‘It was exciting at the beginning and we couldn’t keep our hands off his campaign literature,’ said activist Sheila Timms, who has never been married to Gingrich. ‘All of us supporters were at it like rabbits – and by ‘at it’ I mean exchanging, all the hours that God sent, our thrilling, passionate, exciting views on abortion, immigrants and Big Government. Phew, it was exhausting! And I won’t pretend that those previous ethics violations of Newt’s didn’t add a certain frisson to the relationship.’

Other Gingrich supporters also agreed that he presented a powerful allure to red-blooded Republicans. ‘I saw Newt speak at a rally in Iowa and I’d never met a man with such stamina,’ said lifelong conservative Mimi Bendricks, tousling her hair with her fingers. ‘After spending twenty breathless minutes expounding on Obama’s Kenyan ancestry and his anti-colonialist foreign policy, a lesser candidate would have rolled over for a well-earned breather. But not Newt! He just climbed back on and hammered home his point even harder. The man was insatiable.’

But drooping polls are starting to show a waning in Gingrich’s staying power, and many supporters are now questioning their vows of loyalty. ‘When you meet someone who shares your own fetish viewpoint, it’s natural to think you’ve found ‘the one’,’ said Felicity Amherst, who admits to previous dalliances with John McCain and George W Bush. ‘But inevitably things start to go stale after a while, and then you wake up one day and realise the same old illiberal rhetoric just doesn’t do it for you anymore.’

‘It’s at that stage when I think both parties have to ask themselves whether it might be better if they were allowed to see other people,’ continued Felicity. ‘I mean, perhaps I’d like to hook up with Mitt Romney for a while, and if Newt wanted to see voters in other countries – perhaps consider running for office somewhere in South America or Asia – then I wouldn’t want to stand in his way. This is the 21st century after all.’

‘I gave him a very stern telling off for snapping at dear old Mr Murdoch, which I think he took on board as he’s been very quiet lately,’ said Mr Cameron, ‘but all of a sudden he’s back to his old tricks again, gnashing his teeth at my American Republican friends simply for wanting to cut benefits and let the rich keep all their money. I mean, really!’

‘I wonder, maybe a new kennel at the Ministry of Defence might persuade him to behave a little better or perhaps we could give him BSkyB back for him to bury in the garden for a while,’ mused Mr Cameron, ‘but all things considered he knows he’s been a very naughty little boy,’ he said, tickling Vince Cable under the chin and adding ‘Yesh you have, oh yesh you have,’ as Cable adoringly glared back at him and showed his teeth in an endearingly aggressive way.

‘Of course you have to understand he was a bit of a lost soul when we found him as a playful 67-year-old puppy who lived in a world without any real hope,’ added Cameron, ‘but one look into those doleful eyes and we knew we could give him a home and a better life. Given the circumstances at the time I think anyone would have done the same. I know Gordon Brown had a go.’

But if the muzzle doesn’t work out and ‘Vincey’ remains agressive towards the Prime Minister’s occasional visitors and wider friends the Prime Minister hinted that, regrettably, further measures may have to be taken. ‘If things don’t improve,’ he said, before lowering his voice to a whisper, ‘we may have to, you know, chop his balls off. I’m keeping my voice down because he’s a clever old dog and I really do think he understands everything I say, and if he hears me say that I just know he’ll go ballistic.’

‘God forbid, maybe even nuclear.’

At the end of his six-day tour of Europe, Mr Obama praised Poland’s ‘impressively swelling’ economic growth and ‘well-rounded’ support of pro-democracy movements in North Africa and the Middle East. In a press conference with Poland PM Donald Tusk, the US President said Poland was “one of our most attractive allies, and certainly our closest partner in Europe”.

In response, the British ambassador in Washington, Sir Nigel Elton Sheinwald, released a statement confessing concern that America’s recent appreciation of Britain’s own ‘special relationship’ might not translate into tangible transatlantic economic benefits.

