Boris Johnson secretly discussed Apple having a store on the Garden Bridge in return for funding the doomed project
He was accompanied on his secret 'sales' mission by a deputy mayor who had once mocked the Garden Bridge as a 'crazy idea that was never going to happen'. The project was abandoned in August.
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Your support makes all the difference.Boris Johnson secretly discussed letting Apple have a store in the middle of the Garden Bridge in return for the tech giant paying for the ill-fated project, it has been revealed.
Newly released transcripts show the “mad” idea was raised after Mr Johnson, then the mayor of London, embarked on a 24-hour secret “sales” mission to San Francisco hoping he could persuade Apple to sponsor the whole bridge.
He was accompanied by his deputy mayor for transport Isabel Dedring who – it has now emerged - had mocked the Garden Bridge scheme in its very early stages as “a crazy idea that was never going to happen”.
No Apple sponsorship was forthcoming.
Despite Mr Johnson’s dream of giving central London a vegetation-filled “living bridge” to rival Florence’s Ponte Vecchio, no building work ever began.
Mr Johnson’s successor Sadiq Khan appointed Dame Margaret Hodge MP to lead an independent review, which found that construction costs had ballooned to £200m and pressing on with the project would pose too great a financial risk to the taxpayer.
The Garden Bridge project was abandoned in August, having cost the taxpayer an estimated £46.4m.
Transcripts of Dame Margaret’s interviews with Mr Johnson’s key aides show that the mission to Apple had been conducted in conditions of some secrecy early in 2013.
When interviewed last November, Sir Edward Lister, Mr Johnson’s former mayoral chief-of-staff, was clearly reluctant to admit that Apple had been the target of a “sales” mission launched by the politician who is now Foreign Secretary.
“We’ve never actually said who it was,” Sir Edward told Dame Margaret. “It was just somebody in San Francisco ... I don’t really want to say [who] in this interview. Because to some extent there was a degree of confidentiality about that.”
Explaining how he ended up on a plane to San Francisco with Mr Johnson and Ms Dedring, Sir Edward said: “The mayor felt there was a fair chance that Apple might actually sponsor the whole bridge … So we jumped on a plane.
“We were only there for 24 hours and flew back again. We went there, we talked through it all … It was, ‘We do this, we call it the Apple Bridge and you pay for it, chum’. It was a real sales operation to try and sell it.”
Implying that he thought Apple’s suggestion of having a store in the middle of the plant-filled bridge was mad, Sir Edward said: “They had an interest if they could build a retail store on the bridge, and that was not going to be acceptable.
“Then there was the idea you could build a retail store on Temple [Tube] Station, which was not mad at all. But it then transpired it wasn’t really a possibility.”
And so, Sir Edward said, the “pretty good idea” to get Apple sponsorship “came to naught.”
Sir Edward regretted not bringing Mr Johnson’s friend the actress Joanna Lumley, who had become heavily involved in promoting the bridge project.
“Maybe that was a mistake,” he said. “She could have worked her wonder on them.”
The transcripts show that in the course of her evidence Ms Dedring admitted that when the Garden Bridge was in its earliest discussion phases, it had been the subject of mockery.
She told Dame Margaret: “Anthony Browne [Mr Johnson’s former economic adviser] was Boris’ partner in crime on that whole set of discussions and I vividly remember because we would always tease him about it.
“We all thought it was a crazy idea and was never going to happen. So I do remember, poor Anthony, always mocking him about this and he was like, ‘No,no it’s going to happen’, and we’re ‘It’s never going to happen dude’.”
Sadiq Khan withdrew support for the Garden Bridge in April after Dame Margaret’s review criticised the estimated £200m construction costs of a bridge that had originally been priced at £60m.
Dame Margaret, a Labour MP, found that £37.4m of public money had by then already been spent on pre-construction work.
A deal for the Government to underwrite cancellation costs of up to £9m is expected to take the taxpayer’s final bill to £46.4m, for a bridge that will never be built.
In August the Garden Bridge Trust, the charity tasked with building and running the bridge, announced the project would be “formally closed”.
In her evidence, Ms Dedring described the Garden Bridge as “this very left-field something that popped out of the mayor’s head.”
Agreeing that there had to be checks on how public money was spent, she said: “Is it a bad thing if you could have a ‘vanity project’ which then delivers something good for society? No, but what you don’t want are unchecked vanity projects that are totally pointless.”
When Dame Margaret asked who in the mayoral team had scrutinised the Garden Trust’s pre-construction spending, Ms Dedring replied: “Nobody really”.
When this prompted Dame Margaret to exclaim ‘Jesus!’ Ms Dedring told the former chair of the Commons Public Accounts Committee that such detailed management was the job of Transport for London (TfL).
She said: “That would be in line with all the other mayoral direction type of stuff. All the mayoral direction is doing is saying ‘I would like you to do this’, and then the management of that instruction should be handled by TfL.”
She added that on the subject of whether public money would be used to fund maintenance once the bridge was built, "the mayor made a series of not coherent statements".
Ms Dedring also admitted she did not share Mr Johnson’s “passionate” enthusiasm for the Garden Bridge and found “virtually all” the rest of her portfolio more worthy of her time.
She said: “He’s my boss, this is what he’s passionate and enthusiastic about … so I’ll do the minimum to make sure it happens well, but equally, it’s not something I want to spend my time on because there’s road safety and cycling and pollution and all these other things … across a really huge portfolio, virtually all of which I was more passionate about.”
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