Simon Calder: The Man Who Pays His Way

The distress of the long-distance passport

When you look like your passport photograph, goes the saying, it's time to go home. Jamie Bowden, the public-relations guru whose credits include handling the much-postponed launch of the London Eye, has a different problem: so well-travelled is his passport that he is finding it difficult to leave the country.

Nine o'clock last Monday morning found the spin doctor getting barely further than the revolving door at the Indian High Commission in central London. His plans to travel to Mumbai this weekend began to unravel when a clerk explained that he would be most welcome in India, except there was no space in his passport. From a Jordanian stamp that demands he contacts a police station in the next two weeks, to a photo of a turtle that decorates his permission to enter the Galapagos, there is barely room to apply the tiny "Turista 3 Meses" from Argentina, let alone the extravagant full-page stamp that the Indian government insists upon.

The UK Passport Agency must shoulder the blame for this; when the old British passport was downsized to the softback Euro version, the encyclopaedic 96-page version lost half its pages; you can still pay extra for a thicker "Jumbo" passport, but the extra £10 buys you only 16 more pages than the standard version.

Financially, this is excellent business for the agency, as Mr Bowden discovered at his next stop, Globe House. Since the Passport Agency moved a mile from the shabby old office in Petty France, its fees for turning up and asking for a new passport have gone well beyond petty cash.

"I am Jamie Bowden and I claim my new passport," was the essence of his opening gambit. "That'll be £85," came the riposte. What the Passport Agency used to deliver on the same day, for the usual fee, is now classed as "Premium Service", and costs more than twice the normal price. Once the clerk examined the travel-beaten document that has taken Mr Bowden several times around the globe, matters took a turn for the worse.

"This passport is badly distressed," said the official. "It looks as though it may have been tampered with." By now, distress was beginning to get the better of Mr Bowden. Before he could get a replacement, he was told, he would need to get someone to countersign the application and his passport photograph – an image, it must be said, that does not show him at his cheeriest. "So who do I get to do that?" His attention was drawn to the list of suitable worthies, properly capitalised: "Bank or Building Society officials, Police Officers, established Civil Servants, Ministers of Religion..."

None of the above features in Mr Bowden's circle of friends. Neither is he close to a Funeral Director or Salvation Army Officer. He is, however, a close personal friend of at least one dot.com millionaire. "They said that wouldn't do," he reports.

Worse was to come. "We preferably like to have people with degrees." That eliminated a couple of airline bosses, Bob Ayling – formerly of British Airways – and Sir Richard Branson. Mr Bowden checked his voluminous contacts book and finally found an old schoolfriend with not one but three degrees (educational qualifications, that is, not Prince Charles's favourite girl band), whose office was nearby.

Monday was nearly over by the time he got back to Globe House, waited, and was finally granted his new, expensive passport.

"But my existing passport still has two years to run – do I get a refund on that?" "No."

"Can I keep it as a second passport?" "No," fibbed the official, and clipped the corners to make sure it looked too distressed to fool even the sleepiest immigration official. Mr Bowden's epic voyage by taxi around London, plus £30 for the Indian visa, ended up costing £150.

Second passports are routinely issued to anyone with a reasonable excuse for needing a matching pair. Good excuses include frequent travel to countries that have complicated visa rules, or a trip to the Republic of Cyprus when your passport bears evidence of a visit to the self-styled Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. It is just as well that the Passport Agency is prepared to issue a second passport (at a price), because of the casual manner in which it dispenses passports by post. Had someone told me that, on each working day, 10 passports are reported lost between being dispatched by the Passport Agency and arriving (or rather failing to arrive) at the recipient's home, I would have paid the extra fee for Special Delivery when I needed a replacement recently.

Anyone who decides to pilfer a passport will find the task trivial: besides the obvious shape and feel, each envelope carries the address of the passport office that sent it out. The present black-market price of a British passport is around £15,000, so the opportunity for turning a profit is huge.

Should your passport go missing in this way, you will end up speaking to the Lost in Post Section of the Passport Agency. Eventually you will get a one-year passport, sent out by Special Delivery – the same means as many issuers of credit cards use. In the area of London where I live, banks refuse to send out plastic cards through the regular post to my postal district, and it seems strange that the Passport Agency should be so casual about such a precious document. Meanwhile, let me know if you see someone pretending to be me.

AT least I have one passport left, which means this morning I can fly to the Association of British Travel Agents' convention in Cairo. Or not, depending on how Heathrow is at dawn today.

Assuming I can reach the UK's busiest airport by around six this morning, I should be able to check in for the 6.35am departure to Vienna. An on-time arrival in the Austrian capital will give me – and the Austrian Airlines baggage handlers – exactly 35 minutes before the connecting flight departs for the Egyptian capital.

Should anything go awry, I can expect to be placed on the next flight – but it does not leave Vienna for another two days. Given the parlous state of air-traffic control at Heathrow, I have packed an Austrian guide book. Fortunately, an insider tells me that so long as we take-off by 7.10am, the flight should arrive on time.

The reason: schedule padding. Delays are so endemic at Heathrow that airlines take an informed guess about how long they will be forced to wait at the gate before being allowed to take off. Bung on an extra 40 minutes for luck, and it's as punctual as an airline can be.

The minimum connecting time at Vienna is just half an hour, which shows great confidence in the transfer system. Air France is even cockier. At its hub at Clermont-Ferrand in the Massif Central, international travellers need allow no more than 10 minutes between arrival and departure. Added to a check-in time of just 10 minutes at London City airport, this is the fast track to Europe.

Why subject myself to the stress of not knowing whether today's lunch will be taken by the Nile or the Danube? After all, both British Airways and EgyptAir fly non-stop between Heathrow and Cairo. Two problems: the cheap seats on BA were booked up months ago; and I'm not sure I like the look of the inflight service on EgyptAir. I checked the airline's website before booking on Austrian Airlines, and it confirmed the xenophobe's worst suspicions about harsh punishment in the Islamic world. I wanted to look at the loyalty scheme, but instead found myself at the section of the website where they presumably whip travellers into shape: the part labelled "Frequent Flayer Program".