Nothing annoys Richard Branson more than other people's lateness – and as someone who relies on trains in the UK, I agree

What a lovable and joyful comment by Richard Branson, that what annoys him more than anything is other people’s lateness.

It’s delightfully lacking in self-awareness, like a toddler saying “I like being clean” while covered in mud and frog spawn. You want to tickle his beard and say “Aah, he doesn’t realise that 80 per cent of the lateness in Britain is caused because people are stuck for two hours outside Stafford on one of his trains, squashed on the floor in a shape that yogic masters would insist you shouldn’t attempt until you’ve trained in Tibet for nine years, the poppet.”

For him to complain about other people’s lack of punctuality is like Isis declaring that what they can’t stand is when someone doesn’t turn up to an appointment because they’re locked in a basement. Then a spokesman can tell us “If someone calls me to say they can’t get here because they’ve got a hood over their head and are beside a man with a sword, my attitude is they should have left earlier to allow for hold ups like this.”

All the railway companies display this adventurous spirit. For example, this year, for the third year in a row, Southern Rail was voted the worst rail company in the whole of Britain.

The great advantage of privatising the railways was that rail companies would have to be competitive, and there’s the proof. Once the shackles of the state were removed, they’ve competed to beat all their rivals, and be the most useless expensive incompetent worthless heap of fox mess in the entire network, against very stiff competition.

For example, throughout this time, getting out of Brighton station has been harder than securing a passage out of Casablanca in the film. You CAN get out, but you have to find a man in a fez behind a stall, who says “I can get you to Crawley my friend but you must give me keys to your house.”

So now there are lawyers and accountants from villages such as Wivelsfield, screaming “That’s it, I’m going training with a guerrilla army, we’re going to overthrow Southern Rail’s Board of Directors and replace them with a Peasants and Commuters Alliance.”

Because even these people who love crazy adventures, who row across the Pacific in a hollowed out zebra, or run across Syria carrying a combination boiler, aren’t so foolish as to attempt the rail journey from London to Brighton at a weekend.

For a £39 ticket, you get as far as Three Bridges, then everyone has to leave the train and is squeezed through an alley into a vast piece of ground, and as part of a crowd of thousands are shunted in several directions and left by some recycling bins, then spun back in a circle the opposite way and onto a bus, with no clue as to the destination, so you come to terms with the probability there’s been a military coup, and you’ve been captured by a new regime that’s going to do experiments on you involving your teeth.

There’s a touching gesture in which they check your tickets as you get on the bus. What can be the purpose of this? Who would try and go through this for free if they hadn’t been forced into it? You might as well wander round Guantanamo Bay, checking to see if everyone has a valid ticket to be waterboarded.

The bus chugged like something you see in films about Cuba after the Russians stopped sending them things, and I expect it usually breaks down, so they herd you into a sewage depot until you’re strapped into a waltzer, and a teenager smoking a roll-up spins you as far as Burgess Hill, until it conks out from signal failure so you have to roll along the A23 in a Special Supermarket Trolley Service, that you share with a family of five.

This happens because Southern Rail is upgrading the line, apparently, but it’s been like this for six years. Maybe they’ll surprise us and when it’s finished it will have been upgraded to a rocket launching pad, and from then on the train will divide, the front four coaches for Brighton, the rear four stopping at all stations to the outer rings of Saturn.

Every industry should try such cost-saving measures. Car showrooms can take your money, then tell you they haven’t any cars, but they do have a plant replacement service and give you a cactus.

But competition is doing its job, and other rail companies are trying to be as hopeless. When Go-Ahead, which owns Govia Thameslink and Southern Rail, were reported by the government for “totally unsatisfactory levels of service”, the CEO said it wasn’t his company’s fault, it happened because “timetables were not delivered to us in time”.

That’s the trouble with these timetable deliverers, they’re terrible at timekeeping. I suppose they’re blaming their lateness on the company responsible for delivering the timetable for delivering timetables, who couldn’t deliver their timetable timetable on time as their train was late.

That episode also illustrates how difficult it is to complain about any aspect of the rail service, because it’s been divided into several million companies. You call a number to ask why you spent all day in a car park and you’re told “Sorry mate, we only deal with the cushions.”

It’s also why, if nationalisation of the rail companies is suggested, most people don’t consider this a crazed piece of Marxist ideology. Instead they’re likely to say “Nationalise them? Never mind that, they should strap those shareholders into a chair in Salisbury and tell Putin they’ve been calling him names.”

At least when it’s Branson’s turn we know he’ll turn up on time.