Boris Johnson, MP, becomes minor Jules Verne via John Lennon, suggests invasion

On the first day of Nicholas Sarkozy's France, a Daily Telegraph visionary has the solution to South East England's property madness.

You may say I'm a dreamer, in the words of the poet Lennon, but I'm not the only one. It was back in the 1980s that EuroRoute proposed a magnificent scheme to the British and French governments, backed by such names as Barclays and Trafalgar House. The EuroRoute involved both a road and a rail link, and it strikes me as tragic that we didn't choose it. Dial it up now, and you will see how the motorist goes out to sea on a big bridge, though no bigger than many already in existence. You then arrive at an island seven miles out, like a gigantic Fisher-Price kiddy kar park, and you descend a short spiral ramp to the sea-bed.

There will be a lot of Jules Verne over the coming weeks, and probably not so much Boris Johnson - who strikes me as a Coryat kind of figure. I pity the traveller 400 years on who tries to follow in Boris's footsteps. Or cycle-tracks.

Meanwhile, another view of invasion - the other way around.

And the National Review discovers an entirely new Kent

The Kent Corridor from London to Dover is known ironically as “France’s Silicon Valley.”

Late King Lear Weather Hits Kent

April 28, Saturday. (Bloomberg)

A magnitude 4.3 earthquake struck Kent, a region southeast of London known as "the Garden of England",in the worst tremor in the area since 1580, the British Geological Survey said.



Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks!

The quake is the largest in Britain since an earthquake in Dudley in 2002.

And a few days later the humourists get to work.