Chris Jones, editor of The Courier-Mail, remains in hospital this morning suffering from severe shock and chronic depression after a prank played by senior colleagues went terribly wrong last night.

The senior editorial staff had asked the art department up at the LNP’s Bowen Hills branch to build a fake front page for today’s edition (below), declaring that a massive budget black hole in the LNP’s election costings had blown the Opposition’s chances of winning Saturday’s election out of the water.

When handed the fake splash, Jones reportedly stood up, shouted “No! Surely we deserve to finally get one right!” before his eyes rolled back inside his head and he slumped unconscious to the floor.

“We only did it as a bit of a giggle,” a deputy editor who asked not to be named told The Bug. “We just assumed he’d realise straight away it was all a joke because the LNP’s costings black hole wouldn’t have been that large, surely?

“Besides, we didn’t know that Jonesy had also only just gotten word of The Australian’s Newspoll showing the election race tightening as well.

“We certainly wouldn’t have gone ahead with that silly prank if we’d known that.”

Jones is understood to be slipping in and out of consciousness this morning in a private ward at the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital.

A nurse in the hospital’s Bjelke-Petersen private wing told us: “He keeps muttering that it’s his fault that he didn’t use James Campbell’s exclusives from Melbourne as the paper’s main election yarns over and over again like he and other Courier editors have relied on in past Queensland state elections”.

“That and the fact that he thought the LNP was going to win in such a landslide that the Courier could look like a real, balanced and fair newspaper every now and then, for old time’s sake and to try to remember what that felt like.”

Editor’s note: Luckily for the paper’s readers who are dying – literally – to know the Courier’s view, Jones had already penned his editorial for today’s paper saying Labor was hopeless and it was time for it to go. Yes, we know BUGgers, it came as a complete shock to us too.

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