Chances are good you’ve seen this already, but for those of you who haven’t, well, it really needs to be seen.

We can thank Charlie Stross for spotting it while trawling through Hansard, the official transcript publication of the proceedings of the UK Houses Of Parliament; depending on just how conspiracy-theory minded you are, it’s either an astonishing revelation about an unnamed and extremely wealthy organisation (such as, hypothetically speaking, The Vatican) offering to buy out debt-beleaguered Britain with a no-strings-attached cash donation of stupendous size, or an obscure back-bench peer of the House Of Lords with something of a history for rambling non sequiteurs having what we might politely and euphemistically refer to as a very public “senior moment”.

Just go read the whole thing, seriously; if it was sourced from anywhere other than Hansard, you’d have to dismiss it as a missing (and suspiciously well-written) Dan Brown chapter. It’s gonna be providing novelists with a high-grade Jonbar Point for years to come.

Additional: Justin Pickard picks out a comment from the thread on Charlie’s post which suggests mashing up textual analysis software with the government transparency project They Work For You to allow real-time assessment of the sanity of our elected and non-elected representatives. An interesting and strangely plausible project, but one whose result would probably bear more bad news than we really need at this precise moment in time…