REVEALED: How a French wine tycoon and Grand Prix driver tried to get Margaret Thatcher to build a bridge across the Channel
4 min read
It was to be a very long stretch of road with a casino dumped in the middle. In this exclusive interview with PoliticsHome, Lord Fowler lifts the lid on the Thatcher-era plan for a bridge across the Channel.
Boris Johnson snatched the headlines again today - this time with his suggestion to the French of a new 20-mile road bridge spanning the Channel after Brexit. But the idea is not as novel as it sounds, and our French neighbours have not always been so enthusiastic about it either.
In 1980 a group of men gathered for lunch with two rare bottles of wine in a posh Eaton Square home. The meeting had been called by British Steel boss Ian MacGregor on behalf of Philippe Rothschild - the playwright, Grand Prix driver and renowned wine grower - who had a hare-brained scheme to build a bridge between the UK and France with a spot of entertainment in the middle. One of those present was then-transport minister Norman Fowler - now the Speaker of the House of Lords.
“We had a lunch there where he tried to persuade me on the case for a bridge,” the peer tells PoliticsHome. “And apart from the wine - which in my memory was mostly consumed by Christopher Soames - the one thing I do remember is that Rothschild had this idea that halfway across there should be a casino. I don’t know if this is part of Boris Johnson’s plan or not… but that was an interesting squiggle on the plan.”
The discussion had come up after the previous Labour administration was forced to abandon plans for a tunnel in 1975 because it ran out of money. When Thatcher took charge in 1979 she said a link could only be built if it was paid for through private finance. “That was the major breakthrough, as far as we were concerned, because up to then the project had looked as though it was dead and buried,” Fowler recalls. “Then came the question of what kind of link.”
Files released by the National Archive a decade ago contained a detailed bridge plan suggesting motorists would have paid £5.60 and lorry drivers £8 to get across. The estimated costs for the structure - suspended some 220ft above the water between Dover and Folkstone and held up by huge pylons planted in the sea bed - was about £3bn. But it would have brought in some £220m a year in tolls.
But despite the lobbying for a bridge by Rothschild and MacGregor (the latter was pushing the idea “like mad” because “obviously he saw a market for a vast amount of steel to be used”) the suggestion failed to take hold for two reasons. Firstly, a tunnel was better value for money and therefore more attractive to private investors, and secondly, the French simply said ‘non’. “The French just didn’t have any interest in having a bridge - they wanted a tunnel. So as it was a two nation thing, that’s how it went,” Fowler says.
In fact, building the Channel Tunnel was just about the only thing the Thatcher administration and the left-wing Mitterrand administration - which came into power in France in 1981 - could agree on. And the French were so opposed to the suggestion of a bridge - in part because they wanted to ensure their rail freight sector got a big boost through the tunnel - that the blueprints weren’t even shared with the Prime Minister.
“I don’t think we ever engaged her on the bridge,” Fowler explains. “I think that she accepted - and the Foreign Office certainly accepted - that as the French were only prepared to consider a tunnel there wasn’t really a great deal of point in having a long conversation about having a bridge.”
Now that Johnson has rekindled the idea, Fowler says it is “certainly worth looking at”. But he notes it is "not the most obvious plan to go forward at this stage” - especially when the Government complains about having no money to repair the crumbling Palace of Westminster.
And he strikes a note of warning - from experience, of course - about the many hurdles such a grand project would have to jump over: The road network that would be needed in Kent, the environmental impact, and the possibility of the money running out and leaving half a bridge jutting, pier-like, into the sea, among others. Surely Boris Johnson thought of all those hurdles before he floated the idea with the French?
“You think so?” Fowler laughs. “Right.”
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