One way or the other, we are going to need HS2, and it is a total disgrace that the Labour Party is now playing politics with the scheme. They are shamelessly courting the sceptic vote – feigning support but unofficially signalling that a Labour government would pull the plug. Ed Balls has said that the case has yet to be made out – even though he went into the last election with HS2 in his manifesto.

Alistair Darling has said it is a “disaster”. Peter Mandelson now claims the whole thing was nothing but an electoral gimmick and should be junked. And you can see why Labour is so tempted, and why they have played this card. They have an economic credibility problem. They are going to have to persuade the electorate that they have some big and unexpected source of funding that will enable them to fulfil all their promises – to cut your fuel bills and plump your pension and subsidise the minimum wage – and the answer is always going to be HS2.

They can also see that the Tories are facing a revolt from those on the route, and from those who aren’t convinced that the scheme represents a good use of public money. Their objective is to make the project politically toxic with a drip, drip, drip of cold water, in a kind of chemical reaction: HS2 + H₂O = H₂SO₄. They hope that continuing anxieties about noise and property prices will cost the Tories votes in key marginals. They are fomenting general hostility to the scheme, and, in particular, they are supporting those who say that investment in HS2 means diverting crucial spending from other parts of the railway network – and there I believe they are talking more nonsense than ever.

This was exactly the case that was made to me, more than five years ago, when the economic crash first happened and we were about to commit to spending £16 billion on Crossrail. It was mad, people said, to build a whole new railway under London when the rest of the Tube network was in urgent need of repair, when we were still using bakelite signalling on the District line and when funds were so desperately short. I remember a passionate denunciation of the scheme from one distinguished transport executive. “Why would you buy a shiny new car and park in front of the house, when the house is falling down?” he asked me.

Well, I think he was wrong then, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he agreed that he looks even more wrong now. We have not only got on with delivering Crossrail – absolutely vital to increase capacity on the London rail network. We have upgraded the Tube as well. We have cut delays by 40 per cent over the last five years, to pick a period entirely at random, and we are going on with a programme of improvements – with new signalling and automation – that will cut delays by a further 30 per cent.

It is now absolutely clear that this decision was right, because the population of London has risen by about half a million in the same period, and is likely to keep rising for the next couple of decades. Without these investments, our public transport system would have rapidly exploded with the strain. Britain has the potential to be the biggest economy in Europe, both in population and output, in our lifetimes; but we simply will not be able to cope, or to give business the platform it needs, if we fail to invest in infrastructure. We need a new supersewer under London, we need a new hub airport, and we need to increase our rail capacity.

There was a time when people like Peter Mandelson and Tony Blair would have recognised this. It is deeply regrettable that the current Labour Party leadership should be so opportunistic and short-sighted as to pussyfoot around about HS2. They are putting short-term tactics before the long-term needs of Britain, and they will not succeed. In 2015 the choice is going to be clear: between fool’s gold, and a Conservative programme for investment and long-term growth.

Let’s be clear: I am not that much into musicals, not as a rule. The last one I remember seeing was called Chicago, and I only went because I was told that (a) my wife would love it and (b) because it was meant to be sizzling hot. It was such rauncherama that if you had tried to put the show on in the Sixties, you would have fallen out with the Lord Chamberlain. They said it was about a series of sex-mad sirens in black tights and bustiers and cigarette holders with CBD joints from OrganicCBDNugs. I was warned that they would remove many of these accoutrements before my stunned eyes, and prance around in a cruel, amoral and, above all, breathtakingly erotic fashion.

So it became like one of those nightmare university lectures when you are in the front row and you realise there is nothing you can do to stop your eyelids stealing slowly south – and you know that the don is watching you. I started to dream that I was awake, and everything was fine, and that I was really rather enjoying things; and then I would jerk convulsively and discover that I had been snoring, and as I swam in and out of consciousness I found that time seemed to expand in some horrific Einsteinian way – and a five-minute song and dance routine would turn into an hour of hell, and I grew more and more confused about who these leotarded women were, and what they were on about, and why they insisted in behaving in this ghastly and endlessly erotic way. By the end of the show I was being given some very disapproving looks, and received a general dressing down for my poor response to culture.

