Brown to found a 'national health service'

In another example of how he is getting on with the job of leading the country through these difficult times by addressing the problems of the electors of Crewe British people, Prime Minister Gordon Brown yesterday told the House of Commons that a new 'national health service' will ensure that nobody in Britain, but especially in Crewe, will die, ever.

He was contemptuous of Opposition cries of 'election bribe!' and 'total fantasy', dismissing them as 'the empty complaints of a party of shallow salesmen concerned more with short-term political gain than the long-term interests of the British people'.

The Prime Minister explained that the new national health service will be totally different from any previous, similar-sounding organisations because, he said, 'Nobody in Crewe will die, ever, thanks to my brilliance.' Questioned by one of his backbenchers, Mr Brown was forced to admit that he is a qualified doctor in addition to his many other impressive qualifications. He confessed that, as a child, he studied medicine at night in his bedroom upstairs in the manse. 'Yes,' his spokesman later confirmed, 'he is indeed the most brilliant Prime Minister we have ever had, but he hides his light under a bushel so as not to overshadow his colleagues. Er, for whom he has the greatest respect. And of course it's mutual.'

This is Mr Brown's third mighty slap-down in a week for the 'shallow salesmen' on the Tory benches.

The first of his considered and principled reforms, designed to lead the British people onwards to the sunny uplands of his Vision for Britain, was his transfer of Budget responsibility from the office of the Chancellor of the Exchequer to that of the First Lord of the Treasury where, of course, it properly belongs.

The second announcement was of £200 million 'to help first time buyers', money which was announced previously and which had been in the hands of the Housing Corporation for some time but nobody remembered that except a Scottish Nationalist MP whom nobody has ever heard of so Mr Brown was able to announce it to the electorate of Crewe once again. A spokesman for Number Ten Downing Street was unable to confirm when the the third re-announcement of this generous allocation of taxpayer's money government investment will be made, but he explained that since it is enough to buy 1,000 houses at current prices it will go a long way to alleviating the problems of the four million people currently on social housing waiting lists. He dismissed the scaremongering of the Tory-dominated Local Government Association who forecast yesterday that another million people could be added to the waiting list between now and the general election in 2010.

At the conclusion of his monthly press conference yesterday, our famously clubbable Prime Minister invited all the journalists present down the pub where he regaled them with a stream of side-splitting jokes which he had learned as a child, studying at night, upstairs in his room at the manse.

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LATE NEWS
We have learned that the headquarters of the 'national health service' is to be in Crewe. Difficulties with the Parliamentary timetable will oblige the Prime Minister to pre-announce* this at next week's PMQs which just happens to be the day before the Crewe and Nantwich by-election. The 'national health service' will employ absolutely everyone who lives in the boroughs of Crewe and Nantwich at an average salary of £150,000 per annum plus a housing allowance and expenses.

* The official announcement will come in the Pre-Budget Report in the autumn.

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