Why Boris’s ‘barmy’ ideas just might appeal to voters

When Boris Johnson was London mayor, he pitched an idea to the then prime minister David Cameron for a high-speed, completely underground railway between London and Manchester.

It would use magnetic levitation technology and transport passengers between the two cities in just 18 minutes – effectively sucking them in a capsule similar to the way money is transported inside banks along pneumatic tubes.

Mr Cameron greeted the idea, as he did most proposals from his long-time rival, with a sort of bewildered interest. But more sensible heads inside No 10 dismissed it as crackpot, geographically impossible and, literally, money down the tube. It is this enthusiasm for the “grand project”, however, that has become Mr Johnson’s calling card; radical, apparently impossible ideas that he hopes give an iconic, worldchanging air along the lines of Stephenson’s Rocket at the height of the Industrial Revolution.

Some have not made it beyond his newspaper column such as his proposals for bridges between Britain and Ireland and Britain and France.

Others have got quite far down the development line, like the idea for an alternative to Heathrow expansion by building a “Boris Island” – an airport on land in the Thames estuary to the east of London, which was eventually rejected because it would have cost £100 billion and posed a threat to the environment. And there was the Garden Bridge, which was dropped by his successor Sadiq Khan for being too expensive, but not before it cost the taxpayer £43 million.

Only a small number, like the Emirates Air Line across the Thames, have got off the ground, as it were, but the cable car has been criticised as a white elephant.

MPS and policy-makers expect Prime Minister Johnson to have the same keenness for the outlandish idea in office. Government-commissioned research has shown smaller projects are more cost-effective compared to huge infrastructure projects that can not always deliver on the big ticket, transformative aims.

However, it is the visionary ideas that can capture the imagination of voters. “There is a zeitgeisty thing, that we are in the middle of a really exciting technological revolution, with automation and driverless cars, and I think Boris is trying to ride that wave of innovation,” one Tory backbencher said.