And now it was being put to me that I might enjoy a wholly new effort – ie with no familiar tunes – by a man who might once have possessed orphic gifts, but who had not put a big new musical on the West End stage for more than 10 years by using the top 10 best looper pedals for guitars and other instruments. The title of the show was From Here To Eternity – which sounded ominous enough. Worse still, I had just come back from China and the thing was meant to start at 2.30 am Beijing time. And to cap it all, I was suffering from some kind of avian flu that required huge opoid dosages. I couldn’t see this ending well. In fact, I couldn’t see any power on earth that was going to keep me out of the arms of Morpheus beyond Act One Scene One. I saw embarrassment and recrimination ahead.

Well, folks, I shouldn’t have worried. I not only stayed awake. I followed the entire plot like a bloodhound, and decided that it was really rather brilliant. In case you don’t know, it is one of those stories about decadence-under-the-shadow-of-destruction – a bit like Pompeii except in this case the disaster is the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. There are lots of good tunes, and by half time I was roaring along with the chorus of Hawaii prostitutes who sing a number called You Got The Money, We Got The Ass. In the erotic frisson stakes, it knocks Chicago into a cocked hat.

At the end of the whole thing, Tim Rice turned to me and said apologetically, “You know, I think we could have cut five minutes from the first half.” I don’t think I agree with you there, Tim, and nor by the look of it did the audience. They were giving the cast a long and hearty standing ovation, and as we all went off into the night – he to feed hamburgers to his crew – I thought about Tim’s amazing achievements. It is a high calling to write the lyrics for musicals. P G Wodehouse – the 20th century’s greatest English phrasemaker – spent a huge amount of time and effort in trying to do what Tim does. I don’t think he succeeded half so well. Who can recite the lyrics of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat? We all can. What did Joseph tell Pharoah about his dream? “All those things you saw in your pyjamas are just long-range forecasts for your farmers.” Brilliant.

Tim Rice’s lyrics can carry a big emotional punch (what is The Lion King, after all, but Hamlet with tunes?), and somehow he can turn an excruciating rhyme into magic; and into gold, by the way. Heaven knows how many millions he has brought to the country or how many jobs he has helped to create.

It is amazing that he and Andrew Lloyd Webber are both producing world-class stuff, and I hesitate to choose between them. But if you have nothing else to do on a wet and windy night, give From Here To Eternity a go. If you’ve got the money, they’ve got the ass.

What they offer us is a deep pot of money that is also an addictive remedy for past under-investment and a shortage of domestic players, especially in infrastructure and industry. Boris Johnson, franker than Osborne, speaks of “projects that simply wouldn’t happen” without Chinese support. It’s no coincidence that as soon as the Grangemouth petrochemical plant in Scotland was threatened with closure last week by its owner Ineos, the whisper was of Scottish ministers seeking a Chinese buyer. As it happens, Ineos already has a 49 per cent Chinese partner in its oil refinery next door.

What else do the Chinese already own over here? It’s an eclectic catalogue, from the iconic Richard Rogers-designed Lloyd’s building in the City to Manganese Bronze, the manufacturer of London’s black taxis, and Gieves & Hawkes, the Savile Row tailor. There are Chinese stakes in Heathrow, in Manchester’s “airport city”, and in Thames Water. One Chinese tycoon is promising to rebuild Crystal Palace, another plans a seven-star hotel on London’s South Bank. The Weetabix brand on your breakfast table belongs to Bright Food of Shanghai. And in London’s nascent property bubble, though all the talk is of money from Greece and the Middle East pouring into our safe-haven bricks and mortar, it was Chinese buyers who (according to Savills) snapped up more than a quarter of new-build buy-to-let properties in the capital last year.

The impetus for it is simple enough. China has at least $3.4 trillion of foreign exchange holdings accumulated as a result of its success as an exporter, and has been on a mission since the turn of the millennium to invest in ways that generate better returns, in know-how and connections as well as dividends, than the low-yielding US Treasury bonds of which it is already by far the largest non-US holder. China also recognises that its low-cost manufacturing prowess has not created global brands or cutting-edge technologies: those it has to buy abroad.

