CRIKEY, is it ‘Bash Boris’ week? You go out for a jolly little bike ride and it makes the nationals! Well, I have to say I want to ride my bicycle, I want to ride it where I like. And these are not just my words but those of that great Zanzibar philosopher-poet Farrokh Bulsara.

And I have it on great authority, had the future Mr Mercury lived in Westminster, he would not have restricted himself to journeys of less than seven miles.

Do you know that Nina Myskow, a Scottish journalist person, a woman who only ever dresses in pink – which suggests in itself a very limited imagination – argued that my cycle runs should have been made in small circles. What piffle! Ever decreasing circles are what Keir Starmer moves in – and those pesky nationalists – who go round and round the same track.

Just this week, Ian Blackford, this disputatious, tartan-suited dandy, demanded to know once again, “why the people of Scotland’s democratic rights are being traduced blah, blah..."

And I had to remind him my priority is to steer us through this pandemic and convince the public to take the utmost care and precaution.

“Just like you did when you caught Covid, after you had been shaking hands with more people than an apprentice Freemason,” the nippy nat said, and then, just as the Zoom session closed, the bounder whispered: “You’re a balloon, Boris.”

Well, I’m happy to declare balloonery. Because balloons, like bicycle tyres, have to be filled to bursting with air – and I am full of that. And we should remember that life is a cycle; foot to the pedal, constantly changing gears, sometimes racing ahead, sometimes putting on the brakes – but during our journey we must always, always, keep our tyres pumped up.

We mustn’t be sidetracked by sharp tacks such as Yvette Cooper, all too keen to puncture the inner tube of progress, bemoaning that I had been slow to close the door on Brazil, just because Bolsonaro and co threatened us with a savage new Covid variant.

Ms Cooper also criticised our quarantine and track and trace results. But before you Scots go all superior I can confirm that the figures attached to your own devolved government’s failures are just as rubbish. And Andy Murray has Covid. And he is Scottish.

Aristotle once said: “We are what we repeatedly do”. And that is a guiding principle because what I do repeatedly is change my mind on policy at the very last minute – and then take off on my bike.

That’s why I can now support the wonderful Marcus Rashford, whom my advisers assure me is correct that a child’s weekly lunch box should consist of more than a packet of Cheesy Wotsits, a tin of alphabetti spaghetti and a grape.

And I’m totally free of conscience, to ride my bicycle hard in the direction of Mamma Mia! Restaurant in Islington. Or anywhere else I choose to go to.

As imagined by Brian Beacom