Child Soldier with Reading Age of 100 “Still Fit for Purpose”

(Before training it could have been as much as 200, by some estimates...)

The MOD has defended its deployment of a child soldier in Afghanistan’s notorious Helmand Province, in the face of mounting accusations that the astute minor bore the brunt of intellectual duties for the division.

The child, who has not been named in spite of a barrage of baptisms and no less that three separate attempts at nicknaming, was passed as fit after aptitude tests proved it a reading centenarian.

“Paradoxically, this infant, with its phenomenal IQ, is more competent by far than we are to prosecute this war,” said Brigadier Major Sir General Dennis Raffles. “Could we but understand what it is trying to tell us with its moans of speechless horror and the tugging at our sleeves as we leave for battle, or to eradicate local agriculture, why then we would be cooking!”

Two Legs = Priest; Fours Legs = Beast

(Artist’s impression of the computer’s last known thought process.)

BEIJING: Senior party officials in China’s communist government are keeping a low profile today following reports that the giant computer used to generate Dalai Lama insults has gone astray.

The 900-ton bamboo mainframe was not in its calculating hall at the heart of Beijing’s Forbidden City, and did not answer when called. It has now missed two meals (of data) and could be anywhere, according to rumour.

A few junior spokesmen made abortive attempts to strike up a diatribe at press-conferences across the capital this morning. But most were obliged to turn themselves in to police, for re-education, when their efforts to fill in for the misplaced machine floundered.

Veteran Tibetan official Ragdi called the Lama a “stinking sedition-spider” and “a vast bothersome loon-baboon” before blushing deeply and being rushed from his podium by aides.

Tibet’s Communist Party chief Zhang Qingli had a crack at characterising the exiled figurehead as “a selfish shellfish with the head of a monkfish and the eyelashes of a buffalo. He has a goose’s ears, a bat’s bladder, the fingers and toes of an otter – a demon otter – er... and the digestive tract of a... a bee?” before he too beat a hasty retreat.

In neighbouring Sichuan Province, a group of judges accused the Buddhist leader of being a “criminal goat” whose “10 000-uddered milk of unspeakable secessionism had given some cause for concern,” while Foreign Minister Qui-Gon Jin telephoned hundreds of journalists individually to tell them that the elderly hierophant was “actually a whale.”

But by ten a.m. the invective had petered out, and no one was available for comment. The only hint at government plans now is terse statement on state websites denying claims that policy will be reversed in light of a simple mnemonic, allegedly scribbled in biro on the back of an old edict.

£20 000 for Novelty Pea “Not Excesssive”

(Two faced: many bought masks to hide their shame.)

Memory Minister Gandolph Standish has defended his decision to acquire a £20 000 pea and charge it to the taxpayer.

Standish, who was appointed head of the prestigious Ministry of Thoughts and Memories last year, bought the Tesco shelled garden pea from farmers after spotting it on a grass verge, but only recollected the leguminous bargain yesterday when a high court judge accidentally published details of MPs expenses, having mistaken them for the distances in inches to nearby stars.

He wasn’t the only Member of Parliament under scrutiny today.

Education Minister Bestine Sloppur’s bills include a ten-metre-tall jelly in the shape of the pope and 3 000 left-footed clogs.

Chancellor Mannie Vane came close to his maximum with £800 000 for a jasmine-scented shotgun, a purchase which one industry insider called “a bastard of a buy.”

Enid Dudding, the Works and Pensions Secretary, blew £80 on a dandelion.

Serendipity Secretary Dulcie Fnast spent £18 000 on an extended taxi-ride that took her round and round one small field for the better part of a day, plus £50 on dramamine. A tearful Fnast apologised later to onlookers, saying, “I didn’t know what else to get.”

Science Minister Mittenglove Clitheroe stands accused of “wanton rocketry” after it emerged that he charged taxpayers to secretly put a giraffe into orbit. According to NASA, it is still there, cluttering up the space-lanes, and can next be seen from your own backyard on Sunday April the 6th, rising in the northwest at 21:43 and gliding by the brilliant yellow Capella, before vanishing into the Earth’s shadow some six minutes later, just past Mars, in the constellation of Gemini. High resolution telescopes reveal spectacular views of the ungulate’s mournful visage at portholes.

Ailleron Trochanter, MP for Leicesterchester, is facing a lion’s mane of criticism for equipping local swimming baths with poisonous Cnidaria.