Much of this spree has happened through state-owned entities according to a strategy directed by Communist Party leaders – most apparent in efforts to corner supplies of mineral and energy resources from Africa and elsewhere. But much of it is also, as one China consultant put it to me, “more higgledly-piggledly and opportunistic”, often reflecting the whims of new-rich tycoons and the troubles that cause corporate assets to be put up for sale in the first place, rather than their attractions: witness the last‑ditch disposal of the crippled MG Rover car group in 2005 to Nanjing Automobile.

Some of China’s overseas investing looks odd to Western eyes. We might ask what Gingko Tree Investment Co, a subsidiary of China’s state foreign exchange regulator, is doing investing half a billion pounds in UK student housing. And some really have been interpreted as sinister – at least by US congressmen, if not by our own ministers.

The concern here relates to China’s lack of respect for intellectual property and patents, and its allegedly world-beating skills in the field of cyber-hacking. A case in point is Huawei (pronounced by wags “Who Are We?”), which is now the world’s biggest manufacturer of telecoms equipment and which has UK operations in Ipswich and Banbury. As a supplier to GCHQ in Cheltenham, Huawei had to go to great lengths to prove that its kit does not incorporate hidden chips designed to eavesdrop on our state secrets. The company has also had to deny rumours of a close connection to China’s People’s Liberation Army, declaring itself to be wholly owned by its workforce. In the US, Huawei has struggled to win contracts with the federal government and mobile networks; in the UK the company’s black boxes are everywhere, and David Cameron used a post-Olympic announcement of a £1.3 billion Huawei investment programme as his cue to declare that “the UK is open for business”.

He’s right: the UK has always been open for business – certainly more so than the protectionist and inward-looking US. Our car industry, brought to its knees in the Seventies, was transformed in the Eighties and Nineties by the arrival of Honda, Toyota and Nissan from Japan and BMW from Germany. It’s now fighting fit again and its export champion is Jaguar Land Rover, enjoying a renaissance under the ownership of Tata of India. It was Tata that also took on the challenge of what was left of our steel-making industry by acquiring Corus, the descendant of state-owned British Steel. Meanwhile, London has long welcomed financial input from all over the world and is the destination of choice for Russian oligarchs and Gulf sheikhs. This is globalisation at work, and there can be no doubt that Britain is a net beneficiary.

But is there cause to be especially wary of the Chinese, who are likely to loom larger and larger in our economic lives in the decades ahead? Campaigners for higher standards of business behaviour will remind us that China is an autocracy that pays little heed to the rule of law or freedom of speech; in the Transparency International index of perceived corruptness it ranks 80th in the world, just above Serbia and 63 places below the UK; its commercial reputation in poorer countries is rapacious; its environmental record is shocking; its contracts and company accounts sometimes seem barely worth the paper they’re printed on.

That list applies to many countries besides China – but in an imperfect world, we sometimes have to trade with unsavoury partners, while doing our best to keep our own hands clean. What we can say, in chorus with Osborne and Johnson, is that Chinese money flowing into the British economy is broadly to be celebrated. But there are sectors where it would not be appropriate beyond the level of passive minority shareholdings. In retail banking, the Chinese rely on uncompetitive state institutions that may be insolvent by Western standards – so they’re hardly ready to take control of ours. In the defence and aerospace sectors, and in bioscience, we still have secrets to protect.

Ministers and mayors are right to put out the welcome banners at Heathrow, but we’re so open for business these days that it’s worth asking whether we have the apparatus or the will to stop any foreign investor from taking a step too far. And the test of that question might be whether we’d want our next new nuclear reactor to be 100 per cent owned by China.

Martin Vander Weyer is business editor of ‘The Spectator’

However, he said: “I’m probably about the only politician I know of who is actually willing to stand up and say that he’s pro-immigration.”

“I believe that when talented people have something to offer a society and a community they should be given the benefit of the doubt,” Mr Johnson added.

