There was hubris, there was bathos, there was a moral for every taste, and it all happened right on the doorstep

It was in many ways the perfect journalistic storm. We like any bad news, but some kinds of bad news are better to wallow in than others, and the opening of Terminal Five at Heathrow Airport was truly the best kind.

First, nobody died or was maimed, which meant that the baser, more instinctive emotions such as outrage and indignation were not cramped by any tiresome obligation to show respect for the bereaved.

Second, hubris was involved. Big, shiny and nearly 20 years in the making, this thing had been opened by the Queen, no less, and we were promised that it had "the most sophisticated baggage-handling system in Europe" and everything would "work perfectly from day one". Ha! And according to the Sunday Mirror, BA bosses even had a posh celebratory reception lined up, complete with string quartet and (the luxury of it) doughnuts. Double ha!

Third, the opening had been in the newsdesk diary for months, so everybody was ready, and it happened on handy, familiar territory - reporters may be a shambolic lot, but even they can usually find their way to Heathrow. Better still, quite a few journalists and writers happened to be making routine trips through T5 that day, among them, as luck would have it, the aerospace correspondent of the Financial Times, the travel editor of the Sun and the author Anthony Horowitz, all of whom bore harrowing witness to their miseries.

Fourth, the story unfolded in exquisite slow motion and with marvellous completeness, so there was no risk of missing anything and no possible cause to hold back. This was chaos, mayhem, disaster, fiasco, calamity, shambles, disgrace and abject failure. More than that, it was (tee-hee) terminal chaos, terminal mayhem, terminal disaster, and so on.

And fifth - of particular interest to those writing in the middle pages - this was no mere fait divers or random event of the kind the insurers call an act of God. Oh no, it was a story rich in meaning, perhaps even a metaphor. This is where we saw the real wallowing, where the full gamut of emotions was run, from A to Z. And, of course, the meanings and metaphors you detected depended very much on the angle from which you were viewing things.

The Express wondered: "Can we not do anything well any longer?" And the Mail was on the same track: "This is the nation, after all, that once built mighty rail networks not only at home, but across India, Africa and South America . . . Today? With the admirable exception of St Pancras International, the picture is everywhere one of incompetence." Oh woe.

The Financial Times recalled another unhappy opening, of the Liverpool-Manchester railway in 1830, when Stephenson's Rocket ran over the local MP. "These opening day problems need not herald a lingering malaise," it said.

The Independent and the Guardian believed this should mark the end of any argument for a third runway at Heathrow, and so, less predictably, did the Sunday Times, which promised to "keep up the pressure" for its wacky solution to London's air problem - a whopping great new airport on an artificial island in the Thames estuary. (So wacky is this idea, in fact, that Janet Street-Porter embraced it in her Independent on Sunday column.)

And the blame? The Mail had a tilt at BAA's "predatory, cash-strapped foreign owners", Ferrovial of Spain, while the Times was furious with the monopolists of both airline and airport company for their "cavalier approach to the customer". Will Hutton in the Observer had a more subtle beef, complaining that T5's woes were "symptomatic of deeper weaknesses in our private sector" and warning that "we need to recast the way we do business".

Most bracing of all, though, were the conclusions of the true conservatives of our time. Peter Hitchens wrote in the Mail on Sunday that the fiasco was the inevitable consequence of the introduction of comprehensive education in around 1968, while Simon Heffer in the Telegraph put it all down to a British workforce which is "poorly educated, poorly managed, is almost impossible to sack when it fouls up, has its failures rewarded and has a lavish welfare state to fall back on".

Something for everybody, then. Not for nothing did Willie Walsh once joke that British Airways was "the nation's favourite headline".

Byline bother

My colleague Martin Bright finds that he has a namesake with very different political views from his own, who (as is his right) airs those views on Any Answers and in letters to the press. Our Martin wants to reassure everyone he has not suddenly gone all right wing.

He is lucky, when you consider the case of the crime journalist, now at Private Eye and formerly of the Observer and the Independent, who is called Heather Mills.

Brian Cathcart is professor of journalism at Kingston University

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