Tom Larvae, the Shadow Minister of Hours and Passing Moments, bought a “totally impractical” clock with a myriad of microscopic hands for half a grand, which constituents say he never uses anyway, and has had to sellotape a free wristwatch over the face of, just to tell the time.

Paul Cannon, MP for Haslet Heath, spent £600 000 of taxpayer’s money in a dream! Bills record a series of increasingly bizarre purchases over the course of one night last August, culminating in “a sort of hard man’s shoes called dayjobs,” which he wore proudly while assuring his wife that “if stick-to-braw means kingso, then you’re beef, old man.”

Other items include:

* The embalmed brain of Albert Einstein, encrusted with rubies and emeralds: £110 000 (Ahabella Wildern, MP for Spume).

* The bottled breath of John Lennon whispering the nonsense word “dilstilsdabum” in 1968: £750 000 (Varicella Wood, MP for Molesby West).

* One owl’s testicle, a tachyon and a CD of constituents’ screams recorded on location in local hospitals: £35 (Rogella McQuarrie, MP for Truro).

* A ghost’s teeth: tenner (Jack Plank, MP for Slockening).

* Anti-ghost sweatband: £11.50 (Jack Plane, MP for Slackening).

* 15 “retirements”: priceless (Michael Eft, Children’s Minister).

Taxpayers also footed the £23 000 bill for Treasury Secretary Marcus Dudding’s 365 scarecrows, and the quarter of a million an agency was paid to devise names, logos, online avatars and personal moe anthropomorphisms for each of them.

There is no suggestion that Mr. Standish or any of his colleagues did anything illegal though.

“It’s not unusual, compared to what others in a similar income bracket are claiming,” the embattled MP remonstrated. “The real criminals are anyone who thinks different. I loved that pea like my own brother. Now, where did I put it?”

French Hats Are Not British: PM

A number of prominent figures have come out in support of the controversial remarks of Aggravations Minister John Haulm, misquoted last week in The Sunday Paper, about French hats.

Prime Minister John Brown called the beret, which is designed to cover the hair and upper head of a Frenchman, “a mark of separation.”

Gordon Campbell, Leader of the Opposition, agreed with the embellished diatribe, adding that, in his opinion, it would be “better for Britain” if Frenchmen switched to proper headgear like bowlers and trilbies.

Judge Justice Alison Burkheart wrote in The Deadly Telepath that it was “all very well for Frenchmen to say that they feel comfortable in soft felt, or that it keeps the sun off, but these pate-puddings do not make me feel comfortable. Not comfortable at all. In a way, it could be said that, by wearing such comfy hats, they are being selfish – and that’s a kind of anti-Semitism.”

Meanwhile Conservative MP Elmer Griffins called for the Gallic garb to be abolished completely: “The cranium-cosies are provoking me to intolerance!” he told The Sunmail Times. “How do they think I feel having to hold such unconscionable notions?”

Labour MP Harriet Harlequins said that the beret was “frightening and intimidating” because it was “so obviously French,” while Shadow Employment Secretary Jasper Basculant Devises-Dives suggested that the hat was responsible for a raft of lewd remarks he himself had made to French infants on a drunken spree that morning, calling it “a kind of voluntary apartheid: effectively hate-dressing.”

Reflecting in The Mirror, Jeremy Crace, chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, declared that the minister was “basically on the ball with this one, so long as he didn’t really mean it.” The British National Party praised Haulm’s misrepresented outburst, presenting his office with a set of insensitive etchings, so that his distorted views could be commemorated for all time in copperplate. And morose writer, Widesly Amiss detailed a series of bad dreams he’d had since childhood, many of them involving berets and/or snakes, after which he confessed that he wanted to hurt someone now and “I am not overly discriminating whom.”

It is not known what Frenchmen thought, as they were not asked.

Haulm himself was not available for comment either, although eyewitnesses describe a man they thought did look a bit like him, through the windows of the ministry building, trying to become available over the course of the afternoon.

“We saw him locked in this titanic struggle, and around teatime he did begin to have an available air about him, but in the end it just wasn’t enough.”

Lost Medals Could Be on Taliban Shirts Now: MOD

(The Murder Cross: Britain’s highest accolade.)

A crate of medals airlifted into Afghanistan’s notorious Helmand province may have fallen into enemy hands, Ministry of Defence sources have revealed.

