Brown sees the funny side

The battle between the BBC and Downing Street over the Iraq dossiers may be becoming increasingly hostile - but Chancellor Gordon Brown can certainly see the funny side.

On Monday, he joked during a debate that a BUPA healthcare document he found on the Internet was not lifted from a PhD thesis and was too dull to have been "sexed up".

But he obviously liked the joke so much he decided to use it twice - today applying the same gag to a National Audit Office report into sales of gold reserves.

"This study is not from a PhD thesis on the Internet," he told MPs and then, after enjoying the 'oohs' of MPs, added: "Reading this in its quite detailed complexity, there is no question of it ever being sexed up".