Inconsistency – the bane of life at airport security

One of the many pieces of common sense passed down to the officers Mr Le Brocq trained and then nurtured was that while they could and should apply discretion where appropriate that discretion must always be applied fairly and consistently. My cousin told me that as a very simple example he always took this to mean that if there were a dozen cars parked on a yellow line in the same street then he should either book none or book the lot.

That probably over simplified it a little but I got the general drift and recalled it the other evening when Herself and I had dinner with an old friend who I first met not that long after I left school and was in my first job – as he was. Although we did different things for different bosses our paths crossed frequently and we became and have remained firm friends.

About 50 or so years ago he decided to leave here – both his parents died within a few months of each other and he had no siblings or other close family – and did so with the few hundred quid remaining from the sale of the home he’d inherited after what his dad borrowed had been paid off.

To say that he did well for himself is perhaps as big an understatement as I can utter. He has business interests (and several homes) on three continents and is very seriously wealthy indeed. Apart from that he hasn’t changed a great deal from when we were teenagers trying to convince very sceptical barmaids that despite the fact that there was a distinct absence of facial hair about us both, we were actually 18 and therefore entitled to drink a bottle of brown ale each after work on Fridays. Sadly, it was a ploy which rarely worked for those two 15- or 16-year-olds.

He and his version of Herself come over a couple of times a year and stay with us at Chez Clement – catching up on what they call Jersey gossip and good restaurants, invariably saying in respect of the latter that eating here is comparable in quality to anywhere else they eat.

The conversation also touches upon their travels and last week we discussed the sadly necessary nuisance of airport security and my frequent gripe – based on the rare occasions on which I travel by air but an abundance of anecdotal evidence from friends and this newspaper’s correspondence columns – that there should be a level of consistency in the rent-a-grope mob’s requirements that is standard to all airports. In other words, if belts have to be removed, or shoes or loose change from pockets for that matter, then those rules should be applied to all travellers at all airports each time they travel.

And, given what happened to me a couple of years ago on the last occasion on which I went through Jersey Airport, if I see a security person going through the banknote section of my wallet and I ask (very politely, I stress) what he is looking for, I should be entitled to an intelligent response that includes an explanation, and not the meaningless grunt I actually received.

Anyhow, it was interesting listening to my mate’s account of what happened to him at Gatwick last week. He too was asked to fish out the bulky item in his back pocket and duly produced his wallet, the contents of which he was asked to remove. There were £10 and £20 notes and bank cards and that was the lot, or so he thought. The security person then went through the wallet in from the bottom of one of the credit card slots he produced what my friend recognised as small gold toothpick he’d won at a charity dinner years earlier and which had been placed in his wallet and promptly forgotten.

He accepted immediately that it should not have been there and reached some accommodation about its eventual return before going through to the departure gate to board the aircraft.

There he was seated opposite a woman and he said it took several minutes of him being almost aware something was wrong without it actually dawning on him precisely what it was. She was knitting a sock – that he gleaned from the pattern book she frequently referred to – and the three needles she was using were clearly much more of a threat (in the wrong hands) to aircraft security than the comparatively miniscule tooth pick he had parted company with a few minutes earlier.

As he said, if they can pick up a little tooth pick so small that he’d forgotten he had it out of his wallet then surely all the technology used in scanning this woman’s knitting bag should have picked up the fact that there were three good sized knitting needles in there.

And finally,

Apart from those who actually rip us all off – and please don’t tell me that such spivs don’t exist because I’ve found them from large scale operators to one man bands in both the retail and service provision industries – there can’t be too many people who’d quarrel with the calls for major investigations into what we are required to part with in terms of cash with what we actually receive in return. While the other inquiries have much in their favour, I like Alan Breckon’s call for a public inquiry – principally because witnesses can be summonsed, evidence can be taken on oath and the refusal to produce documents the inquiry demands is an offence punishable at law. Hopefully these big teeth will be used, if necessary.