How my viral tweet became Boris Johnson's flagship policy

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In January of this year, Boris Johnson unveiled his latest wheeze: building a bridge to France. This, I thought, was a stupid idea because there’s already a tunnel, and it’s half-empty.

So I dutifully fired up MS Paint and drew a pink line on a screenshot of Google Maps from Edinburgh to Dublin. I tweeted out the picture and said Boris was an idiot: he should build a high-speed rail line to Ireland instead.

Something about this daydream seemed to strike a chord: the tweet had racked up many thousands of retweets by the end of the day, including from Scottish and Northern Irish politicians. It stayed in my notifications for weeks.

The variety of reaction was a joy: among the tens of thousands of responses, three or four people independently dubbed the imagined undersea tunnel “the craic pipe” and said it would be fantastic for stag dos, which I hadn’t thought of. Others pointed out legitimate problems with the idea, such as the fact I had drawn the line over an old Second World War munitions dump (Beaufort’s Dyke) that might pose construction challenges.

Things quickly escalated from there: the next day a Scottish newspaper managed to find a bona fide bridge expert, who said it was a great idea. They launched an informal campaign to get the thing built, running stories about it regularly. The Irish press soon picked up on the story, too, and a few UK national outlets.

Every few weeks, a friend would send me a new article: the Irish foreign minister thinks it’s a good idea; the DUP are on board; the Scottish government wants to do a feasibility study – that sort of thing.

This was a mildly amusing diversion for a few months, until in June someone spoiled all the fun: Boris Johnson, the very man who I had been railing against with my original suggestion, backed the idea. Out was the bridge to France; in was the bridge to Ireland. They should call it the Jon Stone Memorial Bridge, I suggested, because I am dead with laughter.

Johnson has continued to bang on about the project, this week combining it with a pledge to scrap HS2. I think it is fair to say it is now his flagship policy, because he has no others that I know of.

It was pointed out to me that there’s a political dimension to all this: such a bridge would complicate Brexit negotiations over Northern Ireland by giving it a land border with Great Britain. The EU has argued for customs checks between Great Britain and NI on the basis that they would only be done at ports and would thus be harmless. That might explain why certain Brexiteers are so enthusiastic about linking the two islands by land.

But am I pleased that my tweet has been adopted as policy by the probable frontrunner to be our next prime minister? Not as much as you might think.

I had originally imagined something like the Eurostar, but Boris seems to be keen on a road bridge – which I don’t find remotely interesting because I don’t drive. Nobody seems to be interested in building the high-speed railway that would actually link Edinburgh, Glasgow, Belfast and Dublin, and which would make a bridge better than flying.

Of course, I’m not even sure if it is economically feasible anyway, because I did exactly 15 seconds of development work on my grand plan. Which, let’s be honest, is probably about as much as Boris Johnson has done.