Opinion: Will Heidi Alexander be a Prescott or a Darling?

2024 was a bad year for former Transport Secretaries, with the deaths of both Alastair Darling and John Prescott.

And it’s not been a good one for current Transport Secretaries either, as we are now on our third of the year.

Louise Haigh’s sudden departure (more on her legacy in future columns) leaves her successor Heidi Alexander with a long list of immediate issues to face - from fulfilling promises about improving the performance of both buses and trains as part of a just-launched integrated transport strategy, to coping with the megashambles of HS2 and a transport infrastructure programme that needs shifting away from road investment.

Alexander should be able to hit the road (and rails) running, given her past experience at Transport for London. And she would do well to look at the achievements (or otherwise) of those two late predecessors.

Prescott was a blustery visionary who wanted to get things done and bring about change, while Darling was a money man, a Treasury apparatchik long before he became Chancellor, who was only really content when stopping people spending money.

I remember bumping into him at Edinburgh Waverley station early one morning, as we were both getting off the night Sleeper. And in that brief encounter, he managed to complain about the money being spent on the tram line in Edinburgh, where he was MP.

Indeed, he had it in for tram schemes particularly, chopping out proposals in Leeds, Liverpool and the South Coast when he was Transport Secretary.

These schemes had been put forward by Prescott in his remarkably radical Transport 2010 document (published in 2000), which envisaged 25 new tram networks within a decade around the country.

In the event, only one (Nottingham) was built, although another of his schemes (Crossrail) has become a reality.

I wonder: in their last days, did Prescott think proudly of his achievements, even though they had been sadly reduced? Did Darling ponder over how well he had done by ensuring things were not built and the Treasury coffers were a bit fuller?

Just a thought for our latest Transport Secretary.