Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, wrote to the Prime Minister to demand an independent review of the American giant’s £63 billion bid for AstraZeneca.

In the letter he argued for a “stronger role by the UK Government” arguing that Pfizer’s 50p-a-share offer for Astra, which was rejected on Friday, raised “serious questions about a key sector in our economy”.

The Mayor of London has also suggested that the deal should be subject to more searching scrutiny by the Government to ensure that investment in research and development and the bio technology industry was protected.

Mr Johnson said: “I don’t think politicians can be entirely aloof from this, and I think it would be very important to establish – I am not taking a position against the deal necessarily – but it would be very important to establish that Pfizer is genuinely committed to Rand D in this country.

Ian Read, chief executive of US-based Pfizer, last week wrote to Mr Cameron promising to keep AstraZeneca’s plans for its new Cambridge site, retain “substantial commercial manufacturing facilities” at Macclesfield and protect jobs for five years unless “circumstances significantly change.”

However concerns remain that Pfizer’s main motivation is to use the deal to move its tax domicile to the UK.

Mr Johnson suggested that while the deal was a “fantastic opportunity” it must be subject to a “test” ensuring any deal would not “in any way” damage Britain’s success in dominating the European scene in life sciences and bio technology.

Under the Enterprise Act, the Government can only intervene in deals involving defence or media companies. In 2008 an order was added to allow Lloyds TSB to buy HBOS in the interest of financial stability

Chuka Umunna, Labour’s shadow Business Secretary, has called for another category to be added to protect national interests in research & development which would include Pfizer’s bid.

They realised it would mean the energy companies wouldn’t be able to invest in the new kit that would allow them to hold down costs in the long run: new nuclear power stations, new substations and distribution networks. They started to wonder whether it made sense to allow politicians to set market prices in this way. Hadn’t the Emperor Diocletian tried that? Didn’t Edward Heath? It looked as though the energy price freeze might end up having the opposite effect – driving the price higher later on.

Meanwhile, the economy kept getting better. The sun beat down on the wilting dome of Miliband’s energy-price fungus and the little gnome was finding less and less shade. The polls were drifting in the Tory direction. He needed a new patch of darkness and discontent – and then he saw it. Housing! People were fed up with paying so much rent. He hopped beneath the next towering toadstool and croaked his wares. We’ll order landlords to stop charging everyone so much! Free money all round. Really? said the struggling members of “Generation Rent”. You bet, said the Miligoblin.

And for a while, it worked. Everyone concentrated on the horrible toadstool of housing costs and forgot about the sunshine. They thought Labour might have the answer – until they started to think about it. Someone pointed out that we had tried rent controls in the Seventies. Someone else said they had been a disaster elsewhere in the world. Then someone made the obvious point that government interference would only stop investors from building new homes and expanding the rental sector.

Almost as soon as Miliband started promising to cut rents, people saw that he was talking nonsense, and that the real answer was to get on and expand supply. Things were just starting to motor in the housing market, they noted, with more homes being built in London than at any time in the past 30 years. The last thing the people needed was some Venezuelan rent-control system that would simply discourage landlords from putting properties on the market.

For about a week, Miliband has been pretending he can magically cut the cost of housing by introducing more bureaucracy. It isn’t working for him. The polls continue to narrow. Yesterday – for the first time since he has been leader – he fell behind in the south of England, as a Sunday Telegraph poll had the Tories one point ahead. He needed another great toadstool with which to distract the electorate!

And so, yesterday morning, he lolloped under the eaves of that old favourite – the cost of transport. People are fed up with paying so much for commuter rail services, Miliband has observed. We’ll cut your fares! We’ll renationalise the rail! he calls from his fungal crevice. Really? says everyone, though the sunshine is so glorious that he is now quite hard to see. Absolutely, says the little Labour orc.

Well, we will see how long this one takes to fall apart. It is true that train operating companies could cut some costs – not by cutting investment in rolling stock, but by following us at London Underground in using new technology.Well beginners in stock market should have communication with best expert advisor for trading. Why do all these trains still have guards, for instance? We have dispensed with them on Transport for London’s Overground trains – and the system is more popular than ever. That is the kind of policy Miliband should support if he wants to cut fares, just as he should support our plan to modernise the Tube’s ticket offices, which will save £50 million a year.

