Will HS2 be or will not HS2 be? That’s a question with which British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has been repeatedly faced in recent weeks.

Would he choose to continue with, or pull the plug on, the UK's most ambitious and exorbitantly expensive infrastructure project in living memory?

And, even if he allowed its initial phase to progress, would he decide to cancel its second stage: HS2B or not HS2B, as one might (annoyingly) ask?

The high-speed railway line HS1 was the British end of the Eurostar train link, opening in 2003 to connect London with Paris with the channel tunnel. Its successor, imaginatively named HS2, was originally intended to provide superfast rail transport from London to Manchester, via Birmingham, thus bringing the capital together with the two largest cities of northern England and the Midlands.

When David Cameron's Conservatives had been swept into power (or at least wafted into a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats) on a wave of electoral apathy and political disillusionment following the global financial crash, his administration had declared a new age of austerity in an ill-judged bid to restore the nation’s finances by not actually spending any money.

His predecessor in Downing Street had known that, in order to stimulate an economy reeling from the banking crisis, the most effective policy would be to invest in key infrastructure. Following Gordon Brown’s lead, his Keynesian approach had been successfully embraced by other major Western economies, but, when they won the 2010 election (more or less), the Tories exploited the crisis to justify their ideologically driven imposition of massive cuts to public budgets.

The Conservative Chancellor George Osborne had announced that this was the only way to balance the country’s books and that there was no Plan B.

Of course, it didn’t work. Austerity only served to exacerbate economic stagnation. And that meant that tax revenues decreased, and the future of the nation’s finances looked no less bleak.

So, Mr. Osborne snuck in a Plan B by the back door, a major infrastructural investment intended to boost the UK’s economic prospects (or at least those of Tory-voting England).

In 2009, the soon-to-be-outgoing Labour government proposed the construction of a high-speed rail link between those three major English cities. In 2012, the Conservatives dusted off those plans and announced they were proceeding with HS2, starting with a new rail route between London and Birmingham.

The entire project was originally costed up to a maximum of £36 billion. By 2019, those costs had been projected to rise to around £90 billion. Today, some analysts say that (as a result of the particular impacts of inflationary pressures upon the construction industries) those latter estimates should now be doubled.

Approaching £180 billion, those costs would represent about seven per cent of the UK’s total national debt, or about eight per cent of the country’s GDP.

That would be a lot of money to spend on a railway which might at best manage to cut journey times between London and Birmingham by between a half and a quarter of an hour. It’s a massive sum even in normal economic times. During a cost-of-living crisis – when high levels of inflation have so impacted upon fuel and food prices that ordinary families are struggling to feed themselves and heat their homes – it would seem politically insane to sign up to spend such a mind-numbing sum.

But with 30,000 jobs depending on the continuation of the project and many billions already committed or spent, the decision to junk the plan hasn’t been as simple as it might at first appear.

Measures to cut costs had therefore been mooted. One was to stop the line at Birmingham and delay or cancel the extension of the route further north. Given the Conservatives’ promises to level up the socioeconomic fortunes of the north and south, and given their current electoral reliance on northern constituencies, there have been some in the party who balked at that unattractive option.

Others however said they would much prefer the money to be invested in desperately needed public transport links within the north of England (most obviously ones linking big northern cities from Liverpool and Manchester to Sheffield, Leeds and Hull) rather than one connecting the north to the south.

Another idea was to end the line not in central London but in a western suburb of the capital. This would almost certainly mean that, following the spending of an initial sum of at least £50 billion, we might (in an attempt to save about ten per cent of that cost) end up with a high-speed line that in fact takes longer than the old service to get people from Birmingham to the heart of London.

That would obviously be quite embarrassing for anyone involved.

Rishi Sunak therefore spent much of the last few weeks trying to dodge questions on the subject – a controversy that has polarized opinion not only across the country but also in his own party – as he weighed up the options in his mind and on his spreadsheets.

