Four hours at Terminal 5

I can imagine what it’s like for travellers with cancelled flights at Heathrow. Actually, I can more than imagine – I was in a dress rehearsal there last week.

Olympic Hell

From last Monday's Guardian - http://bit.ly/OIMwQS

Heathrow will be hell today. 

600,000 items of Olympic baggage

Apparently it’s going to be the airport’s busiest day ever, as the first wave of Olympic athletes is scheduled to arrive. They’ll step straight into queues to have their passports stamped by immigration officials with just a couple of week’s training, then on to even longer queues at the lost baggage desks. There’ll be international temper tantrums by nightfall.

Beating The System

The lost suitcase's trip to Hawaii had been brief.

The computer system that had misdirected it soon found the miscreant lying on a warm baggage belt and whisked it on to freezing Heathrow. That would have been the end of the story, had it not been for the American Airlines baggage retrieval system. Apparently it was passed to some delivery company, who promptly dumped it in a warehouse in Slough, where it remained for the following two weeks.

Now I wouldn't wish Slough on one my ex-wives, let alone a piece of my mother-in-law's baggage. It's a ghastly industrial estate masquerading as a commuter town outside London. People who live in Slough never admit it: they claim to live near Windsor, or even, if they're forced, in Reading. Slough was immortalised by the great English poet Sir John Betjeman, who wrote in wartime:

Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough It isn't fit for humans now
There isn't grass to graze a cow
Swarm over, Death!

Slough’s only real asset is its proximity to Heathrow Airport. That credential puts it 300 miles from our house, where mother-in-law’s bag was supposed to be.

Jo rang the airline daily to track its progress. Or tried to. You try ringing the airline’s 0208 lost baggage number. It rings ten times, then puts you onto a long voicemail message, before dumping you into the abyss. For days I saw her sitting sadly in the corner of Izzy’s room, phone pressed to her ear, endlessly redialling the number.

Eventually I could take it no more, and went into battle. It's not a pretty sight. Having been, in my time (albeit in a former neolithic age) something of a consumer journalist, I simply won't take this sort of treatment, so I undertook to get the bloody bag back myself. In doing so I wrote off any possibility of doing any real work this week.

I played the 0208 game first. No wonder Jo has been in a tetchy mood. After half a dozen vain attempts to speak to a person, I was fuming.

Then I used a little lateral thinking. This clearly wasn't a switchboard which was messing me around. It was probably a single phone on a desk manned by a solitary bloke with better things to do than answer the telephone. Most likely with a queue of disgruntled passengers standing in front of him. I worked out that this phone was more than likely to be found within Heathrow Airport itself.

I pictured the scene: a long line of Americans wearing white shirts and fawn colored trousers with white golf shoes, complaining very loudly to this one person about their expensive suitcases winging their way round the One World stratosphere. In the background, you can hear a single telephone ringing. Ten rings, then it goes onto voicemail. That was me.

So I changed the last digit of the published phone number. A 7 instead of a 5. It was answered by a charming lady called Zoe. Who put me in touch with an even nicer lady called Sam. Once in the system, with a name to a voice, I wouldn’t leave them alone. I even heard them say, behind muffled voicepiece, “It’s that irate passenger again”.

I created such mayhem and dropped so many names that even I was fed up with me. So they gave me the number of the warehouse – the bag had been moved to Durham, and was scheduled for delivery, as I suspected, precisely one day after mother-in-law was scheduled to go home again.

As we set off to collect the wretched suitcase ourselves, the phone rang. American Airlines Customer Relations. To apologise. And ask us how we got Sam’s number. She’s the secretary to someone quite important, you see. I said I had my ways. Someone else then rang, with even more abject apologies. Then a third person. They were playing my game.

OK, AA, we forgive you. Now leave me alone. And next time, I promise mother-in-law will fly BA. Except that, mischievously, American told me that BA still have 15,000 undelivered bags of their own stuck at Heathrow. Now how come that news hasn't reached the press?

End of a Dream

[Labour managed its worst performance in 40 years in this week's local elections]

The second of May is a significant date in Labour’s history book. It marks the beginning and the end of the dream. It’s the date when, in 1997, the united army of Blair’s New Labour marched into power. It’s also the date when, in 2008, Gordon Brown’s bedraggled forces lay defeated, washed up on the arrogance and complacency of its tired, uninspiring leadership.

With a certain nostalgia, I looked up some of Labour’s party political broadcasts from that first triumphant battle. In one of them, Anita Roddick said, “Whenever I’ve spoken to Tony Blair, what comes through is conviction, a sense of what Labour will give. Finally, a politician that is not arrogant. I like the way he looks exhausted. I like the way he’s working.”

On Andrew Marr’s programme yesterday morning, the leader of Labour’s dispirited troops certainly looked exhausted. Yet, extraordinarily, Gordon’s arrogance still shone through. You’d have thought there’d be a modicum of humility, a tiny scrap of shame for the devastation he has caused. But no, this was a man still blind to the mood of the nation. He claimed to be “listening and leading”, but he wasn’t hearing a thing.

