Asked if the tricycle is sponsored by Barclays he said: “It might well be. That was what I was told. Thank goodness. It’s not in my briefing. I wasn’t briefed on baby presents.

“My memory is and I’m glad it has been confirmed we are sending Prince George a beautiful, bouncing blue tricycle to get him on the bike at the earliest possible opportunity and to acculturate him to the joy of cycling.”

The Mayor added: “It will be beautiful whatever it is.”

^{Telegraph picture exclusive: the tricycle the Mayor is sending to Prince George}

The gift echos a tandem version of the London hire-bike given by Mr Johnson to Prince George’s parents to mark their wedding in 2011.

Painted in the same blue colour scheme as the regular bikes, it carries the number 220713 to represent the Prince’s date of birth as well as his name in place of the cycle-hire logo.

The bike has not been specially built by Barclays. The company has bought a tricycle and simply added a “wrap” over its frame.

The three main party leaders last week disclosed the gifts that they had sent to Prince George.

David Cameron and his wife sent the third in line to the throne a selection of books by the celebrated children’s author Roald Dahl.

A typical 15-book box-set of classics by Roald Dahl includes favourites such as The Twits, Matilda, Fantastic Mr Fox, and Boy. Its recommended retail price is £88.85 but it can be bought online for as little as £15.99.

The Prime Minister’s gift to welcome the birth of the royal baby was disclosed after Nick Clegg, his Liberal Democrat deputy, said he has given an embroidered cot blanket made by Spanish nuns.

Ed Miliband, the opposition leader, has sent a three-year-old apple tree – a traditional gift for a first-born boy.

The tree currently has apples on it and it was grown at a London orchard project called BEST, or Brent Eleven Streets.

As new countries have joined, we have seen a hurried expansion in the areas for Qualified Majority Voting, so that Britain can be overruled more and more often (as has happened in the past five years). We have had not just the Maastricht Treaty, but Amsterdam, Nice, Lisbon, every one of them representing an extension of EU authority and a centralisation in Brussels. According to the House of Commons library, anything between 15 and 50 per cent of UK legislation now comes from the EU; and remember that this type of legislation is very special.

It is unstoppable, and it is irreversible – since it can only be repealed by the EU itself. Ask how much EU legislation the Commission has actually taken back under its various programmes for streamlining bureaucracy. The answer is none. That is why EU law is likened to a ratchet, clicking only forwards. We are seeing a slow and invisible process of legal colonisation, as the EU infiltrates just about every area of public policy. Then – and this is the key point – the EU acquires supremacy in any field that it touches; because it is one of the planks of Britain’s membership, agreed in 1972, that any question involving the EU must go to Luxembourg, to be adjudicated by the European Court of Justice.

“At a time when Brussels should be devolving power, it is hauling more and more towards the centre, and there is no way that Britain can be unaffected”

Boris Johnson

It was one thing when that court contented itself with the single market, and ensuring that there was free and fair trade across the EU. We are now way beyond that stage. Under the Lisbon Treaty, the court has taken on the ability to vindicate people’s rights under the 55-clause “Charter of Fundamental Human Rights”, including such peculiar entitlements as the right to found a school, or the right to “pursue a freely chosen occupation” anywhere in the EU, or the right to start a business.

These are not fundamental rights as we normally understand them, and the mind boggles as to how they will be enforced. Tony Blair told us he had an opt-out from this charter.

Alas, that opt-out has not proved legally durable, and there are real fears among British jurists about the activism of the court. The more the EU does, the less room there is for national decision-making. Sometimes these EU rules sound simply ludicrous, like the rule that you can’t recycle a teabag, or that children under eight cannot blow up balloons, or the limits on the power of vacuum cleaners. Sometimes they can be truly infuriating – like the time I discovered, in 2013, that there was nothing we could do to bring in better-designed cab windows for trucks, to stop cyclists being crushed. It had to be done at a European level, and the French were opposed.