One senior minister known more for his loyalty rather more than for his competence said it would be “crazy” not to reconsider the viability of the project in the light of its spiraling costs, while, by contrast, Boris Johnson and George Osborne loudly urged him to stick with it.

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In a series of high-profile regional radio interviews at the end of last month, the premier could be heard to squirm time and again as he did his best to avoid being pinned down to an unequivocal position on the subject, merely repeating that he was determined to ensure the country got “value for money”.

It was not of course a problem of his own making, but Mr. Sunak was well and truly forked upon the horns of this thorny dilemma, the decision whether to fund a cripplingly costly white elephant in his own backyard or to bear an immeasurably weighty job-loss albatross around his neck.

It was just one more hazard for his ailing administration to face as it chugs haltingly on towards the end of the line.

At the end of last month, Mr. Sunak tried to twist the media agenda towards another transport topic by announcing his opposition to the introduction of traffic-calming measures on roads across the country and declaring that he was “slamming the brakes on the war on motorists” in an unwittingly mixed metaphor that was perhaps rather less inspiring (or indeed coherent) than it intended to be.

His moribund government has already declared war on the woke and on small boats. This latest battle cry feels less like the fighting talk of a bullish comeback kid than the last gasp of a defeated politician.

A week ago, as the Conservatives opened their annual conference in Manchester, one of their best-known supporters quit the party, saying that it was “drifting out of touch with the needs of business, the environment, and everyday people”. Even as the Prime Minister was announcing additional funding for towns that had been “overlooked” – but still refusing to confirm whether HS2 would ever reach Manchester at all – his prominent former backer was denouncing the Tories’ failure to reverse “high levels of regional inequality”.

While former and even current Cabinet ministers were spending their party conference jockeying for position to succeed him, Mr. Sunak’s office was forced to deny reports that he’d already decided to scrap the second phase of the high speed rail link… the stage that would take it to the key northern city where his conference was actually taking place.

With the applause from his immediate predecessor’s call for tax cuts still ringing hollowly in his ears, he can’t have been especially pleased to hear the Tories’ outspoken deputy chairman preempt his own decision (and steal his thunder) by suggesting that investment in HS2 had always represented a bad gamble and that he’d only been given his prestigious party role by the Prime Minister in a bid to shut him up.

It would have taken a barnstorming performance at his keynote speech last Wednesday to raise the roof on the conference hall and turn his political fortunes around. Sunak would have had to channel Thatcher, Johnson, and Churchill all in one.

It would have been an unrealistically tall order and one which, despite his best efforts, he’d never have been able to fulfill.

But at least he at last gave them an answer. It was an answer that many of them wanted to hear – but also one which many didn’t.

He might be applauded for his bravery, if nothing else. For there he stood, in Manchester, in the heart of that great industrial city of the north of England, and announced that the benefits of the country’s greatest infrastructural investment – an initiative launched more than a decade earlier by his own party – was never, as far as he was concerned – going to reach there.

The move was described by the Conservative mayor of the West Midlands as “an incredible political gaffe”.

The premier promised that all of the £36 billion to be saved on the northern end of HS2 would be invested in public transport in the north of England. Those who believe that the savings will be at least twice as much were unimpressed.

The sense of the North being short-changed in the deal was reinforced by the news that the southern end of HS2 would stretch all the way to central London after all.

His conference speech also launched broadsides against tobacco, universal opportunities for higher education, and sadistic murderers (obviously something of an open goal), and even took a sideways swipe at his own Home Secretary, responding to her recent declaration of the failure of multiculturalism by claiming the UK to be “the most successful multi-ethnic democracy on Earth”.

His final promise to deliver change to “build a brighter future” received the inevitable standing ovation, although it may be unclear how a party in power for the last thirteen years can seriously claim to be the only force that can now turn the country around.

But what will be most remembered from his speech will be his cancellation of the northern half of the greatest infrastructure project in modern British history. The political, social, environmental, and economic fallout of that decision may rumble on for decades to come.

A decision was announced in the great northern city of Manchester. On a day when, once more, no trains were running, thanks to yet another national strike.