Thomas Cook, the world’s oldest travel firm, collapses

THOMAS COOK began life in July 1841, offering day-trips between Leicester and Loughborough to teetotallers. It counted Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling and Winston Churchill among its customers, before evolving into a leading modern package-holiday firm. But its story ended ignominiously this week, with some holidaymakers locked in hotels by security guards demanding that they pay again for their rooms. Some 600,000 tourists, a quarter British, were left stranded when the world’s oldest holiday firm collapsed into liquidation on September 23rd after a decade of financial trouble. It leaves behind big questions over who should pay to rescue stranded holidaymakers in future.

Until recently Thomas Cook seemed likely to escape bankruptcy. Fosun, a Chinese conglomerate keen to deploy the Cook brand in Asia, and the firm’s lenders had agreed to rescue the company with a cash injection of £900m ($1.1bn). But on September 20th its main banks threatened to withdraw their support if the group was not able to find an additional £200m, which they calculated it would need to survive the lean winter months. None of its backers was prepared to cough up. A last-minute appeal to Britain’s government for a bail-out fell on deaf ears. Grant Shapps, the transport secretary, later said the company was in such a bad state that bailing it out would involve...