It’s said that the first Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, joked that the water that divides Arabia from Iran should be renamed the American Gulf after the nation that exploits it. That wouldn’t be the first time its name was in dispute.

Today, most call it the Persian Gulf, emphasising its connection to the pre-Islamic empire that once ruled from the Indus to the Aegean but some have tried to switch it over to Arabian Gulf in recognition of the states on the western shore.

The US deal settles the debate by recognising one key fact: many can access the Gulf, but Iran can close the Strait. That victory may bring $300 billion to those who control Hormuz, if they stick to the deal.

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Washington promised the money to ensure the rehabilitation of Iran, as well as lifting the sanctions constraining the regime’s oil sales and opening up the banks and insurers that had been closed to them.

The deal’s supporters, like those who backed President Obama’s similar agreement a decade ago, insist that the frozen reserves stay frozen and nothing moves until Tehran behaves, but the way it’s being reported in Tehran and in the media on Capitol Hill in Washington suggests one side feels victorious and the other not.

Republicans in Congress who have spoken out can recognise the ghost of 2015, when the last deal released the better part of $100 billion of Iranian money on a solemn promise of moderation. Those of us who opposed it then, as I did, were clear that it would give money to murderers. Senators Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, have used similar words in the media, because we all know what happened last time.

What did Iran’s government do with the money they got? Did they build hospitals? No, they dug graves.

Across Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and Iraq, the money went to backing militias and terror groups supporting then-President Bashar al-Assad. They financed the barrel bombs falling on Aleppo and the chemicals that suffocated those sheltering in cellars. Tehran fuelled a war that hollowed out a country, driving millions across the Turkish border in the largest refugee movement on earth, and sending a column of desperate people north into Europe in the autumn of 2015.

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Angela Merkel told her people they could cope with the words “Wir schaffen das”, German for “we can manage this”. Given the rise of the Alternative für Deutschland, and of other such parties across Europe, she may have been wrong. President Obama’s deal with Ayatollah Khamenei shook our continent to its core, and we can still feel the tremors.

You’d have thought Washington would have learned the lesson. Æthelred’s attempt to buy off the Vikings has been immortalised in our politics as Danegeld, with the reminder that paying the Danes ensured they would return for more. Perhaps we should just call it tala now, the Persian word for gold.

The deal’s defenders will say the new money is ringfenced, supervised, conditional. They said that last time. What they gloss over is that in reality there is no civilian government in Iran. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is the state. It fires the missiles, commands the proxies, controls the factories and farms, and answers to the Supreme Leader alone. And the IRGC is sworn to one thing: advancing the Islamic Revolution, the millenarian cult that has murdered millions of Muslims, thousands of Jews in the region, and even people on our own streets.

That’s why this matters to us. That money won’t stay in Tehran. If any of the $300 billion is injected into the IRGC’s bloodstream, they will use it to target us. I have not only been sanctioned by Tehran but targeted by their proxies and, in Afghanistan, attacked by their agents.

According to the Director General of MI5, this country has confronted more than 20 potentially lethal Iran-backed plots on our own soil since the start of 2022, and last autumn he revealed that the same grim tally had been reached again in a single year. The money won’t be resting in their account for long, but will go out in contracts around the world.

The IRGC hires others to do its killing and works through proxies to launder cash and target opponents. Follow the trail and it will take you from London to the Iguazu Falls, where Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay meet. You will meet phone smugglers, restaurateurs, charity workers, preachers, and, perhaps most surprisingly, Iranians carrying diplomatic passports from countries like Venezuela. At each step, proxies like Lebanon’s Hezbollah do whatever is necessary to bankroll terror. With $300 billion, they will have even more freedom to act.

That means we need to be ready. Our intelligence and security forces aren’t structured to face the massive increase in state threats Iran could bring. We know that Tehran has already plotted to kill the Saudi ambassador in the US and dissidents like Masih Alinejad in New York. Do we really think they will stop there? Not when, according to them and their friends, they’ve just faced down the Great Satan and won.

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Nor do they think they have any reason to concede before the final victory of the returning Mahdi, or messiah, as they see it, particularly now they have an ayatollah some claim fits the bill.

