Winging it

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The report of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee on the intervention in Libya contained a damning indictment of the former Prime Minister, David Cameron according to all the newspaper reports.  In some ways, though, it’s a pity that the investigation and report were limited to the issue of Libya.

At one point, the report said that “…former prime minister David Cameron was ultimately responsible for the failure to develop a coherent Libya strategy”.  It struck me that the sentence would still ring true if the word ‘Libya’ was deleted.  The debacle over Brexit, for instance, was a result of the same tendency – a lack of a coherent strategy and a tendency to fly by the seat of his pants, making it up as he went along.  Overconfidence in one’s own ability to ‘wing it’ is not a sound basis for good government.  In the case of Libya, it probably led to many needless deaths as well.