The first casualty of war is truth, but travel is never far behind. And this week, European officials have been talking about travel in soundbites of questionable veracity. Both the boss of the International Energy Agency and the EU energy commissioner have made pronouncements of imminent aviation fuel shortages that are not borne out by my study of the available data. Careless talk costs holidays. “Every other question is about fuel,” one leading independent travel agent tells me. I can be quite certain that, two months ago, the number of customers wondering about whether their holiday flight would take off due to a lack of fuel was zero. It is eight weeks since we woke up to the news that Iran had retaliated against attacks by the US and Israel, and that a large swathe of the Middle East was off-limits to civil aviation. The big airports of the Gulf are still on the Foreign Office no-go list, with Emirates, Etihad and Qatar Airways still struggling to repair their schedules.…