Former Lord Protector of Great Britain, Oliver Cromwell, was resurrected by scientists today, to sort out the financial scandals at the Palace of Westminster.
'Right, men!', he said to his soldiers of the Ancient Model Army, 'attention! At ease. Now, we're marching to Westminster to fight the Royalists, and we must not let our proud Puritan heritage down. Let us first remove the Papish Speaker from his golden chair!', to great cheers and sabre-rattling from his troops.
'Silence! And we shall take this monstrous Parliament, this blot on our great British landscape, and hang every MP, man and woman, for treason! And close the doors of that accursed building for ever! Quick ... march! Ah-left, right, left, right ...halt!'
'You, boy!', he shouted at a foot soldier, 'you have a spot on your tunic. Guards, execute this boy for Devil worship and treason at once!' 'Yes, sir!', and the Roundheads continued with their march on Parliament.
But the Royalists had a cunning plan, and their battle leader, Lord Baldrick of Bladder, set a trap for the Puritans. 'We'll outwit that miserable clown Cromwell. 'Lord Protector' indeed! Who does he think he is, General Franco or something?'
'What we must do', he told his marshalls, 'is give them lots of rope, pretend we're surrendering to them, and as soon as they start acting all moralistic and holier-than-thou, they'll find out their entire army has hanged itself!'
'And quickly the people will wish they'd never heard of expenses frauds, and will wish sanctimonious gits like Gordon Brown and David Cameron would shut up, and that Parliament would open again and be ruled by us Royalists! Again! At even more cost!', and his soldiers went off to the nearest B&Q, to get hundreds of yards of strong rope.
But Cromwell himself was already struggling with the expense of running an army in the 21st century, and had to stop a few times to claim money back from the government to continue his march on Parliament.
And by the time his army got there they were too tired to fight, and gratefully accepted the Royalists' gifts of nice new pieces of rope. And soon they were getting plenty of rest, by going along with the Cavaliers' suggestion of putting themselves to sleep by hanging themselves from nearby lampposts.
Cromwell himself was nowhere to be seen, as he'd shrewdly accepted the title of Earl Hippocrite of Finger-Pointing under Cameras, and was enjoying an eight-course dinner in the Ritz Hotel. At taxpayers' expense. While 'Won't Get Fooled Again' by the Tory Sleazebags was playing on the radio.
