Fuelled by political puff and short-termism, HS2 has finally run into the buffers of reality

When was it obvious that HS2 was an economic turkey at risk of becoming "an appalling mess", as the transport secretary, Heidi Alexander, described today's position?

- Nils Pratley

A fair case can be made for 2013, a year of two neon-lit warnings of trouble ahead. One was a scathing report on HS2 from the National Audit Office (NAO), the first of many, when the project was still at the planning stage. The NAO concluded it was impossible to say whether the programme was likely to deliver value for money; the cost and benefit estimates were "uncertain"; there had been "past errors in the underlying model"; the Department for Transport had "poorly articulated" how HS2 was supposed to rebalance economic growth. In short, there was "a weak foundation for securing success".

Then there was Peter Mandelson's remarkable insider confession in the pages of the FT of how Gordon Brown and his cabinet came to approve HS2 in the first place in 2010. It was a tale of collective short-termism: in the grim post-banking crash era, the Labour government didn't want to be outdone by the Tories in their enthusiasm for a shiny new project.