This blog first appeared as a column in the Andersonstown News
What is it with Boris Johnson and big projects? We all know men who drive big cars as a sub-conscious counter-balance to their lack of size in other areas. But Johnson doesn’t just get driven around in a big car. He is, in another sense entirely, a driven man.
In 2019, picking up on a chic idea tossed out by Joanna Lumley, Johnson threw the full weight of his mayoral bulk into a plan which would have built a flower-filled bridge from London’s South Bank to the Temple. All objections that it was a hair-brained idea, a needless idea, a monstrously expensive idea, meant nothing to the then-Mayor of London. Eventually, his flower-power bridge plans began to cost the British people. £2.76million to the guy who designed the bridge. £12.7 million to the engineers who got involved in planning. £2.3 million to the lawyers (there are always lawyers). £1.3 million to the executives who didn’t actually execute anything. And of course they needed surveyors to survey the riverbed and see that no unexploded bombs from WW2 were hidden in the water. In addition, the project had to have a website, which cost £161,000. Biggest of all was the bill from the people who won the tender to build the bridge: £21.4 million. Total bill for everything: £53 million. For a fragrant bridge that never got built.
Then there was the HS2 scheme – a fast rail-line that would join up Britain’s big cities. Especially in the north, and so generate enormous wealth. Some people thought it would connect the people in England with Scotland. Uh-uh: the HS2 is to go only about half-way to Scotland. Some people thought it’d cut down carbon emissions. Uh-uh: the HS2, broadly speaking, will have a ‘neutral’ impact on carbon emissions. Latest word now is that the to-Leeds leg of the HS2 will not, as originally planned, go to Leeds. So much for levelling up. But hey – the bit Boris and his boys are still determined to do will cost somewhere between £70 and £80 billion. Now that’s what I call a big rail project. Nice one, Boris.
But closest to our hearts and homes was surely Boris’s Burrow. That’s the name they gave to Boris’s bold plan to build a 25-mile tunnel that’d connect NEI with Scotland. It’d be a mere £10-billion project, and, Boris believed, would ease trade between the UK and NEI – providing, of course, that Scotland doesn’t leave the Union. Or, come to think of it, NEI.
Alas, a government-initiated study has found that this tunnel would be “too technically challenging and expensive”, so any week now, we will hear that the idea has been scrapped. Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s former aide, seems to have got it right last July when he called it “the world’s most stupid tunnel.”
So two pet projects scrapped, one pet project continued but with a bit missing. Could this fetish of latching on to colourful but crackpot plans be part of a major construction: Boris’s public image? Looked at that way, It doesn’t matter whether these big bold plans are brought to fruition or not – they’re just another element in the Boris persona as a strong, daring visionary. Yes indeed Virginia – building an image costs money, but the public will pay the price, not Johnson. Compare the colour and dash of Johnson with that Starmer guy, forever whining on about figures and jobs and vaccination rates. How drab he is, and what fun Johnson is by comparison.
The British electorate like big, colourful thinkers, and while Johnson may not be much of a thinker, he is big and colourful. He is a sort of Maggie Thatcher in reverse: while Thatcher reduced the British economy to the money in your handbag, Johnson expands the British economy with wild, technicolour dreams. When the dream ends the bills come in, but hey – at least Johnson showed he was a visionary. A fatally flawed one, but a visionary. That’s why the slightly unhinged British electorate think he’s great.
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