Many elderly pensioners would face a colossal annual fine of tens of thousands of pounds – in other words, ruin. He has not thought of the many families who are living in large properties, but whose outgoings mean they would be unable to pay the tax without unreasonable sacrifice. He has failed to take account of the way any such tax would bite disproportionately on London – where property values have inevitably been resilient throughout the recession, and where they are now surging again. As the estate agents Knight Frank have shown, he is above all being dishonest in his projections about what the tax would yield. In order to raise his target sum of £1.75 billion, he would have to hit houses of values much lower than £2 million – and once a tax of that kind was in place, we all know that the Government would keep coming back for more: cruelly taxing people for an increase in the value of their property. Indeed, they would be providing many homeowners – especially those on the threshold of being clobbered – with a weird incentive to reduce the attractiveness of their homes, perhaps by planting buddleia on the roof or artistically smashing the windows for when the inspector calls.

This tax is an utterly typical Lib Dem policy, in the sense that it sounds pleasingly populist – and many people will mistakenly believe that it will only hit “rich foreigners” – while being actually both impractical and irresponsible. But what really makes my blood boil is the tone in which the pronouncement is made. It’s the lordliness, the condescension, the sublime certainty that the Lib Dems are going to be in government, whatever happens. Here is a party that is currently on 9 per cent in the polls, and languishing fourth behind Ukip. And yet it appears to be the settled view of every pundit and psephological expert that they are once again about to hold the balance of power.

The two most likely outcomes – so we are constantly told – are a continuation of the Tory-Lib Dem coalition, or else a new coalition between Labour and the Lib Dems. You can have any government you like, in other words, as long as it’s got yellow in it. The British constitution has turned into an ice cream van that sells only red-and-yellow lollies, or else blue-and-yellow lollies. Most of the punters don’t want either. They want blue lollies or red lollies – and yet there is nothing they can do about it.

It was the Lib Dems who saw to that. They were so piqued at losing the referendum on AV that they betrayed all their principles and made it impossible for Parliament to reform the boundaries so as to reflect the population; and that makes it much harder for any Conservative government to get an outright majority. The whole thing is frankly an abuse of democracy – but it allows Cleggers to lounge back on the silken cushions of his harem, and wonder whether to click his fingers at the pouting figure in the red pyjamas or the one in the blue. He is the invincible loser, the Hans-Dietrich Genscher of British politics.

Or that, at any rate, is becoming the general view at Westminster. If he believes it, I reckon he is being much too complacent. Look at the polls in the past few months. It is not just that there has been a steady drop in Ed Miliband’s support, to the point where his personal ratings are becoming truly alarming to Labour MPs. Much more significant is the steady climb in David Cameron’s vote – and the huge lead he is now establishing as the best candidate to occupy No 10.

The closer the election gets, the sharper the contrast will be – between a Tory party that has very largely addressed and rectified an economic disaster, and a Labour Party that had a large share in causing that disaster. With just a few more points for the Tories, and a few less for Labour, we are back in the territory of outright majority. And then it won’t matter at all what demands the Cleggster makes now, as the price of his cooperation.

Just in case, though, I have an idea. I see that my old chum Jeremy Clarkson is thinking of standing against Ed Miliband in Doncaster. Right idea, Jezza – wrong seat. I hope fervently that the great man can be persuaded to stand against Cleggers in Sheffield, where his majority (unlike Ed’s) is very frail indeed. Come on, Clarkson! Stand against the Cleggster with his hideous turbines and mad new taxes. That should put the wind up him.

You don’t have to delve far into Labour history to understand what has gone on: you just have to look at the election of Miliband minor to the party leadership in 2010. As you will recall, his older brother got more votes both from MPs and Euro-MPs and from ordinary Labour Party members. David Miliband won on the first ballot, on the second ballot, and even on the third ballot. He only lost on the fourth ballot, by 1.3 per cent, because of thousands of orchestrated votes from the likes of Unite and the GMB – which sent out ballot papers in envelopes marked “Vote Ed”.

The whole procedure was really a bit of a disgrace, and the result is that we have a party that is still financially dependent on the unions – Labour has taken £12 million from Unite since the election – and whose leader bobs pathetically on his strings. Ed Miliband’s handling of Falkirk shows that he cannot operate independently of the union barons – and that is potentially disastrous, since the polls show, even if by an ever-dwindling margin, that it is still technically possible that he could be prime minister.

