And I thought the SNP were destined to win the award for this year’s most pathetic excuse – after Scottish transport minister Jenny Gilruth blamed the party’s failure to dual the A9 on Putin’s war in Ukraine. Then UK transport secretary Mark Harper turns up and tries to use the very same excuse for HS2’s soaring costs. The Birmingham to Manchester section of the high-speed line will be delayed for two years, he said yesterday, because ‘Putin’s war in Ukraine has hiked up inflation, sending supply chain costs rocketing.’

HS2 has turned out to be an extremely expensive turkey because it was misconceived from the start

Much as I despise Vladimir Putin, I’m sorry this just won’t wash. It wasn’t Putin who claimed in 2010 that Britain could build a Y shaped network of high-speed lines between London, Manchester and Leeds for £30 billion – and then kept ratcheting up the costs. By the time of the Oakervee review three years ago (commissioned by Boris Johnson to decide whether to plough ahead with the project) the estimated costs had already risen to as much as £106 billion. Lord Berkeley, who was on that panel, has since made his own estimate of £170 billion. Moreover, it simply isn’t true that recent inflation in oil and other commodity prices began with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February last year – inflation began to surge in 2021 as the global economy awoke from Covid and found supply struggling to keep pace with the demand that had been fuelled by money-printing by governments around the world.

Sorry, but HS2 has turned out to be an extremely expensive turkey because it was misconceived from the start. It was apparent long before the Ukraine war that the projected, mile per mile, costs of HS2 were vastly higher than other European high-speed projects.

The Oakervee review’s figures put the cost of HS2 at around £200 million per kilometre. By contrast, recent European high-speed projects have come in at an average of around £25 million per kilometre. There are several reasons for this vast differential. In an attempt to make the project acceptable to residents of the Home Counties, the government has specified far more tunnelling that the terrain demands – and in geological conditions which do not favour it. The properties on the route which need to be compulsorily purchased are also significantly more expensive in Britain than in other countries. Moreover, much of it was purchased very early, before the route had been finalised. The constant chopping and changing has added significantly to the costs. The boss of Ferrovial, which specialises in building high speed rail projects around the world, has blamed Britain’s planning system for many of the costs and delays. Compared with Spain, where all these matters are worked out by government before a contract is awarded to a construction company, here the process drags on for years, involving far more people and forcing contractors to sit idle while planning and environmental issues are sorted out.

The irony is that one of the reasons we voted to leave the EU was the perception of excessive legislation from Brussels, such as the EU Habitats Directive. Yet much of the red tape holding back infrastructure projects originates in Britain.

We can’t blame the EU anymore for the failure to keep HS2 to time and budget, but hey, we can blame Vladimir Putin. It is so much easier than reforming the bungled processes by which we go about infrastructure projects.