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Adonis - fine example of a Lib-Lab minister in action!
The Mole: How the Transport Secretary was forced into action by wily Willie Walsh
Kwipes. Transport Secretary Lord Adonis performed a spectacular U-turn last night to lift the blanket ban on all flights to and from London airports. His 10pm announcement caught everyone off-guard, and knocked the rise of Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg off the top spot in news bulletins.
But it didn't help Gordon Brown's claims to competence in a crisis. Instead, the news bulletins were filled with moaning Brits complaining of the chaos they faced in getting home and blaming inaction by the Government.
Brown had promised 100 coaches would pick up stranded Brits in Spain, and that the Navy would come to the rescue. Instead many were left to make their own way home, after too few coaches turned up, and the Navy vessel left port without them because it was filled with troops returning from Afghanistan. So much for the Dunkirk spirit.
It put the spotlight for the first time on Lord Adonis, the brainy Transport Secretary, who can't sound his 'rs'. Adonis has had a glittering rise to the Cabinet. He was first spotted by the Blairites as the brilliant policy editor for the Financial Times and then the Observer. Living in Islington, he was regarded by the Blairites as 'one of us', except for the inconvenient fact that was a Liberal Democrat.
He switched to New Labour before the 1997 election, and was brought into the Blair administration as a Downing Street policy adviser before being made a minister with a peerage in the Lords.
The only problem is that all those brains don't guarantee commonsense. On Sunday, Adonis had stood on the steps of Downing Street with another co-opted member of the Brown Government who has not stood for election for years - Lord Mandelson - to announce that the ban on air traffic in Britain would have to stay indefinitely while the ash cloud from the Icelandic volcano continued to pose a threat to aircraft.
Britain's airline bosses understandably went bonkers at that news because they were losing millions of pounds. Then BA chief executive Willie Walsh, in what appears to be an amazing act of brinkmanship, decided to force the issue by sending Transatlantic flights to London yesterday before the ban was lifted. Adonis, astonishingly, said he had heard about the BA flights by watching the news on the television.
The polls suggest we are still odds-on to get a hung Parliament with Lib Dems sharing power. It's unfortunate for those who support this outcome that the best example of a Lib-Lab minister in action is Lord Adonis. The sight of Adonis 'at the wescue' is unlikely to inspire the voters after this debacle.
Will David Cameron - who got a boost last night from a new ComRes poll suggesting he has regained a nine-point lead over both the Lib Dems and Labour – be thanking Lord Adonis for helping him squeeze a majority on May 6? ·
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I saw one stranded person say, roughly, "we can't say anyone made mistakes because we don't know the full extent of the problem". Well done to him. But the many half-wits who know no more than he does but readily lay blame on airlines/airports, government etc. will all be allowed to vote in the coming election. Sometimes I question the value of democracy. It seems to me the problem is we live in an age where we enjoy very many things (e.g. we can go to a supermarket and buy any of several thousand items, we can arrange a holiday in Australia from an armchair whilst watching TV) and we never think of the complexity of the systems that make them possible (who feeds Paris?). People just assume things work...almost as if by magic....because we never need to think about it. Then when something goes wrong, it seems, people believe "they" should solve the problem...almost as if "they" just have to wave the magic wand. It sometimes amazes me "the system" works so well, being full of half wits as it is.