'I Thought The Home Office Was A Spare Room With A Laptop,' Explains Jacqui Smith

The former Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, has said that she wished she had been better trained for the role, pointing out that she had "never worked for a major organisation" in her life.

"When Gordon Brown offered me the Home Office, I thought, 'Great! I can sit in my sister's back room - which also happens to be my main residence, no really - all day long with a bottle of liebfraumilch, watching DVDs and voting on the internet, instead of trudging into Westminster every day'," admitted the MP.

"Imagine my surprise when some civil servant rang up and told me the police had foiled some would-be terrorists who had parked a bomb-laden car in Mayfair," she told Total Politics magazine. "I said, 'Well, good for them, but why are you telling me this?' and he told me I was responsible for the Metropolitan Police, as well as the formulation and implementation of the UK's overall anti-terror strategy. Bugger me, I nearly fell off my swivel chair."

Ms Smith criticised the cabinet system of British politics for reshuffling ministers into jobs for which they had no aptitude or experience, saying: "I hope I did a good job, but if I did it was more by luck than by any kind of development of those skills. It's ridiculous really, this whole silly system of electing a useless bunch of dolts in some kind of national popularity contest every few years. What we need is some kind of self-perpetuating meritocracy, in which the country is run by unelected, unaccountable officials who have a far better understanding of big affairs of state than Joe Public."

"Basically, what I think, right, is we ought to hand over the country to the civil service, the police and private enterprise, yeah?" said Ms Smith before being distracted by Dickinson's Real Deal on the telly.

Government Snooping Bad, Corporate Snooping Good

The Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, has announced the scrapping of controversial plans to store a copy of your entire life in a government database.

Instead - she revealed - every last detail of everything you do, say and think will be recorded by private companies and used for marketing purposes, in the unlikely event that it fails to prove that you are a subversive terrorist bent on the extermination of the human race.

"We in the National Socialist British Labour Party decided some time ago that the only way to protect your traditional, hard-won freedom was to sweep away your traditional, hard-won freedom," explained the Reichsminister. "But then a few troublemakers started wailing about 1984-style totalitarian government, which presented the Department for Community Singing, Fat Reduction and Propaganda with a bit of a ticklish problem - at least, until we can come up with a plausible-sounding reason to abolish voting, in the interests of national security."

"Then our great friends in the private sector came up with a brilliant wheeze," she went on. "They said: 'Look, we already know everybody's details, from dietary preferences to inside-leg measurements, and they seem reasonably OK with that. How about you let us spy on their emails and phone calls too? Then you can quietly buy the info off us, and cover up the transaction with the usual guff about commercial confidentiality.' It's beautiful - the government's hands are clean, for very little effort our pals at BT, Serco and EDS make a handsome profit out of the very taxpayers they're grassing up, and I get my claws into everyone's private affairs. Everybody wins!"

Ms Smith was, however, keen to emphasise that the scheme was only a temporary measure. "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear," she smiled. "Once we've done away with all you terrorists, you perverts, you criminals, you protesters, you free thinkers, you unemployed, you disabled, you non-Party members and you dissidents - only then will you be truly free at last."

"I heard that," she added.

Footage Shows Met Police Breaching Heath & Safety Regulations Again

The Metropolitan Police have admitted that they are still struggling to get to grips with health and safety rules, after mobile phone footage revealed that innocent bystander Ian Tomlinson was attacked for no apparent reason by a police officer, minutes before he collapsed and died in the general vicinity of last week's G20 protests.

The video clip shows the unsuspecting Mr Tomlinson casually ambling past a line of riot police with his hands in his pockets, until a highly-trained officer suddenly rushes up behind him, strikes his knees out from under him with a baton and knocks him to the ground.

Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Kim Jong-Stephenson said he was very concerned about the battering his force is receiving in the press at the moment. "We are currently studying this footage to see if perhaps it has been faked in CGI by some anarcho-terrorist with access to a Silicon Graphics workstation. If we can't duck out of it that way, then it is clear that our officers are still experiencing great difficulty in negotiating the minefield of silly health and safety regulations which they have been forced to observe since we shot Jean Charles de Menezes - who, it should be remembered, won't be committing any more visa-related offences."

"Obviously my thoughts are with the family of the officer concerned, who is probably a bit difficult to be around right now as he considers the prospect of having to cry his eyes out and act like he cares at some pointless, annoying inquest a couple of years down the line," he added.

The chairman of the Metropolitan Police Federation, Peter Smyth, told reporters: "Sometimes it isn't clear, as a police officer, who is a protester and who is not. I know it's a generalisation, but anybody in that part of town at that time, the assumption would be that they are part of the protest. Basically, in case you hadn't noticed, we can twat anyone we want to and get away with it. We're the Met, we're above the law and we know where you live."

The Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, took time out from deleting her husband's porn collection to say that it may be possible, at some unspecified point in the future, that she might think about setting up a public inquiry to declare that the police had done a fantastic job under very trying circumstances.

Jacqui Smith's Alert Husband Uncovers Home Office Porn Link

The Home Office has removed a link from its website which connected surfers to a Japanese porn site, after Home Secretary Jacqui Smith's husband and aide, Richard Timney, was found sitting in front of a computer in her constituency office late in the evening with his trousers around his ankles.

When challenged by his wife's constituency chairman, Mr Timney said he was researching international terrorism for Ms Smith, and had clicked on a link which was supposed to take him from the Office for Security and Counter Terrorism page to the homepage of the Technical Advisory Board. He added that he was unaware that he had been misdirected into the depraved depths of Japanese pornography.

"The site to which I was directed certainly seemed to have some sort of security connection," explained a sweating Mr Timney. "There were hundreds of video clips showing pixellated images of male and female genitals. I was in the process of examining my own wedding tackle for moving squares when I was interrupted by the cleaner, who screamed and ran."

"I say, don't tell the wife, will you?" he begged as he tucked his shirt into his underpants. "I'm already sleeping on the sofa - I don't want to be exiled to the garden shed, £349.99 from the John Lewis catalogue."