My first real introduction to UK politics was listening to an only mildly tipsy ex-London mayor rant about how if he could, he'd gladly "pay the rest of the UK £10 billion to go fuck itself, and get us towed out into the mid-Atlantic and declared an independent city state."
This impressed me on several levels. :-)
Boris Johnson then?
Nope.
Was it a Mayor or a Lord Mayor?
An ex-mayor, and not a Lord Mayor. Really small search space here. :-)
Indeed - London is a hugely different economy. But it relies on people commuting in across a huge area. Where all those salaries were counted would make a huge difference to how the system worked.
To make it work properly would probably require a different currency, so London£ could free-float to the sky like the Swiss Franc while the rest of the UK had a weaker £ more suited to export-driven economy. A large chunk of the economy would be exporting power and water to Londonistan.
London would become even more like Singapore or Dubai than it already is: skyscrapers for the mega-rich surrounded by immigrant guestworkers.
> London as a separate federal part
Not the first time I've heard the suggestion of ejecting London from the Union :)