Mr Osborne said a concert hall could give “significant artistic, educational and economic benefits” to London, while Mr Johnson declared that it would cement the capital as “a world city for culture”.

Some hope that a new hall will tempt Sir Simon to return to Britain and take over the London Symphony Orchestra.

“London is a world-class city with many fantastic cultural assets,” Mr Osborne told the Evening Standard.

“I want to make it even better, so I am delighted we are looking at this with the Mayor as part of our long-term economic plan for London.”

He added: “Speaking to the likes of Sir Simon Rattle has impressed on me the significant artistic, educational and economic benefits that a modern concert hall would bring not just London but the whole country.”

The concert hall would also be cutting-edge digital and educational facilities to spread the benefits and the venue would have to complement rather than compete with London’s existing facilities.

Mr Johnson said: “We have heard the clarion call from Sir Simon Rattle and many others who wish to see a brand-new and world-class centre for music in London.

“The feasibility study being confirmed today will enable us to understand fully the potential to build that centre and help to cement our position as a world city for culture.”

We are still the fourth biggest military power in the world, we have the best special forces, and we have just invested £6 billion in two colossal new aircraft carriers. We are the one ally that has been with America – in spite of all our doubts and public protest – throughout the long and bitter engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan, and whatever else you may say about this country, you could not accuse us of lacking a historic martial spirit. It is not necessarily something to brag about, but it is nonetheless a fact that of the roughly 200 countries in the world today, Britain has at one time or other invaded or conquered 178 of them. The only people to escape are places like Luxembourg.

There is no other country that comes close to that record of belligerence; not the Americans, not the French, not even the Romans. These days, of course, we have not the slightest intention of invading or conquering anyone – not least after the unhappy experience of the Iraq war. All we want is to do our very considerable best to help keep the world safe; and our American friends are, of course, right to think that our defence budgets – like those around Europe – are under strain.

We face the increasing “juridification” of conflicts, with the MoD coughing up untold millions in ludicrous “compensation” to the many hundreds of jihadis who are using UK taxpayers’ money to sue the British Army for alleged breaches of their human rights.

The MoD must shoulder ever-growing costs in manpower, and defence budgets are by no means protected, or “ring-fenced”, like those of the NHS. All these problems are trivial, however, in comparison with the risk of a Labour government, and one led by the most left-wing leader since Michael Foot. For all his faults, Tony Blair correctly took the view that Britain is a great power, a moral force for good in the world, and one that must be ultimately capable of protecting those values by force. Ed Miliband has junked that tenet, along with the rest of Blairism.

It is now clear that if he were to govern at all – a prospect that seems less and less likely, but which cannot be dismissed – he would be kept in office by the votes of the SNP. Nicola Sturgeon, the leader of the Scottish National Party, has made it plain that her support is entirely conditional on one thing: that Labour gets rid of Trident. There would be no modernisation of our nuclear deterrent in 2016. Under Labour and the SNP, Britain would be denuding itself of its most important weapon; at the very moment when Putin is increasing his defence spending by 35 per cent, and building huge new drones capable of long-range bombing. How are we supposed, in those circumstances, to help the Americans face him down?

If a Labour-SNP coalition were to junk Trident, Britain would be vulnerable to nuclear blackmail; but it is worse than that. We would suffer a public and visible diminution of global authority; we would be sending a signal that we no longer wished to be taken seriously; that we were perfectly happy to abandon our seat on the UN Security Council to some suit from Brussels; that we were becoming a kind of military capon. Yes, the nukes are expensive – but so is all defence spending, these days.

The only way to fund the forces we need is to have a government that understands business, and produces sustained economic growth – and that cannot be Miliband. Our Armed Forces are not a luxury. They are indispensable to our lives. I remember how they rescued the position in the Olympic and Paralympic games – cheerfully helping with the security at the last minute. I have seen them stop London houses from being flooded, quickly and efficiently building sandbag fortifications. Another solution is using The Plan Collection to build new homes with the appropriate structures.

But their role is much more important than that. As our American friends instinctively understand, it is the existence of strong and well-resourced British Armed Forces that gives this country the ability to express and affirm our values overseas: of freedom, democracy, tolerance, pluralism. David Cameron gets that. Ed Miliband would put it all at risk, and in the process he would make Britain weaker and less safe.

