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How Boris Island is blocked by his father’s great work
It was Boris Johnson’s father, Stanley Johnson, who created the very EU Habitats directive that his son would need to overcome if the Thames estuary airport is to become a realityIf “Boris Island” is ever to become a fully fledged £50bn international aviation hub with six runways and links to Europe and London, as mayor Boris Johnson envisages, the government will need to get round, weaken or somehow overcome the EU Habitats directive, the gold standard legislation that has protected the wild north Kent marshes and its myriad birds, plants, insects, bats and newts from development for nearly 30 years. But what the government’s lawyers and advisers may not know is that there is a bizarre oedipal twist in this tale of ecological ambition and destruction.