Paper Monitor
11:31 UK time, Friday, 26 January 2007
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
Ah, the old gags are always the best... an adage the Sun has clung to for two days running, recycling Spitting Image's serial thriller, The President's Brain is Missing.
Only the paper replaces the befuddled Ronald Reagan with a more contemporary figure whose brain has made a bid for freedom. And it's not George W Bush, he's already starred in the New York Times' own rip-off of the joke.
"NATIONWIDE HUNT: JOHN REID'S BRAIN IS MISSING," trumpeted the red-top on Thursday. "A huge hunt was underway last night for ±«Óãtv Secretary John Reid's walnut-sized BRAIN following his abysmal failure to solve the jail crisis."
But wait, there's more today: "BRAINLESS," it repeats, again gracing its front page with a snap of the home sec - described as looking "vacant" - with a hole cut in his forehead.
The paper reports that its observant readers have joined the hunt, with one claiming to have seen the brain among the cargo of the wrecked MSC Napoli in Branscombe, Devon. "But he said: 'Looters took it while cops were sifting through anti-terror legislation to see if they had power to touch it'." How gallant, allowing a reader to make the best gag (just like Paper Monitor).
Intrepid reporter Tim Spanton is pictured performing a fingertip search outside Westminster, kitted out with a white forensic suit, and there's a snap of Mr Reid with stitches in his forehead.
Gosh, where do they get their ideas from? If he's pictured in tomorrow's paper bedridden, with the button for "nurse" dangerously close to one marked "free 'em all", then we shall know for sure.
Naturally, one would expect Mr Reid to rise above this sort of ridicule. He has after all got more pressing things to think about than newspaper headlines. Disturbingly, however, the Times' sketch writer Ann Treneman relates how in a press conference yesterday the ±«Óãtv Secretary ceremoniously presented a Walnut Whip to the Sun's political editor George Pascoe-Watson.
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