Sack Heathrow’s boss? No, put him on the front line

Airports are on my mind, since I’ve just stepped off an on-time early-morning flight from East Midlands to Bergerac – yes, Ryanair, efficient as ever. But what a relief not to be battling through Heathrow, where such anarchy has taken hold that the Civil Aviation Authority and Department for Transport have given chief executive John Holland-Kaye an ‘ultimatum’ to sort it out – after he capped passenger numbers at 100,000 a day, forcing innumerable flight cancellations. As the airport that used to be Britain’s gateway to the world becomes a global embarrassment, attention turns to the question of whether the man in charge should resign or be fired.

I had always assumed Holland-Kaye was no more than a flak-taking PR, but I see he takes credit for delivering the Terminal 2 refurb on budget in 2014 and has a background in housebuilding. As a highly paid hands-on boss rather than a mere spokesman, he deserves even more stick for misjudging the pace at which travel demand would recover while blaming everyone else for his domain’s mounting chaos.

But he also has to please private foreign shareholders led by the Spanish group Ferrovial and a bunch of sovereign wealth funds, while facing disruptive unions with no help from gone-tomorrow ministers. So I’m not demanding Holland-Kaye’s honourable resignation: let’s face it, that just isn’t a thing these days. And rather than instantly sacking him, Heathrow’s owners should send him out front, to spend August marshalling queues of furious travellers.

Naming race

What price a grand memorial to yourself at Oxford University these days? A Vietnamese company called Sovico – big in aviation, banking and energy, we’re told – is paying £155 million to have the college that salutes the physician Thomas Linacre (1460-1524) renamed Thao College, in honour of Sovico’s chairwoman Nguyen Thi Phuong Thao.