Top adviser tells Boris: Axe HS2 in South – and use the cash in North
£108bn budget could be diverted to rail services in new Tory ‘heartlands’
BORIS JOHNSON is under intense pressure from one of his most influential advisers to scrap the southern leg of HS2 and instead plough the money into rail services in the new Tory ‘heartlands’ of the North.
Transport adviser Andrew Gilligan has been lobbying the party’s newly elected MPs to support the cancellation of the phase one Birmingham to London leg of the controversial high-speed rail route.
According to one MP, Mr Gilligan suggested that phase two of HS2 – from Birmingham to Leeds and Manchester – could be spared as part of a ‘repurposing’ of the project, which is now predicted to cost up to £108 billion.
The news comes after Transport Secretary Grant Shapps received the draft findings of the Government- commissioned Oakervee review into HS2, which recommends it should go ahead despite spiralling costs.
A final decision is expected within three weeks.
The Prime Minister has privately indicated he thinks the whole project should be given the green light, but he has also run into strong opposition from chief adviser Dominic Cummings, who called the project a ‘disaster zone’.
Mr Gilligan, a former BBC journalist who in 2003 claimed on the Today programme that the Blair Government had ‘sexed up’ a report to exaggerate Saddam Hussein’ s ‘weapons of mass destruction’, has been ‘sounding out’ new Tory MPs on the rail project.
One MP elected as part of Mr Johnson’s smashing of the ‘Red Wall’ of Labour seats in the Midlands and North told The Mail on Sunday: ‘Gilligan started by congratulating me and asking how I was settling in, before getting on to the real subject – did I support the HS2 project in full? Or did I think just the bits north of Birmingham should be built?’
Mr Johnson owes last month’s General Election victory to previously safe Labour seats in the North turning blue, a political shift he hopes to entrench through investment projects in those areas.
Mr Gilligan also asked the MPs if they agreed that priori ty should be given to the £ 39 billion Northern Powerhouse Rail project, previously known as HS3, a trans-Pennine route that would raise the average speed between cities including Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Bradford and Newcastle from 46mph to 140mph.
A senior political supporter of HS2 said: ‘Gilligan has been on a one-man destabilisation campaign to stop HS2 since he came into No 10 last year.
‘He wants to sabotage it, and Cummings is supporting him. He is trying to get as many of the newbie Tory MPs on board as possible so he can drip poison in the PM’s ear.’
Mr Gilligan has been closely linked to Mr Johnson since leaving the BBC in 2004 after the ‘sexed-up’ dossier row and the outing of biological weapons expert Dr David Kelly as his source.
In the ensuing furore Dr Kelly took his own life, prompting the Hutton Inquiry and the resignation of the BBC’s chairman Gavyn Davies, its director- general Greg Dyke, and Mr Gilligan, who was offered a job at The Spectator by then editor Boris Johnson.
In 2013, Mr Johnson, who had become the Mayor of London, was accused of cronyism when he appointed Mr Gilligan as his Cycling Commissioner.
Last week, Lord Berkeley, the former deputy chairman of the panel that produced the HS2 review, dissented from the report, saying the £108 billion cost would generate just 60p of value for every pound spent.
Meanwhile, Mr Shapps is due to make a decision by the end of the month on whether troubled rail operator Northern will be taken into public ownership. The company has the finances to continue only ‘for a number of months’.
A Government spokesman said it had commissioned the Oakervee review into HS2 to ‘provide advice on whether and how to proceed, with an independent panel representing a range of viewpoints. The Prime Minister will consider t he review as part of his decision’.
A senior source said of Mr Gilligan: ‘Advisers to the Prime Minister work closely with MPs on a huge range of priorities. We are already looking at ways we can level up infrastructure and transport, particularly in the North.’