Boris Johnson warns that David Cameron’s ‘bazooka’ plan will wreck democracy in EU
In an interview with The Sunday Telegraph the London Mayor hit out at Mr Cameron's call for the European Central Bank to deploy a "big bazooka" - effectively printing money - to help bail out the stricken economies in the south of the continent.
Mr Johnson also attacked plans, backed by the British government, for the 17 eurozone countries to share closer fiscal links, making them more unified on tax and spending.
"What I don't think you can do, is just pretend that you can create an economic government of Europe, effectively run by Germany," the Mayor added.
He described the replacement of elected leaders in Greece and Italy with governments led by technocrats as "completely mad" and warned that if the rest of the EU went ahead with a plan to impose a "Tobin" tax on financial transaction, even without British participation, it would be seen as a "hostile act" because it would still hit so many deals in the City of London.
Mr Johnson also outlined his own "orderly" solution to the crisis - which was miles away from anything suggested by any member of the British government.
Boris Johnson: ‘I’ve a healthy dose of sheer egomania’
In his large, eighth-floor office in London’s City Hall, with its phalanx of computer screens and its views over the Thames, Boris Johnson is plotting his re-election campaign. In May, he will take on, once again, Labour’s Ken Livingstone for the mayoralty of the capital: four years after Mr Johnson swept to victory on the back of 1.1 million votes, the biggest direct personal mandate in British political history.
Mr Johnson was a controversial choice for the Conservatives at the time. David Cameron urgently needed a colourful candidate, with the charisma to show that his party could win big contests after more than a decade of defeat, but Mr Johnson’s career in journalism, and then as a Tory MP, had already marked him out as a major loose cannon.
As Mayor, many feel he has spent as much, if not more, time, taking potshots at his party’s high command as he has changing the lives of Londoners. He is the bookies’ favourite to succeed Mr Cameron as Tory leader – even though he describes the chances of this happening as the same as his being “reincarnated as Elvis”.
The Sunday Telegraph asked him about his plans and what motivates him in politics and in life.
EU crisis: The Greek Austerity Diet will only leave them feeling fed up
OK, that’s it. I can take the taunts no longer. I am inventing a new diet: it’s called the Greek austerity diet. And I am putting myself on it right away. The moment of revelation came last Friday when we were out there in Monaco to argue that London should host the World Athletics Championship in 2017.
Even though we won the bid, there was a nasty moment for your correspondent. We were all walking along some corridor in the glitzy hotel, when we went past some gilt mirror — and I saw the awful contrast between the hard-bodied core members of the team, and the portly periphery. There was the Lord Coe, lean and chiselled as a whippet; there was heptathlete Denise Lewis and supersonic sprinter Jodie Williams, without an ounce of fat between them; and there were assorted other athletes and ex-athletes, all looking pretty darned svelte. And there, alas, was I.
For some reason, it had been decided that we should all wear identical dove-grey suits, and I am afraid my measurements must have been supplied from a younger and fitter self. As I went past the glass, I could see some spherical Scandinavian businessman staring back at me with bloodshot eyes, his thighs straining at the trouser fabric like bursting sausages — and I realised it was me. Then this morning I read a cruel piece in one of the Sunday papers that says I look as though I am no stranger to a bacon sarnie; at which I smote the board, and cried, no more. It’s time for the Greek Austerity Diet ©. It’s time for a programme of savage cuts on the carbs, and steep retrenchment of the alcohol consumption. You can wave a cake under my nose and I will push it moodily away. As for cheese, it is now officially the food of the devil.
I know it will be tough. These austerity drives always are. I must brace myself for that hallucinatory feeling you get in mid-afternoon, when you haven’t had quite enough for lunch. My stomach will rumble with protest, like the crowds in Syntagma Square. My psyche will crave chips, like an army of Greek civil servants yammering for their ancestral right to retire at 50. As I cycle past London Bridge station, my nostrils will be filled with the tormenting aroma of Cornish pasty — like the torment that afflicts a Greek customs officer when he thinks of the Porsche he has had to sell, the mistress he has pensioned off, the villa he has been forced to flog to a nice man from Düsseldorf.
There will be times when the withdrawal symptoms will be so bad that I say to myself that this can’t be worth it, and that we might as well abandon the regime, just as there are constant threats to the existence of the government in Athens; and yet I will soldier on with the Greek Austerity Diet — olives, tomatoes, onions, and not even a lump of feta — with all the implacable logic of the new “technocratic” governments that are shortly to be installed in Athens, Rome and elsewhere. Polite opinion will be united: that it is the best thing for all of us. And I am not at all sure that polite opinion will be right. At least I know that my diet is a good idea. But there is (of course) the world of difference between an individual decision to go on a diet, and the agenda of economy now being forced on the peripheral euro members; and the first and most obvious difference is that my Greek Austerity Diet is entirely a scheme of my own devising. I voted for it. My own body politic took the decision. It is a plan entirely calibrated to suit my own interests, as far as I interpret them. I don’t have Angela Merkel leaning over me and cracking her whip, and barking at me to hurry up. I don’t have Herman Van Rompuy, President of the EU Council, saying things like “This is not the time for elections, this is the time for decisions!”
Metal thieves dishonour the war dead with their vandalism
It was one of the most conspicuous acts of bravery of the Second World War. On March 18, 1944, a 30-year-old lieutenant from Sidcup was leading his men up a hill in Burma that was occupied by the Japanese. It was always going to be a tough encounter, since the Japanese were known to fight with suicidal ferocity; and sure enough, an officer leapt upon George Albert Cairns and attacked him with his ceremonial sword. So furious was his stroke that the Japanese severed Cairns’s arm. Yet the lieutenant not only killed his opponent; he mastered his pain to pick up the fallen sword.
