When I was a Berkshire County Councillor I fought a rearguard action that prevented the doomed Council from taking a position of outright opposition to the planning permission for Heathrow Terminal 5. I did so not least because a lot of Labour voters in Slough depend upon Heathrow for their jobs and lots of People working in IT owe the location of their US-originated firms to the convenience of Europe’s leading hub.

A few year later, I think after permission for the Terminal had been awarded but before construction had started, I returned from Sydney on a direct flight via Singapore. That involves an eight hour leg and a three hour break followed by fourteen and a bit hours back to London. 747 flights of that length generally don’t get held in a stack, which is something to be thankful for at least, however on that occasion the smooth landing was followed by 90 minutes plus stuck on the Tarmac because the powers that be at Heathrow couldn’t find a parking space or enough buses. As I have to stand up rather a lot on long haul for fear of bits of me needing internal treatment with WD40, I simply continued my conversations with a sociable bunch of Aussie students, apologising for the strange welcome they were receiving from ‘the old country’ (their term). Either way it wasn’t what was needed after the best part of a day in an economy seat rather less wide than my shoulders.

Today I read the dire business of the Air India flight from Mumbai (9.5 hours plus) diverted from Heathrow to Gatwick and left on the Tarmac for a reported eight hours before taking off to fly the 30 miles or so round the M25. Now forgive me for pointing out an uncomfortable truth here, but if this had happened to, say, a BA flight at, say, I don’t know, Delhi, Her Majesty’s Press would be ranting on about how it was a disgrace, uncivilised, almost racist and who knows what else. These same papers may or may not choose to report what this and the state of our London airports actually are: an acute source of national embarrassment not to mention a serious impediment to maintaining our economic position in a rapidly developing world.

Over the years I have apologised for the London arrivals experience to all sorts of business and political colleagues, but I sometimes now think that the folk who get the worst deal at Heathrow are we UK citizens. Nowhere else in Europe do I seem to queue for the length of time it can take to get through Heathrow. Some of this is a failure of basic organisation and some of it a failure of Euro enthusiasts to think through the implementation of Shengen, Maastricht and all that. Even US Immigration, which isn’t exactly a barrel of laughs, manages to improve over time. When a US Citizen arrives at any US airport they are welcomed ‘home’ through their own line – which moves considerably faster than we visitors. Fair enough – it’s their country after all. Here we queue with ‘EU plus a bunch that said they didn’t want to join’ – no special privileges in our own country. That’s a pity, because it is the sort of thing that doesn’t really matter much, but acknowledges the way a lot of people feel about their countries and, by that small concession, takes away one aspect of a big negative about the EU – that we are somehow not in control of our own nation(s).

All that is before experiencing the Heathrow toilet experience: filthy, broken, unpleasant. And it is before having your luggage delayed, before having to pay fantastically more to get to the centre of our Capital than any other I’ve visited.

Naively, perhaps I thought that Terminal 5 might put an end to this sort of thing, but it hasn’t and I doubt anything else will. I still find myself waiting for steps or climbing up steps in the rain at Heathrow. I still find myself apologising for my country’s lamentable inability to run airports and I still find the attitudes of gutless politicians across the parties both depressingly opportunist when it comes to airport policy and elitist in the extreme toward air travel in general.        

So to all those stuck on that Air India flight who could have cycled to Heathrow quicker than BAA got them there. Sorry, but it’s really not my fault!