This morning at 4.28 I was, as is frequently the case, woken by the first lumbering large Boeing or Airbus coming in from the Far East to land at Heathrow. The siting of an airport to the West of the City it serves when the prevailing wind is from the South West was a very dim idea indeed. But, as Heathrow dates back to the pre-jet era, nobody thought about this and the resulting sleep-disturbance it causes to millions is no laughing matter. Equally unamusing are the appalling levels of air pollution that exist at Heathrow.

Even if it was in the correct place, Heathrow is full. It operates at 98% capacity which means, as occurred last Winter, when we get a bit of snow all hell breaks lose and we become the air transport laughing stock of Europe. Gatwick has only one runway and is not a proper business airport. Stansted is a Ryanair ghetto miles from London with the slowest and most useless train link outside Afghanistan . Luton… Well, don’t get me started.

So we require a new airport and the Thames estuary is clearly the place for it.  The announcement this morning that the government is willing to do some research to consider it as a possibility is a good start. But there is a long long way to go. Where to stick a new alternative to Heathrow is an argument that has been going on for decades and I’m old enough to recall the fight against it being placed on Maplin Sands, an earlier version of Boris Island. It was the twitchers who were in the vanguard of the protest movement against that idea, as they will be this time round.

The infrastructure necessary to bring hundreds of thousands of passengers into central London each day from the estuary will be very expensive indeed. But building it will be a great economic stimulus and create huge numbers of jobs. By contrast if  we don’t do something fast we are in grave danger of being left behind as rivals in Holland and Germany eagerly suck air passenger traffic away from us. A recent GLA report shows that airline passenger demand is forecast to increase from 140 million to 400 million by 2050. We cannot just sit there and watch as everything clogs up to the point of standstill.

We’re supposed to be an outward-facing trading nation. Stuff doesn’t arrive on ships any more. People arrive on planes and gliding down to touch a runway in the Thames, our most ancient commercial waterway, is very apt.

One dreads to think what the cost to the UK economy has been at the hands of the weather in the last few days. The nation’s retailers have been pinning a lot on a massive pre-VAT-hike Christmas rush – but even the old-stager Brent Cross shopping centre gave up the fight on Saturday and closed its doors as the white stuff came down deep’n'crisp’n'even. It’s certainly going to be a bad year for Brussels sprout growers: the little green gas-laden fiends need to be picked shortly before sale, but they’re currently laying under feet of snow in the fields, way out of reach of Heston’s little paring knife.

But the chief villain at the moment is Heathrow and its owner BAA. Only 16 flights left Heathrow yesterday out of a total of 650 scheduled services. The place is complete chaos. And this isn’t just bad news for all those unfortunates wrapped in tin foil hoping to jet off to join Simon Cowell (minus his ‘fiancee’) at Sandy Lane in Barbados. Heathrow accounts for 25% of the UK’s non-EU trade by value.

Everyone is on the back of Colin Matthews, the BAA CEO. He’s had Boris Johnson on the phone, Philip Hammond has been spitting tacks and there are rumours of very angry conversations with Willie Walsh, British Airways’ boss. And you wouldn’t be wanting to get into a scrap with Willie Walsh these days; he’s had more fights in the last few years than a Glaswegian barfly on the downward slope.

Now here’s a controversial question. Do you think the disruption at Heathrow would have been less severe if it had been owned by a less cash-conscious organisation with deeper pockets and the national interest at heart – ie. the Government? This is a near-heretical thing even to be thinking. We’re the progressive nation that took the no-nonsense, market-led attitude to all our utilities and flogged them off one by one. We didn’t become a joke, like the French, when when they stopped Pepsi sniffing around yoghurt-maker Danone on the grounds of national security. But one has to ask it.

BAA was already pretty out of favour with the powers-that-be before this latest farce, and it was forced to flog off Gatwick to lessen the heat. (It’s a cool irony that Gatwick is smugly boasting that having imported some snow ploughs from Switzerland, 300 of its scheduled 700 flights managed to operate yesterday).

BAA, which is controlled by Spain’s Ferrovial, is claiming that it has spent an extra £6m on equipment to deal with snow and ice compared with last year. But with pre-tax profits expected to near £1bn this year, the operator has been accused of failing to invest properly in equipment to cope with extreme weather. This morning at Heathrow, they still have only one runway operating – and it hasn’t snowed there for two days. The question has to be asked: when they sat down with their budgets last year at BAA, do you think they were thinking about how much they had to provide their masters back in Madrid to keep the bankers at bay? Or about whether or not an extensive snowfall was going to leave the nation’s most vital transport hub completely stuffed?

I leave you with one small thought about the Stalinist virtues of state control. While in the UK we’re now the laughing stock of the sea-faring world with the Ark Royal going into retirement, the Sea Harrier mothballed and vague talk about sharing an aircraft carrier with the French… the Chinese quietly confirmed last week that they plan to build their first aircraft carrier.

I can’t say I’m in the least bit surprised that BA chairman Martin Broughton’s outburst about airport security checks has struck such a chord. Air travel is a bit of a misery at the best of times, especially if you travel Ryanair or aren’t sufficiently well-heeled to turn left as you enter a plane. But the security stuff of the last decade has made things far worse.

The kind of blanket measures that are currently used are oppressive, time-wasting and often entirely inconsistent. I don’t even want to think about the number of times I’ve had half a small tub of Sudocrem – baby nappy rash cream for the uninitiated – confiscated by one of the amazingly rude and unbending CAA goons at Stansted. That’s after I’ve been forced to sip baby milk and various other vile toddler organic smoothies in front of an unsmiling operative.  How many terrorists have ever bought down a plane with all three of their dearly loved kids on it?

My point is that the current system, because it is so undiscriminating, is desperately unintelligent. It makes flight travel a misery for everyone which is exactly what the jihadist nut jobs want. We play precisely into their hands.

Sooner or later we’ve got to accept that airport security needs to get into a bit of intelligent profiling. So a 96 year old Bolivian nun heading from La Paz on the trip of a lifetime to Rome should probably attract less interest than a twenty year old male Yemeni who has paid cash for his one way ticket, shaved his body and has a welcome note in his pocket from the seventy two virgins he’s expecting to greet him with all sorts of favours when he arrives in paradise. This may be tough on law-abiding young, male Yemenis on the move – but that’s unfortunate, not racist prejudice. It’s just common sense and proper policing.

Last week I travelled through Nairobi back to London and had to go through the same x-ray machine and frisking twice before getting on a BA flight. The machines were side by side.

However, possibly the most absurd personal experience I’ve had was on the Scottish island of Islay a couple of weeks back. I’ve written a piece about the Scotch whisky industry – out in MT next week, hurry while stocks last etc – and I was leaving  Islay’s tiny airport (which is the size of two Portakabins). Four uniformed security personnel gave each and everyone of the twelve people on my flight out – one of only two aircraft movements each day –  the kind of intense going over to be expected by a member of the Bin Laden clan.

These security clowns are the laughing stock of the island and I dread to think what they cost. But, of course, there had to be some even bigger clown on our flight who was revealed to have a pair of nail scissors in her handbag. The look of triumphant self-justification on the grim face of the jobsworth was very dispiriting indeed.