Off the rails

With civil servants rightly being lambasted for making a right hash of issuing a rail franchise for the West Coast mainline, thereby handing taxpayers a bill of at least £40m (goodbye promotion, farewell knighthood), we can be grateful for small mercies that they wised up before embarking on a protracted legal battle with beardy, ex-balloonist Sir Richard Branson, saving the nation at least a little bit of money and allowing the mess to be sorted out more quickly. It would have been so easy for civil servants to say “well, it’s not my money being wasted on legal fees and court time, it’s government [i.e. taxpayers’] cash,” and then send it down the line and probably appealing when they lost. The civil servants responsible for the fiasco have been suspended but they should be sacked – this goes way beyond a ‘first warning’.


Branson hasn’t had it all his own way though this week, with Newcastle United deciding to exercise their option to terminate the deal at the end of the season, instead of letting it running through to May 2014. I can’t say I’m saddened by it. Northern Rock on the shirts had a powerful theme, even if the club were frequently as chaotic as the now-defunct bank during this period. VirginMoney may have made logical sense as the successor to Northern Rock, but it would have stretched the tolerance of many a replica-wearing fan to sport a shirt emblazoned with ‘virgin’ on it!