Weak members of the eurozone may leave the single currency in the coming year because “hysterical attempts to bubblegum” the euro keep failing, the London mayor Boris Johnson warned on Sunday.
In some of his most outspoken remarks on the euro, which prompted a rebuke from Nick Clegg, Johnson also appeared to question David Cameron’s entire negotiating strategy at the European summit.
The London mayor, whose interventions before the summit prompted Downing Street to toughen its stance, said he expected a realignment of the single currency over the next year.
Speaking on the Andrew Marr Show on BBC1, he said: “I’d be amazed if we were all sitting here next year and the euro had not undergone some sort of change. I think it highly likely that there will be a realignment.”
Asked whether that meant some countries would leave the euro, Johnson said: “I think possibly, yes, and we all know who the likely candidates are.”
Johnson, who first made his name as the Brussels correspondent of the Daily Telegraph in the 1990s, said that European leaders are attempting to keep the euro afloat because so much “political ego” has been invested in European integration.
“There’s such phobia about this and such a lot of political ego has been invested in the success of the euro project that people are failing to see that actually that might be the best way forward. We continually go on with these hysterical attempts to bubblegum the whole thing together. We’re just going to consign those periphery economies particularly to low growth and we’re never going to get confidence back in the eurozone.”
Clegg dismissed Johnson’s remarks. Speaking shortly after the London mayor’s appearance on BBC1, the deputy prime minister told the Murnaghan programme on Sky News: “I read and hear a lot of people sort of breezily predicting almost with a sense of glee that the eurozone is going to fall apart and this country is going to drop out of the euro. I don’t know, my crystal ball is no clearer than anybody else – all I do know is that no one should lightly wish for that outcome because there’s no such thing in my view as an orderly break up of a currency.”
Johnson also challenged the PM’s negotiating strategy at the European summit earlier this month. Cameron vetoed a revision of the Lisbon treaty, which would have placed the eurozone’s new “fiscal compact” on a legally binding basis, after failing to secure a series of concessions to protect Britain’s financial services. But the prime minister said he supported greater co-ordination of fiscal policy for the eurozone.
Johnson indicated that there was little threat to financial services because Britain has a veto for “most of the important stuff”. He also said Cameron had been right to wield the veto because it would be wrong to give Britain’s blessing to an “anti-democratic structure of a fiscal union”.
Vince Cable, the business secretary, highlighted Lib Dem unease over the veto on the Andrew Marr Show: “I frequently wonder about my position in government because we’re all making difficult decisions, but when I reflect on it – as I do – I realise that what we’re committed to is actually making this government work.”
