The shopaholic Ministry of Defence has been on a bit of a spending-spree lately, splashing out on £22 light bulbs and £103 screws without bothering to follow Gio Compario’s (intensely irritating) advice to ‘Go Compare’. Honestly, even the meerkats could have told them that, especially in the current financial climate, comparing the market is crucial – ‘simples!’
No buyer’s remorse for the MoD, though. Last night they added to their shopping basket 24,000 copies of Toby Harnden’s book Dead Men Risen: The Welsh Guards and the Real Story of Britain’s War in Afghanistan to the tune of around £150,000 of taxpayers’ money. A wedding present to Will and Kate, perhaps? Sadly not.
In fact, this latest purchase can be filed under the ‘panic buy’ category: on the eve of publication, MoD officials broke into a cold sweat when they realised that – despite having already spent four months reviewing Harnden’s book and securing some 500 changes to it – the text still contained classified information, the release of which could, in the MoD’s view, jeopardise national security. OK so the books were already printed and packed into boxes, waiting to be dispatched to booksellers today, but better late than never, eh? One hefty cheque later and the offending copies were safely secured – much to the delight of publisher Quercus and author Tony Harnden who can, I suppose, now describe himself as a sell-out author.
Big Cheese has had his say on the subject too - check out his Total Politics blog here.