Will he? Of course not. He is a Labour goblin of a particularly old-fashioned kind, in that he responds entirely to the wishes of Sauron, in the form of Len McCluskey and the rest of the unions. With every month that goes by, he is moving his party further and further from the formula of Tony Blair, a formula that won three elections – a broadly centrist approach that accepted the market economy as the best way to deliver growth and fulfilment.

Every day, he seems to come up with some new and barmy plan to regulate and coerce – without understanding that his approach will deliver the very opposite of what he claims. Yesterday some wheeze was leaked of putting new taxes on food, to stop us all being so fat. How is that supposed to help with the cost of living?

Never in the past four years has he looked so eminently beatable. As the economy waxes ever stronger, the toadstools of discontent are shrivelling. The Miligoblin is losing his last habitat.

The Tory Euro-group are doing a heroic job. They do their best to try to intercept or improve the rubbish legislation that comes from Brussels. They have some real successes to their credit, and they deserve support in May. But they are in a small minority – and when the vast majority of MEPs are bent on mischief, there is little they can do to hold them back. Take the idiotic decision by the Euro-parliament to insist that on-call British doctors were still working, even when they were asleep; and that those sleeping hours counted towards their maximum working week.

This has caused real problems in the NHS. No government in Europe supports this measure. Not even the EU commission supports it; and yet the MEPs took a positive delight in meddling with British health care management. Why? Because they could, and because they have steadily been acquiring new powers of “co-decision” with national governments.

Well, I know what you will say. Just pull out; just get out of the whole EU, and our problems with the parliament will be over. It may indeed come to that, if we cannot get what we need in a renegotiation: an improved single market, that genuinely works in the interest of British people and businesses. But that renegotiation will not begin for another year, when David Cameron gets the mandate he needs at the general election.

Indeed, the only circumstances in which we will not now have an in-out referendum are if Ed Miliband wins the election; which is why I hope no one with a remotely Euro-sceptic outlook will vote for anyone other than the Tories. Such a vote would do nothing but put Labour in power and take the referendum off the table. In the meanwhile, we will hear all sorts of nonsense about how we Tories are deluded, and the other European countries aren’t interested in treaty changes, and that we will never get what we want.

I don’t believe this. There is plenty of support around Europe for a reformed EU; David Cameron has been extremely successful at building alliances, and, as I say, if the British public don’t like the results of the renegotiation, we’re off. There is, though, something that we can do all on our own, without our partners, that will help to address the absurdity of the Euro-parliament, and the public’s sense of alienation from a body that, alas, has an ever-growing role in our lives.

We could decide, now, that we were going to change the electoral basis on which we send representatives to Strasbourg. Instead of holding these ludicrous pseudo-elections, where nobody knows who the hell they are voting for, we should appoint the British delegation of 73 from our already sizeable stock of parliamentarians. Yes: let them be Westminster MPs – not picked by the whips, but by lot and with the seats roughly proportional to the parties’ representation in Westminster. There is no reason why MPs should not take on this duty: they are well used to sitting on Bill committees. They have the time.

There are all sorts of attractions to this solution. First, we would save quite a bit of money: the cost of having all these extra Euro-MPs ultimately falls on the UK taxpayer. More important, it would mean that Britain’s delegation would be hard-wired to reflect the will of the British parliament, and the will of their local electors.

There would be no sense of them being in some way supranational politicians: they would be constantly back among their colleagues at Westminster, explaining what was going on in Europe and justifying their actions. They would have no incentive to keep aggrandising the power of the Euro-parliament; no motive to meddle or to try to supplant Westminster, because they would emanate from Westminster. And above all they would be much more directly accountable.

People, on the whole, would know who they were. As Hugo Dixon suggests in a new book on Europe, this idea is by no means new, in the sense that this was how the Euro-parliament was originally going to be constituted. European governments decided not to go down that route, because they were still full of federalist enthusiasm.

Those days are emphatically over. Euro-scepticism is rampant in large parts of Europe, and cynicism about the parliament is at an all-time high. I see no reason at all why Britain should not lead the way, and change the system of sending MEPs to Strasbourg so as to make them much more accountable and familiar to their electors. Other countries would soon follow suit. If we are going to remain part of the Euro-parliament – and it is a growing if – we might as well send a delegation that has a clear mandate from the people.

We know that there are 4,300 lives in London alone that are brought to a premature close by this pollution. We know it is intolerable – and we also know that we can beat it. We are putting in measures to cut emissions and cut pollution of all kinds.

