One advantage of being a true hardcore anti-war obsessive - I mean "doughty and dogged" - is that you do know a lot. Chris Ames realises that the reporting of the Iraq Inquiry is, as I suggested here, here and here, highly selective and biased:


But then I should acknowledge that Ames's Iraq Inquiry Digest, which I called a conspiracist website, is open-minded enough to carry a range of contributions, including one headed "Don't call Blair a liar", one that defended Blair and one that was originally headed "22 reasons why it was right to invade Iraq", although the Digest did change it to "22 things for the Inquiry to consider".

In the small hope that they might lean against the vast weight of biased reporting of the Chilcot inquiry, here are Stan Rosenthal's 22 reasons:

( Read more... )

Daniel Finkelstein's advice to David Cameron on Islamic Schoolgate, or how to prepare for Prime Minister's Questions,
is very sound, and provides my quote of the day:


Photograph: PA

There is just too much of it to try to rebut all the prism-reporting of the Iraq Inquiry. But it may be worth trying to do the lowlights.

David Grossman was terribly excited on Newsnight last night about all the "revelations" from yesterday's session, but as he listed them each could be ticked off from the Butler report of 2004.

The story that best fitted the anti-war narrative was probably the "Mandarins reveal that 10 days before Iraq invasion PM knew Saddam couldn't use WMDs". Or, as the Daily Mail headlined it across a two-page spread: "Blair lied and lied again." Or, in the real world: "Daily Mail lies and lies again." (Not that the l-word is desirable.)

None of this is new, and none of it is clear-cut, as the Inquiry witnesses made clear. Some of the intelligence suggested Saddam's biological and chemical weapons had been dismantled, some suggested that it had not. All of it suggested that Saddam had stocks of illegal weapons material which, if not immediately usable, could be rendered so.

The Mail also asks Question to Which the Answer is No number 182: "Will Greg Dyke and Gavyn Davies, respectively former director general and chairman of the BBC, have their names cleared?"

But there is just so much of it about. Part of the anti-war narrative is The Cover-Up, which is the basis of The Independent's front-page story (right). And the lead Opinion article, by my dear colleague Adrian Hamilton, is not his best. Along with all the rest of the whitewashers, he says that the Chilcot inquiry will fail to "answer the hard questions on the legality and responsibility for this defining episode of the country's recent history".

Well, I can answer those. The Iraq invasion was legal enough to mean that there has been no suggestion of any challenge to it in any court anywhere, despite the fears of Peter Goldsmith, the Attorney General, beforehand. It was more legal in one sense than the military action in Kosovo, which had no basis in United Nations resolutions at all.

And the responsibility lies with Tony Blair, his Cabinet and the rest of the 412 MPs that voted for the Government motion on 18 March 2003.

If Adrian has any further questions, he can make his way across the office and ask me.

As predicted, the coverage of Day One of the Chilcot inquiry into Iraq was heavily skewed towards the anti-war narrative. It was of course difficult to report an intensely dull session, which covered entirely familiar ground. Even the metaphor of the moment, the drum beats, was tediously familiar from press coverage of the issue for all of the past seven years. But it was the only remotely colourful thing that Sir William Patey, head of the Middle East department at the Foreign Office in 2001, said, so up in lights it went.

Of course, it had to be slotted into the meta-story, which I discussed yesterday, "The Search for the Smoking Gun", so it became the drums of war, heralding George Bush's determination to remove Saddam Hussein come what may, and Tony Blair's determination to support President Bush, whatever he decided.

So, The Guardian gave us "Iraq war inquiry: Britain heard US drumbeat for invasion before 9/11", although there was no prospect of the Bush administration invading Iraq before 9/11 changed American public opinion.

The Independent gave us "Iraq invasion discussed in 2001 – but was dismissed as illegal", implying that it was illegal in 2003 too, which is not remotely what Sir Peter Ricketts and his fellow witnesses said.

