Pete's NewsPoke.

This is an artist's impression of the proposed Universitas Leadership Sanctuary, to be possibly built out in Nevada. It's supposed to be a sort of super exclusive hotel for world leaders, free from the stresses and strains of their lordly duties. A place where a tired El Presidente can relax, play Nintendo Wii in his pants and presumably enage in many many sessions of the Biscuit Game with the other presidents and prime ministers.

Firstly, I'm not sure I like the idea of the Prime Minister buggering off to Nevada to play table tennis with the President of Benin when he should be at home taking care of business. Secondly, and more pertinently, it seems like the worst kind of folly to put the most powerful men on the planet in a building like that. They already have the ability to wipe out humankind many times over - put them all together in something that looks like a cross between the Death Star and Superman's Fortress of Solitude and there'll be no telling what kind of crazed power-trips they'll embark on. Have another look at the picture. Now imagine it choked with corpses, with dead Mexicans impaled on the spikes and the mountains ablaze in the background. Screams fill the air. Roving deathsquads rove their roving way about. There are lasers. People shitting themselves. It's nightmarish. And, if you look very carefully at the central ball structure, you'll see Gordon Brown playing underpants Wii tennis with John McCain, while Nicholas Sarkozy gags on the biscuit.

That'll be the scene ten years after this thing gets built. We'd basically be installing them as supervillain dictators. We might as well issue them all Doctor Doom costumes and have done with it. The Universitas Leadership Sanctuary: it's a shit idea and no good will come of it.