The government’s biggest A321 jet took off from Stansted at 6.05 a.m. this morning with no Prime Minister on board, flew 34 minutes to Manchester to collect Andy Burnham, then set off for the Commonwealth summit in Antigua. Guido estimates the detour cost around £20,000 of taxpayer cash. Avanti not good enough for him?
Flight tracking data shows the jet landed in Manchester at 6.39 a.m. and left again at 8.06 a.m., heading for a refuelling stop in St John’s, Newfoundland, before the Caribbean. The government eventually publishes what every trip on the plane costs. Starmer’s same-day trip to Paris in April came to £39,756 at roughly £20,000 a leg. Stansted to Manchester is shorter than Paris, but every additional leg brings its own landing and handling fees. About £18,000-20,000’s worth according to Guido’s fag packet maths…
There is an environmental cost. An A321neo burns roughly 1.7 tonnes of jet fuel on a short hop like this once take-off and climb are counted – every kilo of jet fuel makes 3.16 kilos of carbon dioxide. Ergo, the Manchester diversion pumped out around 5.4 tonnes of CO2. Britain emits only about 4.25 to 4.5 tonnes of CO₂ per person per year…
The whole jaunt, there and back, comes to about 21 hours of flying. Based on Starmer’s £121,239 trip to Yerevan in May and Yvette Cooper’s £148,700 trip to Washington in December, long-haul flying on the plane costs £9,500 to £12,400 an hour. That puts the full trip at about £250,000. And at around 2.4 tonnes of fuel an hour that is roughly 150 tonnes of CO2…
Burnham took the same government jet from Glasgow to Manchester in July to open No10 North, despite a choice of trains. When Liz Truss used the same plane to fly to Australia, Angela Rayner called it a “ridiculous waste of half a million pounds on a private jet trip”. Thoughts on this one, Ange?
Krishnan Guru-Murthy asked John Healey: “Just finally, I mean Andy Burnham has been very clear he wants Britain back in the European Union in his lifetime. Do you?”
The Chancellor replied: “I’m older than Andy Burnham. I don’t expect to see that.”