The Daily Mail combined the two, with "The illegal toppling of Saddam", and a commentary by John Kampfner, who used to be a sophisticated journalist and is now reduced to spouting anti-war, anti-Blair platitudes.

The Telegraph had "British officials heard 'drum beats' of war from US before 9/11".

Even The Times had the virtually identical "US ‘drumbeats’ about Iraq invasion were heard months before 9/11". The only difference was whether drum beat was one word or two (the right answer is two). At least it was balanced by a sane leading article, which noted that the lust for a judicial reckoning was a demand to "supplant the decisions of an elected government".

It would be a full-time job to be the Iraq Inquiry Misreporting Rebuttal Unit, and I haven't even got on to The Sunday Telegraph's surprising decision to give front-page prominence to yet another attempt by Andrew Gilligan to write "I was right all along".

He was not, and The Sunday Telegraph report, to which I will return, further undermines rather than repairs his credibility.

My brother and I picked up my dad, who was returning from India, at Heathrow's Terminal 5 this morning.

It reminded me of an argument we had in a recent leader conference. The general tenor was unusually gloomy, with most of my comrades moaning about how appalling the design of Terminal 5 is, how impractical parts of it are, how hideous the architecture is and so on.

I took exception to this. And this morning's expedition confirmed my reasons for so doing.

Partly because of the achievement of the eco-lobby in moving environmentalism into the mainstream, and partly because of the general cynicism of much of the British public, the reputation of the aviation industry has taken a battering in recent years. This was reinforced by the terrible opening few days that Terminal 5 had.

I think this is a great shame. Terminal 5 is an extraordinary achievement, a testament to human ingenuity and innovation, and a practical manifestation of so many of the delicious possibilities brought about by globalisation. If one considers the whole grand sweep of civilisation, and thinks how miraculous air travel would have seemed even to the Victorians, never mind the Romans, it must be considered highly rergettable that aviation is now imbued with the kind of despondency and dissatisfaction familiar to the everyday consumer.

Those middle-class folk in Britain who lament the difficulty they have moving their suitcase between baggage and passport control should remember that most people currently on the surface of the earth will never experience the delight of air travel. They should try, if their brains allow them, to recall not only the spirit of the Wright Brothers, but the hopes of their contemporaries. They should read Alain de Botton's dispatches as writer-in-residence at Heathrow.

Building another runway probably would be bad policy, and probably would reinforce a 1940s planning error. But rather than seeing Terminal 5 and the industry it represents as a modern tale of woe, we'd do well as a society to look back upon history and see its sheer improbability.

We might then see that, both literally and metaphorically, Terminal 5 is a kind of apogee or high point of our escape from barbarism. That journey, even the miserabilists might agree, has been one worth making.

It is the Hutton inquiry all over again. Almost all the reporting of the Chilcot inquiry will be through the anti-war prism of liberal journalists. So, when we get to the end of it and the committee comes to reasonable conclusions based on the evidence, the balloon will go up, because the report will seem to be at odds with the daily reporting of proceedings.

This reporting will be dominated by the idea that there is a big secret that is being concealed from us, a smoking gun that "explains it all". This is a symptom of the anti-war psychology, which so strongly disagrees with the decision made by Tony Blair, the Cabinet and the House of Commons that it seeks constantly for a hidden reason for it. Oil. Poodledom. Some kind of sinister swearing of loyalty in a ceremony probably involving Blair signing in blood (hence the antis' obsession with "when did Blair commit Britain to war?").

This sets the tone for so much of the coverage, from Brian Jones in the Standard to David Blackburn at Coffee House.

