Boris johnson

As soon as the recent phone hacking scandals broke, Ken Livingstone lost no time in castigating Boris Johnson’s ‘dire judgement’ in dismissing the original claims as ‘codswallop cooked up by Labour’. Livingstone also said that Boris ‘had at least two meals with Rebekah Brooks, one dinner and one lunch with James Murdoch, and one dinner with Rupert Murdoch [when he was] trying to keep the lid on this story.’ Livingstone was at it again on the Today programme this morning, saying the ‘scandal goes right to the heart of the establishment’. Certainly, it was rash to describe the claims as ‘codswallop’, but is dinner such a crime?

Schoolboy rivalries never quite go away - just look at the ongoing competition between Boris Johnson and David Cameron. Even though it was Cameron who held up Johnson’s arm in a symbolic victory gesture after Boris became Mayor of London in 2008, you wonder if Cameron had his doubts. After all, Cameron never actually approached Johnson about the post, initially choosing Nicholas Boles as the Conservative candidate. Furthermore, Boris Johnson refused to rule out a future bid to become Prime Minister. With the increasing unpopularity of the coalition government and its leaders, the Spectator decided to conduct a(n admittedly unscientific) poll of 75 people: would Johnson, the ‘cycling mayor’, make a better Prime Minister than Cameron?

The news, via a leaked letter, that Boris Johnson now opposes high-speed rail will come as little surprise to the government. Boris has been moving to this position for quite some time and the Department for Transport resigned itself to the mayor coming out against the scheme earlier this week. Recently, one of Boris’ senior aides visited the Department for Transport and said that the mayor would only support the scheme if there was an additional tube line from Euston as part of it. But when the Department for Transport pushed for details of where this line would go to, and how it would be engineered it became apparent that this was more of a rhetorical point than a negotiating position. Oddly, the politics of Boris’ position could work out for both sides.

One of the staples of the Westminster summer party season is speculation about future leadership contests and so I rather suspect that Ben Brogan’s piece on the coming George Osborne Boris Johnson leadership contest will be much referenced in the coming weeks. Any speculation about a future leadership contest is, obviously, absurdly premature. If a week is a long time in politics, six years is almost a geological era. But the prospect of Obsorne versus Johnson is, as Tim Montgomerie puts it, so ‘delicious’ that Westminster Village people will take any excuse to talk about it. What makes the contest so appetising is that Osborne and Johnson’s strengths are so different. Osborne plans everything out, Johnson flies by the seat of his pants.

Toughness, or at least the appearance of it, is clearly the theme of the week on Downing Street. After the vacillations over NHS reform, David Cameron seems to be going out of his way to sound that little bit more hard. There's the headline on the front of today's Times, for instance: "Cameron to Europe: not one penny more." And there was the PM's claim, yesterday, that a Tory majority government would be "tougher" on immigration and welfare. Even the recent hyperactivity of Michael Gove is, I'm sure, all part of the plan, given that schools reform is broadly one of the areas where the government will (probably) never apologise, never surrender. But the new hardline isn't just a straight one, oh no.

Boris, we know, has never had any compunctions about distinguishing his views from those of the coalition government. Take his recent proclamations on the unions or on the economy, for instance. But his latest remarks are still striking in their forthrightness. Exhibit A is the article he has written for today's Sun, which — although it doesn't mention Ken Clarke by name — clearly has the Justice Secretary in mind when it exhorts that "it's time to stop offering shorter sentences and get-out clauses." And Exhibit B is his column for the Telegraph, which waxes condemnatory about Greece and the euro.

When the GMB union invited Vince Cable to address their conference today, I doubt they wanted this: a warning that the government could legislate if the brothers decide to militate. The Business Secretary does add that "the case for changing strike law is not compelling," so long as industrial action remains limited. But, on the surface, this is still the firmest coalition attack on the unions since David Cameron and Boris wrote that angry article for the Sun in January. And it comes from the side of the coalition, the Lib Dems, who were thought to be opposed to taking on the unions in the first place. Perhaps Cable really is more ruthless on this than his reputation would suggest. The question, though, is of how the rhetoric will translate to reality.

The Telegraph's James Kirkup has already highlighted Boris's suggestion, yesterday, that the coalition is being "lily-livered" over strike laws. But, as there has been no let up in the Mayor's rhetoric today, we really ought to mention it here too. "The government needs to get a move on," is how he put it this morning, in reference to the sort of legislation that might hinder the RMT and their persistent Tube strikes. Boris's latest broadsides against the coalition are all the more notable because he and Cameron were united, arm in arm, against the unions only a few months ago. In a joint piece for the Sun in January, they raged that, "you can try to drag this country back to the 1970s, to a time when militants held our country to ransom, but you will not succeed.

