the Labour front bench were seen to be nervously texting their offices to check how much they were getting paid for their various declared interests.

Mr Darling, meanwhile, spent the rest of the afternoon drawing meaningless graphs on a flipchart and referring Britain to the tables in Appendix C.

Patriotic Forgers Doing Their Bit For British Economy

As it emerged that as many as one £1 coin in twenty could be a fake, the Chancellor of the Exchequer today praised Britain's public-spirited forgers and counterfeiters for putting so much effort into quantitative easing.

"The Royal Mint has been working flat out to put as much new currency into circulation as possible," said Mr Darling. "However, even with all the presses running flat out, there are only so many hours in the day. So I'd like to thank the criminal underworld for coming to the rescue in Britain's time of need. The more money there is, the better."

The Bank of England, however, pointed out that forgeries may not be accepted by sharp-eyed retailers. Some feature a portrait of Barbara Windsor instead of the Queen, while others have replaced the inscriptions around the coin's edge with mottoes from Christmas crackers.

"The Treasury is in negotiations with leading underworld figures about the possibility of subcontracting them to do the job properly," announced the Chancellor. "We have opened talks with the presentation of a complete set of proof-quality dies, as a measure of our good faith."

He went on to say that, in a reciprocal spirit of co-operation, the criminal fraternity had already commenced production of near-perfect forgeries, adding that they were asking for the contract fee to be paid in krugerrands.

The international money market reacted to the announcement with an unprecedented run on chocolate money.

"Not only is the shiny foil wrapper now worth more than the pound, but you can eat the chocolate too, if you want to," said a spokesman for leading currency brokers Moriarty Raffles.

"Yum," he added.

Government Legally Unable to Force £16m From Shameless Banker, But Perfectly Able To Force £16 From Blameless Paupers

Sir Fred Hugewin, the ex-chief of the Royal Black Hole of Scotland, has told the government to go piss up a rope if it thinks he is going to hand over a single penny of his £693,000-a-year pension, saying the arrangement was all set out in his contract and, with so many lawyers on the government benches, they bloody well ought to have checked the small print before signing it.

He set out his views in a letter to Alastair Darling, in which he told the Chancellor of the Exchequer: "Fuck off, you caterpillar-faced grey freak. And tell Lord Mynah-Bird, or whatever the fuck his stupid name is, he can fuck off too. And as for Gordon Brown - the miserable, whey-faced fucker can fuck off, run the fuck back and fuck right off again, and he can fucking keep going until he falls off the edge of the fucking world. Speaking of which, I'm fucking off to Hawaii with my fucking surfboard, where I shall be snorting prime Colombian fucking cocaine off the breasts of the finest fucking whores that money can fucking buy. If you need to reach me, the direct number to the Presidential Suite at the Hilton is 1-800-FUCK-OFF. Got that? Good."

On hearing Sir Fred's robust reply, a furious Prime Minister is reported to have hit the hapless Chancellor repeatedly with a rolled-up newspaper, until the Law Lords brought the good news that, since he cannot persuade the failed banker to hand over his $16m pension fund, he is now allowed to simply wrench money from the desperately poor by ruthlessly dragging innocent, struggling benefit recipients through the courts in a mean-spirited effort to claw back any bungled overpayments - no matter how insignificant - made in error by the chaotically inept Department for Work and Pensions.

Bankers Confused By Meaningless Noises From PM and Chancellor

Baffled banking chiefs are scratching their heads today, trying to decipher the unintelligible messages they have been receiving from Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling.

"I've checked my dictionary twice," said Sir Robert Blind, chairman of the Piggy Bank of Scotland. "There's no mention of anything remotely like 'moral', 'responsibility', 'duty', or 'shame'. I've asked our overseas branches if these noises mean anything in their languages, but they've drawn a blank too. Perhaps they're speaking in tongues?"

"I did recognise the word 'bonus' a couple of times," said James Hamer-Head, Director of Self-Enrichment at merchant bankers Fubarcorp. "That's Latin for 'good' - I remember that much from the good old Shortbread Eating Primer, ha ha, oh dear - so presumably they approve of everything we're doing and want us to carry on as normal."

"I must say, though, the other stuff seems to be complete gibberish," he added. "But I suppose they're under a bit of a strain, what with the state of the economy and everything. It must be an awful burden for them. I don't know how they can sleep at night."

Sir Robert, Mr Hamer-Head and other leading financiers agreed to hold further discussions about the incomprehensible utterances of the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer over an agreeable champagne luncheon at Le Gavroche.

