Ancient documents set for auction records

Two ancient documents are to be sold at auction in London where they are expected to break all records for historical texts.

Discovered in a cellar in the London borough of Westminster, the documents are believed to be authored by Danny Alexander, a Caledonian noted for his fables, and renowned Victorian novelist and eccentric Oliver Letwin. The two are companion pieces to one another, forming the majority part of a series known as The 2010 Election Manifestos.

These two sections of the series were particularly noteworthy as they contained such fanciful notions of scrapping tuition fees, no top-down reorganisations of the NHS, a reform of banking regulation and a more progressive tax systems. Clearly, and with the benefit of hindsight, this was pure whimsy on the part of the authors, but in scenes reminiscent of Orson Welles's successful radio play of The War Of The Worlds, contemporary commentators report that people did actually believe that what was contained in these works was actually true and that the authors were in some sort of position to make it happen. Instead, the documents have gone down in legend alongside the great hoaxes of the time such as Piltdown Man, the Turin Shroud and Britain still clinging onto the notion of monarchy well into the second decade of the 21st century.

Head auctioneer at Christie's Hammar Gavelbasher, who will be conducting the auction, told us these lost texts are set to break all records. "We fully expect to record a price of less than the paper they're written on", he said. "Frankly we'd be better off auctioning real toilet paper".