What’s left of HS2 will serve as a monument to the Conservatives’ time in power

At the dawn of the Conservative Party Conference, the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, solemnly told impatient reporters that it was not the “appropriate time” to announce whether the HS2 link to Manchester was to be cancelled. It turned out that the actual moment of the (unofficial) announcement was highly inappropriate, at least from Mr Hunt’s point of view, as it arrived minutes before his keynote speech.

The chancellor would be right to be angry about the timing and the manner in which the story broke – but it was only a matter of time before the original scoop in The Independent was followed through. It was, in other words, foolish to try to delay the announcement indefinitely.

The unfortunate (to say the least) coincidence of the conference being held in Manchester complicated matters, as did divisions within the cabinet. But Mr Hunt and his colleagues had a choice when The Independent first revealed, some weeks ago, that the project was in jeopardy.

They could either seize the initiative, and manage the “comms” as best they could, long before conference met; or they could dither and run the risk that it would break in the most damaging way possible. That has now happened. The government still claims that a “formal” decision has not been taken, but that is a formality, in the same way that a parliamentary bill doesn’t become law until it gains royal assent. The game’s up.

This particular “rail crash” of an announcement fits into a number of sorry political narratives. First, it adds to the impression of an administration that is not in control of events – and a party that cannot control the agenda, even during the one week of the year when it traditionally has the political stage all to itself.

Had the uncertainty about HS2 been cleared up before the party met, then the damage might have been better controlled. Alternatively, if ministers had decided to treat the media and the public as adults, they could have said that the project was under review, that there was a debate taking place within government, and that the decision would be announced in due course, for instance as part of the autumn statement in November.

Yet Mr Sunak kept talking repetitively for days about “spades in the ground”, which sounded positive insofar as it meant anything, while his chancellor was complaining about costs being out of control and struck a decidedly negative tone.

When Michael Gove, supposedly in charge of “levelling up”, told Trevor Phillips on Sky News on Sunday morning to forgive him for being evasive about HS2 because no decision had been taken, presumably Mr Gove was unaware that such a decision had indeed been taken and was set to be leaked to reporters shortly. It does suggest that members of the cabinet are the last to know about such momentous developments. Conclusion: they’re divided – and incompetent with it.

The other “narrative” that the HS2 debacle feeds into is one of national malaise and serial failure – and in this case, one with a vast waste of public funds attached to it.

HS2 is hardly the first major public project to be wildly over budget. Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin’s Gothic masterpiece, the rebuilt Palace of Westminster, was completed in 1876, late and badly overspent. Concorde, the troubled joint venture between Britain and France, was an embarrassing drain on public resources for decades, never turned a profit, and carried relatively few passengers. Yet at least the nation had things of beauty and wonder to point to: a world heritage site, and a technological aeronautical marvel still unsurpassed.

By contrast, HS2, at best, will now run from Euston station in London to just outside Birmingham, and on to East Midlands Parkway – which is two miles from East Midlands airport but has no public transport link to it.

At worst, HS2 will run, as the joke goes, from Acton to Aston – at a cost of about £31bn to date. That is about double (in real terms) the previous worst example, the NHS IT project that was finally abandoned in 2013.

Pretty humdrum. No one will admire that, and no tourist will come from Texas or Tokyo to take a selfie with it. What’s left of HS2 will serve as a monument to the Conservatives’ time in power; to a party that combined austerity with the sickening waste of public money, not least on the botched contracts awarded to ministers’ cronies during the pandemic.

In his lacklustre and, as it happens, overshadowed and mostly ignored speech, the chancellor rightly asked why it costs 10 times more to build high-speed rail in this country than it does across the Channel in France.

Taxpayers – and other members of the voting population – will be asking questions, too. They will want to know how a project that could have helped transform the prospects for the North, and lifted the whole country’s economic growth rate, has come to this.

With the promise of renewal and progress now broken, they are instead left wondering what might have been. They might wonder how the contracts and costs were managed. Why the strategic decision was taken to build north from London, rather than south from Manchester, Leeds, York and Newcastle (as was first envisaged).

Was too much spent on tunnelling to placate voters in Tory constituencies in the home counties? Who, exactly, is accountable for the mess? Only a full independent inquiry will answer such questions.

They might not justify yet more expense on a judicial public inquiry, because the truth may not need that much excavation to discover – but even so, the people have the right to some answers.

The money wasted on this and other failed projects could have been spent on, say, fixing the schools hit by the Raac crisis, or paying nurses, or rebuilding our armed forces, or instituting tax cuts for the working poor. Wouldn’t we all like to know what went wrong?