Prescott ministerial perk to go in HP sauce factory closure
4 Jun 2006 by hra
In a selfless gesture worthy of his unique political stature, John Prescott has finally bowed to public pressure and given up his grace-and-favour HP sauce factory, DeadBrain has learned. The news broke sensationally on Saturday night in the form of a crumpled sheet of newspaper found outside a burger van in Prescott's Hull constituency.The "iconic" Heinz factory was originally donated to Prescott by a grateful nation for his own exclusive personal use, to complement his ministerial grease-and-flavour bacon butties. Loss of the privilege will mean that Prescott, in a supreme act of sacrifice, may have to make do with Sainsbury's – or even Tesco's – own-brand ketchup. Meanwhile, production at the Heinz factory is predictably set to be outsauced.
According to the report, Prescott, who denies being one of New Labour's growing number of political has-beans, felt the issue was "getting in the way" of his other activities, and is modestly proud to be able to make this token contribution to public finances at a time when so many departments are claiming to be critically short of resources.
The report speculates that Prescott was in fact secretly worried about rumoured Government plans to introduce compulsory obesity testing for Cabinet ministers and cut down their intake of junk food – widely shown by latest medical research to be a contributory factor in behavioural problems such as truancy and loutishness.
However, in related news, an illicit HP sauce factory is now believed to have been the target of Friday's massive police raid in East London. Security services had been alerted by discovery of a wholesale order for 100 cases of the product, marked for delivery to the ODPM. Intelligence officials neither confirm nor deny that the document was found in Prescott's diary secretary's Palm Pilot, which inexplicably turned up at a tabloid newspaper's office last week
Sauces close to Mr Prescott were unavailable for comment.
