The only thing Boris Johnson’s EU bridge will bring together is a united Ireland with an independent Scotland

By the time his project is completed, it will be not just a feat of engineering but the greatest act of philanthropy in human history

It is a bright February morning in 2040. Most people get about in various types of small, driverless, electric pods that look a bit like a Sinclair C5 with windows and a roof. As they’re all interconnected, they can and do travel bumper to bumper at speeds of 200mph or more. There are no more parked cars, and regular roads are wide enough for up to 10 lanes of traffic. Major motorways have more than 40 lanes. Commuting between London and Cornwall is fairly commonplace.

In the EU, on Friday evenings, Berlin office workers regularly step into their flatbed car at midnight, go to sleep and wake up for the weekend on the Amalfi coast. The British are missing out on all the fun, but they don’t appear to care.

Even the ones that do, can’t do very much about it. A pound is worth about 40 cents. No one goes on holiday much anymore. Boris Johnson, now into his fifth term as prime minister, regularly appears on television and describes the exchange rate rumours as “piffle”. A few Brits still take his word at face value, book holidays and then on arrival find themselves unable to buy anything to eat. They blame the French.

Anyway. This morning, it is not so much an unfortunate coincidence as a piece of epic trolling that two opening ceremonies are occurring on the same day.

Johnson is attending the long-awaited opening of HS2. At a cost of £212bn (at 2019 prices), the UK’s brand new train line will link London Paddington and Reading in just 18 minutes, shaving four minutes off the most recent journey time, before it went out of service in 2032 due to complete lack of demand. (Further phases of the project, stretching as far as Didcot Parkway, are scheduled for 2062, but have not yet been signed off.)

No one is completely sure what the train service will be used for. Dominic Cummings is, of course, still in post, and despite his very best efforts, the civil service, exists almost entirely as it did before, the only notable reform being direct orders from Downing Street with requests to use round Post-it Notes instead of square ones.

They have drawn a blank. They have no idea what to do with it. The current plan is to split each government department in two, with one office located at either end of the new train line, taking advantage of its super-high speeds to deliver messages between colleagues in a door-to-door timeframe of just under an hour. (It is more than a decade since Dominic Cummings banned email, after a special adviser other than Dominic Cummings leaked a story to a newspaper.)

Four hundred miles to the north, just below the mull of Kintyre, quite the gathering has assembled. This is an auspicious day. Michel Barnier is there, remember him? Eighty-nine years old too. North of the border (and yes, there is a border) there is much to celebrate.

Twenty-one years ago, people laughed at Johnson when he said he was going to build a bridge between Scotland and Northern Ireland.

But they didn’t laugh at him as much as they are today. The Belfast to Stranraer road bridge they said could never be done has broken all kinds of records, not least for philanthropy.

At a cost of just under £100bn, it is already being talked of as the most expensive present in human history. It is a huge and glorious gift, from English taxpayers, handed directly to a reunified Ireland, and the EU’s newest member, a newly independent Scotland.

Officially, the crossing is to be known as the Jean-Claude Juncker bridge, but it has already been nicknamed “The Tusk.”

It is now more than 10 years since both Northern Ireland and Ireland voted overwhelmingly for reunification in two separate referendums on either side of the Irish border.

At roughly the same time, the Scottish government ignored Westminster’s refusal to grant a second independence referendum and held one anyway. It won a convincing majority, and then unilaterally applied for EU membership.

After the 10th year-long extension to the UK-EU trade talks, Johnson eventually gave in to the EU’s demands and allowed Scotland to rejoin as the price for single market access. They had, he said, asked him to agree to something that “no British prime minister could ever accept”.

It was politely pointed out he’d already done that, several times. And with that, Scotland was gone.

Somewhat strangely, no news of either the bridge to Ireland or the obsolete-on-arrival railway appeared on the front pages of most of the next day’s newspapers, which instead chose to lead on Johnson’s brand new plans for a cable car to Australia.