One solution to Tube crisis

Bob Crow and Boris Johnson can't have stood shoulder to shoulder on many issues in the past. In fact, the transport workers' champion from the East End and the Eton-educated toff have been at loggerheads more or less continuously since Johnson strolled into office blithely talking of strike bans and "efficiency savings."

So their appearance on the same side is a sign of just how shambolic the Tube Lines situation is - and just how disastrous it could be for Londoners.

Johnson is not, after all, a friend of the workers. And he's a big fan of privatisation, having already flogged off London's last publicly owned bus company.

But he's not stupid - not if you look past the carefully crafted "blundering twit" act. And he can see millions of votes slipping down the drain if the Tube Lines maintenance firm goes the same way as Metronet, meaning at best a massive public bail-out and at worst three Underground lines coming to a screeching halt.

Johnson has learned a painful truth which Mr Crow and the Star could have told him a long time ago - privatisation doesn't work. It's a costly failure everywhere it's tried, and it's the taxpayer who ends up paying.

So is it time to welcome Comrade Boris on board the anti-privatisation train? Not quite, alas.

Johnson's quite right to scream blue murder at Tube Lines' demand for the best part of £6 billion from the public purse.

This while running nearly a year late on Jubilee Line work that has hit passengers with constant station and line closures.

And he's quite right to point out that ultimately Westminster must carry the can for the failures of public-private partnerships (PPP).

These were forced on Johnson's predecessor Ken Livingstone by then chancellor Gordon Brown - so Brown can hardly wash his hands now of the mess he created back in 2002.

But what exactly does Johnson plan to do?

He can grit his teeth and pay up - either the extra £400 million that the PPP arbiter has recommended, or the £1.75bn extra that Tube Lines is demanding.

But the sight of yet another incompetent private firm getting yet another fat taxpayer bail-out is not likely to win him any friends among London's voters.

He can dig his heels in and refuse to pay a penny more - not £400m nor the £1.75bn extra that Tube Lines is demanding.

But if Tube Lines collapses on his watch and three lines are brought to a standstill, that won't do his popularity any good either.

Or he can kick the decision upstairs to Westminster, as he's trying to do, and hope that Brown values his pet PPP project over the chance to cause mighty embarrassment to Johnson. That's a big gamble to take when all the talk in government is of public-sector cost-cutting and when the stakes are so high.

But there's another option that Johnson's strangely quiet on. And that's doing exactly the same thing as Livingstone did in 2007 when Metronet collapsed.

Livingstone knew that workers' livelihoods and London's infrastructure were too important to gamble with - so he immediately pledged to step in and have Transport for London run Metronet.

The government was eventually forced to concede that he had been right all along. And so it renationalised the failed firm and brought it back into TfL.

So Johnson needs to listen to his unlikely ally Mr Crow, who's putting forward the sole sensible solution to the Tube Lines debacle.

The only way out, without massive bail-outs, job cuts and travel chaos, is to give the money-grabbers the boot and take their work back into the public sector where it always belonged.