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Lucky escape for Taliban from James Blunt threat
‘Incompetent’ RAF left Blunt and Katherine Jenkins stranded for 15 hours
Singers Katherine Jenkins and James Blunt missed their chance to entertain British troops spending Christmas in Afghanistan when a series of mistakes delayed their RAF flight by 15 hours.
The stars were due to leave East Midlands airport in order to perform a two-hour show in Helmand but were initially held back because the staff didn't have the right equipment to load meals onto the plane.
With the dinners safely stashed, the crew boarded only to discover that the 50-year-old VC10 aeroplane had a faulty radar system and had to wait eight hours for RAF officials to give the all clear, by which point the staff had to take a legally enforced break and forfeit their 5pm take-off slot.
While Katherine Jenkins showed a bit of the old 'Blitz spirit' by performing an impromptu version of Silent Night for the other 160 troops waiting to fly out with them, James Blunt, a former officer in the Life Guards, lashed out at the "bad organisation, verging on incompetence within the structure of the RAF", according to a report in the Daily Telegraph.
RAF bosses may well be kicking themselves at a missed opportunity – the whiny balladeer had threatened to "sing the Taliban into surrender". A lucky escape for the insurgents and, it could be argued, for the British troops as well. ·
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You'll notice that the Telegraph has modified the story a bit - mainly because it turns out that the aircraft was a civilian charter flight, operated (strangely enough) by civilians, and the counting mistake may well have been made by *cough* Army movements staff (if any service personnel were involved at all in this aspect of the flight) , since air movements of this sort are covered by both the RAF and the Army. The news story here is actually that the Telegraph has a defence correspondent who is pretty clueless.