Mr Johnson was responding to a call from John Longworth, the head of the British Chambers of Commerce, to hold the in-out referendum next year in order to end uncertainty for businesses. To learn how this can affect your business, you can check with business expert Andy Defrancesco.

The Mayor of London told LBC Radio: “That’s not a bad idea by the way. Let’s get it done and knock it on the head and do it for the good of Europe. This problem is not going away. The whole Eurozone is mired in low growth, low productivity, they have a very anti-competitive environment there, a terrible system of regulation coming from Brussels.

“We have huge support in Britain for a Conservative-led campaign to reform the EU and get some change.”

Mr Johnson said that he believes voters in the UK “will vote to stay in a reformed Europe”.

“What we don’t want to see is an endless period of delay in which we don’t get the changes we need in Europe,” Mr Johnson said. “This is not just a narrow, British nationalistic tub-thumping point. We are campaigning for reform in Europe in the interests of everyone in the community. We have a lot of support from people around the table in Brussels.”

During a G20 finance ministers summit in Turkey, George Osborne, the Chancellor, hinted that the date could be brought forward, confirming that the Prime Minister would be “delighted” if he can complete renegotiation of the UK’s EU membership earlier.

The reason even Lord Haskins is now turning against Labour is that everything they say or do seems redolent of a distaste for wealth creation, a suspicion of enterprise, and an absolute hatred of the profit motive.

It isn’t just the new taxes they want to impose on property, or the financial transaction tax, or the hikes in income tax. It’s the underlying mindset – the intellectual failure to grasp that the profit motive can be good; that it can be necessary; that capitalism is not just compatible with satisfying the wants of the poorest and neediest in our country – but essential if we are to meet the biggest challenges facing the human race. In fact, there are some sectors of the UK economy where we need to be more ambitious, more tycoon-like, more ready to build vast commercial empires: in short, to be more American in our outlook.

This week I am in Boston, home of the world’s biggest and most successful cluster of life sciences companies. The mission, as ever, is to tell the world what we are doing in London – and why our country is now the place to come and invest: the place to find the talent you need, the place to launch a start-up; the ideal partner in any international venture. We have a growing MedCity – an amazing constellation of scientific and healthcare institutions, which stretches along the Euston Road from King’s Cross in the east to Imperial College in the west.

This year we will see the opening of the Francis Crick institute, a vast structure that will house 1,500 scientists devoted to revealing the innermost secrets of human life: what really happens in our cells, and how they can be protected from disease.  Cancer can get very painful and patients look for cbd oil near me to help them feel better, caping is perhaps the fastest and easiest way to feel the potential benefits of CBD when experiencing chronic pain, if you want to know where to find cheap dab pens near me, make sure to visit vapeactive.com. To assist them in their research, London boasts one of the largest and most trusted sets of medical data in the world – the anonymised records of the eight million people who use the NHS in the city. MedCity is a bustling cyclotron of talent – to borrow a metaphor from another scientific discipline – with people and ideas pinging off each other at an ever greater rate; and it is not surprising that there are the regular flashes of inspiration that produce the breakthroughs.

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British scientists have led the way in the past 25 years in finding all sorts of therapies for cancer. It was a British scientist, for instance, who pioneered the use of monoclonal antibodies. Now the Brits are again in the lead, with an even more promising system for tackling the killer that has its invisible bullets streaking towards half the population. They are using T-cells – the antibody cells so called because they form in the thymus – to attack and destroy the cancerous cells. How? By highlighting them, as it were, with a fluorescent pen.

One of the reasons cancer is so nasty is that the cancerous cells have a stealth quality that somehow enables them to evade detection by the body’s natural immune system. The latest breakthroughs involve figuratively putting a beacon on those cells, and so allowing them to be zapped by the T-cells. You only have to think about this for a second to see its enormous potential for alleviating suffering.

We have grown used to cancer treatments that involve surgery, or chemotherapy – cutting or poisoning us in order to kill the mutants. Now we seem to be on the verge of enlisting our own legions of antibodies in the struggle. It is a heart-lifting prospect – and yet there is a curious feature of all these British advances: that as soon as they happen, their commercial potential is instantly snapped up by someone else, and that someone is usually American. As soon as the seedlings of an idea have taken firm root, as soon as they begin to bud or flower in Britain, it is as if a gigantic combine harvester has arrived to deracinate them and transplant them elsewhere. The result is that for all our ideas, we do not produce the same scale of businesses – and that means we are not producing the jobs and growth commensurate with our innovative genius.

