Tom Richmond: We may pay penalty for Boris's second term

BORIS Johnson's decision to seek a second term as Mayor of London is good news for the Tories. He's one of the party's more recognisable and respected politicians, despite his eccentricities. It is, however, bad news for Yorkshire.

With the election not until 2012, just weeks before the opening ceremony of the London Olympics, Johnson's early decision provides him with a powerful platform to push even harder to exempt the capital from the worst of the spending cuts.

He's already done this once. He threw a hissy fit when he learned that the budget for Crossrail – the new transport link across London – was to be trimmed by five per cent, a small reduction in comparison to proposed departmental budget cuts of 25 per cent.

Johnson threatened to resign until Ministers relented.

They knew it would be virtually impossible to find a suitably high-profile candidate to replace Johnson in 2012. Yet, with the Mayor's candidacy now confirmed, it will be even more embarrassing for the Government if he chooses to step aside on a point of principle over funding.

He also knows that he can hold the Treasury over a barrel becauseit will be even more difficult for the Tories to win with another candidate if he chose to resign in a fit of pique.

Yet, for the Mayor's precious ego to be suitably soothed, there will

have to be even more money ploughed into London'stransport infrastructure – money that will, presumably, come at the expense of regions like Yorkshire that have already been short-changed for far too long, andwhere congestion is now greater than in the capital. You have been warned.

TRANSPORT Secretary Philip Hammond means business. "I want to see far fewer civil servants sitting in my department evaluating, monitoring and appraising transport schemes proposed by local authorities in Bradford, Birmingham or Bristol," he says.

"What local communities need is answers to problems, not poorly-designed, 18-inch wide cycle lanes, laid down roads that go nowhere simply to meet some target in a plan handed down from Whitehall."

What Hammond did not reveal is where the money is going to come from. It certainly won't be coming out of the London Mayor's budget.

HAVING suggested two weeks ago in this column that policy-making would be better served if certain Whitehall departments moved out of London, I see that York Outer MP Julian Sturdy has now taken up the cudgels.

He has suggested that Defra – the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs – moves to York, where it already has a base, so it can use this region's "expertise in agricultural matters".

"I am keen to put forward a proposal to make York into a centre of excellence for agriculture matters, following the example of

Montpellier in France," Sturdy told Caroline Spelman, the Environment Secretary.

Her response was not entirely dismissive, but she did point out that she had recently visited Defra outposts in Worcester and Bristol.

It was a polite way of saying that Defra will not be moving out of London – and closer to its countryside constituents. More's the pity.

WITH the Police Federation claiming 40,000 jobs are at risk, there is, inevitably, going to be claim and counter-claim as the spending review approaches.

This was borne out by the conflicting figures that two newly-elected Yorkshire MPs presented to Nick Herbert, the Police Minister who has the misfortune to find himself standing, like a lonely officer, on this particular frontline.

Herbert found himself rebuking the assertion by Karl Turner – John Prescott's successor in Hull East – that Humberside Police will have to reduce its number of officers.

Help was, however, close at hand – in the form of Brigg and Goole MP Andrew Percy. The Tory was quick to point out that police numbers in Humberside fell by 150 under Labour and that rural policing, in future, needs to "be treated with as much importance as city centre policing has been in the past".

It looks like this will be one issue where Ministers cannot win.

ON the subject of policing, what does this say about Britain today when it can cost 826,000 to train officers, from four forces, to respond to earthquakes – an unlikely occurrence here, thankfully – but a school will have to pay two officers to protect children on their walk to church because community safety officers are "not trained for crossing the road"?

IT is ironic that ex-ministers, including Doncaster's Rosie Winterton, have been complaining that the coalition did not allocate more than seven days to debate electoral reform and plans to reduce the number of constituencies.

They were, after all, members of the last Labour government that permitted MPs a single day to discuss Gordon Brown's sudden conversion to the Alternative Vote system – and which they are now opposing because they don't like the decision by his successor to dispense with the services of 50 MPs.

WHAT has happened to deference? I ask this question after seeing the BBC's 10pm news bulletin – and a tie-less reporter covering shamed singer George Michael's jailing for drug driving.

A bit more respect for the justice system would not go amiss from the BBC, especially given how Michael's selfishness could have killed innocent road users. But, then again, standards appear to count for little at the Corporation these days.