To unpick this debacle, the transport secretary will have to cajole companies to go against their shareholders’ interests

Louise Haigh, like many transport secretaries before her, wants to know what the hell has gone wrong at HS2, why the costs jump every time the numbers are added up, and whether anything can be done to get a financial grip on the project. “I have seen up close the scale of failure in project delivery – and it’s dire,” she says.

Nobody would argue with that assessment. The latest estimate for the first stage of the project is a colossal £60bn to £65bn in today’s money, and it’s odds-on that a few more billion will come at the next count. So it is reasonable for a new government, especially one contemplating reinstating the section to Crewe, albeit in slimmed-down form, to want to know what happened. Yet another independent review of HS2 – this one by James Stewart, former chair of infrastructure at KPMG – is justified.