Poor old Andrew Adonis. The former Blair adviser, journalist and academic, was sent to the Lords a few years ago, after heading the No.10 policy unit. Like all Labour peers, he simply used his surname as his title. Unlike other Labour peers, his surname is that of the Greek God of strength and male beauty.

And he is a very plain little man.

Terrible, isn’t it? You take the most unassuming form of ennoblement, and suddenly you look like a megalomaniac.

“It is,” remarked one British comic, “as if I had suddenly decided to call myself King Strong”.

The disappointment when he turns up — short, slight, balding, big-nosed — must be immense. His wife is an ad executive who has created a start-up with Oxford University, focusing on new hair-loss products.

True story.

Where was I? Ah yes, Adonis has been working for years on getting a major high-speed rail project going. It must be admitted that he is one of the more purposeful of the people surrounding Labour, and today it was finally announced — a high-speed rail line from London to Birmingham, and eventually Manchester and Edinburgh, cutting the time from the capital to the Midlands from 90 minutes to 50 minutes. Construction will start in 2017.

Yep, that’s right, 2017. Not finish, start. The line will be finished another 10 years later.

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The announcement is, of course, pathetic. France and Germany have had these trains for decades, decades, and they have contributed enormously to those countries’ carrying on as multi-polar entities — while also providing a focus for engineering training, innovation and, with China’s burgeoning rail network, export.

Britain turned instead to motorways in the 1960s, and in the ’80s it simply stopped investing in itself altogether. The British rail system is a wonder to behold for those of us with an Asperger-ish streak, the befuddled traveller never quite knowing what will turn up, an intercity sprinter taking you straight into Kings Cross, or a two-carriage Tonka toy dumping you at Didcot Parkway at 11pm on a wet Wednesday, with a three-kilometre hike to make the connection to Spalding.*

King Strong tried to put a brave face on it, calling it the equivalent of Isembard Kingdom Brunel in the 21st century, which is an insult to the man who put a tunnel under the Thames, a cable across the Atlantic, and lines over and through mountains in the era of the horse and shovel, but let that pass. The BBC had fun, rendering footage of the scheme’s launch in jerky sepia, like an old newsreel — and the inventiveness of the media standing in stark contrast to the half-heartedness of actual infrastructure development says all one needs to about the current predicament of the UK.

But that is as nothing to the predicament of the Conservatives in the face of such announcements, who don’t know whether to go fully green in their standard turquoise manner, and oppose the thing, or knuckle under and support it. They solved that by going beyond it, saying the line should run through Heathrow, and straight through the Brum to Manchester and around to Leeds. They’re right, but the insistence on a larger project and one starting two years earlier sits ill with their rhetoric about swingeing — yes, swingeing, they use that word all the time — cuts, and a return to fiscal rectitude.

Like Tony Abbott’s mob, the discipline of the conservatives has fallen apart completely, as the grand old alliance between economic liberals and social conservatives born of the Cold War, has finally fallen apart. Abbott, having served in John Howard’s thus-constituted government, has now come out with a capital C conservative statist measures to shore up a preferred social model — parental leave — and hang the cost.

I’m in favour of parental leave, too — though we may as well call it maternal leave, as experience in the Nordic countries shows that the female-male use of it is about 85%-15%, unless a less unequal split is made compulsory. But Abbott’s sudden promulgation of a big-spending package (greeted with aggrieved Soviet-esque silence by News Ltd) appears to be his Sarah Palin moment.

When John McCain, who’d been trading on the idea of experience, chose Palin, effectively the mayor of Alaska county, to be a swollen prostate away from the Presidency, the choice, for a moment, looked audacious — and then everyone at the same time, realised it was nuts. McCain kicked out his own chocks that day, and Abbott appears to have done the same.

The UK Tories are in the same jam — they’re trying to answer the vexed question, what should a centre-right party propose. By now all but a diminished coterie of Accountantaliban of the Austrian/Ergas/Alan Wood etc school, realise that the West cannot cut its way back to growth by further starving the public sector. But as Labor and left parties now have a franchise on nation building, what are they now to say? The short answer is anything and everything. The Tories had a strategy — outflank Labour on  left and right, appealing to Greens and nationalists with notions of protecting “England” — but it’s now come apart as they bid for support. Tony Abbot has, well, Christopher Pearson. Nuff sed.

No one really believes that Adonis’ announcement heralds anything other than the continued slow decline of the west, in relation to the east, at least within the current political-economic framework. But it is this dour mood that is making the Broon look all the more presumptive as leader, and Cameron like a smooth punk.

The trick — the worse the news, the more a dour Scotsman sounds like just the ticket. When he spoke to yesterday’s appalling trade figures — the UK does not have a trade surplus with anyone that really matters — it sounded like he had already won.

It’s enough to put hair on your chest. Anywhere but the head of poor old Lord Adonis, who, like the government, appears smaller the closer you get to him.

*If I get any gunsel correspondence as to whether you can get from Didcot Parkway to Spalding without changing through London, I will not be responsible for my actions.