Forget a Channel bridge and celebrate Crossrail

This column has long been a sucker for a grand projet. ‘Time for a trip to Boris Island,’ I gushed in 2010 when London’s then mayor came up with his much-mocked (though in engineering terms not unfeasible) wheeze to shift Heathrow to a giant man-made landing strip in the Thames estuary. But even I could see no merit in the Foreign Secretary’s equally unscripted suggestion, during the recent Sandhurst summit with President Macron, of a bridge across the Channel — which would play havoc with vital shipping lanes and cost upwards of £120 billion. If the objective is to facilitate continuing trade with Macron’s compatriots after we leave the EU, as one expert observed: ‘It would really be cheaper to move France closer.’

So let us leave that one as a blot on Boris’s jottings pad. Instead let us cleave to the idea that multi-billion infrastructure schemes are not always about political grandstanding.