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TRAVEL
with AJ Kirby
ALL TRAVEL:
Diddy Dave Goes To Liverpool
04/02/12
To LIVERPOOL, where this week ‘Diddy’ David Cameron has been engaged in a charm 
offensive to offset some of the offensive ‘charm’ of the government files, released recently 
under the 30-year rule, which reveal that Margaret ‘The Iron Lady’ Thatcher was privately 
encouraged to abandon the city into a state of “managed decline”, or post-apocalyptic, 
Blade Runner-style ruination, after the riots in Toxteth in 1981.

There has been widespread up-in-armsery from the inhabitants of the North West conurbation since the secret dossiers were released. Your
intrepid reporter engaged some of the loveable scouse rogues in vox-populi, truly putting his neck on the line for the sake of the HDUK readers
before D-Cam’s arrival, and here’s what some of them said (prior to one of their number – a scally, as I believe they’re called – running off with my 
Dictaphone).

Souey-side

“Managed decline? If they want to talk about managers and declines then all they need to do is take a look at 
the mug of one Graeme Souness. That shitehawk’s buys for the famous Liverpool Football Club knocked us 
off our perch far more than that Alec Ferguson ever did,” said one Derek 'Degsy' Hatton (right), the erstwhile 
Liverpool MP.

Another, a Mr. Stewpot McManamanamanaman of the Wirral, agreed: “These papers show Conservative bigwigs urged the then PM – now a
Hollywood starlet – not to spunk any more public moulah on the “stony ground” of Merseyside. But how can they say we’ve got stony ground
when there's a big-massive river running right through the middle of the feckin city?”

Mrs. Buried My Husband Under a Patio, of Brookside Close, weighed in with her own opinion 
too, which I suppose is the point of these things. She said: “The papers say that speccy 
knobhead Geoffrey Howe told Thatcher that trying to ‘save’ Liverpool would be like “trying to 
make water flow uphill”, and I’m not trying to be a funny fucker, but is he taking the piss?”

So it was to a city simmering with discontent that Cameron, who these days has taken to wearing Wings of Steel like 
Bat-Fink, was dispatched this morning, like some avenging superhero who would sit on top of the Liver Building muttering 
about how much the city had gone to the dogs, on board his Prime Ministerial Gravy Train. 

Literacy

On the way up, HDUK news understands Diddy Dave engaged in a little light reading. As well as perusing the train’s on-board magazine, which had some handy recipes he tore out to take home for the cook – he was sick of her always serving stuff like sea bass and chicken with chorizo stuffed up its arse, or whatever other shit she’d seen on Come Dine with Me the previous evening – he leafed through the report from 1980s Environment Secretary, Michael ‘My Hairspray Caused the Hole in the Ozone Layer’ Heseltine, who was dubbed “minister for Merseyside” back then, when anybody bothered to take notice of what was going on. It didn’t make for happy reading. 

To Cameron, Liverpool seemed a city without a country. But he soon forgot all about that when, at Liverpool Lime Street
Station, he was met by a troup of sulky school kids who sung him a special welcome song with some drums and mime acts
and stuff. Man he must get bored of that crap.

But onlookers observed a noticeable change in Diddy Dave then. A straightening of the 
shoulders, a more puffin-ish aspect to his face. He whacked on his political mask again.

Jolly Day For Jolly Dave

Over the course of what was an eventful day, Diddy Dave visited a number of the city’s 
cultural landmarks. His whistle-stop tour, led by famous scouse tour-guide The Man off Coach Trip On Channel Four, arranged all kinds of lovely activities for D-Cam and his retinue of staff journalists and proper press journos like me. The first trip was to not 
one but two cathedrals – Dave borrowing the old Jimmy Tarbuck line when he said, later, that he didn’t know what “scousers are 
moaning about. They’ve got a spare cathedral for Christ’s sake. Can’t they sell it to the Americans 
or something?” 

Which segued nicely into the next segment of his trip. To Liverpool Football Club itself, which is 
majority-owned by Yanks, and, according to the Didmeister, a “shining example to the rest of the 
city about not looking within the shores of the UK for help with your bloody petty municipal 
problems… I know I keep banging on about how we’re all in this recession together, but really, if you’re north of, say, Watford, then you
can fucking sort it yourselves. You know, I’ve been watching that Game of Thrones recently on Sky Atlantic. Sky-plussed the whole
damned series and watched it pretty much back-to-back did Sam and I. Talk about commitment. I think a nanny was holding the baby.
Anyway, in the show, there was this big wall separating the civilised ‘south’ with the north, and all its wildings. I’d back a similar bill here
like a shot.”

