IF IT were possible to make a bad situation worse the failed shotgun marriage of Aurigny and Blue Islands has achieved it in spades.

As with most quickie divorces, all that is left behind is a trail of wreckage and recrimination.

The victims include Flybe, who are left feeling unloved and unwanted, and the staff of both Aurigny and Blue Islands, who spent two months unsure whose job would be surplus to requirements.

The main players fare little better. The multi-millionaire owner of Blue Islands wonders whether relaxing on a beach in the Caribbean would not be a better use of his time and Treasury and Resources are left counting the cost of an exercise in futility.

That process has established only one thing: the States can never sell Aurigny.

For there will never be a better offer. An owner with deep pockets and an even deeper love for his adopted island vowed to use his own money to make it work and bent over backwards to secure the Gatwick slots for the island.

In the commercial world it does not get better than that.

And yet it was not enough.

It soon became clear that ‘the best legal brains in Guernsey’ had got it dreadfully wrong and the words ‘watertight’ and ‘contract’ should never be used together in law.

All of which leaves the States holding a rather needy baby, one that has cost it £12m. over the last seven years and accrued debts of almost £7m.

At the current rate, those losses will amount to £15m. every decade – and Blue Islands says that is being optimistic. A period of heavy investment is on the way at a time when the States can ill afford it.

Worse, the bitterness provoked by the States humiliating volte face means that any hope of the two airlines working together for their common good has, for the moment at least, evaporated.

There is little on the horizon to generate optimism for the future.

Instead, the island is being asked to accept that the cost of insuring its air links is an annual bill measured in the millions.