As I said earlier up-thread, plenty of CEO's publicly campaign and back something in public to gain the brownie points, eg, "of course, we welcome new competition" whilst privately having the opposite view and doing everything they can to scupper something that would do just that.

The master of this is Richard Branson who so vociferously campaigned for VS to get access to LHR two decades ago on the basis of consumer choice, competition is good etc....but then once he got access he quickly joined the others in trying to scupper DL, NW, CO etc efforts to be allowed access too:rolleyes:

I work in the rail industry and Virgin's tactics to restrict and generally place obstacles to the entry of other rail operators having access to the WCML are legendary :rolleyes: Yet Branson publicly positions himself and (very successfully IMHO) as being some sort of peoples champion, fighting against big business to get a better deal for the man in the street. The reality is very different.

Since when was Theresa Villiers the Transport Secretary?

There's an easy solution to that

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLSIU9BG41U

http://www.dft.gov.uk/ministers

http://www.dft.gov.uk/ministers/theresa-villiers

What a pity that the Telegraph couldn't take a quick look at those pages, which clearly say that she is not the Transport Secretary.

Honestly, does anybody in the press check facts any more?

(That's a rhetorical question, of course. We all know the answer is "no".)

She's a Transport *Minister*. Justine Greening is the Secretary of State.

Whoever wrote that article needs to go back to journalism school. The Telegraph's standards are slipping if their writers don't know who is in the Cabinet and write sentences such as "Gatwick is the world’s biggest single runway airport in the world".

Of course, just like Virgin Atlantic being 50% owned by Singapore Airlines, Virgin Trains is 50% owned by Stagecoach.

Ooh no VS is 49% owned by SQ, Branson didn't want to lose control of the airline when he sold off that chunk. I suspect the same is true of Virgin trains but I don't know that for certain.

I don't know about the reasoning behind Virgin Trains, but one consideration in relation to the airline would probably have been that it had to remain majority EU-owned (or possibly, at that time, UK-owned) for route authority reasons.

Wikipedia states the trains are 49% Stagecoach. I presume the 1% to keep the Virgin name on the trains.

And control of the company with Virgin ;)

And thats why I would support a 3rd runway - to help manage congestion and give flexibility due to weather or incidents etc and NOT for loads of extra flights.

Because a lot of the routes BA fly from LHR would not be economical without transfer passengers........duh

No the plan was to build a brand new terminal for 35 million people and increase flights cap from 480,000 to 650,000 flights

the silent majority are slowly coming out of their shells