The Banana Republic of Boris Johnson

[Republic of Scotland]

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2018/11/banana-republic-boris-johnson

Like dictators and presidents of banana republics, Boris Johnson is
eager to build monuments to his own greatness. Thus, when Thomas
Heatherwick, designer of the Olympic cauldron at the 2012 London games,
proposed spanning the Thames with a “garden bridge”, Johnson seized on
the idea. He was just beginning his final term as London’s mayor, and a
“Boris Bridge” would be a far grander and more enduring legacy than
Boris Bikes.

What followed was, by any standards, an unmitigated catastrophe.
Heatherwick and the engineering company Arup were awarded lucrative
contracts to design and build the bridge following a public tendering
process that was blatantly – almost criminally – rigged in their favour.
When it was pointed out that Heatherwick had built just one bridge,
whereas a prize-winning rival had built 25, Johnson blithely retorted:
“Michelangelo had probably never built a duomo or had never painted the
roof of a chapel before he did the Sistine Chapel.”

The construction contract was awarded to Bouygues after various
pre-conditions were abandoned. It was awarded before any sort of viable
business plan was produced, the requisite funding secured, or the
necessary land and licences procured. The projected cost soared from
£60m to more than £200m, and the notion that the bridge would be
entirely funded by private donations was quietly jettisoned. By the time
Sadiq Khan, Johnson’s successor as mayor, finally scrapped the project
in 2017 it had cost taxpayers £46m without a brick being laid or bucket
of concrete poured.

Typically, Johnson refused to be held to account or to accept
responsibility for this fiasco. In a scathing report, Margaret Hodge,
the former chair of the Commons public accounts committee, said: “I
deeply regret that Boris Johnson, the London mayor ultimately
responsible for all the decisions and actions taken on the Garden
Bridge, refused to co-operate with this review, either in person or in
writing and despite several requests.” She also noted that no records
were kept of key meetings and discussions – a failure she described as
“completely unacceptable when decisions around spending public money are
being made”.

The Greater London Assembly’s oversight committee forced Johnson to
appear before it under threat of subpoena, but he blustered, obfuscated,
changed the subject, blamed others, professed not to remember key
details and claimed – in the face of overwhelming evidence to the
contrary – that “not a single penny of taxpayers’ money was wasted”. Len
Duvall, who chaired the committee, said he used “all the tricks… rather
than take responsibility for the project”, and added: “The rules are for
others, not for him.”

Will Hurst, the managing editor of the Architects’ Journal, who has won
awards for his magazine’s investigation of the scandal, told me: “It’s
an utter disaster and Johnson has not taken responsibility for that.
He’s tried to deflect blame on to others like Sadiq Khan who cancelled
the project. He’s allowed Transport for London officials who did his
bidding to take a lot of the flack.

“It’s an astonishing failure and loss of public money and Johnson has
been extremely disingenuous about why it happened. The rules were bent
and broken to try to force it through because it was his priority as a
‘grand projet’ to leave behind.” Yet Johnson sails blithely on,
unashamed and unrepentant. The Garden Bridge would have merely spanned
the Thames. The man who would be Britain’s next prime minister now
dreams of building bridges across the English Channel to France, and
across the Irish Sea to Northern Ireland.

***

On 6 July, Johnson endorsed Theresa May’s Chequers plan for leaving the
European Union, though he did tell the specially convened cabinet
session at the Prime Minister’s country retreat that selling it would be
like “polishing a turd”.

David Davis then resigned as Brexit secretary and Johnson reconsidered.
On 9 July, fearful of being outflanked, he announced his own resignation
as foreign secretary – “second over the parapet” as one commentator
observed. “I have practised the words over the weekend and find they
stick in the throat,” Johnson explained in a letter published in
defiance of the usual convention that a minister’s resignation letter is
released at the same time as the prime minister’s response.

Johnson has an expensive lifestyle to maintain – all those ex-wives and
mistresses, children and love-children. But he was not out of pocket for
long. Within days he had resumed his old job as a Daily Telegraph
columnist, contemptuously ignoring the rule that forbids former
ministers from accepting new positions for three months after leaving
the cabinet without the express approval of the government’s Advisory
Committee on Business Appointments.

The Telegraph is paying Johnson £275,000 a year for his weekly column,
and there is no doubt who is getting the better deal. Britain’s biggest
broadsheet has become Johnson’s megaphone, his personal Pravda.
Alongside large pictures of Johnson in statesmanlike poses, it regularly
splashes his latest excoriating attacks on the Prime Minister across its
front pages.

“Scandal of Brexit is not that we’ve failed, but that we have not
tried”, the headlines proclaim. Or “It’s time to believe in our Great
Britain”. Or “May’s Irish Brexit plan is a disaster, warns Boris”.
Inside it publishes, entirely uncritically, his 4,000-word diatribes.
“He should be paying us for these advertorials,” said one disgusted
Telegraph journalist. A Telegraph executive told a friend he was
“utterly, utterly appalled that all this money is being spent on this
person, and that all his uncouth and ignorant takes on things are now
taking over the newspaper every Monday”.