Cloudy and windy weather, with the mercury hovering around 9°C, greeted Mamata Banerjee as her flight from Dubai touched down at Heathrow on Sunday morning, delayed by 22 hours in the aftermath of Friday’s flight disruptions.

Mamata’s third London visit as chief minister, after 2015 and 2017, began on a day the UK launched an investigation into Friday’s freak fire at an electricity substation that had blacked out Heathrow and disrupted over 1,300 international flights.

She spent Day One of her trip — whose objective is to court investment for the state — mostly inside her hotel since it was a Sunday.

“As chief minister, she is trying the best she can to get investments into Bengal to tackle the problem of unemployment,” economist Omkar Goswami told this correspondent at the cafeteria of St James’ Court, the central London hotel where Mamata and her team had checked in.

Communist patriarch and former chief minister Jyoti Basu used to stay at this hotel through the 1980s and 1990s during his two-week summer trips to London, which he would keep largely free of official engagements.

“I can still recall the heyday of labour unrest in Bengal in the 1970s and 1980s and the impact it had on industry.… That situation has completely changed under her,” said Goswami, who has been a consultant to organisations like the World Bank, IMF and the ADB and served on the boards of topnotch companieslike Infosys.

Mamata, once a dab hand at leading disruptive movements as Opposition leader, now projects a drastic fall in the loss of man-days to labour unrest as one of her government’s biggest achievements. She will be emphasising this point to paint Bengal as an attractive investment destination.

The other hallmark of her governance she is likely to underline during her trip, which ends on March 28, is the wide welfare coverage for the poor and disadvantaged, especially women, Dalits, tribal communities andreligious minorities.

While the bureaucrats accompanying her, such as chief secretary Manoj Pant and industry secretary Vandana Yadav, were on Sunday lending the finishing touches to her long list of programmes for the next few days, the focus of the trip will be on two big engagements.

One, a business conclave, to be organised jointly by the Ficci and the UK-India Business Council on March 25, where Mamata will meet industrialists and invite them to invest money in Bengal.

Representatives of more than 100 Indian and British companies are expected at the event, whose thrust will be on large-scale investment in the manufacturing sector and collaborations in the field of emerging technologies, a source said.

Second, the chief minister will participate in a discussion, titled “Social Development – Girl, Child and Women Empowerment”, at Kellogg College, Oxford, on March 27.

The college, which has students from about 90 countries, is one of the 36 colleges that make up the University of Oxford.

“She is very excited about the Oxford event as it will give her an opportunity to highlight the human face of her government, which is at the core of her politics,” a source close to the chief minister said. “It will also be a personal milestone for her.”

Mamata will attend an event at the Indian high commission on Monday and lead her team at a raft of business-to-government meetings on Wednesday. More events are being worked out to get the maximum out of the trip, a source said.