Sleeping in airports or holidaying in Wales: Which will be your summer?

POSTPONED flights and bedding down in Manchester Airport is a grim way to spend half-term, but the only alternative may be a holiday in Wales. Let’s weigh the pros and cons of each.

Airports: A pretty good selection of food, from burritos to Chinese, or at Heathrow a Heston Blumenthal restaurant and a Fortnum & Mason oyster bar. Not much use to Brits planning to gorge on chips in Marbella, but a cheeseburger shouldn’t prove terrifyingly exotic.

Wales: Mostly fish and chips, fried ‘donuts’ and a Nando’s if you’re lucky. For eating out, dossing down on the floor of an airport wins hands down.

Airports: It’s safe to say the weather won’t be a problem, because there is no weather. Assuming the air conditioning is working, you can’t fault airports on this score.

Wales: Expect rain. Lots of it. Ever seen the Ray Bradbury film The Illustrated Man, where the astronauts are driven completely insane by non-stop rain? It’s a lot like that, except you can take cover in a cafe and feel unpleasantly clammy for a bit of variety.

Airports: Not ideal places to stay, designed as they are without beds or en suite bathrooms. Also day trips aren’t really possible due to losing your place in the queue. (Pro tip – they’re just going to cancel your flight anyway.)

Wales: Also not a good place to stay, if you’re in a B&B that looks like Winston Smith’s pad in Nineteen Eighty-Four, a hotel with a shitty nightclub next door, or a caravan where every day is a Sisyphean struggle of folding stuff away just so you can eat your f**king baked beans. Wales wins, but only because of actual beds.

Airports: Actually have a surprising number of tourist places of interest, if you look hard enough. At Heathrow you can visit bits of the airport where Love Actually was filmed, or sit on a toilet Liz Taylor may have shat upon in her heyday.

Wales: Also has places of interest, but generally a bit rubbish. Often a mountain/big hill or boring museum. If you’re fascinated by the lives of Methodist slate miners you’ll be gripped, otherwise you may as well take the kids to Heathrow’s equally dull runway where Concorde made its historic 1976 inaugural flight.

Airports: It’s impossible to have a beach holiday in an airport. With airlines that haven’t bothered to employ enough people, and a government that doesn’t give a shit and is making the situation worse, installing artificial beaches and wave machines in airports might be the only solution for years to come.

Wales: Loads of great beaches, on the rare days it’s sunny and you can go mad and take your North Face jacket and fleece off. Fun whatever the weather for the kids, who can explore the rock pools and befriend a dead crab.

Airports: The people you meet aren’t going to be cheerful right now, but there might be a sense of camaraderie and shared suffering, like in the trenches, as you hang around Boots aimlessly for something to do.

Wales: The people you meet aren’t going to be cheerful right now, but that’s because it’s Wales. At least in an airport no one thinks you’re a stuck-up bastard who works in the City purely because you’re English. Weighing up this and previous factors, a holiday in Wales rather than an airport is still the better option, but only just.

The fence-sitting Conservative MP's guide to deciding whether Johnson's totally f**ked yet

ARE you a Tory MP trying to work out whether Boris Johnson is f**ked enough for you to hand in a letter of no confidence? Here’s how to decide.

Where is your constituency?

If you’re in a Cotswolds safe seat where people would vote Conservative even if Boris Johnson personally shat in their beds, you can afford to hold off. But if you’re a Red Wall MP who scraped in thanks to Brexit and nothing else, at least look like you’re standing up to the posh Etonian who’s blatantly taking the piss.

How big is your majority?

If it’s chuffing massive, you can do what you want, but if you’re clinging on by a few hundred votes you need to play it carefully. Or throw caution to the wind and see what happens. There are other jobs more fulfilling than being an MP, you know. Oh. You don’t, because you’re a self-important politics obsessive who craves attention but has no obvious showbiz talent.

Are you desperate for a promotion?

Fancy a go in the cabinet? Now’s your chance, as Johnson is reportedly phoning anyone who’ll listen and promising them a promotion in exchange for their support. Bear in mind your new post will not last very long, and you’ll have to do the morning media round defending Boris trying to shag a Mummy Pig animatronic at Peppa Pig World, or whatever he’s done this time.

Are you scared of the alternative?

Boris is bad, but what if the Tories end up with someone just as inept but without the bullshit charisma to make people vote for them? Liz Truss and Michael Gove are favourites, but do you really want those wankers as your boss? They might get you voted out even quicker than your current one.

Have you got any morals?

Do you genuinely believe poor old Boris is dim enough not to realise when he’s at a party? Then do the right thing and stick by the unobservant chap. However, if you lack morals then bosh your letter in now. You can always retract it later if he clings on. That’s the great thing about politics – you can be completely unprincipled and all the other self-serving bastards won’t judge you for it.