Boris Johnson's Blog, page 24

HS2 ‘will cost over £70billion’, says Boris Johnson

The peer had said that, despite backing the plans when Labour was in power, said that he now believed the line to be an “expensive mistake”.

Mr Johnson said: “That is why the Treasury is starting to panic, and the word around the campfire is that Lord Mandelson is actually doing the bidding of some fainthearts in Whitehall who want to stop it now – not the first or second Lords of the Treasury, clearly, but the beancounters.”

Mr Johnson criticised “the whole nightmare of consultation and litigation – and the huge army of massively expensive and taxpayer-financed secondary activities”.

This meant that £1 billion is likely to have been spent on HS2 before a sod of earth was cut.

He said: “It is the environmental impact assessments and the equalities impact assessments and the will-sapping tedium and cost of the consultations.

“Did you know that in order to build HS2 we are going to spend £1billion by 2015 – and they won’t have turned a single sod in Buckinghamshire or anywhere else?

“That is a billion quid going straight down the gullets of lawyers and planners and consultants before you have even invested in a yard of track.

“To understand the prohibitive costs of UK infrastructure, you need to take this haemorrhage of cash to consultants, and then multiply it by the time devoted to political dithering.”

The new estimate comes less than a fortnight after transport secretary Patrick McLoughlin said the projected cost has risen from £33billion to £42.6billion because of a “contingency2 fund to cover the cost of potential problems with the programme.

The Department for Transport said there were significant changes to the line, such as more tunnels to avoid disturbing the environment and those living near the line.

Labour leader Ed Miliband, his shadow chancellor Ed Balls and former transport secretary Lord Adonis are all said to still publicly back HS2.

Current shadow transport secretary Maria Eagle recently branded the project “essential” for Britain’s railways to cope with rising demand.

But the admission by Lord Mandelson has added to the growing fears that the political consensus over HS2 is in danger of being shattered.

The news came as a senior minister suggested that the government should scrap HS2 and spend the money on other transport projects instead.

David Lidington, the Europe minister, whose Aylesbury constituency in Buckinghamshire will be severely affected by the proposed railway from London to Birmingham, has written to Patrick McLoughlin, the transport secretary, detailing concerns over the new route.

Mr Lidington is known to have serious reservations, but his letter is the closest he or any government figure has come to calling for it to be scrapped altogether.

Boris Johnson: Ludicrous to suggest I think women only go to university to find a husband

Attempting to clarify his remarks, Mr Johnson said that it was "utterly ludicrous and infuriating" to suggest that he believes women attend university in order to find a husband.

He insisted that he was merely pointing out that when a large number of students are female, you intensify so-called "assortative mating" – whereby people choose to choose a partner similar to themselves.

"Some people seem to have misconstrued something I said at a press conference five days ago, about relative male underachievement in university entrance," Mr Johnson said.

"It is utterly ludicrous and infuriating to suggest that I think women go to university to find a husband. I was merely pointing out something that I've said several times before - that with a graduate cohort 68 per cent female you intensify the phenomenon sociologists identify as assortative mating."

Kate Green MP, Labour’s Shadow Equality Minister, called on Mr Johnson to apologise for his “outdated opinions”.

“Boris Johnson may think his buffoonery allows him to get away with his outdated opinions but this isn’t funny,” she said.

“These comments are insulting to the women across the country and across the world who have gone to university, worked hard and used their talents to get on. He should apologise.”

The Everyday Sexism campaign group tweeted that the remarks were “pathetically archaic, unacceptably sexist and hopelessly out of touch”.

A City Hall source said that Mr Johnson’s comments were “off the cuff” and said they were “clearly intended as a joke”.

“He does not, of course, think that at all,” the source said. “It was completely light-hearted. It has been misconstrued.”

Mr Johnson met his first wife, Allegra Mostyn-Owen, while studying classics at Oxford.

Mr Johnson last month described David Cameron as a “girly swot” because he got a first class degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford.

The Mayor of London got a 2:1 degree from Balliol College.

As Britain dithers, the rest of the world is getting things done

But as a general principle it is obvious that both London and other cities would benefit from better and faster connections. The problem, as Peter Mandelson has indicated, is cost. This thing isn’t going to cost £42 billion, my friends. The real cost is going to be way north of that (keep going till you reach £70 billion, and then keep going). That is why the Treasury is starting to panic, and the word around the campfire is that Lord Mandelson is actually doing the bidding of some fainthearts in Whitehall who want to stop it now – not the first or second Lords of the Treasury, clearly, but the bean-counters. So there is one really critical question, and that is why on earth do these schemes cost so much?

