But as a general principle it is obvious that both London and other cities would benefit from better and faster connections. The problem, as Peter Mandelson has indicated, is cost. This thing isn’t going to cost £42 billion, my friends. The real cost is going to be way north of that (keep going till you reach £70 billion, and then keep going). That is why the Treasury is starting to panic, and the word around the campfire is that Lord Mandelson is actually doing the bidding of some fainthearts in Whitehall who want to stop it now – not the first or second Lords of the Treasury, clearly, but the bean-counters. So there is one really critical question, and that is why on earth do these schemes cost so much?

Doug Oakervee is a brilliant man to have in charge of HS2, and if anyone can deliver it, he can. But he is dealing with a system of building major infrastructure projects that is holding this country back. Talk to the big construction firms, and they will tell you the problem is not the cost of actually digging and tunnelling and putting in cables and tracks. Those are apparently roughly the same wherever you are in the world.

It’s the whole nightmare of consultation and litigation – and the huge army of massively expensive and taxpayer-financed secondary activities that is generated by these procedures. It is the environmental impact assessments and the equalities impact assessments and the will-sapping tedium and cost of the consultations. Did you know that in order to build HS2 we are going to spend £1 billion by 2015 — and they won’t have turned a single sod in Buckinghamshire or anywhere else?

That is a billion quid going straight down the gullets of lawyers and planners and consultants before you have even invested in a yard of track. To understand the prohibitive costs of UK infrastructure, you need to take this haemorrhage of cash to consultants, and then multiply it by the time devoted to political dithering.

Look at the Turks. They have decided that they need a new six-runway airport at Istanbul, so that they can take advantage of the growing importance of aviation to the world economy. They are almost certainly going to do it for less than 10 billion euros, and long before we have added a single runway anywhere in the South East. Or look at Chep Lap Kok, the airport Doug Oakervee built for Hong Kong. The authorities announced it in 1989 — and opened it nine years later! If you want to get a sense of our sluglike pace in the UK, we announced Heathrow Terminal 5 in 1988, and it took almost 20 years to create; not an airport, just a new terminal, for heaven’s sake (and if anyone thinks the advantage of a third runway at Heathrow is that it would be a “quick fix”, they frankly need their heads examining).

Other countries have clear plans for their infrastructure needs over the long term, and the talent and managerial firepower is being moved from one to the next. We don’t have a plan; we have a list of schemes, each of which causes politicians such heeby-jeebies that they waste billions – literally – in optioneering when what they need to do is decide on the right course and crack on with it. We have proved with Crossrail and the Olympics that we have the expertise to deliver big infrastructure projects. But time is money: we spend far too long on bureaucratic procedures and then enormously multiply that expense by a political failure to blast on with the task in hand.

The result is that we are being restrained from giving this country the improvements it needs at an affordable price. We are like Laocoon wrestling with the serpents, or like some poor bondage fetishist who has decided to tie himself up in knots — and then realised, too late, that he has gone too far. We tug at our bonds with our teeth and pathetically hope the neighbours will come. Of course they won’t! Our neighbours are out there investing in airports, while we are investing in consultants.

The revelations cast an interesting light on Mr Miliband’s professed love of “One Nation”, about which he’s so fond of babbling. If One Nation means anything, it is that a party promises to govern without favour to any sectarian interest. Quite how that squares with being owned by one union, which then supplies the candidates, defeats me.

I’m having a laugh at Labour (who isn’t?) while pointing out the impossibility of being the perfect candidate, to make a point: the selection procedure needs to be reformed.

For while Labour’s problems are of its own making, none of us can claim to be perfect. The Tory process works as follows: interested applicants are assessed by the Parliamentary Assessment Board (PAB), and gain entry to the “list”. Being on this list permits application to seats; but control over the final selection is in the hands of the local, voluntary association. There’s an uneasy dance, often, between Tory central office (CCHQ) and the association officers, but it’s the associations that have the power. It’s their shortlist and their membership will vote for their choice.

Neither aspect of the process works perfectly. The PAB itself is a fair process, I’d say, reminiscent of any other competency-based job interview. I went through it in 2010 because David Cameron opened up the list and I wanted to apply to stand in Brighton Pavilion. To my surprise, I passed.

Brighton Association, it turned out, was able to resist my many charms and the seat was fought by the wonderful Charlotte Vere. After the election, I was told by CCHQ that henceforth I could apply only for “The City Seats Initiative” – inner city seats, where the candidate’s task is to rebuild the association. I politely declined, and came off the list: I’d come to realise that I didn’t have the urge to fight any seat that might have me. I wanted to beat Caroline Lucas, and represent Brighton.

CCHQ meddles like this, because it’s trying to craft a population of candidates to do the party proud. But the meddling never works – whether with the City Seats thing, or the unlamented “A list” (“You look nice! Do you want to be an MP?”) – because no central office can know who will work best in any particular town.

