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A virtuoso performance – Friday November 27 2009
Categories: RAILBlog
If you didn’t hear it live this morning at a few minutes before 0800, have a listen to Andrew Adonis banging the drum for railways on Radio 4’s Today programme and doing a very good job against one of the great interrupters of all time – Sarah Montague.
He was pushing the case (surprise, surprise…) for High Speed with authority, enthusiasm and total command of his argument. Sarah is a top-notch journalist and while her colleague and rail’s friend John Humphry’s has the reputation for being an interrupter, I’ve always thought she leaves him standing in this regard. I’ve often winced as she wades in and mercilessly skewers politicians with what she wants to talk about, rather than let them ride their own hobby horses through her agenda.
But AA more than held his own, and in a prime slot. He even resisted the temptation to correct her when she described our old chum Professsor Stephen Glaister (who had not been quite such an enthusiastic a supporter of HS2!) as a “rail expert.” Hah! I think even Stephen would demur at being described thus, for as we all know as Director of the RAC Foundation, and so roads are his big thing. And he does them very well, too. He’s always good to cross swords with on this sort of thing.
It was a great performance by Adonis and you can listen to it again on the BBC website – have a root round on www.bbc.co.uk/today and you’ll find it in listen again. Seemingly there was an earlier interview with HS 2 Chairman Sir David Rowlands and I’ll be listening-again to that later, as I missed it live. I’d give you the link here but I’m writing this on a train and I haven’t time to wrestle with East Coast’s snail-like wifi to seek it out!
What struck me yet again was the incredible passion and effectiveness that Adonis has as a rail supporter. In the midst of a lot of hot air about NXEA and C2C (which also came up) let’s not forget that this is the Secretary of State for Transport we always wanted – and he’s probably only got another 6 months tops in the job.
The rail industry has never been good at industry-wide PR and lobbying (as I’ve said many, many times, so apologies to regular readers!) and I sense that there’s been a ‘sitting back’ even further by top players and such organized groups as there are, since he arrived, as they let Adonis take up the slack and take the lead.
Which means that boy, are we going to go ‘cold turkey’ and miss Adonis, when he’s gone from the DfT.
I’ll be getting into the hot air about NXEA and C2C on here and in the magazine soon – all, I’ll say here for now is that the idea that AA has been forced into a ‘climbdown’ is as absurd as the notion that he’s ‘stripped’ NX of its two remaining franchises. I’ve seen and heard both positions reported in this last 24 hours and they’re both poppycock. But we’ll come back to that.
Right, we’re near Huntingdon. I’d best set about trying to post this if I intend to succeed by Kin
Comments
Nov 27, 2009
Nigel - yes I heard this it was good stuff (it woke me up actually! Since my commute is on foot I get from bed to desk in under 55 mins!) Reminded me that not long ago Grauniad had an article by Prof Glaister about HS2 in neg terms - he started off by skewering the rail industry by pointing out there were 2 or more HS proposals (Net Rail, HS2 etc) and thus the industry could not even get its act together on that. Ouch - as you would say - but precisely as you had predicted about rails failure to press its case sensibly and forcefully in some Rail editorials a few weeks earlier! Maybe, if Tories win next election, they could recreate BR and invite Adonis to be chairman of the BR Board...either that or they have got to find the money to keep bailing out franchises after all (ha ha)