Boris kicks off his Telegraph column today by observing that Colonel Gaddafi and Gordon Brown "look vaguely similar". And yet the really provocative copy, at least so far as the government is concerned, is reserved for the final paragraph: "It is bonkers [by pushing for AV] to be pursuing the last manoeuvre of a cornered Gordon Brown. By all means let us have a referendum – the one we were promised, on the Lisbon EU Treaty. Have you noticed the EU policy on North Africa? Have you heard much from Baroness Ashton? Shouldn't we have a vote on all that?" It's hardly a secret that Boris wanted a referendum on Lisbon: he said as much in an interview before the 2009 Tory conference, and irritated the party leadership in the process.

No doubt about it, George Osborne is being pulled in two directions ahead of the Budget. There are those, such as the Lib Dems, who would have him reduce taxes for the least well-off. There are those, such as Boris, who would have him reduce taxes for higher earners. As I suggested yesterday, this debate pivots around two particular measures: raising the personal allowance and cutting the 50p rate. Rachel Sylvester develops the story in a typically insightful column (£) for the Times today. It quotes an "ally of the Chancellor" to the effect that Osborne is minded more to raise the personal allowance than to cut 50p. "Not many Tories want to reverse the 50p top rate," says her source, "We are big fans of raising the threshold and would see that as the priority.

One of the most eyecatching political reports of the weekend was squirrelled away on page 16 (£) of the Sunday Times. It's worth clipping out for the scrapbook, even now. In it, Marie Woolf reveals some of the fiscal sweeteners that Osborne might sprinkle into the Budget. There are two particularly noteworthy passages: i) Raising the personal allowance. "The income tax threshold is already set to increase by £1,000 to £7,457 from April 1. However, Osborne is expected to raise it by about a further £500. Details of the additional concession are still being worked on, but it marks a victory for the Liberal Democrats, who have been arguing within government for tax cuts for the poor." ii) Holding off on 50p.

Nigel Lawson and Francis Maude are both interviewed in the Telegraph today, and the results are very different in each case. For his part, Lawson is in bombastic form – waxing sceptical on everything from the coalition to the Big Society. Whereas Maude is predictably more reserved and accepting. It's the Maude interview, though, that contains the most politically significant revelation. Namely, this: "Boris Johnson, privately backed by several Cabinet ministers, is leading the charge for tougher union laws. But Maude, a key player in the Coalition’s dealings with the public sector, is reluctant. Tightening Thatcher’s labour laws is a 'last resort' he says.

David Cameron and George Osborne must have hoped that their message from Davos today would be broadcast unimpeded. It is, after all, a blunt message, designed to smash through all the radio chatter: we must continue with deficit reduction, there is no alternative, etc. But, inconveniently for them, there are other voices saying what we must do – among them Boris Johnson. The Mayor of London's interview with the Telegraph is at once typical and quite intriguing. Typical, because he holds aloft the same standards as always. "I understand 50p tax politically," he says, "but there has got to be a sense of where we are going and where we want to be as a country.

A potent Tory tag team in the Sun today, as David Cameron and Boris Johnson join pens to take on the unions. The tone of their article is as blunt as anything we've heard from them on the matter, particularly the Prime Minister. "Let's call these threats what they are," it says about the prospect of strikes during the Royal Wedding and the Olympics: "nothing more than headline grabbing to score political points". And it continues to deliver a warning to union bosses: "you can try to drag this country back to the 1970s, to a time when militants held our country to ransom, but you will not succeed." It's not all frontal assault, though. There's a subtler vein of divide-and-conquer in all this.

It’s costing more than the government cuts in welfare, more even than the UK’s Irish bail-out, but what exactly is all that money set aside for the 2012 Olympic Games actually being spent on? You might be surprised. In this week’s Spectator, Andrew Gilligan and I disclose, for the first time, all the petty, legally-binding demands made by the 115-member International Olympic Committee (IOC) of London. This is information that the government, the mayor and the London Olympic organisers never wanted you to see – even though it forms a binding part of the Host City Contract signed when we won the right to host the games in 2005. Paul Charman, a researcher in East London who contributes to the website GamesMonitor (www.gamesmonitor.org.

Snow makes people statist. Or at least that is what you'd think if you went by newspaper headlines alone. Why has the government not bought enough grit?, they scream. Why has Mayor Boris Johnson gone abroad instead of commanding London's snow-clearing? Should the PM not freeze with the rest of us? (As it happens, the Foreign Office heating system has broken down so at least the Foreign Secretary's gilded office is as cold as anywhere else in the country). It is true that only governments can order salt in industrial quantities, clear roads and grit streets. But dealing with a snow blizzard can also put the big in Big Society, so to speak.