Timely telling off for Branson over lateness

Tycoon boasts about the importance of being on time as figures reveal Virgin’s unpunctuality

RICHARD BRANSON is facing a backlash after saying that lateness is “the one thing that annoys me in life”, despite one in five of his trains arriving late.

On Monday the Virgin tycoon wrote a blog on the Virgin website in which he criticised others for being late in a post titled “The importance of being on time”.

Sir Richard said: “There’s very little that annoys me in life, but people turning up late really does irritate me. It certainly reminds me of my dad’s wise comments.

“Thomas Chandler Haliburton said that ‘punctuality is the soul of business’. I wouldn’t say it is the soul, but it’s an important part of the package. It shows you are serious and it shows you are organised.

“But, most importantly, it shows you are respectful of other people’s time and their value.”

However, the post was met with an angry response from members of the public, who suggested it was ironic that Mr Branson’s heightened sense of personal punctuality did not extend to his vast business empire.

According to the latest Office of Rail and Road data, nearly one in five Virgin West Coast trains is at least five minutes late, and more than seven per cent are more than half an hour late.

Back in 2016, Virgin East Coast – which has now been taken over by the Government – was the third-worst train operator for punctuality, according to the ORR.

And according to Civil Aviation Authority data, one in five (21 per cent) of Virgin Atlantic flights from the UK is classed as “delayed”, although this was slightly better than average when compared to other airlines.

Flights are only classed as on time if they are less than 15 minutes delayed.

Virgin broadband also came under fire for a lack of punctuality yesterday, as customers reacted to Mr Branson’s post.

They claimed they had waited five weeks for an engineer to fix their broken internet while the company claimed it was “on its way”.

To prove his point, Sir Richard used the blog to publish photographs of him running through the streets of New York to avoid being late for a meeting.

Beneath the images, he wrote: “I jumped out of the car and ran down the sweltering Manhattan street as fast as I could go, running 15 blocks to Rockefeller Plaza. We made it a few minutes before our slot. I was sweaty – but I wasn’t late! Another time, visiting the UK, I found myself sprinting across Westminster Bridge to make a meeting at the Home Office.”