Daily Mail volunteers to staff Heathrow during strike
Strike News: Editorial staff at the Daily Mail turned up for work at Heathrow this morning, coming to the aid of a UK Border Agency struggling with a chronic manpower shortage.
Editor Paul Dacre assured Theresa May that there was ‘nothing to worry about’ and that his ‘team of patriots and professionals’ would display the same qualities of fairplay and excellence in their treatment of Heathrow’s arrivals as they did ‘on the pages of the Mail itself’.
However, it wasn’t long before the skies above Britain’s busiest airport were filled by circling aircraft, with pilots in utter dismay at being told by unfamiliar voices from air traffic control to ‘bog off’.
“Can’t you read?” one captain for Greek airlines Aegean Air was told. “Why don’t you try Germany? As per usual.”
A request for permission to land by an Air Nigeria flight from Lagos was simply met by laughter. Then the line went dead.
With the attention of the usual authorities focused elsewhere today, fears are growing that the Mail has well exceeded it’s temporary mandate of helping to staff passport control and, as one eye witness puts it, has gone ‘AWOL’.
“No one is being allowed in or out,” said Emily Baxter, 32, Portsmouth, who sneaked past Jan Moir as she barked orders at employees while chewing a cigar.
“I heard Peter Hitchens talking about ‘drawing a line in the sand’ while Richard Littlejohn was separating people into two groups by asking them which cricket team they support.”
Story: Jasper Gibson
Image: Q4Nobody