But neither would it do to allow associations total control. By definition, those of us who belong to a party are unrepresentative, because we’ve self-selected ourselves to be activists. It’s quite arrogant to say that no matter how poorly an association might function (some are great, some aren’t) they have the best knowledge of how to determine who should fight an election for the Conservatives.

There’s an answer to this. CCHQ is entitled to run its PAB process. But final selection should be by primary – whether open, postal or electronic, I don’t really care. Anyone on the PAB list, and anyone who is a member of a local association, should be entitled to put their name forward, and all the voters in the seat be given a chance to have a say in the final selection.

Boris Johnson’s mayoral candidacy was selected in this way. Commentators often mention how Boris is “Tory mayor of a Labour city”; no one ever makes the link with the method by which he was chosen for that fight.

The Tory system works quite well, and opening up selection via primaries would just make a good thing better. But imagine what it would do to Labour! Trade unions would have to find another way to subvert our democracy. At least Mr Miliband could say he believes in One Nation, without his words attracting the cold, shocked laughter of disbelief.

The trouble with Kinnock, they will say, was that he was a Welsh windbag and that no one could see him as prime minister; and the trouble with Ed Miliband is that he is vaguely geeky and nerdy, and no one can see him as prime minister, and I suppose that may be true as far as it goes.

But this is about much more than image. The problem with Ed — and his similarity with Kinnock — is far more fundamental than that. Neil Kinnock didn’t lose because he was a Welsh windbag, but because he didn’t match the Tories in coming up with a language of opportunity and aspiration. He failed to equal Margaret Thatcher and, in the end, John Major, in providing a sense of how he, Kinnock, would unleash the talents of the British people and get the economy moving.

He was brilliant at sticking up for those who needed help — the elderly, the sick, the poor. But he never showed any real acknowledgment or understanding that we live in a broadly capitalist and free-market economy. At no stage did he seem to accept that it is always this money — the tax revenues – created by this capitalist system that allows us to finance all the social benefits and protections that government is able to disburse.

Neil Kinnock failed because he made his pitch to the Labour base — the unions, the public sector and all their clients; he had absolutely nothing to say about enterprise and ambition. The man who changed all that, and who understood how Labour could win was, of course, Tony Blair; and it was Blair who made a break so decisive with the legacy of Kinnock that they actually re-baptised the party, and called it “New Labour”; and the whole point of New Labour was that it straddled the divide.

You could, of course, vote for New Labour if you had a social conscience. But you could also vote for New Labour if you had a social conscience and you wanted to get rich. People felt under Blair that Labour was emotionally and psychologically reconciled to the realities of free-market economics. They looked at old Tony, with his zillionaire friends and his love of tennis and his ever-expanding property portfolio — and they thought: this man is not hostile to business.

They could see that he was in favour of wealth creation — and the problem with Ed Miliband is that he sends out absolutely no such signal because it is just not part of his political make-up. He can’t help it. He is the product of a world of north London intellectuals and grew up in a household where the words “free market” or “capitalism” were positively terms of abuse. His problem is not any supposed geekishness or nerdiness; his problem is entirely to do with substance, not style.

Under Ed Miliband, Labour has offered no explanation whatever of how it would like to inject more dynamism and growth into British capitalism. It has nothing to say about the everyday problems of business, about high tax and regulation; and as the election approaches it will pay an ever bigger price for its failure to offer any improvement in our relations with the EU in the form of a renegotiation, let alone a referendum.

Labour has nothing to say about Britain’s ability to compete in what David Cameron rightly says is the global race. Of course, we want a society where we care actively for the vulnerable; but the reason young people are not much turned on by Labour is that it is saying nothing exciting or hopeful, let alone about starting your own business or getting on in the world, and that is because in his heart Ed Miliband does not really view those prospects with excitement or hope.

They are not why he came into politics. He is there to curb the free market, not to celebrate what it can achieve. He has reduced Labour to its old role as a party of protest, complaint, and public-sector special interest groups.

That is not how Tony Blair won three elections. It is how Neil Kinnock lost twice.

Some of this applies to Andrew Feldman, whose sole qualification to work at (let alone chair) Conservative HQ appears to be that he played tennis with the Prime Minister while both men were undergraduates at Brasenose College, Oxford, in the Eighties. However, the party co-chairman is not just a crony. He is also a key link between the Prime Minister and Conservative Party donors (I would imagine his fingers are all over the knighthood awarded to Sir Michael Hintze, a hedge-fund manager who has given more than £1.5 million, for “services to the arts” in this week’s birthday honours).

