Today the Government have announced that they are scrapping the West Coast Mainline FirstGroup deal. To be honest, everything about the deal felt dodgy in the first place, as I pointed out in an earlier post.

Without trying to be too sensationalist, like the Daily Mail or someone, I’ll skim over the fact that the DfT were the ones who:

a) had a thing against Richard Branson, that went back to when he initially won the contact all those years ago and…

b) the DfT are the ones who made so many ‘technical errors’ in the bidding process that the whole thing has been scrapped.

A rushed job gone wrong? Or something darker…

Just what is the DfT’s ulterior motive here? What do they want? Branson out, indebted First in? Branson out, the DfT in (that’s what is having to happen in the interim after all)?

Surely the simple answer isn’t that they were just that stupid.

There are 15 more rail franchises to be looked at before the next election, the BBC has reported.

And you can watch this video on the BBC and attempt to work out what the hell is going on. There are far too many intelligent people working in government for this to be simply a monumental ****up. Who is playing who? I’m no detective but it’ll be interesting to see how this all plays out.

#firstvirgin #winning

Sophie Collard on Google+