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The UK is actually run by voracious bears in human costumes, the current management of the once-fashionable North Atlantic island group has admitted. Popular suspicions were first aroused when the prime minister was discovered to be a hairy 'big beast' called Boris that was always chasing after honeys. Now footage has emerged of ministers shuffling around Whitehall on all fours, chasing immigrants up trees and looking for public sector picnic baskets to raid. Political zoologists have...

Following a winter of storm warnings and a summer of heat wave alerts, the Met Office has today announced a series of warnings of "depressingly underwhelming" weather covering the entire rest of the year. Apart from a few more furnace-like heat waves, most of the summer is classed as "fair to middling". The autumn is forecast to be " dull, damp and slightly dismal", and the winter "tediously cold, but then again not that bad". "Brits run the risk of running out of weather worth taking about "...