Downing Street insiders have revealed that Labour’s five election pledges were written hastily in a taxi on the way to the press conference because Gordon Brown “fell asleep in front of the TV”, and forgot to finish them. Despite promising colleagues that he was on the verge of “something brilliant”, the pledges were written during the ten-minute drive to the conference centre.

At yesterday’s key press conference, Brown unveiled his hastily assembled five pledges for a new manifesto:

• Maximise the efficiency of doing good things
• Reduce the risk of doing bad things
• Strengthen front-line smiling and hand-shaking
• Not spend absolutely gazillions of pounds, and
• Be fair, sympathetic and quite nice to children

“It was a disaster,” said a source close to Brown. “We were all hoping for something a bit more, erm, substantial. And when we left work yesterday, Gordon was still at his desk, promising that he ‘had it sorted’. Well, nobody believed him, but the very least we expected was that he might work through the night.”

“Instead, he sat down to watch Frasier on Comedy Central with a glass of wine, and woke up the next morning with nothing done.”

Brown, realising that he only had an hour to get to the press conference, then flung on a shirt and a tie, and confided to Lord Mandelson in the taxi that he hadn’t written a single pledge.

“It was then that Lord Mandelson’s eyes turned red,” said a source close to the Dark Lord. “And he insisted that Gordon scribble something down immediately. Mandelson was almost dictating, saying – ‘put something about being nice to people’ and ‘make sure you don’t mention anything like hospitals, wars, British Airways or David Cameron’.”

At one point, Brown got confused and pledged to torpedo the Conservative Party, but despite Lord Mandelson egging him on to include it, he scribbled it out, saying that it was “far too specific”.

Labour MPs are delighted with the pledges, which they say will commit them to “absolutely nothing specific” if they were to win the election. Eric Trunkpants, MP for Shytte North, said that he was “over the moon”:

“Gordon couldn’t have come up with anything better if he’d thought about it. These are fantastic pledges – I can now go to my constituents and say nothing specific whatsoever. Thank God he didn’t give any numbers about, say, investment in hospitals or schools – and thank the Lord Mandelson that he didn’t say the slightest thing about getting out of Afghanistan or the minimum wage, or what he would do about the rising price of childcare. This is great.”