The Terminal 5 luggage farrago has left 28,000 bags in temporary storage and airport staff admit it could take a week to reunite the baggage with its owners.

The scale of the problem was revealed today as Jim Fitzpatrick, the aviation minister, conceded that the grand opening of the heralded Heathrow terminal had “fallen well short of expectations”.

Before his announcement it emerged that one of the passengers to lose their bag at Terminal 5 was the foreign minister for an EU country.

David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, noted on his blog that he met an unnamed politician during a meeting in Slovenia over the weekend who had asked him to speak to airport bosses.

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In a post headed Tearing your hair out, he wrote: “He arrived merely to transit, but his bags are nowhere to be seen and it was whispered that it might take weeks. He asked me to pass on a message to BA/BAA: for goodness sake get your act together.”

British Airways announced a further 54 flight cancellations today and 50 more tomorrow as Mr Fitzpatrick claimed that the Government could not have foreseen the problems.

“The travelling public is not interested in who is to blame,” he told MPs. “But rather in being properly treated when things go wrong.”

“While recognising the considerable challenges of opening a major new terminal, we agree it is extremely regrettable to say the least that passengers using T5 have had to suffer an unacceptably poor travel experience.”

Mr Fitzpatrick said the Department for Transport had been in constant contact with BA and the airport operator BAA during the first catastrophic days at Heathrow’s newest terminal.

A high-tech baggage system, which was supposed to revolutionise luggage handling, has failed to work properly since Terminal 5 was opened last week. BA has cancelled hundreds of flights as 400 additional staff battle to reduce the suitcase backlog.

Theresa Villiers, Shadow Transport Secretary, said the airport had become “a national embarrassment”.

“Both BA and BAA have let their customers down badly,” she said while tabling an emergency question in the House of Commons.

Ms Villers claimed that the fiasco had strengthened calls for an end to BAA’s monopoly on airport capacity. She also suggested that the Department of Transport could not be trusted to deal with BAA firmly because it was “actively colluding with the company to fiddle the figures on Heathrow expansion”.

Norman Baker, Liberal Democrat transport spokesman, said: “The T5 website still has the BA’s chief executive, Willie Walsh, describing T5 as ’an extremely sophisticated baggage system with a terminal built around it.’

“It reminds rather more of the legendary sign at Oslo airport which said: ’We take your luggage and send it in all directions.'”

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