Sally Gimson at the Bloomsbury Waterstones with Nasrine Djemai, whose home was bulldozed for HS2

TO Bloomsbury and the book launch for Off The Rails, a searing look into the chaos behind the bungled High Speed 2 railway.

Oh what a mess both the Tories and Labour have made of a project, which has spiralled predictably way over budget and is so late in the delivery that we could have walked to Birmingham and back a couple of thousand times since the scheme was first imagined in 2010.

Sally Gimson is the author who says she went into her work “agnostic” about HS2 – but what a boring book that might have been.

It surely must have been clear to her when she picked up her quill that it’s been a humiliating lesson in why Britain is so bad at major infrastructure projects.

Walk around Euston, for example: homes and businesses have been seized and flattened only for the work to halted.

Those left living next to it have a ghostly construction site to contend with each day.

There have been problems and protests all along the line, and the bits that might have been most useful in the north of England amputated on cost grounds.

Perhaps the UK was unlucky that a man who has never won an election, the Labour peer Baron Andrew Adonis, was always treated like a god-like guru on infrastructure.

It was his brainchild and he still doesn’t seem to be able to accept that waiting another 15 or 20 years for it to be finished is making building the Pyraminds an easy job.

“This is my first book, I’m surprised actually that HS2 has been the start of my journey as an author, but I’m glad it has been,” Ms Gimson told the gathering in the Waterstones near the university.

“I started writing the book with an agnostic view of HS2 and I still believe in the right kind of high-speed rail linking up the north and making it faster and simpler to travel around the country. I come from Scotland and intercity trains changed my life in the 1980s, but I was astonished at how this megaproject went completely off the rails.”

Ms Gimson was a journalist before she joined Camden Council as a Labour councillor. She was later selected to stand for the party in the safe seat of Bassetlaw in Nottinghamshire, only to see her dreams of making it to the House of Commons dashed by a controversial re-run of the selection process.

That must have been a wounding experience, but she’s the kind of writer who would have been frank about HS2 regardless.

Friends from her eventful lives in politics and journalism came to support her at the launch, including the former transport lobbyist Baron Mike Katz, who was elevated to the House of Lords recently by Sir Keir Starmer.

Neither of the main parties at Westminster are absolved of blame in her new book, however.

On HS2’s failure, she told the launch that problems had included “interference from politicians, the lack of expertise in government and for quite some time nobody appreciated just how complex HS2 was”.

Ms Gimson added: “As I wrote it, I became more and more angry and seriously worried for Britain.

If the state is so incompetent, what hope for other infrastructure projects like energy or sewers?

Yesterday, I read a piece in the FT about how Sizewell C is so complicated it’s more or less unbuildable.”

Sizewell C is a new nuclear plant planned for the Suffolk coast.

Baron Adonis, meanwhile, wrote in Prospect magazine a little while back thatthe scheme was not dead and that quicker journey times to Birmingham would one day be celebrated.

“When HS2 opens, I expect it will be greeted as a transport miracle, rather like the first railways and motorways, or more recently the Elizabeth Line in London and high-speed lines around the rest of the world,” he said.

“All of these at the time had critics on grounds of cost and novelty in their generally fraught periods of construction.”

It would be hard for a man so self-assured that he is always right to backtrack now.