 The Conservative Government of Margaret Thatcher had insisted that the project had to pay its own way, and the UK legislation which authorised and facilitated the project contained an outright ban on any British public subsidy for the works.In 1999, the British deputy prime minister John Prescott MP appointed Morton to the chairmanship of the British Railways Board and, once created from February 2001, the Strategic Rail Authority, from which he resigned in October 2001 in the aftermath of the collapse of Railtrack.Morton famously coined the phrase that the aftermath of the Hatfield rail crash constituted a 'collective nervous breakdown' on the part of the British railway industry.