Since his elevation in March, Iran’s new Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, who inherited his father’s throne in defiance of a revolution that swore to abolish princes, has hidden his face and silenced his voice. It seems likely that he will emerge during the funeral, which opens in Tehran on 4 July and ends at the shrine in Mashhad, where Mojtaba was born, five days later. Choosing American Independence Day and emphasising his claim to be the long-prophesied Khorasani who will save them, would not be an accident.

Will a regime that believes it was saved by a hidden Mahdi really abandon nuclear weapons? It seems unlikely. This deal, like Obama’s, is based on a rational government that hasn’t ruled in Tehran for nearly 50 years.

So what are neighbours to do if even the UK should now be concerned about Iran’s capabilities? Many are hedging.

The United Arab Emirates staked its security on the US and expelled IRGC finances from its banks and institutions. For its loyalty, Abu Dhabi and Dubai absorbed the heaviest bombardments of the war, with thousands of missiles and drones hitting homes and streets. Qatar, which has gifted President Trump an aircraft, holds the bleak distinction of having been struck within a single year by both Israel and Iran. From Riyadh to Manama, every capital is asking the same question: what’s coming next? It’s hard to be sure, and without certainty it’s hard to trust.

So once again cartographers will redraw their maps in pencil, but for today, after this deal, the Gulf’s name has largely gone to one side: Persia.

Getting children out of the house is exhausting. Is there a limit to the number of times you can say: “put your shoes on”? If there is, I don’t seem to have reached it. But even saying it a hundred times doesn’t get it done until you either, finally, make it through the door, or you reach the point where it’s not worth it. You’ve already missed the train or the film and might as well stay home.

Being in opposition is driving me to the same distraction and desperation for action. For more than a year many of us have been calling for the government to publish the Defence Investment Plan. It was promised alongside the Strategic Review published last year but somehow never quite made it to print.

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It’s not hard to understand why. Instead of understanding the need to pay for the wish list he’d asked for, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer did not, as the military put it, situate the estimate. So the list grew larger than his political muscle could bear.

What followed was predictable and predicted.

First came the delays. Despite promises almost weekly, the government had to come up with the kind of excuses that even my kids won’t try. The dog ate it. I’ve finished it, it just needs colouring in. Every line I, ahem, may have tried a generation ago, repurposed in the service of the state. They worked as well as they did for me 40 years ago.

So ministers were made to look weaselly as they twist and twitter in the chamber, half nodding to a non-answer, unable to tell the truth: there’s no new money and the promises are unaffordable with the old. And so we go round the circle again.

“This is the third time I’ve asked you to put your shoes on. Please put them on!”

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But again the minister explains why preparations are both brilliant and unnecessary. He is already striking deals with manufacturers across the UK, generating growth and opportunity. The plan isn’t what we need.

“So you’re saying you don’t need shoes?”

And off the minister goes again, explaining the importance of an integrated plan, the alignment of energies and the reason for the delay is that the laces are on wrong. Sorry, no, that’s my kids.

Until you get to the point we’ve just reached: the moment of publication. I have now been told, with certainty though not for the first time, that the DIP will come out next week. It has to, because otherwise the PM will have nothing for the NATO summit in Ankara. And this is the summit at which allies are meant to show how they are paying for the Hague pledge they all signed last year. He is walking into the one room in the world where an empty plan will be most obvious.

Here, finally, is the press line and the punchline of this story. But it isn’t funny.

A plan only matters if someone is going to be around to deliver it and everyone in Whitehall, everyone in the City, everyone in every capital that matters knows the truth that isn’t being said out loud: the window has closed. The train has left and the film is nearly over. It doesn’t matter if you get your shoes on now or print the Defence Investment Plan, no one cares.

The document will be published, thick and glossy. The foreword will sound determined, measured and authoritative. It will talk about balancing ambitions and building on strengths. It may even make a strategic choice or two. But every word will be irrelevant and no one will bother reading it. It will be the plans to a lost war or the menu to a closed bar.

This DIP is the choice of a prime minister who still inhabits the space but has long since lost the power to determine the future and no one believes it will hold. No investment will flow from it and no alliance will be built on it, because you cannot anchor a generation of national security to a man whose authority is all in the past.

