Hello and a very happy new year to you all, especially if you are reading this on Rugby railway station wondering why all the tracks are still in the ground waiting to be turned from iron ore into something on which a train one day might run.

Or conversely, you might be at Birmingham International pondering the vexing question of why the whole thing had to be shut down for two hours because of what the emergency services called a “small fire” in a nearby cafe.

Well, I am afraid the answer is simple. In the olden days, all that stood between the bosses and the work being done was the trade union movement. And the unions could be silenced most of the time with a corned beef sandwich and a vague promise of some jam tomorrow for the workforce.

Not any more. Now, when you want to get something done, the union boys are the least of your worries. Because you must also ensure that no Muslims or gingers are upset in any way by what you’re planning, that no creatures, even if they are rubbish ones like snails or foxes, will be dislodged, that you won’t make any unnecessary carbon dioxides, that all those involved will wear orange clothes, hard hats and boots made from box girder bridges, that they are all as sober as a Sunday best Swede and that should a small fire break out within 200 miles, provisions are in place to send everyone home for at least a year.

If I ruled the world, by Jeremy Clarkson

Perhaps the most popular choice for PM never to run is our own Jeremy Clarkson. Would he really be the best choice for Britain? Clarkson has been laying out a manifesto of sorts for years in The Sunday Times and Times Online. Here, then, we have collated his thoughts into a unified vision for world domination

BACKGROUND

• Jeremy Clarkson on the environment

• Unhand my patio heater, archbishop

• Make my day, sir, shoot a hoodie

• We’ve been robbed of our Englishness

Related Internet Links

• Jeremy Clarkson on cars

• Jeremy Clarkson on everything else

That’s before you go to the government, which gives you £2.50 to replace every railway line in the country because all the rest of the money it gets each year is being spent on arresting Pete Doherty and holding public inquiries into how it lost the medical records, banking details, driving records and previous convictions of everyone in the world.

These public inquiries can be convened only once all concerned are aware that they can’t kill a fox or upset a redheaded person and that if there’s a fire nearby they must sail immediately to a point midway across the Atlantic and sit there until it, and every other fire in the world, has been put out.

And an investigation then has to be held to find out what caused it and who’s responsible and how that person should be punished. Unless they are ginger, in which case they will get a free tinfoil coat, a bit of soup and some counselling.

Plainly, all this has to stop. We must go back to the closing days of the 19th century when, without any heavy lifting gear or automation, 177 miles of broad gauge railway line from London to Bristol and beyond was converted to narrow gauge in just one weekend.

Actually, we don’t even need to go back that far. The M1 was not there one morning and the next it was. Then there was Spaghetti Junction. The 30-acre site was crisscrossed with two railway lines, three canals and two rivers but despite this they had to build a network of slipways that would link 18 different roads. And they got the whole thing done in 30 months. Which is about as long as it takes these days to build a garden shed, if you do it by the book.

I believe that the time has come to stop the nonsense and last week we were gifted the perfect opportunity. As I’m sure you heard, the Royal Marsden hospital in Chelsea, west London, was severely damaged by a fire and even a partial loss of its facilities is rather more than an inconvenience. A damaged railway line causes people to be late for work. A damaged hospital, which sees 40,000 patients a year and sits at the centre of an already overstretched National Health Service, may well cause people to die.

Gordon Brown visited the scene and said that the evacuation of the hospital at the time of the blaze had seen Britain at its best. And that he would do everything in his power to get the place up and running again.

Stirring words and now let’s go for some stirring action. People are already saying that it will take “months”, which is government speak for “years”, to remove the ruined roof and replace it with a new one. But why can we not aim to do it in “weeks”?

Let’s go back to the days when governments – and rail companies for that matter – knew that they existed to serve us and that we weren’t just a nuisance who are told to stay at home if we’re not involved and wrapped up in fluorescent clothes if we are.

Let’s go back to the days when speed was not a dirty word. In 1994 the Santa Monica freeway in California was destroyed by an earthquake. You may remember the scenes of total devastation: crumpled bridges, huge slabs of concrete, twisted steel and rubble. It was a nightmare, but they had traffic running on it again in just 84 days.

Let’s aim for the same sort of target with the Marsden. Let’s tear up the rule book about carbon dioxide and hard hats and no reversing without a banksman. Let’s get the builders in there tomorrow, or now, and let’s allow them to smoke so they don’t have to pop outside every 15 minutes.

To achieve this, a vast army of busybodies and nitwits will need to be kept at bay as they strut about with their clipboards and their concerns that mice may be nesting in the embers and that they must be taken, in a helicopter, to the countryside and freed humanely before work can start.

Dealing with them is possible, providing the man in charge has a side parting, a small moustache and a fondness for telling everyone who gets in his way to eff off. It’s a job that I would like very much.

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