David Cameron has appealed for the return of his bicycle after a thief stole it from outside a supermarket in west London.

The Tory leader, who regularly rode the bike to the House of Commons, had chained it to a bollard while he popped into a Tesco store in Portobello Road to buy some groceries yesterday evening, close to his home in Notting Hill.

The thieves had apparently lifted the bike - and the chain - over the bollard and vanished.

“Someone must have just picked it up and walked off with it,” he told reporters.

“I was cycling home and stopped to pick up some things for supper. I chained the bike through the wheel then put it around one of those bollard things.

“If anyone has seen it I would very much like it back. To me it was absolutely priceless.”

He added that he had reported the theft on Scotland Yard’s online crime reporting site, but said he was pessimistic about its return. “I am not holding my breath.”

Mr Cameron's spokeswoman said that he had had the bike for about five years and regularly used it to cycle to work at the Commons.

“He will have to get a new one when he gets back from his holidays,” she said.

Nearly 19,000 bicycles were reported stolen in London last year.

In March, Mr Cameron pledged to cycle more carefully after the Daily Mirror newspaper filmed him riding through two red lights and the wrong way down a one-way street en route to the Commons.

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