A public figure will invariably revert to the mode of communication that suits him best. Many commentators have reasoned it’s why we seldom see either of our country’s two most senior politicians in an intimate interview setting, and when they are wheeled out, reluctantly, one of the few things Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn have in common is a propensity to look shiftily away from camera, as though for help, inspiration, or escape. I’m a political party leader… get me out of here!
Corbyn is much happier on the public soap box, at the rallies, in the stadia, even Glastonbury, where his allotment club secretary figure is somehow transformed into a revolutionary for our times.
For Johnson, it’s all about the physical, the striking visual, Henri Cartier-Bresson’s decisive moment, the takeaway image that defines the idea, what the Queen in a bad mood might dismiss as “a stunt” (she is reported to loathe them), what others might call political genius. It’s the zip wire – where some cynical onlookers claim he deliberately got stuck, but surely not! – it’s the so-called Boris Bike, it’s the rugby brawl and, when all else fails, it’s another Bridge.
It was to a bunch of schoolchildren that the Prime Minister mooted his big new scheme on Wednesday, this time a bridge to cross the sea between Scotland and Northern Ireland. But should we dismiss this idea as an apparent crowd-pleasing whimsy from the tousled one, we should note that this isn’t the first time such a scheme has been mentioned. Johnson brought it up previously during his party leadership campaign, and has pushed it forward to the point where Channel 4 News have reported Department of Transport officials have been tasked with looking at the logistics of the enterprise.
Civil Service resource managers may not wish to make this one a priority. Firstly, Johnson has a history of building bridges, on sand, in his head, that don’t necessarily translate to our physical landscape. One of his suggested workarounds for goods transportation problems post-Brexit was a bridge that crossed the English Channel – which seemed like a bright idea to end all possible problems, until some killjoy pointed out it would interfere with the busiest shipping channel in the world.
Less disruptively, but perhaps catering for a more elite bunch, came his support for a Garden Bridge, something to capture the mood of a long-ago, happier London, with a city-side “floating paradise” where the best-dressed of us could perambulate on a summer evening. It was finally ditched over uncertain costs to the taxpayer, but not before £53m of public funds had been plunged into the Thames (David Cameron’s hands in these muddy waters are not entirely clean, either).
But Johnson is nothing if not undeterred, telling his young audience this week of a bridge between Stranraer in Scotland and Larne in Northern Ireland, “That would be very good. It would only cost about £15billion.”
A prophet will always have his doubters, however, and a retired offshore engineer was quick to add his weight to all those feeling instinctively this was not an idea to build their next family motoring holiday around.
Edinburgh’s James Duncan comprehensively listed the challenges posed by the scheme, from the depth of the water the bridge would have to cross (1000 feet in some parts), the need for an astounding 54 towers to keep upright the bridge across the 22 miles of water, and more worryingly, his mention of the obsolete munitions that were dumped from the 1940s onwards in that very stretch of water, the Beaufort Dyke – an estimated 1.5million tonnes of unlisted explosive material, and no maps guiding anyone to their locations. Hurt Locker, anyone? Plus, more reliably, the weather conditions would mean any bridge that did get built would invariably be closed for a huge chunk of the year.
While Johnson’s announcement was greeted more positively, if tentatively, by both the DUP and the Scottish government, the reality is that this bridge doesn’t really have legs politically, either.
The PM’s idea is a totemic one, a symbolic link to demonstrate that, whatever happens in the coming weeks/months/years, Northern Ireland will always be part of the United Kingdom. But, built between two rural outposts, there is no promise of economic benefit. For example, any manufacturer in Dublin wanting to export goods to the continent will need a huge financial incentive to take his goods via Belfast, up to Larne, then across to Scotland, and down again, when most of his market is in the south anyway. There’s a reason why most of Ireland’s export goes through southern England.If Johnson and his government really wanted to create a sweetener for the DUP, and that becomes increasingly questionable the nearer we get to October 31st, they could instead built a motorway to Derry and make life easier for the province’s travellers queuing up on dual, and in some parts single-carriageway routes.
At the other end of this bridge of dreams is Stranraer, a beautiful but remote spot connected to the rest of Scotland on equally narrow roads. One recent visitor told me, “I went there on the ferry. Mostly sheep and flowers.”
But never mind the naysayers, for Johnson and his organ grinder Dominic Cummings, it’s all about the optics, and the election. How is this likely to play out with the increasingly head-scratching electorate? Again, with the approaching deadline of Brexit looming, we will likely hear less and less about the DUP’s concerns and needs in conversations at Westminster. And if the politicians stop pretending to care, how likely is it that Johnson’s main base of English Leave voters will want to spend public money on a bridge somewhere far away? Contrarily, it may cause resentment in parts, with voters still reeling from years of austerity watching their taxes being spent, not on their own local infrastructure but something else entirely.
One political journalist tells me, “There isn’t one vote in England to be had in building that bridge, and it’s not particularly attractive to the Scottish or Irish either. They have bigger options facing them right now.”
This is exactly the kind of negativity that Johnson is constantly at pains to quash, telling the Sunday Times last year, “There is so much more we can do, and what grieves me about the current approach to Brexit is that we are just in danger of not believing in ourselves, not believing in Britain.”
Others, however, see it more likely that Scotland will be an independent nation long before the bridge is started, let alone finished. Another political journalist tells me, “The fear is we’ll be left with three enormous towers in the Strait between the two, that will never get finished, while nations argue about the money, and it will sit as a permanent blot on our landscape, an enormous totemic symbol of this sorry debacle.”
Furthermore, the way things are going, with both Northern Irish commentators and Scottish government revving up for more discussions about independence for their respective nations, post-Brexit, it’s not unfeasible for both countries to have left the United Kingdom before the bridge is finished, in which case, it will either end up joining two countries no longer in the United Kingdom.
In the meantime, that same Scottish engineer James Duncan describes it as “feasible as building a bridge to the moon”. Let’s not give anyone any ideas, eh?