It is being rushed into print not to fund a single ship, regiment or squadron, but to give one man something to wave in Ankara. That’s a prop not a plan, it’s salving an ego not saving a nation and we are fools if we think the world doesn’t see it.

No manufacturer will tool up a production line, no ally will rebase a single decision, and no Treasury official will release a single pound against numbers that everyone expects the new king to tear up. You don’t sign a thirty year procurement contract or alliance on the word of a Prime Minister whose own voice is now a whisper ignored by his own party.

Once that’s happened it’s time to stop. Still asking your kids to put their shoes on once the train has gone and the film has finished won’t make them ready for next time. It’s done. The train left and it’s time to plan for a different future.

Thank you very much for inviting me to speak to the Conservative Environment Network. I’ve been part of this group for nearly a decade, and it’s a pleasure to be here, particularly with Sam’s family in the front row. Sam was there when I first joined, and he was an inspiration to me. I’m very glad to have the chance to pay some respect back by being here tonight.

It’s also a pleasure to speak at a time when security and defence are at the forefront of people’s minds. Yet that is precisely why the task Sam left us has become more difficult. Across the country, the foundations of environmental policy are being challenged. Many people feel that Britain is holding itself back with policies that others ignore.

This government has abandoned multilateral environmental action and embraced something closer to unilateral economic disarmament. Instead of leading the way, we are punishing our own households and businesses with higher costs and fewer opportunities. Rising energy prices are closing factories and driving investment overseas.

Now, with risks mounting on every side, we need to be honest about what has worked and what has not. In doing so, I draw inspiration from Sam’s favourite phrase and the pen name he used: “Repairing Lease.”

The phrase came from Margaret Thatcher, and Sam quoted it often:

“No generation has a freehold on this earth. All we have is a life tenancy—with a full repairing lease.”

That idea deserves a moment’s reflection.

A repairing lease is not about preserving a museum. It is about living in a home. It does not require us to leave everything untouched. It asks us to enjoy what we have inherited, to make full use of it, and to ensure that when our time is up, we leave it in better condition than we found it. The roof repaired. The walls painted. Something stronger and better for the next generation.

That is at the heart of Conservatism.

Sam understood that conservatism and conservation share the same root. But he also understood that stewardship is an active duty. His environmentalism belonged less to the curator than to the builder. You honour an inheritance by improving it, not by locking it away.

Somewhere in recent years, we lost sight of that.

We forgot that our task is to repair and improve. Instead, we began to worship scarcity. We treated refusal as virtue and self-denial as wisdom. We wore hairshirts while failing to develop the technologies that could genuinely reduce emissions. The result is that we are losing support for environmental ambition and failing to create the opportunities that would make a cleaner future possible.

No one wants their children to inherit a more polluted or unstable world. But nor do we want to deny them the opportunities we ourselves enjoyed. The answer must be investment, innovation and growth—creating the wealth that allows us to pay for the repairs we owe future generations.

Tonight I want to make that case in three parts:

1. The scarcity we have chosen.

2. How that scarcity has prolonged our dependence on carbon fuels.

3. The cost this choice is imposing on Britain’s future prosperity and security.

The remedy, I believe, is simple: remember that liberty creates opportunity, opportunity creates innovation, and innovation creates abundance. Throughout history, greater efficiency and cleaner technologies have emerged not from restriction, but from freedom and invention.

In short: take off the hairshirt, get out of the way, and let abundance flow.

The Politics of Scarcity

For too long, environmental policy has become a policy of constraint rather than transition.

Government has legislated against development and piled obstacle upon obstacle in the path of construction. Those who want to build cleaner energy infrastructure, modern transport systems or new technologies carry the entire burden of innovation, while regulators face no obligation to account for the cost of inaction.

The result is predictable. The default answer becomes “no”.

Projects that would cut emissions and strengthen our resilience become trapped in planning disputes and legal challenges. Nuclear power stations are delayed. Infrastructure is stalled. Investment is discouraged.

We see the consequences everywhere:

• New North Sea exploration has been banned despite repeated energy crises.

• Britain imports energy we could produce ourselves.

• Small Modular Reactors are promoted abroad while deployment at home lags behind.

• Onshore wind was effectively blocked for much of a decade.

