Heathrow rebels look a gift horse in the mouth

The control tower at Heathrow is full of screens, but when I visited this week there were two that caught my eye. The first shows the situation on the ground. Looking at it, I saw there were around 20 planes taxiing around. Fifteen of them, which could be seen out of the window standing in an orderly traffic jam, were waiting to take off. The second screen shows the airspace for roughly 15 miles around the airport. On that screen, I could see 30 planes, stacked up into the atmosphere. A good portion of those were waiting to land. It’s been like this for a decade.

Nearby, beyond the south runway, are the cargo depots. Few people realise it, but Heathrow is Britain’s biggest port by value of goods. The goods usually travel in the same planes as the people, only under our feet. So, unlike at Gatwick, the debate about Heathrow’s expansion isn’t about holidays and leisure – it’s about whether we want to see an instant 50 per cent growth in trade at our biggest port. Never mind Brexit. This is the real issue hanging over UK plc: can Parliament be crazy enough to say no?

MPS will vote on the matter in the next month. If, as expected, they vote yes, it will be the furthest the project has progressed in 25 years of trying. Theresa May, in a rare and commendable show of conviction, supports it despite opposition in her Maidenhead constituency. That in itself should tell you how important this project is.

Ask foreigners, from the US, Germany or China, and you’ll meet with total incomprehension at the controversy. Here is a private investor, desperate to put in £14billion, to create 180,000 jobs and £187billion in economic benefits (by independent estimates), all at minimal cost to taxpayers...and we can’t decide whether to say yes.

At a stroke, this extra strip of tarmac would push Britain’s air hub capacity above that of France and Germany. Whatever the politics of Brexit, international trade simply wouldn’t be able to resist the lure. We’d be well on our way to becoming the world’s link between Asia and North America.

I know that some people will lose out. Whatever the mitigation plans – compensation, sound insulation, respite periods, public transport links to reduce emissions, and so on – some people’s living standards will go down. But governments have to do what’s best for the whole country. There are few cases as clear-cut as this.

It’s certainly a good time to send a positive message to investors in Britain. God knows, MPS rarely do. The Treasury select committee, now under the leadership of Nicky Morgan, is a case in point. They are rightly investigating the terrible performance of TSB Bank in resolving its IT problems. The bank certainly merits biting public criticism, but that isn’t enough for our vainglorious MPS.

This week, they issued a unanimous statement saying they had “lost confidence” in TSB’S chief executive Paul Pester and that he ought to “consider his position”. I had to read the press release twice and could then only draw one conclusion: these MPS have forgotten that, in Britain, politicians don’t get to hire and fire the chief executives of private companies. We leave that to such places as China.

One group that wouldn’t be sad to

see Heathrow expand are the plane spotters. Standing near the end of a runway on my tour of the airport, my guide pointed to a grassy knoll in the middle of a busy roundabout just outside the perimeter fence. It was full of aviation geeks wielding camera tripods and binoculars, their eyes trained eagerly on the comings and goings of the jets above us. So keenly do they watch that the police have even been known to keep them on the lookout for suspicious activity.

Experiencing the passage of a plane coming in right over my head, I had some inkling of the thrill. The shorthaul flights are impressive enough, but it’s quite something when a jumbo jet passes over. For a moment, an enormous barrel of metal seems to hang, suspended in the air like a whale, barely moving as if it is about to fall on top of you. Then it zooms onwards to the runway.

Some of the airlines flirt with the plane spotters. The codes denoting each of Virgin’s planes relate to the coquettish names it gives them. So, the code for “Beauty Queen” is GVSXY, for “sexy”, while the Dreamliner “Dream Jeannie” is GVZIG, for David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust. It’s certainly an odd way to pass the time, but it gets them outside, I suppose.

In one derelict corner of the airport there’s a wistful monument to human ingenuity. It’s an old, disused Concorde sitting on a patch of tarmac surrounded by a tall, chain-link fence. It’s a remarkablelooking thing. Unlike the round, barrel-shaped fuselages of most jets, the Concorde is shaped like an elongated S, its sharp nose dipping down a bit and its tail whipped up. The wings protrude out on either side in triangles, as on a fighter jet. Rumour has it that the space where the engines used to be is stuffed with out-of-date British Airways in-flight magazines.

There had been a thought, some years ago, to make the old Concorde the centrepiece of the refurbished Terminal Two. Instead, it was moved out of sight. Looking at it, I could see why. Ultimately, this testament to a great, but failed, engineering project wasn’t uplifting. It was sad.