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What’s better, meeting Barack or getting your stolen bike back?
For Tory leader David Cameron it’s probably a very close run thing.
Yesterday, just before his meeting with Barack Obama, Cameron was reunited with the bike he’d left lightly tethered outside Tescos on Wednesday. It woz the Sunday Mirror wot won it.
Journos from the tabloid did what the police could have done: they asked around the local area.
“While the Tory leader sat at home bemoaning his loss, we enlisted the help local community elder Ernest Theophile and his Rasta friend “KJ”, who used their street contacts to trace the bike.”
The bike is a Scott and was found minus its front wheel. The Sunday Mirror graciously replaced the wheel and handed the bike back to Cameron in time for a splash in today’s paper.
Cameron said: “Thank you very much indeed. I’m very surprised to have it back – it’s incredible. I never thought I’d see it again. It’s priceless to me.”
In a video on the Sunday Mirror’s website Cameron tells the paper’s political editor “We have to educate at all levels: nicking bikes is wrong.”
But Cameron could also do with some education of his own. It turns out the lock he’s using is a cheap and nasty cable lock and even though the bike was stolen by lifting over a bollard, it could also be half-inched in future by anybody carrying a pair of small pliers.
When the bike was reported stolen by Britain’s mass media, the Dutch Tourist Board offered to gift Cameron a roadster. Instead of a new bike he now needs a better lock, a golden opportunity for an enterprising bike lock company. And once Cameron has a beefy padlock and chain combo he needs to read the definitive article on how to keep bikes thieves at bay.