Doug Oakervee is a brilliant man to have in charge of HS2, and if anyone can deliver it, he can. But he is dealing with a system of building major infrastructure projects that is holding this country back. Talk to the big construction firms, and they will tell you the problem is not the cost of actually digging and tunnelling and putting in cables and tracks. Those are apparently roughly the same wherever you are in the world.

It’s the whole nightmare of consultation and litigation – and the huge army of massively expensive and taxpayer-financed secondary activities that is generated by these procedures. It is the environmental impact assessments and the equalities impact assessments and the will-sapping tedium and cost of the consultations. Did you know that in order to build HS2 we are going to spend £1 billion by 2015 — and they won’t have turned a single sod in Buckinghamshire or anywhere else?

That is a billion quid going straight down the gullets of lawyers and planners and consultants before you have even invested in a yard of track. To understand the prohibitive costs of UK infrastructure, you need to take this haemorrhage of cash to consultants, and then multiply it by the time devoted to political dithering.

Look at the Turks. They have decided that they need a new six-runway airport at Istanbul, so that they can take advantage of the growing importance of aviation to the world economy. They are almost certainly going to do it for less than 10 billion euros, and long before we have added a single runway anywhere in the South East. Or look at Chep Lap Kok, the airport Doug Oakervee built for Hong Kong. The authorities announced it in 1989 — and opened it nine years later! If you want to get a sense of our sluglike pace in the UK, we announced Heathrow Terminal 5 in 1988, and it took almost 20 years to create; not an airport, just a new terminal, for heaven’s sake (and if anyone thinks the advantage of a third runway at Heathrow is that it would be a “quick fix”, they frankly need their heads examining).

Other countries have clear plans for their infrastructure needs over the long term, and the talent and managerial firepower is being moved from one to the next. We don’t have a plan; we have a list of schemes, each of which causes politicians such heeby-jeebies that they waste billions – literally – in optioneering when what they need to do is decide on the right course and crack on with it. We have proved with Crossrail and the Olympics that we have the expertise to deliver big infrastructure projects. But time is money: we spend far too long on bureaucratic procedures and then enormously multiply that expense by a political failure to blast on with the task in hand.

The result is that we are being restrained from giving this country the improvements it needs at an affordable price. We are like Laocoon wrestling with the serpents, or like some poor bondage fetishist who has decided to tie himself up in knots — and then realised, too late, that he has gone too far. We tug at our bonds with our teeth and pathetically hope the neighbours will come. Of course they won’t! Our neighbours are out there investing in airports, while we are investing in consultants.

Falkirk is a farce, but the flaws in selecting political candidates are not Labour’s alone

The revelations cast an interesting light on Mr Miliband’s professed love of “One Nation”, about which he’s so fond of babbling. If One Nation means anything, it is that a party promises to govern without favour to any sectarian interest. Quite how that squares with being owned by one union, which then supplies the candidates, defeats me.

I’m having a laugh at Labour (who isn’t?) while pointing out the impossibility of being the perfect candidate, to make a point: the selection procedure needs to be reformed.

For while Labour’s problems are of its own making, none of us can claim to be perfect. The Tory process works as follows: interested applicants are assessed by the Parliamentary Assessment Board (PAB), and gain entry to the “list”. Being on this list permits application to seats; but control over the final selection is in the hands of the local, voluntary association. There’s an uneasy dance, often, between Tory central office (CCHQ) and the association officers, but it’s the associations that have the power. It’s their shortlist and their membership will vote for their choice.

Neither aspect of the process works perfectly. The PAB itself is a fair process, I’d say, reminiscent of any other competency-based job interview. I went through it in 2010 because David Cameron opened up the list and I wanted to apply to stand in Brighton Pavilion. To my surprise, I passed.

Brighton Association, it turned out, was able to resist my many charms and the seat was fought by the wonderful Charlotte Vere. After the election, I was told by CCHQ that henceforth I could apply only for “The City Seats Initiative” – inner city seats, where the candidate’s task is to rebuild the association. I politely declined, and came off the list: I’d come to realise that I didn’t have the urge to fight any seat that might have me. I wanted to beat Caroline Lucas, and represent Brighton.

CCHQ meddles like this, because it’s trying to craft a population of candidates to do the party proud. But the meddling never works – whether with the City Seats thing, or the unlamented “A list” (“You look nice! Do you want to be an MP?”) – because no central office can know who will work best in any particular town.

