Get ready to ride on Gordon Bennett Railways!

Dear happy commuters and supersaver ticket holders,

We in the Labour government are thrilled to unveil the exciting new name for Britain's renationalised train company. We'll be calling it Gordon Bennett Railways, because this mild expletive is what you're most likely to be muttering while on board, as in:

'Gordon Bennett, this train's fuller than a can of sardines.'

'Gordon Bennett, we've been waiting in this cutting outside Crewe for a sodding age.'

And: 'Gordon Bennett, the points have failed at Clapham Junction, and I'm going to be 20 minutes late for work again.'

We could have spent some taxpayers' money sorting out the problems at Crewe and Clapham Junction, but we blew it all on hiring an overpriced branding agency to come up with a new livery design for the locomotives.

They'll now be a lurid mess of red, white, blue and hi-viz yellow - flecked with dead leaves, graffiti and rust - which will have you exclaiming on the platform: 'Gordon Bennett, what a sodding eyesore.'

All aboard! Or, all a-bored! Which you will be, after waiting three hours for a train at Carlisle.

Image credit: stablediffusion.com

Corbyn’s new party could provide 'limitless source of cheap energy'

Scientists today announced they’ve discovered a way to turn the factional infighting of Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s Your Party into a limitless source of cheap energy.

'The trouble with existing hydrogen-based fission reactors is that you have to put the material under extreme heat and pressure to make it split into its component parts,' explained Dr Bunsen Honeydew. 'So most of the energy you get out, you have to put straight back in to keep the reaction going.

'But this new material, yourpartium, is incredible - you just need a tiny amount and it gets overheated and starts splitting all by itself. In fact, some experiments suggest you just need a single atom of corbynium and one of sultanium, and fission occurs almost immediately.'

Newspaper columnists and cartoonists confirmed they also find the party a limitless source of cheap gags, often referencing the People’s Front of Judea from Monty Python’s 'Life of Brian'.

'However, it does have the same problem fission always does,' Dr Honeydew continued, 'in that it produces a rather toxic waste product - in this case, bitterness. 

'Clearly, we need to find a way of disposing of it safely. One suggestion is to combine it with the former Prince Andrew’s bitterness at losing his titles and status, and dump the whole lot out at sea.'

Image credit: NB archives

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