TALK ABOUT PARIS

I suppose I should be flattered that someone thought I should write a blog about how to do business in what they called a growing climate of fear. Flattered that they thought I might have anything useful to contribute to the vast amount of analysis, handwringing and horror.

               
I have just two things to say before migrating to less well trodden ground.

1. I wish we’d regard this less like a football match in which every “kill” on our side is described joyously in “back of the net” terms. Wouldn’t it be better just to take out the “bad guys” quietly and say nothing?
2. We mustn’t be frightened. Those of us who lived through the IRA outrages without changing our shopping habits know that a certain sang froid is the answer.

 A salesman who worked for me back then and  who covered Northern Ireland described how the front was blown out of Debenhams as he was about to call there. When I asked him what he did, apart from brushing off the glass, he said “Oh I called on S.D. Kells instead.”

We need to avoid the knee jerk reaction of “kill them all” which some ill-advisedly describe as being Churchillian.  Guerrilla fighters are so hard to defeat because they don’t play by any of the rules that we know. They behave like the triumphant David to our Goliath.  We’ll only beat them by understanding them better and then by out-thinking them and not just by bombing where we think they are.
Have we learnt nothing from Vietnam and Afghanistan?

But then I listened to our Secretary of State for Defence on the Today programme and I rather gloomily realised we hadn’t.