Only one thing came faster and more furious than the TGV that set a new world record of 357mph between Paris and Strasbourg on Tuesday: the carping from this side of the Channel. Don’t French taxpayers realise they have been ripped off, the TGV critics assert: the new line has cost them €5 billion, and is a white elephant introduced in spite of official predictions that it will never make a profit.

I am not always a fan of the French way of doing things. Their agricultural subsidies stink and the bureaucracy imposed on small French businesses is beyond parody. But can’t we just have the good grace to admit that railways are something that the French do right and we do appallingly? Only €5 billion (£3.54 billion) for a brand new 285-mile, high-speed railway line? That is less than half the £7.6 billion that British taxpayers spent on new signals on the existing London to Glasgow line, which enabled the maximum speed of trains on the line to be raised from 110mph to, er, 125mph. What do we have to show for the money? The sprawled wreckage of one of Sir Richard Branson’s Pendolino trains, which jumped the tracks because of a faulty set of points and plunged down an embankment in Cumbria in February.

The difference is that the French spend their rail investment money on engineering — while we spend ours on consultants’ fees, legal bills, diversity officers, £1.1 million in bonuses for the directors of Network Rail and just about anything other than physically building railways. The result is a bizarrely inflated cost of running trains — which is costing taxpayers four times as much in subsidy as before privatisation. On the same days that the record-breaking TGV set off to Strasbourg, Network Rail announced a £2.4 billion plan to improve Britain’s railways. What are we getting for the money? A few extended platforms, a few miles of doubled track in Staffordshire and a new 15-mile line from Bathgate to Airdrie in Scotland. An extra platform at King’s Cross alone is projected to cost £15 million. Presumably at that price it will be paved with ivory, and adorned with lamp standards finished in gold leaf.

And still it costs passengers 55p a mile to travel from London to Manchester — three times as much as it costs to travel from Paris to Calais. No one likes to poke fun at the French more than I do, but on this occasion I am humbled: I only wish I had been there on Tuesday, on an overbridge near Reims, to throw my beret into the air with pride as the record-breaking TGV sped below.

Much as I approve of privatisation, where pragmatism demands it, we would have been better selling British Rail lock, stock and bogie to the Société Nationale des Chemins de fer Français.

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