Portilloo

After years of extensive research, covering everything from cheek tendons and Botox-2 tests, geneticists of LabCentral’s biotech division, working with other experts at the famous Lightman Institute, have found a ‘definitive’ cure for Michael Portillo’s sneer. Now, with a special DNA treatment, the British politician (a Tory shadow chancellor) turned broadcast TV media pundit is expected to make a full and lasting (if not quite permanent) recovery from his unsightly and - it must be said - rather annoying facial condition.

On the mend after a successful psychic surgery in Wackhampton’s Clinic, in the heart of Wessex, Portillo himself was unavailable for comment (other than one disgustingly slurred ‘uhm’), but a spokes-flunky confessed that “everyone associated closely with” ‘RH Portaloo’ (the man who admitted that, since Conservatives lost the 1997 election, his name was “synonymous with eating a bucket-load of shit in public”), was pleased, at last, to finally be rid of his “insufferably smirking disfigurement.”