Sometimes the public can see all too plainly the impotence of their own elected politicians – as with immigration. That enrages them; not so much the numbers as the lack of control. That is what we mean by loss of sovereignty – the inability of people to kick out, at elections, the men and women who control their lives. We are seeing an alienation of the people from the power they should hold, and I am sure this is contributing to the sense of disengagement, the apathy, the view that politicians are “all the same” and can change nothing, and to the rise of extremist parties.

Democracy matters; and I find it deeply worrying that the Greeks are effectively being told what to do with their budgets and public spending, in spite of huge suffering among the population. And now the EU wants to go further. There is a document floating around Brussels called “The Five Presidents Report”, in which the leaders of the various EU institutions map out ways to save the euro. It all involves more integration: a social union, a political union, a budgetary union. At a time when Brussels should be devolving power, it is hauling more and more towards the centre, and there is no way that Britain can be unaffected.

David Cameron has done his very best, and he has achieved more than many expected. There is some useful language about stopping “ever-closer union” from applying to the UK, about protecting the euro outs from the euro ins, and about competition and deregulation.

There is an excellent forthcoming Bill that will assert the sovereignty of Parliament, the fruit of heroic intellectual labour by Oliver Letwin, which may well exercise a chilling effect on some of the more federalist flights of fancy of the court and the Commission. It is good, and right, but it cannot stop the machine; at best it can put a temporary and occasional spoke in the ratchet.

There is only one way to get the change we need, and that is to vote to go, because all EU history shows that they only really listen to a population when it says No. The fundamental problem remains: that they have an ideal that we do not share. They want to create a truly federal union, e pluribus unum, when most British people do not.

It is time to seek a new relationship, in which we manage to extricate ourselves from most of the supranational elements. We will hear a lot in the coming weeks about the risks of this option; the risk to the economy, the risk to the City of London, and so on; and though those risks cannot be entirely dismissed, I think they are likely to be exaggerated. We have heard this kind of thing before, about the decision to opt out of the euro, and the very opposite turned out to be the case.

I also accept there is a risk that a vote to Leave the EU, as it currently stands, will cause fresh tensions in the union between England and Scotland. On the other hand, most of the evidence I have seen suggests that the Scots will vote on roughly the same lines as the English.

We will be told that a Brexit would embolden Putin, though it seems to me he is more likely to be emboldened, for instance, by the West’s relative passivity in Syria.

Above all, we will be told that whatever the democratic deficiencies, we would be better off remaining in because of the “influence” we have. This is less and less persuasive to me. Only 4 per cent of people running the Commission are UK nationals, when Britain contains 12 per cent of the EU population. It is not clear why the Commission should be best placed to know the needs of UK business and industry, rather than the myriad officials at UK Trade & Investment or the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.

If the “Leave” side wins, it will indeed be necessary to negotiate a large number of trade deals at great speed. But why should that be impossible? We have become so used to Nanny in Brussels that we have become infantilised, incapable of imagining an independent future. We used to run the biggest empire the world has ever seen, and with a much smaller domestic population and a relatively tiny Civil Service. Are we really unable to do trade deals? We will have at least two years in which the existing treaties will be in force.

“This is a moment for Britain to be brave, to reach out – not to hug the skirts of Nurse in Brussels, and refer all decisions to someone else”

Boris Johnson

The real risk is to the general morale of Europe, and to the prestige of the EU project. We should take that seriously.

We should remember that this federalist vision is not an ignoble idea. It was born of the highest motives – to keep the peace in Europe. The people who run the various EU institutions – whom we like to ply with crass abuse – are, in my experience, principled and thoughtful officials. They have done some very good things: I think of the work of Sir Leon Brittan, for instance, as Competition Commissioner, and his fight against state aid.

They just have a different view of the way Europe should be constructed. I would hope they would see a vote to leave as a challenge, not just to strike a new and harmonious relationship with Britain (in which those benefits could be retained) but to recover some of the competitiveness that the continent has lost in the last decades.

