In a fantasy world of wise government vision and decision-making, HS2 would have been announced in November 1964, shortly after the Tokyo Olympics. Visitors to those games saw the future in the form of the Tokaido Shinkansen – the first Japanese ‘bullet train’, which raced 320 miles from the capital to Osaka, carrying 1,300 passengers per train and eventually running 360 trains per day, with average delays measured in seconds. But in that era, UK ministers thought only of axeing railways and building motorways.

A de novo British high-speed network could not have taken off in the 1970s, when the French were building the first ligne à Grande Vitesse from Paris to Lyon, simply because we were broke. Nor would it have happened between 1979 and 1997, because Margaret Thatcher and her successors would have insisted that it had to be done entirely at private-sector risk.

And so HS2 became a thing only in 2009: not so much a showpiece to match the best of Europe and Asia as a Keynesian fag-end of Gordon Brown’s regime picked up and tossed around by the Cameron coalition. With hindsight – though I was a supporter for most of the project’s first decade – it was always going to be cursed by nimbyism, cost inflation and officialdom’s propensity to tinker with lines on maps. As estimates for completion rose from £30 billion to £107 billion, so the enthusiasm of passengers for slightly faster journeys to the Midlands and further north was drowned out by demand for more frequent and punctual existing services, better on-board broadband and much better trans-Pennine connectivity.

Andy Burnham, Greater Manchester’s mayor, puts an eloquent case for the economic damage the non-arrival of HS2 in his region will cause. But I suspect the voting public, with no realistic expectation of ever travelling on it, no longer cares. Only contractors making fat livings from it weep at the prospect that the original Y-shaped scheme from Euston to Leeds as well as Manchester will end up as an insanely expensive folly linking Old Oak Common in west London to Curzon Street station in Birmingham.

Better, I’m sad to say, to call a halt to the whole fiasco. Build houses and industrial parks on the purchased land in the south. Divert the available funds to give the north its desperately needed new line from Liverpool to Leeds. Make the rest of the trains we already have run on time. And
take a Shinkansen tour of Japan to see what might once have been.

Ignore the Sunak switch

Having made that journey myself in the 1980s when I lived in Japan at the height of its rise as a global industrial power, before it was eclipsed by China and Silicon Valley, I’m still an admirer. So I was pleased to see the Nissan chief executive Makoto Uchida declaring that his company, which employs 7,000 in its UK factories, will stick to its strategy of going all-electric by 2030, despite Rishi Sunak’s decision to push back a ban on sales of petrol and diesel cars to 2035.

The way the global auto industry has pivoted to EV production and made huge bets on battery technology since the start of this decade – having previously been deeply wedded to Rudolf Diesel’s 1890s technology – is a model of how big capitalism reads the future and adapts. All it ever asks from governments is consistency of signalling. As for Sunak’s reversal, it’s a model of shameless and ultimately pointless vote-seeking that won’t save him at the coming election. Carmakers should stick to their electric course.

Different codes

‘Lounge suits’, the dress code for an Oxford lunch to mark the 50th anniversary of going up as an undergraduate, sounds these days as archaic as ‘sub fusc’. A more senior table was for those from 60 years ago – and the assembly of sober tailoring and unremembered faces made me think that few of us win glittering prizes in the end, but at least these cohorts of ’63 and ’73 had a relatively easy ride. Despite social turmoil in the 1960s and economic chaos in the 1970s, we had steady career ladders, afford-able mortgages, defined-benefit pensions and, unlike our parents, no war. We fuelled financial crises but survived them. In hindsight, we’re a fortunate generation.

‘You bring the colour!’ was the dress code for an extravagantly Cuban-themed wedding party in London the following evening – an opportunity to quiz the graduate class of the late 2010s. Their career choices were as dazzling and varied as their outfits, but often as flimsy. How many, I wondered, will remain stuck as baristas, be replaced by AI – or end up in dull parts of the civil service because flexi-working helps with child care? Will any of them ever afford to retire? Yet compared with my lot, they have much less pressure to conform, more freedom on every front, more colour in their lives. I’m only sorry I won’t be at the golden wedding bash to find out what they make of it.

92 not out

In these anti-elitist times, I apologise for a second mention of Oxford. But not for being proud to share a college, Worcester, with Rupert Murdoch – who I admire, whatever his influence on public morals, as an undefeated gladiator of the global media arena and a saviour of what he himself called ‘a lot of damn fine newspapers’.

So I was sorry he was too busy with his newly announced retirement plans (and perhaps his latest romance, with Roman Abramovich’s former mother-in-law) to represent the cohort of ’49 at the anniversary lunch. In the hope of picking up advice for those wedding-party youngsters, I’d love to have talked to the 92-year-old tycoon about the way life can turn out for early under-performers, recalling that he took a third-class degree and was even blackballed from the college’s casual cricket team, the Rustics. I wasn’t, but his lifetime batting average, in all respects, certainly beats mine./>