I agree with all Roobarb says but another factor was the fixation with "new management" philosophy.
Bob Ayling was very close to New Labour and Tony Blair and the fixation with monitoring and league tables were common to both.
In response to long hospital waiting times the government didn't spend the money on doctors and nurses but tried to tackle the problem by establishing performance league table and monitoring waiting times.
Bob did exactly the same thing. Flights were delayed by loading shortages, but instead of recruiting 2 loaders on 20K p.a. he would recruit a junior manager on 40k, equip them with a clipboard and stopwatch, and send them forth.
We then knew that last weeks delays might have been 4% less than a week before but not a single extra bag would have been loaded.
This happened throughout the airline. Cabin Crew introduced whole new layers of non-flying management to monitor sickness, measure how many crew could be removed before the complaints from passengers got worse etc. but nothing was actually done to improve the product.
Waterworld was stuffed with people working hard measuring things, but not actually doing anything to improve the bottom line.
They know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.