The impartial BBC news tonight had Huw Edwards declare "there are still big questions to be answered". No there aren't. Everything important is known, with the kind of disclosure of official documents in the Hutton inquiry that would normally have taken 30 years or longer. And Nicholas Witchell's report of the day's proceedings summed up: in 2001 the British Government concluded that regime change in Iraq lacked a legal basis. This is meaningless: the British view was always that regime change was inadequate legal basis for military intervention; that was why the legal basis was Saddam Hussein's failure to comply with UN disarmament resolutions. Witchell's conclusion may have been meaningless, but it insinuated to the casual viewer that the Iraq invasion was unlawful.

Much of the coverage is not going to be as measured as the BBC's. Paul "Anti" Waugh gives a flavour, with his brilliantly observed but bitterly hostile report of Day One:



Of course, none of those entrenched on either side is going to change, but there are a lot of open-minded people in the middle, who do not pay much attention to politics (as Daniel Finkelstein said the other day, this is not ignorance but efficient use of time), and who form generalised impressions about issues such as this that are shaped by the prevailing wind of media bias.

For that reason, it is worth challenging the myths of the antis, and I shall try to make my small contribution here over the next year.

She said today, of the Iraq inquiry, which opens tomorrow:


Always had a lot of time for her.

Photo: The Mirror

Much excitement about about a hung parliament after one opinion poll showing the Conservative lead down to six points. My esteemed rival Andrew Rawnsley even devoted his column yesterday to the subject.

As Nick Robinson suggests, we should remember Twyman’s Law of market research:


All the same, we can dream, can't we? Especially those of us who want to see Gordon Brown replaced by David Miliband or Alan Johnson before the election. (Interesting, was it not, that Brown was reported to have tried twice to persuade Miliband to take the Europe foreign affairs job? That suggests that the Prime Minister is aware that Miliband is a threat to his position.)

But what would NIck Clegg do if no party had a majority in the House of Commons?

Just where is David Cameron getting his economic advice from?

This is from the Tory leader's speech to the CBI today:

"The idea that the deficit brings the risk of higher interest rates for businesses and families isn’t a theoretical possibility – it is actually happening already. One of the things that is limiting the supply of affordable credit is that banks need to build up their deposit bases and become less reliant on unstable wholesale funding. But amazingly the most attractive – and therefore competitive - one year savings product on the market at the moment is actually being provided by the Government, through National Savings and Investments. So the Government’s need to finance its borrowing is already affecting the supply of credit to families and businesses - and its cost. In other words, government action is already beginning to crowd out the private sector."

So the Treasury-controlled NS&I puts an attractive rate on its bonds and this is crowding out lending to the private sector? Er, bit of a leap here. First, NS&I has a target of raising no new net money this fiscal year. See here, page 83. The size of NS&I liabilities are due to remain constant at some £97bn. How is this crowding other borrowers out?

Second, what makes the Tory leader think that if those funds went into deposit accounts, the banks would lend it out to the private sector? Money has been pouring into the banks thanks to capital raising and quantitative easing, but, as the Bank of England lending trends reports make clear, this hasn't boosted lending to small and medium sized businesses. Why? Because the banks are using these additional funds to repair their damaged balance sheets. They're not interested in new lending.

There's an even bigger economic fallacy in Cameron's thinking. As Paul Krugman and others have made clear, in these special economic circumstances, high public borrowing is, in fact, crowding in private investment, not crowding it out.


photo: Conservatives

The Tories have produced the following poster this morning:



It comes in response to this Labour poster last week:



Danny Finkelstein, who knows a thing or two about political campaigning, explains the four reasons why the Tories' poster is a mistake, and like to backfire on them, here. His argument is extremely convincing.

Gerard Hendrik Hofstede called National Culture the Software of the Mind in his seminal book by that name. Many things about growing up in America support entrepreneurship. The US is a profoundly individualistic culture, and celebrates “the little guy” who against all odds is able to achieve. This accounts for the success of Forest Gump, the movie that the world couldn’t understand but each American loved.