Unaffordable Stuff To Dangle Slightly Less Out of Reach

In his pre-Budget report, Alistair Darling today announced that stuff will be slightly less unaffordable, with VAT falling on Monday from an eye-watering 17.5% at every stage of the retail process to a merely jaw-dropping 15%. The hypothetical cut will last for 13 months, said the Chancellor, so even if you saved up for that consumer item you need to make your life complete, by the time you’ve got enough money to buy it, the VAT’s gone up again and you still can’t afford it.

“Nice Blu-Ray player, yes?” taunted Mr Darling. “Beautiful HD movies… you want? Hmm? Yes? Mmm? Ohh… but you can’t afford it. What a shame.”

Happily the tax cut will not apply to rich bastards, whose income tax increase has been deferred until after the next election, when it will be quietly abandoned by whoever is running things at the time.

Tax Giveaway - Everything Must Go

The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, is widely tipped to abolish taxes altogether in Monday’s pre-Budget report.

Treasury insiders claim that Mr Darling has carved ‘Fuck It’ in large letters across the famous red briefcase with a Stanley knife, and is to embark upon a reckless scheme in which all forms of taxation - personal and corporate, direct and indirect, stealthy and bleeding obvious - will be scrapped with immediate effect. Furthermore, tax rebates will be available to everybody on a first-come, first-served basis until the nation’s reserves are drained to zero.

“The hope is that people will use this windfall to spend like there’s no tomorrow - which, in economic terms, is pretty much the case,” said a source close to Mr Darling. “After that, God only knows what will happen. Something’s bound to turn up, though. Always does.”

The Shadow Chancellor, George Osborne, fresh from his man-of-the-people voice-training classes, sounded a critical note of caution, however.

“Jesus H. fucking Christ on a frigging unicycle,” he shouted. “With tits.”

Britain Declares War on Iceland

As the Icelandic government nationalised another bank in a desperate measure to save the tiny country from imminent bankruptcy, Gordon Brown today declared war on the beleaguered island state.

The prime minister is hoping that his last-ditch attempt to secure its assets - if it has any - will protect the estimated £3bn invested by greedy Britons in Icelandic banks whose interest rates looked, and indeed proved to be, too good to be true.

“I have dispatched a task force to the North Atlantic on a mission to occupy this dangerous rogue state, which I am sure will prove to have been solely responsible for all of the world’s present troubles,” he told reporters as he emerged from an emergency COBRA briefing. Our elite force will tie up in Reykjavík’s historic harbour in the Old Town district, walk straight past the customs officer and seize the historic, psychologically-important Gaukur á Stöng bar before taking the strategic heights of the revolving Perlan restaurant, situated on top of the city’s water tanks with commanding views of the surrounding landscape.

“From there an armed patrol will set out to capture the hated tyrant, President Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson - which shouldn’t be difficult, as his residence is in the middle of nowhere and if you ring on the doorbell and he’s up, he answers it himself.”

“We shall also topple his statues, if there are any,” he added. “Otherwise we could always drive over to the airport and push the Jet Egg sculpture over. That ought to show the puffin-munching bastard who’s in charge.”

Mr Brown then handed the war briefing over to commanding officer - and sole member - of the invasion force, Alistair Darling.

“I’m ready to take on anything,” explained the confident chancellor. “I’m pretty handy with the old four-by-two, so any saga-spouting fanatic who stands in my way had better look out.

"Once I have seized the reins of power of Iceland, I shall have total economic control of the lucrative salmon-fishing permit and hand-knitted sweater industries. I am sure that if I look hard enough I will find documentary evidence that Iceland was planning to use its weapon of mass destruction - the Hekla volcano - to spread a toxic sulphurous cloud across Europe, and then we can put the evil Grímsson on trial and hang him from the nearest tree. If we can find one.”

When asked by reporters if perhaps the British government could just follow Iceland’s example and nationalise all the banks, Mr Darling rushed off hastily, saying he had to launch his rowing-boat before the tide went out, or the Russians or Swedes might get there first.

Economy Collapses, Dies, Lies Unburied in Street

The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, declared Britain's economy officially extinct this morning.

The economy - which had been faltering for many months - suddenly gasped, clutched at its heart and toppled in an undignified heap into the road. As it lay dying, twitching spasmodically, it was struck by a rubbish lorry, then run over by a bus and several Chelsea tractors. The flattened, pulpy mess was then picked apart by scavenging seagulls, leaving only bloody fragments stuck to the tarmac.

Mr Darling revealed the tragedy to the world by running naked out of 11 Downing Street, screaming, "We're all fucked!" He was rugby-tacked by an alert policeman, who sat on the gibbering madman until paramedics arrived and plunged a large hypodermic syringe into the Chancellor's buttock.

