This is what incompetence looks like: lots of customers, high demand, years in business, ran into the ground.
So it was a well known fact that the company was on the brink of collapse?
First of all, Thomas Cook got undercut by British holiday travelers using the Internet to book vacation trips "a la carte" using low-cost European airlines such as Ryanair and EasyJet. And the unstable political situations in Egypt, Turkey and Tunisia didn't help the company, either. And Thomas Cook couldn't compete against the very well-funded TUI Group (based in Germany), who owns many travel properties like hotels and cruise lines and also serve vacationers from Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, and so on. (TUI has a very successful international travel business from Europe to the eastern USA.)
Like Monarch Airlines, Thomas Cook ran up too much debt and didn't have the resources to take on the competition.
Their government has been so busy trying to block Brexit, frustrate their PM Boris Johnson, hate Trump, and muck around in the Prince Andrew and Meghan Markle debacles that they didn’t even notice the need to forestall this crisis, which had been talked about in the media in advance, and had been in discussion with UK’s financial community for some time. Globalists literally do not mind their own business.