The week bold Boris was taken captive

Monday, for those of us who didn't have to travel, was tremendous fun. The old London was removed and a new one put in its place. From the top of my hill, SE10 looked pure St Petersburg. Without cars, there was a prelapsarian still and calm; in the snowfall, the centuries dissolved.

We shouldn't, therefore, overdo the outrage that virtually every London public service also dissolved. Most people — students, schoolchildren, public-sector workers and others in secure jobs — will have welcomed this cast-iron excuse for a three-day ­weekend.

With snow, however, as with certain other white powders, indulgence is followed by reckoning: in both cases, impaired physical function and unkind newspaper headlines. This morning, amid the ice and grubby slush that already seems to have been here forever, some schools are still closed, some trains still disrupted, some buses still not running. In Greenwich, we have been told that the rubbish which has been sitting outside our houses since last week will not be collected until next week.

Yet it is, at the time of writing, three days since the last flake of snow here. If one single snowfall, lasting a few hours, can close London for a day, and disrupt it for most of a week, we really need to start praying that there will be no more. Because if there is, and if the falls come closer together, we could realistically be shut down for much of the next month.

If there were a couple more nights like Sunday over, say, a five-day period, we could suffer, quite quickly, food and fuel shortages along the lines of the 2000 petrol crisis. Shops depending on just-in-time deliveries could soon run out of stock. Factories would close for lack of parts, offices for lack of workers. The economic crisis would be multiplied many times over.

There would also be — already is — a reputational cost. Across the world, newspapers and broadcasters have been laughing at London under headlines such as "British can't handle a little snow". Much more of that could undo the centre-of-the-universe, anything-is-possible image that the capital's boosters like to project to foreign money.

That is why it was so disappointing that Boris Johnson's first response to the crisis was to praise TfL's effort to run a transport service as "heroic". It was the polar opposite. For the whole of Monday, the Circle line was closed, even though it runs almost entirely underground. For the first few hours that day, even the Waterloo & City Line was out. This line is 100 per cent ­underground.

Above all, of course, at around midnight on Sunday the entire bus service was suspended, ostensibly for health and safety reasons. What about the health and safety of the thousands of people abandoned in the middle of the night to walk home in a snowstorm?  

Since TfL is also responsible for gritting some of the main roads on which the buses run, it was fun to watch it desperately trying to square the circle in the morning media. It wasn't our roads that were unsafe, they said — it was those evil boroughs, neglecting the side streets which lead to the bus depots.

In fact, the huge majority of bus depots are on main roads, and several of the biggest, such as Camberwell and Walworth, are on TfL main roads. Between 7 and 7.30am on Monday, I clicked through the dozens of live traffic camera pictures on the BBC London website. In nearly every location, the roads, whether cleared by the boroughs or TfL, were passable for buses, with plenty of black tarmac showing through.

No one expects London to prepare like Toronto for something that happens so rarely. No one expects a hundred per cent service on a snow day (not that we get one on a normal day). But we do expect our public services to make an effort, perhaps even a "heroic" one.

Many Londoners, mainly the poorer ones, did suffer this week because TfL and the railways made no effort. Those who could not afford a taxi home on Sunday night. Those hundreds of thousands of casual workers who could not get to work and therefore did not get paid. If you live from week to week, losing a fifth of your income is a disaster.

What happened on Monday was not primarily a problem of snow — it was a problem of will. It was not that the roads lacked grit but that the people in charge of the transport network did. What happened was not due primarily to "adverse weather conditions" but to adverse bureaucratic conditions.

Our railways' ludicrous structure makes buck-passing inevitable. The train operators gave up without a fight because of this simple calculation: snowy track is Network Rail's problem, not ours. No fines for not trying, but a lot of hassle if we do try.

Extreme weather, like other extreme circumstances, has a way of illuminating what people's core priorities are. Our buses, we have learned, are run by people whose priority in extremis is no longer their duty to us — to provide the best possible service, the service we pay so much for and on which London depends. Instead, their priority is to eliminate all risk and inconvenience to themselves.

It illuminates some of the politics, too. Boris is supposed to be the public's representative amid all this bureaucratic self-interest. This week's events will fuel some Tories' worry — partly overdone, but partly justified — that he is becoming "captured" by City Hall, too comfortable with the bureaucracy.

Boris has been Mayor for only nine months, not long enough to overturn TfL's complacent culture; he need not have taken ownership of its failures this week. But instead of spending his Monday knocking heads, he spent it making excuses.