Just when you thought it was safe…

Lady Thatcher so disliked British Airways’s ethnic tailfins that she famously took out a paper napkin and covered up the tail of a model plane on the BA stand at a Tory party conference. Should she be passing a model of a BA plane in the next few days, she’ll want a tablecloth to cover up the whole damn thing. It wasn’t meant to end this way, not when British Airways was liberated from state control in the first flush of privatisations in the early 1980s. With the dead hand of the minister for transport lifted from its shoulder, the airline became one of the most admired British businesses of that decade. The service became responsive to consumer demand rather than to a civil servant’s whim. For several years, international competitors like Air France performed dismally by comparison, flying half-empty jets with frumpy decor to destinations to which few wanted to fly.