The US managed to engineer a publicly-funded transport project to the moon, we can’t even manage one to Manchester Airport - David Behrens

And they can’t say they weren’t warned. The Department for Transport was told many times that they were taking the wrong advice, from ‘consultants’ who preferred speed to practicality because there was more money in it for them.

Several alternative routes were proposed which would have cost far less and spared many homes and acres of fields at the expense of a few extra minutes of travelling time. But those arguments didn’t chime with the political mood of the time.

If you think about all the mistakes and miscalculations that have been made since then, right across government, even the literally astronomical expense of HS2 seems like small beer. With every step forward we’ve taken what feels like 90 billion paces back. The question now is whether we’re on the brink of an even more damaging reversal.

In Manchester, where they should have been laying the foundations for HS2, Labour has begun digging itself a hole in which it may lie buried for generations to come. Our newly-departed Health Secretary used the 10th anniversary of a referendum that was supposed to have settled our relationship with Europe once and for all, to take out his surgical scalpel and pick open the wounds.

Wes Streeting, burning with ambition to succeed Keir Starmer but lacking the votes to do so, overplayed his hand by urging his colleagues to admit Brexit had been a “catastrophic mistake” and that Britain’s future lay “one day back in the EU”.

It looked like a ploy to embarrass his likely adversary Andy Burnham, who let slip last year that he wanted the UK back in Europe. “I hope it happens in my lifetime,” he said.

So do I, and given our ages my lifetime is likely to end sooner than his. But Streeting had missed the point: it is a government’s job to try to unite the nation, not rip it further asunder.

On Brexit and almost everything else, Labour has always been its own worst enemy. A decade ago it could not decide where it stood so it failed to campaign coherently for either side. If it thought leaving the EU was going to be a catastrophe, party HQ kept curiously quiet about it.

The root cause of that deadlock was having the wrong leader. Now it finds itself back where it started.

There have been four leadership contests, not counting the present one, since Gordon Brown left office in 2010 and each time the party has plumped for the wrong man. It’s proof that the worst people to choose a Labour leader are Labour members: the very people who will be doing it again this time.

They could have had Andy Burnham in 2010 but they chose Ed Miliband because they thought he and David Miliband were the same person. They could have had Burnham again in 2015 but they picked Jeremy Corbyn because they cared more about ideology than about winning. And that’s Labour all over: it sacrifices popularity to philosophy every time. It just can’t decide which philosophy it wants.

I didn’t believe there would be a leadership contest this summer because everyone knew there was no succession plan. I was half right: there was no plan but they went ahead anyway. Then they compounded their error by reigniting the Brexit debate.

It was a mistake that might make a Reform government unpreventable three years from now.

Burnham has done his best to row back on rejoining Europe. Now is not the time, he says. And that may be enough to placate voters in the Brexit-skewing seat of Ashton-in-Makerfield, where his Reform opponent is a local plumber who failed to get elected two years ago.

But if he takes his Remainer’s inclination to Number 10 this year, where will Eurosceptics turn at the next general election? With the Tories under Kemi Badenoch sleeping through the revolution, it leaves Nigel Farage shooting at an open goal.

In what would be their final abrogation of responsibility, the two main parties could actually cede Britain to extremists.

Come that day you’ll find the rest of us on the slow train to Manchester Airport – en route to America to thumb a trip to the moon.