“People need to know we have a strong sense of direction, that we’re putting in place the big building blocks of the future”, said Brown, convinced that the cause of the rout was neither his leadership nor the insensitive and ill-timed decisions he himself had taken, but instead the failure of Labour to explain the big picture, “to get its arguments across to the public”. Boris Johnson got it in one: pompous, overblown, bonkers Boris, now mayor of all London, said in an interview immediately after his acceptance speech, “Brown should go, and Labour should replace him with David Milliband”. Spot on, Boris, though “Dave” Cameron will hardly thank you for endorsing the one man who could keep him from Number 10.

Actually, thanks to the events of May 2nd, there’s now a second man who could keep Cameron from power, and that’s Bonkers Boris himself. To have such a loose Tory cannon as Mayor of London is just about the only piece of hope Brown can cling onto between now and the next election. He must be praying for the first pratfall.

Mind you, it’s going to be hard for even Boris to make living in London a worse experience that it is at present. I still have to travel down there once a week, and count the hours to my return. The tubes are packed, hot and unreliable; in the area where I used to live three women have been mugged outside their own homes in the last month; the congestion charge, which worked for a bit, now fails to curb the jams at all; Heathrow remains one of the most unpleasant airports in the world and blights the lives of half the city’s population. Boris promises to tackle all of these problems. He even wants a new airport in the middle of the Thames Estuary. Hopefully not run by BAA.

I remember the evening of Labour’s first May 2nd very well. I was at Television Centre in London, watching the map of Britain turn red. There was an air of great moment – like another May night when Thatcher first came to power. In 1997 like all Labour supporters I basked in the victory. The tide had turned for good.

This year, for the first time in my life, I voted Conservative. Why? Because the only person who bothered to contact me was my Tory candidate. Veronica Jones, you got my vote because you sent me a questionnaire asking for my views on the problems of my area. You then wrote and said what you were going to do about them. None of your opponents sent so much as a handout. I’ve never met you Councillor Jones, I haven’t a clue whether you’re any good, but you do appear to be listening, and in 2008, that’s a trick that all our politicians need to learn.

Crash Landing

Senior First Officer John Coward must have the least appropriate name for a hero. With nerves of steel he guided his 777 onto the Heathrow grass, rather than parking it somewhere in the middle of Hounslow. Quite what he must have felt when the engines lost power in his final approach can scarcely be imagined.

It was hardly life threatening, but I once piloted a television programme that lost power and crash landed in front of six million viewers.

The programme was Panorama, in the days when it was presented live in the studio by David Dimbleby. One week, when I was in the director’s chair, the show looked as though it would be an extremely easy ride. With no studio guests, David had to walk across the studio, sit down at a desk, and introduce two films. We even had some standby films lined up in case anything went wrong.

With the thirty or so television monitors making the studio control room glow like the deck of a jumbo jet, the show took off with its portentous opening music. David went into the first link. “Good Evening. Tonight on Panorama…”

Just as he reached the word “Tonight”, all the screens in the control room suddenly went blank. All except four. Every single piece of film had disappeared, but there were four separate camera shots of David.

In vain, I gazed at the empty screens, willing the films to reappear. The technical crew were screaming into telephones. Oblivious to the approaching catastrophe, Dimbleby kept going.

“Our first film tonight…”

We had just ten seconds before David reached the end of his script. I braced myself for the inevitable.

“Here’s his report”, he announced. Then silence.

It took a few seconds for David to realize we weren’t going to cut away from him. Then he apologised to the viewers, and paused. I rang the telephone on his desk. The scene has been replayed many times on Auntie’s Bloomers Indeed, if you turn up the volume you can just about make out my voice at the end of the line.

“Er, David, we have a problem”.

“I can see that. Shall we go to the next film?”

“Er….there is no next film. And no standby.”

“So, what would you like me to do?”

“Just… keep talking”.

Which he did, for eight gruesome minutes. He talked about the studio, the cameramen, what he was going to have for supper after the show. In front of six million transfixed viewers.

It was a performance worthy of the adlib king Mike Neville during some of the many glorious breakdowns on Look North. But that was local news, and this was the BBC’s current affairs flagship.

Then, suddenly, the screens bounced back into life and I rang the studio phone again to put David out of his misery.

We did eventually find the cause. During the afternoon a fluorescent light bulb had gone out at the back of the control room and someone had rung up the engineering department to have it changed. Just as we went on air, a man in a brown coat arrived clutching a spare, found a switch marked “Power”, turned it off, changed the bulb, and exactly eight minutes later turned it back on again.

I do hope for Boeing’s sake something as simple as that lies behind the 777 problem. Because right now I wouldn’t live in West London if you paid me a fortune. It was bad enough living in Putney for 14 years, right under the flight path, with conversations drowned out every sixty seconds. We all used to fear that one day a plane would come down on top of us.

And yet the Government is seriously thinking of allowing Heathrow to expand and blight the lives of Londoners even further. Instead they should shut the whole thing down and build a decent airport in the middle of the Thames Estuary. Provided Boeing makes sure their planes can float.