My original premis was that they GAVE the shipping contract to a company with no ships.Party politics is nothing to do with it. It is not a question of owning ships or renting them. They had no ships at their disposal either owned or leased, and no they did not have any experience of shipping. You are making an argument out of nothing.
The entire episode was a disgrace, compounded by the £33m they had to pay Eurotunnel because the contracts were issued in a "secretive" way https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-47414699
I actually worked on 2 of the privatised probation service offices, one in Newcastle the other in South Shields. Believe it or not they were run by a French catering company called Sodexo! Add the £171m for the probation service fiasco to those figures already quoted and you are more or less up to £250m or a quarter of a billion wasted by the incompetence of one man.
