British actor Hugh Grant has emerged as a wildcard entrant in the race to replace outgoing United Kingdom Prime Minister Liz Truss.

In an audacious plan hatched by desperate Conservative elders, the help of the party’s longest serving MP and some fairly major tweaking of the party rules, Grant will be allowed to stand for the party leadership next Monday.

If successful, he will in effect become PM from outside Parliament and will not take up his full role in the House of Commons until he wins the seat of Upper Cuntington in Cambridgeshire north of London, where Sir Laurence Bolivia, 98, has agreed to resign immediately to allow Grant to take the seat, the safest in the UK, in a snap by-election.

“My departure is no big deal really,” Sir Laurence said. “I’m about to do a Burton anyway,” the former World War 2 RAF bomber pilot confided.

“Besides, Hugh Grant was a wonderful prime minister back in the early 2000s and I know he’s still much loved by the British public, despite the foppish and rather pansy persona he carries on with just a little too much for my liking. Still, he did a tickety-boo job then and I know he’ll do a bang-up and marvellous job again if given the chance to return to his old role, what,” Sir Laurence said.

“Who will forget the way he handled that arrogant son-of-a-bitch US President Billy-Bob Thornton, if you’ll pardon my French.

“The man’s a deadset star and the socialist Jew-hating Labour Party would underestimate him at their peril.”

On location in Croatia where he is currently filming Hatred More Like It, said to be a loose remake of Love Actually, Hugh Grant said it would be “an immense honour just to be given the chance of leading this amazing country of ours once again”.

“Let’s make Britain great again!” he thundered before being called back on set.