I think 9/11 was the watershed
Bmi took a huge gamble on getting rights to join the the private BA/Virgin club flying to the US from LHR and ordered A330's on the back of it, in the event the didn't get the right to fly to the US from LHR, so had to cobble together a plan B which was MAN to the US, which was just a few weeks before 9/11 I remember flying to Washington with just 23 people on board!
At the same time FR took another gamble that paid off, for them by ordering hundreds of 737's and turn killed short haul flying in and out of the UK for legacy carriers, BA used to fill 757 767 out of some regional airports at the time.
Faced with a collapse in business Nigel Turner embarked on a cost reduction program that killed the reason to travel in business, remember NBM new business model? Also known as Nigel's big mistake, food in cardboard boxes!
The prices didn't come down just the quality. The one thing that didn't change was the quality of the cabin crew, then along came baby when GO moved into EMA, jeans and t-shirts became the image of bmi, as money became scarce baby followed everyone else down market and crossed the line into iffy practices, there after bmi was all ways referred to in the press as " bmi the low cost airline" in over seas markets no one knew what bmi meant or stood for, hence the slow rebranding of British Midland International, it is now very much a quality product. Routes like NCE will go well for bmi and should not have been culled in the first place.
At least the vast majority of the old management have been either pensioned off or encouraged to work somewhere East of the UK across all three Group companies.