Always the first with the exclusives, Guru will soon expose a staff conspiracy that goes right to the heart of government. In fact, he will do it so soon it will appear in the next paragraph or so.
If you were to visit Portcullis House – the office building for MPs in London – you might feel slightly overawed by the important faces strolling around or the police wielding their scary-looking automatic weapons.
Yet if you concentrate, you might detect an air of suspicion and distrust. Has there been a back-bench rebellion? Or perhaps a security scare? No – there has been widespread theft of knives, forks and spoons.
Signs in the staff canteen proclaim a ‘cutlery amnesty’ against MPs and their staff, who have allegedly been nicking crockery to furnish their offices. The signs say no action will be taken against the offenders if the cutlery is returned ASAP.
But is it a coincidence that the Terrorism Bill is set to come in just as Parliament finds itself caught up in a web of culinary intrigue?
You are not allowed to take cutlery onto a plane in case you plan to hijack it. At the same time, this Bill would allow ministers to impose ‘control orders’ on terrorist suspects – exactly the kind of people who carry spoons onto planes with malice aforethought.
Clearly this new law is going to be used to instigate random searches of MPs’ offices as the government grows more and more desperate with its cutlery deficit.
Why nobody else has spotted this is beyond Guru.
Get story straight with online fakers
No amount of journalistic training can prepare you for some of the folk you come across in this most sordid of careers. The downside of capitalism is that everyone has a plan, and they frequently end up on Guru’s desk in the form of a press release.
In this case, you have to admire the PR person who was given the job of promoting the following:
A controversial website offering customers alibis for marital affairs has begun accepting members in the UK.
The founder of fakealibi.co.uk, Rob Mendoza, says he would not use the site personally, but recognises there is a need for assistance in concealing the truth in certain situations, in order to assist in saving relationships.
The site was established to assist with people who cannot avoid infidelity, but want to keep their families intact.
‘People who cannot avoid infidelity’?! What, did it sneak up on them unawares or something? And isn’t it noble that Mr Mendoza wouldn’t use the site himself? Guru was always brought up to practise what he preaches.
It’s worth noting that users of the site are 60% male and 40% female, showing that the gender pay gap is much worse than the gender play-away gap.
Giving errant stats the cold shoulder
A couple of weeks ago, a story appeared in these hallowed pages which stated that a survey had found half of UK workers had made a presentation to large audiences as part of their jobs.
Disciple Iain took umbrage with this and pointed out that it’s incredibly unlikely 50% of UK workers did this. So far, so pedantic. However, he went on to make an even better point about errant stats, as this letter shows:
Dear Guru,
[These odd figures] wouldn’t have caught my attention were it not for an article that I read at much the same time in Dimensions, the house magazine of Aon insurance brokers, which seemed similarly flawed.
It stated the following among a list of ‘the world’s most interesting, disturbing and curious weather facts’: Temper-atures in the west Antarctic peninsula have increased by an average 2.5C per year …. since 1950.
Calculating this over the intervening period of 55 years, this suggests that, assuming the initial temperature was minus 37.5 degrees, the peninsula has now reached boiling point of 100C.
It makes you wonder who does these surveys, and whether they should be allowed to present to a blank wall, never mind a large audience.
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