Boris and Prezza hit turbulence at Gatwick

Boris Johnson, the forthright Mayor of London, has called the managers of Gatwick airport "chimpanzees" after his luggage went missing for hours when he and his family returned from a week's holiday in Turkey recently. "We stood in hell," the mayor says of his long wait in the luggage hall with hundreds of other travellers – many of whom had already been waiting two-and-a-half hours before he arrived - because the airport had insufficient numbers of baggage handlers.

Johnson, not a good enemy to make, went on: "It is a measure of the extreme cowardliness and cynicism of the airport authorities that there was no one from BAA in that baggage hall." He writes in the Daily Telegraph: "There was no one from Servisair, the baggage handlers whose entirely foreseeable 'staff shortages' had caused the problem. The only representative of authority was a nice but increasingly rattled young man from the lost luggage department. He knew nothing. We offered to mount an Entebbe-style raid to liberate our luggage and were told we couldn't do that for health and safety reasons."

For explanation, passengers were handed a photocopied letter from a Servisair official apologising. But Johnson discovered that it had been given out every night for the previous six nights and he called it "one of the most snivelling and insincere letters I have ever read". He warned that if the airport persisted with its "'sod the public' attitude", the London 2012 Olympics would be chaos.

Not everything that goes wrong at Gatwick is the airport's fault. John Prescott, the former Deputy Prime Minister, was spotted at the easyJet check-in desk there this week, aiming to fly up to the Edinburgh Book Festival to promote his autobiography.

Amid growing consternation, according to the London Evening Standard, he was refused a boarding pass. Though he is a former Minister for Transport, he is perhaps not well versed at flying alone as it turned out that he held a British Airways ticket. He appeared "bemused" and more than a little peturbed, according to the newspaper's eyewitness.