I encountered the British love for effortless success at INSEAD where I did my MBA in 1997. Whereas I had planned my INSEAD adventure for 7 years studying for the GMAT, getting someone to edit my entry essays, and working to build just the right profile for entrance, the Brits in my promotion would tell me that they hadn’t really given their entrance application more than a day’s thought. Only much later would I understand this wasn’t necessary true – it reflected their desire and cultural requirement for success to be effortlessly achieved.

The Software of the British Mind I believe is still programmed to show this effortless success. It is not particularly cool to say that you work 80+ hours a week, and yet every entrepreneur who I know who is successful does just that. Entrepreneurs, amongst other things, are time-shifting in their life; they are willing to work hard at 35 because they’d rather not at 50.

Entrepreneurship is the national sport in the US. Stories abound of the guy who came from nowhere and made it big. There is a culture of hero worship tied to this which some, and me, find a bit nauseating, but overall it encourages people to dream and drive hard towards success.

As Lord Davies, the Commerce Secretary, said this past week, if the UK had as many female entrepreneurs as the US does proportionately, we would have 800,000 more women entrepreneurs. Indeed many women find their way to success not by breaking through anyone’s glass ceiling, but by building their own cathedral.

Entrepreneurship used to be counter-cultural in the UK. This has changed over the past 10 years, and today I don’t know anyone under 30 who wants to work for someone else. They are schooled on shows like Dragon’s Den and The Apprentice, and think of themselves as their own P&L and brand.

What hasn’t changed yet is British society’s understanding of the role of the entrepreneur as the engine for economic growth. I found myself recently in a Chatham House rules dinner with Titans of Industry who said, when I threw out into the dinner time conversation, “well, you know that the economic growth will be fuelled by entrepreneurs,” – “you don’t really believe that, do you Julie?”

But it’s true and proven. NESTA have just released research which demonstrates that the “vital 6%” of high growth firms in the UK account for 54% of all new jobs.

The media don’t cover the emerging giants until they’ve well and truly arrived. There is a general feeling by the national business press that small companies are just that small and niche. But small becomes big, and start-ups change the world.

Until we become a nation of believers, and I don’t mean that in a religious sense, we won’t create more global leading firms. Strong entrepreneurial ecosystems recognise the role of the entrepreneur at the center, and early believers whether business angels or friends and family provide capital and support and help find early reference customers.

Two UK giants reflect the importance of their early believers and their success against all odds.

Ariadne has advised Monitise, the global leader in mobile banking, since November 2004. They have 1 million customers, have secured the backing of VISA, Standard Chartered, Flemings and PCCW. They have lifted up an entire ecosystem of retail banks and mobile carriers on 4 continents and enabled them into a new paradigm of mobile banking. Once in a generation, an entrepreneur comes along who is able to do something so profound. Alastair Lukies, the CEO and Founder of Monitise, would be a hero in the US, feted quite extraordinarily for his phenomenal ability to lead people, influence corporate buyers, and execute his market vision. Alastair has that lovely British quality of talent without ego – atleast I haven’t seen it yet. Not that he’s in it for the glory, I know he’s not; he is compelled by the inevitability of his vision, by the sheer challenge, and by his love of his country. But sometimes I wonder how much more UK entrepreneurs could do if they felt that warm grip from society who would cheer their success along the way.

SpinVox, another Ariadne portfolio company, has created a new category of communications – voice to screen. Speech recognition existed before they arrived, but they did two things very right. They created a business case for mobile carriers and sold a managed service into them. They also secured 100,000 early adopters through a clever retail deal, and then marched that market demand into the mobile operators 33 times. I’ve seen a tremendous amount of venture capital go to mobile application companies in the UK who are trying to sell to carriers only to have no market traction. Spinvox has achieved more operator traction than any other start-up in Europe, now accessing 50 million consumers worldwide, and lowering their cost of event to 3 cents a call because of the excellence of their technology. And yet their success was pilloried by the media over the summer. It’s hard to imagine the standards of success that some journalists were hoping for –33 operator deals not enough in 2 years? Expecting 50? Sometimes I wonder how much more UK entrepreneurs could do if they felt that their success as they were managing rapid growth was applauded instead of attacked.

