London mayor 'knight on shining bike'

LONDON Mayor Boris Johnson rescued a woman attacked by a group of girls wielding a metal bar after answering her plea for help during an evening bicycle ride, a spokeswoman for his office said yesterday.

Documentary filmmaker Franny Armstrong was confronted by a group of young teenage girls while walking in North London on Monday night.

"I was texting on my phone so didn't notice the girls until they pushed me against the car," the Guardian newspaper quoted Armstrong as saying. "I saw that one of them had an iron bar in her hand. It was more than a meter long."

"Then along came a cyclist. And I thought, 'Good, he's a big bloke,' and shouted, 'Can you help me please?"

"I said, 'That's the mayor of London!' and they ran off," Armstrong told the Guardian.

"They must have thought they were going to get in trouble. One dropped the bar, so Boris picked it up and cycled after them."

Johnson, a Conservative who read classics at Oxford and was elected London mayor in 2008, then walked Armstrong home, said the report.

She said that although she had voted for his Labour opponent Ken Livingstone in last year's election, Johnson might be the tougher of the two if you ever found yourself in trouble down a dark alleyway.

"He was my knight on a shining bicycle."

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