Quintin Jardine's blog

We had a close call yesterday. Driving south on the A1 in Northumberland, in a line of traffic heading directly into the low, bright mid-morning sun, we had reached the Haggerston Castle caravan park when we were forced to pull over and come to  an almost complete halt, by two fast moving vehicles with emergency lights ablaze; they were acting as outriders for two long-loaders, also travelling at an unsafe speed, and laden with huge pre-fabricated steel structures which were considerably more than half the width of the single carriageway. No way should that convoy have been using that road, in any conditions. They represented multiple fatalities waiting to happen.

The incident underlined something on which Eileen had just remarked. Large stretches of the A1 between Edinburgh and Newcastle are no longer fit for purpose and  have not been for many years. It’s ironic, is it not, that while Cameron, the former Chancellor Alastair  Darling, and their cronies are trying to persuade us that we’re ‘Better Together’, the same men have shown no interest in providing a decent road to link the two capital cities.