Whatever happens, Britain needs to be supportive of its friends and allies – but on the lines originally proposed by Winston Churchill: interested, associated, but not absorbed; with Europe – but not comprised. We have spent 500 years trying to stop continental European powers uniting against us. There is no reason (if everyone is sensible) why that should happen now, and every reason for friendliness.

EU: How the Cabinet will vote

For many Conservatives, this has already been a pretty agonising business. Many of us are deeply internally divided, and we are divided between us. We know that we do not agree on the substance, but I hope we can all agree to concentrate on the arguments; to play the ball and not the man.

At the end of it all, we want to get a result, and then get on and unite around David Cameron – continuing to deliver better jobs, better housing, better health, education and a better quality of life for our constituents for whom (let’s be frank) the EU is not always the number one issue.

It is entirely thanks to the Prime Minister, his bravery and energy, and the fact that he won a majority Conservative government, that we are having a referendum at all. Never forget that if it were down to Jeremy Corbyn and the so-called People’s Party, the people would be completely frozen out.

This is the right moment to have a referendum, because as Europe changes, Britain is changing too. This is a truly great country that is now going places at extraordinary speed. We are the European, if not the world, leaders in so many sectors of the 21st-century economy; not just financial services, but business services, the media, biosciences, universities, the arts, technology of all kinds (of the 40 EU technology companies worth more than $1 billion, 17 are British); and we still have a dizzyingly fertile manufacturing sector.

Now is the time to spearhead the success of those products and services not just in Europe, but in growth markets beyond. This is a moment to be brave, to reach out – not to hug the skirts of Nurse in Brussels, and refer all decisions to someone else.

EU referendum countdown

We have given so much to the world, in ideas and culture, but the most valuable British export and the one for which we are most famous is the one that is now increasingly in question: parliamentary democracy – the way the people express their power.

This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to vote for real change in Britain’s relations with Europe. This is the only opportunity we will ever have to show that we care about self-rule. A vote to Remain will be taken in Brussels as a green light for more federalism, and for the erosion of democracy.

In the next few weeks, the views of people like me will matter less and less, because the choice belongs to those who are really sovereign – the people of the UK. And in the matter of their own sovereignty the people, by definition, will get it right.

EU referendum: Timeline

In the meantime, though, I want to show you some of the horrors in that crevasse. There is one set of polling data that is now beyond doubt. There is one part of Britain where a seismic change has already taken place, and that is Scotland. In yesterday’s The Times, Damian McBride, Gordon Brown’s former spin doctor, wrote an excellent piece in which he analysed the Labour disaster north of the border.

Labour has basically given up the fight, he announced. They have moved through the cycle of grief, from denial to anger to depression to acceptance. They know that the gaps are so big that they are going to lose at least 20 seats to the Pisces of the political firmament – Salmond and Sturgeon.

It has taken some time for Westminster to grasp what this means for Britain. If Labour were to win an outright majority, they would need another 69 seats from all other parties; and no one thinks that is going to happen. If they lose 10 seats in Scotland, that pushes the required number of seats up to 79. If they lose 20, they need 89 – and so on. In other words, it is now becoming ever clearer that the only way Labour can govern this country is with the support of the Scottish National Party – and that is a prospect that is chilling the blood of sensible people across the UK.

I watched Nicola Sturgeon on television at the weekend, and the SNP leader was making no bones about it. She made a clear and unambiguous commitment to support and to work with a minority Labour government; as well she might, since she wants to reassure those huge numbers of Labour-SNP switchers in Glasgow and elsewhere that they can have their cake and eat it: a more Left-leaning government in the whole of the UK, and more independence for Scotland. And her promise, alas, is in one sense entirely plausible. Salmond at Westminster would run rings round Miliband, and in any kind of Labour-SNP coalition it is all too easy to see how the Scottish tail would wag the English dog.

