Get ready for the Mandelson Marathon

It's one of the greatest tests of endurance known to humankind and will leave even the keenest followers of the news wondering why the hell they bother.

Yes! It's the Mandelson Marathon - a low-voltage scandal involving some dusty old political has-been from the Blair years and a handful of crashingly dull senior civil servants which is, unfortunately, set to run and run around the Westminster village.

'After a week of hearing Starmer making hours-long statements about who said what at precisely what time in the afternoon, and talking about the fine print of security vetting rules, you will all be finding life achingly dull," said one Fleet Street newspaper editor who is organising the event.

'After a month, you will be screaming for a rest, as in: 'For pity's sake, just give it a rest!

"The winner of the Mandelson Marathon will be the one newspaper reader in Britain who is still remotely interested in any of this by the time the story finally collapses of exhaustion... in about three year's time.

"Good luck, everyone!'

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Image credit: Wix AI

AI writed this headline: The future is now

It has been announced that the Isle of Wight’s best-selling free weekly ‘newspaper’ the Ventnor Harvester (not to be confused with the popular eatery) will be the first newspaper to be totally generated by AI with no human intervention whatsoever.

Proprietor Muppet Murdoch said, ‘We are proud to be world leaders to take news publishing into the sunlit uplands of an exciting tomorrow. Our innovative and exciting AI news-gathering will anonymise from where we plagiarised – oops, I meant creatively and lovingly duplicated – all of our exciting material. Here is an example of an item from this week’s exciting issue:-

‘In an exciting, sensational development today, some political bloke slagged off another political bloke, and accused him of being an anarchist / Reform fascist / Tory scum / Labour scum / Liberal scum / vegetarian / train spotter / Johnny Foreigner. The other political bloke hit back, accusing the first political bloke of being a sheep shagger and or Welsh / priest or bishop / former Post Office Chief Executive / Newsbiscuit contributor. Another political bloke standing outside his party’s stunning / iconic / exciting HQ slammed the first two, insisting that they were totally out of touch with the popular zeitgeist and that only his party could bring the county together and make the Isle of Wight Great Again (stylish baseball caps available in the Harvesters online store.)’

Mr Murdoch continued, ‘I had made the decision to bring the Harvester bang up to date. I found out that our neighbour’s son is doing GCSE Computing. His first project investigating Jaguar Land Rover’s IT systems didn’t go quite according to plan, so he was happy to have a stab at AI. People have been claiming that some rag called Newsbiscuit has been using AI for years – and when you look at the bad grammar, stilted prose and total lack of anything remotely funny this is probably right.’

When asked what the initials AI stood for, Mr Murdoch confidently responded 'Artificial Insemination'.

Image credit: perchance.org