ONLY now, seven years after the States bought Aurigny Air Services to safeguard the island’s lifeline links to Gatwick, has the full story of how those take-off and landing slots became available finally been told.

Extraordinary though it is, the tale would probably never have emerged but for one thing: Treasury and Resources’ enthusiasm for offloading Aurigny to Blue Islands.

Having been so intimately involved in securing the slots and in exploring options other than airline purchase to do so, former chief minister and elder Statesman Mike Torode is appalled that T&R can even contemplate putting them at risk.

And as our disclosures on pages six and seven indicate, it was a completely fortuitous combination of circumstances, aviation contacts, political friendships and a bulldog determination not to let British Airways leave this island in the lurch that led to Guernsey being given five Gatwick slots.

That will not – cannot – happen again. And in confirming the 45 minutes from disaster scenario, another former political heavyweight, Advocate John Langlois, has also added his insider’s legal experience that golden share options provide no guarantee when it comes to protecting access.

T&R can correctly claim that neither they, nor islanders, have yet seen the legal safeguards that the Derek Coates/Blue Islands potential deal would seek to put in place.

But what their intervention has done is to highlight how close Guernsey came to becoming a backwater, a satellite of Jersey, and how carefully it should tread when contemplating anything that might jeopardise – or even weaken – the security of those hard-won Gatwick links.

Their view is shared by a specialist aviation lawyer who also warns that because the slots have a value – probably of several million – they could be regarded as assets to be sold to the highest bidder in the event of ‘Bluerigny’ going bust.

The airport access regulator has also made it clear that theirs is a black-and-white approach: are the links being properly operated and are they owned by a functioning airline?

Unless T&R has a magic, rather than merely golden, share, ultimate security or risk rests with who owns the airline.