I’ve suspected for quite a while that the Tory talent pool would run dry, but we seem to be seeing the final drops of run out. 

What am I talking about? Well, the story starts some years ago, when Labour was in power and Gordon Brown was, so briefly, the prime minister. He committed the country to building HS2, a high-speed rail line that would link London with the north–Birmingham, Manchester, and Leeds. Whether it was a good idea is open to raucous debate, but since then one government has tossed it to the next–from Labour to a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition to a series of Conservative governments–and it’s gone further and further over budget. 

The initial budget was £32 billion. Okay, it was £32.7 billion, but when you’re dealing with billions, who cares about the .7? According to some estimates, the whole thing would now cost £100 billion.  

Irrelevant photo: Not a dandelion but one of a zillion flowers that look like them but aren’t.

Ah, but the whole thing won’t be built. One leg of a Y-shaped line was canceled years ago, and now the prime minister du jour, Rishi Sunak, has announced that the entire northern part of the project is going in the scrap bucket and the money that saves will be spent on other transportation projects in the north of England. 

Why the north? Because the whole thing was sold as a way to connect London and the north, and prime ministers du days past, especially Boris Johnson, made a lot of noise about how that would bring prosperity to the north, which could use a bit of that, thanks. His favorite phrase was the annoying leveling up. I expect he was nervous about letting that scary word leveling run around bare-ass nekked, because folks might think the project would take something away from London. 

So he reassured London that it would continue to be the favored child, but the north would now become just as favored, just as rich. Every child would be the favorite. And I’ll become my own grandmother.

It’s in this context that, in the midst of the Conservative Party conference, the government published a 40-page prospectus to back up Sunak’s cancellation of the northern leg of the line: Network North: transforming British transport. On the first page, it plonks Manchester down where Preston’s supposed to be. Since I can’t locate either Preston or Manchester, I’m taking the word of two sources, one of which says, cautiously, “At first glance . . . it seems to relocate. . . .”

I’m not sure what happens at second glance or why it only seems. Still, even appearing to misplace a major city does give the impression of carelessness.

But let’s not be hasty. The prospectus is clearly the product of deep thought and careful work. It promises to fund an extension of the Greater Manchester Metrolink system to the airport, although the system linked to the airport in 2014. It promises improvements in Plymouth, which even I can find, right down there on the south coast, which is another way to say, Not in the north. Bristol–also not in the north–was promised a £100,000 investment until, overnight, the promise disappeared in the online document and was replaced with some vague verbiage about the west. Which is, likewise, not in the north. And then there’s a commitment to upgrade a road near Southampton (situated where the name makes you think it would be, not in the north), but that was a mistake. They meant Littlehampton, which isn’t on the south coast but is pretty damn close. 

I don’t know about you, but I’ve come to love British politics.

So what’s left after the cancellation?

What’s left is an expensive train from London to Birmingham. Which–I’m getting tired of typing this–isn’t in the north. It’s in the Midlands, where it’s always been. After trains reach Birmingham, they might end up using the existing track to Manchester, but instead of being high-speed, they’ll run slower than the trains that already run on that line. The existing trains tilt. The new ones won’t. The article I stole this from doesn’t say so, but I assume that means they have to slow down on the curves. 

Oh, and the platforms are too short for the high-speed trains the system was originally planned for, so they’ll be replaced by skateboards. 

Can’t stay upright on a skateboard? Get out on the highway and stick out your thumb.

The transport secretary, Mark Harper, has since clarified that his department was only giving a few examples of where the money might be spent so we needn’t get so starchy about it all. 

And did I mention that £1 billion has already been spent on the canceled part of the line–or at least invoices amounting to that have already been submitted? You see why I can’t get worked up about the £.7 billion, right?