Politics

Boris, bridges and me


Northern Ireland and the Republic need better transport connections between Dublin, Belfast and Derry. The PM’s talk of a bridge is the stuff of circuses

February 24, 2021
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London Mayor Boris Johnson (right) worked with Andrew Adonis (centre) on Crossrail. Photo: PA Images / Alamy Stock Photo

The Mayor of London is essentially the capital’s chief transport planner. But he doesn’t have any money and depends on the government to do anything big. So when Boris was first elected mayor in 2008, and I was Transport Secretary, we had to get on or nothing would have happened.

We rubbed along okay, agreeing an infrastructure plan. We inherited from Ken Livingstone the plan for Crossrail—the new rapid east-west commuter rail line across London, extending out in both directions to Reading, Heathrow, Docklands and Shenfield. When it finally opens, Crossrail will boost London’s public transport capacity by 10 per cent and create vibrant new commuter towns.

We also inherited schemes for tube and bus upgrades. Boris added his cycle superhighways and designs for a new double decker bus. I added HS2 to Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds, and a second Crossrail line to go north/south across London with a central tunnel from Wimbledon and Clapham to Islington and Hackney, serving Clapham Junction and many other (normally) congested London rail stations, including the soon-to-be HS2 terminus at Euston.

We basically did a deal to do the lot, supported by PM Gordon Brown, and official planners who believed in London, one of the greatest cities in the world, having a transport system to match, with far better links to cities in the Midlands and the North.

Gordon was especially keen to get HS2 to Scotland. My HS2 plan had high-speed trains running through from London to Glasgow and Edinburgh in just over three hours, travelling on conventional lines beyond the new track. Gordon wanted to call HS2 “the Union railway.” It is a pity that, in the constant stop-go on HS2 since 2010, this big picture has been lost.

However, until the vaccine, Boris’s sole good decision as PM was to keep going with HS2, albeit at too slow a pace and with a Sword of Damocles over the vital eastern Yorkshire leg, which makes it possible to run high-speed trains through to Newcastle and Edinburgh. Once again, the opportunity for a “Union railway” is being lost, although in the context of Brexit and internecine strife as to who should head No 10’s Union Unit, there’s no focus on infrastructure or anything else.

Boris and I converged on infrastructure from different perspectives. His eyes glaze over at the mention of regeneration. He loves Shiny New Things with his name on them: buses and bikes are good, trains and bridges better. He is the Roman Emperor. He once quoted Juvenal to me in Latin. Not being an Etonian I can only remember the English, which is roughly: “give them bread and circuses and they will never revolt.”

To Boris, a huge bridge or tunnel across the Irish Sea is one giant circus, like the London Olympics over which he presided with gusto. In truth, this is one of the most absurd ventures since one of his emperors made their horse a consul. Advisers are whispering as much in the imperial ear: he is swatting them away, but let’s hope they prevail. Ireland, north and south, desperately needs decent road and rail connections between Dublin, Belfast and Derry, its three key cities, not a bridge serving a fraction of the traffic at ten times the cost.

I don’t do empires, real or imagined. I’m more Brunel—an infrastructure planner with a nuts and bolts view of what makes for good modern cities and the required facilities within and between them. Where Boris and I agree is that, in the depths of this modern plague—the Romans had a lot of those too, indeed they may have caused the fall of its empire—the death of the city is greatly exaggerated.

London will be back. To flourish as a still bigger and more successful metropolis it will need Crossrail 2 as well as Crossrail 1, and new bridges across the Thames Estuary, where there is a vital necessity to transform towns going out to Southend and Medway into successful extensions of the capital, addressing London’s housing crisis in the process.

Bread, circuses and bridges all have their part to play, but in the right places at the right times.