Hang on. Isn’t the heart of private enterprise supposed to be the old saw ’speculate to accumulate’? And isn’t investment the key to speculation? Not for our feather-bedded UK Government contractors. BAE Systems, due to delver HMS Astute to Faslane in Argyll by the end of this month, has been awarded a fifteen year contract [...]
Watching the Russian Ambassador to the UN deny the Russian army presence in Georgia was an extraordinary display of brass neck. Terrifyingly his plausibility wasn’t dented by the assembled press corps. The only reason I ‘know’ he was lying, was a subsequent report from the BBC which I have no reason to doubt was accurate. [...]
Fancy a bet on Trooping the Olympic flag, a trot-by from the Blues and Royals, men running around assembling and diss-assembling field guns, Changing the Guard, a few Beefeaters, the odd Pearly King and Queen, a naval tableau of the heroic exploits of an island nation (somehow without offending the Spanish and the [...]
During the opening ceremoney, our own Hazel Irvine uttered two cringers:
She described China as ‘the least westernised country’.
Then she went on in a flush of enthusiasm, in praising them for their work in preparing for the 2008 Games, she said ‘They’ve had such a struggle to civilise themselves’.
Hazel’s probably a safe winner but Adrian Chiles, [...]
The Ministry of Defence ordered eight Chinook military helicopters in 1995, took delivery of them in 2001 and have yet - in 2008 - to get a single one into service. Why? The reason given today is that ‘the wrong software was fitted’. Would it be misguided to wonder about the specifics of this ‘wrong’ [...]
You couldn’t make it up - but you can and will pay for it. In 2002 one of Faslane’s nuclear submarines, HS Trafagar, ran into the seabed close inshore off the Isle of Skye. The Inquiry report, released earlier this month, found that the trainee navigators had been using tracing paper to plot their course [...]
