“It wasn’t me in that park – it was clearly my evil doppelganger,” Cabinet Officer Minister Oliver Letwin has claimed in response to a tabloid newspaper’s allegations that he had been caught taking a dump in a public park. “I don’t know who he is, or where he’s come from, but he’s clearly trying to ruin my life with his outrageous behaviour!” Letwin is just the latest minister to claim that he is being undermined by an evil double, leading to suggestions that the government is under attack from supernatural powers – possibly summoned by opposition leader Ed Miliband. “These are clearly demons summoned from the depths of Hell,” opines Work and Pensions Secretary and committed Christian Ian Duncan-Smith, who has been appointed by Prime Minister David Cameron to investigate this apparent outbreak of evil. “How else can their foul and lewd behaviour be explained?” Duncan-Smith himself has apparently experienced a close encounter with his own evil double. “He walked into his office to find it sat behind his desk, drafting a new Bill designed to slash disability benefits and subject claimants to humiliating means testing,” a senior official in Duncan-Smith’s Department has divulged to The Sleaze “Apparently they just stared at each other for a minute, before the real Duncan-Smith had the presence of mind to grab a framed photograph of the blessed Margaret Thatcher from his desk and thrust it at the double. Faced with this vision of conservative virtue, the beast simply exploded!” Despite describing the Bill the double was drafting as ‘the Devil’s work’, Duncan-Smith subsequently decided he could ‘redeem’ it with a few minor modifications.

Nevertheless, the newspaper is adamant that it was definitely the real Letwin that it photographed defecating in London’s Regents Park. “There can’t be any mistake – it is definitely him crouching in the rose bushes, trousers and underpants around his ankles, straining to bury a Quaker,” declares Roy Dogger, Deputy Editor of the Tits on Sunday. “To make things worse, when he finished, the bastard wiped his arse with what we subsequently found was a letter from one of his constituents!” Indeed, the newspaper subsequently recovered the letter and showed it to seventy-two year old Bob Crobbett, who had originally written it. “It’s bloody outrageous! If this is the way he treats the concerns of the people who voted for him, then he’s not fit to be an MP,” the retired council official, who has been a life-long Tory voter, told the newspaper, upon seeing the crumpled, shit smeared remains of his missive. “I most certainly won’t be voting for him again.” Cabinet Office officials have tried to give Letwin’s version of events credence by revealing their own encounters with his evil double. “I was quite surprised when he walked through the outer office without saying a word to anyone. I followed him into his office and was shocked to see the Minister stood at the open window, urinating into the street!” The Sleaze was told by one senior civil servant, adding that, pausing only to shake his penis, the ‘minister’ then fled from the room. “No sooner had he left, the minister reappeared, storming into the outer office, dripping with urine and demanding to know who had been pissing out of his office window as he had passed beneath it on his way into work!” Another official told of how Letwin had revealed to him his attempts to catch his double ‘in the act’ in Regent’s Park one morning: “He told me that he must have been only seconds behind his double – the turd was still steaming when he came across it! Unfortunately, a tabloid reporter managed to get a shot of him bending over it, giving credence to their claims that there was no double – it was him all the time!”

The plague of evil twins is believed to have started at least a year ago, with a local peeping Tom claiming that, in the course of his nocturnal prowlings, he had climbed a drainpipe on the outside of the Defence Secretary’s flat in order to peer through the bedroom window. What he saw shocked him. “Liam Fox was bent over the end of the bed, stark bollocking naked, having his arse thrashed with a cane by a gorilla!” forty three year old Leonard Pustle told us. “The gorilla pulled its head off to reveal that it was really Foreign Secretary William Hague in a gorilla suit!” Although he admits to having been high on glue fumes at the time of the incident and later altered his statement to say that Fox had been alone and fully clothed when he saw him, following a bloody good kicking by the police, he now says that his original account was true, denying that the ten thousand pounds he was paid by the Tits on Sunday had anything to do with this change of heart. The government has denied both versions of Pustle’s story, pointing out that neither of the ministers he claimed to have seen had even been in the country that night.

But what is the origin of these doubles, are they truly supernatural phenomena, or flesh and blood, sent by the government’s enemies to discredit it? Tory Party Deputy Chairman Lord Nutjob shares Ian Duncan-Smith’s belief that the creatures are actually devils, summoned from the depths of Hell. “The evidence all supports the demonic explanation – the faeces left by Oliver Letwin’s doppelganger, for instance, are said to be, quite literally, evil smelling. There have been reports of park wildlife, including pigeons and squirrels, caught downwind of it expiring in agony. Clearly, this bile the thing is excreting is the very essence of evil,” opines the fifty seven year old former priest, who also believes that the demons are being summoned by the Labour leader, Ed Miliband. “I have it on good authority that he has sold his soul to Satan in exchange for electoral success – surely his blandness and lack of personality and authority betray his soullessness?” Nutjob also cites as evidence of Miliband’s demonic deal Labour’s opinion poll lead over the Tories, despite the Labour leader’s lacklustre Commons performances and lack of policy initiatives. However, right wing Tory backbench MP Sir Hugo Noblander believes the doubles’ origin lies closer to home, blaming the Conservative’s coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats. “Trust me, these things aren’t demons – they’re tulpas, thought forms created via meditation. It’s a discipline which originated amongst Buddhist monks in Tibet – exactly the kind of New Age mumbo-jumbo those bloody lentil-eating tree huggers are into,” he explains. “They are obviously hoping that if they can discredit enough Tory cabinet ministers, they can move their own people into the key posts and subvert government policy to their insipid, wishy washy values.”

Other commentators remain unimpressed with such explanations, rejecting the very notion that the doubles have a supernatural basis. “Quite frankly, these people are talking bollocks. It’s all too obvious that they are simply the government’s latest convenient excuse for their own ineptitude,” declares Professor Bob Mincer, of the West Norwood College of Nail Technology. “Clearly, their standard refrain of ‘It’s all the last Labour government’s fault’ has worn thin with the public, so they need another excuse. They obviously believe that if they’ve already managed to convince a large proportion of the electorate that the global economic crisis had nothing to do with their banker friends, but was instead all Gordon Brown’s fault, then they’ll also believe that everything is now the fault of their evil doubles. After all, blaming unpopular policies on a demonic doppelganger is preferable to their usual humiliating U-turns.”