A TV drama forced Sunak to act over the Post Office scandal. Can HS2 please be next?

Something is desperately rotten at the core of our government machine. It simply isn’t working, not as others do.

On the very day that Rishi Sunak has the nerve to bask in the glow of being decisive by announcing plans to exonerate Post Office operators caught up in the Horizon computer scandal, documents are leaked showing that HS2 is in an even worse state than anyone thought.

To cheers from the Tory benches behind, the prime minister makes his Post Office statement. It’s punchy, “Action Man” Rishi, cutting through the mess of previous administrations.

His braying backbenchers fail to acknowledge that it was the Tories who awarded Post Office chief Paula Vennells a CBE in 2019 (the one they clamoured for her to hand back.) And it was a Tory regime that appointed her to the board of the Cabinet Office.

The posturing is breathtaking: Sunak taking on the judiciary; the hated judges, who dared to rule on the EU and to question his immigration policy; Sunak doing what others said was impossible. It’s an election year and Rishi is coming out swinging.

How they kept a straight face when denying he was simply responding to the success of the ITV drama, Mr Bates vs the Post Office, was a masterclass in hypocrisy.

Hopefully, ITV’s commissioning department is urgently ordering similar reprises of the tragedy of haemophiliacs receiving contaminated blood; Covid PPE purchasing and the handing of large sums of money to Tory friends for equipment that did not function; Grenfell and who was responsible; Britain’s flood defences that patently are inadequate; Hammersmith Bridge (a pet subject of mine as I live nearby) still closed to vehicles four whole years after it was temporarily shut for safety reasons.

Anything, to bring a halt to the gravy train enjoyed by lawyers at the interminable inquiries – not just the smart alecs doing the interrogating, but the bunch sitting behind them, staring for hour upon hour at their laptops. We’re paying for them; what they are doing and why there are so many of them is baffling.

There’s an inquiry into the Post Office debacle, of course there is. It’s been taking evidence since January 2021 and is not due to wrap up until this summer.

Protracted review is the time-honoured weapon of choice for governments caught in the crosshairs of crisis: to appoint a senior judge to scrutinise the whole episode and report back. To park it, in other words. By the time the judge makes public their findings, the heat will have died down, the world will have moved on.

Not this time. Tough guy Rishi has seen to that. The inquiry can meander on, but Sunak has acted. Whether a precedent has been set for basing government decision-making on TV reconstructions remains to be seen.

Sunak’s last act of bravado was at the Tory conference, when he announced the scrapping of HS2’s northern leg in the very city it was planned to serve, adding to his “fear nothing and no one” image.

At some stage, surely, a judge will be asked to look into HS2. The point of the new high-speed rail line, we were informed, was to increase overall capacity between London and the north of England. More services would allow more people to switch to rail from cars; freight services would increase, alleviating pressure on the existing West Coast Main Line and jammed motorways.

Costs spiralled upwards, and there were planning issues galore. In the end, faced with an eye-watering bill and an ever-lengthening time horizon, Sunak stepped in. The first stage, from London to Birmingham, would be completed, the rest would be ditched. But be assured, northerners would benefit from boosted local and regional networks.

Leaked documents paint a different picture. The plan is that HS2 trains will join the West Coast Main Line near Lichfield, and continue north to Manchester, Liverpool and Scotland. They will be 60m shorter than the Avanti trains currently operating on the West Coast Main Line. And they will not be able to tilt, so they will have to slow down. So much for the promised super-fast railway.

Internal Department of Transport papers also make clear there will be no extra trains per hour (tph) using the route. The number “will be the same (or less) than the number we run today. This is a particular problem for Manchester and Glasgow, where we know there is no extra capacity to run additional services.”

Trains will be shorter, and there will be no extra ones. This, on an existing heavily-used route. On a recent journey from Euston to Oxenholme Lake District, on a train bound for Glasgow, all seats were occupied and passengers were standing or lying on the floor at the ends of the carriages.

In desperation, planners are considering joining two HS2 trains together. They would have to divide at Crewe since Manchester Piccadilly cannot accommodate such long trains. However, no funding is so far available for this option.

Nor is it likely to be. Given that the estimated cost of HS2 from London to Birmingham has climbed – from between £49bn and £56.6bn to £66.6bn – it’s difficult to see where the funding required for the longer trains would come from.

Fewer seats, slower trains, and it’s called HS2. It would be funny if it wasn’t true. Another inquiry looms, unless the TV scriptwriters followed by Rishi get there first.