Tale of a stolen bike

So let’s say you are a member of a conservative establishment party. What the heck, let’s make you the head of this party. Your party is the leading opposition party so people say you are rather important and people also say maybe your party may take the majority soon because they are becoming unhappy with the majority party.

Keep this up and you could be head of the country some day.

Even though you are important, you commute to work every day and this shows how “green” your party is. The distance is about 4 miles and unlike our Prez, when you bike, you don’t have security SUV’s following you all over the place. You have your papers delivered between your home and the office, though because 1. There are a lot of papers, and 2. who knows when it will rain?

So on your way home one evening, you stop by the supermarket to pick up a few things. After chaining up to a bollard, you go inside and when you come out five minutes later, your bike is gone.

What do you do?

Well if you are David Cameron, head of the UK Conservative Party (a/k/a Tory), you are amazed at the cheek of these scoundrels. You yell and curse and wish aloud for Sharia law. You call the police, they fill out a report, and then you walk home. In the dark.

Next day, Cameron is all over the newspapers which quote people saying things like, “he was pretty hacked off” and remark at how shocked he was that common theft could happen to him, of all people. And he makes a public appeal for the return of the bike. There are also “comical” photos of him from the security cameras. People tsk and tut about chaining up to, of all things, a bollard since all the thieves had to do was lift the bike up and over.

Well, that’s what David Cameron did, but what would a liberal tabloid newspaper do to find the bike?

Simple. The newspaper “put the word out on the street.” Actually, they didn’t, but they turned to a “citizen activist” one 60 year-old Ernest Theophile, who spends a lot of time outside in that neighborhood shooting the breeze. Ernest asks one of the Rastafarian kids in the neighborhood “KJ” to help and the game is afoot. In the US papers KJ is identified as a “youth.”

An hour later, the bike is recovered, sans the front wheel and the next day it is returned to it’s rightful owner. The newspaper sprung for a new front wheel. I guess it wouldn’t look so hot to “present” the bike without a wheel.

We find and return Conservative leader David Cameron’s stolen bicycle

The police took fingerprints and are studying CCTV tapes. Meanwhile Ernest is enjoying his day in the sun, “I told him that they’ll steal anything round here, it’s pretty normal.” Not much heard from KJ, though.