With his good arm he then laid about him to such effect that the Japanese were routed and the hill was taken – a rare event in that grisly conflict.
Lt Cairns then toppled over, with the bodies of his enemies around him, and later died of his wounds. He was awarded the Victoria Cross. His name was recorded, along with those of 137 others from Sidcup who gave their lives in that war, on a bronze plaque and placed on the town’s war memorial.
This monument had been erected by public subscription in 1921 to honour the dead of the First World War, and in particular to the 204 men of Sidcup who “passed out of sight of men in the path of duty”. So there were altogether 342 names on that memorial in Sidcup. They were there so that people of our generation, and the next generation, would never forget the sacrifice they made.
They were intended to be a permanent reminder of the horror of war, and of the losses sustained by families in this one Kentish town. The whole purpose of the memorial was to act as a physical reassurance to the shades of those soldiers that their deaths had not been in vain. It is a promise from the living to the dead – that we will always revere what they had done.
Daylight saving time: Don’t let the Scots steal this hour because they want a lie-in
No, no, that can't be right. They can't trifle with our hopes like that. It is now more than two years since the Greater London Authority renewed its campaigning for lighter winter evenings – and last week we thought we had a stunning breakthrough.
The Government said it was "minded to support" a Bill put forward by a heroic Tory MP called Rebecca Harris, calling for British Summer Time to be in force all year. We all had the strong impression that the Cabinet had abandoned the inertia and spinelessness of the last 40 years, and was going to support Mrs Harris in her bid to save lives, expand the economy and cheer everyone up. Then I pick up my paper yesterday and I find that there has apparently been a U-turn.
It now turns out that the support of the Government entirely depends on the Scots. Unless Alex Salmond and his team agree that there should be another look at daylight saving, the whole thing is once again going to be slammed back into the bulging filing cabinet of projects that are commonsensical (like repatriating some powers from the EU) but just too politically difficult to pull off. According to a Downing Street source, the whole thing is now "dead in the water". Come on, folks. This isn't good enough.
This requires a bit more guts and determination. We can't let the Scottish tail wag the British bulldog – and especially not when the change would be in the interests of the Scots themselves. The arguments are overwhelming, and especially in London, the motor of Britain's economy. Lighter winter evenings would enable all kinds of places to stay open an hour longer – sporting venues, monuments – with huge benefits for the tourist and service industries. The income boost was calculated last year at up to £720 million – a lot of money and a lot of jobs in tough times. Then there is the point that crime is far more likely to be committed at dusk than in the morning. A switch to lighter evenings would not only cut crime by three per cent – according to Home Office figures – but it would lead to a fall in fear of crime as well.
If we all had an extra hour of daylight in the evening, there would be significant savings in electricity bills – and a cut in CO₂ emissions of 80,000 tonnes in London alone. There would be less seasonally adjusted depression, say psychiatrists. You would no longer have that terrible Lapland sense that the day was over by 3pm and you might as well go and get drunk.
Mellitus, the saint who retook London from barbarians
“Mellitus?” said the guide with an air of surprise. I felt as if I had gone into Waitrose and asked for something quaint —like a hogs-head of mead.
After all, it’s tricky finding a Londoner who has heard of Mellitus. But Vivien Kermath is one of the accredited red-sashed guides of St Paul’s Cathedral. She knows her stuff.
“Of course,” she said. “Mellitus. AD 604. He built the first of several churches that have been on this site. Come this way, we have an icon.” “An icon?” I boggled.
We walked through the great church of Christopher Wren, past memorials of Nelson and Wellington. We passed where Lady Diana Spencer consecrated her ill-fated union to the Prince of Wales, and the list of former deans, including John Donne and his illustrious predecessor, Alexander Nowell, who discovered how to bottle beer – “probably his greatest contribution to humanity”, said Vivien.
At the far end of the church we came to the American memorial chapel, and there – perched above an illuminated book recording the names of the 28,000 Americans who gave their lives in the Second World War — is Mellitus.
Boris Johnson’s ‘Life of London’: exclusive extract
People go to art galleries for all sorts of reasons: to edify their souls, to make assignations, to get out of the rain. But it is not often they are rewarded with a thermonuclear bust-up between two of the world’s greatest artists.
The scene was the Royal Academy, then in its former home of Somerset House, in the final preparations for the summer show of 1831. From floor to ceiling, the walls were crammed with the offerings of the Academicians, each painting shouting to be noticed above its neighbours. To hold the centre space of a wall – that was clearly an accolade. To be excluded was an insult.
Into the principal room of the exhibition stomped a 56-year-old man with a battered stovepipe hat and a shiny black coat. In one hand he held an umbrella-cum-swordstick that he used on his continental travels. He had a powerful conk, a protruding chin and with an inside leg of only 19in long, he was stumpy even by the standards of the day. He might have been some Dickensian coachman or innkeeper, except for the pigment lodged beneath his fingernails.
He was Joseph Mallord William Turner, a painter so confident of his genius that he had already proclaimed, “I am the great lion of the day.” Now the great lion was seeking whom he might devour.
Once again his eye roamed over the Academy walls. There was no getting around it. His vast pink-and-gold fantasy of imperial Roman decay – Caligula’s Palace and Bridge – had vanished, to be replaced by some chocolate-boxy view of a large grey church. Then Turner’s blazing eyes alighted on the culprit – a man who had not only had the gall to remove Caligula’s Palace, but who had painted the very landscape that now hung in its place.
