“This whole thing, it just makes me want to weep. It just makes me despair. I mean, the original sin, as it were, was agreeing to do it in the first place. It was obviously going to be hugely expensive, with relatively little gain from it relative to pretty much anything else you could have done with the railway or transport system, whether that’s making rail connections across the north vastly better or actually building a bunch of bypasses and improving the roundabouts in the road network. And we knew that, that this was not the best way you could spend that amount of money. We also know how difficult we find it to build these projects. … I just, as I say, wish it had never happened in the first place. It rather looks like we’re going to totally waste the money on this in producing a railway at the cost of tens of billions, which will get you from Birmingham to central London less quickly than you can do at the moment.”