I was going to do this as a correction but it turns out there may be nothing to correct.

An anonymous commenter found an exact copy posted on a BBS in Nov of 2000 and left the link. it was posted by one Kassandra Calhoun, but she didn't write it. She says it was passed on to her by email. She apparently didn't know who wrote it.

But the piece was then published and signed by Cleese in the Dec 15 issue of Bellaciao--last month.

Did somebody attach Cleese's name to it? Was he the original author in 2000? (It shows up, unattributed, in a collection of English jokes about the 2000 election on a British website.)

It certainly reads like Cleese, and I suspect he wrote it originally in 2000 and then simply recycled it when we did it again and Bellaciao wanted a response. But I can't find a reference from 2000 with his name attached to it--they're all anonymous so far.

So did he write it? Or is it the work of an anonymous Brit wit?

I'm going with Cleese. His style is very distinctive and this piece is swimming in standard Cleese-ish word-play and the outraged uber-Britishness of Basil Fawlty, a character he created and wrote all the dialogue for.