Eleven years ago, when I founded First Tuesday, a network of entrepreneurs which connected 500,000 entrepreneurs across 43 cities in Europe over 2 years, we were a digital island. There were a few of us who were doing the internet deals, and we all knew each other. Today more and more of us go to "Entrepreneur Country" every day when we go to work. The pressure can be intense, and there is no guarantee of success. You can’t be doing it for the glory; you’ve got to be up for an unpredictable journey.

And yet throughout history, capital follows ideas – always has, always will. By putting those with the ideas at the center of society, and supporting their development and execution, we all benefit from the products and services that they bring to life. We are fortunate that there exist that group of people in society who are willing to live abnormal lives to bring the inevitable to life. It is our job to put aside our negativity and don the cloak of early believer in support of their global ambitions.

And in supporting with pride the ambitions of our own entrepreneurs, and celebrating their breakthrough moments, we become very slowly and then all at once, an Entrepreneur Country.

Global Entrepreneurship Week 2009 took place from 16-22 November. The Week’s aim has been to shine a spotlight on the role that entrepreneurs and their ideas can play to help spark economic recovery in communities, towns and regions nationwide.

Find out how you can get involved at www.gew.org.uk/


Julie Meyer, panellist on the online version of Dragons’ Den and head of the investment firm Ariadne Capital.

Number 179 in my series of Questions to Which the Answer is No, from today's, er ...

The sweet Chris Ames personifies the anti-war paradox, that many of the people who were most vociferous in demanding a fifth inquiry into the Iraq war are most convinced that it will be, in their view, yet another "whitewash".

On his pre-emptive website, Iraq Inquiry Digest, he suggests that the inquiry chaired by Sir John Chilcot (right), which opens proceedings on Tuesday, cannot be independent because it is staffed by 19 civil servants, in an inversion of the usual Blair-haters' complaint that he compromised the pristine impartiality of the British mandarinate.

And Chris Lamb, one of his associates, elaborates that any official from the Cabinet Office cannot be independent of ministers because the department has sometimes refused Freedom of Information requests. (I think.)

Richard Norton-Taylor got his retaliation in even earlier, describing the Chilcot inquiry as "another Whitehall whitewash" five months ago. The exception is Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, who wrote, before Sir John was even appointed, that no official inquiry into Iraq could be trusted - a position that is at least consistent: none of the four inquiries so far has produced the "right" answer, so therefore none will.

Pointless as it might be, the dear Yasmin has nevertheless signed (along with some other familiar names) a submission to the Chilcot inquiry, saying that they did not agree with the invasion of Iraq. The letter follows usual Blair-hater practice of referring to the former prime minister as Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, as if that makes it sound a bit more like a court document, thus sustaining the fiction that he may one day be "brought to justice".

All of which is grist to Nick Wagstaff's mill. He demanded a year ago, in a letter to The Independent, a sixth inquiry to establish why the previous inquiries have produced the "wrong" answer:

Interesting interview with Nigel Lawson in the Telegraph today. Benedict Brogan draws attention to the former chancellor's disagreement with George Osborne, his would-be successor, over Labour's 50p income tax rate, which comes into effect on income over £150,000 a year in April:


The rest of the interview is just as intriguing, though, for its portrait of Lord Lawson's solitary life in Britain and France - his second wife Therese left him last year - and of his views of climate change. He does not dispute global warming (I prefer not to use the phrase "climate change denier", an attempt to slur people of admittedly daft views by association with Holocaust deniers), but thinks that we should focus on adapting to it rather than trying to stop it.

And he comes up with my quote of the day:

He says in his Daily Mail column today that Sir John Chilcot has two ts, when everyone knows that the chairman of the Iraq inquiry has only one.