Let me give an example of the kind of disaster I mean. Just 25 miles from where I sit, they are putting the finishing touches to a stupendous and brilliant project – a new deep-water port for London and the UK. With the help of colossal investment from Dubai, we will next month be opening the DP World port at Thurrock. This will begin to undo the damage that was done in the Sixties and Seventies, when union militancy and government hopelessness brought the London docks to ruin. We failed to invest, we failed to expand and to meet the challenge of containerisation – and we saw our business go to Rotterdam. The population of London plummeted; thousands of jobs were lost; the docks were turned into a wasteland.

Now all that is being reversed, and at breathtaking speed. Canary Wharf is bigger than the whole financial district of Frankfurt; Chinese investors are putting billions towards a third financial district at the Royal Albert Dock. With the DP World port, London will be able once again to handle the very biggest ships, and a huge logistics park is being created at the site. There will be about 27,000 jobs and £2.5 billion worth of growth.

And what is the response of Unite members? Are they celebrating the good news for working people? On the contrary, they are picketing the site, jumping on cars and hurling abuse like something from the Seventies. Unite has done nothing to bring this investment to Britain. It didn’t think of it. It didn’t promote it. Yet the union somehow believes that it has a right to be a partner in the running of the port, and that the owners should be compelled to deal with it rather than with their employees. McCluskey wants to run the place, just as he wants to run the Labour Party, and he threatens exactly the same madness that brought this country to its knees in the Seventies – the strikes and the militancy that drove investors away, and that cost London its port.

With the right employment conditions, and the right infrastructure, I have no doubt that London is going to lead the rest of the UK in an astonishing commercial and industrial renaissance. But the global competition is intense, the margins are small, and if vital facilities are in the hands of men like McCluskey, our chances are much diminished. Unite cannot bully this Government. Whatever he claims at Bournemouth on Tuesday, Miliband is a different story.

What is the definition of a milimetre? The distance between the positions of Miliband and his masters in the trade unions. What is the definition of a milisecond? The time it takes for Miliband to do their bidding. What is a Miliband? A rubber band that is twirled between the fingers of militants. The Falkirk debacle has exposed the reality of Labour’s relations with the union barons. If Ed ever got through the door of Downing Street, he would have McCluskey barrelling in first and plonking himself on the sofa. It is a disaster we cannot allow.

That delay is a huge tribute to the Prime Minister. It is a recognition of the role he has played in leading the response to the atrocities of Assad of Syria. It is also, frankly, a reflection of the quandary we all face. It seems overwhelmingly likely that the forces of the Syrian regime have indeed used chemical weapons, and killed hundreds of civilians in an act of utter savagery. I wrote in this space a few weeks ago of my deep anxieties about our getting embroiled in Syria — and I still have them.

But to use gas for mass murder is a crime that we cannot allow to go unpunished. It is no use saying that we let Saddam get away with using chemicals at Halabja: so we did, but doing the wrong thing once is no justification for doing it again. Nor is it relevant that the Americans used defoliants and napalm in Vietnam. Even if you accept the moral equivalence, one form of barbarism does not legitimate another.

This was a peculiarly nasty attack on innocent people, and the most likely account seems to be that it was perpetrated by Assad’s sinister brother, in the belief that it would teach rebel communities a lesson they would never forget – and that the West would never get round to a response. As the debate in Parliament showed, there was some shrewdness in that view. It is thankfully very difficult to get democratic politicians to vote for military action. They require hard facts, and there are still many questions to which the answers seem vague at best. There are some who say that the gas was unleashed not by the Assad regime, but by rogue elements.

You will find plenty of seemingly authoritative reports on the web — mainly emanating from Russia or Iran — that suggest the chemicals were in fact in the possession of the rebels, or had been supplied by the Saudis. There may still be some who are puzzled as to why the regime was so arrogant and insouciant as to use chemicals when they knew the weapons inspectors were nearby. All these questions can no doubt be answered — and perhaps already have been — but you can see why Obama would want them properly masticated in a debate.

Then there is an even more difficult question: what does the “strike” consist of, and what is it meant to achieve? Is this a slap on the wrist, or six of the best? Or is it regime change? The world needs to hear how Obama’s plan will be commensurate and effective — and that discussion will now take place in Congress. If the President can articulate such a mission, I doubt that US legislators will stand in his way.

There is one British figure that excites the unanimous scorn of all American politicians, and that is Neville Chamberlain. The Americans have a horror of appeasement and the notion of failing to stand up to dictators. After due consideration, I bet Washington will endorse a limited and punitive strike against Assad — provided it can be shown that the intervention will not escalate and provided there is no hint that it will lead to boots on the ground. By then, too, the evidence against Assad may have solidified.

