On any other day, this would have been a major story. But given the Home Office meltdown over the immigration debacle, the conclusion by the Transport Select Committee that the rail network is a shambles that is totally out of control was relegated to the inside pages. But it's absolutely devastating stuff. Here's a sample:

'The industry is “out of effective control”, with soaring costs and slow progress on reducing delays. It has fragmented into “competing baronies” that absorb more than three times the subsidy granted to British Rail but deliver worse performance... Ministers botched their previous two attempts to reform the structure of the industry ... confused organisational arrangements ... Network Rail, the not-for-profit company created by the Government to replace Railtrack, had presided over a “scandalous” decline in performance last summer. The company “lacks accountability” because it is answerable neither to shareholders nor to ministers...'

And most lethal of all: '(The Government) has had six years to construct a policy and structure for the railway that works, but our report shows that is has failed to do so.” '

It is the combination of (rightly or wrongly) perceived dishonesty, as in the Beverley Hughes affair, and palpable, endemic and potentially fatal incompetence, over which there can be no dispute, which has now mired this government's reputation so badly it is hard to see how it can possibly recover.