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.