We will have to disagree on it's necessity and your argument is further weakened by the second reason you cite for its failure "unnecessary tunnels just to sooth some Tory voters in the Chilterns" which shows your true colours as opposed to rational thinking.

My view is that it was ill conceived, was not integrated with the remaining rail strategy and that the funding could have been far better spent on improving a lot more elements of the network. The need for it to be high speed was pointless as the surrounding connections were not high speed and so any journey times other than direct London to Brum remained compromised: so yes HS2 phase 1 would get you to Birmingham 20 minutes earlier, which saving would be lost by the cancellation of your connecting train to Wolverhampton (this is what I mean by not integrated)

If we are looking at the moving of goods capacity, then extra lines are needed for sure, but I don't see the virtue in that being high speed with its additional costs of having to be built in straight lines. Carriages full of raw materials such as sand/gravel etc don't benefit from being at destination 20 minutes early. Even tomatoes don't go off that quickly.

But each to his or her own - it's something that divides opinion and no-one is entirely right or wrong. My view is that the rail infrastructure overall could have benefitted much more from the money budgeted (then wasted) and that "high speed" does not solve the problem when everything else around it is slow speed - or stopped/cancelled. This is why I refer to it as "vanity": the need for speed.