It was a passionate "Go home."

"We wish she hadn't been invited here," said a student at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts. "Why should we be seen to condone the actions of this woman?"

"When I found out she was coming here to speak to our children, I didn't want her to preach what she did in Iraq," said Rabiya Adam, protesting outside the Pleckgate High School in Blackburn.

A local mosque withdrew its invitation for her to visit. She was booed and heckled wherever she went.

Across northwest England, officials had trouble scraping up people willing to populate events in her honor.

According to The Independent, "the [Liverpool] Philharmonic Hall scoured its C-list of possible comperes for a gala evening in her honour, following refusals by the poet Roger McGough and the actress Cathy Tyson."

She received an honorary soccer jersey in an empty Blackburn Rovers stadium.

Hundreds of protesters stood outside the Blackburn town hall, jeering and chanting, as Rice and Straw arrived to meet with local muslim leaders.

Rice declared her visit an unmitigated success.

She told a news conference in Blackburn that she'd been "very warmly welcomed" and didn't have a problem with the crowds of angry protesters howling with outrage at her every movement.

"If it is not possible for me to go somewhere and to be willing to encounter people with different views then I'm really not doing my job," she said.

She admitted that the U.S. had made "thousands of mistakes" in Iraq, but then later recanted.

"I meant it figuratively, not literally. I was not sitting around counting," she told a news conference.