Heathrow: Will Boris Johnson lie down in front of the bulldozers? He was happy to lie down the side of a bus.

It took 50 years to come to the decision that Heathrow might have a third runway, and it took Zac Goldsmith almost as long to decide to resign over it

The Foreign Secretary said London would become 'the city of planes' and not in a good way (Reuters)

Fifty years of prevarication is over. Now we know. There will be a third runway at Heathrow. Probably. Construction will begin in 2021. Maybe. It could even be open by 2026. Possibly. And Transport Secretary Chris Grayling was despatched to the house to tell everyone that this was a big deal. “This is one of the most important messages we can send to the world about Britain being open for business,” he said.

The world may, however, get mixed messages, not least as the Foreign Secretary has promised to ‘lie down in front of the bulldozers’ to stop it being built. That said, as far as the world's view of Britain is currently concerned, the spectacle of the Foreign Secretary engaged in direct action against the government's flagship policy would hardly be off message.

On his part, Johnson has already sought to clarify the comments, telling Sky News that what he in fact said was not that he would lie down in front of the bulldozers, but that he would lie down the side. And he never actually said bulldozers, he said bus.

Still, if the Prime Minister wants to assure people that she will do what she says she’s going to do, she picked the right man to deliver the news. In his last job at the Ministry of Justice, many of Chris Grayling’s policies, like banning prisoners from reading books, were in place for a full six weeks before Michael Gove overturned them.

But on Heathrow’s third runway, it’s clear Grayling means business. “There have been suggestions in the media that this process has been slowed down or somehow delayed,” he said. Evidently the eruptions of laughter from both sides of the house, the press gallery, the public gallery and even, it appeared, the speaker’s chair, put him off his stride a little bit. “In fact, Mr Speaker,” he continued, “the opposite is not the case!” If nothing else, it was true.

Next he assured MPs that, “Even with expansion, fewer people will be affected than today.” Yes, that’s right. The only way to reduce the impact of Heathrow is to expand it. Leave it the same and the problem will only get worse. Hey. It's 2016 after all, this sort of stuff barely troubles the mercury on the ridiculometer.

But one man, above all, was not convinced. Two rows behind, stroking his chin, his face set in a stony mask of moral certitude, his hair seemingly having grayed overnight too, was Zac Goldsmith. This, he knew, and the house knew, was an issue over which he had pledged to resign and force a by-election, a pledge that, unfortunately, around a hundred TV interviews's worth of desperate jokes spread over the last twelve months, about how much he wished he’d never made it, had not appeared to have got him out of.

There was not exactly a frisson of excitement when Goldsmith stood up. Even less so when he sat down, around thirty seconds later. It was hard to know where to place his anti-Heathrow peroration in the pantheon of commons resignation speeches. Jeffrey Howe and Robin Cook already had two distinct advantages, in that both of theirs had been audible from a distance of more than three feet, and they had also actually remembered to resign during them. Goldsmith didn’t manage that until three hours later, finally finding his convictions through the medium of an email from the Treasury, advising that he had been appointed Steward and Bailiff of the Three Hundreds of Chiltern, which happen to be just south of High Wycombe and slap bang on the Heathrow flight path. So he resigned from that job minutes later too.

Goldsmith is a chap who had thought nothing of leafleting the Sikhs of South London with news that Sadiq Khan was planning on stealing their family jewellery, a course of action that caused his own sister to publicly disown him, so it wasn’t unreasonable to hope he might have more to say on this, his career-defining issue, than: ‘I place my strong opposition on the record,’ before sitting down again.

His main points, too were ill-considered. The third runway, he said, will be subject to ‘constant delay, constant anger, and is almost certainly not going to be delivered.’ Has he not realised that is precisely what government policy in 2016 is meant to be?

Detail remains light, but no one expects the third runway to be finished for at least ten years, and no one expects it to cost less than £17bn. Some people have been brave enough to wonder out loud why rolling out a long strip of Tarmac should take so long. Longer, for example, than the M25, and cost twice as much as all the Olympic infrastructure, but with his final words, Grayling had an answer: “The third runway will be built with British steel.”

Now that really will send a message to the world, and the one they've come to expect, too.