Finally after a week of pro-Heathrow aviation spin the Standard, they publish some letters against

Eight years ago, the former Environment Minister Tim Yeo drove a revolution in Tory thinking that embraced the science of climate change and questioned the conventional arguments for air expansion. Yeo, one could say, is the father figure of the Coalition’s embargo against a third runway at Heathrow.

But now he has abandoned his brainchild. Now he says a third runway cannot be put off. “We need it within 10 years, and preferably within five, or the Chinese and others will take their business elsewhere,” he told the Evening Standard. “We cannot afford to delay.”

So what changed his mind? Anyone assuming a Damascene conversion will be disappointed. Yeo was unusual among Tories a decade ago because he agreed wholeheartedly with the “compelling science”  that mankind was causing temperatures to rise through carbon emissions. But he approached it as a businessman, not a tree hugger.

“My thinking was that those countries which decarbonised their infrastructure would have a competitive advantage in the 2020s because the price of carbon is likely to go up very substantially.” Under international treaties, carbon pollution has to be paid for.

Mr Yeo, 67, was no newcomer to the field. He was Countryside Minister in John Major’s government in the Nineties, trade & industry spokesman under Iain Duncan Smith’s shadow cabinet and then shadow environment & transport minister for Michael Howard in 2004 when he began working on the change of policy. “It was quite a difficult task at the time. They have become much more receptive since David became leader.”

The decisive moment was a “brave” change of European Union policy in January this year that meant flights taking off or landing in the EU will come under a European carbon cap, so that the total rather than one airport is limited. “Even if we build 10 more runways at Heathrow it would not add a single gram of carbon dioxide to the emissions in the EU,” he said. “That was the trigger point.”

Another factor is the astonishing economic boom in the Far East, in cities that have no direct flights to Britain. “There were now quite a significant number of major cities that had direct flights to other European cities but not to London. That handicaps British business quite materially,” he said.

Other changes that make a third runway necessary are the introduction of new, quieter aircraft on premium routes. “Because Heathrow is seen as a very important hub the airlines choose the newest and therefore quietest aircraft to fly here,” he said. “Providing Heathrow maintains its leadership then more of the planes landing and taking off will be the quietest in the world. If we lose that status we will get older, noisier planes.”

He recalls flying to Chongqing, a city of 28 million people, to make a speech to the university and having to fly via Hong Kong, taking up a whole day. “That is ridiculous. People who travel regularly to the East will know how out of date much of our transport infrastructure actually is.”

Business travellers would rather do a deal in a place that is easy to get to: “All the evidence is that travellers like convenience. Therefore the hub airports are the ones that work.”

He rejects the Boris Island solution as too slow. “Creating something from scratch is appealing but would take too long,” he said. “The earliest we could open Boris Island is 20 years and by that time these great cities in China will have formed their links with Europe — and Britain will have been penalised permanently.“

He thinks Gatwick could be expanded if it had high speed links with Heathrow, at a pinch, but Stansted is too far away. Yeo senses David Cameron and George Osborne are ready to change to an open-minded stance in the next Tory manifesto and suggests that Transport Secretary Justine Greening, a diehard opponent of a third runway, will have to sit out of the decision.

Yeo has been ahead of the curve twice now — so his predictions for the future are worth heeding: “In the next 100 years planes will get bigger and quieter and so the opportunities for night flights will increase. At present Heathrow is virtually shut down for six hours every night. We can see in 100 years larger volumes of traffic with much less disruption. People would not worry about planes if they could not hear them.”

A bigger, busier but quieter Heathrow open 24 hours a day? It could be heading our way.