My Plan To Save Labour Is Launched

Success! With this morning's headlines breaking the good news, I can at last reveal details of my cunning plan to rescue Labour from its catastrophic financial straits.

Like all great ideas, the Labour-saving plan came to me in a flash as I reflected on two quite different stories from opposite ends of the globe. The first was my success in winning the Labour Home poll for Deputy PM, showing that an honest face, sound politics and the threat to reveal embarrassing personal details about the other contenders on my blog could work wonders.

The second was a little-reported story about the 5% salary levy imposed on New Zealand MPS for failing to comply with election spending laws.

Now I may not be the world's greatest mathematician, but the underlying principle was obvious. With a 5% levy on Labour MP's salaries and 352 sitting Labour MPs, Old Queen Street's shortfall of £23.4m could easily be made good in one year by raising salaries sufficiently. And I was just the man to organise the lobbying needed to achieve it.

The next stage was the most difficult. I had to borrow a calculator from a colleague at work and get some help to generate the numbers: 23,400,000 debt, divided by 352 MPs, divided by 0.05 percentage levy, leading to the salary necessary to generate the required funds... a mere £1,329,545.

Bingo! A salary hike of just 2,105.7% (thanks Tom) would do the trick perfectly.

So I've been beavering away generating dozens of submissions to the Senior Salaries Review Board suggesting this figure, justifying it on the PR grounds that politicking is a specialised niche market deserving of commensurate rewards.

Initially there seems to be some resistance and lower figures are being quoted, but I'm sure that if I continue the pressure the right decision will ultimately be made.

I could do with some extra help on this one, so if any of you have got some spare time, it would be useful if you would drop a brief note or two hundred to these chaps at the Senior Salaries Review Body urging this modest and sensible hike in MPs salaries. Please don't use the same colour pen for each letter.

Of course there is a downside to all this - principally that it means paying more to Tories and - worse still - to LibDems.

So if any of you can think of a way to hike Labour MP salaries by 2,000% while at the same time cutting the salaries and expenses of the lard-arse gentry and queens on the other benches I'd very much appreciate any advice you can give.

One person who has been opposing my plan and mouthing it to the press overnight is prudent Gordon, who has been reported to be furious about the pay rise request at a time when inflation is 2.4%.

It's hard to see why. Gordon will be able to claim the same % rise and based on his current salary of £134,000 this will put him on £2,821,638 p.a., or nearly enough to buy a garage in Chelsea.