Christian Wolmar

My alter ego, Mystic Wolmar, sometimes gets predictions so wrong that I have contemplated smashing his crystal once and for all. But just occasionally he hits the mark as sweetly as a Gareth Bale piledriver. So allow him, for once, a little bit of glory. When the Department for Transport published its franchise plans, Mystic was quoted in The Sun (I know, but they did ask…) saying ‘I suspect they ...

It’s fortunate that Patrick McLoughlin appears utterly unflappable because there has been an awful lot to flap about in the Department of Transport since he took over as Transport Secretary in the autumn reshuffle. If he expected a quiet time after seven years in the Westminster maelstrom as the Tories’ chief whip, he was sorely mistaken. Within days of taking office, he found himself having to deal with the West Coast ...

When it was decided to set up an enquiry on the scandal over the suicide of the scientist, David Kelly, in 2003, I happened to be on holiday near where a couple of members of the Labour government were staying. When the name of Lord Hutton, the judge appointed to hold the enquiry emerged in the conversation around the pool, the ministers smiled benignly:  ‘He’s a great appointment’, one of ...

If Patrick McLoughlin thought that escaping the bear pit of the whips office to the post of Secretary of State for Transport was a passport to a peaceful life, he will swiftly have been brought back down to earth. Within days of taking office he was plunged into the worst crisis in the Department since the collapse of Railtrack a decade ago with the withdrawal of the West Coast franchise ...

Patrick McLoughlin is shrewd enough to have known that becoming transport secretary might thrust him into public consciousness at some point. But not in his worst nightmares could he have expected, just three weeks after moving from 20 years of anonymity in the Conservative whips’ office, to be dealing with the railways’ biggest crisis since the demise of Railtrack a decade ago. The collapse of the West Coast franchise bidding process ...

Dear Richard Brown, You have the unenviable task of trying to sort out the franchising issue and make sense of system that simply is not sensible. Your remit is pretty limited, though apparently it may change when the first review, into the specifics of the West Coast omnishambles by Sam Laidlaw is completed but I suspect – nay I know – that the thorough root and branch reform of the system ...