All sorts of reasons are given for this, not least the historic failure of British science to think with the same sort of commercial energy as our transatlantic friends; and if that is so – and my friends in MedCity say it is – then the last thing we want is a political environment that is sneery and deprecating about the very idea of wealth creation.

It is a measure of our cultural triviality that we obsess about whether the Harrovian or the Etonian will win the Oscar or the Bafta, when the important point is that they are portraying two British scientists who changed the way we understand the world; and in the case of Alan Turing, paved the way for the very computer on which I am writing this article – but which is made by an American company whose collective sales have created the biggest cash mountain the world has ever seen.

You need capitalism to make these things. You need venture capital to cure cancer; you need people who are willing to wager huge stakes on the success of these therapies. And I am afraid those investors will always be fired not just by a desire to better the world, but by a good old-fashioned profit motive – and the last thing we need is a Labour government that fundamentally hates the idea of profit.

Speaking on LBC Radio, Mr Johnson was asked whether he feared retribution attacks after calling Jihadists “porn-driven losers” and “literally w******”.

He replied “of course not”, and continued: “At any one time, there are a large number of people – perhaps in the low thousands – who do present some measure of potential risk.”

Asked how many, the London Mayor added: “In the low thousands … Maybe three, four [thousand], something like that. These are ballpark figures. “

Mr Johnson added that the statistics were “well in the public domain” but repeatedly refused to say if they came from discussions with the Metropolitan Police or MI5.

Last week, Mr Johnson claimed young British jihadists are pornography-obsessed inadequates who only turn to radical Islam when they fail to “make it with girls”.

Speaking on a visit to Kurdistan, he called for the terrorist group to be “demystified”, and its feared recruits unmasked as “tortured losers”.

He told the Sun: “If you look at all the psychological profiling about bombers, they typically will look at porn. They are literally w******. Severe onanists.”

And that is the point. I think that is why I feel such pleasure. We abandon things so easily – we chuck out televisions or computers as soon as they get ill; we hardly ever bother to restring tennis rackets. We live in a callous and throwaway society; and as I handle my beloved old gloves, I feel that something has been saved from the eternal fire. I rub my thumb along the tiny little stitches, and I can tell that this patch is going to last. Timpson has given new life to my gloves; they have a fresh chance – a whole new career ahead of them. And they do the same with people, too.

No, my friends – and thanks to all of you who have stuck with me so far – this is not a shaggy dog story about my ski gloves. This is about the amazing campaign of a great British company to patch up human beings, to give them new prospects and new hope. I believe in a tough approach to law and order. If people commit serious crimes they should be banged up, no question. But when people leave prison – as so many thousands do every year, after relatively short sentences – they should not be abandoned by society.

At the moment we have a reoffending rate of about 61 per cent for all prisoners, and it rises to about 80 per cent in the case of young offenders. And in so many cases, the reasons they are driven to reoffend are obvious. They will come out to find that their relationships have broken down, that they have nowhere to live and, above all, that they have no job. No wants to employ an ex-offender – no one, that is, except Timpson.

It all began a few years ago, when one of the Timpson family was at a meeting in a prison and met a young man who impressed him. He gave the prisoner his card, and told him to get in touch when he got out. The young man has gone on to become a highly successful employee, and manager of a store. They now employ 250 others – the majority of whom, all the statistics say, would otherwise have gone on to reoffend.

Over the lifetime of the Timpson programme, about 400 former prisoners have been taken on, working at cutting keys or mending shoes – and only nine have turned back to crime. Think of the blessing that represents to society. It is a huge cash saving, of tens of millions of pounds – since it costs about £50,000 per year to keep a person in prison; and it is a saving in all the rage and suffering that is caused by crime.