Dave the Davester gave this speech outside the hallowed gates of the Club’s stadium, Anfield – recently dubbed Ku Klux 
Klan-field by supporters of opposing football teams after allegations of racism were made against one of the players, and 
against two supporters too – which was once the home of the most successful football team in the country. The speech, 
rousing as it was, was met with heckles and no little booing. There was a large crowd in situ to meet the PM, and most 
of them appeared to be wearing t-shirts with SUAREZ 7 on both front and back, for some reason. Some of these 
supporters had ‘blacked-up’ in order to prove a point, or something. ‘Diddy’ Dave seemed mystified by the crowd as 
much as I was, and cracked that he’d “always been a 
rugger-bugger”. When quizzed further, he had this word of 
encouragement for the Liverpool fans: “Cheer up, Scousers, 
it could be worse, you could be Leeds United!”

Sergeant Cameron's Lonely Hearts Club Band

And from Anfield to the Albert Docks and the Beatles museum where, a minor incident aside – a Cameron aide
was rumoured to have been seen pissing on John Lennon’s white piano from the Imagine video and a couple of
security guards threatened to tear the young toff’s head off – a grand old time was had by all. ‘Diddy’ Dave
speculated who would be on the cover if Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band were made today: “Well,
up front, of course, you’d have myself. Then I suppose, behind me, you’d have those other stalwarts of
Britishness; John Terry, Jordan and Peter Andre, the Arctic Monkeys, David and Craig Bellamy, the England
rugger x15, the couple off The One Show,  one of the Brannings offof Eastenders, one of those northern
monkeys offof Corrie. The horse, Kauto Star. Duncan Bannatyne. Anyone from The Only Way is Essex. These
are all people I admire.”

S-Coolio

The final visits of the day were reserved for what D-Cam calls “the boring stuff”. But the PM was pleasantly surprised by the 
school and hospital he visited, perhaps because he thought they were both “working museums”; examples of how shit life 
was before his official Toriness was invented, or conceived. No, invented. Concocted up from many wanked-over biscuits at 
his posh private school. 

In an unfortunate slip of the tongue, Diddy Dave referred to the St. Robbie Fowler Primary School in Toxteth as “the workhouse”. And
when told it was a school, he was even more nonplussed. On his walk-and-talk through the pupils, he was continuously heard
asking them “where’s your fag?” and “is Moab your washpot?” or similar. He told the pupils how much they must enjoy playing like
they really were in the 1980s, or even the 1880s (when they had none of that distracting stuff like computers, decent textbooks or
proper gym equipment), and how pleased the teachers must be to have some extra space to spread out in the staff room these
days. “Makes the old tea run a little easier to handle, I’d say,” he was heard to quip.

No Free Parking

And at the hospital, Cameron was again impressed by the sheer gusto and fighting spirit shown by the three staff he met; all of them car park 
attendants, one of which was an Alsatian. Cameron gave the dog a Bonio dog treat and told him he was a shining example to the rest of this 
godforsaken shithole. He then demanded the two men go off and clamp some more cars while he and the Alsatian, named Luis Suarez is 
Innocent, La, got down to their important chat.

So all in all, a good day for our hero, D-Cam.

But back on the Prime Ministerial Gravy Express, Cameron quickly changed his tune. In a hastily convened press
conference with staff and reporters alike, he uttered the now famous remark that Thatcher and her Henchmen hadn’t
gone far enough in their Social-Cleansing-Thinking. 

“Get the science boffins on the case,” he roared. “What if we get engineers and that 
boring holes and drilling down into the ground in loads of places at about a twenty mile radius of the city of Liverpool and then, somehow, 
getting a massive earth mover or something to detach that massive chunk of land from the rest of the United Kingdom altogether? 
Would that work? Leaving Merseyside – or Murky Dive as I like to call it - to drift aimlessly over to Ireland, or America instead? Or else 
bring back those Lynx deodorants which had all the bad gasses in them. Spray these directly at the hole in the Ozone. Get them sea 
levels rising. Drown the bastards.”

Cam cracked open a can of Gravy Train gin and tonic, poured himself a plastic glass-full. The ice chinked. 
“It’s no wonder Liverpool’s most famous, and hence best, residents want to leave it. All you have to do is 
look at Cilla Black, John Lennon, and Twitter’s Own Joey Barton to know they’ve got their heads screwed 
on, whilst the rest of the North West conurbation’s population clearly hasn’t.”

Then he put on his big headphones – the type footballers wear on their way into stadiums – and he told 
everyone to fuck right off while he listened to Bros. Yes, even Cleggy. 

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