The Sketch: How to make the railways reliable ­ cancel all the trains

It was an unnecessarily boring Transport question time. Most of the money that fat fool John Prescott said was going to upgrade the railways has been spent, services are being cut, Network Rail is a Horlicks, and everyone's fed up talking about it.

Information was in very short supply. Alistair Darling wouldn't tell us which airlines were relegated to the distant parts of Heathrow on security grounds (plane spotters enjoy more official information than MPs). The wee Cabinet Office fellow simply refused to say what Lord Birt's duties were ("Is it that embarrassing?" Norman Baker asked). And Andrew Robathan's long-running campaign to bring the wretch Prescott to justice over his union flat has run into another wall of silence.

What did we get? Some government monkey telling the Commons: "We need to focus resources where need is greatest and problems exist." And no one threw their shoes at him. Why are they allowed to say such life-denying things? How can they go through all the difficulties of public life just to answer a House of Commons question with the words: "We are looking for appropriate speed limits for the appropriate circumstances." Anyway, "problems" invariably exist and "need" is invariably greatest because some well-meaning idiot in some previous parliament decided to "make a difference". It is worth a full academic study to determine how much parliamentary activity is taken up with correcting absurd mistakes made by Parliament itself. If government was a company its directors would be in jail, its assets stripped and 85 per cent of its functions franchised off.

What else? Boris Johnson asked a probing question about the Chinnor-Thame bus service in his constituency. By and large, Mr Johnson is on the right side of the Tory argument: on liberty, the level of taxation and on the role of the state. He must be quite brave too; his first act on being elected an MP was to publish an article about the Speaker which described him as a useless old todger with a face like an exploding haemorrhoid. (I can't remember exactly how I put it at the time).

But in the House Mr Johnson has a manner half-borrowed from Ken Clarke which he must abandon. It has a degree of self-mockery in it. Typically for a politician, he has taken over functions for himself which properly belong to the private sector. Still, at least he doesn't say he is working to improve services through strategic local partnerships to restore access to shopping, education and work-related opportunities in accordance with government targets on social exclusion. He has an impressive vocabulary; I have heard him with my own ears use the word "fructify". And even his opponents enjoyed his use of the word "squirrel".

Mr Darling told us he was going to increase the predictability and reliability of the railways by cancelling services. There is a logic in what he says. If he takes it to its conclusion he will cancel all services entirely and at last the predictive power of the railway timetable will be perfect.

SimonCarr75@hotmail.com