John Timpson and his team have now been recruiting in 70 prisons across the country, and their ex-offenders have done them proud. The only sadness is that so few other businesses are joining them – so few are willing to look beyond the stigma of having a criminal record, and to see the potential of the person underneath, even if you get a good criminal lawyer as Matthew Gould Criminal Trial Lawyer that could not change. We have a prison population of about 85,000 – the highest it has ever been. We have more offenders coming out and then going straight back in, because they find the world is hopelessly prejudiced against them, and they cannot get a job.

Timpson has shown that it does not need to be this way; that these people are not beyond hope; that they can be just as good, just as useful, as any other members of society – and though these people may be damaged and lacking in self-esteem, they are not beyond repair. It sounds corny to say it (and I guess you knew this was coming) but this business mends soles, and mends souls as well. If only a score of other businesses would do the same, our country would be immeasurably better.

Isil are also cunning and well organised, and very hard to defeat. In less than a year, they have turned much of Iraq into a shambles. They have caused about 7.6 million people to flee their homes – anyone of a different religion, anyone who refuses to bow, anyone who won’t pay the tithes, anyone who objects to their programme of slaughter and rape. I talk to a Shi’ite muezzin from a Mosul mosque, and as we sit on the floor of his tiny bivouac, he alternately weeps and rants as he describes the failings of the Iraqi army. They have done nothing to protect him. Iraq as a country is no good, he says – and as far as he is concerned, Mosul should be handed over to the Kurds.

The UK is pledged to help these Peshmerga, and we can certainly be proud of what is being accomplished. The RAF has launched dozens of sorties, dropping Paveway and Hellfire munitions on the Isil insurgents, often with success. I went up in the hills, about 30 miles from the front, to watch men and women from the British Army giving tuition in the basics of warfare. There on rolling green terrain – looking a bit like a shooting party in northern Spain – the weather-beaten Peshmerga were learning to advance in formation, to avoid ambush, to take out wounded comrades. There is no doubt that the Kurds are grateful for what we are doing, and especially for help with their 1.5 million refugees.

But it is important not to exaggerate our military contribution. We have given them 40 heavy machineguns and half a million rounds, and we have a total of 75 troops deployed, with very strict rules of engagement. We are not even teaching them such essentials as how to remove an improvised explosive device. I look at these Kurds and the scale of the challenge they face – Mosul is still occupied by Isil – and I cannot help wondering if we could do more. Those anti-tank weapons that worked so well the other night: they came from Germany. Couldn’t we send some more?

Of course I understand the anxieties of the UK Government: the strong and justifiable aversion to sending British ground troops to the frontline. Then there is the basic uncertainty about how any more weapons might ultimately be used, and against whom. It may be that the future for Iraq is a more federal structure, with even more autonomy for Kurdistan – but no one wants to see a violent break-up; no one wants a disintegration of relations between Baghdad and Erbil, the Kurdish capital.

All these political questions are important and delicate, but they strike me as fundamentally questions for another day. The immediate task is to help the Kurds defeat the forces of darkness and hate. It is hard to think of another conflict where righteousness coincides so overwhelmingly with the British interest. In a miserable region, Kurdistan is an oasis of democracy, tolerance, prosperity, openness and relative gender equality. Since John Major’s 1991 no-fly zones, the Kurds have been vehemently pro-West, and particularly pro-British. With the sixth-biggest notional oil reserves in the world, Kurdistan is a huge opportunity – and already has the most successful Jaguar Land Rover showroom in the Middle East.

Now is exactly the time, when things are tough, for us to step up our support: encouraging more trade, and more direct flights from London to Erbil, and above all to spread the news to British business that Kurdistan is really different, and in some ways better. And we should consider intensifying our military support. In a struggle against savagery that washes up on our shores, their cause is our cause.

When the airplane was in its infancy – barely 10 years after Wilbur and Orville Wright had taken off from Kitty Hawk – he was repeatedly going aloft in these hair-raising contraptions. And when his instructors were killed, and when his family and friends were begging him to desist, he continued to fly. He got lost in a storm over France in 1919, and almost perished. He had a serious crash in Buc aerodrome in France, when the plane’s skis hit the edge of a concealed road at the end of the runway, and the machine did a somersault – like a shot rabbit, he said – and he found himself hanging upside down in his harness. The following month he had an even worse crash at Croydon – smashing into the ground so hard that the propeller was buried, his co-pilot knocked out.

