Norman blooded
`NASTY Norman' seems an unkind name for British Airways News to call my colleague on The Spectator's board, Lord Tebbit. Apart from anything else, First Officer Teb- bit (retired) is one of the airline's most dis- tinguished Old Boys. His offence was to criticise the European Commission, which had let Lufthansa's Star Alliance of airlines through without a murmur, while frustrating BA's planned alliances at every turn. The right attitude, so its house journal says, is to welcome Andrew Cahn aboard as BA's new director of government and industry affairs. He comes hot from Brussels, where, as chef de cabinet to Neil Kinnock as commissioner for transport, he understudied the part of the Dormouse in the Mad Hatter's Tea Party — or, as British Airways News prefers to put it, played a key role in persuading Europe's governments and parliament to back his chief's ambitious programme of reforms. Its objectivity may have been affected by the clear-air turbulence now being reported from BA's boardroom. I rather suspect that Lord Marshall, BA's busy chairman — now busier still as acting chief executive — momentarily muddled it up with one of his other chairmanships, and that this swipe was meant to appear in the house journal of Britain in Europe.
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