This article is taken from the May 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
A tiny fiddle plays a mournful air in the Ned household. I have done the maths. I have double-checked the numbers. And it’s now official. My career is going to top out before I get my Lifetime Gold card from British Airways.
It’s every business person’s retirement dream — reaching those magical 35,000 tier points and hanging out in the first class lounge until your cardiologist eventually bans you from air travel.
But I am stuck a few thousand points shy, and the only board I have left is reluctant to pay even for peak time tickets on the Great Western Railway. Like a flat-bed Icarus, I can feel the wax melting from my arms as I soar tantalisingly close to the sun.
At least I can console myself that turning left on a plane ain’t what it used to be. I have never much cared for business class — everyone’s too performative. There’s always a hoodie-wearing management consultant talking loudly on his phone right up until the engines rev for take-off, desperate to maximise his billable hours.
There’s the recently retired northern couple on a trip of a lifetime, guzzling the complimentary Veuve until they turn puce and pass out. Then you often get the Arab parents who receive noisy delegations of children and nannies who have been dumped in economy.
Things improved when I landed my first job which included first class travel as one of the perks. I clearly remember my first martini in the Concorde lounge followed by the trepidation as I passed through the curtain into the nose-cone seats.
As I inspected my fellow passengers, what struck me was the middle-brow normality. One chap was filling in the Daily Mail crossword. Another was reading a Dick Francis paperback, whilst a third was eyeing up the spring bulbs in a gardening catalogue. If this was a club, it was more Royal Automobile than Studio 54.
There followed a few years when I travelled monthly between Heathrow and the Eighties horror movie that was JFK’s Terminal 7. I was on first-name terms with all the stewardesses — handsome ladies like the kind of stern, efficient PAs who are so hard to find these days.
I remember sitting next to Helena Bonham Carter who arrived on board wearing curlers and floral pyjamas and sporting a furry teddy bear hot water bottle which she asked the cabin crew to fill.
Another time I watched in fascination as the Lizard King himself, George Soros, dribbled biscuit crumbs and water all over his navy sleeper suit. I never saw any evidence of Mile-High action. Most passengers had probably not achieved full arousal since Peter, Paul and Mary first left on a jet plane.
Many people love to criticise British Airways, and there have been suggestions that its top cabin has been outclassed by the luxury offered by Emirates or Etihad. But BA always understood that its core customers were paying extra for the freedom to slum it. They didn’t want to feel their nocturnal stumbles to the toilet were a catwalk performance.
A few years ago, a friend in the airline business told me that first class would soon be extinct — squeezed by more comfortable and affordable business class offerings on one side and on the other by the growth of private jet travel.
And certainly, I know fewer people whose accounts departments are willing to sign off on the 10 grand cost of a transatlantic return in first.
Yet, I read recently in the FT that the opposite has happened. Spurred on by competition from the Gulf carriers, European airlines are investing heavily in their most expensive luxury cabins.
BA is betting on a new 2-metre seat which is also wider than the one it replaces. Air France has gone further with La Première — a sprawling “seat-to-suite” offering which extends across five windows.
But I fear these new top-tier options are designed for a different crowd to the one that used to shuffle into the front seats in my day. They are for those who wish to see and be seen, for the YouTubers and the Instagrammers.
It’s about using viral marketing to create a “halo effect” for an airline’s more cost-effective tickets. The very notion that I would ever have taken a photograph of my braised beef and dauphinoise is absurd.
So now I look to a future of queueing in the snail lane and turning right. If, when you’re next rushing to the lounge, you catch sight of a codger waiting at Pret for his cup of tea, spare a thought. That could be your future too — unless you stay focused on flying high on other people’s money.