According to the shock revelation, which emerged during a drunken late-night game of truth-or-dare between generals and reporters, the decorations were dropped last week over British lines in a bid to incentivise sullen troops. But it now looks increasingly likely that the only soldiers reaping motivational rewards this fighting season will be Her Majesty’s implacable foes, the Taliban.

“These laurels were literally priceless,” said disgruntled ex-General Sir Toby Montague-Snares. “Their loss will be a kick in the button-hole to our little boys, and they will make our enemies immensely proud.”

The accolades and brag-rags, which have a street value of half a million euros, are thought to include 10 Murder Crosses, 10 Big Badges of Courage, 10 Little Badges of Lesser Courage, 21 Orders of the Garters of St. Boniface of Nîmes, 41 Tin Hearts of Fortitude, 51 Brown Patches of Gallantry, 9 Fairy Garlands, 2 ‘Merits’, 2 Honourable Mentions, a Nutter’s Star and up to 900 Courtesy Rub-Ons.

“With that lot, there’s no knowing what magnificent deeds our foes may accomplish,” despaired the former warrior.

Army bosses have conceded that anyone with information as to their whereabouts will probably be shot.

“We simply have no rewards left to give,” General Sir Mandeville Saunders-Whaurour said. “Besides, anyone with such information is almost certainly one of them, and must therefore be killed on sight, unless they can buy their life by fingering at least two ‘terror suspects’, to keep our brave little boys entertained, and cover our expenses with at least a dozen more.”

Closure for Unproductive Hospital

(Oops: locals attempt to self-medicate in the wake of the closure, with mixed results.)

Saint Uncumber’s Hospital, Ghoul, finally closed today, after a campaign by locals to preserve it proved ineffective. According to managers, the hospital was simply not productive enough.

“We knew we had a productivity problem from the day our predecessors were golden-handshaken,” said director Lady Veronica Harlequins. “But the extent only became apparent when we looked at the books. It turns out St. Uncumber’s was producing nothing at all. In fact, the hospital seemed to be dedicated almost exclusively to a healing a range of ailments and palliative care.”

“It was a shocking situation, financially,” agreed director of finances Sir Ogilvy Barnes. “We did what we could to modernise. We sold the carpark, nurses’ flats, catering and cleaning departments, even the hospital building itself, but then we had to pay for the owners’ profits as well as the services themselves. It was clearly an improvement on before, as it was clearly more modern, although it did take its toll. And, of course, we still had zero productivity.”

But the final straw came when the struggling trust was penalised for failing to meet its targets.

“When the government docked our grant, the writing was on the wall,” Barnes said, dismissing the demonstrators as “a vocal minority of valued customers whom we strive to do what’s best for.”

The protests were led by local woman Wendy Lanyard who rose to prominence last year when she successfully sued the hospital for losing her favourite hat after it blew out of a fifth floor Fertility Ward window and was eaten by crows.

“One year ago, a tribunal found in my favour,” she called to supporters, mutedly, through the wrong end of her megaphone. “Those crows were stoned on hospital waste, and I was delirious with natural justice. But now...”

“But now... what, Mrs. Lanyard?” a sad wind sighed.

Offsetting Abuse

Today sees the launch of a new scheme that could reduce the impact of state terror by up to 30%.

The government is to offset up to a third of atrocities committed in its dungeons and foreign wars, and up to a fifth of heinous acts, with a one-off Good Day on which contractors will pay subcontractors to employ staff to grin at pedestrians, distract motorists with friendly waves, and just be pleasant generally.

In specially selected areas, pensioners will be rendered to the theatre to see impresario Andrew Lloyd Webber’s new musical based on his own hit BBC 1 series How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?, and babies bombarded with coochie-coo noises.

Rights groups have been broadly supportive of the plan, which will cost the taxpayer nothing, providing that they are descended from a medieval warlord who conquered the land by fire and the sword 900 years ago.

It is estimated that the suffering of ten thousand people inadvertently robbed, rent limb from limb, or kidnapped and held without trial in secret torture-jails could be offset in this way over the course of a single day’s kindliness.

Speaking at a dinner for rich and important folk from all over the world, Prime Minister Gordon Campbell described the Offsetting Wrongness bill as the single most nice thing he knows, and its effects as nothing short of affable.