Can I count on your vote?

In a land where voting is done by the use of different coloured pegs when hanging out the washing, societal collapse was never far away. But nor did it ever seem close or likely, until it happened.

As part of the conversion to proportional representation, all citizens were issued a set of coloured pegs representing all major parties and instructed to use them when hanging out the legally mandated six socks per registered voter on Wash Day/Election Day. The choice of colours was up to the voter - they could award all six votes to a single party, or spread them around as they saw fit.

Once the washing was out, trained arithmomanic falcons counted the pegs, the results were tallied, and seats dished out to parties.

But one day, a tired housewife put out five socks for her vote rather than six. How was she to recognise the error when she, her husband and their two adult sons were at home on the day of voting and she was hanging out twenty-four socks? The count that night was close, so close that the result was to hang on a single peg - the peg that had not been put out.

A media scrum, allegations of bribery and corruption, the exposure of a suburban brothel-keeping ring, the day the Leader of the Opposition mooned a protest march, and the final question - what colour was the peg supposed to have been?

This is the story of how Mrs Betty Teele, of 41 Lancashire Gardens, brought down the government.