Round the bend!

PM’s tunnel vision of rail roundabout under Isle of Man ridiculed

FIRST Boris Johnson had a vision for a bridge to connect Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Amid much ridicule – and practical doubts – that idea became a 25-mile rail tunnel on the same route from Stranraer, Wigtownshire, to Larne, Northern Ireland... and was met with more mockery.

But it seems the Prime Minister’s love of grand, and very expensive, projects has fuelled yet another wildly ambitious plan from Downing Street – four tunnels converging on an underground roundabout under the Isle of Man.

Perhaps inevitably the scheme triggered more criticism. ‘Bats***’ and ‘round the bend’ were two of the more unkind remarks. The Downing Street project, part of Mr Johnson’s determination to connect Great Britain and Northern Ireland, proposes tunnelling from three points in Britain – Stranraer, Heysham near Lancaster, and a site near Liverpool.

They would meet a tunnel from Larne, passing south of Beaufort’s Dyke – a 32-mile long sea trench used to dump a million tons of world war munitions.

But Mr Johnson’s proposal, named Douglas Junction, has been derided by Whitehall officials.

A source told the Sunday Times: ‘The idea was that these three tunnels would meet in a giant roundabout underneath the Isle of Man and the tunnel to Ireland would start there. Everyone knows Boris wants to do this so people were asked to look at how.’

Another government source suggested the plan for Douglas Junction was designed to ‘highlight how nuts this whole thing is’.

It was claimed the tunnel scheme is regarded as ‘bats***’ by No10 aides, who have likened it to a ‘Fuhrer bunker project’, so beloved of Mr Johnson that it ‘cannot die’.

A source said: ‘Just as Hitler moved around imaginary armies in the dying days of the Third Reich, so the No 10 policy unit is condemned to keep looking at this idea, which exists primarily in the mind of the PM. The roundabout is round the bend.’

Mr Johnson’s bridge project was widely criticised as it required support towers at heights ‘never achieved anywhere in the world’ over a sea up to 600ft deep.

But a proposal for the Channel Tunnel-style link has already been submitted by the High-Speed Rail Group. A feasibility study for the tunnel could be approved in just weeks.