I hear that Crossrail, currently with the lawyers, has missed an important deadline. No one is giving me any more details, and I am told the delay is nothing significant. But you have to wonder if it will now get built.

This is a project seen as making it easy for rich bankers to get to and from Heathrow in comfort. Can you think of a couple of reasons why this might not be top of the public spending agenda today? Not many bankers left and the survivors are pariahs, for example? “Crossrail isn’t just about bankers getting to Heathrow,” a City source wails. “It’s the most fundamental change in London’s transport infrastructure in a generation.” Maybe. But that £12 billion saved would take us a third of the way towards the cost of this week’s banking rescue.

Cancel the Olympics and we’re two thirds of the way there. Hard times bring forth hard measures. Perhaps the French still want it. Alternatively, I am reminded that in 1948 London hosted the Austerity Olympics. The athletes ran around a dog track, the Olympic pool was originally an ice rink and they all lived in schools and converted barracks and travelled around by bus. Why not again?

Public servant

In the blue corner: Ron Sandler

It was little-noticed in the trading statement from Northern Rock the other day that Ron Sandler, the bank’s chairman, has taken a savage pay cut, after he became a non-executive at the start of this month. Sandler, best known for sorting out Lloyd’s in the late 1990s, was appointed in February as the Government took control. He was on a package of £90,000 a month and this week’s announcement makes clear that henceforth he will have to jog along on a mere £350,000 a year. Doesn’t this make him the UK’s highest-paid part-time civil servant, I ask? The Rock’s people clearly hadn’t thought of that. “Effectively, he’s running . . .” one splutters. “It’s, OK, under temporary public ownership but it’s being run by the board of Northern Rock.”

Only connect. One of the ministers involved in the nationalisation of the banks is Baroness Shriti Vadera. Who was also heavily involved in the nationalisation of Railtrack, during which she contemptuously referred to small shareholders as “grannies”, investors in the banks might note.

And which other minister was involved in what Sir Fred “The Dead” Goodwin calls his “drive-by shooting”? Paul Myners, who ran Gartmore, part of NatWest, only to lose his job when the bank was acquired in a hostile takeover by RBS and Fred “The Discred”.

Yesterday was to be the official launch of the Story of the T&G in book and DVD form. The reception had to be cancelled “due to unforeseen circumstances”. My man among the brothers wonders if this has anything to do with reports in this newspaper that relations between the union and its fellow, Amicus, merged as the super-union Unite, are somewhat unfraternal and that the T&G has sought legal advice about pulling out. Might they still be working on the last chapter?

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