Spherical objects (Part 1)

Savoie, too, cites the Iraq war as an example. “The pollsters - modern witchdoctors - take too short-term a view,” he says. “The pollsters may have said the public favoured war but no pollster could tell Bush or Blair that after the war there would be a problem.”

Come again ?

The quotation is from "Mandarin dynasty" by Sue Cameron, FT Magazine, 8 April 2006. Donald Savoie, although now a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, is a Canadian. He acted as special adviser to the Gomery inquiry into a scandal in Canada, where civil servants 'broke almost every rule in the book'.

But that still doesn't explain anything: the war was just as unpopular in Canada as in the UK (and of course Canada did not take part in it).