As it happens, I met the good lady, by chance, on a crowded train in south-west London. I had a long conversation with my constituent, and I can confirm that she is neither a religious nutter nor driven by vindictiveness. She just wants the airline to accept that it was unfair and wrong, and the irony is that she has now been driven to take her case to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. And the further irony is that the British Government — a British Government whose individual members, if asked, would almost certainly agree that BA was loony in its decision — is now apparently backing that decision and opposing Mrs Eweida.

Ministers will argue, in Strasbourg, that BA was perfectly within its rights to kick her out of the workplace, because there is nothing in the “rules” of Christian observance that says you have to wear a cross. They will argue that wearing a cross is “optional”, and therefore unlike wearing other items of apparel (headgear, bracelets, etc) that other religions demand of their adherents and which are therefore permissible for BA staff.

I don’t know the process by which government lawyers have decided this is the right way to go, but someone needs to march into their room, grab them by the lapels, and tell them not to be such confounded idiots. They appear to be following the 2010 Court of Appeal ruling of Lord Justice Stephen Sedley, who threw out Mrs Eweida’s case for discrimination and accused her of having a “sectarian agenda”.

Sedley is a very clever man, and a distinguished jurist, but I don’t think he would object if I called him the most Left-wing judge of the past 50 years. You should read his judgment, as a perfect example of how a brilliant mind, in the grip of strong ideological prejudice, can depart completely from common sense.

His first point, as I say, is that Christianity does not demand that its followers wear crosses — in the way that, say, Sikhism demands turbans — and that Mrs Eweida was therefore not discriminated against, and suffered no disadvantage, simply for being a Christian. Sedley makes much of this distinction between “optional” and “compulsory” bits of religious clothing or apparel, and you can see why it might be convenient for employers like BA.

Mrs Eweida might argue that her deep personal convictions drive her to wear a cross; and another female employee might argue that her deep personal convictions drive her to wear a burka. How could BA forbid one but not the other? What if a member of cabin crew turned up insisting (as many Britons do) that she believed in the Jedi order, and that her personal convictions demanded that she dress as Princess Leia? This objection may sound logical enough; and yet it flies in the face of common sense. There is surely a world of difference between discarding a uniform, in favour of a burka or a Princess Leia outfit, and wearing a small cross on a virtually invisible chain.

The airline was neither reasonable nor proportionate in its first response — as was shown by its subsequent capitulation — and the Appeal Court could have recognised that.

Sedley’s second point is that no other Christians, in BA’s entire 30,000 staff, protested in the same way, or insisted on wearing a cross, and that there was therefore no evidence that Christians were disadvantaged as a group. That may or may not be true. But if it is true that Mrs Eweida was on her own in wanting to wear a crucifix, then that surely shows she was not the thin end of the wedge, and that allowing her to wear a cross would have been a reasonable and harmless indulgence, rather than a general invitation to others to break the rules on uniform.

Mrs Eweida is a member of a group — Christians — and she wanted to express her membership of that group in a small and inoffensive way. She was suspended and sent home. She was told she could not have contact with the public. She was discriminated against. She did suffer disadvantage. It is plain as a pikestaff. Government lawyers should run up the white flag now. Never mind Strasbourg: it is time for some common sense.

I know the money is there, because I can see what is happening to London property values, and I can see the money still washing in from overseas. The other day I met a distinguished gentleman who told me he had lived in his house for about 35 years. It is a large, terrace family home – creaking staircase, cracks in the wall, a faint suggestion of cats as you enter the front hall. It is the kind of Georgian or Victorian home that you find in large numbers in London, and of course, after years of property price inflation, it is worth a fortune.

Some people – mainly but not exclusively “non-doms” – get around stamp duty by treating the house as a company. They buy shares in the company, and therefore pay tax at 0.5 per cent rather than at 5 per cent for expensive homes. But there is an even larger group of people who are exploiting a loophole, and going for a (legal) dodge called subsale relief. The result is the same: through the agency of some clever lawyers, they avoid a tax that is paid by virtually everyone else. According to a leading tax accountant, this loophole is being ever more ruthlessly exploited, and the loss to the Treasury could easily now be a billion pounds.

It is time that it was closed. Yes, of course London’s destiny is to be a great global metropolis, and of course it is right that people should come here to enjoy the many pleasures of London life. I have nothing against such people – and I do not blame them for trying to minimise their tax exposure. At least they are frank about what they are doing. They are not hypocrites, like some people, ahem, I could mention – no names, no pack drill – who foamingly denounce tax avoidance, and call for bankers to be hung, and who then turn out to have elaborate schemes to avoid paying the full whack of income tax on their earnings.

What all these people need to remember, humbugs or otherwise, is that hundreds of thousands of Londoners cannot afford the accountants to help with this kind of avoidance, and that there are hundreds of thousands who cannot afford any kind of property at all, let alone the fleshpots of Cricklewood or Mayfair. Here in London we will have built 50,000 new homes over the past four years, homes for social rent or part-buy, part-rent. It is a record number, and will help huge numbers of people who cannot afford to live in the city. We believe we can do even more over the next four years, in a programme of construction that will help to get large numbers of people into employment. Of course, it would be easier if we had an extra billion to spend on support for the housing construction programme.

