News:Brown Is The New Black
From Bolton Interweb
Helen Hywater, Westminster Correspondent, 18th February 2010
Following on from Gordon Brown's interview with Piers Morgan, unreliable sources apparently close to a senior MP's mother-in-law, report that further image-changing tactics may be afoot in Downing Street. Secret opinion polls apparently show that if President Barry O'Bama stood for election in the UK he would win a massive majority for whatever party could recruit him. The Labour Party is alleged to have despatched headhunters to Washington with authority to offer a safe seat in Middlesborough or a life peerage. A performance related bonus in the form of the post of Secretary of State for Health in a new Brown government is also on the table, leveraging on Barry's current major political interest. Public health is causing President O'Bama huge problems in the US but he would have no trouble here.
Sadly for Gordon Brown, Barry apparently rebuffed the headhunters' approaches, remarkably preferring to "stay where I am for the moment".
The opinion poll researchers found that the fact that Mr O'Bama is black was a positive factor in his US election success. Unable to get Mr O'Bama to repeat his success here, Labour strategists decided that the only option was for their party to acquire their own black leader. Gordon Brown, however, apparently refused to relinquish power but was convinced by overwhelming evidence based on some research work by a second year politics student at the University of East Anglia. So a new plan was hatched. Gordon Brown will need to become black. Covert focus groups have been providing detailed feedback on the Prime Minister wearing surplus make-up found in a BBC warehouse labelled "Black and White Minstrel Show". Our unreliable sources report that the initial response has been exactly what Lord Mandelson, the Minister in charge of the project, was hoping for. He is reported to have confirmed to an aide "Yes, they are laughing at him and he is completely devoid of any remaining dignity he may have had, but people will love him for it. The beauty is that Gordon just trusts me totally."
A medical procedure, known in the trade as a Reverse Jackson, involving four hour daily immersion sessions in a bath of strong tea, has also been considered as the result would be more subtle with the skin tone changing slowly over a period so no-one notices. It is thought that there is time for the procedure to work before the May election and we will just wake up one morning in April to see the Prime Minister in some election campaign address, and wonder how we hadn't realised he was actually black. At that point it would be more or less impossible for the Conservatives to respond; and the best Cameron could manage would be bright orange.
Our sources inform us that they would tell us anything for the £50 bung we offered but suggested that nothing has yet been finally decided and some election strategies are being leaked deliberately to fool the Tories into formulating their own unbelievably stupid ideas, such as starting a campaign inviting unprecedented ridicule along the lines of "I've never voted Tory before, but... I love their plans to abolish inheritance tax for the wealthiest citizens whilst hitting the poor with higher VAT" and that sort of thing. When we asked the Tories to comment on rumours of this new poster campaign we were told in no uncertain terms that they would never be so daft as to use a strap line so easy to spoof and that they would come to regret for the next 5 years.
We have been asked to point out that we have absolutely no evidence that Gordon Brown is falling for Peter Mandelson's advice on image changing, or that the Tories are going to launch a poster campaign with more backfire potential than a 1958 Morris Minor. We are merely reporting speculative rumours with no basis in fact in the honoured tradition of British tabloid journalism.
© Evrose, 2010
