Why Boris Johnson’s bridge is like Donald Trump’s wall – Martyn McLaughlin

Boris Johnson’s scheme to build a bridge between Scotland and Northern Ireland may simply be a classic diversionary tactic straight out of Donald Trump’s playbook, writes Martyn McLaughlin.

Will Boris Johnson go down in history as a great builder of bridges? (Picture: Frank Augstein/pool/AFP via Getty Images)

In the autumn of 1913, with tensions high surrounding the Home Rule Bill, Winston Churchill addressed his constituents in Dundee and suggested an exception may be made for Ulster. His calls were quickly greeted with scorn and derision. The satirical magazine, Punch, enlisted one of its illustrators to flesh out Churchill’s view of a partitioned Ireland. It showed a man-made channel separating the province from the rest of the island. The leftover material was discarded in the Irish Sea, forming a makeshift bridge with the Rhins of Galloway.

How fitting it is that, more than a century later, a Prime Minister so untethered from reality should revive plans for a fixed link connecting Scotland and Northern Ireland.

It is an idea which has been bandied around since 1799, pursued and mocked by successive generations with varying degrees of sincerity. Boris Johnson’s iteration is not the most absurd ever floated, although you should not infer from that he is taking it seriously.

The myriad arguments pointing out the utter folly of the £20bn project are now so familiar that even the average punter has a working understanding of Beaufort’s Dyke, the vast trench which scores the seabed of the North Channel, and the innumerable horrors which lurk within it.

In what represented a state-sanctioned act of encopresis, the Ministry of Defence lacked the will or industry to properly dispose of harmful chemical munitions in a safe location, instead chucking the lot off the Cairnryan coast.

Bridge to the moon

The practice has long since been disavowed, but dark and persistent rumours abound that the submarine depths remain a dumping ground, used by Dominic Cummings to rid himself of Topman’s 2018 autumn season beanies and quilted gilets for fear of becoming the subject of a caustic caption in Esquire.

A succession of civil engineering experts have made clear the impracticalities of the bridge. Famously, James Duncan, a retired offshore engineer from Edinburgh, did so in considerable detail, writing to the Sunday Times to point out the crossing was more than 1,000 feet deep in places, and would require at least 54 support towers unprecedented in their height. The whole endeavour was about as feasible, he concluded, as building a link to the moon.

But still Boris Johnson persists with it. Only he knows why. The rest of us must accept the fact that this is the illusion of choice the nation voted for – a Prime Minister who is either so recklessly idiotic as to believe the thing can be built, or one sufficiently shameless as to act in bad faith and talk up the conceit.

It is hard to say which option is the worst, or which is closest to reality. There is a depressing logic supporting the idea that Mr Johnson is sincere in his belief the bridge can become reality. It is the kind of thrusting, big ticket infrastructure project by which leaders with a paucity of imagination believe history shall remember them. Politicians, like pre-school children, love a bit of mark making.

But then again, that wrongly assumes Mr Johnson’s primary concern is legacy. I suspect that it is not the case. His overriding obsession is power. For a long time, it was how to seize it. Now, it is how to hold on to it at any cost.

Millions spent on garden bridge folly

If that includes being derided by experts for concocting a headline-grabbing wheeze, so be it. Mr Johnson’s political career is littered with envelopes, coasters, and fag packets on which he scrawled the first drafts of grand building projects, safe in the knowledge they were destined never to see the light of the day.

From the proposed new airport in the Thames estuary to the doomed 1,200-foot-long garden bridge in central London, a scheme which sucked up £53m before being unceremoniously scrapped, these follies follow a distinct pattern. They are bold, carousing visions, expressly designed to cajole The Sun into mocking up a front page featuring Mr Johnson as Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

It is a cynical form of politics, of course, but it works, bolstering the Prime Minister’s profile while sparing him the inconvenience of actually doing anything. More than that, it is a classic diversionary tactic, borrowing a page – if not an entire chapter – from the Trump playbook on how to make promises that are monumental and undeliverable. How is that wall coming along, anyway?

It is no coincidence that the so-called Boris Bridge was resurrected on the very day Michael Gove confirmed frictionless trade with the EU will end this year, meaning border checks are “inevitable”.

What better way to obscure the looming reality of our small island growing ever more distant and remote than to peddle a myth that we will soon be able to wander between its outposts with a newfound freedom?

Inexplicably, many choose to feast on this phantom banquet, ignoring the crumbs meted out so far. Anyone who has the misfortune of commuting on the A77 will know only too well the shocking state of the road network. Across the Irish Sea, meanwhile, the absence of a continuous motorway between Derry and Belfast is a farce.

Such mundane concerns are not newsworthy enough to tickle Mr Johnson’s ego and will go unaddressed, just as his bridge will go unbuilt.

Let’s just hope he doesn’t come across a 1913 copy of Punch and decides to send in the diggers.