When Mr Darling had calmed down, he fought back tears as he told the gathering crowd of reporters that, with the passing of the economy, money was now of no worth whatsoever.

"This is the end of the financial world," he sobbed. "For thousands of years, civilisation has marched forward hand-in-hand with monetary trade. Now we face years of misery as we return to the dawn of human history, with each person's daily survival hanging on the barter value of whatever meagre goods and skills they possess, and the strength of their bodies."

Mr Darling then bit off a finger and drew a chart on the pavement in his own blood, showing how the new barter economy would affect a typical cross-section of society, including:

City banker with family of four, total income of £250,000 a year, mortgaged five-bedroomed house in home counties: home seized by rampaging mercenary forces, wife carried off as spoil of victory, children eaten by wolves; starvation in 2-3 weeks

Two married teachers, no children, joint income of £48,000, renting two-bedroom flat in provincial city: apartment building razed to ground by feral teenage gang, taken in by wandering scavenger band and fed scraps in return for telling entertaining stories round camp fire; survival prospects moderate, dependent on whim of charismatic leader

Single pensioner, living in sheltered accommodation on basic state pension: thrown onto bonfire by marauding middle-management executives

Overweight chav, living in council flat on JSA: dragged outside, cooked on pensioner-fuelled bonfire and eaten

Pay Restraint for Kettles, Urges Chancellor Pot

Alistair Darling has urged pay restraint, following the settlement of the Shell tanker dispute by the offer of a pay rise thought to be in excess of 7%.

On the day after consumer inflation leapt to a ten-year high, the Chancellor said: “We have got to be vigilant in relation to all pay settlements, public and private. If we get back into that spiral, it will take years to get out of it.”

Meanwhile, the Daily Express claims that senior backbench MPs are demanding a 21% pay increase in order to “catch up” with other professionals, according to a memo it attributes to Sir Stuart Bell, Tim Harvey and David Maclean. The increase would give MPs a £75,000 salary. The story was only slightly spoiled by the fact that there is no such MP as Tim Harvey.

“If you don’t pay MPs the same rates as, say, company directors, then people will choose to be company directors and not MPs,” said the fictitious Mr Harvey. “Of course, some ignorant people might think that you need skills and abilities to become a director, rather than simply pinning on a rosette once every few years, but this is a gross oversimplification. You certainly do need qualifications to join the board of a merchant bank, defence contractor, IT supplier or consultancy firm – and, in my experience, the best qualification you can possibly have is to be an MP. No MPs - no company directors. If we don’t get our pay rise, then every business in Britain will stumble swiftly into oblivion. Is that what you communists want?”

Mr Harvey later accepted that there may have been some minor flaws, contradictions, leaps of faith and bare-faced lies in his logic, but argued that he wasn’t doing badly for an imaginary character.

“Of course, I would probably have come up with a better argument if I was better paid,” he claimed.

Mr Darling 'Very Cross' With Little Mervyn

The Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, has written to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, following the news that the Consumer Price Index has risen by 3.3%. According to Treasury rules, the governor must write an explanation if the rate of inflation exceeds 3%.

Mervyn offered a variety of reasons for the rise, including “It wasn’t me, it was some big boys from another bank”, “I haven’t got my PFI kit”, “The dog ate my economic forecast” and “I’ve got a verucca.”

Mr Darling is said to be very cross, and will either make Mervyn write out “I must not tell the truth” a thousand times, or write a letter to his parents.

How The Budget Will Affect You: A Nev Filter Special

The Nev Filter's in-depth look at Alistair Darling’s budget.

- An extended family of seven chain-smoking Lithuanian alcoholics with a combined income of £20,000 and a 999-year fixed-rate mortgage, driving a Jag: £20,000 worse off

- A disabled single mother with a part-time job earning £20 a week, living in a cardboard box and looking to buy an articulated lorry: £950 worse off

- A lance-corporal serving in Afghanistan, driving an eco-Challenger tank, with a WAG at home spending his income on bling: £20 worse off

- A single centenarian with a state pension, living in a Band D underground bunker, running a Harley on biofuel: 99p worse off

- A non-domiciled chairman of a major high-street chain with a wife, two mistresses three children and a helicopter, living in rented council accommodation with a well-stocked wine cellar: £30m better off

The Chancellor has hit back at critics who say he delivered a bad news budget, saying: “It doesn’t really matter what I do. We’re all at the mercy of greedy corporations and stupid banks. We’re screwed.”

After being hit around the head several times by Gordon Brown, however, he issued a clarification, explaining that although the world faced a terrible recession, Britain was in some inexplicable way uniquely placed to prosper through, with record quantities of jam at some indeterminate point in the future.