I’m at work. I’m bored. Make me laugh.

Trawl Rockall for:

Blair rips open shirt on open government

Despite winning the historic third term fairly comfortably, Tony Blair has acknowledged that he'd taken a bit of a pasting from the media on behalf of the electorate and promised to reclaim the people's trust by returning to a more traditional style of government in his final term. Henceforth decisions would be made in full Cabinet meetings after extensive and open debate, with formal minutes taken, tea served in proper bone china cups and saucers by a proper tea lady wearing an apron and so on — a refreshing change from those secret, boozy sessions on the sofa with unelected cronies and their simpering tarts who would say yes to anything that were the hallmark of his first and second terms.

But he was keen to go further than this and be absolutely straight with the British people as soon as he possibly could in order to get the new relationship off to a cracking start. So he responded to the very first journalist's question on the make-up of the new administration with unprecedented candour, revealing not only who would be in the Cabinet and what role they were each to have but exactly how it is that he decides on the pecking order within it at the start of each new term.

"Four years ago I went purely on size — the bigger the better," he divulged, "whereas in '97 it was colour and texture — the more livid and red and scabby and filled with pus the higher the posting you got. That's how Robin landed the Foreign Office the first time round for example, which convinced me of the need for change."

As a measure of how the government itself was committed to modernising its own internal practices he had adopted a more sophisticated formula for the third term, recently developed by educational prodigy Ruth Kelly, which takes both major criteria into account and produces a definitive combined score.

"It makes no difference to my own personal rating of course," he observed. Noting the raised eyebrows of the assembled reporters he leant forward conspiratorially. "Yes, you may be surprised, but I throw my hat in the ring with the rest of them every time. I've got no divine right to the top job, absolutely not. It just so happens that I'm way ahead of the field on both counts, so I end up getting it whatever the scoring system employed."

A slight trace of that dangerous smugness of the past was beginning to rear its head, and the Prime Minister compounded the error by misinterpreting the journalists' worried looks.

"Oh, you don't believe me?" he challenged them, loosening and yanking off his tie and popping the buttons off his shirt in his haste to rid himself of the encumbrance and present to the sceptics a magnificently bronzed chest lightly brushed with patches of soft grey curls above a washboard stomach of astonishing tone and allure considering his fifty-two years. But this was not the message. The Prime Minister wrong-footed the press once again by contemptuously turning his back on them. A gasp went up as the awesome patchwork of deep red gashes and jagged vermillion scars running hither and thither across the golden dorsal expanse was revealed, the legacy of countless violent clashes with the wobblers and wreckers in the public services who even to this day had not been entirely suppressed, fighting him tooth and nail every inch of the way to retain their outmoded practices and block all attempts at reform.

"Oh yes," said Mr Blair, facing the buzzing crowd again and grinning as of old, confident that he'd scored a sensational coup. "I always make sure to top up my scars just before an election."

Some other big hitters whom many pundits predicted were on the slide and likely to be downgraded this time around have also been doing their damnedest to halt the decline and keep their hands on a major portfolio, not least a trio of loyal sreet fighters whose notable absences at various points during the recent campaign were now explained. Determinedly keeping to his promise to withhold no information from the public that might be of interest, the Prime Minister was only too keen to detail the activities of these pugnacious generals during the past month and how they had variously chosen to renew their scars.

Butch Leader of the House Peter La Haine, now given the fiefdoms of both Northern Ireland and Wales, had donned his leathers and taken up a long-standing invitation to indulge in some hardcore S&M in a semi-detached correctional facility run by a hard-working family in Ilford.

Burly John Prescott managed to retain most of his empire after a week-long walking holiday in those pleasant green acres of Essex, Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire that he's done so much to popularise in recent years and bring within the reach of ordinary people migrating from overseas and up North. His extensive ramble coincided with the opening of an innovative New Labour nature trail that speaks volumes about the government's commitment to the environmental agenda in the third term. The Deputy Prime Minister bared his gargantuan torso and cut a swathe through some of the most rural backwaters of the Home Counties, pulling up hundreds of ancient trees and unmodernised hedgerows that were blocking the new runways and low-cost housing developments marked out on the road map kindly lent to him by Alistair Darling and which are so urgently needed if economic growth is to be sustained. In the process he enhanced and embellished those all-important deep rutted scratches and scars that keep him in the very top rank of élite Cabinet contenders.

That other famous bluff Yorkshireman David Blunkett, meanwhile, left nothing to chance after his enforced spell out in the cold. Putting together some of the best elements in the strategies of Messrs Blair and La Haine he embarked on a punishing tour of schools, hospitals and other public institutions of ill-repute, travelling incognito in a discreet police cavalcade organised by forces no longer under his control but only too keen do what they could on the QT for an old mate in a worthy cause. Arriving in full gimp regalia he followed the unerring nose of his canine companion Lucy, descending into some of the dankest corners of Britain's most notorious education authorities and NHS Trusts for a series of ritual flagellations by a relentless succession of saucy young nurses, strict spinsterish schoolmistresses and sundry uniformed dominatrices whose professional endeavours soon had a ravishing new set of lacerations and weals bubbling up under the torn shreds of the hired costume in the ex-Home Secretary's surprisingly tender white flesh.

After such valiant efforts it came as something of a disappointment when under the new Kelly formula he was allocated the relatively unglamorous post of Secretary of State for Work and Pensions with its tedious obligation to sit down at a desk and do sums rather than generally swan about as is the wont and duty of most other ministers, but he does maintain the perks of his special relationship with the Prime Minister which leaves him comfortably settled in perpetuity in the official Home Secretary's palatial residence in Belgravia with uniformed WPCs at his beck and call.

With tough stalwarts like these still giving their all in support of a radically-reformed Prime Minister committed as never before to open government and public accountability the third term looks rosy indeed, with every prospect of putting in place the remaining pieces of the modernisation jigsaw that were left at home on the back burner during the overseas campaigns and mopping up those last few pockets of resistance in the diehard sectors of the public services, leaving successor Gordon Brown with nothing much left to do after the expected handover in a few years' time.

Breaking News — Rival party's intensely colourful supremo in post mortem bust-up

There's been bitter in-fighting between Robert Kilroy-Silk and himself over who should be the leader of Veritas, the party he founded earlier this year and which made its mark on the political scene in spectacular style — going from a standing start to meltdown in its first ever national campaign. The flaming row culminated inevitably in acrimonious divorce, with Veritas splitting up and regrouping as ITV Arse. The mud-slinging didn't stop there however — each of the two new parties instantly claimed the moral high ground and promised to continue the war of attrition from a safe distance after Kilroy went over to ITV and Silk disappeared up his arse.

Previously

• General Election 2005&trade — Are you still floating?
• Wheels fall off Tony's election bandwagon
• 'I've got the biggest chopper' — Blair

 Email an enemy  Pub-friendly printable version  ‘Politics’ index page