The Garden Bridge

Subject: The Garden Bridge.

Once upon a time there was a bridge which professed to be a garden bridge, a bridge as imagined by Joanna Lumley, one of the nations luvvies who has been able to reinvent herself by popping up all over the place and has the ear of people in power.
The bridge has been described as a 'folly', an ornament, little functionality other than a statement which describes a desire to have one.
If you are Bill Gates then you can build follies all over the place it is after all your own money. But what if the folly is to be built with public money. What if the people who desire the folly and who have already lined  up a design company who have agreed to build the folly, then the only hurdle is to ensure the rules governing the spending of tax payers money can if necessary be circumvented.
These rules depend on 'costed plans' being presented to the client and the companies who tender for the work being sufficiently able to meet the technical standees and have some sort of track record and the expertise to build it.
The ex mayor of London, our current Foreign Minister, probably the 3rd most important official in the land had taken up the project and offered, through the offices of Transport for London, to meet 50% of the cost to do the preliminary planning work. George Osborn, the 2nd most important minister of the crown, promised the other 50%.
To date 80 million pounds have been invoiced without a spade entering the soil.
Models must have been made and plans showing the artistic representation drawn up. Negotiations with certain bodies who keep an eye on "planning" must have been entered into with perhaps a few lunches.  Legal consultation doesn't come cheap but consuming  80 million pounds in times of austerity is highway robbery.
Today we listened to the editor of an architectural journal describe how after 2 years of digging for information into meetings where no minutes were kept (remember this is public money and I would have thought minutes a statutory requirement), he described a plethora of dodgy practice to obtain the go ahead for the bridge to be built and secondly to explain where the 80 million was spent and who got it.
Thomas Heatherwick in collaboration with Arup the builders presented their plans along with two other design/builders and submitted tenders. Both of the other competitive bids had the pedigree to build and design bridges, Heatherwick had virtually non. Heatherwick and Lumley had many preliminary meetings with Boris Johnson the mayor prior to the other designers being brought on board to tender. The tender process a, statuary requirement, was obfuscated by a preference already being in place.
Two of the officials in TFL have subsequently been taken on by Arup in senior positions "but no assumptions can be drawn" we are told, according to the powers that be, that their pursuance of the Garden Bridge project, to the benefit of Heatherwick / Arup, had anything to do with their new jobs. Yeh, pull the other one !!!
Only today has the current mayor, Sadiq Kahn pulled the plug on the project. But will we see a proper independent investigation of Boris Johnson or TFL and their involvement.  Will they, as usual sidestep any legal remedy, "too big to tumble" "too engrained in the establishment", "too many pals pulling for them" !!