The Prime Minister has announced that the £50,000 per head price being charged to have dinner with him at 'Number 10' is to be reduced to just £20,000.
The decision to significantly reduce the dinner prices follows adverse publicity over the weekend when it was found, without Mr Cameron's knowledge, that Tory co-treasurer Peter Cruddas had been telling potential dinner guests the £50,000 price would then quickly bring them lucrative government contracts 'as a little way of saying thank you'. Peter Cruddas has since resigned and seems unlikely to be offered another job in the Conservative Party for at least a few weeks.
"It was very naughty of Peter," said Mr Cameron this morning on his way out from Number 10.
"Samantha is still crying her eyes out in there over this" he said, "and frankly that's hardly surprising. She's worked very hard when cooking those meals. When a dinner guest compliments her cooking afterwards Sam says she wants to feel the compliment has been made with sincerity. She says any guest paying £50,000 for their meal in the belief that a lucrative government contract will then find it's way to them later will say they've enjoyed the meal she's cooked for them even when they haven't. And frankly I can see her point. They're hardly going to say it tasted like sawdust are they! This has made Samantha very, very upset."
The Prime Minister also made it absolutely clear that Samantha had made no financial gain from the meals at all.
"Samantha would go to the supermarket to select the ingredients in a trolley, line up at the check-out tills to pay for them, all without any financial gain to herself. Then when it came to preparing those ingredients, cooking them, serving the wonderful dinners to guests at table and so on, again all done by Samantha freely and from the sheer goodness of her heart, bless her. Obviously the cost of the actual ingredients she'd paid for at the supermarket from the money in her own purse had to then be taken out later from the £5,0000, plus the money it had cost in gas to cook the delicious meals on the stove. Gas is very expensive nowadays." he added.
But the Prime Minister did admit there'd been profits made from the dinners.
"Yes, there was a little profit made," he said, "and as the man of this house I did then decide it should be donated to party funds. But it was very little, rarely more than a fiver and that would only be when a dinner guest had chosen to have a glass of mineral water with their meal rather than a glass of wine."
A clearly annoyed Mr Cameron continued, "And let me assure the people of my country that after a hard day's work the very last thing I want to talk about over dinner with guests is business or politics. Conversation with the male guests would be about things like football, while the women would be chatting about things like their new shoes or what had been happening on Coronation Street and Emmerdale on the TV that week."
He said Samantha had told him to make it absolutely clear to anyone thinking the new cut-price £2,0000 meals would be of the same quality as the £50,000 meals of the past, that they will all be in for a big dollop of disappointment.
"Samantha has made it absolutely clear to me £20,000 per meal will mean she'll have to use frozen vegetables instead of organically grown and use the cheaper cuts of meat just in order to make sure there's no overall financial loss."
But it gets worse. "Samantha is very, very upset about this," said Mr Cameron. "She has told me she doesn't mind continuing to carry the plates from the dinner table back out to the kitchen after guests have finished their meals, but she says that in future she will no longer be doing all of the washing up of the dirty plates by herself out in the kitchen sink like she has in the past.
"So I'd just like to say here and now a very big thank you very much for nothing to those undercover reporters. I like to roll my sleeves up to show how manly I am, but in future I'm going to have to be rolling them up to place my hands in the kitchen sink's soapy water to help out with that washing up. In future I strongly suggest that dinner guests do as I do by making sure to lick their plates clean when finishing each course."
