With one cunningly placed number, Boris may have killed HS2

‘Does anyone seriously doubt that this amazing scheme is actually going to go ahead?’ boomed Boris Johnson last week. ‘No is the answer!’ He was waxing rhetorical about the redevelopment of Battersea Power Station, the fourth such scheme since the landmark hulk’s turbines were switched off in 1975. The Malaysian consortium behind this £8 million gamble are ignoring both the site’s troubled history and my own advice — which was to lose the shopping mall plans and start digging for minerals — by going for a full-blown residential-retail-office complex that’s a sure sign of economic optimism, underpinned by mayoral enthusiasm.

But knowing Boris’s modus operandi, it won’t surprise me if he tells us, when a fifth scheme comes onto the drawing board in a decade’s time, that the Malaysian investors misinterpreted his Latinate grammar. It wasn’t a nonne but a num, as it were, or possibly vice versa: ‘No’ was not the answer to ‘Does anyone seriously doubt…’ but to ‘Is this amazing scheme actually going ahead?’ And that also seems to be his position on HS2, the much-disputed fast rail link to Birmingham and beyond.