The Times - UK (2021-12-18)

48 Saturday December 18 2021 | the times

NewsSaturday interview

ability is kind of frozen out of the

cabinet.”

On Brexit the Irishman says it

“infuriates” him when travelling in

Europe and seeing Britons disembark

his flights only to be excluded from

EU queues at passport control.

“Could they do something and

negotiate some kind of concession

with the European Union? No... they

want to fight over about five trawlers

in Jersey, instead of saying ‘Look let’s

have a bilateral agreement where all

British passengers arriving in and out

of Europe are allowed into the EU

passport control queue’. ”

J

ohnson’s vision for the UK is

Peppa Pig, O’Leary says. Tim

Martin, the boss of

Wetherspoon is “nice but dim”.

Dominic Raab, the deputy

prime minister, “cannot add or even

subtract”.

The other people making his blood

boil are so-called online travel agents

such as On the Beach, Expedia and

eDreams, that he brands as “pirates”.

On the Beach is in the process of

suing his no-frills airline for blocking

it from booking flights with it. In legal

documents filed with the High Court,

On the Beach claims Ryanair

‘You wouldn’t hire Johnson, Patel or

Michael O’Leary of Ryanair believes that the

drive for Brexit has led to political talent being

frozen out of the cabinet, he tells Ben Clatworthy

T

here is “blind panic” in the

UK about Omicron,

Michael O’Leary the

firecracker chief executive of

Ryanair says, the air

punctuated by swearwords. “There’s

this mass hysteria about Omicron

generally driven by Downing Street

and Boris Johnson, probably to cover

up all of the party messes that they

were having 12 months ago,” he

bellows. “I think it shows the inept

political leadership in the UK

that is not replicated in the rest of

Europe. They’re not all panicking in

Italy or Spain or Germany or

Holland.”

O’Leary, known for his

inflammatory statements, is

particularly animated when we speak,

barely drawing breath between

sentences. It is unsurprising he is

frustrated. After 20 months of travel

restrictions, the industry is staring

down the barrel of yet another bleak

winter. Punitive and expensive testing

regimes are being reintroduced across

Europe, borders are closing and

holidays are once again being

cancelled.

Less than 24 hours after we speak,

the government in France said it was

shutting its borders to arrivals from

the UK with almost immediate effect,

cancelling tens of thousands of

Britons’ Christmas plans.

O’Leary’s people said the airline, or

the man himself, would not be

commenting on President Macron’s

decision. But he believes border

closures are wrong and that countries

should not need to rely on testing

passengers. “Testing is a way of Grant

Shapps and all these guys, pretending

that they’re doing something. They

want you to do your testing two days

after you’ve arrived in the UK, but

only after you’ve got on the London

Underground. So what’s the point? If

you’re infected, you’ve already

infected half of London by travelling

on the Underground.”

The answer, O’Leary says, is to

clamp down on the unvaccinated. “I

have no difficulty in saying to people,

you can fly, but you have to be

vaccinated,” he said. “We fully

respect your right to be not

vaccinated if you are one of the

lunatic fringes who believe this is

some government, big pharma

conspiracy. But if you are not

vaccinated, you can’t go to the

supermarket, you can’t go to the

pharmacy. You shouldn’t be

allowed into hospital if you’re not

vaccinated.”

So will the airline ban unjabbed

passengers? O’Leary, for the first

time, pauses. “We have to be careful,”

he says. “Airlines can’t ban people, it’s

governments can ban people. But

governments need to.”

O’Leary, 60, was born in Dublin

and married Anita Farrell, 12 years his

junior, in 2003. They have four

children and live in a large home,

Gigginstown House, near Delvin in

Co Westmeath. He breeds racehorses

and has won competitions such as the

Cheltenham Gold Cup and the 2018

and 2019 Grand Nationals — after

which he opened an extremely rare

free bar for passengers on his flight

back to Dublin.

Drinks, he insists, is a winner. “If

you tell someone under 30 years of

age that they cannot get into a pub

they’d get vaccinated pretty damn

quickly. The huge majority of the

population that has done the sensible,

the caring, the protective thing for the

community and gotten vaccinated,

should not be restricted. But

governments should place increasing

restrictions [on the unjabbed], while

recognising the rights of everybody. If

you want to be unvaccinated, that’s

fine, but we should increasingly not

allow those to go to work, to travel on

the Underground, to fly, to go to the

supermarket, to go to pharmacies.”

Such a policy — certainly in the

UK — is unimaginable in a week in

which there has been a huge Tory

rebellion over the introduction of

Covid passports. Almost half of Tory

backbenchers voted against new curbs

that will require people to show proof

of vaccination or a negative test at

large indoor venues across England,

leaving the prime minister reliant on

Labour’s support and his authority

even more undermined than it was

after the Downing Street party

scandal.

O’Leary is furious at the

government in Westminster and

especially the leadership of Johnson:

“He was the one who said, ‘f***

business”. And to be fair to him, he

has followed through brilliantly, he

has f***ed businesses all over the UK.

If you were running a business, you

wouldn’t hire Johnson, Michael Gove,

or Priti Patel. They’re all idiots. The

only thing they have in common is

that they were all Johnson-supporting

Brexiteers. Anybody with any