As I suspected. This week’s proving very different to the last one. I’ve hardly moved from the house apart from a brief foray into Sowerby Bridge yesterday in order to pick up some shopping. Mind you, the weather’s hardly been conducive to venturing far. We’ve had more than our fair share of rain here in’t Pennines – such a contrast to the great weather we enjoyed in Surrey. So, I’ve battened down the hatche and got square eyes by wading through the hundreds of pictures I’ve had to sift through and edit before captioning them and getting them on to my Zenfolio website. The process is almost finished – the last ones will be done by tomorrow. I’ve also written an article for RAIL magazine on my visit to the HS2 bridge site near Aylesbury last week.

HS2 is taking up a lot of the media’s time right now due to the absolute car-crash that’s the Tory party conference in Manchester. That the route to Manchester might be scrapped has been widely leaked to the press and Sunak is making an utter fool of himself parroting ‘spades in the ground, spades in the ground’ whilst refusing to quash speculation that he’s started himself! The optics of this are mad. Who in their right minds would hold a party conference in a major city you’re about to deprive of a new high-speed railway? But, looking at the conference it’s clear anyone in their right mind has stayed away. Leaks from those there describe the atmosphere as like a party at a funeral. It’s more ‘the last days of the bunker’ in the levels of unreality that have crept in. One would be forgiven for thinking its really the UKIP conference with the Tories having drifted so far to the right. That Nigel Farage himself has attended and been lauded by some says it all. Then there’s the video of Farage dancing with Priti Patel. God help us! It gets worse, our esteemed (are you taking the piss? Ed) Transport Minister, Mark Harper has joined the ranks of the batshit conspiracy theorists and condemned the concept of ’15 minute cities’. Add this to Sunak announcing his going to scrap non existent plans to tax meat and make you use seven recycling bins and you can see how far from reality the Tories are straying.

The Daily Mirror newspaper has helpfully highlighted 5 of the maddest claims and outright lies used in speeches at the conference. Talk about having no shame…

Then, today, Home Secretary Suella Braverman channeled her inner Enoch Powell to give the most awful speech imaginable, full of anti immigration rhetoric and condemnation, telling people we’re facing a ‘hurricane’ of immigrants coming to take over our shores then launching into more ‘war on woke’ tirades that forced one man to grumble aloud. It wasn’t even a heckle, but he was immediately pounced upon by security and police, had his pass ripped from around his neck and was ejected in full view of the media who caught it on camera. Then it turned out the man was none other than Andrew Boff, the Conservative Chair of the London Assembly!

This car crash will hit the inveitable brick wall tomorrow, although from what I’m hearing many delegates have already left in despair. Tomorrow Sunak is due to address the conference. Will he be suicidal enough to announce the cancellation of HS2? Who knows. Whoever is advising him from the Tufton St cabal could well have sealed his, theirs and the Tories fate, because such an announcement will go down like a bucket of cold sick, no matter how he tries to spin it. ‘Levelling up’ will be exposed as a joke and the North won’t forgive, or forget. And I suspect the Labour party will be watching with bated breath as the Tories could well be about to leave them a huge open goal.

I’ll be waiting for the next set of opinion polls to come out after this shambles is over with great interest. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with today’s picture which is one of the batch I’ll have uploaded to my Zenfolio site tomorrow. Rightwinder try and pretend there’s no need for investment in the railways anymore as no-one using the trains nowadays. Really? Here’s the concourse of London’s Liverpool St station seen at 18:25 last Thursday. Just containing tumbleweeds, obviously….

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