Boris`s bid for power

Boris Johnson has managed to escape with his career intact after making so many unacceptable and offensive speeches, one can only hope that this time, he has gone too far, even for right-wing, but extremely election-conscious, Tories. If "the spirit of envy" and "greed" are characteristics to be admired and fostered, presumably Johnson would lend his wholehearted support to strikes in London by nurses and carers, social workers and cleaners, in their attempts to break the stranglehold on them imposed by the "economic apartheid" which he appears to care so little about in the capital. He apparently does not want a return to a time of "heartlessness", when "figuratively riffling banknotes under the noses of the homeless" was commonplace, yet isn`t the membership qualification test for his beloved Bullingdon Club exactly that, only literally?

       The speech appears to be the start of his bid for Tory leadership, hoping presumably Cameron`s hold on the party will weaken further after the expected Ukip gains in next year`s Euro elections, and stealing Gove`s thunder with his call for a return of grammar schools, the inevitable long-term result of the recent examination reforms. Ingenuous to the last, Johnson hails the super-rich, the "1% of earners who contribute 30% of income tax", many of them his friends in the City,yet fails to mention not only their obscene wealth for "socially useless" work, and their tax avoidance and evasion, which now costs £95bn a year to the British economy, but also their refusal to pay decent wages to the majority of their workforce. Those are the reasons why they are "so despicable in the eyes of all decent British people", Boris. They are not hard-working "Stakhanovites", but greedy capitalists, and this version of laissez-faire, where they will "do more to help poorer people" is simply preposterous.