Call Clegg: The one where Boris agreed with Nick

Yes, you couldn't make it up. "Boris from Islington" put a recorded question to Nick Clegg on his LBC phone-in this morning. Apparently the London Mayor will be in the hotseat next week during the recess.

Anyway, this was also the one where Clegg outlined his 3 proudest achievements - cutting taxes for the lowest paid and making the tax system fairer, giving extra money to disadvantaged kids in school, son idea he first wrote about a decade ago and Steve Webb's pensions triple lock, guaranteeing a decent state pension increase.

He also summed up a huge difference between us and the Conservatives thus:

Liberal Democrats are in favour of a fair tax system. Conservatives are not. 

Anyway, here are the tweets of the occasion.

Boris will not run for Louise Mensch's seat

Good luck to Louise Mensch as she heads to New York to live with her new husband.

It didn't take long for Political Betting to kick off the speculation that Boris Johnson will fight this highly marginal seat for the Tories.

I don't think he will, however, for three main reasons.

First, he's only just been re-elected as London Mayor. Technically, he could do both jobs, but in a highly marginal seat, which he'd have to defend on new boundaries before the next mayoral election in 2016, this would be a huge issue. "Two Jobs Boris" would be on the front of every opposition leaflet. His charm and popularity would not be enough to counter that.

If he did resign as London Mayor should he be elected in Corby, the Tories are not, shall we say, the favourites for the mayoral by-election.

And if he resigned as mayor to fight the by-election, he could well end up with nothing.

Second, if he has leadership aspirations for the future, the very last thing he'd want to do is contest a highly marginal seat that's changed hands twice in five elections. He'll be after a safe seat - maybe Rifkind's when he retires, which must be in 2015, surely?

Thirdly, I suspect he is the very last person David Cameron wants to see back in the House of Commons. The "Boris for leader?" speculation is bad enough when he's not even in Parliament. It would seriously undermine the Prime Minister if Boris were actually eligible to depose him. Every single political journalist would be talking about it every single day.

I may well be proved wrong, but I just can't see Boris as candidate. And given that Sebastian Coe can't resign from the Lords, it won't be him either.

I expect that both parties will try to find someone who has some connection with the Games to be their candidate. Wonder what Labour supporter Danny Boyle's plans are for the next wee while....

Londoners pay for Boris Johnson to go to World Cup

I almost choked on my Corn Flakes this morning when I saw Boris Johnson being interviewed on BBC Breakfast, not from City Hall, but from the World Cup in Cape Town.

Who, exactly, I thought, was paying for this?

It appears that Londoners are funding this trip to the sunshine out of their Council Tax, so that Boris can go and promote England's bid to host the 2018 World Cup.

It seems that some Londoners I discussed this with on Twitter are happy to see this money being spent purely to get him out of the country, but if he's still appearing on our tv screens, how does that work?

I guess he looks better with a vuvuzela than he did waving the Olympic flag in Beiing, but I do wonder why there is a need for the Mayor of London to represent the English bid. And should we really be committing to another major World sporting event so soon after the Olympics?

I had a look at the bid site and I'm not convinced we should be doing it. Football already has enough investment in this country and we certainly don't need to host the World Cup to inspire the next generation of players.

I can see the point in the Olympics in regenerating that part of East London and in investment in sport in the future, but I'm not sure whether it's worth the cost to hold the World Cup at a time when we really need to only spend money on what's absolutely necessary. What do you think?