Just how long do airlines and airports need to get their house in order?

Et Tui, brutes…

AMID warnings the travel shambles will trundle on into the summer, just how long do airlines and airports need to get their house in order?

We're not only talking about holidays here, important though they are, but also family reunions long-delayed by the pandemic , weddings and funerals: missed memories that a refund and a few hundred quid in compensation can't ever make up for.

Although Tui is far from the only offender, it is one of the worst, yesterday cancelling nearly 200 more flights from a single airport before the end of June.

In recent days, some of its passengers reached the departure gates only to be scandalously informed by text message that their flight had been axed.

Others got the bad news from an armed cop . Airlines took billions of pounds in furlough cash — as well as unwisely making swathes of staff redundant — to keep them afloat through Covid.

Given firms appear to be doing their best to ground themselves now restrictions have been lifted, many angry travellers will ask: what was the point?

Cut waste, Saj

HIKING National Insurance in order to pour still more money into an unreformed NHS and social care system was always going to be a huge political gamble.

But, as we warned at the time, if the Government was determined to push ahead with this folly, EVERY penny had to be used with ruthless efficiency.

With dismal predictability, this isn't happening — with the number of fatcat managers having doubled since February 2020.

Meanwhile Health Secretary Sajid Javid is accused by Cabinet colleagues of being too busy showboating on matters outside his brief, such as housing.

Get a grip on the cash-hungry bureaucrats, Saj. If the public don't feel real improvements for the extra £12billion being hurled at our Health Service, it'll be you they blame.

Wreck 'n' rail

IT seems impossible these days to organise so much as a backyard BBQ without the rail unions using it as an excuse to go on strike.

Hot on the heels of the RMT's Platinum Jubilee picketing comes rumblings of a walkout timed to disrupt the Commonwealth Games that start in Birmingham next month.

If union bruiser Mick Lynch focused solely on a rise for lower-paid staff such as cleaners, he might have a point.

But his Luddite goons demand hikes for even train drivers earning an average of £59,000 with gold-plated pensions, and oppose cost-saving tech improvements to working practices, some of which date back over a century.

Next stop, oblivion.