Cherie Blair gets Equity card

Cherie Blair was today awarded an honorary gold membership card to acting union Equity in recognition of her tear-jerking performance on TV.

"It was sensational," said an equity spokesactor. "You'd think she'd been acting all her life. Gone was the challenging tone, the educated voice and the clever remarks she used in court every day. In came the hint of a Liverpool accent and use of homely phrases like 'do him proud', the sob in the throat talking of her poor son all alone in his luxury flats, the talk of sticking by her friends — it was all top-drawer stuff."

Drawing on his Shakespearean experience while cleverly appealing to the Jewish lobby, Blair followed up by playing a scene from The Merchant of Venice. With true artistry and a look of intense embarrassment, Gielgud Blair went even further than the play and complained that he had actually lost his pound of flesh. Presumably this explained his drawn and shifty look, though no signs of the flesh loss were visible. He was only prevented from launching into "The quality of mercy is not strain'd" by the Turkish president asking him to confirm the details of the subsidies they could expect when they joined the EU.

A bald man saying he was from the Tory party or something then whispered something silly about swimming pools, though nobody present was quite sure why. He is understood not to be in the running for even a trainee actor's Equity card.