Stop fighting...and help the paying public instead

ENTERTAINING though it is to see two corporate titans bashing seven bells out of one another, I imagine I speak for most of the travelling public when I say Sir Nigel Rudd and Willie Walsh could make far better use of their verbal talents.

Instead of pouring out torrents of invective and bile on one another, these two jumbos of the airline industry should turn their minds to helping customers.

Who is right in the row? The terrible thing is that they both are. There are large nuggets of truth in their mutual recriminations, and this is no consolation whatsoever to passengers whose holidays and business trips have been wrecked.

Never has the old phrase about the pot and the kettle been so apt.

When Rudd, sounding like a shopsteward on steroids, accuses Walsh of being obsessed with slashing costs, he hits a nerve.

For his part, Walsh is on the money when he lambasts Heathrow’s move to cap passenger numbers as ‘farcical’. He is also quite right to argue that the airport’s rich foreign shareholders should put their hands in their pockets to repair its debt-riddled balance sheet.

Neither man comes with a reputation as a corporate saint – in fact, they both have enough baggage to jam a carousel.

When he was head of BA’s parent company, Walsh’s relations with unions was toxic. To take just one example, early on in the pandemic he was attacked by MPs who suspected him of using Covid as cover to cut 12,000 jobs.

Veteran industrialist Rudd is a serial chairman who has sold a string of British companies to foreign bidders, earning himself the nickname Sir Sell-Off. The most recent of these, defence firm Meggitt, has just been cleared by the Government for sale to a US aerospace company.

Both men have a reputation for being forthright. As former bosses, they are able to dispense with diplomacy in a way the current top brass at Heathrow and BA cannot. Whether the pair have been put up to it by their former employers or are acting on their own initiative, they are proxy generals in an unedifying battle to deny blame.

Rather than this self-indulgent festival of insults, Walsh and Rudd could have used their stature as elder statesmen to co-operate on alleviating the airport chaos.

Fat chance. Each has adopted a pose of bristling, self-righteous indignation, painting their organisation as the injured party. There is more than a touch of absurdity about this, coming from a couple of very rich men representing powerful corporate interests.

Neither seems to care much about the real victims here – the poor old passengers.