Harriet Harman today raised a few eyebrows today when she claimed today on Radio 4's World at One that Labour had lost the Norwich By-Election because of people's worries about swine flu.

Interviewed by the BBC's Shaun Ley, Ms. Harman said, "Yes, we are very disappointed by Labour's showing in the by-election, but it is clear that people were very worried about the outbreak of swine flu and are clearly punishing Labour for it."

She was pressed on the question of why the outbreak did not effect the standing of the Conservative party and responded, "It always tends to be the case that people blame the party of government for these outbreaks, even though we are actually in the process of eradicating swine flu for ever and ever."

Asked whether the Labour party deserved any of the blame for the shock result, by deselecting the sitting MP Ian Gibson, she responded, "We told him that he couldn't stand at the next election and the wretched man said, "You can't sack me, I resign."

"What a swine."

The government has set up a new hotline to handle concerns about the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Ever since the credit market meltdown ended, the government has naturally been seeking new agendas to develop, new fears to work upon, new monsters to slay and new catastrophes from which it might 'save the world'.

The latest is the fear that the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are beating a path to a neighbourhood near you and that they may destroy your habitat and subvert everything in which you ever thought that you had faith.

The government was in two minds as to whether it should set up a hotline or a 'Twitter' line. "We were thinking that we could encourage people to send 'Tweets' if they saw the horsemen," said the Prime Minister. We thought that they could say things like, "I'm at Bouji's, everyone... just saw horsemen. Awesome."

"But in the end we thought that we'd go for the old fashioned bollocks and set up a hotline so that people knew that we were doing something really important and so that they knew that we, the British government really, really cared."