The UN will have had longer to report. If there is new and better evidence that inculpates Assad, I see no reason why the Government should not lay a new motion before Parliament, inviting British participation – and then it is Ed Miliband, not David Cameron, who will face embarrassment. The Labour leader has been capering around pretending to have stopped an attack on Syria – when his real position has been more weaselly.

If you add the Tories and Blairites together, there is a natural majority for a calibrated and limited response to a grotesque war crime. I predict that by the end of this episode it will be Labour that looks divided, and David Cameron who looks the statesman. In the meantime, the West has longer to weigh up the two evils – doing nothing and doing something. That is a delay for which we can thank the British Parliament, and proof (if you really needed it) that Britain matters a great deal.

Mr Johnson has just been on a family holiday in Australia and was also the keynote speaker at the Melbourne Writers Festival.

He says that following his speech he was approached by an Australian teacher, Sally Roycroft, who had been teaching at a school in London but was forced to leave the UK because of “disgraceful” immigration rules.

“She isn’t a citizen of any of the 27 countries of the European Union,” Mr Johnson says. “She is Australian; and she has been told to bog off by the authorities in our country because it was, they said, too much of a palaver to go through the business of ‘sponsoring’ her to stay.

“That is the infamous consequence, as we all know, of a historic and strategic decision that this country took in 1973. We betrayed our relationships with Commonwealth countries such as Australia and New Zealand, and entered into preferential trading arrangements with what was then the European Economic Community.”

The Mayor says that the UK must now distance itself from the EU and “seek a wider destiny for our country”.

David Cameron has pledged to renegotiate Britain’s relationship with the EU before holding an in-out referendum on the UK’s membership in 2017.

However, Mr Johnson says that as well as altering our relationship with Europe, the Government should now “intensify” links with the Commonwealth countries.

He says that “you could not do better than by starting with Australia” and calls for freedom of movement rules to apply between the UK and Australia.

Mr Johnson adds: “I suppose there might be some objection from the EU — but they should be told firmly to stuff it. There is already variable geometry in EU border control arrangements. It is basically outrageous and indefensible that Sally Roycroft is deprived of a freedom that we legally confer on every French person.”

Under current EU freedom of movement rules, any citizen of a European member state has the right to live and work in the UK.

Just over 20,000 “skilled workers” are each year allowed to come to the UK from outside the EU but they need to be sponsored by an employer and pass a complicated points-based assessment.

Commonwealth citizens who have a grandparent who was born in the UK can also apply to come and work in Britain for five years. They can then apply for indefinite leave to remain in the UK.

Thanks in part to the misbegotten euro project, the EU has turned into a microclimate of economic gloom, with colossal unemployment and misery in those many parts of Europe that are being brutally deprived of the safety valve of devaluation. Since 1988, when Jacques Delors and others launched their frantic drive for monetary union, Europe has shrunk in importance and in its contribution to world output – from about 29 per cent to about 19 per cent today; and that is in spite of the considerable expansion of the EU.

There has been growth, to be sure. In fact, the world economy has grown by something like $10 trillion since the global financial crisis began in 2008. But that growth has taken place everywhere else – in Africa, in Asia and, above all, in the very Commonwealth countries that British negotiators so snootily disregarded in 1973. We need to raise our eyes beyond Europe, forging and intensifying links with countries that are going to be growing in the decades ahead – countries that offer immense opportunities for British goods, people, services and capital. And you could not do better than by starting with Australia.

This is not just a phenomenally beautiful and relatively underpopulated country with stupendous natural resources. By fluke of history it happens to be intimately cognate with Britain. I don’t just mean that we once supplied them with the dregs of the Victorian penal system, or that we have cricket and rugby in common. I mean that we British are more deeply connected with the Australians – culturally and emotionally – than with any other country on earth.

As I walk around Sydney today, I see advertisements for the recipes of Jamie Oliver. I meet people who watch Top Gear, who have fundamentally the same view of the world, basically the same set of assumptions, the same sense of humour, and – though Australians have in many ways adorned and improved modern English – we have the same language. Apart from anything else, they voted in 1999 not just to remain part of the Commonwealth but to retain Her Majesty the Queen as their head of state.

That is mainly, of course, because all the alternatives looked too ghastly – but it is a consideration, none the less; and it makes it all the more disgusting that we are treating Sally Roycroft in this way. It is time to undo the damage of 1973, and give her exactly the same freedom of establishment that we give – say – a French teacher trying to find a job in London. It is time for Britain and Australia to set up a bilateral Free Labour Mobility Zone.

