Travel chaos and understaffed airports are a wake-up call: Britain is

We made it home from holiday, eventually, on the third day of trying. Not bad, really, by the standards of this hellish summer. Better than being stuck for 21 hours in traffic outside Dover with a screaming toddler in the back and no loo for miles. Or sitting on the asphalt for six hours in a heatwave without food or drink, as the inmates of one American Airlines flight to New York reportedly were this week. At least I wasn’t missing a wedding or a funeral, or even (like one despairing passenger on what was meant to be our flight home) trying and failing to get back for a sister’s graduation.

All we had to contend with was a flurry of last-minute changes to our tickets, followed by someone else’s plane breaking down on a runway in New Jersey and triggering a now woefully familiar chain reaction: delayed takeoffs, jumbo jets queueing on the tarmac unable to offload increasingly stressed passengers at the gates, a missed connection, a day and a night unexpectedly stuck at Newark airport. There’s only so much time you can kill boggling at the Donald Trump “I’ll be back!” T-shirts and Kamala Harris commemorative socks on sale in the airport gift shop.

Still, we managed to get on to another flight the next evening, which was airborne for one hopeful hour before starting to leak hydraulic fluid somewhere over Canada, prompting a scramble back to Newark and a runway lined with emergency vehicles. The rest, to be honest, is a blur. After more than 48 hours in transit everything takes on a faintly dreamlike quality, fogged by living on a diet of airline snacks and never being sure what time it is in real life.

Travel chaos is the ultimate in first-world problems, of course, confined to those lucky enough to afford a holiday. But if it’s a luxury complaint it’s also an illuminating one, a lens through which something may finally snap into focus. Going away in summer is the sort of thing most people take for granted. When even hopping on a Channel ferry becomes a heroic expedition against the odds, the sense of things falling apart at the seams is palpable.

The Home Office has been failing in plain sight for years now. But when more than half a million people are waiting to renew their passports, these failures become impossible to hide even from those who wouldn’t ordinarily notice. Nothing brings home the reality of Brexit, meanwhile, like gridlocked motorways in Kent. Now a summer of airmageddon threatens to expose some painful truths about post-pandemic working life, too.

The never knowingly understated Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary has blamed cancelled flights on a government that “couldn’t run a sweet shop”, together with airports failing to prepare for a predictable summer rush, which feels at least partly true. Ryanair was readier than some for the lifting of travel bans; the company retained its staff through lockdown (albeit while imposing an unpopular pay cut), and has been visibly exasperated with airports cancelling slots at the last minute, making it kick enraged passengers off otherwise viable flights. But this isn’t a universal story. We were told to arrive at Heathrow four hours before our flight, where we…