Boris Johnson has been accused of embellishing the truth in a heartrending story about getting his bike nicked.
The would-be PM said that the last time he has cried was when a bike - which he nicknamed Bikey - was stolen outside Parliament.
Mr Johnson explained that Bikey and he and been through a lot together, with him having ridden the bike throughout his time as London mayor.
He even used the story to take a swipe at Sadiq Khan .
“I had my bike for the whole of my mayoral career,” he said. “
"It was never nicked during all my time as mayor and I used to chain it up across the whole city. "Barely had Sadiq Khan’s reign begun before it was nicked.”
He even used the tale of this injustice to support his policy promise to get more police on Britain's streets.
He added: “Anyone who has something they love stolen feels a sense of outrage and injustice. That’s another reason we need more police on the streets.”
But the eagle-eyed quickly began to suggest that Mr Johnson was telling porky pies.
the would-be Prime Minister in 2014, in which he said that Bikey had been written off after its frame snapped when he rode it into a pothole concealed by a puddle during a storm.
In fact, in 2014 Mr Johnson gave a much more mundane account of Bikey's demise.
The PM hopeful wrote" “Old Bikey had survived every prang and prangette that goes with urban commuting: shaving trucks, kissing buses, and lovingly locking wheels with a motorbike on the Embankment – an encounter from which, alas, the motorbike came off second best.
“No one had seen fit to nick it in all those years – not even when I chained it and left it for several nights outside King’s Cross.
“Now it was dead, killed by – the weather . Yes, amigos, it was slain by the rain.”
As if writing to specifically embarrass himself years later he went on: "After eight years of uncomplaining service, the venerable steed had charged his last.”
“This was the bike that had taken me every day to distant parts of London, carried me into battle in two elections, heard my agony as I cursed up hills and listened in reassuring silence to my whispered rehearsals for the speech I would have to make when I arrived.”
So which is it?
Did Bikey bite the dust when Mr Johnson still had two years to go as Mayor or when it was stolen years later?
