Originally Posted by
KARFA
This is in no way meant to be any criticism of the OP, but yes if you are close to conformance of the scheduled departure time you are better off going to connections rather than exiting landside and going up to security. Conformance will normally work off scheduled departure time rather than the estimated delayed departure time.
My reading is that is what they did, but it's not perhaps well explained. I think they got caught in the UK and Ireland "no man's land" between passports and the HAL barriers, with unfortunately no-one on duty there. Plus some idiotic decision not to turn off conformance, which they should have done. When that failed, they then went via the main UK Border up to departures. So there wasn't a lot the traveller could do here given the lack of staff at the right place.
As a general point, when Wimbledon is on, the best place to look for hotels is somewhere like Basingstoke, which isn't so far (time wise) from T5 and did have hotels last night going for sub £120. Holiday Inn was an example.