The Scots Nats want to end and reverse all benefit reforms, even though these are supported by the New Labour faction in Miliband’s party and by the overwhelming majority of the British public. The SNP positively drool about the swingeing new taxes they could impose on the English, especially in London and the South East. They also want to scrap Trident – in defiance of most experienced and serious Labour MPs.

They would pursue policies, in other words, that would weaken Britain at home and abroad and, if he wanted to be prime minister, Miliband would have no choice but to bob along and agree. We would be consigning this country to five years of the most negative and regressive Left-wingery, larded with a ghastly finger-wagging political correctness.

In the end, though, the SNP agenda is subtler and more insidious. What do they really want? It’s there in the title. They want a new nation; they want independence. And to that end they will surely spend their time in government in a constant effort to tease, bait, goad and generally wind up the English until the patience snaps.

They will want five years of socialism in the UK, followed by another chance at breaking away. The risk is that by then the people of England will be so fed up with the moon-faced Salmond, with his sanctimony and sarcasm and beautifully judged air of injured innocence, that they will throw up their hands and consent – and we would incur the disaster that we thought we had averted last year.

The awful thing is that Labour in Scotland is already being forced to play along with this strategy: see Jim Murphy’s pathetic attempts to steal SNP clothes, bragging about tax raids on London and the South East in a way that has infuriated Labour in London.

It is no way to run a country, let alone to strengthen the union. The tragedy of Ed Miliband is that he can only govern this country by relying on a party that wants to destroy this country. There would be five years of socialism, and then a rupture that would appal the world. “Doubtful it stood,” says the sergeant describing the state of the battle at the beginning of Macbeth, “as two spent swimmers that do cling together / And choke their art.”

That is a perfect description of the state of Labour and the SNP in Scotland – and, if it were to come to it, in the country as a whole. They are locked in a deadly embrace, and the risk is that they will take the rest of us down with them.

It reads at times like a mixture of Monty Python and the Horrible Histories. He describes the French generals during the Second World War as “white-haired dodderers in their Clouseau-like kepis” commanding “an origami army”. Hitler and Himmler are part of a “demented crew” with “deranged plans” for a new world capital called Germania. “At its heart was to be the Hall of the People – a demented granite version of the Pantheon of Agrippa.”

Meanwhile, our great wartime leader, according to Johnson, spent the war dressed in “strange Victorian/Edwardian garb”, giving the appearance of “some burly and hung-over butler from the set of Downton Abbey”.

At one point Johnson deliberately invokes one of Monty Python’s more iconic images as he ponders how British fortunes may have fared during the war without Churchill at the helm. “Let’s send down one of those giant Monty Python hands,” he postulates, “and pluck him [Churchill] from the smoke-filled room. Let us suppose that he’d copped it as a young man, on one of those occasions when he had set out so boisterously to cheat death.”

Nor is the author shy about placing himself centre stage in the narrative. He writes about visiting Chartwell, Churchill’s family home in Kent, in an attempt to better understand the “teeming brain that helped invent the tank and the seaplane and which foresaw the atom bomb”.

Johnson’s novel conclusion is that the entire house has been constructed as “a gigantic engine for the generation of text”, enabling Churchill, who was to become the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953, to produce more words than Shakespeare and Dickens combined.

In another classic Johnsonian diversion, he sets off on his bicycle in the rain along the Romford Road in east London to visit the grave of Churchill’s beloved nanny, Mrs Everest. “I am soaked. My blue suit is black and shiny with water and there is a sucking noise in my shoes as I get off my bike.” As with the many other visits Johnson undertakes in the course of the narrative, there is a more serious purpose underlying his humorous antics.

The gravestone Churchill and his brother Jack erected to Mrs Everest’s memory is testimony to Churchill’s deep humanity.

Indeed, as with so much Johnson does in his public endeavours, there is a profound point underscoring all the levity and bravura. As the title suggests, the book is an exploration of the many distinctive facets of Churchill’s character that made him the man he was, and provided him with the inner strength and spirit that enabled him to save the British nation in its darkest hour.

