Michael O’Leary p*sses on the media from a great height again

It says much about how daft the British media and the UK in general has become in these times when Michael O’Leary, the rude, crude and hugely successful chief executive of Ryanair, p*sses on them again from a great height.

On Friday O’Leary made a supposedly off hand comment on the BBC about how in the future Ryanair might put a coin operated lock on the doors of the toilets to raise extra cash.

Since then po faced expert after expert has been on British news shows ponderously discussing the negative societal consequences of the ‘unbundling’ of air travel charges, whether or not the fee-for-a-pee could have a beneficial effect in reducing global warming because it could encourage the weaker bladdered jet setters to become more infrequent as well as incontinent fliers and thus save 100,000 tons of carbon emissions per second per passenger per trip, and so forth.

Britain has become such a petty minded and humourless nanny state that it is surprising the travel industry isn’t doing a roaring trade in ‘lighten up your life’ holiday packages to Singapore, but let’s not digress too far.

Michael O’Leary was taking the p*ss out of the British yet again in another calculated move to keep Ryanair in the news for free. Even his own spokesperson was officially suggesting it might have been ‘another p*ss take ‘ a few hours later, but the gormless fools of Fleet Street (well, what used to be Fleet Street) keep grinding out stories dripping with learned indignation about O’Leary and Ryanair.

O’Leary doesn’t care who he offends to capture the shallow end of the media. In recent years that has included sending up the previous Pontiff, ridiculing the ‘excessive’ demands of the handicapped, and promising free blow jobs for passengers in the dirt cheap business class cabin he was contemplating offering on a trans Atlantic service, but which in the financial crisis that hit hard only weeks later, suddenly ceased to be one of Ryanair’s immediate objectives.

Offending people, and charging them for all sorts of things passengers on the over priced (and struggling) legacy carriers like British Airways or SAS or Lufthansa take for granted, is a black art practised to perfection by Ryanair, and spoken about with moist eyed admiration by the management of such pale imitations as Jetstar, Tiger and AirAsiaX. Only Ryanair would ask Boeing to look at fitting its seats with flip up plastic lid mechanisms or leaving out the window shades to save weight. But it succeeds because only Ryanair bothers to serve a whole range of secondary airports in Europe with genuinely useful non-stop flights to other cities that the legacy carriers either ignore, or grudgingly accommodate with outrageously overpriced multi stop flights that go through truly bastardisingly inconvenient hubs like London Heathrow or Frankfurt Main.

We can be confident O’Leary is not going to charge for a pee because he did after all rule out holding an in-flight lottery a few years ago in which one elderly passenger per flight would be ejected at altitude in order to reduce fuel consumption and prevent the polar ice caps from melting. The chuck-out-a-granny lottery was actually a spoof that did not for once originate within O’Leary’s wicked mind, but even then it was also breathlessly carried by some of the main stream media for several hours before the..er…penny dropped.