It would be good for the UK, where skilled people like Sally would no longer face an absurd discrimination. It would be good for Australia, where the unspoken reality is that Australians are actually quite keen to encourage more immigration from Britain, and it would be a small but practical way of intensifying British links with the growing economy of Oceania. It would be an assertion that we are no longer thinking of ourselves as little Europeans, run by Brussels, but as a country with a truly global perspective.

I suppose there might be some objection from the EU – but they should be told firmly to stuff it. There is already variable geometry in EU border control arrangements. It is outrageous and indefensible that Sally Roycroft is deprived of a freedom that we legally confer on every French person. She ends her letter with these plangent words. “I am a bloody good teacher, I worked hard to ensure that your children were given the best opportunities and I just want to come back.”

It is time she was given a fair suck of the sauce bottle, as the Australians say.

The really quite extraordinarily attractive young woman swung round. She couldn’t believe her eyes. Emerging from the dynamic, go-getting traffic of London – universally renowned as the planet’s numero uno city for business, banking, nightlife, tourism, architecture, culture, restaurants, transport, weather, girls, romance and basically everything except airport construction – was a figure known to every man and more importantly woman in the capital. And he was cycling straight towards her.

“Can it really be…?” she gasped. “The most famous cyclist, panel show guest, author, newspaper columnist and future prime minister in the country? Rushing to my rescue in this, my hour of need? Why, yes! Yes it is! It’s him! It’s really him!” She could hardly contain herself. “It’s Horace Thomson!”

“What ho,” said Horace Thomson smoothly, as he squeezed his brakes, stopped, flew headlong over the handlebars, landed helmet-first on the pavement, got up, tried to take off his bicycle clips, got his watch-strap caught in one of them, and managed to free himself only by wriggling his left hand out of his watch. “What seems to be the trouble, madam?”

“Oh, Horace,” sighed the desperately pretty young woman. “I’ve got a puncture, and I simply don’t know how I’ll make it to The Most Tremendously Fruity Young Woman of the Year competition, which incidentally, I am the red-hot favourite to win.”

“This, madam,” declared Horace, “is your lucky day. You say you want to go to The Most Tremendously Fruity Young Woman of the Year competition. As fate would have it, I happen to be on my way there. For I, naturally enough, am the judging panel. In point of fact, it is the most important of my mayoral duties. Hop aboard my trusty Horace Bike and we’ll be there in two shakes of a lamb’s jiffy.”

“Oh, Horace!” cried the damned near eye-poppingly exquisite young beauty, as they clambered on to his bicycle, her arms wrapped around his sinewy albeit suit-clad torso. “You’re my hero! How can I ever repay you?”

“Gosh, steady on!” replied Horace. “I’m a happily married man!”

And through the thrusting London traffic, off the two rode towards City Hall.

The strange world of hack-speak

‘Hurry up and get ready for school, Charlie, or you’ll be sensationally blasted by sirs!” No, nobody talks like that – except, of course, tabloid newspapers, which use a mysterious but fascinating form of English all their own. The journalist Robert Hutton likes it so much that next month he’s publishing Romps, Tots and Boffins, an amusing dictionary of arcane hack-speak. For example, “slapdown”, which means “a member of the Cabinet whom we like has disagreed with a member of the Cabinet we don’t like”. It reminds me of the day The Sun reported that Wayne Rooney had flown abroad after having hair implants. Headline: ROO HOL AFTER BONCE OP.

He wasn’t always the Real thing

As the reported £93 million transfer of Tottenham’s Gareth Bale to Real Madrid nears completion (I hope, because the story’s been dragging on for ages), it’s worth recalling that the young Welshman hasn’t always been highly valued. I quote from a story in this newspaper’s sports pages, December 15 2008. “Tottenham will have to part with Gareth Bale as well as £15m,” we revealed, “if they want to land Stewart Downing.” That remarkable deal never went through, which is a pity, because in hindsight it would have been very entertaining. If you’re unfamiliar with Downing and Bale, imagine that Man A wants to buy a second-hand Vauxhall Corsa from Man B. Man B says, “All right, as long as in exchange you give me a Ferrari F40. Oh – and £15 million.”

Who cares about Europe?

‘The message is clear: people want their say,” said Nigel Farage after a poll by Saga showed that three quarters of people over 50 want an EU referendum. But the trouble with polling is: which poll to trust?

In another new survey, by Ipsos Mori, people were asked to name the most important issues facing the UK. The results were as follows. Number one: the economy. Two: immigration. Three: unemployment. Then the NHS, crime, education, poverty, housing, pensions, inflation…

Eventually, in joint 14th, level with drugs, came the EU. It was named “the most important issue” by 1 per cent of people, and “an important issue” by seven per cent. Meaning, presumably, that 93 per cent don’t think it’s important. Or that they don’t see a connection between the EU and, say, immigration or unemployment. So do we really care about the EU or not? Maybe the message isn’t clear after all.