But neither would it do to allow associations total control. By definition, those of us who belong to a party are unrepresentative, because we’ve self-selected ourselves to be activists. It’s quite arrogant to say that no matter how poorly an association might function (some are great, some aren’t) they have the best knowledge of how to determine who should fight an election for the Conservatives.

There’s an answer to this. CCHQ is entitled to run its PAB process. But final selection should be by primary – whether open, postal or electronic, I don’t really care. Anyone on the PAB list, and anyone who is a member of a local association, should be entitled to put their name forward, and all the voters in the seat be given a chance to have a say in the final selection.

Boris Johnson’s mayoral candidacy was selected in this way. Commentators often mention how Boris is “Tory mayor of a Labour city”; no one ever makes the link with the method by which he was chosen for that fight.

The Tory system works quite well, and opening up selection via primaries would just make a good thing better. But imagine what it would do to Labour! Trade unions would have to find another way to subvert our democracy. At least Mr Miliband could say he believes in One Nation, without his words attracting the cold, shocked laughter of disbelief.

Battersea Power Station redevelopment ‘a testimony to London’s attractiveness for investors’

Mayor of London Boris Johnson joined the prime ministers to take in the view at the site, which, within 10 years, is due to boast 3,500 new homes, shops, cafes, restaurants and offices, set in a six acre riverside park.


Mr Johnson said: "Many thoug...

Boris Johnson: we need to ‘be honest’ about amnesty for illegal immigrants

Boris Johnson said there should "absolutely" be an amnesty for illegal immigrants.


"Actually, if you look at what we've got, we effectively have it. If you've been here for more than 10, 12 years I'm afraid the authorities no longer pursue you," he...

Boris Johnson: we need ‘be honest’ about amnesty for illegal immigrants

Boris Johnson said there should "absolutely" be an amnesty for illegal immigrants.


"Actually, if you look at what we've got, we effectively have it. If you've been here for more than 10, 12 years I'm afraid the authorities no longer pursue you," he...

Miliband is taking his cue from loser Kinnock, not winner Blair

The trouble with Kinnock, they will say, was that he was a Welsh windbag and that no one could see him as prime minister; and the trouble with Ed Miliband is that he is vaguely geeky and nerdy, and no one can see him as prime minister, and I suppose that may be true as far as it goes.

But this is about much more than image. The problem with Ed — and his similarity with Kinnock — is far more fundamental than that. Neil Kinnock didn’t lose because he was a Welsh windbag, but because he didn’t match the Tories in coming up with a language of opportunity and aspiration. He failed to equal Margaret Thatcher and, in the end, John Major, in providing a sense of how he, Kinnock, would unleash the talents of the British people and get the economy moving.

He was brilliant at sticking up for those who needed help — the elderly, the sick, the poor. But he never showed any real acknowledgment or understanding that we live in a broadly capitalist and free-market economy. At no stage did he seem to accept that it is always this money — the tax revenues – created by this capitalist system that allows us to finance all the social benefits and protections that government is able to disburse.

Neil Kinnock failed because he made his pitch to the Labour base — the unions, the public sector and all their clients; he had absolutely nothing to say about enterprise and ambition. The man who changed all that, and who understood how Labour could win was, of course, Tony Blair; and it was Blair who made a break so decisive with the legacy of Kinnock that they actually re-baptised the party, and called it “New Labour”; and the whole point of New Labour was that it straddled the divide.

You could, of course, vote for New Labour if you had a social conscience. But you could also vote for New Labour if you had a social conscience and you wanted to get rich. People felt under Blair that Labour was emotionally and psychologically reconciled to the realities of free-market economics. They looked at old Tony, with his zillionaire friends and his love of tennis and his ever-expanding property portfolio — and they thought: this man is not hostile to business.

They could see that he was in favour of wealth creation — and the problem with Ed Miliband is that he sends out absolutely no such signal because it is just not part of his political make-up. He can’t help it. He is the product of a world of north London intellectuals and grew up in a household where the words “free market” or “capitalism” were positively terms of abuse. His problem is not any supposed geekishness or nerdiness; his problem is entirely to do with substance, not style.

Under Ed Miliband, Labour has offered no explanation whatever of how it would like to inject more dynamism and growth into British capitalism. It has nothing to say about the everyday problems of business, about high tax and regulation; and as the election approaches it will pay an ever bigger price for its failure to offer any improvement in our relations with the EU in the form of a renegotiation, let alone a referendum.