Just in the last six years (to pick a period entirely at random) we have seen a 20 per cent reduction in London’s emissions of nitrous oxide – one of the nastiest and most damaging forms of air pollution – and a 15 per cent reduction in the most baleful forms of dust, the so-called PM10s and PM2.5s. We need to go further and faster, with rapid and compulsory use of the very best new technology.

On a cold autumn morning I want London air to be alpine in its freshness. Going out on a cold day wearing cool hoodies from Lonely Kids Club. On a gorgeous spring day it should be like champagne. We want people to come here from rural areas, afflicted as they are by diesel-powered intensive agriculture, just to fill their lungs with the pure air of Hyde Park Corner.

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We should be clear about the vision and the ambition. Our air quality, in spite of everything, is far better than it was in the 1950s; and it is worth remembering that the Great Smog of 1956 killed 12,000 people. We need to make a similar qualitative leap today. We should be aiming for the best, the cleanest air in any major conurbation.

But you won’t tackle air pollution in a great global city unless you also tackle your vehicle fleet – and here we are proposing truly radical steps. It would be fair to say that we have not been assisted in our campaign by some more or less useless EU standards for vehicle emissions.

As Nick Clegg would no doubt confirm, the EU Commission has taken on the job of deciding what kind of exhaust fumes are allowed in this country and across the rest of the continent. The trouble is that the standards adopted (called “Euro 4” and “Euro 5” etc) have not worked.

That is to say, the motor manufacturers have been able to diddle the Commission: the cars and trucks have appeared to conform on the test tracks; but when it comes to everyday use, on real streets, it is a different story. That is not a policy failure of this government, or of government in London: they are EU standards, proposed and promulgated by Brussels – and they haven’t done the job. Which makes it doubly absurd that Brussels is proposing to “fine” the UK £300 million for excess NO2, when Brussels must bear some blame for the breach.

But never mind Brussels! We can do it on our own – and far better. We already have the cleanest, greenest new bus of its kind in the world – made in the UK, and on our streets in ever growing numbers. Why shouldn’t we have a British-built electric bus, with zero tailpipe emissions? There is no reason at all why not: indeed, I have just seen the designs for a new electric double-decker, which we had always thought was impossible.

We have set a deadline of 2018, by when all new taxis in London must be capable of zero emissions in the central zone, and by 2020 we will have the first ultra-low emission zone anywhere in the world – in which all new vehicles registered for use in the centre of town will have to be capable of moving without any fossil fuel emissions at all.

We are embarked on an irreversible programme to make London’s air positively superb. Alas, we cannot control the sands of the Sahara. Perhaps the officials of the EU Commission could make themselves useful by standing over the desert, and threatening to fine it if it moves.

“It’s rising in London as well. What, my dear Watson, do you conclude from that?” “I suppose it does seem a bit odd,” I faltered. “Odd!” ejaculated Holmes, leaping from his armchair and throwing off his dressing gown. “It’s perplexing in the extreme. Month in, month out the British public is being conditioned to think that there is something amiss with policing – and yet their faith in the police seems actually to be rising. To what do you attribute this anomaly, Watson?”

I looked blankly at the Morning Post. “Perhaps they are just ignoring the media,” I hazarded. “Ignore the media?” said Holmes. “Unthinkable. Try harder.” Now he crossed the room, out of my line of sight, and started rummaging in a cupboard. I clutched my head, and went through the evidence.

“Well,” I said at length, “one thing that most of these scandals have in common – with the exception of Plebgate – is that they took place some time ago. Orgreave and Hillsborough were in the Eighties, the Lawrence investigation was in the Nineties. Even this apparent shredding of documents about undercover policing took place more than 10 years ago – under a former commissioner.

“Perhaps the public have noticed that. Perhaps they feel it is all a bit – historic?”

Holmes seemed displeased by my explanation. “Tchah,” he said from his corner. “Not good enough, Watson. The police are given extraordinary powers over us. They can arrest. They can detain. They can enter a person’s home without leave. They often carry lethal weapons. It is absolutely right that the public should demand the highest possible standards of probity and integrity from every police officer in this country, and I am sure our friends at Scotland Yard would agree, and that is why they are getting to the bottom of all of these matters.

