Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem

by Tim Shipman

The ridicule might have been greater had Johnson not been stopped by his senior aide Will Walden from announcing his latest wheeze to boost Brexit Britain – a new Channel Tunnel for cars. In private conversations at the Tory Party conference he said, ‘If you wanted to show your commitment to Europe, is it not time for us to have further and better economic integration with a road tunnel? That’s what we need.’ Johnson argued that such a plan had been ruled out in the 1980s ‘on the basis that you could not clean the fumes out of the tunnel’. But he said, ‘That’s all changed. They now have the technology. You could come out of the EU but join Europe in the most fundamental way.’ The plan was even more grandiose than the ‘Boris Island’ Thames Estuary airport he had advocated as London mayor and appealed to Johnson’s sense of history. ‘You undo the damage done at the end of the ice age,’ he explained. ‘The Channel is really a river whose tributaries used to be the Seine and the Thames. It became bigger and bigger and bigger as the ice melted until it separated Britain from France.’ Reversing it would be ‘a great symbol of European commitment’.