Recently Andrew Feldman was accused of calling Tory activists “swivel-eyed loons”. He has denied doing so, unconvincingly. I have no doubt, having consulted relevant sources, that the remarks made were actually his. It comes as no surprise that a Tory party chairman whose real constituency is not the Tory membership but wealthy donors should have expressed such sentiments.

But he is the least of Mr Shapps’s numerous problems. The Tory chairman also has to cope with George Osborne. Though officially Chancellor of the Exchequer, in practice Mr Osborne spends a great deal of his time overseeing Tory politics, attending many of the relevant meetings. The lurking presence of the Chancellor is the main reason why Mr Shapps has no authority.

Mr Osborne’s main channel of influence is through Stephen Gilbert, the prime minister’s political secretary. Mr Gilbert (seen internally as a far more important figure than Grant Shapps) is also, in effect, head of campaigns at Central Office. It is conceivable that Mr Gilbert might do one of these jobs well. It can be said with certainty that he does both badly.

One of the functions of the political secretary (one done well by Jonathan Hill, now Leader of the Lords, during the Major premiership, or Sally Morgan for Tony Blair) is to establish a passage between the prime minister and the parliamentary party. At times this is close to a full-time job. Unfortunately Stephen Gilbert can only devote a small amount to this because of his other responsibilities, one of the main reasons for the catastrophic disconnection between David Cameron and his Tory MPs.

The campaigning situation is yet worse. Back-bench MPs complain about poor briefing and lack of strategic direction, a problem that was glaringly obvious during the Eastleigh by-election, when it was never clear who was in charge. The hapless Mr Shapps could do nothing about this shambles, even if he wanted to, because while he occupies high office he is not permitted to exercise real power.

There is also Lynton Crosby, recently appointed political strategist to the Prime Minister. There are conflicting views of Mr Crosby, but almost everyone agrees that he gives focused and tough advice. However he is at the moment part-time, which means that nobody reports to him and he is not part of the command structure.

To sum up: Conservative organisation is a mess of special agendas, secret influence, and back-channels of communication. Contempt for traditional party structures is complete, meaning that conflicting messages and operational incompetence have become the hallmark of the Tory machine. One MP told me so many people carried out the role of chairman that “if one of them won’t do what I want, I go and ask another”. As a result the superb work which is being carried out by many ministers is hardly recognised, while the relationship between Downing Street and Tory back-benchers and activists is the worst I can remember.

The underlying responsibility for this shambles must lie at the door of David Cameron. From the very start he and (in particular) George Osborne have shown a point-blank refusal to relinquish control of party organisation, which explains why no Tory chairman has been able to make a mark. It is very hard to see how the 2015 general election could be won in these circumstances.

There is a very obvious solution, but it would require courage. Mr Cameron could bring in a heavyweight politician – his own Patten or Thorneycroft – with the vision and substance to shape his own election-winning machine. Such a character would, however, have to be given overall control. He or she could not be second-guessed by Downing Street.

There are three candidates: William Hague, Michael Gove and Boris Johnson. Mr Hague, I am told, shudders at the thought of returning to the boredom, squalor and anxiety of domestic politics. Mr Gove cannot be spared from education. It is hard to think of any modern Conservative better suited for the job than Mr Johnson. Popular with the public, loved by the party, he has reinvented the rules of political discourse since becoming Mayor of London.

So far he has been kept at arm’s length by the Tory leadership, who feel envious and threatened by the Mayor’s charm and ease. The most intelligent reaction is to tie Mr Johnson in – by making his fortunes dependent on those of Mr Cameron. Both men come, after all, from the same stable: socially and economically liberal, defiantly optimistic. There is an inevitability that, over time, Mr Johnson would use his position to mount a challenge for the leadership. But the immediate task is to win the general election, and Mr Johnson is the only Conservative with the proven capacity to do just that.

“This has now been going on for nearly two-and-a-half years. We really shouldn’t be in the business of ruling out any options.

“There are no palatable options, I want to be clear with the whole country about that.”

David Cameron faces growing political opposition at home amid suggestions that he is in favour of joining the Americans in helping to assist rebels. He has been warned that he could be defeated in the Commons if he tries to win a parliamentary agreement for Britain to arm the rebels.

Mr Cameron clashed with the Russian president at a Downing Street press conference on Sunday.

Asked by reporters whether he had “blood on his hands” for arming the Assad regime, Mr Putin said that his nation had acted in accordance with international law by delivering arms to the Syrian government.

He added: “I believe you will not deny the fact that one should hardly back those who kill their enemies and eat their organs – all that is filmed. Do you want to support these people? Do you want to supply arms to these people?”

The Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg also cautioned Mr Cameron against arming the Free Syrian Army, saying that if it were a good idea, Britain would have done it already. The former head of the Army, Lord Dannatt, said he feared any such assistance would lead Britain into further intervention, while the Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, urged Mr Cameron to “tread very warily”.

