Dear Reader

WHERE do we go from here? Nowhere is the answer if you’re waiting for a passport and had intended to travel in the next few weeks.

Yesterday, I took a call from a Mrs Davies, who lives near Huddersfield, asking for advice. I could hear her voice trembling with anxiety. She is due to fly to Iceland (pictured) in June and has just realised that, because of new EU rules which require you have at least three months left on a passport, she must renew hers before travelling.

‘With the waiting time being at least ten weeks you’ll have to go down the “fast-track” route,’ I told her. ‘It will cost you around £140 and you must book a faceto-face appointment.’

Hopeless advice. She’s been trying every day to book a face-to-face appointment and is happy to drive to one of the seven UK passport offices (London, Newport, Glasgow, Durham, Peterborough, Liverpool, Belfast) but there is no availability at any of them. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, feebly. The passport fiasco is yet another spanner in the works for travel — and a divisive one, too. Matthew Rycroft, the permanent secretary at the Home Office, might be right in saying that where Abi Tierney — the £160,000a-year Passport Office boss — works has ‘precisely zero bearing’ on coping with the crisis, but perception is everything.

Of course she should be in her London headquarters rather than her leafy home in Leicestershire, if only to avoid giving the impression that her government department is run primarily in the interests of its staff rather than the needs of the public.

Margaret Thatcher spoke about rolling back the frontiers of the state — and she did so at a time when it could take three months to get a new telephone line from nationalised BT. Yes, that’s longer than it takes in 2022 to get a passport — but only just.