The rail strikes could be the end of the line for Boris

Here I go again, in my occasional role as your intrepid transport correspondent. Last week I reported on airport chaos, last month on the opening of the Elizabeth line. Now here I am boldly defying the rail strike on a Grand Central train from York to King’s Cross.

To be honest, on a perfect sunny morning, it feels less stressful than my regular journeys on this crowded and often disrupted line. The RMT pickets at the station entrance were less aggressive than the pigeons on the platform trying to steal a bite of my bacon roll. Grand Central – ultimately owned by German taxpayers, though I don’t suppose that explains why its trains are still running – is maintaining welcome Tannoy silence, while no doubt praying that striking signalmen won’t halt us north of the capital. And the onboard wifi is working better than usual because so few passengers have been brave enough to travel.

But what a bone-headed, uncaring, economically illiterate, Trot-driven, back-to-the-1970s industrial action this is. And what a harbinger of troubles to come as public-sector employers waft 3 per cent offers at unionised workers suffering double-digit inflation. In the private sector, Rolls-Royce’s one-off £2,000 ‘cost-of-living bonus’ for 14,000 staff may become the favoured device for holding percentage rises down. But with unemployment for the time being unnaturally low, the threat that unaffordable wage demands will lead to job losses – either directly as afflicted firms rationalise or automate, or more widely as recession sets in – will be drowned out by calls for ‘fairness’ in the face of food and fuel poverty and rhetoric about ‘rising inequality’.

My train cruised into London almost on time and I’ve just thanked the smiling driver, who agreed with me it was ‘all nice and calm this morning’. But it’s not going to be calm this autumn – and I’m glad my destination isn’t 10 Downing Street, because I’d have no advice to offer on how to handle this crisis for a Prime Minister who will, I predict, finally be brought down by it.