While Johnson is clearly an admirer of Churchill, it can be difficult to see what new insights he brings to the study of the statesman. The obvious subtext, of course, is that Johnson is seeking to compare his own reputation as a political maverick with that of Churchill, which poses the question: what would Winston Churchill have made of Boris Johnson?

Boris Johnson will be taking part in a Q&A with Gaby Wood on October 23 at Imperial College London. Tickets are £40 (including a signed copy of The Churchill Factor) and are available from telegraph.co.uk/borisjohnson.

The Churchill Factor by Boris Johnson

416pp, Hodder, Telegraph offer price: £20 (PLUS £1.95 p&p) (RRP £25, ebook £8.96). Call 0844 871 1515 or see books.telegraph.co.uk

Now it was dead, killed by – the weather. Yes, amigos, it was slain by the rain. My bike has been one of the many economic casualties – admittedly, a very minor one – of the inundations that have caused so much grief and misery across the country.

It happened like this. It was Friday afternoon, shortly after a detailed lunch with my father, and it was bucketing down. As I cycled up Whitehall, I saw a puddle ahead; well, not so much a puddle as an inky mere that spread six feet across the road. I wonder how deep that puddle is, I said to myself, as Old Bikey whizzed me nearer. I wondered whether I should steer round it; and then I thought, nah. This is my road, a Transport for London road, serviced to the most exacting standards. To steer round a little pool of rainfall was not only wimpy; it was positively disrespectful to the superb roads-maintenance team in our Surface Transport division.

So I clapped my spurs to the side of the machine, and pointed it straight to the bit that seemed darkest and most sinister – and, as ever, Old Bikey lunged forward with joyful acceleration. You may vaguely remember the story of the Lacus Curtius, the mysterious and terrifying pit that opened up in the Roman forum, and how some young buck decided to save the city by leaping into it, fully armed, on a horse.

Well, I think I know how he felt. Down, down, down went the front wheel for what seemed like a very long time, before jack-knifing on some storm drain or sunken U-boat or other obstruction at the bottom; and then, sploof, I went over the handle bars before making brief but thorough contact with the wet tarmac; and, boing-oing-oing, I bounced up again – as we old rugby players have learnt to do – a millisecond before the taxi behind me could organise a swift election, and I had taken the bike off the road to assess the damage.

I had not a scratch, but it was clear that Old Bikey was unwell, in some fundamental way. Nothing was obviously broken or even bent, but as we went along it made a terrible mewling noise, like some stricken animal, and when I turned one way or the other the rear wheel would lurch in the opposite direction, as if it objected to the very principles of my leadership. It was like trying to run a coalition with the Lib Dems.

The first bike doctors were stumped. They span the wheels, checked the gears, twanged the brakes – and after a lot of frowning over their stethoscopes they said it was nothing too bad, just something to do with the ball bearings in the pedals. I tried to believe them. I crossed my fingers and carried on. But by now my steering was so wonky that a casual observer might have formed the impression that I was riding a bike while under the influence; and we couldn’t have that.

I went for a second opinion, to the medicovelocipedal equivalent of Harley Street, where they did an ultrasound or whatever – and they found the problem. After eight indefatigable years of jouncing and bouncing over potholes and cobbles, with a load – including clothes and rucksack – of approaching 17 stone, the bike’s great heart could take it no more.

Something fatal had taken place not in the replaceable periphery, but in the irreducible core of the machine. I had managed to snap the frame itself. One of the lower wishbone struts had sheared in two – not at the join, but right in the middle. Couldn’t we solder it? I asked; but I knew the answer from their faces.

So I grieve for Old Bikey, like the owner of some superb steeplechaser that has snapped his fetlock in a freak mid-season accident, and has had to be put down. My sorrow is assuaged by one small detail about this bike – a point I have not yet shared with you – the only defect it had. My friends, it was made in California. Now is the time for a bike that won’t expire beneath me, a bike that won’t snap. It’s time for a British bike.