In a round of TV interviews at Lough Erne, Mr Cameron said: “Let’s be clear – I am as worried as anybody else about elements of the Syrian opposition, who are extremists, who support terrorism and who are a great danger to our world.

“The question is what do we do about it? My argument is that we shouldn’t accept that the only alternative to Assad is terrorism and violence.

“We should be on the side of Syrians who want a democratic and peaceful future for their country and one without the man who is currently using chemical weapons against them.

“What we can try and do here at the G8 is have further pressure for the peace conference and the transition that is needed to bring this conflict to an end.”

The Prime Minister added: “We haven’t made a decision to give any arms to the Syrian opposition but what we do need to do is bring about this peace conference and this transition, so that people in Syria can have a government that represents them, rather than a government that’s trying to butcher them.

“What we are doing right now is helping the official Syrian opposition – people who have signed up to democracy and human rights, who want that sort of future for Syria.

“We are advising them, helping them and we are assisting them – and we should.

“President Assad wants us to think that the only alternative to him is extremism and violence. Yet there are millions of people in Syria who want a peaceful and democratic future. We should be on their side.”

Clip courtesy of Today on BBC Radio 4, the full interview is available to listen to on the BBC’s iPlayer.

Odious, twisted, hate-filled thugs; arrogant and inadequate creeps, intoxicated by the pathetic illusion of power that comes with guns; poisoned by a perversion of religion into a contempt for all norms of civilised behaviour.

They are fighting not for freedom but for a terrifying Islamic state in which they would have the whip hand — and yet there is no dodging or fudging the matter: these are among the Syrian rebels who are hoping now to benefit from the flow of Western arms.

How is it supposed to work? How are we meant to furnish machine guns and anti-tank weapons to one set of opposition forces, without them ending up in the hands of men like the al-Qaeda-affiliated thugs who executed a child for telling a joke? The answer is that we have no means of preventing such a disaster, any more than we can control what kind of “government” the rebels — if they were successful — would form in Damascus.

What is happening in Syria is one of the greatest human and cultural catastrophes of our age. For two years the mortar rounds have been pulverising the cradle of civilisation. When I think of the happy days I have spent roaming the souk of Aleppo or the Umayyad mosque of Damascus, I am filled with grief, and I hear such awful tales of destruction that I almost dread to go back. The dead are said to number 93,000 just in the past two years. But what else could we possibly have done?

Perhaps if we had piled in with the rebels at the beginning, it might have been possible to topple Bashar al-Assad and his nightmare regime. Perhaps we could have installed some sort of pluralist and democratic government, before the Syrian opposition became contaminated with jihadis.

You only have to raise that option to see that it was never on the cards — not after Iraq. We know what happens when you topple the regime of a Ba’athist strongman. You expose the fault lines of a state that was invented, in 1916, by the British colonial office, and you unleash an unbearable cycle of sectarian violence.

No one was going for a military option in 2011, certainly not the White House. With dozens of people being murdered every day in Iraq, no one was calling for us to repeat the experiment. So we sat back, without a strategy, hoping vaguely for the best — and now we have the worst of all worlds. The Assad regime has suffered all kinds of defeat and humiliation, but it has not yet lost.

Indeed, it has just recaptured the strategically important town of Qusayr, with the help of Hizbollah. We are now on the verge of a disastrous escalation, in which Syria becomes the centre of a regional if not a global power struggle.

On one side we have the rebels, including al-Qaeda, and they seem to have support — to a greater or lesser degree — from Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the United States, the European Union and an assortment of extraordinarily unpleasant fundamentalist preachers who are very keen on establishing an Islamic state.

On the other side we have the Assad regime, and they have the support of Lebanon’s Hizbollah militia, Iran and Russia, which has always regarded Syria as part of the Russian sphere of influence. Both sides are now symmetrically raising the stakes. The EU has decided to lift the arms embargo that has been in place since May 2011; the Iranians are now threatening to send in 4,000 troops.

Surely to goodness it is time to recognise that no one can win this conflict, because it has become at least partly a religious conflict, between Sunni and Shia. No one can win that conflict because it is almost beyond reason. It is an argument about the protocol that surrounded the succession of the Prophet Mohammed — in the seventh century AD! One side or the other might technically “win”, and impose a government over the whole country. But unless that government has the approval of both Sunnis and Shias, we are doomed to sectarian violence and reprisals forever.

This is not the moment to send more arms. This is the moment for a total ceasefire, an end to the madness. It is time for the US, Russia, the EU, Turkey, Iran, Saudi and all the players to convene an intergovernmental conference to try to halt the carnage. We can’t use Syria as an arena for geopolitical point-scoring or muscle-flexing, and we won’t get a ceasefire by pressing weapons into the hands of maniacs.