Conservative leader David Cameron has been reunited with his stolen bicycle, pinched from outside a supermarket this week while he was shopping inside, after a Sunday paper tracked it down.

Cameron, who regularly rides his bike to the House of Commons, had chained his bike up outside a local supermarket store on Portobello Road while he went shopping for groceries on Wednesday evening.

He was pictured looking mystified after discovering it had gone.

The Sunday Mirror said it had found the missing bike after a "local community elder" received a tip-off from some local youths. The bike had been dumped in a nearby street with the front wheel missing.

"I'm very surprised to have it back - it's incredible," Cameron told the paper. "It's priceless to me."

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

In March, 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.