Boris beats two loud drums

Boris Johnson’s interventions today are another reminder of his ability to please the Tory tribe, and be a thorn in Cameron’s side. The prime minister has concluded that the best approach on Europe is to argue that the Eurozone needs to follow through on the logic of the single currency and move to fiscal union. This is not a popular position in the Tory party. From the Cabinet down there are doubts about the wisdom of it; I understand that Justine Greening told last week’s Cabinet meeting that she did not believe that a transfer union could be made to work.

But no senior Tory expresses their disagreement with this policy more often or more publicly than the Mayor of London. In his Telegraph column, he bemoans how ‘we are all meant to be conniving in a plan to create a fiscal union which (if it were to mean anything) would mean undermining the fundamentals of Western democracy.’

If this was not enough for one day, the mayor is also out banging the airport drum again today. In an interview with New York magazine, which is another reminder of his ability to go where most British politicians can’t, he says ‘We have to have a new airport.’ To which he then, half-jokingly, adds ‘One of the only reasons I want to assume supreme power in England is to make sure that happens.’ In the Standard, he accuses the government of ‘drift’ on aviation policy.

It is, perhaps, Boris’s position on airports that most infuriates many of those close to Cameron. They complain that his support for a new airport is simply a ruse to get him out of having to back Heathrow expansion, which is unpopular with London voters. But nevertheless the mayor’s enthusiastic support for a new airport is winning him credit with Tory MPs who worry that the coalition’s lack of a plan to increase capacity in the south east is simply ‘economic self-mutilation’.