Britain To Be Protected By One Very Large Umbrella

Britain is to be shielded from the skies by a single enormous umbrella, a canopy of waxed canvas roughly the size of Wales, held up at the edges by anyone who can get the time off work. The cost is given as ten billion pounds, a figure arrived at by a country that cannot currently afford to fix a pothole, light a hospital corridor or keep a library open past Thursday, but which can find a round ten billion down the back of the sofa the moment somebody says the word "incoming".

The design was presented to reporters in Birmingham on a stand that kept folding itself shut. Shoppers who stopped to watch were assured this was deliberate, a demonstration of the deployment mechanism, and that in service the fabric would be treated with something, probably, at a later stage. The handle will be somewhere near Rugby. Nobody has been told exactly where, because that is the sort of thing an enemy would want to know.

Funding is described as straightforward. The ten billion comes out of savings, and savings come from the bits of the state that cannot hold a press conference in a shopping centre. The nation is broke in every direction that involves a person, and solvent in every direction that involves a thing with a trigger on it. Nobody finds this strange any more. We have simply agreed that money is imaginary until it is pointed at the sky.

It is understood the umbrella does not open in high wind, which is when the country is most likely to need it.

When a reporter raised the obvious difficulty, that a thing with a handle in the Midlands cannot cover Shetland, Cornwall and Norfolk simultaneously, the room was told that the government of the day would tilt it. Tilting will be done by consensus. A rota is being drawn up for the Home Counties first, on the grounds that they have the most to lose and the best access to car parking.

Labour has called the proposal unfunded and structurally illiterate, before quietly commissioning drawings for a slightly smaller umbrella with a matching one for Gibraltar. Defence analysts say both parties have now accepted the central principle of British strategic thinking, which is that the weather is coming either way, we have no money, and somebody ought to be holding something.