Brown Pins Hopes On Outbreak Of Pig Shingles

ALLIES of Gordon Brown believe the prime minister will recover in the polls as soon as Britain is hit by a devastating animal disease.

Mr Brown is respected across Europe for his ability to comfort sick farm animals and give them millions of pounds in compensation.

Now Labour strategists believe they can relaunch Mr Brown's premiership by engineering the worst outbreak of pig shingles since 1954.

A Downing Street source said: "We are asking our MPs to go somewhere exotic on holiday, find a sick looking pig and wipe it with a handkerchief.

"They should then place the handkerchief in a sealed plastic bag, bring it home and rub it all over a pig in their constituency."

The source added: "Once the virulent strain of foreign pig bogies starts to spread, the PM will step in with one of his patented animal disease contingency plans, confidence will be restored and our poll ratings will soar.

"We'll have him photographed straddling a well known British pig and riding it around a farmyard while eating a bacon roll."

But despite the pig shingles strategy, Mr Brown's cabinet colleagues continue to plot against him with suggestions the justice secretary Jack Straw is to trip the prime minister so he falls head-first into a bucket of incredibly strong glue.

A senior Labour MP said: "No-one is going to vote for a man who walks around all day with a bucket on his head. He'll have to go."

Countdown In Crisis: Vorderman 90% Less Attractive, Says Channel 4

HUMAN calculator Carol Vorderman was asked to take a pay cut in direct proportion to her loss of attractiveness, it was claimed last night.

Sources at Channel Four say the walking abacus, now in her early 70s, no longer commands the same loyalty amongst Countdown's vast army of sexual under-achievers.

One senior executive said: "In the mid-80s and 90s a typical cross-section of the audience would have been students with one hand on a Pot Noodle and the other buried firmly in their underpants.

"Those students have grown up and now achieve intense sexual gratification from watching a couple of bespectacled freaks generate a series of tedious five letter words.

"Carol's every bit as good at arithmetic as the day we built her, but she's basically held together with gaffer tape and bits of old chewing gum."

Friends of Vorderman said she will now be forced to encourage home owners to borrow money in the depths of a recession, while 'promoting the crap' out of her 28 day piss-drink detox.

Meanwhile Channel Four insiders revealed the star was told to calculate her pay cut using six random numbers, before being shown an anagram of 'First Plus'.

A Channel Four spokesman said last night: "Carol Vorderman made the fatal error of thinking she was bigger than Countdown.
 
"Let this be a warning to EACH AND EVERY ONE OF YOU: No-one is bigger than Countdown."