Mandela demands end to UK prison inhumanity

Celebrity ex-lag Nelson Mandela is preparing to embark on a mammoth tour of British prisons in an attempt to have high-profile criminals released.

In the wake of his calls last week to have convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi ("Bob" to his mates) treated more humanely in his Glasgow prison cell, celebrity gaudy shirt-wearer Mandela is expected to call for the release of a whole host of nice people such as paedophile Sidney Cooke, landscape gardener Rose West and complete nutter Jeremy Beadle, suggesting that they should all be rehoused and given a living wage at the expense of the taxpayer.

Addressing a crowd of reporters at some World Cup freebie or other in Japan, Mandela spoke candidly of the conditions that these notorious criminals were enduring, and of his hopes for their future freedom: "I have been told of the harrowing conditions in British prisons, and I know for a fact that these poor, lonely people are enduring unspeakable mental, physical and psychological hardship," explained the South African jailbird. "Last week Rose West was spoken to by a prison officer who raised his voice not once but twice, whilst Sidney Cooke has had all his copies of the Spring/Summer 2002 Mothercare catalogue stolen by other inmates. This sort of torture must be halted, and I hope to see these persons released as a direct result of my hand-shaking photo opportunities."

The tour by Mandela is set to cause uproar within the Labour government, not least because it threatens to upstage their own ongoing efforts to get dangerous criminals released into the community after serving the minimum amount of time possible "inside". "It's not that we don't respect Mr. Mandela's sentiments," stated Peter Secshopp, Labour spokesman for their Carelessness in the Community initiative. "It's just that we are more than capable of slipping the odd convicted paedo out of the back door of Her Majesty's Pleasure ourselves. If he wants to drop in on these people and hear their grievances, that's fine with us, but if he thinks he can trample over Tony's vision to do away with prisons during this Parliament, we'll have him banged up before he can say 'double gin and tonic and easy on the ice bitch'."

It would not be the first time that Mandela has campaigned to have "undesirables" released from incarceration, with his impassioned address to the United Nations Congress in 1997 successfully securing the release of Peter Mandelson from a Bangkok jail. Mandela himself endured more than 20 years as a prisoner in South Africa under the Apartheid regime, an experience that convinced him that all prisoners should at the very least have access to an Olympic-sized swimming pool and 24-hour room service.