Following last week's cabinet meeting in Birmingham - the first to be held outside of London in almost 90 years - Prime Minister Gordon Brown is to follow this innovation with a second get together of his top ministers to be held on Southport beach.
Ahead of the Labour party conference in Manchester which is due to kick off on September 21st, Brown will convene the Cabinet at the popular holiday resort where Labour officials are preparing 24 holes. The ministers will meet, exchange pleasantries, and then insert their heads into the holes, which will then be filled in around them. They will then remain there until after the end of the party conference.
Foreign secretary David Miliband insisted that this was not a ploy to avoid the endless rain of shit that was currently falling on the heads of Mr Brown and his ministers. "We as a government are dealing with some extremely difficult issues - the global financial crisis, terrorism, trade - and what better way to solve the problems than by burying our heads in the sand and having a really long talk about them."
Other Cabinet ministers have hit back at media claims that the party leadership were simply hiding from the conference and wanted to ignore members. Chancellor Alistair Darling said that the government was "committed to the long haul, and would be doing some serious thinking about some major issues, along with sand and tide levels." Deputy party leader Harriet Harman explained that "the ostrich is a grand and noble bird" and that any comparison was "not necessarily negative."
However there peace and quiet may be shattered by a protest by several MPs who have resigned from the frontbench in recent days. The ex-junior ministers and aides, who claim to have resigned on a point of principle, but in reality, want to raise their public profile ahead of a general election they think Labour will lose thus putting their seats under threat, are planning to kick the embattled Cabinet up the arse repeatedly during the week long meeting.
"The time has come for a debate on the leadership," said ex-Scotland Office minister David Cairns, who resigned on Tuesday. "Connecting our boots with the Cabinet's collective arse is the first step towards re-connecting with the electorate."
