‘Does anyone seriously doubt that this amazing scheme is actually going to go ahead?’ boomed Boris Johnson last week. ‘No is the answer!’ He was waxing rhetorical about the redevelopment of Battersea Power Station, the fourth such scheme since the landmark hulk’s turbines were switched off in 1975. The Malaysian consortium behind this £8 million gamble are ignoring both the site’s troubled history and my own advice — which was to lose the shopping mall plans and start digging for minerals — by going for a full-blown residential-retail-office complex that’s a sure sign of economic optimism, underpinned by mayoral enthusiasm.
But knowing Boris’s modus operandi, it won’t surprise me if he tells us, when a fifth scheme comes onto the drawing board in a decade’s time, that the Malaysian investors misinterpreted his Latinate grammar. It wasn’t a nonne but a num, as it were, or possibly vice versa: ‘No’ was not the answer to ‘Does anyone seriously doubt…’ but to ‘Is this amazing scheme actually going ahead?’ And that also seems to be his position on HS2, the much-disputed fast rail link to Birmingham and beyond.
In the guise of accusing the fellow mischief-maker he calls ‘Mandychops’ of doing the bidding of Whitehall ‘fainthearts’ by the revelation that Labour’s green light for the scheme was a political gimmick with no real ‘business case’, and lamenting the bureaucracy that hinders all British infrastructure projects, and expressing ‘a general principle’ of support for ‘faster connections’, Boris inserted in his latest Telegraph column the killer phrase ‘£70 billion, and then keep going’.
Where it came from no one knows. But it’s his figure for the real cost of HS2, it’s £27 billion more than the current official estimate, and it will be bandied about for ever more by opponents of big state spending projects as well as by Buckinghamshire nimbyists.
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