Johnson vision as one with Thatcher

Boris Johnson has set out his stall as a political heir to Margaret Thatcher in a speech suggesting their approach would be “one and the same”.

The Mayor of London suggested he would be in unison with the former Conservative prime minister on the way Britain should be run as he set out a vision for the country that spanned infrastructure, education and the economy.

Envy and greed are key to spurring on an economic revival and it would be ” wrong to persecute the rich”, he said during the annual Centre for Policy Studies Margaret Thatcher lecture.

The mayor also in dicated he was in favour of a back-door reintroduction of grammar schools and called for more to be done to help the brightest succeed but claimed inequality is “essential” for Britain’s prosperity.

The new generation of “Gordon Gekkos” – a reference to the character in the film Wall Street whose mantra was ‘greed is good’ – must do more to help the wider population but their greed is a “valid motivator”, he said.

“I don’t believe that economic equality is possible; indeed some measure of inequality is essential for the spirit of envy and keeping up with the Joneses that is, like greed, a valuable spur to economic activity.”

He added: ” I hope that this time the Gordon Gekkos of London are conspicuous not just for their greed – valid motivator thought greed may be for economic progress – as for what they give and do for the rest of the population, many of whom have experienced real falls in their incomes over the last five years.”

Mr Johnson said he had sat in meetings where it had been agreed that it would be political madness to bring back grammar schools but suggested that Baroness Thatcher would have found a way to reintroduce them in a different guise.

“She might not have flooded the place with grammar schools, not under that name, because that would have been a U-turn, and we know what she thought of U-turns; but I hope that she would have found some way of making far wider use of that most powerful utensil of academic improvement – and that is academic competition between children themselves.”

In the What would Thatcher do? speech, the mayor also claimed that the former premier would back his plans for an airport in the Thames estuary, insisting she would row back on the decision under her tenure to cancel plans for an extra airport in the capital.

“Does anyone doubt that she would have the cojones to rectify that second mistake, and give this country the 24 hour hub airport, with four runways, that it needs? When she was in power there were flights from Heathrow to more destinations than from any other European airport.

“Would she sit back and watch the rest of them eat our lunch – the French and the Dutch and the Spanish, the Finns, for heaven’s sake, who now send more flights to China than we do?

Mr Johnson also lashed out at the BBC, berating the corporation for the way it had covered the late PM’s funeral.

“The amazing thing about the funeral of Baroness Thatcher was the size of the crowds, and the next amazing thing was that they were so relatively well behaved,” he said. “The BBC had done its best to foment an uprising.”

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Johnson vision as one with Thatcher