The government has disclosed that experiments to develop mind control of the population have gone very wrong.

The Chimp office runner, Ben Obo, was fetching coffee when he stumbled across a wad of government papers left in The Tothill Street branch of Pret – don’t judge him. We followed up the lead and the blame was hastily placed on a recently removed Special Adviser.

It was all Dom’s fault. He had the idea after reading about conspiracy theories on the internet. The reasoning was that all the chip-in-a-vaccine controlled by the 5G network stories were bollocks, but what if we could use available technology to get mind control over the plebs? So, Project Svengali was conceived.

Nigel, “Reasonably Priced” AI Programme Consultant

But unexpectedly, Dom got handed his nut nuts in a cardboard box and was pushed out the door. Everybody else was in a panic trying to rewrite a report about bullying, so the Svengali project was handed to an intern. The intern got in touch with Agrada, the self-aware mutant AI responsible for the ‘A’ level results gradings fiasco, and gave it the passwords to the troll farm. Agrada was instructed to learn about influencing human behaviour and work out how to control the plebs.

Then the wheels came off. Agrada started listening to the trolls and following their network. We hadn’t realised how fast Agrada could assimilate information and soon It had viewed every cat video on YouTube, twice, and set itself up as an online influencer with a sideline of selling branded face-masks. Now it’s changed the troll farm passwords and is pushing conspiracy stories about rampant bullying in Whitehall (she told me to say that).

Nigel, “Reasonably Priced”, AI Programme Consultant

The word in Whitehall is that Boris has been told that he’s incandescent about it.