So it is official, as if that makes a difference. After a 15-month review by the new chief executive, the transport secretary, Heidi Alexander, has revealed that HS2 will now cost up to £102.7bn and trains may not start until 2039. Alexander called the original design a “massively over-specced folly” and called the increase in time and costs “obscene”. Indeed it possibly ranks as the wildest white elephant in British history. In comparison, Donald Trump’s White House ballroom is a garden shed, and Dubai’s Burj Khalifa a mere sandcastle.

This week, Alexander, the ninth transport secretary since HS2 was proposed, admitted the project made her angry. As she dusted off her department’s latest defence of its appalling conduct of this fiasco, she tried to feign surprise. She has been in office 18 months. Don’t tell us she did not know.

We thus got the usual promise of a clear-out, of a new page turned and a talented new management team bringing the project at last under control. Alexander should not have recited this familiar speech to the Commons. She should make it in public outside every hospital in the land, every one that has spent the past decade unmodernised, every school unrepaired, every care home unbuilt and every prison overcrowded.

The HS2 project remains what it always was, a total dud. It is a superfluous railway that has simply run wild.........

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