It has emerged that some politicians actually have a sense of humour. The final gesture of the outgoing Democrat administration was to remove and hide the W's from the keyboards of computers in the White House.

Poor old George * Bush will have to resort to spelling out his middle initial like everyone else did suring the election campaign.

A White House spokesman told The Washington Post: "There are dozens, if not hundreds of missing keys. In some cases the W has simply been marked out but the most prevalent example is the key being removed."

Al Gore's press spokesman suggested that the keys may have fallen off "through sheer atrophy", as "the White House did not have many reasons to use the letter W over the last couple of years".

An amusing idea, no doubt, but here at Vulture Central we prefer the theory that the W's wore out during the Le*insky affair. A bit like the Oval office carpet which Dubya has had replaced. ®