Heathrow’s story goes up in flames
Every weekday morning I’m up and ready to receive an important email that comes in at 6.30am. The email is sent by the producer of Nick Ferrari’s breakfast show on LBC, and it contains an initial plan for the stories that I’ll discuss with Nick on air exactly an hour later. It’s a slick routine and I enjoy my 7 minutes of breakfast broadcasting.
However, on the morning of 21 March my alarm clock failed and I woke up about ten minutes before I was due to go on air. After leaping into a shirt I checked my emails to discover that the plan for that morning’s business news slot was simply “we’ll focus on Heathrow, obviously.” The reason why was far from obvious to me, until I checked the news.
This is my confession; in a rare lapse of professionalism (or perhaps in the ultimate expression of it) I rapidly hoovered up what we knew about the Heathrow fire and took to the airwaves. I mention all this because it seems I wasn’t alone in waking up in a state of ignorance that March morning. Heathrow’s chief executive, Thomas Woldbye, only found out about the closure of his airport half an hour before I did.
We know this because the airport’s internal review into their handling of the fire, published yesterday, confirmed that the CEO first became aware of the drama at 6.45am on 21 March, having gone to sleep the night before with his phone on silent.
This mistake could certainly be forgiven, were it not for the fact that media reports subsequently implied that Woldbye had been aware of the fire and that a strategic decision had been taken for him to hand over to his Chief Operating Officer in order to get some sleep and be at his best the next morning.
The Sunday Times reported this version of events, quoting ‘Heathrow insiders’ – and while the airport never formally made such a statement, the transport secretary said at the time that it was her “understanding” of events – and the narrative was never corrected by Heathrow.
The fact that Heathrow’s CEO was uncontactable during a major crisis is regrettable, and lessons relating to resilience are paramount, but we also deserve to know exactly how and why a version of events was put into the public domain and, it would seem, briefed to the transport secretary, that now turns out to have been very far from the truth.