The benefits of privatising BA seem to have worn off — so why not do it again?

It is exactly 20 years next week since British Airways was privatised. Arguably, it was the most successful of all the Thatcher-era privatisations. Under the redoubtable Lord King and his marketing-wizard sidekick Colin (now also Lord) Marshall, a demoralised, loss-making state enterprise had been turned by five years of vigorous, not to say brutal, leadership into ‘the world’s favourite airline’. The share offer in February 1987 was 32 times oversubscribed, and almost 10 per cent of it was set aside for the airline’s staff, many of whom became proud owners of a stake in a business which seemed to have been miraculously transformed.

But that was then, and this is now. Despite two decades of shareholder ownership — and the relatively brutal style of chief executive Willie Walsh, who previously turned Aer Lingus’s fortunes around by sacking 2,000 staff — BA today seems to have slipped backwards to become the nearest thing we have to an ailing ‘state enterprise’.