Blog

THIS week I was privileged to attend the presentation of the Charles Wheeler Award, given in memory of the BBC’s greatest-ever foreign corespondent. It was a delightful occasion in which Mishal Husain of Radio 4’s Today programme (left) received the honour and Lindsey Hilsum, the intrepid International Editor of Channel 4 News, gave a talk […]

IT’s long been the case that the daily print media cannot hope to stay abreast of a big news story when it breaks overnight. Never has this been truer than this morning, when the papers largely failed to get to grips with the biggest news story of the decade – the astonishing ascendancy of  Donald […]

TODAY’s  Budget held good and bad news for Britain’s bus passengers. On the one hand, Rachel Reeves trumpeted that the cap on bus fares introduced by the Sunak government would be continued. On the other the minimum price will go up from £2 to £3. This will not be welcomed by the young, the old […]

  ENJOYED being a  judge for this year’s London Press Awards, presented in the delightful historic surroundings of the Stationers’ Hall in the City. The judges agreed that it may have been a tough year for many newspapers but the ability to get to the heart of important and difficult issues is as strong as […]

BACK in 1964, as a young rail enthusiast, I travelled on the very final Atlantic Coast Express from Waterloo to the West Country. It was one of the great named trains of the world, and on this last sad occasion, it was hauled by Merchant Navy class No. 35022 “Holland America Line”, one of the […]

AT LAST some sense in the HS2 debacle as Transport Secretary Louise Haigh appeared today to signal the go-ahead for the multi-billion pound line’s link to Euston in central London. Previously, under nonsensical plans by Rishi Sunak, it was to terminate in a god-forsaken corner of west London at Old Oak Common. This is good […]

I WAS never a great fan of HS2, believing that it would have been better to sprinkle the largesse across the  existing network, bringing benefits to our ailing railways in general. If it had to be built I believed it would have been better to construct it on the trackbed of the old Great Central […]

AS the plans for the once-grand HS2 fell apart of the weekend – with the Manchester line set to be canned and the Euston terminus dumped in favour of ending up in some West London wasteland – I journeyed into a different kind of railway universe on Saturday. Aboard the 7am from Paddington, Brunel’s magnificent […]