BRITAIN’S favourite entertainers are to make everything you buy much more expensive before deciding whether to let you keep your house.
The prime minister and his deputy charmed reporters in the Downing Street rose garden yesterday by opening with a haphazard musical number using a variety of everyday items that will soon be subject to VAT at 20%.
The Tory leader then told the historic press conference that he had just bought his wife a lovely Grecian urn.
The Lib Dem leader immediately asked: “What’s a Grecian urn?” to which the prime minister replied: “A hell of a lot more than a teaching assistant by the time we’re finished. I thank you.”
The deputy PM then tried to persuade Glenda Jackson to appear in his latest play about a bank that relocates to Hong Kong, while the prime minister got into a vicious fist-fight with André Previn after telling the pianist that his capital gains tax was going up to 50%.
Meanwhile Britain’s funniest ever cabinet will meet for the first time today as Lib Dem and Tory ministers bid to make each other laugh with their chucklesome, knockabout policy programmes.
Work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith will set out a series of terrifying practical jokes he wants to play on single mothers, while Lib Dem Chris Huhne said everyone would be tickled by his plan to outlaw aeroplanes and make cars run on raw sewage.
New home secretary Theresa May was forced to stifle her giggles as she pledged to overhaul the DNA database by filling it with millions of innocent homosexuals, while the CBI sniggered quietly as it insisted the expectations on business secretary Vince Cable are nowhere near as high as he thinks they are.
And the Foreign Office stressed it was not joking when it confirmed that William Hague will always have an official with him when he meets overseas dignitaries so they don’t think that everyone in Britain is like that.
But as the nation tittered its way through the first coalition press conference, thousands of grassroots Lib Dem activists were this morning still sitting in front of their television sets gaping in abject horror.
Anne Hobbs, whose husband Roy is secretary of the South Lincolnshire Liberal Democrat Association, said: “His bottom jaw just kept sinking lower and lower and then he let out this pathetic little squeak and dropped his cup of tea.
“He’s got some very limited movement back in his left arm, but he is basically catatonic. I’m going to have to sellotape some gauze over his mouth otherwise he’ll end up choking on a wasp.”
