Breaking news coming from the Arctic Circle. The notoriously vicious baby seal has launched a violent attack on Paul and Heather Mills McCartney. Our resident artist, here at The Spine, has tried to capture what this incident might have looked like but, without doubt, the cruelty of the episode is likely to cause renewed appeals for the authorities to reconsider the place of baby seals in areas populated by well-meaning multi-millionaire pop stars.

A cull is now likely with Sting leading protests to have the baby seals outlawed. ‘These animals are a plight to the existence of us rockers,’ said the laid-back lead singer of 1980s’ supergroup, Police. Bono has called for calm. ‘If we need to cull the seals,’ he said from New York, ‘then we should do so in the proper time and when I’ve finished my current album. Then I’ll be able to escape the studio and come and help round them up. I’ve got a particularly nasty piece of three-by-two at home with a bent nail stuck in the end.’

Developing…

Tony Blair signalled a new clampdown on antisocial behaviour, Tuesday, by telling unruly children to ‘pack it in and clear off before I call the coppers’. Speaking on an estate on the outskirts of London, Blair waved his fist in the direction of the would-be lawbreakers and, promising them that ‘I know your names’, he ruefully reflected on the fact that ‘they don’t even bloody-well live round here’.

After celebrating his victory in the Liberal Democrat leadership election, Sir Menzes Campbell took an opportunity to denounce critics who have called him too boring to be Prime Minister. Sir Menzes was unveiling his waxwork at Madam Tussauds, London, when he spoke about the contest where he emerged as victor when the two front-running candidates slipped up by revealing compromising details of their private lives. Casting an eye over his doppleganger, Sir Menzes remarked: ’He’s a handsome looking brute with no skeletons his his cupboard but for a slightly embarrassing incident in 1962 involving some Dundee cake and half a pound of my best black shag pipe tobacco.’