Boris will fight them on the bridges … but is he Churchill? I’m afraid not

Are doomed bridge ideas cheaper by the dozen? The question arises after infrastructure dilettante Boris Johnson called for a second bazillion-pound bridge, this time stretching between reality and the sunlit uplands of Brexit. Forgive me – between and the UK and France, which may well amount to the same thing. Or, as Boris puts it: “Our economic success depends on good infrastructure and good connections.”

Don’t set too much store by that “our”. The thing to remember about Boris Johnson, with apologies to Simon and Garfunkel, is that he’s not on your side when things get rough. He’s not even on your side when things are great, unless your side happens to be the thing that’s best for him. The only circumstance in which Boris might lay him down over troubled water would be if he fancied a bunk-up with the water. Perfectly possible: he likes troubled things.

Mostly, though, the foreign secretary imagines headline ideas to be a substitute for actual ideas, and is drawn to flashy projects that in popular parlance might come to bear his name: Boris Bridge, Boris Bikes, Boris Island … Alas, Boris is such a terminal ironist that even things he really means sound like wordplay – clever metaphors that only the plodding would take literally. Do keep up, is his chief rhetorical message to the left behind. Plenty of Donald Trump supporters claim the wall was always a metaphor; plenty of Boris supporters will suspect this bridge is one too.

After all, Johnson is a chap who would much rather Send A Message than process a cargo. The latter is for boring little people whose parochial concerns are embodied in the highly restrained tweet of the Dover MP. “Boris is right – we must invest in infrastructure,” this ran. “Let’s start by dualling the A2 to Dover, building the Lower Thames Crossing, and lorry parks on the M20.” Boris’s Widened A2? Boris’s Lorry Park? Pretty sure none of those have the ring he desires.

If Boris talked to any ordinary Conservatives out in the heartlands and all the places that voted for his Brexit, he might be shocked to discover that their chief reaction to stories like this is to wonder why there could be money for such a thing but not for the NHS. The Tories are entering a stage of their journey in government that has proved an endgame before: every voter is rubbing up against the realities of an underfunded NHS, or is close to someone who is. Thus every single thing the government even notionally talks about spending even notional money on that isn’t the NHS had better offer some immediately clear benefit. The £350m red bus was such an appealing message for a reason.

Ultimately, though, the bridge should remind us how feverishly Boris Johnson is still searching for the thing that is going to define him as great. When oh when, he wonders, is he going to finally transform into Winston Churchill?

If you haven’t read his Churchill book, it is hugely recommended as a psychiatric document – for all the horrifying and hilarious things it unwittingly reveals about its author. I can never believe his therapist let him publish it. By the end, it’s quite clear that you have not read Churchill’s story so much as Boris’s attempt to get you to see anything he might have done, or might ever do, as Churchillian. All politicians are self-interested gamblers with events, Johnson explains, and Churchill “put his shirt on a horse called anti-Nazism … his bet came off in spectacular fashion”. Mmmm. It probably helps to imagine Churchill spending a Sunday morning writing two columns – the first advocating resisting Hitler, the second making the case for supporting totalitarian conquest of Europe and the elimination of Jews.

Inevitably, then, the major unresolved dilemma of the work is Johnson’s search for his own war. He obviously takes comfort in the slightness of Churchill’s prewar speeches: “Where was the feeling, where was the truth, where was the authenticity?” The reader is constantly sledgehammered by the intimation that just because someone is known for bandying around Latin zingers and bellowing things like “We sell French knickers to the French, sparkling wine to the Italians!”, it doesn’t mean he isn’t going to step up and into history at Britain’s moment of destiny.

The terrible irony for Boris Johnson, of course, is that the moment of national destiny is already here. And it is a project that really does deserve to bear his name. Boris’s Brexit is upon us – we are living through the phoney war, and the real business will be unleashed soon enough. Cometh the hour, cometh … oh dear. Cometh a well-briefed report in the Sun this week, in which friends of Johnson said he would “rather stay in” the EU than accept a soft Brexit. What can you say? Other than: “Friends of Winston Churchill said if he couldn’t have No 10, then no one could.”

• Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist