A book chronicling the chaos and cronyism that characterised the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority's government of Iraq has swept to victory in the £30,000 Samuel Johnson non-fiction prize. Imperial Life in the Emerald City, by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, says that more than $1.6bn (£800m) of Iraq's oil revenue was paid to the US vice-president Dick Cheney's old firm Halliburton; that the Baghdad stock exchange was put in the hands of a 24-year-old who had never worked in finance; and that the Iraqi capital's new traffic regulations were based on the laws of the state of Maryland, downloaded from the internet.
The Halliburton payments were for trucking fuel into Iraq and came from a $20bn development fund fed by the oil revenues which was almost all spent. By contrast, bureaucratic delays caused almost nothing to be spent of another $18bn budget intended for construction, health care, sanitation and clean water.