Hybrid train's late arrival fails to electrify MPs – let alone the rail network | John Crace

No one can accuse Chris Grayling of not having his eyes firmly fixed on solutions. On Sunday the transport secretary had outlined his vision of a post-Brexit Britain. Those bits of the country that weren’t going to be turned into a lorry park when we left the customs union were going to be ploughed into one large vegetable patch.

The spirit of the Blitz would see us through. And it wouldn’t matter if there weren’t any foreign workers to pick the vegetables, because the potatoes and cabbages would be so thrilled to be British they would spontaneously leap out of the ground into waiting shopping trolleys.

Appearing before the transport select committee the following day, Grayling was in equally buoyant mood. People shouldn’t get too worked up about the government going back on its plans to electrify large sections of the railway network. Rather it would be a crime to follow the example of almost every other European country by focusing on electricity alone, when passengers would be denied the benefits of the new generation of hybrid trains.

Committee chair Lilian Greenwood was understandably a bit puzzled. Should she mention the fact that only that morning Failing Grayling had suffered the embarrassment of attending the launch of the new hybrid train between Bristol and London? A service that had not only arrived into Paddington 45 minutes late after the train broke down while switching from diesel to electricity, but whose air conditioning had failed, drenching dozens of passengers with water.

How could she put it tactfully? “People don’t think hybrid trains are very reliable,” she pointed out. “The trains are heavier so there is more wear on the track and the reality is that the technology isn’t particularly new.” In fact, the hybrid train was really nothing more than a large, out-of-date Toyota Prius. That presumably the government would soon have driven by Uber drivers on zero-hours contracts.

Grayling was indignant. He was sick of people talking down Britain like this. Compared with all the cancelled services on Southern Rail, a hybrid train arriving just 45 minutes late was a fantastic achievement. And the water leaking from the ceiling had merely been the hydroponic prototype of a carriage designed to grow high-speed carrots. The future was bright, the future was orange.

“Are you saying that the government’s plans to electrify the whole network back in 2012 had basically been misconceived?” Greenwood asked, trying to make some kind of sense of Grayling’s ramblings. Oh, no, he insisted. It was just that sometimes you needed to go backwards to go forwards. If he remains transport secretary for too much longer, the rail network will be running on steam.

Realising she was getting nowhere with rail, Greenwood switched to air travel. Could the minister give any more details of the dying hours of Monarch Airlines? It had been complicated, Grayling observed. He had known that the airline was in danger of going belly up a few days before it did and there had been talk of a bridging loan from the government. But Monarch had never made a formal request for help: mainly because with Grayling in charge of the department it really was the blind leading the blind so there wasn’t much point. So that was that, really.

Conservative Steve Double wondered whether, in hindsight, there was anything more that he could have done. Grayling looked around desperately. He was a bit out of his depth now. “Perhaps the committee could make some suggestions,” he said eventually.

“But it was the government’s job,” Greenwood pointed out.

“Yes, but...” Grayling’s voice tailed away.

Next question. “How much of the £60m the government paid out to repatriate travellers will you recoup?” she asked. Grayling couldn’t say precisely. Though it would definitely be as much as possible. Even if that turned out to be next to nothing.

Heads began to fall among some members of the committee. While there was a refreshing honesty to his incompetence, there really didn’t seem to be any part of his brief that Grayling fully grasped. He was dangerously deluded about what had gone on on his watch and complacent about the here and now. With Grayling it wasn’t just the past that was a foreign country. It was the present, too.