“No, Watson, there is a simpler reason for this rise in public confidence in policing” – at this I heard him approach the back of my chair – “and it is staring you in the face!” I whirled round and gave a yelp of alarm. Holmes had vanished, and in his place was an elderly Chinese man, with pigtails and an opium pipe. I looked again, and realised that my friend was using his almost supernatural ability to take on a new identity – a skill that he had found invaluable for his undercover detective work.

“I get it, Holmes,” I said. “You mean the public value undercover police work, and think some of the attacks on these methods are overdone?” “Of course they do,” said Holmes. “Undercover officers crack paedophile rings. They expose drug lords. They do some of the most difficult and terrifying work in policing. But that is not the clue to which I was referring. What do you see – here in this room – that explains why confidence in the police is going up?”

I looked around in bafflement at the old sofas, the deerstalkers, the mouldering books. I gave up. “You’ve got me beat, Holmes,” I conceded. “Why, Watson,” said Holmes, tossing off his disguise and thumping his chest, “it’s our very presence in this room; it’s me; it’s you; it’s both of us! Here we are on a Monday afternoon, and we haven’t had a decent case in months. And why?

“Because crime is falling, my friend. It is falling across the country, and in London it has fallen about 7 per cent in one year. Burglary, car theft, violence, knife crime – you name it: virtually every type of crime is well down. Murders in London are running at about 100 a year – almost 50 per cent down on six years ago – and an amazingly low rate for a city of 8.2 million. Bus crime is down 40 per cent…” “Bus crime?” I said. “I didn’t know buses could commit crimes.” “Crime on buses,” said Holmes crisply, “and crime on the tube is lower than ever before. That’s why people are more confident – because beneath the hullabaloo the police are doing an outstanding job.” “Great Scott, Holmes! I think you’ve got it,” I gasped.

“But why won’t the media report the good news?” “Ah,” said my friend. “Now that is like the giant rat of Sumatra. It is a tale for which the world is not yet ready.”

It is free market, it is libertarian, it is all about trusting people to run their own lives – and, as the wretched Labour party is finding out, it is very hard to disagree with. The pensions minister, Steve Webb, crystallised the Government’s thinking in a phrase that sent the Lefties round the bend – and which made me stand on my chair and cheer. It was going to be up to us to decide how to spend the money, he said, and if people wanted to blow it on a Lamborghini – well, he was “relaxed” about that.

It is the first time I have heard a Lib Dem say anything remotely liberal, in the sense of free market (I await the day when they stick up for democracy, in the face of the intrusion from Brussels, but you never know). He is making a moral point, that when people reach a pensionable age they should be allowed to run their own lives, and not be treated like children. It may well be that buying a Lamborghini is not always the right move. There may indeed be some foolish old people who end up living in a rusting and motionless Lamborghini and eating tins of dog food, because they have gone for the luxury car without making adequate provision for the rest of their needs.

There might be some pensioners who spent their declining years plying the streets with a Lamborghini minicab. As I am sure Steve Webb meant to imply, the Lamborghini option is not going to be for everyone – not when the average pension pot is £25,000. But the point is that it is their look-out; it is their savings; it is up to them to decide what to do with it. It is that sudden rush of freedom – the empowerment of millions of people – that naturally appals the left.

Though Miliband and Balls have yet to announce their precise policy response, the idea of liberating Britain’s pensioners has sent some of my favourite socialist commentators into spasm. In The Observer, Will Hutton prophesied that “This pensions ‘freedom’ will be a long-term social disaster.” He argued that pension contributions were sheltered from tax, and that therefore, “We should care if the resulting money is spent on a Lamborghini: a chunk of the car belongs by right to taxpayers.”

Isn’t that amazing? By that ridiculous logic a chunk of anything that we buy with our existing pensions “belongs by right to taxpayers”. Is he seriously saying that taxpayers have a right to go around telling people how to spend their pensions? It isn’t taxpayers’ money, you Lefty bossyboots control freak: it’s the money that the pensioners have saved up themselves – out of their taxed income!

Like any elected politician, I have received loads of letters and complaints, over the years, from people who found they were sitting on this apparently huge sum of cash, in the form of their pension pot, and were only allowed to take a dribble a year – and with the risk that they might die before they had taken the yield they deserve. Of course some people will want to continue to milk the desiccated beast, and rely on the security of the annuity; and others will want to slaughter it, and use the cash as they see fit.