“Is the USA some kind of slag, or what?” He asked journalists at a press conference this morning. “Leading us on like a right little tease – Poland special? They said we were special, the tarts!”

British Prime Minister David Cameron expressed ‘disappointment’ with what he called the ‘fickle values’ displayed by American diplomacy. “When Obama came to see us, he said he wasn’t into huge booming recoveries,” he complained. “Now we find out he’s courting Polish opinion, and all of sudden he can’t get enough of her massive economic capacity – it makes our growth look unimpressively flat, I’m afraid. Now we realise they took advantage of us for short-term political gains – I feel used. Would it have helped if I’d said how dirty some of our foreign affairs can be?”

Reginald Blythe-Partington, the UK consul in Gdansk, threatened to use “every diplomatic means at our disposal” to prevent Poland from signing unilateral US trade agreements to the detriment of Britain. “Basically, if the Poles go and get into bed with America I’ll go straight round Lech Walesa’s house and nut the bastard”, he explained.

Trump who has made millions from real estate, hotels and casinos is now better known for his TV appearances and very convincing head of hair.  He was seen by some commentators as an outsider for the Republican nomination; ‘It would have been a bit of a risk to go with a maverick outsider who knows nothing about politics or world affairs’ said one Congressman, ‘when we have the safer, more moderate option of Sarah Palin already waiting in the wings.’

But Trump’s no-nonsense Apprentice-style approach was said to have a certain appeal in many of the swing states. ‘Running a country is no different to running a business’ said a spokesman for the Trump campaign.  ‘And if Detroit doesn’t shape up, it should have to ship out! If any American cities or states are costing us more in Federal Assistance than they are providing in tax revenues, then they are clearly in the wrong country.  We are not running some Communist charity here!’

Trump was apparently thinking of giving challenging tasks to various states, such as asking Rhode Island to come up with an exit strategy for Iraq, or asking Maine to rebuild New Orleans. ‘Each week we could have lost one star from the star spangled banner, until we were just left with all the winners.’

His favourites for the chop were West Virginia, two of New York City’s five boroughs and Hawaii.  ‘Hawaii isn’t actually making a loss,’ confessed Trump, ‘but that was the only way we thought we could prove that President Obama had not been born in the USA.’

Realising that the FBI had placed no limit on the number of entries per household, and that there was no penalty for an incorrect guess, Mr Renfrew last April purchased a giant AA motoring map of Pakistan, Afghanistan and surrounding provinces, and peppered it with some eighty thousand drawing pins, each labelled “Bin Laden is here”. The CIA have apparently been working their way through the pins for several months, and only yesterday turned to the small town of Abbottabad, a highland settlement north of Islamabad, where Bin Laden turned out to be indeed hiding.

“To be honest, we were starting to lose faith in Mr Renfew’s intelligence,” explained a grinning Major Dirk McQuickly, head of the team that carried out the assassination. “If felt like we’d been all the bloody place following these pins, and after we spent two months trawling the bottom of a lake, a few of us were ready to give up. But all credit to that Kent genius – he knew where Bin Laden was hiding all right, and led us straight to him. How he knew, I’ll never know.”

Mr Renfrew credits his idea to his long experience of newspaper “spot the ball” competitions, where an entry form completely covered in little “x”s was often likely to win the prize. “It won’t change my life at all,” he insisted while being photographed drinking champagne with attractive models for the Thanet Observer. “I’ll still enjoy a quiet pint, and I’ll probably move on to Jamel Ahmed Mohammed Ali Al-Badawi – he’s wanted in connection with the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen – there’s five million for him. Luckily my wife gave me a touring map of Yemen for our first wedding anniversary, so I’ll be getting my pins out later.”

