"Having been made aware of hundreds of thousands of people in the capital involving themselves in suspicious underground activity," Superintendent Dirk Dimm-Witt of the Metropolitan Police told reporters, "we took the imaginative step of cutting electric power to this city-wide criminal network to interrupt their operations.
"Our intelligence - although I use that term very loosely - identified that these villains were using several different lines of profitable criminal endeavour, which they had codenamed the 'Jubilee Line', the 'Central Line' and so forth.
"It is only after I had received a series of calls from the Met Commissioner, the Mayor of London and the PM, calling me the biggest Dimm-Witt ever to wear the uniform, that the nature of my error gradually dawned on me - viz. that I had mixed up the terms 'London Underground' and 'London underworld' on account of my being so incurably thick.
"I apologise unreservedly to the masses of law-abiding citizens left sweltering on subterranean trains and platforms at rush hour.
"And I warn them that it would be a serious offence to march on New Scotland Yard with pitchforks and torches, demanding my severed head in revenge.
"And they'd be pushed to find me there, anyway," said Dimm-Witt, "since I'm being sent on gardening leave for the next few months, back at my home in Berkamsted."