There are blind auctions, there are Dutch auctions and there are Iraqi auctions. The only good thing about Tuesday’s attempt by the Iraqi Oil Ministry to bring foreign investment to the country was that the whole mess was recorded on television.

It will be apparent to everyone watching the auction over oilfield service contracts that there was nothing sinister in the failure to secure more than one acceptable bid. There was only stupidity.

Even as US troops prepared to leave the country and with the Iraqi Government desperately needing a political success to crown its new independence, the sale of commercial rights over its most important resource was in disarray.

Bids for multibillion-barrel oilfields were submitted by companies from Beijing to Houston, but the tenders were at huge multiples in excess of the Government’s self-imposed price limit.

Even the keenest bidders — ExxonMobil and BP — asked for fees that were twice the $2 per barrel service fee offered by the Government, and higher.

Astonishingly, BP appears to have accepted the Oil Ministry’s demand for a 50 per cent cut in its fee and the company will now be at pains to explain why it thinks it can make good money at such a rate when every competitor appears to think the risk too great for the reward.

Iraq now has a problem. The sale of the century has been a flop and it must do something quickly to revive interest. The auction will encourage political rivalry in the Kurdish north, which is enticing billions of dollars of foreign investment, and in the south, where anti-Western ideologues will draw comfort from the farce in Baghdad.

BP has not necessarily done itself a favour by accepting such a scrawny bird in the hand. Only five years ago it would not have even considered a service contract. The danger for BP is that other host nations might now consider $2 per barrel to be enough reward.

For BP’s sake, let us hope that Gordon Brown was not watching Iraqi TV.

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