Dear Reader

NO ONE, obviously, will take responsibility for the appalling scenes at UK airports following yet another technology meltdown, which left people waiting longer to get passports processed on arrival than it did flying home from southern Spain.

Tuesday’s fiasco came nearly a year after the last e-gate nonsense and only eight months on from the August 2023 Bank Holiday shenanigans when hundreds of planes were grounded due to National Air Traffic Services’ flight planning systems failure.

‘The UK processes more passengers through e-gates than any other country in the world,’ boasted the Home Office last year.

And Miguel Leitmann, CEO of Vision- Box, a Portuguese company reportedly paid £600,000 a month to provide e-gates at airports such as Gatwick, said it was proud to work with Border Force to ‘facilitate secure and seamless entry into the UK.’

Technology is meant to be our servant, not a tyrannical master.

I stayed in a hotel last week and a member of staff took more than ten minutes processing my check-in with a hapless iPad, which needed to be rebooted three times before he was able to give me the room key.

And I received an email yesterday from a disgruntled Ryanair passenger who claims if you’ve booked through a third party and don’t have verification that you’ve done so on a smartphone you can’t fly. ‘This discriminates against the elderly, disabled, visually impaired, technophobes and those like me who do not use an iPhone,’ she says.

This week’s e-gate horror is thought to have been caused by a wi-fi outage which knocked out a key database and that, as a Home Office minister put it, ‘there is no indication of malicious cyber activity’.

So we can’t blame China or Russia. But I wonder who can we hold accountable?