Leaked recordings of President Trump phoning vice president Mike Pence from a golf course appear to reveal the sitting president has offered Pence the presidency in exchange for a family pardon ticket.

With the net slowly tightening around Donald Trump and his entire family for colluding with some foreign chaps of doubtful character it seems the world’s most successful real estate agent has decided to get ahead of the curve.

An aide to the vice president spoke to the Rochdale Herald’s ‘Everything that ends in gate’ correspondent, on the condition of anonymity.

“You know he’s probably guilty as sin right?” Ms Parah Salin asked. “Donald Trump has the moral compass of a slug who is only afraid of a ring of salt. He’s virtually a wizard. I expected we would have had to impeach him, we’d have to exorcise him out of office. Although now he’s made this offer to Pence, it maybe possible to have an orderly and smooth transfer of power to the man the Republicans intended to make president all along.”

The thought of President Pence is a soothing one. Suppliers of electricity are said to be expecting a boom period if he can put in place policies designed to cure wrongdoers of bad decisions they’ve made about who they will choose to love.

Other benefits will include having a man who is actually convinced the end of days will come in fireballs from the sky as president in charge of a massive arsenal of nuclear weapons. This will be preferable to a man who is just likely to destroy the world through being an idiot.

Quite when the handover of power is to happen is anyone’s guess although presumably it will occur sometime after special prosecutor Mueller discovers that Donald Trump is worth significantly less than Donald Trump imagines he’s worth.

The pardon will be a useful tool to allow America’s greatest public servant to retire to a room wallpapered in real gold and then tweet out his memoirs of his time serving the people while he waits on the toilet each morning for the magic to happen.