Boris Johnson:

“It has been a very emotional day,” said Sky News’s Adam Boulton. “I have seen some incredible things today, things I never thought I would see.” What were these incredible things? “I have seen the Blairs’ exercise bicycle removed from Number 10,” groaned the honest fellow; and across Britain one imagined the Sky audience returning their sodden handkerchiefs to their eyes as they were racked with fresh bouts of sobbing. The exercise bicycle! The Prime Ministerial exercise bicycle! Never more to be used in Downing Street again! Woe, woe and thrice woe…Sky News may be treating it like the funeral of Queen Victoria, but I am really feeling quite chipper about the political extinction of Tony Blair. Yes, I was going to say, there are some of us who are bearing up pretty well, on the whole, and there are some of us who can’t think of a better fate for Tony than to be carted off to the Middle East. I was just about to launch into a polemic on these lines, when something happened on the television that caused the words to die on my lips. Suddenly my mood changed; suddenly I felt a sense of desolation and morosity that we had lost Tony Blair, and I can tell you the exact moment when I caught the bug and joined the national mourning. It was the moment Gordon Brown opened his mouth, and, with every word he uttered, the mercury of my mood started to sink and the clouds rolled in…Gordon croaks, “Let the work of change begin”, like some mad professor hunched over a necromantic experiment. What he means is “let the blizzard of legislation continue”, with all the dire consequences that implies for the size of the state and the burden of tax. There will be no change: only an intensification of the rhythm that has criminalised 3,000 courses of human conduct over the past 10 years, a process in which Gordon Brown has been the principal player.