Unemployed must become Scouts

GEORGE Osborne has told unemployed people that they must earn Scouting badges to keep their benefits.

The plan would teach new skills like hill-walking, lighting fires and playing games of chess with a disinterested vicar.

Osborne said: “People say there are no jobs. But scouts manage to find them simply by knocking on old ladies’ doors and offering to weed their garden for 50p.

“And by working towards your DIY, Astronomy and Customer Contact Solutions Operative badges you can give yourself new employment options.

“To warm down, Akela will organise a game of British Bulldog with 2.49 million people across the entire UK.”

He added: “If you’ve done five years on the dole, we’ll abandon you in the middle of Dartmoor with a compass and a pack of freeze-dried sausages and it’s up to you to get home.

“This will teach pathfinding skills, encourage independence and hopefully thin out numbers.”

Bridget Jones's husband inevitably kills himself

THE husband of fictional character Bridget Jones takes his own life to avoid listening to her incessant bullshit, it has emerged.

Author Helen Fielding described the bloody death of Mark Darcy – played in the film adaptation by Colin Firth – as ‘inevitable when you consider what his life would be like’.

Her new novel, Bridget Jones & Some Shit About Chardonnay, opens with Darcy holding a loaded gun to his forehead while saying, “Shut up! Dear God just shut up for five fucking minutes!”

When Bridget fails to stop bleating on about her petty neuroses, Darcy pulls the trigger and his head explodes “like a big balloon full of meat”.

Distraught Bridget Jones fan Mary Fisher said: “To clarify, does this mean that Colin Firth is actually dead?

“Because if I’ve lost both my favourite fictional character and my favourite actor – neither of whom I would ever even meet in real life – I don’t think I could keep going.

“I would just retreat into some stereotypically modern spinster-ish nightmare of lying under a duvet quaffing diet hot chocolate drinks.”

Clitorally disappointed 43-year-old Nikki Hollis said: “My real-world husband has a bad knee and a three-year-old works BMW that he won’t shut up about.

“What unthreatening fantasy figure remains available to me now?

“Paul Hollywood looks like a badger and everyone in the pop charts resembles the lad that’s bullying my son in school.”