How close are Brown and Blair? This close

During a week in which the relationship between Prime Minister Tony Blair and Chancellor Gordon Brown was again under enormous scrutiny, one thing became clear: that no one has a bloody clue how close they are, except perhaps Tone and Gordon.

Until now that is. In a world-exclusive survey commissioned by The Rockall Times, we have spoken in depth to well-placed sources, sources close to the ministers, plain ordinary sources, good friends of both men, insiders and a few drunks hanging around Charing Cross station and asked them to judge, in TI units*, the different aspects of the men's relationship.

What we have discovered will shake the foundations of government to its roots, reshape the way media will have to make vague comparisons, cause well-informed and intelligent columnists to have to find another topic to drone on about and probably ensure Life Will Never Be The Same Again™.

Here are the true figures on how the personal relationship between the two most powerful politicians in the UK stands:

• Affection: Stands at the size of an egg, down from a grapefruit at the last election
• Friendship: Stretches to four double-decker buses
• Trust: The size of five football pitches
• Enmity: One spoonful of it would kill three guinea pigs
• Respect: Blair's respect for Brown is as big as the BT Tower; Brown's for Blair, the Empire State building.
• Understanding: As close as that as between three mothers and two newly born babies.

And that just about settles it

That should put an end to it until the New Year.

* Tabloid Issue units — set of international recognised units for newspapers devised from two platinum measurements of the pun and the over-exaggeration on 22 June 1799. Further developed in the 1980s under the active leadership of Maxwell and MacKenzie through the British Association for the Advancement of Journalese (BAAJ).