BORIS Johnson has scoffed the main course and is trying to tuck into dessert – before the North-East’s political leaders have even sat down at the table.

I’m talking about the irrepressible Mayor of London’s latest pitch to persuade his fellow Bullingdon Club old boys in Downing Street to hand him yet more powers.

Meanwhile, there is an open Cabinet revolt over Lord Heseltine’s plans to end Whitehall’s iron grip on every other part of England – a grip which will not end anytime soon.

Yesterday, Mr Johnson published a report demanding complete control over property taxes – council tax, including revaluations, stamp duty and business rates.

His London Commission also argued for the right to raise new tourism and environmental taxes, as the capital strives to match the muscle of Scotland and Wales And London’s government would also enjoy the power to borrow billions to build houses and improve infrastructure.

Mr Johnson denied any plans to turn London into a “city state” – insisting this was a “sensible and moderate attempt” to secure faster economic growth.

The Mayor said: “For too long, London has been an economic giant, a political giant – but a fiscal infant. It’s high time London was treated in a more grown up way.”

Suggestions that – with London’s economy already racing ahead of the rest of the country – these extra freedoms were premature, were firmly rejected.

Yet, it is only a few weeks since Vince Cable, the Business Secretary appeared to tell me that the Hezza’s report – on devolution to the regions – was dead on arrival. He said local enterprise partnerships (LEPs) were simply not capable of handling huge sums of public money, as the Tory peer had proposed.

He pointed to key spending areas in his own department – innovation funds and skills budgets – that must be administered from Whitehall, to ensure value for money.

And, skewering the heart of Heseltine’s dream – his call for multi-million pound “spending pots” in each sub-region – Dr Cable said: “That’s not going to happen.”

Even if Tarzan’s report is adopted, tax-andborrowing powers – now wanted by London – were never on the menu for the rest of England, of course.

Now, there are huge doubts about the wisdom of handing huge sums of public money to unelected, unaccountable, unproven “enterprise partnerships”. But, equally, it makes no sense for a government that wants to “rebalance the economy” to reward the part of it that already holds all the cards – London runs its own transport system, retains its own development agency and raises some taxes.

And it receives massive Government funding.

The problem is that the regions have no structures to do the same. Time to regret that rejection of an elected North-East assembly, all those years ago?

THIS job produces a few surprises – including, this week, the chance to bend elbows at a Westminster bar with none other than the Archbishop of Canterbury.

The former Bishop of Durham remembered the Black Paw Brewery, in Bishop Auckland by arranging for its Archbishop’s Ale to be the guest brew in the House.

As we sipped together, the Most Reverend Justin Welby revealed he had persuaded Prince Charles to accept bottles of Archbishop Ale at his Gloucestershire home.

He laughed: “The staff were in ecstasies when they drank it!”