When apostrophes go missing

As Tom Chivers noted in yesterday’s paper, some people are upset that The Apprentice’s Luisa Zissman has dropped the apostrophe from the name of her business, Bakers Toolkit. Still, she’s hardly the first. In 1968, Kingsley Amis wrote to the house magazine of the teaching profession. Its name: Teachers World. “Shouldn’t that name have an apostrophe?” suggested Amis. “But I suppose it is safer to drop it if you aren’t too sure where it should go.”

In reply the editor called Amis “a bit of a pedant” and said the apostrophe was dropped “for modern design reasons”. Thereafter in the Amis household, any instance of illiteracy was dryly attributed to “modern design reasons”.

Take a look to these 21 Best Romance Novels That Blow Your Mind Right Away.

The Mayor joked that he will choose the name Rosie M Banks – the name of a recurring fictional character in books by P G Wodehouse.

Mr Johnson said: “In a trance, you will buy this blockbuster by Rosie M Banks and I hope to be somewhere quietly raking it in.”

Wodehouse’s Rosie M Banks is a romance novelist who his character Bertie Wooster describes as “the most pronounced and widely-read tripe on the market”.

Harry Potter author J K Rowling was last month unmasked as the writer of detective novel The Cuckoo’s Call by Robert Galbraith.

The Mayor also used his trip to Australia to give his strongest endorsement of Mr Cameron yet, saying that he will be the Prime Minister for a “very long time”.

Asked during a radio interview about his own leadership ambitions Mr Johnson said: “[David Cameron has] got to get on and be Prime Minister and he will go on and be that for, I think, a very long time.”

Mr Johnson added: “If you look at what’s happening I Britain, the offering from the Labour Party is pitifully thin. It’s not at all clear what Ed Miliband and his guys stand for and I think David Cameron’s set there for a long spell.”

Mr Johnson is regarded by many Tories as the strongest contender to replace Mr Cameron.

However, some suspect the mayor of talking up a Tory election victory in order to increase the chances of the party removing Mr Cameron in the event of a hung parliament in 2015.

The Mayor’s comments, made during a radio interview in Australia, come after he predicted that his brother Jo Johnson, the head of Mr Cameron’s Downing Street policy unit, will one day be the Prime Minister.

Mr Johnson added: “If you look at what’s happening I Britain, the offering from the Labour Party is pitifully thin. It’s not at all clear what Ed Miliband and his guys stand for and I think David Cameron’s set there for a long spell.”

The Mayor is in Australia for a family holiday as well as an appearance at a writers’ festival.

In his interview Mr Johnson also criticised the response of the Left to the banking crisis.

“The Left…nowhere around the world, not in America, not in Britain and not in Europe, nowhere did the Left produce a new critique of the market economy that was really valid after the banking crisis,” he said.

“They never really came up with a new model. They moaned about banks and they moaned about rich people but they never really came up with a new solution, a new way forward. All we had was the Occupy movement with a few flapping tents everywhere and that didn’t really add up to much.”

There has been regular speculation about whether or not Boris Johnson has ambitions to take over the leadership of the Conservative Party from David Cameron.

Although overshadowed by his high-profile brother, Jo Johnson, a former journalist for the Financial Times who only entered Parliament in 2010, is regarded as a fast rising Conservative star.

Like Mr Cameron, he attended Eton College before Oxford University, where he was a member of the notorious Bullingdon club. He has previously been tipped as a future Prime Minister.

In his interview, Boris Johnson was asked whether he and his brother could have a similar political rivalry to Ed and David Miliband.

Since being defeated by his brother, David Miliband has regularly made his disappointment clear and has used articles and media appearances to snipe at the Labour leader.

He last month said that he would never be able to “erase” the memory of being beaten by his younger brother.

Asked whether he and his brother are “like” the Milibands, Boris Johnson said: “Absolutely not. We don’t do things that way, that’s a very left-wing thing … only a socialist could do that to his brother, only a socialist could regard familial ties as being so trivial as to shaft his own brother.

“I mean, unbelievable. Only lefties can think like that … they see people as discrete agents devoid of ties to society or to each other, and that’s how Stalin could murder 20 million people.”

Elsewhere in his interview Boris Johnson said that immigration has been “the lifeblood of London” but added: “But if you want to live in London, there are certain things you’ve got to sign up for – gender equality, freedom of speech, religious freedom.”

He also described immigrants attempting to enter Australia by boat as having “a lot of balls”.