Think of that Russian oligarch and the house he wants to buy for his cleaner. There are all sorts of reasons for him to love London. We have the right time-zone, the right language, we have excellent schools, more museums than Paris, more theatres than New York and a murder rate now at its lowest since the 1960s and considerably lower than Moscow’s. Is he really going to hop it to another jurisdiction, just because he has to pay the same for his property as any other UK taxpayer? I don’t think so. Sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander.

This would mean the majority of the network would be served by driverless trains by the end of the decade.

Mr Johnson added: “The revenue that comes into the DLR from automation, from making sure that you don’t have personnel doing things that are unnecessary, greatly exceeds the cost of running it.

“You can use that revenue to invest in new systems. I want to be the mayor who delivers that.”

Mr Johnson has previously had to contend with 23 London Underground strikes during his four years in office.

The RMT union described driverless trains as “lethal and unworkable”, while Aslef, Britain’s biggest drivers’ union, said it would “vigorously” fight any attempts to eliminate the need for drivers.

“I want to stress that in making these reforms of the Tube, I believe it’s going to be possible to work with the unions,” he said.

In a thinly-veiled attack on his rival Ken Livingstone over his links with transport unions, Mr Johnson added: “There may be some union bosses who won’t agree but I’m not funded by them and I’m not supported by them.”

Mr Johnson also refused to rule out running for a third term as Mayor despite claims of a bid for the Conservative Party leadership.

He said he “regrets” previously saying he would serve a maximum of two terms.

They have been bawling about the need for “proper” jobs, and denouncing all companies who cooperate with the scheme. You may wonder what these “proper” jobs might be: presumably the kind of self-replicating public sector positions that so rampantly expanded in the era of Gordon Brown, and that helped to wreck the public finances.

But the worst of it is that the companies themselves are taking fright. They don’t want to be thought of as silk top-hatted slave-drivers. They know that a spirit of anti-capitalism stalks the land, a fire-breathing beast that has shrivelled Stephen Hester’s bonus in its nostril-blast, and scorched Fred Goodwin’s knighthood, and now seeks whomever else it may devour.

They have seen what happened to the St Paul’s clergy who got in the way of the Occupy movement – and they don’t want to be the next in line. Certain sections of the media have been flamming it up, with loose talk of “workfare”, and the companies are now nervously telling the Government that they would rather not be involved.

Well, it is quite vital that they hold their nerve, and that they continue to help young people into work – indeed, it is vital that they step up their efforts.

One of the biggest problems we now face is that companies are relatively flush with cash – but don’t have the nerve to spend it; and that means they are neither expanding nor taking on more staff. This is precisely the moment when they need to be given every possible encouragement – and praise – for letting young people through their doors. They should be championed, they should be extolled, for taking on young people as workers, and the bleats of protest from the loony Left should be ignored.

In London we have been working with the National Apprenticeship Service to create more opportunities for young people – and in the last 18 months we have helped place about 54,000 apprentices. People are getting off benefits and into work. They are earning at least the minimum wage. Instead of collapsing back into depression and self-doubt they are in a place of work – with all its stresses and joys – and they are learning the cunning you need to hold down a job. When needing help to cope with stress, there are new natural methods you can beat it, Synchronicity Hemp Oil is a good way to maintain your mental clarity. It can be used by anyone who suffers from chronic stress, anxiety or any other mood-related disorder that impacts daily life for the worse visit them at https://synchronicityhempoil.com/.

They are finding out about turning up on time, and wearing a suit, and office politics: all kinds of things that you can never really understand in even the best training colleges. They are getting the appetite and ambition and competitive work ethic that you can only find in a place of work itself. So far, 85 per cent of them have gone on to get full-time employment, and we need to accelerate this scheme. We are currently seeing new apprenticeships generated in London – which used to lag behind the rest of the country – at a rate of 5,000 a week.

We think we will get up to 100,000 by the end of the year. There is much more that can be done to make the scheme work faster and better. I am now pushing to make sure that businesses that take on apprentices get a National Insurance holiday. We are looking at ways of encouraging people to stay in work, for instance by giving them – as a bonus – a share of the saving in unemployment benefit.

These schemes are working, because business can see clear benefits from hiring apprentices. They are typically loyal and hard-working, and all the evidence is that firms that hire apprentices are more productive. The man who transformed modern Tesco didn’t arrive as an Oxbridge graduate trainee. Sir Terry Leahy began by sweeping floors.

It doesn’t matter where you start. It just matters where you are going, and you can’t get going unless you are given a start.

Blackfriars Underground station, shut for nearly three years, finally reopened today after a spectacular redevelopment.

The work has been part of the redevelopment of Blackfriars main line station which, in turn, is part of the Bedford to Brighton Thameslink rail project.

He added: “the rebirth of this central London station will improve the journeys of thousands of passengers every single day.”