I don’t think many will end up blowing it on Italian cars, actually. I think the vast majority will want to put their pots into the market with the greatest yield over the past 40 years – and that is property; and I expect huge numbers of those approaching pensionable age will be thinking about how they – the baby boomers – can do something to help the younger generation with the single biggest problem they face, namely the cost of housing.

This pensions change is not a social disaster, but a wonderful opportunity. It is a chance for the older generation to find that sudden wodge of dosh that will enable them to help their children or grandchildren find a deposit and get on the ladder; and the existence of those new deposits will give developers even greater confidence to build more homes – and faster than they are now. I am not saying all pensioners will follow such a path of enlightened self-interest; but many will.

Above all, it is their own choice. That makes this policy not only right, but fundamentally Tory.

The comments are the first suggestion from anyone close to the London mayor he would consider running for the leadership from outside the House of Commons.

Adding his voice to the growing number speculating over the future of the leadership of the Conservative party Stanley Johnson said: “It would not be a reasonable expression of the way things are if there were to be an election in the Tory party for leader under whatever rules they have – it just wouldn’t be reasonable if Boris somehow was not able to be a candidate.”

To allow a contender from outside Westminster the Conservative party rules would need to be rewritten. However the change it would allow Mr Johnson, who is seen by many as a natural successor to David Cameron, to focus on being Mayor of London without running an election or by-election campaign.

Stanley Johnson used the Conservative leadership campaign of 1963 as a comparison. Alec Douglas-Home won from the House of Lords, and then quickly renounced his peerage and won a safe Conservative seat. “Alec Douglas-Home was not a member of the House of Commons, he was a peer. But they found a way.

“Don’t tell me it wouldn’t be possible to have a system whereby you say: OK, life has moved on, there are now important elective offices.”

He added: “How reasonable would it be to exclude the mayor of a major city?”

The comments follow earlier reports that Mr Johnson was left furious following claims that the Chancellor had made a “personal approach” urging him to stand as an MP.

A source close to Mr Johnson distanced the Mayor of London from the reports, insisting that there is “no civil war” between the two men and that Mr Johnson has yet to decide if he will stand in 2015.

Speaking to LBC Radio earlier this month, Mr Johnson ruled out any attempt to re-enter the Commons before 2015, and indicated he wanted to serve out his full term as mayor, which runs to 2016.

“I am so sick of this subject, I think I’m going to expire sometimes. I am going to get on with my job as mayor of London,” he said.

“The answer is I am sticking to my job that I was elected to do in 2012 and indeed in 2008. I’m very, very privileged to be here.”

The comments are the first suggestion from anyone close to the London mayor he would consider running for the leadership from outside the House of Commons.

Adding his voice to the growing number speculating over the future of the leadership of the Conservative party Stanley Johnson said: “It would not be a reasonable expression of the way things are if there were to be an election in the Tory party for leader under whatever rules they have – it just wouldn’t be reasonable if Boris somehow was not able to be a candidate.”

To allow a contender from outside Westminster the Conservative party rules would need to be rewritten. However the change it would allow Mr Johnson, who is seen by many as a natural successor to David Cameron, to focus on being Mayor of London without running an election or by-election campaign.

Stanley Johnson used the Conservative leadership campaign of 1963 as a comparison. Alec Douglas-Home won from the House of Lords, and then quickly renounced his peerage and won a safe Conservative seat. “Alec Douglas-Home was not a member of the House of Commons, he was a peer. But they found a way.

“Don’t tell me it wouldn’t be possible to have a system whereby you say: OK, life has moved on, there are now important elective offices.”

He added: “How reasonable would it be to exclude the mayor of a major city?”

The comments follow earlier reports that Mr Johnson was left furious following claims that the Chancellor had made a “personal approach” urging him to stand as an MP.

A source close to Mr Johnson distanced the Mayor of London from the reports, insisting that there is “no civil war” between the two men and that Mr Johnson has yet to decide if he will stand in 2015.

Speaking to LBC Radio earlier this month, Mr Johnson ruled out any attempt to re-enter the Commons before 2015, and indicated he wanted to serve out his full term as mayor, which runs to 2016.

“I am so sick of this subject, I think I’m going to expire sometimes. I am going to get on with my job as mayor of London,” he said.

“The answer is I am sticking to my job that I was elected to do in 2012 and indeed in 2008. I’m very, very privileged to be here.”