‘They’re a bit on the small side,’ said a spokesman for Oxfam. ‘You couldn’t get a Margate tart and a Boy Scout in here – not standing up anyway.’ But Emin – who denied she might move to Haiti for tax reasons – said she hoped to teach Haitians how to exploit their predicament as performance art. ‘We might wrangle Arts Council funding,’ she said, ‘if I can persuade them to stay in their air pockets long enough for me to do a few sketches.’

Turner Prize winner Martin Creed, who has taken his installation ‘Work No.  227, the lights going on and off’ to Haiti, complained that thousands of Haitians have stolen his idea. ‘There’re lights going on and off all over the place here,’ he said. ‘I wish I’d brought my ‘Work No 79, some Blu-tack, kneaded, rolled into a ball and depressed against a wall’ instead.’

Also in Haiti is ‘Angel of the North’ Antony Gormley. ‘I’ve got a brilliant idea involving a plinth if I can only find something still standing in Port-au-Prince. Christ, this place looks like bleedin’ Gateshead,’ he said.

A number of options were considered, including burial in a Challenger tank, a tomb shaped like an iron handbag and a life-size statue in the shape of a Spitting Image puppet.  However the judges all agreed that the milk bottle design, harking back to Thatcher’s decision to end free school milk for the over-sevens in 1970, would be the most cost-effective.

‘We would like to thank everyone who put forward suggestions for the Thatcher Memorial’ said panel chairman, architect Richard Rogers, ‘and can only apologise to the National Union of Mineworkers, whose detailed blueprint of a massive sepultural turd somehow got mislaid.’

‘I was baring my all to save the children of the world while that French-sounding tart was still a flat-chested schoolgirl wearing a beret and carrying bags of onions,’ Madonna fumed. The orphan in question, Zahara Marley was originally adopted by Jolie and Brad Pitt in Ethiopia when she was three months old. But Madonna told a federal court in New York last week that as a high-ranking star and Kabbalah guru, the child belonged to her.

The singer also argued that Jolie’s adoption was invalid because she has tattooed the wrong map co-ordinates for Zahara’s birthplace on her arm. She had got them confused with the address for Brad Pitt’s hairdresser, Madonna alleged. However Jolie hit back, saying that Madonna ‘couldn’t even point to her adopted children’s birthplace on a map – she thinks Malawi is a character from The Jungle Book.’

Jolie vigorously defended her right to keep Zahara, saying that she found her first and that it was one of the perks of being a Unicef ambassador that she was entitled to adopt any Third World children she liked the look of. New York Judge Hugh Bowen ruled that under international law, super-rich Hollywood stars could adopt any orphan they liked, and dismissed Madonna’s case.

Madonna was not available for comment after an appearance at London’s 02 Arena, where she performed ‘a special tribute to Michael Jackson’. Fans applauded as she injected herself with a lethal cocktail of drugs.

Fredd (punchline from Ludicity)

The rare copies had a mistake in the story at the bottom of page 12, about trees. The word ‘government’ was wrongly printed with a capital ‘G’. The defective copies, dubbed the ‘Grauniad Grey’, were initially changing hands for £500, but now, seventeen years later, copies in mint condition are worth a great deal more.

The previous record for a defective newspaper was set in 2007 when an issue of the Financial Times containing ‘stranglewank’ misspelt as two separate words, fetched £200,000.
Fredd

Uri Geller also rallied to his friend Jackson’s defence ‘convinced with all his heart’ of his continued vitality, telling GMTV ‘I can still sense Michael’s vibrant aura and although he hasn’t been returning my calls for a while, that is not unusual.’

Santa Barbara District Attorney Thomas Sneddon, declined to comment but is reportedly preparing for a prolonged battle.

Fredd

Martina Navratilova, the former champion best remembered for her between sets renditions of ‘Old Man River’ during her 1980s heyday, complained that Michelle was ‘cheating, pure and simple’. Meanwhile, Wimbledon institution Cliff Richard was asked for his views on the controversy, but was unavailable for comment in the wake of revelations that he had provided the vocal track for the Chinese girl lip-syncing at the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony.

‘Everyone already has had to suffer the mild humiliation of revealing their embarrassing middle names and date of birth to everybody within earshot while phoning their bank from work,’ said a representative from the Financial Services Association. ‘But increased identity fraud means we now need personal details that friends wouldn’t usually reveal to friends or work colleagues.’

Several banks are already piloting the new security measures with the result that one London office was witness to a caller giving the responses ‘Spoons’; ‘plump-rumps-dot-com’ and ‘glory hole in Rio, but she turned out to be a bloke.’ ‘It certainly livened up a dull day in the House of Commons’ said one Westminster secretary.

However there is concern that with an increasing number of call centres bringing in automated systems, callers will be required to speak loudly and or indeed shout their sexual habits down the line. ‘We had a bloke in the office trying to book some cinema tickets’ said another office worker. ‘And all we could hear was our office manager shouting ‘Doggy! No, doggy! Randy Grannies!’ and ‘Stranglewank!’ He was only buying tickets for ‘Toy Story 3’.

In this particular case it transpires that the institution was not automated at all, it was just the call centre workers’ finding a way to entertain themselves. ‘It’s one of the few perks of a very boring job,’ said an employee.

‘We found the bodies, and the police are abusing our goodwill by holding on to them for an unacceptable length of time,’ he said. ‘Sometimes we don’t get them back at all, and when we do get them back they are often not in the condition that we found them in.’

The law states that anyone who finds a body must declare it to the coroner within 14 days. The coroner can then choose to bring in the police, but many dog-walkers are increasingly tempted to keep the find to themselves. ‘Nothing beats making a really good find’ said Bert Perlman, of Leicester. ‘But all the pleasure is being sucked out of it with the job’s-worth mentality of the police.’

Many police forces admit that the whole business of processing dead bodies is not as fast as they would like it to be, but claim they are setting new targets for returning the finds before they are fully decayed. ‘Frankly our hands our tied by petty government regulations and endless red tape. These days you can’t even dig up the body of a missing kidnapped heiress without some busy-body wanting to get the police involved. The problem is that with so many corpses being passed over the police station counter, it’s difficult to process them all what with with all the lost keys, empty wallets and wheel-less bicycles.’

In order to reduce the workload of the police, a number of forces have issued new guidelines to dog-walkers. Henceforth, any ramblers that find severed body parts in the woods or on waste ground, are requested to just put a home-made notice up on a nearby lamp-post. ‘That way, anyone who has lost an arm or a leg can claim it back directly from the finder without the police having to get involved.’