Christmas Turkey Pens "Shambles" Memo

I have it on the very best authority that a memo found yesterday and leaked to the press was not written by any of The Great Leader's political aides was was, in fact, the work of a No.10 Christmas turkey.

The fattened bird, awaiting slaughter this weekend for the Christmas table and believed to be the subject of an ASBO, conspired with a goose held under the Prevention of Terrorism Act and a large squid believed to have escaped from an asylum detention centre. Using a quill pen and black ink, the conspirators scrawled the protest note, describing the Government as a "shambles" and expressing concern the Party is viewed as riven by "internal conflicts" and lacking "grip and competence on vital issues".

The conspirators caught on CCTV

President Bush attacked by a teenybopper

My friends in Whitehall tell me that the idea was hatched after the creatures watched a home video about "The Tamworth Two", the half-wild boar piglets who escaped certain death when they broke out of a Wiltshire abbattoir and spent a week on the run in January 1998. The turkey, goose and squid engaged in the PR stunt in the hope that, as with the piglets, the "Daily Mail" would step in to buy them and launch an attack on Government animal cruelty. John Prescott dismissed suggestions that humans might have been behind the caper, saying: "I can't be sure it wasn't the work of teenyboppers".