The New Routemaster, out of favour since Sadiq Khan succeeded Boris Johnson as Mayor of London in 2016, could be back in the public eye as Johnson — now foreign secretary — uses it to advance his case for a 22mile crossroad bridge between England and France. He regards the New Routemaster as one of the most lasting achievements of his eight years at City Hall, with 1,000 on the streets of the UK capital providing a daily backdrop to outside television broadcasts and retaining the potential for busy Londoners to hop on and off between stops.
Disappointed that his successor, who regards it as a vanity project, has decreed that no more will be built and that the final batch was consigned to the relative suburban obscurity of route 267 (Hammersmith- Fulwell), he wants the design to become a prominent symbol of his ambitious Channel bridge for a post-Brexit age. Although heralded as an Anglo-French project during president Emmanuel Macron’s state visit to Britain in January, Johnson says the bridge must be visibly British and that its Britishness should not be compromised by Gallic culture in the way that the supersonic airliner Concorde was spelt with an ‘e’.
He also worries that Macron, who deregulated …
