Air travel is in terminal danger

During the political car crash of 2019, I couldn’t imagine ever agreeing with Theresa May. Yet last week she exhibited both principle and pragmatism — qualities sorely lacking in her capitulation to the conniving EU paradigm whereby Northern Ireland made Brexit supposedly insoluble. The legacy of that surrender, Ulster’s disastrously unworkable trade protocol, will wait for another day. I come to praise May, not to bury her.

The previous prime minister stressed to the Commons that ‘chaotic’ and ‘incomprehensible’ international travel restrictions, more oppressive this summer than last, send the message that Britain is ‘shut for business’. She upbraided the government for failing to register three truths: ‘we will not eradicate Covid-19 from the UK’; ‘variants will keep on coming’ and if we refuse to open up travel until there are no more mutations anywhere ‘then we will never be able to travel abroad ever again’; and Britons will keep dying from Covid in future, ‘as 10,000 to 20,000 do every year from flu’.