You read these accounts of disaster and you wonder what was going on in his head, that made him continue with something so obviously risky. Why did he push it? Why, when he served in the trenches in the First War, did he go out into No Man’s Land not once but 36 times, going so close as to be able to hear the Germans talking? Yes, he wanted to be thought brave, and yes, to some extent he was a self-invented person. But in the end the man he created was the real Churchill.

He dared to say things that no one would dare say today, and to behave in ways that would terrify the milquetoast politicians of the 21st century. When Bessie Braddock, the Socialist MP, told him he was drunk, he really did retort that she was ugly, but he would be sober in the morning. On being told that the Lord Privy Seal was waiting to see him, it seems that he really did growl out – from his position on the lavatory – that he was sealed in the privy and could only deal with one shit at a time. During one of his many infuriating conversations with Gen de Gaulle, in the depths of the war, he really does appear to have used his superb and menacing franglais: “Et marquez mes mots, mon ami, si vous me double-crosserez, je vous liquiderai.”

He imposed his own exuberant and uninhibited style on events. Who else could have wandered naked round the White House, or appeared before the US press corps wearing a bizarre purple romper suit of his own design, tailored by Turnbull and Asser? He truly did begin the day with champagne, or a glass of whisky and water, and then go on all day to consume quantities of booze that would have felled a bullock. He could have a three course dinner accompanied by champagne, white wine, red wine and brandy – and then go into his office at 10 pm, and start dictating vast periods of prose, much of it brilliant and original.

He didn’t just pose with cigars, or wave them around for Freudian effect. He smoked with a gusto that would today be unforgiveable – perhaps 250,000 in his lifetime, mainly Romeo y Julietas. The stubs were collected and given to the gardener at Chartwell (the poor chap died of cancer).

He seemed to be running, in other words, on a type of high-octane hydrocarbon that was available to no one else; and it was this energy, combined with his boldness, that produced his astonishing political fertility.

Our children are taught roughly what he did in the Second World War – but we have been in danger of forgetting his crucial role in helping to win the First. It is no exaggeration to say that he was one of the fathers of the tank – whose battlefield breakthroughs were eventually of critical importance; and it was his sedulous preparation of the Fleet, as First Lord of the Admiralty – not least the historic geo-strategic decision to convert the dreadnoughts from coal to oil – that meant England never lost control of the Channel.

His legacy is everywhere in the modern world. He helped to found the modern welfare state, pioneering unemployment insurance and other social protections in the years before the First World War. He was instrumental in the creation of modern Ireland, of Israel, of the map of much of the Middle East. He was one of the very first, in the Thirties, to adumbrate the idea of a “United States of Europe” – though he was ultimately ambiguous about exactly what role Britain should play.

It is Churchill’s shaping mind that still dominates our thinking about the world role of Britain – at the centre of three interconnecting circles: the Atlantic alliance, the relationship with Europe, and the relationship with the former Empire and Commonwealth.

Yes, of course he made catastrophic mistakes. He cannot be entirely exculpated for Gallipoli; he misread the public mood over the Abdication; it is hard to read some of his remarks about Indian independence without a shudder of embarrassment. But in these very disasters we see his boldness and determination to stick with the course he had embarked on, even if everyone was saying he was wrong.

And it was precisely that stubbornness and that bravery which was required in 1940. Think yourself into that smoke-filled room in May, that fateful meeting of the seven-strong War Cabinet. France had fallen; Europe had been engulfed by the Nazis; the Russians had done a nauseating deal with Hitler; the Americans were standing on the sidelines. Britain was alone, and the pressure to do a deal was overwhelming. The City wanted it; much of the media wanted it; Halifax wanted it; Chamberlain wanted it; Labour would have gone along.

It was Churchill and Churchill alone who was decisive in ensuring that Britain continued to fight. It was Churchill who was crucial to bringing America in – more than two years later. If Churchill had not been Prime Minister in 1940, there seems little doubt that Britain would have made an accommodation with evil – letting Hitler have his way and plunging Europe into darkness and barbarism. No one else round that table had the guts to do what he did; and it is to him, therefore, that the world owes thanks for the eventual victory over Nazism, and the 70 years of peace that have followed.

The more you study Churchill, the more I hope you will share my conviction that there has been no one remotely like him before or since.