How the Heathrow fire, like everything else, proved that Richard Tice’s politics are correct
It is the dream of every government minister to have to make an emergency statement to the House of Commons about something that is definitely not their fault. This is why everyone wants to be Foreign Secretary: no one thinks David Lammy is to blame for what’s happening in Gaza or Ukraine or Congo. Try being Home Secretary, when all you ever get to talk about is terrorism and stabbings.
So Heidi Alexander rose with every evidence of pleasure on Monday to tell us about the fire at Heathrow. Three days earlier, this had been the subject of BREAKING NEWS and liveblogs. Fevered speculation? We’d had it! Excitable reporting? We’d seen it, most notably the marvellous announcement that the Special Air Service had cancelled 12 round trips from the airport. Unhappily for the world’s hostage-takers, it turned out this was based on someone misunderstanding a press release from the other SAS, Scandinavian Airlines. Britain’s SAS remained, as ever, on standby tickets.
By the time Alexander rose to her feet on Monday afternoon, almost all the exciting possible causes of the fire had been ruled out. It turned out to have been, to use a technical term, one of those things. Stuff, as they don’t quite say, happens. “The Metropolitan Police,” the minister told us, “confirmed that the fire is not believed to be suspicious”. With apologies to live-bloggers, it was all a powerful argument for getting your news once a week.
But crucially for Alexander, whatever had happened, she is responsible for neither the electricity supply to West London nor the operation of a private airport. She didn’t need to sweat as she told us that much of what we’d read over the weekend was incorrect: there were backup generators, including diesel ones, there were multiple supply points to Heathrow, it was just quite a complicated place, full of the kind of people who weren’t going to let planes land until they were sure everything was safe. About her worst crime was when she told us that “there will of course be learnings”, but she’s unlikely to have to resign over it.
In response Gareth Bacon, the shadow transport secretary, had very little to say. He pretty much agreed with everything that the government was doing, and the only challenge he could put to Alexander was to seek her assurance that she really would keep talking to the airport and report back to the House of Commons.
The fire still had useful qualities. It had become one of those hooks onto which you could hang your particular idea, whatever it might be. Take Reform’s Richard Tice. Heathrow isn’t technically part of his constituency of Skegness, but his partner, the journalist Isabel Oakeshott, lives in Dubai (it’s not such a bad place for a hack if you can get past the fear that your sources might be arrested). As a result, Tice spends so much of his life in the Heathrow departure lounge that he can probably claim it as a second home.
His Friday had been spent furiously announcing that the airport had been closed because of “NET STUPID ZERO”: Heathrow bosses had, he claimed, refused to install diesel generators. That’s right: the planes had been cancelled because of Woke. As with the SAS story, a moment’s thought might have revealed the problem with this argument: are the people who run the UK’s largest airport really the types who lie awake at night worrying about their carbon footprints? But moments of thinking didn’t get Tice where he is today.
As it happens, one place where Tice wasn’t on Monday was the House of Commons, so he was unable to put this vitally important point to the secretary of state. Maybe his flight back from Skegness had been delayed. Or perhaps he was aware that his idea had been pretty thoroughly debunked everywhere except his own Twitter feed. The explanation for the Heathrow closure is that if you set fire to parts of extremely complex systems, there are knock-on effects. Is there a wider lesson there? Don’t expect Reform to learn it.
Perhaps the real Heathrow disaster was whatever you had already thought before it began
The only Reform MP in the chamber was Rupert Lowe, who is suspended as a result of his own runaway fire. He sat cheerfully on the very backbench of the chamber, where all the people who’ve departed or been thrown out of their parties sit, but didn’t speak. It was left to Sir Edward Leigh to ask if Net Zero was to blame for the airport closure, enabling Alexander to swipe “honourable members who aren’t present in the chamber today, who were busy pedalling myths on Friday morning.”
But it was hardly just Reform who were drawing politically convenient lessons from random events. Lib Dem Munira Wilson said the fire proved why expanding the airport was a bad idea. “We need a better Heathrow, not a bigger Heathrow!” she said. As it happens, her constituency of Twickenham is under the flightpath. Perhaps the real Heathrow disaster was whatever you had already thought before it began.
