Geoffrey Howe Denies He Wanted To Write Off Liverpool.

Sir Geoffrey Howe, pictured above enjoying his well-paid retirement as a life peer, has denied today that he once advised Margaret Thatcher to effectively abandon Liverpool as a lost cause. "I did no such thing," he told our reporter. "I don't care what the record shows. What I actually said was 'You might just as well - we've abandoned the rest of the bloody country.'" Rushing to the rescue of his former colleague, Michael Heseltine, also enjoying a well-heeled retirement in the House of Lords, told the "News in Shorts," "I told him that we'd never get away with abandoning one of the largest cities in Britain since that would draw far too much attention to what we were doing to the rest of the country. My advice was to spend money on the place to fool everyone else that we were governing in the national ineterest rather than our own. It didn't work to be honest. You can fool some of the people all of the time, etc. It's a pity we didn't have a banking crisis to hide behind - all we had was the Falklands War and that was a bugger to organise I can tell you."