‘This leaves us in a bit of a fix,’ admitted leading right-wing sceptic Donald Trump. ‘On the one hand we know once and for all that Obama is not a natural-born citizen of the United States and is ineligible for the presidency. But on the other he is the human incarnation of Almighty God, and that’s likely to play pretty well among our church-going grass-roots supporters. Even so, you show me where in the Bible it says that these healthcare reforms are the divine will of God.’

The copy of Obama’s ‘long form’ birth certificate provides conclusive proof that he was born in a manger in the Holy land on 25 December to parents Mary and Joseph. It is signed by the attending shepherds, witnessed by three wise men and carries the official stamp of the Judean authorities.

‘It’s difficult to know how to proceed,’ continued Trump. ‘We could oust the President on the grounds that he was not born in the US, but then he could smite us where we stand and damn us for all eternity. In hindsight, I can’t believe the founding fathers didn’t specify in the Constitution that the Commander-in-Chief’s mother can’t be a virgin or his father the deity of a major world religion.’

Disillusioned by Obama’s seemingly infallible status, some birthers are now turning their attention to questioning the credentials of other famous authority figures. ‘I think this Jesus guy maybe wasn’t all he claimed,’ said one. ‘Firstly, I’d argue that the King of the Jews lost his citizenship when his family fled to Egypt. And secondly, he was almost certainly a Muslim. Look, we found this birth certificate for Jesus Hussein Christ.’

Many rally attendants agreed. ‘I brought my little girls here with me,’ said local resident Dwayne Lee Floyd. ‘I wanted them to see exactly what’s right, and exactly what’s wrong, with America. How am I s’posed to fill them with paranoia and hate for that Muslim Kenyan socialist dictator when he’s starin’ down from that sign like he’s Groucho f’ing Marx?

Other protestors were concerned at the correct spelling of ‘Obama’ and the abject failure to indicate how much the name looked like ‘Osama’.  She also neglected to put in his middle name in capital letters and underline ‘Hussein’.

However not all members of the fledgling movement were as upset by the sign. Glen Beck, unofficial spokesman for the Tea Party, addressed the issue on his show, where he called for cooler heads to prevail. ‘I can’t for the life of me figure out why this is such a big deal,’ he said from his Fox News studio on Monday. ‘It’s not like she made him not black.’

Tom Sarvay

‘This is so much better than the vampire costume I wore last year,’ said eight-year-old Troy Winklemann, dressed in a well-cut suit from the fancy dress store and a Barack Obama mask. ‘Usually the grown-ups just pretend to be scared, but at all the houses with Republican posters in the windows, they’ve been genuinely terrified. Can we scare the shit out of them? Yes we can!’

Nine-year-old Nathan Pintle, a life-long Republican from Kansas, agreed. ‘This costume’s just neat. Obama is easily the scariest thing that’s ever happened to America – papa told me. The only problem is so far I haven’t got any candy. Instead people keep promising to vote Democrat if I’ll just leave their families alone, or frantically offering up their taxes and telling me to spend it all on Hispanics.’

As conservatives across the US prepare for a night of terror, the White House has taken the opportunity to reassure citizens. ‘There is absolutely nothing to worry about,’ said press secretary Robert Gibbs. ‘If children choose to go out dressed as the President, it is simply because they want to express their support for his policies. And please don’t try to pretend you’re not in. All these kids ask for is a Democrat majority in both Houses, and universal healthcare for all. We’d hate to see any terrified elderly Republicans suffer seizures they can’t afford to pay for.’

Right-wing politicians have fought back by encouraging their supporters’ children to dress up as self-confessed witch Christine O’Donnell, while advising homeowners to adopt the progressive politics of Sarah Palin and shoot any intruders on sight.

Despite the good-natured political rivalry, things appeared to get a little out of hand in South Carolina when a group of diminutive Obamas were chased from town by a gang of Republican children dressed in white-hooded robes. ‘It was all we could find in our parents’ wardrobes,’ said one of the protagonists. ‘Besides, grandpaw always said you can’t bring about change from the bottom up, you’ve got to do it from the neck down.’