.Was I, I wonder, the only person living within the Yorkshire part of the summarily rejected Northern Powerhouse Rail project to experience unaccustomed rage as I watched the recent – extensive – media coverage of the new Elizabeth Line Crossrail scheme in London?

This is, you will recall, a project which opened years behind schedule and billions of pounds over budget but hey! – of what consequence is that in the national scheme of (transport) things?

This impressive piece of railway engineering finally offers the good people of London and the South-East of England a new, 21st century, means of crossing London from east to west. The 20th century multi-optional equivalent, whose constant upgrading has gobbled up so much of the national transport budget over decades, is apparently no longer up to scratch it seems.

My rage turned to incredulity though as I heard Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London, explain on the Today programme, with no hint of irony, how the whole country would benefit from the Elizabeth Line project. How? Because some companies outside the South-East of England had managed to get themselves a few crumbs from the table of this fabulous new London feast in the form of contracts for its construction.

Just to really rub salt in the wound, though, we needed Grant Shapps to give us misguided Yorkshire folk a lesson on fake news and this he duly did in his article in The Yorkshire Post on June 9.

Apparently, we, in Yorkshire and the Humber, have been victims for years of a gross misconception: i.e. ‘the prevailing view that Government transport spending is far higher in the South-East than the North’.

I have to admit to being at a loss to understand how we normally savvy Yorkies could be so stupid as to fall for fake news like this for so long. Or could it be, perhaps, the removal of Pacer trains only relatively recently from our network? Or is that fake news too?

Anyway, back to Mr Shapps. Surely, I thought, he would provide some evidence to justify his belief in our long-held misconceptions that, for decades, our region has received, annually per person, only a fraction of the investment pumped into London and the South-East.

OK, I thought – it must be easy for Mr Shapps to confirm or disprove these fake news disparities; just give us the figures. Needless to say, he did not. Instead, he went on to insult our intelligence further by telling us what the Government is going to do in the next three years – oh, but not for Yorkshire, by the way!

If I may be so bold, I would point out that spending in the North-West is going to be of little relevance to our much needed east-west rail link in Yorkshire, because we are the bit of the Northern Powerhouse Rail project which, with the exclusion of new rail to Marsden, has been shunted into the sidings.

I am a 75-year-old and I have spent most of my adult life attempting to negotiate a rail system in Yorkshire which is not fit for purpose.

I was foolish enough to believe Boris Johnson’s assurances of major improvements and I even thought I might live long enough to see and experience at least part of our new, 21st century, railway.

It will, I have to accept despite Mr Shapps’s assurances, now not happen in my lifetime nor, I suspect in the lifetimes of my daughter and grandchildren.

Grant Shapps insults Yorkshire's intelligence with 'fake news' claim - Yorkshire Post Letters