Where was the elephant in the room? It received not a mention in the spending review. In among the hospitals and schools, the highways and the prisons, the great beast wandered, a ghostly presence cursing all from whom it stole.
I found it in a Whitehall handout, sandwiched somewhere between Leeds station and a Welsh level crossing. The transport department did not even include it in its railway plans for the parliament. It was relegated, as if an extinct species, to just one short sentence. It said it would spend £25.3bn “to address longstanding delivery challenges” for HS2. Is it a train or not a train?
