The most astonishing government document I have ever read sits on my desk. It is called Network North: Transforming British Transport and it purports to explain why Rishi Sunak cancelled half the HS2 project last month. In fact, it does not explain anything. It is an angry rant, tearing the entire HS2 project to bits: ridiculing, smashing and intellectually humiliating it.
The white paper is apparently an announcement of new transport projects in the north and elsewhere, perhaps meriting a transport department press release. Yet it is presented as from Downing Street with all the pomp of a peace plan for Ukraine. It rubbishes every argument made for HS2 over a decade, in identical terms to those made by its critics. It does so, most unusually for a government paper, under a picture of Rishi Sunak, with his personal foreword. But who was the proud parent of this £100bn monster mistake? None other than the man Sunak has just dragged out of retirement to be his foreign secretary, David Cameron. Is this political sadism?