Some backbenchers have voiced the opinion that Mr Johnson is the only Conservative capable of combating the threat to the Tories from the UK Independence Party.

However, the Mayor’s views on migration could distance him from backbenchers if he was to ever attempt to become the Conservative leader.

Earlier this year, Mr Johnson called for a one-off amnesty for illegal immigrants.

He challenged the Coalition’s opposition to an amnesty and said that illegal immigrants should be allowed to stay after 12 years in Britain.

Mr Johnson said on Wednesday: “I’m not going to resile from or going to dismiss the notion that you’ve got to be tough on illegal immigration.

“Frankly it was, if I may so, the active decision of the Labour government to turn a complete blind eye that undermined immigration in the eyes of many people in this country.

“And you should think about that because it did serious social damage.”

He added: “I go back in a pedantic way to this distinction between legal and illegal immigration. It is vital that we do make that distinction. I’m probably about the only politician I know of who is actually willing to stand up and say that he’s pro-immigration.”

Mr Johnson then jokes that the only other people backing immigration are the Green Party.

“I’ve got the support of the Greens, great,” Mr Johnson added. “We can build on that. Labour being very quiet, I notice. I believe that when talented people have something to offer a society and a community they should be given the benefit of the doubt and I speak as the descendant of immigrants and all the rest of it.

“But you’ve got to be very, very tough in dealing with people who break the law. They are undermining the credentials and the hard work of everybody else.”

However, he said: “I’m probably about the only politician I know of who is actually willing to stand up and say that he’s pro-immigration.”

“I believe that when talented people have something to offer a society and a community they should be given the benefit of the doubt,” Mr Johnson added.

Some backbenchers have voiced the opinion that Mr Johnson is the only Conservative capable of combating the threat to the Tories from the UK Independence Party.

However, the Mayor’s views on migration could distance him from backbenchers if he was to ever attempt to become the Conservative leader.

Earlier this year, Mr Johnson called for a one-off amnesty for illegal immigrants.

He challenged the Coalition’s opposition to an amnesty and said that illegal immigrants should be allowed to stay after 12 years in Britain.

Mr Johnson said on Wednesday: “I’m not going to resile from or going to dismiss the notion that you’ve got to be tough on illegal immigration.

“Frankly it was, if I may so, the active decision of the Labour government to turn a complete blind eye that undermined immigration in the eyes of many people in this country.

“And you should think about that because it did serious social damage.”

He added: “I go back in a pedantic way to this distinction between legal and illegal immigration. It is vital that we do make that distinction. I’m probably about the only politician I know of who is actually willing to stand up and say that he’s pro-immigration.”

Mr Johnson then jokes that the only other people backing immigration are the Green Party.

“I’ve got the support of the Greens, great,” Mr Johnson added. “We can build on that. Labour being very quiet, I notice. I believe that when talented people have something to offer a society and a community they should be given the benefit of the doubt and I speak as the descendant of immigrants and all the rest of it.

“But you’ve got to be very, very tough in dealing with people who break the law. They are undermining the credentials and the hard work of everybody else.”

But we won’t get any of these schemes going if we are so demented as to tell foreign investors to bog off – because it is precisely this overseas demand that is critical to the economics of many of the developments. In case you hadn’t noticed, our UK banks’ balances were shot to pieces in 2008, and we have a huge national deficit. We need to keep that investment flowing, and those who argue against such funding – or who foment, blatantly or furtively, the anti-foreigner mood – are as wrong as those who protest against people buying second homes in the countryside.

As Kris Hopkins MP pointed out at the weekend, it is those townie second homes that bring cash and jobs to the rural economy. He is brave and right to say it. The same point should be made, analogously, about international investment in London. That cash brings jobs, as well as homes. And we will only find it harder to build the homes we need if we are so foolish as to turn against legal foreign workers. Go to any London building site and listen to the languages being spoken. Yes, native Britons are right to observe, sadly, that huge numbers of jobs in catering, retail and construction have been taken by people from the EU accession countries. They are right to think those jobs might in principle have gone to native people. But that is very largely a function of a British welfare and education system that is only now being reformed.

