Bill Board, spokesman for the Government, has told The Rochdale Herald that Theresa May is privately thrilled that the Russian Government has accused her Government of staging the Salisbury poisoning.

Mr Board explained, “Theresa was bouncing around the place with delight. This is the leader who called an unnecessary and ill-advised snap General Election don’t forget. She seems to muddle from one ill thought out, badly planned, poorly executed policy announcement to another and yet the Russian Government are accusing her of orchestrating the covert poisoning of an ex-KGB spy.

“She couldn’t be happier.”

And it’s not just Theresa May. Bill told us, “They all love it. Last week, David Davis and Liam Fox managed to negotiate paying full price on a DFS sofa. This week they’re something from a John Le Carre novel. Even BoJo, a man who struggles to string coherent sentences together and who was the Iranian Government’s star witness a few months ago. He’s come out of this looking like a world war two era Winston Churchill.”

A Russian Government spokesman said, “When we accused the Government of staging the poisoning we meant the ‘deep Government’. The one that lives in a bunker doing this for some sort of ill defined power trip that allows them to go on living in a bunker.

“Or maybe the Queen.”

Bill told us, “If the Queen was that powerful you’d think she’d have managed to back a few winners at Cheltenham the other week.”

We understand that the Government had intended to celebrate the Russian Government’s accusation by organising a piss-up in a brewery.

Unfortunately, they forgot to send out the invitations.

Fact checked by Snopes; Plagiarised by Andrew Neil; Nancy Sinatra's favourite Rochdale satirist; sued by Chris Froome and winner of the 1922 Nobel Prize for Chemistry.* *Not all of these necessarily true.