Boris and the PM at war once again over law and order

BORIS Johnson and Theresa May have been sniping at each other over law and order ever since she used her power as home secretary in 011 to ban him from using the water cannon he bought as London Mayor to deal with rioting.

When she became Prime Minister she humiliated him again after he jokingly compared himself to a pet dog reportedly strangled by Michael Heseltine.

Irked by Mr Johnson’s rebellious antics in her Cabinet, she quipped: ‘Boris, the dog was put down – when its master decided it wasn’t needed any more.’

They carried on feuding over policing methods right up to Mr Johnson’s resignation as Mrs May’s foreign secretary in July last year over Brexit. Four months earlier, he criticised her at a Cabinet meeting for preventing greater use of stop and search to combat rising knife crime in London.

It is no surprise she took Mr Johnson’s remarks personally: Mrs May’s views on stop and search stem from her famous speech in 00 when, at the height of Tony Blair’s power, she said the thendeeply unpopular Conservatives were in danger of turning into the ‘Nasty Party’. Among the reasons she gave was that it was seen by some as having ‘demonised minorities’.

A decade later, as home secretary, she turned her words into action, supporting curbs on stop and search, portraying it as racist on the grounds that black people were seven times more likely to be stopped than white people.

Abandoning her usual caution, she told MPs: ‘Nobody wins when stop and search is misapplied. It is a waste of police time. It is unfair, especially to young, black men. It is bad for public confidence in the police.’

She claimed that as many as one in four of one million stops carried out in

013 could have been illegal. Mrs May used the same issue to upstage Mr Johnson at the 014 Tory conference, when they were front runners in the battle to succeed David Cameron as party leader.

She arranged for Alexander Paul, a black student from Brixton, south London, to introduce her with a moving speech on how he had been stopped and searched 0 times since he was 13 despite having no criminal record. She paid tribute to Mr Paul again in her 017 conference speech after he died of cancer, aged 1. But within months, a surge in knife crime in London led to calls for a rethink on the issue.

When Mr Cameron resigned, Mrs May trounced Mr Johnson in the race to succeed him after his leadership campaign imploded. Now the boot is on the other foot. With some Tories claiming Mrs May will have left office by the end of the year, Mr Johnson, bidding to succeed her in Downing Street, is determined to have the last word on knife crime – and on who should run Britain.