Labour has nothing to say about Britain’s ability to compete in what David Cameron rightly says is the global race. Of course, we want a society where we care actively for the vulnerable; but the reason young people are not much turned on by Labour is that it is saying nothing exciting or hopeful, let alone about starting your own business or getting on in the world, and that is because in his heart Ed Miliband does not really view those prospects with excitement or hope.

They are not why he came into politics. He is there to curb the free market, not to celebrate what it can achieve. He has reduced Labour to its old role as a party of protest, complaint, and public-sector special interest groups.

That is not how Tony Blair won three elections. It is how Neil Kinnock lost twice.

The weather prophets should be chucked in the deep end

In Roman times, a swimming pool was a sign of taste, style and affluence, and in some of the biggest Romano-British villas you can see where Roman nobs frolicked and enjoyed the pleasures of water and nakedness. These days it would be fair to say that a swimming pool is a luxury – but not an unheard-of luxury. In the past 10 years there have been plenty of middle-class punters who have decided that they want a touch of Beverly Hills about their homes – and I know why they did it. They thought it would be nice for the kids and the grandchildren. They thought it might conceivably add to the value of their homes. In their secret hearts they hoped, forgivably, that it might provoke the envy of their neighbours.

But then there was an extra spur – the new and unanswerable imperative to find a way of keeping wet and cool. For more than 20 years now, we have been told that this country was going to get hotter and hotter and hotter, and that global warming was going to change our climate in a fundamental way. Do you remember that? We were told that Britain was going to have short, wet winters and long, roasting summers. It was going to be like 1976 all over again, with streakers at Lord’s and your Mr Whippy melting before you could even lick it, and Hyde Park scorched into a mini Kalahari.

They said we were never going to have snow again, and that we should prepare for southern England to turn gradually into a Mediterranean world. There were going to be olive groves in the Weald of Kent, and the whole place was going to be so generally broiling in summer that no one would be able to move between noon and 4pm, after which people would come out to play boules and sip pastis, to the whine of a mandolin, in the dusty square that had once been a village green.

That’s what they said: the BBC, and all the respectable meteorologists – and I reckon there were tens of thousands of people who took these prophecies entirely seriously. Omigod, they said to themselves, we are all going to fry. The only answer was to build a source of permanent refreshment – and so they did. They saved up, and they remortgaged, and they got in the diggers. They moved huge cuboids of earth and used them to create curious berms at the bottom of the garden, and then they lined these trenches with tiles (jolly expensive) or with a kind of blue plastic sheeting (virtually indistinguishable and much cheaper) and then they filled these holes with thousands of gallons of water that circulated endlessly by an unintelligible process known only to the people who had installed it but who seemed unfortunately to have gone bust.

They fought gallantly but in vain against the green slime, and to understand the balance of chemicals that the pool required; and they watched baffled as it oscillated – now choking with vegetation, now a glorified sheep dip of eye-stinging acid. Year after year they summoned up their courage, choked back their nausea and fished out the dead mice and the pallid corpses of worms bleached white by the chlorine. They sieved for leaves; they flipped out bugs with their hands; and all the while they were comforted with the thought that it was a sound investment.

They imagined the poolside parties they would have when the warming really kicked in: the barbecues; the bikinis; the pina coladas. They saw themselves on their lilos talking to their brokers on their mobile phones or getting up early on a glorious summer day and diving in unclothed when no one else was around. They thought they were doing the sensible thing and getting ready for a Californian lifestyle – and they were fools! Fools who believed that the global warming soothsayers really meant what they said or that they had a clue what the weather would be in the next 10 years.

I hope I don’t need to tell you that we have not experienced a Mediterranean climate – not since they started to tell us to expect it. On the contrary, we have had some pretty long and miserable winters – including the last one, in which I saw snow settle in London on four separate occasions – and our summer is at risk of becoming a bit of a farce. As I write these words, I am looking out yet again at lowering grey clouds, in what should be the peachiest time of year – and now these so-called weather forecasters and climate change buffs have the unbelievable effrontery to announce that they got it all wrong. They now think that we won’t have 10 years of blistering summer heat; on the contrary, it is apparently going to be 10 years of cold and wet.

It is outrageous. Think of all those honest hard-working folk who have sunk their resources into a pool, only to find they use it only a couple of times a summer, and even then the wind-chill is so bad that the swimmers get goosebumps as soon as they emerge. I am generally against the compensation culture, but in my mind’s eye I see a class action: aggrieved English pool-owners against the global warming prophets and the erroneous meteorologists who have, frankly, been taking the piscine.