Now this superb business faces a threat from Brussels, and the imposition of an unnecessary and badly thought-out regulation. For 134 years, the company has sourced its sugar cane from around the world — not unnaturally, since the crop doesn’t grow in the UK. Week in, week out, huge boatloads of brown crystals come up the Thames to be treated. The plant has the capacity to produce 1.1 million tonnes of refined sugar a year; and yet the company is prevented, by the EU commission, from importing the raw materials in the quantities it needs. Their current output is now down to 60 per cent of capacity — and the result is that jobs are being lost in a part of London that already faces the highest levels of unemployment in the city and indeed in the whole of the country.

And while a great London business is unable to fulfil its potential, the price of sugar is pushed up — by the EU — far higher than necessary, and that price hike is felt by every hard-pressed consumer who eats anything in which sugar is an ingredient. That is a long list of foods, in tough times, whose prices are being pushed up by the Common Agricultural Policy. It is utter madness, and it derives from the ruthless determination of the Commission to protect the sugar beet producers of continental Europe.

For decades they have been artificially shielded, by high tariff walls around the EU, which mean that sugar prices in Europe are more than double the world market price. And those sugar beet producers have been given huge sums of taxpayers’ money, in export refunds, to dump their produce overseas. In 2006 the Commission reluctantly bowed to outrage from Oxfam and others, and agreed to a programme of “reform”. Of the total EU sugar market of about 17 million tonnes, 13.5 million would be reserved for the European sugar beet barons. The other 3.5 million tonnes could be supplied by sugar cane producers around the world.

The trouble is that these countries — in Africa, the Caribbean or Pacific regions — have not been able to fill the gap. To find enough cane sugar, Tate & Lyle need to be able to bring in boatfuls from places like Brazil or Central America: and that Brussels forbids. They face swingeing tariffs to bring more in — while the sugar beet producers are given a licence to produce more. At every turn the British refinery finds the system skewed in favour of the beet producers, mainly in France and Germany. But they can’t use beet in the London plants; and you can’t use beet to make golden syrup.

Already 30 jobs are going — high-skilled jobs held by long-serving staff; and it is surely a disgrace that a natural source of employment is being choked at a critical time for the economy. London firms need to be given every incentive and confidence to hire more staff and expand, from tax breaks to the apprenticeship schemes we have been helping to lead from City Hall. And we are lobbying Brussels to drop its crazy prohibition, and allow Tate and Lyle to get cane sugar from wherever in the world it can find the stuff. It is time for common sense on the sugar regime — in the name of jobs for London and cheaper food all round.

Well, to see the answer, you have to go back to The Social Network, the wonderful film about the birth of the company. It was about the war between Zuckerberg and the preppy Winklevoss brothers over the paternity of Facebook. It was a feud that began at Harvard, and in many ways the environment resembled Oxbridge – gowns, rowing, fusty old traditions, oak-panelled dining halls. And yet what struck me as deeply un-British, and unlike Oxbridge, was the maniacal determination of these undergraduates to get rich, the single-mindedness with which they set about it – and their unalloyed joy in success. Making money seemed to them a good thing, even a great thing, and these days it is not clear how widely shared that assumption is in this country.

Let us imagine a British Zuckerberg. He and his fellow billionaires would be the object not just of envy, but of resentment. There would be debates in Parliament, instigated by Ed Miliband, about the scale of his prospective wealth, and whether it was tolerable in a fair society. Wherever he lived, the British Zuckerberg would be tracked down by anti-capitalist protesters, and even now, in all likelihood, the pop-up tents would be appearing on his lawn. His new-found wealth, in short, would not be the subject of simple amazement. It would provoke amazement and a fair degree of rage; and that – to put it mildly – is not a climate that is conducive to wealth creation.

It is one thing to object to bonuses that are explicitly funded by the taxpayer. It is another thing to start attacking “Mammon” of any kind – because as my old schoolmate Ed Miliband has found, it is very hard to make a distinction between “good” enterprises and “bad” enterprises, between good money and bad money, between profit that is socially useful and profit that is not socially useful. In the general confusion, there is a danger that banker-bashing will metastasise into an all-round scorn for all varieties of money-making instinct – and I can’t believe that is in the economic interests of the country.

We need to stop wasting our energy in hating the disgusting affluence of the top 1 per cent, and we need to start doing more for the bottom 20 per cent. The poor and needy will always deserve help, in taxation and in philanthropy – but we can’t expect to generate either, on the scale of the Americans, if we continue to denigrate wealth-creators. In the US, unemployment is now falling sharply, in contrast to Europe and indeed to this country. Jobs are being created, not least because America is full of people who are not only scrabbling to be the next Mark Zuckerberg, but who know that if they make it they will receive admiration from their fellow Americans, rather than chippiness and disgust.

I have no idea whether the myriad Facebook investors are correct in their potential valuation of this company. I don’t pretend to grasp the economics of the web, which seems to me to be a colossal destroyer of value, reducing the price of text, music, images and voice telephony to virtually nil. But one thing is for sure. If the Facebook bubble bursts, the investors won’t blame Zuckerberg. They will shrug their shoulders and gamble on something else.

It’s called capitalism. It’s about ideas, energy, innovation and reward, and we need to remember that for all its defects, humanity has yet to come up with a better way to run an economy.