The measure of success of whether LBA is sold to the “right” bidder will be if Manchester Airport look at the new owners and think “oh ****, we’ve got a a bit of a bit of battle on our hands for the Yorkshire market now”. Remember, MAN needs a big flow of passengers from Yorks and Humberside to keep at current passenger numbers and to justify more investment and at the moment there must be as many people from Yorkshire using MAN as there are people using airports in Yorkshire. LBA with council owners, limited investment in facilities and no investment in access, has managed to get up to close to 3m passengers so you’d have to think it could start to recoup some more passengers form MAN under the right owners. Out of the confirmed bidders so far, I think BB are much more likely to get the MAG group a bit twitchy than MAR. In fact, if I was running Manchester, I’d be delighted if a low key operator like MAR came along. To stir things up in the North, it really needs a big established operator like Macquarie or Abertis to come along – then things would get interesting.