It appears that the defence procurement stories we’ve been tracking are coming to a head. Recently, it emerged that the Astute SSN, Nimrod MRA4, and T-45 destroyer projects are going significantly overbudget again; the first two of these are, of course, the ones that were already £800 million over budget and several years later. The…
Read More The Defence Crisis; BAE Are Still HopelessThe consistently superb Bartholomew’s notes on religion has published extensive details about Paul De L’Aire Staines, various old friends, and South Africa. As it seems inevitable that he will fire off a nastygram at any moment, readers are asked to mirror the text in the interests of public enlightenment; I’ve dropped it in the comments.…
Read More Mirrorball: Paul Staines and those “Liberals”The Tory is sure to leap on the news that, as Dr Rant points out, there is little point in doing a “deep clean” of hospitals because hospital-acquired diseases are propagated by the staff. Strange, I remember when Michael Howard floated a whole election campaign on the line “How difficult can it be to keep…
Read More How difficult can it be?James Graham asks: does your candidate for Mayor of London pass the 7th July competence test? This is of course a strong suit for the Liberals; perhaps the only one going in a dead campaign. Picking Brian Paddick as the candidate against lardbucket and International Marxists for Police Bullets was a cracking idea; wouldn’t JG’s…
Read More Liberal CompetenceI would like to take this opportunity to make clear that I stand for surgery. We know that the queen of specialisations is a highly effective treatment for many different conditions; British surgeons are respected around the world. In fact, I believe we would be failing in our moral duty to patients of all kinds…
Read More In Favour of Surgical InterventionKen Livingstone is surely unelectable now, sez one of the sinister faceless committee/gaggle of sockpuppets attached to Daniel Davies that is Aaronovitch Watch. Jesus, I hope not; the prospect of Boris Johnson being put in charge of London is too much to contemplate. Consider this; Ken brought a load of old hard-left mates with him…
Read More Open up my eager eyes…I’m Mr BrightsideYou think things were bad in Pakistan? Think again; if Dawn‘s sources are worth anything, it’s now the policy of the British government, in the person of David Miliband, to get behind Nawaz Sharif and the Saudi lobby in Pakistani politics. We warned you; it looks like they’re heading for a kind of negative excellence…
Read More I got the poison! I got the remedy!Under-reported story of the week; reported, of course, by Ackerman. I think this is going to be very significant indeed. Roll back, if we may, to the winter of 2006; it had just become authorised knowledge that things in Iraq were unpeachy, Rumsfeld had just been thrown off the sleigh, and the Baker-Hamilton commission was…
Read More A ragged army fixing bayonets…The naval incident in the Strait of Hormuz has rapidly been blogged into next week; I think there may still be some angular momentum to be had, though. It now looks like the USN is backing off from the claim that the voice taunting them on an open radio channel was someone aboard one of…
Read More Away sea boat’s crew!So, the Obscurer snagged an interview with Gordon Brown. And what did he have to say? Well, he spoke of identity cards. And the news is not good at all. It seems that Brown is ill-informed about his own proposals (something which we have seen already from past ministers), is still committed to the most…
Read More Still addicted