The indecision over HS2 is becoming tiresome with Lord Hendy offering a glimmer of hope to the North - Ismail Mulla

Who’d have thought that going up to contractors and giving them a blank cheque book would end up leaving the project morally and financially bankrupt? ‘How much will it cost to dig a hole?’ ‘An endless hole? Every penny you’ve got.’

The arguments for high speed rail have been articulated time and again by people who have a grasp of the needs of Yorkshire’s transport needs. When the project was being greenlit the only real argument people had was that we should start on HS3 first.

It was not just quicker trains to the capital but rather about freeing up expanses of the network to additional capacity in the region.

As construction began, passengers on Yorkshire’s railway network such as myself were being subjected to punishing levels of incompetence by the likes of TransPennine Express and Northern Rail.

HS2 was a distant dream for people who would leave home at 6am and find that their 20 minute rail journey would actually take them upwards of two hours. In some cases, the trains would do a disappearing act completely.

But anyway, being fair-minded I sceptically gave HS2 a chance. Just because immediate issues were resolved we shouldn’t subject transport investment to complete inertia either, I reasoned.

However, what followed was a routine chainsawing of the scheme over the years. By the time Rishi Sunak came along, it had already been reduced to a rump. Now it’s a case of trying to pathetically salvage scraps. If HS2 was an animal, it would have been put down.

Instead we have another round of maybe, potentially. This time the highly respected Lord Peter Hendy said the Government is still considering the future of the previously cancelled routes to Manchester and Leeds.

The Minister of State for Rail at the Department for Transport, in a new series for BBC Radio 4, said: "The planning that went into HS2 was over a long number of years, and to… stop it without any thought of what you would do instead has caused us to have to think very clearly and do a load of work. So I can't pre-empt that, and in any case, our first job is to fix the project we've got now."

You can’t blame Lord Hendy. It’s the hand that he has been dealt but even as someone who would like to see high speed rail reach this corner of the country, it’s hard to see how that’s going to be realised.

Lord Hendy said that the future of the land that is still being held by HS2 remains undecided and says it is under consultation. So we’ve got in some cases prime land locked up for a project that is not happening but if it goes then the dream dies with it.

Illustrating just how far out of control HS2 has got is the fact that Lord Hendy is waiting for up to date estimates from HS2 CEO, Mark Wild, regarding the cost of the project going from London to Birmingham.

Reports suggest that the latest estimate for building HS2 between Birmingham and Old Oak Common is £81bn. Accounting for inflation, that would mean at least £100bn will be spent, but only 135 miles of railway built.

By my calculation that is £740m per mile. Where do you even begin to justify that as value for money? Especially as the central argument of ‘levelling up’ the country has been kicked out from underneath the project.

I don’t often find myself agreeing with our former Prime Minister Boris Johnson. I’ve always found it hard to keep up with his bluster. However, his comment in the Radio 4 programme hit the nail on the head.

He said: "It's a disgrace that since the middle of the 19th century London has been developing and has got better and better and the North East, North West and the Midlands haven't had the same effect. And HS2 was clearly going to be part of it.

“I could see the cost problems but great infrastructure projects depend on politicians having the will, political will to keep going because these are investments in the future."

Perhaps the project would never have been put in jeopardy if we’d taken a different tact. I distinctly remember a few company bosses, early on in my career as a business reporter, say that building work should start in Leeds and work its way down to London.

There’s no way they would have left the capital in the lurch.