Ours is a family who have said: “Never again” to Heathrow. We used to take family holidays in Spain or Portugal; we found that we needed to take a refresher holiday as soon as we arrived, and another refresher when we got back, just to recover from the Heathrow experience. On the last occasion Heathrow locked us in our aircraft after we had landed. I can remember how long we were imprisoned; we were locked up for eight hours, because there were no steps.

I also remember that there was no food, but sweaty queues for the lavatories. When we got to the terminal there were sullen holiday crowds waiting for their delayed luggage; ours took a week to arrive. Heathrow in August may not be Dante's idea of Hell, but it was certainly Dante's idea of Purgatory, even before they opened, or failed to open, Terminal 5.

I was not surprised that the first week of Terminal 5 proved to be a shambles, with 20,000 passengers delayed and 20,000 pieces of luggage lost. Indeed, I wondered who these innocents could be. Had they never travelled through Heathrow before? Did they meekly hand over their luggage to British Airways and expect ever to see it again?

Britain had already acquired a regrettable reputation for the mismanagement of grand projects. In this Millennium we have already had the Dome, which was the responsibility of the former Lord Chancellor, Lord Falconer of Thoroton, who abolished his own office in an absent-minded fit of Blairite reform. Indeed, I suppose that the Dome itself was supposed to be a symbol of new Labour modernisation, and in a way it was; both the Dome and the Blairite reforms suffered from overexpenditure and underperformance. As a nation we are bad at billion-pound projects and even worse at multibillion-pound projects. And the higher the expenditure the more grotesque the results.

We have also had Wembley. A particularly irritating flaw of this Government is its mania for football. Every Cabinet Minister kicking a ball with his children in a back garden in Islington believes he could have been a striker for Manchester United.

Wembley is an example of our national inability to resist the pressure of football mania. The details of the project are admittedly becoming somewhat hazy in my mind. I have a clear memory of the overspend, and of the long delays.

Now we have Terminal 5, where the disaster has occurred in the middle of a significant lobbying effort for a third runway at Heathrow. What a splendid lobbying argument this has been. “We must have a third runway to demonstrate that Heathrow is a great airport; when the suffering passengers get there we can guarantee to cancel their flights and lose their luggage.”

BAA is, of course, not British, since it owned by Ferrovial, which is a Spanish company. Ferrovial has a monopoly of leading London airports; it also owns Gatwick and Stansted. If you are flying to or from London, it is difficult to avoid putting yourself through the Ferrovial experience, which is ghastly at Heathrow, a bit less ghastly at Gatwick and slightly ghastlier at Stansted, particularly if you make allowance for the hazards of the railway connection. The young and fit can just about manage Stansted, but the old and queue-shy are well advised to keep away.

For some reason the Government allowed Ferrovial to buy the BAA monopoly, although that monopoly dominates British aviation. Unfortunately, Ferrovial broke the European Commission rules in its financing of the bid for BAA and currently has 10 billion of debt to refinance.

Those those of us who have noticed what has happened to the refinancing of Northern Rock or Bear Stearns will be aware that a Spanish refinancing of a British airport monopoly in the middle of a global credit crunch may be somewhat difficult, particularly as a House of Commons committee has recommended that the BAA monopoly should be examined and if necessary broken up - a policy that would probably enjoy a great deal of public support. The British do think that Heathrow is a national scandal, but they do not really expect an underfunded Spanish company to succeed in clearing up the problem.

My conclusion is that Britain should not attempt exaggerated prestige projects since we are so bad at them. Of course, St Pancras station is an example to the contrary, but that was originally built in the 19th century, when most of our projects actually worked, with the notable exception of the Forth Bridge.

An Englishman invented the computer, and another Englishman invented the internet, but there will always be a third Englishman, standing in the footsteps of giants, who will foul things up. The computers seem again to have fouled up at Terminal 5, as they have in the National Health Service, as they will in biometric identity cards. In the Terminal 5 disaster, there was a new computerised system of baggage handling. As one might have expected, it was the baggage handling that failed most completely. Heaven knows whether the computers will work for the Olympics.

The public would like to see someone held responsible. It is not impossible for competent managers to schedule the start-up of a big project, so that day one does not begin either with a big bang or a big raspberry. I would nominate Willie Walsh, the chief executive of British Airways, who has said: “If you want to blame someone, blame me.” I do want to blame someone; I want to blame him.

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