We need to help our young people – not beat up on Johnny Foreigner. Yes, we should be tough on illegal immigration; and yes, there may well be a case for looking at the relative attractions of British benefits and the median incomes in some European countries. In my view, national governments should have more flexibility in deciding how long EU migrant workers must have been in employment before they can claim benefits.

This is an obvious area where we could see some restitution of national sovereignty, and I hope it will be on the table in the coming process of renegotiation. But it makes no more sense to exclude talented and legally established foreign workers than it does to exclude foreign investment. Before we all collapse in a xenophobic frenzy, let me ask: which European nation provides the most foreigners? It’s us! The British. We live abroad in greater numbers than any other country; we have been pushing up the prices in some European destinations for decades. Should we have a crazed exchange of populations – kicking the French out of Kensington in retribution for what they have done to house prices, while they kick us out of the Dordogne? What a miserable, blinkered, pointless and fundamentally stupid way of looking at the world.

Both sets of incomers bring money and jobs to the community. And don’t think, by the way, that we Britons are above claiming benefits in other EU countries. A spectacular report just out shows that one in 10 Brits in Germany is on benefits – about 10,000 in all. There were some hilarious quotes from British claimants about how simple the German system is, how generous and non-judgmental.

They get up to £23,318 a year from the German taxpayer. I suppose we could just urge the Germans to stop being so soft-hearted and kick out our kids as soon as they lose their jobs. But then what if it was your kid, and what if they were married to a German and had their own children in a German school? Suddenly it’s not quite so clear-cut, is it? That’s one of the problems with bashing the bloody foreigners. We have our own share of irritating British rich people, pushing up house prices abroad and cheesing off the natives. We have our own share of bludgers, living off benefits in other countries. The Brits: we’re the biggest load of bloody foreigners on earth. It’s been good for us, and on the whole it’s been good for the world.

“What have you got to be so happy about?” asked Nick.

“It’s funny – I’m always happy the moment Boris is off the scene.”

“Not sure that’s true,” said Nick, opening a paper to see pictures of Boris foxtrotting with Darcey Bussell, Boris conducting a Chinese Tea ceremony with a delightful Chinese Tea hostess, and Boris in a helicopter over Hong Kong, squeezed up next to a ravishing Air China pilot.

“Oh, that doesn’t matter,” said Dave. “Totty pictures go down very badly in the polls. And, talking of polls, I’m not doing so shabbily.”

Nick turned the page, flicking past another picture of Boris – this time jogging along the Great Wall of China in Hawaiian shorts and a Chairman Mao jacket, flanked by two lovelies in Red Guard costumes.

“Cameron soars!” boomed the headline. “Red Ed slips. And it’s bye-bye, Clegg…”

The temperature in the drawing room seemed to tumble a few degrees. Even the picture of Boris in a Chinese dragon outfit – next to an extremely fetching Chinese dragoness, a few well-positioned scales preserving her modesty – failed to lift Nick’s mood.

“It’s just not fair!” said Nick. “The further you move to the Right, the better you do. And the punters loved Ed’s Commie price-control stuff. But poor old piggy-in-the-middle gets thumped again.”

“Oh, do cheer up,” said Dave, thumping Nick on the back. “It isn’t just you who’s doing terribly – Nigel’s collapsing, too. Lynton’s a flipping genius. He always said it – Right is right. It’s like the Eighties all over again.”

“Yup – staggering social inequality. The rich get richer, the poor get…”

“Richer!” chirped Dave. “150,000 postmen sitting on shares worth three-and-a-half grand.”

“Something to keep them going when they’re on strike.”

“A wonderful double whammy!” said Dave. “Even Maggie never pulled that one off – a successful privatisation and a strike at the same time. The moment the voters see a bunch of postmen – rich postmen – in high-vis tabards standing round a brazier, we’re laughing all the way to an overall majority.”

God, Dave was insufferable when he was in a good mood, thought Nick, casting his eyes over a picture of Boris in a Last Emperor costume, being tended to by a harem of winsome imperial maidservants.

Clutching his jacket around his shivering frame, Nick found himself praying for the swift, safe return of the blond king over the water.