Amid all the arguments about Wembley Stadium, the one that concerns me most is questioning whether the national stadium ought to be in London at all. I have heard many well-meaning people argue that there is no real reason why the national stadium ought to be situated in the capital This is a disastrous line to take. I have made it my business, both in arguing London’s case and in actual financial support, to ensure that the new Wembley Stadium is built.Later this month, I will be meeting Sir Rodney Walker, of Wembley National Stadium Ltd, to see how we can work together to secure the future of the stadium. He has been dealt a bad hand by Ken Bates, but I hope that we can now move on from the Bates era into something more constructive.
London is a powerhouse of the national economy.

Much as America would be poorer without the economic dynamism of New York, so Britain as a whole would suffer from a weakened capital city. As I have argued in this column and elsewhere, London does not compete with Manchester or Birmingham, but with New York, Paris and Frankfurt. Whether London is the site of the national stadium is thus a matter of considerable significance to the UK as a whole.The fashionable view that London gets too much of the national cake is wrong. London has enormous concentrations of wealth, but also of poverty.

Less public money is spent per head of the population in London than in Scotland, but London’s infrastructure ­ including policing and public transport ­ goes to sustain one of the most important cities on the planet. Any decision about an issue such as the national stadium fits into this context.I do not make the case that everything that is “national” ought to be in London. If we were starting from scratch, it would be rational to ask whether we should locate the national stadium in the capital. On the balance of the arguments, we would probably conclude that the capital was the right place to put the national stadium. But either way, we are not starting from scratch.Wembley Stadium has been a feature of the economy of London for many years, and north-west London in particular.