Patrick McLoughlin leaned across the dispatch box and activated the voice control on his satnav. “Stay on the A303 at Amesbury before disappearing under the Stonehenge tunnel. On re-emerging turn left on the A27 towards Lancing. At the Black Cat contraflow roundabout take the A428 towards Caxton Gibbet. 400 yards after junction 10A, follow the new dualling A34 ring-road around Oxford. I said ‘stay on the A34’ you idiot. Now look what you’ve done. Recalibrating, recalibrating…”
The transport secretary wasn’t at his most fluent during his statement on new road-building in the Commons. Normally a master of the most trivial detail – “I can’t recommend the Little Chef on the intersection of the A50 and the B5030 near Uttoxeter too highly”, he stumbled a few times over directions, as if he suspected the satnav might be faulty.
He wasn’t the only one. Labour’s shadow transport minister, Michael Dugher, was convinced it had been programmed only to drive through Tory and Lib Dem constituencies and that it was an outrage there were no plans to repair the potholes in Hull.
This was about all the opposition had to say about the government’s firmer commitment to the £15bn plan that they had only previously committed themselves to a little bit; in parliament all motorists are “hard-pressed” and “long-suffering” and only Green MP Caroline Lucas is ever prepared to challenge their God-given right to drive wherever they like. As she wasn’t in the House – maybe she had got stuck in traffic – McLoughlin had the chamber to himself. After dismissing Dugher for ranting, the transport minister reiterated his devotion to the road network. Roads weren’t just stretches of inanimate asphalt; they were like children to him. “I am an ambitious man,” he declared. “And I am extremely ambitious for the roads.” He didn’t want his roads to coast. Not even the coast roads. A B-road shouldn’t be content to be a B-road; it should aspire to be an A-road. Nor should A-roads rest on their laurels. They should push themselves to be A*-roads. M-roads even.
As he sat down the A14 caught the Speaker’s eye and shouted “Yes we can”. Or rather its sitting MP, Philip Hollobone, did. Having recently discovered that Ukip doesn’t stand for the United Kettering Independence party as Douglas Carswell had led him to believe, Hollobone has become rather more on Central Office message. His first loyalty is still to Kettering, though. The improvements to junction 10A of the A14 would be very well received in his constituency, he said.
Hollobone was just one in a long traffic jam of Tory MPs who wanted to express their personal thanks for promising to build a new road in their constituency so close to a general election. That didn’t stop some from asking for still more. Now that Maria Miller is spending more time in her Basingstoke constituency than she would like, it’s come to her notice that the M3 can be very noisy. “Could the minister please make sure the M3 is resurfaced with noise-reducing asphalt?” she asked. Andrew Tyrie was more concerned that the improvements to the A27 would make it harder for his constituents to travel in a north-south direction. He stopped short of asking for his own personal bridge, but it was clearly what he had in mind.
In the end, it all became too much even for McLoughlin. When asked when he was proposing to build Junction 7A on the M11, he said, “Let’s just get Junction 7 sorted first.”
Some roads are just too pushy for their own good.
• This article was amended on 3 December 2014. An earlier version referred to Capstan Gibbet rather than Caxton Gibbet.
