I have a friend who, some time ago, instructed me to switch my phone on to silent when I went to bed. “But what if there is an emergency that needs my attention?” I protested (at the time, I had a job that was prone to out-of-hours crises). “In which case,” he replied, “you’re going to need a good night’s sleep so you can tackle it with a clear head.”

If only life were so simple, I remember thinking at the time, and his cheekily facile advice has been brought to mind again with the publication of the report into the power outage that brought Heathrow Airport to a 24-hour standstill in March.

While the conclusion to the review, undertaken by former Transport Secretary, Ruth Kelly, states that “Heathrow made the right decisions in exceptionally difficult circumstances”, much of the attention since has been directed towards the fact that the airport’s chief executive Thomas Woldbye was uncontactable........

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