Private Island: Why Britian Now Belongs to Someone Else (32 page)

Versions of most of the chapters in this book first appeared in the
London Review of Books
and, in the case of ‘Signal Failure', in the
Guardian
. I'm grateful to Mary-Kay Wilmers, editor of the
LRB
, for her support and patience, and for her consent to the breach of the norms of article length that publication involved. I extend the same gratitude towards Alan Rusbridger, editor of the
Guardian
. At the
LRB
I must also thank Daniel Soar, Jean McNicol, Paul Myerscough, Deborah Friedell, Christian Lorentzen, Joanna Biggs, Alice Spawls, Nick Richardson and Jonah Miller. I owe a particular debt to Ian Katz, then features editor of the
Guardian
, who first suggested I looked into the story of the West Coast Main Line and didn't complain when I took one and a half years to hand the piece in; to Charlie English; and to Rob Edwards, who helped with the Freedom of Information request for access to the consultants' report that doomed Railtrack.

I carried out more than one hundred and fifty interviews for this book. Some of the people I would have liked to interview wouldn't talk to me, or were prevented from doing so by the organisations they worked for. Others spoke on condition of anonymity. Where I've quoted people and could do so, I've identified them. But there were many who helped me with background information, or who spoke with me at a stage when I
knew too little to ask the right questions, and so haven't been quoted. Rabina Khan falls into the latter category in respect of housing; David Worksett and Allyson Pollock, health. I'm grateful for their time and their help with context. I'd like to thank Peter Morris for his inexhaustible patience in helping me understand the numbers in annual company reports, and the mechanism behind private consortia takeovers of infrastructure. Alicia Weston, Keith Hill, John Bryant, Roger Harding, Neil Litherland and Stuart Macdonald offered insights into Britain's housing policy mess.

In an era where large corporations' trappings of openness – bright, friendly, content-rich websites and well-staffed PR operations – turn out to be facades for gagged workforces, denial of corporate history and a refusal to engage with sceptical questions, the generalist-journalist is grateful for the work of specialist journals whose reporters track narrow fields scrupulously week by week, and to whose presence shy executives have become habituated. I'm particularly indebted to the staff of
Inside Housing
and the
Health Service Journal
.

Two organisations I approached put me together with helpful, imaginative and articulate men with the authority and confidence to face my questions directly, answering them with intelligence and humour, acknowledging their critics, and accepting that they spoke to a corporate history going further back than the beginning of that financial year. These were David Simpson, then of Royal Mail, and Chris Green, then of Virgin Trains.

The more thorough and detailed a journalistic inquiry, the more likely the journalist is to have to demand of his interlocutors not only information about a situation but a kind of instant education into the most basic terms by which the situation must be framed. It is a great deal to ask of an interviewee in terms of patience, particularly when the questions stray towards the inquisitorial; I thank, in particular, Stephen Littlechild and Emma Cochrane for their readiness to stop and explain concepts to me.

I am grateful to Dieter Helm, who read through the original
version of the ‘Taking Power' article before it was published in the
LRB
; to Michael Pryke, who read ‘Not a Drop to Drink'; and to Nick Timmins, who read ‘Multiple Fractures'. Any flaws in these chapters remain my responsibility.

Examples of electricity market abuse were found in
Power Systems Restructuring: Engineering and Economics
, edited by Marija D. Ilic, Francisco Galiana and Lester Fink, and
Privatization, Restructuring, and Regulation of Network Utilities
, by David Newbery.
Right to Buy: Analysis and Evaluation of a Housing Policy
, by Colin Jones and Alan Murie, was an invaluable text, as was Matt Griffith's report
We Must Fix It
, available on the IPPR website (
ippr.org
). I am indebted to William Waugh's
John Charnley: The Man and the Hip
and John Allan's magnificent
Lubetkin
.

I would also like to thank Chloë Penman, Matthieu Le Goff, Joseph de Weck, Marc Francis and Stewart Smyth; my agent, Natasha Fairweather; my editor at Verso, Leo Hollis; and those loyal Dundonian readers of my articles, Russell and Susan Meek.