By the way, if your camping multitool has a blade over three inches on it, leave it at home, get another, because in the UK you can be jailed, and you will certainly spend at least a night locked up until you can explain yourself to the magistrate in the morning, if the police catch you with a blade over three inches long. I'm not kidding you. Another painter was locked up in England for the knife he used to sharpen his pencil, and told me he was expected to wash and brush his teeth in the toilet in the police cell for three days until the magistrate held court on Monday and apologised to him "for the inconvenience" after he gave a demonstration of how to sharpen a pencil... Bizarro! For that much unhygienic "inconvenience" I could turn into a revolutionary again.
Ok, this is an important piece of information. I guess my standard Victorinox Swiss army knife is too big for that, and it even has a locking blade 
https://myknifeguide.com/legal-carry-swiss-army/
I wouldn't worry about it, no one in the UK has ever been arrested for carrying a knife in a toolkit on a bike, for a start they'd need good reason to search, which has never happened to me or anyone I know. Andre's story is either a work of fiction or he's omitted some relevant detail.
Still best to have a legal knife, if it gets spotted at customs it'll be confiscated.
Paul: I didn't say this fellow was on a bicycle; he's not a cyclist. He was stopped on the street in a routine police sweep. They stopped teenagers and scruffy-looking adults, presumably on the assumption that they wouldn't be on first-name terms with their MP or a hungry journalist, both in the eyes of policemen troublemakers who shouldn't be permitted. The policeman asked him if he had a knife and naively he said yes: when he cleans up he's a responsible citizen. When he couldn't give a local address, he was detained and charged. Police incompetence, I'd say, thick country coppers not recognising a well-known painter, practising their highly
refined developed class-consciousness, wasting the magistrate's time. His lawyer told him it wasn't worth suing; I wouldn't sue either, I'd make laughingstocks of them by name in a newspaper and on television, turn the affair into a tidy bit of income, more than enough to buy a well-specced Thorn.
Flocsy: Obviously I don't know the particulars of your Victorinox but I doubt it has a "locking" blade in the legal sense. The word locking is thrown around in this thread without a full understanding. In practical, legal terms, locking means knives with a positive lock, like a backlock or any kind of a flip lock. It does not mean slip joint detents, which legally are not locks. It is highly likely your Victorinox folding pocket knife has a slip joint on each of its blades; look up the specs by the knife number or name. A slip joint is a construction of a springy back and a separate blade with a circular or squarish with round corners rear end (close the blade and look at the end of the closed knife and you can see what I'm what I'm talking about) which swivels on a pin along the springy back -- you'll see a bit of the back at the forward end rising as you open the blade -- and then braces itself against the blunt forward end of the springback. This is not a lock and in theory it can close on your fingers, but it is a proven mostly-safe design. So, in summary, if your Victorinox has a blade shorter than three inches and is of slipjoint design, you're okay to carry it on your person. (I wouldn't, though.) If the blade is longer, you'd better carry it in your gear, and have your explanation of what it is for ready, and be ready too to give a demonstration of its function; a lot is left up to the individual policeman's discretion, or lack of it. If you buy a new knife, the wording in advertising for under-three inch blade with slipjoint is "EDC" for "EveryDay Carry".
Martin: I imagine you know this: Opinel also makes knives without the ring lock.
For Irish bicycle tourists: Irish law is different again. Some knives are simply banned outright by type-name including all knives deemed to have as their only function cutting or impaling people, martial arts knives from the Far East, but also folding razors, which is a common American pocket blade. A knife with a lock is not particularly banned. But you'd better not be caught here with a knife on your person, though in your gear any knife not particularly banned is okay as long as you can explain its necessary purpose to your tour. Martin's Opinel with the slide-locK would probably be acceptable, depending on its size. My own solution is to take only pocket knives with slip joints and blades less than 3" out of the house, and always in my gear rather than my pockets. Also, I use folding pocket knives of a recognised farmer's design (clip point, lambsfoot, and spay blades, the last passing for a penknife), probably familiar to at least half the policemen here.
