Sunak removes whip from Enoch Powell

The prime-minister has defended his timing after removing the Conservative whip from Enoch Powell on the fiftieth anniversary of Powell leaving the party of his own accord and over twenty years since he died.

"It is important to give people a chance to make amends" said Mr Sunak. "But having given Mr Powell 50 years to change his opinion on the naming of the Commonwealth, its right that he understands he cannot cross the leadership."

It's understood that the Conservative Party had planned to use Mystic Meg to contact Mr Powell to deliver the damning verdict, but after Mystic Meg's death, she's become even more mystical so the minister for Fairy dust and Unicorns is being moved from his Brexit duties to contacting the dead.

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Only 20 Prime Ministers until polling day

The government has set a cap on how many more Prime Ministers it will allow to run the country before the next General Election.  'Twenty, tops,' stated a government spokesman, adding, 'and only that many if we can stop the lunatics having a vote.'  It isn't clear which lunatics he was talking about, but the consensus is that any attempt to eliminate lunatics must be a good thing.  Therefore, any attempt to eliminate any of the current Tory MPs automatically eliminates some lunatics.

'Now that Hunt has found £20 billion of headroom, there must be an opportunity to bring back Truss, she'll blow it in no time' suggested one MP, while another suggested that Boris coming back 'for a day or so' could see that headroom safely allocated to a chum on the VIP lane.  Other MPs think that there should be opportunities for previously untried Prime Ministers.  30P Lee Anderson thinks he'd make a great PM, as long as Labour promise not to sniggle, while Priti Patel thinks a smirking PM could be a real asset.  Most of the potential PMs are thought to be MPs at greatest risk of losing their seats - the pension of £125k per annum index linked for life each is thought to be a significant motivator.

'We'll probably have a leadership challenge next week, and the week after,' the spokesman said.  'It won't serve any practical purposes, but at least the country won't be watching the rest of us syphon wealth away while the spectacles continue.'

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Imaginary numbers: the strange mathematics of UK infrastructure projects

An eminent mathematician writes, "We all remember Bertrand Russell trying to prove an entire logical system of mathematics from first principles in his Principia Mathematica. And then of course Kurt Gödel came along with his Incompleteness Theorems and said, 'That's nearly all bollocks, Bert'. But no-one, until the present Tory party, has ever invented from scratch a whole new method of arithmetic with no founding principles at all.

"Traditionally, arithmetic requires that a solution proved true today must also hold true tomorrow. Otherwise it's clearly not true. So, 'two plus two equals four' has to be valid on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Bank Holiday Mondays. But what if it weren't? What if the answer to 'two plus two' could be whatever you want on any day you choose? This is the important breakthrough in public financing of major infrastructure projects in the UK.

"Take, for example, the deceptively simple space-time inequality formula HS2 = 2 x Hinckley.C

The two variables are both continuously variable, independently. And although they appear linked by the 'equals' sign, that is a special Governmental operator which means, in layman's terms, 'they're both incredible value for money regardless of how much money is applied or how much of the project is completed'.

"HS2 is one of the most important concepts in modern Government mathematics, like zero or infinity. This is because it has no fixed value whatsoever. And the use of hexadecimal fractions in Hinckley.C, .D, .E etc acts as what we call a 'containment number' to shield the population from undesirable, and potentially dangerous, understanding.

"If asked to summarise the result of this breakthrough in number theory, and its application to the real world, I'd have to rely on the old dictum, 'The first 90% of any project accounts for the first 90% of the expense, and the remaining 10% of the project accounts for the next 90% of the expense." 

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