Who’s really to blame for the Crossrail fiasco?

There’s been a strong sense of pre-Christmas turkeys coming home to roost in this week’s news, as stories I’ve written about for months or years have reached, if not a denouement, then at least a new twist in the plot. Saddest of these is Crossrail, London’s east-west mass–transit system that was originally scheduled for its royal opening next week: now we hear it needs ‘hundreds of millions’ more of public money if it is to meet its delayed completion a year hence, though even that date no longer looks a safe bet. Its chairman Sir Terry Morgan has announced that he’s waiting to be sacked, both from Crossrail and from the chairmanship of the possibly even more troubled HS2 project.

I don’t know Morgan well but I’ve always found him impressively straightforward: his role was not to drive the tunnelling machine but to marshal multiple contractors while keeping funders and bankers at bay and giving timely warning when budgets began to show stress.