The Tories will never triumph with five chairmen at the helm

Some of this applies to Andrew Feldman, whose sole qualification to work at (let alone chair) Conservative HQ appears to be that he played tennis with the Prime Minister while both men were undergraduates at Brasenose College, Oxford, in the Eighties. However, the party co-chairman is not just a crony. He is also a key link between the Prime Minister and Conservative Party donors (I would imagine his fingers are all over the knighthood awarded to Sir Michael Hintze, a hedge-fund manager who has given more than £1.5 million, for “services to the arts” in this week’s birthday honours).

Recently Andrew Feldman was accused of calling Tory activists “swivel-eyed loons”. He has denied doing so, unconvincingly. I have no doubt, having consulted relevant sources, that the remarks made were actually his. It comes as no surprise that a Tory party chairman whose real constituency is not the Tory membership but wealthy donors should have expressed such sentiments.

But he is the least of Mr Shapps’s numerous problems. The Tory chairman also has to cope with George Osborne. Though officially Chancellor of the Exchequer, in practice Mr Osborne spends a great deal of his time overseeing Tory politics, attending many of the relevant meetings. The lurking presence of the Chancellor is the main reason why Mr Shapps has no authority.

Mr Osborne’s main channel of influence is through Stephen Gilbert, the prime minister’s political secretary. Mr Gilbert (seen internally as a far more important figure than Grant Shapps) is also, in effect, head of campaigns at Central Office. It is conceivable that Mr Gilbert might do one of these jobs well. It can be said with certainty that he does both badly.

One of the functions of the political secretary (one done well by Jonathan Hill, now Leader of the Lords, during the Major premiership, or Sally Morgan for Tony Blair) is to establish a passage between the prime minister and the parliamentary party. At times this is close to a full-time job. Unfortunately Stephen Gilbert can only devote a small amount to this because of his other responsibilities, one of the main reasons for the catastrophic disconnection between David Cameron and his Tory MPs.

The campaigning situation is yet worse. Back-bench MPs complain about poor briefing and lack of strategic direction, a problem that was glaringly obvious during the Eastleigh by-election, when it was never clear who was in charge. The hapless Mr Shapps could do nothing about this shambles, even if he wanted to, because while he occupies high office he is not permitted to exercise real power.

There is also Lynton Crosby, recently appointed political strategist to the Prime Minister. There are conflicting views of Mr Crosby, but almost everyone agrees that he gives focused and tough advice. However he is at the moment part-time, which means that nobody reports to him and he is not part of the command structure.

To sum up: Conservative organisation is a mess of special agendas, secret influence, and back-channels of communication. Contempt for traditional party structures is complete, meaning that conflicting messages and operational incompetence have become the hallmark of the Tory machine. One MP told me so many people carried out the role of chairman that “if one of them won’t do what I want, I go and ask another”. As a result the superb work which is being carried out by many ministers is hardly recognised, while the relationship between Downing Street and Tory back-benchers and activists is the worst I can remember.

The underlying responsibility for this shambles must lie at the door of David Cameron. From the very start he and (in particular) George Osborne have shown a point-blank refusal to relinquish control of party organisation, which explains why no Tory chairman has been able to make a mark. It is very hard to see how the 2015 general election could be won in these circumstances.

There is a very obvious solution, but it would require courage. Mr Cameron could bring in a heavyweight politician – his own Patten or Thorneycroft – with the vision and substance to shape his own election-winning machine. Such a character would, however, have to be given overall control. He or she could not be second-guessed by Downing Street.

There are three candidates: William Hague, Michael Gove and Boris Johnson. Mr Hague, I am told, shudders at the thought of returning to the boredom, squalor and anxiety of domestic politics. Mr Gove cannot be spared from education. It is hard to think of any modern Conservative better suited for the job than Mr Johnson. Popular with the public, loved by the party, he has reinvented the rules of political discourse since becoming Mayor of London.

So far he has been kept at arm’s length by the Tory leadership, who feel envious and threatened by the Mayor’s charm and ease. The most intelligent reaction is to tie Mr Johnson in – by making his fortunes dependent on those of Mr Cameron. Both men come, after all, from the same stable: socially and economically liberal, defiantly optimistic. There is an inevitability that, over time, Mr Johnson would use his position to mount a challenge for the leadership. But the immediate task is to win the general election, and Mr Johnson is the only Conservative with the proven capacity to do just that.