84% crap - Iraq Enquiry, Day 16

Putting figures on "Crapness" is notoriously difficult and incredibly embarrassing - that's why we hate exams. Putting a stat on the difference between "amateurs" and "professionals" harder still.

Sir Frederick Viggers isn't the first person to call the government "amateurs", but he's the first to have done so in such stark terms, and there's a decent stat in his statements to the Iraq inquiry to measure the professional/amateur differential.

100 days was the estimate given to complete an invasion.

It took just 16.

Aside from our military competence was the fact that the very basis for war - the threat posed by Iraq's military machine under the guidance of Mssrs Hussein & Co turns out to have been a sham. The only people they "conned" were HM Gov PLC.

That's an 84% difference, with the supposed "con" perpetrated by the likes of Comical Ali.

When Gordon Brown promises the end of "boom and bust", no cuts in the frontline of public spending, reduction of the gap between rich and poor etc. we'd do well to remember there's an 84% chance that either he's being conned... or we are.