Willie ‘buck stops here’ Walsh fires two execs

Whatever happened to British Airways chief executive Willie Walsh's claim that "the buck stops here" with the Heathrow Terminal 5 debacle? With bags piling up and customers tearing their hair out, he told a press conference in the first week of the new terminal's opening: "I am accepting responsibility. I am not going to start trying to find someone else to point the finger at."

By yesterday, he was obviously feeling better about himself. Far from taking the blame, he fired two BA executives involved in the fiasco - Gareth Kirkwood, director of operations, and David Noyes, head of customer relations - and announced that he would personally take charge of the terminal for the time being.

A BA source, speaking to the Guardian, defended the apparent contradiction by arguing that "people are confusing taking responsibility with resigning".

The swift dismissal of the two men is thought to have been the result of pressure from BA's institutional shareholders, such as Standard Life Investments (SLI), which voiced its concerns over Terminal 5 to Walsh this week. It now transpires that a fund manager at SLI lost their bags in the terminal's not-so-state-of-the-art baggage system 10 days ago.

A union source suggested to the Guardian that Terminal 5 was an accident waiting to happen because Walsh is an autocrat whose senior staff "lack the confidence" to tell him what he doesn't want to hear. "He has said no one had warned him before the launch - but that's the nature of the ship he ran."