The axing of HS2 should come as no surprise as both parties row back from the project - Andrew Vine

And so Britain’s high speed rail network shrivels into a commuter line between Birmingham and London – and not even the centre of the capital, but a terminus at Old Oak Common six miles from Euston, its original destination.

What a mess and what a betrayal of the north after so many promises about the transformative nature of high-speed rail.

But even so, it’s no surprise, because in an economy where the NHS isn’t working properly and schools are being shut to prevent them falling down around children’s ears, saving £34bn by scrapping the line to Manchester is the only sensible option.

HS2 has been doomed for years, and frankly there won’t be any widespread mourning among the public at its demise, because with each delay, increase in costs and cutting-back of its scope, it has become ever clearer that it was unlikely ever to happen.

That much has been obvious for at least the past two years. When Yorkshire was told it was being left behind, any pretence HS2 was a strategic leap forward that would open up new opportunities for the north was exposed as a sham.

With the estimated cost of completing even a scaled-down network that reaches Manchester now at £100bn – and nobody sensible would bet against that eye-watering figure climbing even higher – this is a project that has long priced itself out of reality.

Yes, it is a blow, and yes, it will be a humiliating climbdown for both Conservative ministers and their would-be Labour successors who have insisted for so long they are committed to the project.

In July, the Government’s own infrastructure watchdog condemned HS2 as “unachievable”, an extraordinary verdict on a project billed as central to turbocharging the economy of the entire country.

It has been an object lesson in mismanagement as costs spiralled out of control with nobody in charge able to get a grip and deliver.

This should be the subject of an inquiry. If other countries can complete strategic projects on time and on budget, as appears to happen all over Europe, then how did high speed rail go so catastrophically wrong?

Lessons need to be learned from this debacle for the sake of the future. HS2 was to have been Europe’s largest infrastructure project. Given that, and the colossal cost even before it started running out of control, what on earth have ministers been playing at?

But those questions are for another day, and probably the next Government, irrespective of who wins office.

There are more pressing matters for now, chief among them what Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt plan to do with the billions saved by curtailing HS2.

If shunting Yorkshire into its sidings was a betrayal, it would pale in comparison to any failure to spend the savings on giving our region the rail network it deserves.

Messrs Sunak and Hunt need to understand that Yorkshire could not forgive that, and they would doom themselves if the money was used instead to fund a pre-election tax cut as a sop to the right wing of their Parliamentary party and southern Tory strongholds.

They ought to realise that HS2 savings represent a last-gasp chance to make something of the utterly failed levelling-up agenda that has let Yorkshire down so badly.

After years of broken promises, and a chronic shortage of investment in transport because so much was being spent on HS2, this pot of money should be ring-fenced to transform trans-Pennine rail services and deliver the long-needed mass transit network for West Yorkshire.

We can just about live without a high-speed line that would have shaved half-an-hour off the journey between Leeds and London, especially now that so many people work at least part of the week from home.

But what we can’t live with is decades more of terrible, antiquated, overcrowded trains running east to west across the largest county in England.