BA’s new brunch offer is final proof that it’s just another budget airline

British Airways once called themselves 'The World's Favourite Airline'
British Airways once called itself ‘The World’s Favourite Airline’ - Shutterstock

I thought of Mrs Thatcher this week when British Airways announced its new brunch offering. You may recall how, back in 1997, coming across a model of a BA 747 with its tail fin adorned with the new logo of animals and trees, she covered it with tissue paper. “We fly the British flag, not these awful things,” she said to the unfettered glee of the accompanying media.

A few months later, after the chief executive was ousted, the tail fins reverted to the traditional Union flag.

I could hear the great lady in my head, à la Lady Bracknell. “Brunch?!” she scoffs. Because it might very well be lunch time when you board your long-haul flight, but lunch is not what you’ll get. Instead, if you depart between 8.30am and 11.29am, you’ll be offered what they herald as “The Great British Brunch”, a concept which is neither great, nor British.

Although the word was coined by an English writer at the turn of the 19th century, it was popularised in the United States. Today, across the pond it has come and, along with the word “like”, taking the knee and Twitter, it continues to pollute our culture.

Brunch is the ultimate symbol of laziness, the meal for those who can’t get up in the morning. It’s the weekend, or worse, midweek, diet of the slob, the person who is averse to the beauties of the dawn, and whose mealtimes, if forced upon others, wreak havoc on the timetables of the civilised.

The astute and intelligent being rises in the morning and has breakfast at eight, lunches at one, has tea around four and dinner at eight. The brunch sloth rolls out of their duvet around eleven, slopes, half-dressed to the eaterie where, as noon approaches, draped across a sofa, eyes locked on their phone, they guzzle pancakes, bacon and syrup and have an oat latté. Lunch, the greatest meal of the day, is thus ruined, and then, starving around 6pm, they demand an early dinner.

Then into this arena of the unshaven oik parades BA. And because it can only begin food service once a plane is at cruising altitude, if you fly at 11.30am, brunch – the likes of cheese frittata and Belgian waffles – gets served (orders received, drinks poured, food plated) at around 1.30pm.

Those brunch dishes, bizarrely, being part of a menu that starts with the likes of smoked salmon or goat’s cheese and crackers and ends with a pudding of chocolate marble slice or panna cotta. Which means they’ve engaged in a sort of reverse fog of cultural confusion by inserting brunch into the middle of lunch!

The editor of Head of Points, a website for frequent flyers, described the brunch innovation as “crackpot”. But it’s much simpler than that. It’s just a final admission that BA is now just another low-cost airline. Just another EasyJet, Ryanair, Whizz, Buzz or SpiceJet.

After all, the budget airlines are where the market is so rather than brace themselves and go upmarket, competing with Emirates or Qatar, they’ve joined the high street pound shops.

It’s been a slow descent, like a tedious holding pattern over Biggin Hill after a long-haul flight. And, like a Labour government ducking questions about broken promises, it’s still in denial. “We’re incredibly proud of our premium dining experience,” said a robotic spokesman for BA this week, displaying a distinct lack of culinary knowledge; brunch may be an experience, but it is neither premium nor, in any respect, dining.

The BA slippage to budget brand has seen food service cut in economy (free drinks now seem like an implausible memory), the scrapping of free wash bags for long-haul economy and, worse, if you now fork out for a business seat in Club World they don’t even hand out pyjamas.

Once, when they called themselves “The World’s Favourite Airline” we believed it. In 2006 BA topped the charts in the Skytrax World Airline Awards. Last year it was at number 18.

BA has just launched a £7bn investment plan: new lounges, upgraded aircraft, improvements to the website and a better app.

But until they adhere to the Great British Culinary Timetable (I stand ready to serve as consultant) I’ll shun BA as firmly as I do brunch.