Whitehall was in shock last night after current Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osbourne, was arrested by Cheshire Police in the grounds of his constituency mansion on charges of running a Ponzi scheme and four thousand other counts of financial mis-management.
The Cheshire Police spokesperson unveiled the arrest at a hastily-convened press conference in the Slug and Lettuce in Wilmslow at 8pm last night, which was then followed by complimentary nachos and a round of whisky chasers. Elaborating on the detail of the arrest, the spokesperson highlighted that it was the initiative of local beat bobby, PC Joseph Joseph, who had realised the crime had been committed after reading reports of the Madoff trial in the USA.
PC Joseph was quoted as saying, "Well during the trial in the US they outlined the meaning of a Ponzi scheme - where money from investors today is used to pay inflated returns to those that paid in yesterday - and I realised that the Chancellor of the Exchequer had been doing this with the welfare system for over 60 years. I had a strong body of evidence and thought it best to put a stop to this crime before the millions of new and current investors realised that their future returns were never going to materialise."
The aspiring young PC continued, "I am hoping to make further arrests including Alistair Darling, Gordon Brown and Ken Clarke during the next week. I've also applied to have the bones of William Beveridge and Hugh Dalton exhumed so that we can put them on trial at the Old Bailey."
Civil servants across the Treasury were today co-operating with Administrators called in to sort out the financial mess left by closure of the Ponzi scheme, known colloquially as 'the Welfare State'. Thousands of jobless were set to find that life would also change for them as the freedom of employers from payments into the scheme or 'National Insurance' would now allow them to invest in their businesses and generate tens of thousands of new jobs.