• Coal is imported from overseas after domestic production is rejected.

This is not transition. It is rejection.

We are not moving from one source of power to another. Too often, we are simply choosing less power.

History tells a different story. Britain moved from wood to coal, from coal to oil, and from oil to nuclear not by consuming less energy, but by making energy cheaper and more abundant. Every major transition in human history has been driven by abundance, not scarcity.

Yet somewhere along the way, environmental policy stopped being rooted in science and became something closer to a moral creed. Prudence became restriction. Stewardship became abstention.

That is profoundly un-conservative.

Conservatism is a partnership between the dead, the living and those yet to be born. It requires investment in the future. It requires us to plant trees under whose shade we may never sit, and to build infrastructure our grandchildren will use.

Let me be absolutely clear. I am not arguing that all environmental regulations are wrong. Rules have an important place in a thriving economy.

But a system that treats construction as destruction and inactivity as virtue cannot deliver the industrial transformation we need.

The Carbon Illusion

Environmentalism should be about reducing emissions. But it must reduce emissions in reality, not merely on paper.

Britain’s domestic emissions have fallen dramatically since 1990. That is often celebrated as a major success.

Yet the picture changes when we look at consumption emissions—the carbon embedded in the goods we import.

Much of the carbon we claim to have eliminated has simply been outsourced. Factories have closed here, only for production to move overseas to countries with lower environmental standards and higher emissions.

The environment does not care whether carbon is emitted in Scunthorpe or Shanghai.

Indeed, many of the facilities replacing British industry are less efficient than those they replace. We close a plant here and production continues elsewhere with higher emissions. Jobs are lost. Carbon rises.

That is not environmental progress. It is self-deception.

The closures of Port Talbot, Grangemouth and the decline of firms such as Denby Pottery all illustrate the same problem. Demand has not disappeared. Production has simply moved elsewhere.

Britain still consumes steel, fuel and ceramics. We now import them instead, often at higher environmental cost.

The lesson is straightforward: the choice is rarely between energy and no energy. More often it is a choice between cleaner energy and dirtier energy.

Too often we have chosen the latter while congratulating ourselves on the former.

The Cost to Britain’s Future

There is a deeper consequence still.

The technologies that will define the future—nuclear power, fusion, long-duration storage, hydrogen, advanced computing and artificial intelligence—depend on one thing above all else:

Cheap, abundant energy.

Without it, innovation becomes uneconomic.

China’s investment in solar power has succeeded because scale drives costs down. Engineers know this principle as Wright’s Law: the more you produce, the cheaper and better a technology becomes.

The same principle applies to AI.

Britain has the talent. Britain has access to capital. But we struggle because we lack affordable power.

Data centres, advanced manufacturing and future industries all require enormous amounts of electricity. Countries that can provide it cheaply will prosper. Countries that cannot will fall behind.

The politics of scarcity is now undermining public support for climate action itself.

Across Europe we have seen protests, political backlashes and growing scepticism. Public concern about climate change has fallen not because the science changed, but because the costs have become more visible.

A strategy based on sacrifice is inherently fragile. The moment economic pressure increases, public support evaporates.

A strategy based on abundance is different. It survives difficult times because it lowers bills, strengthens industry and improves living standards while reducing emissions.

That is the path we should choose.

Security and Environment Are the Same Challenge

Energy security and environmental progress are often presented as competing priorities.

In reality, they are usually the same priority.

Every barrel of oil and every cubic metre of gas we import creates a dependency on someone else’s infrastructure, someone else’s politics and someone else’s decisions.

Producing more energy at home is not only cleaner. It is more secure.

Recent crises have demonstrated the vulnerability of global energy markets. Britain remains heavily exposed to external shocks. We import record amounts of electricity and remain dependent on international supply chains that we do not control.

A resilient nation requires resilient energy.

NATO now identifies secure energy supplies as one of the foundations of national resilience. Sovereign AI, sovereign steel, sovereign manufacturing and national defence all depend on reliable, affordable power.

A cleaner future and a more secure future require the same thing: abundant, low-cost energy.

A Conservative Environmentalism

This brings us back to Sam’s insight.

Abundance, growth and stewardship are not competing ideas. They are partners.

Responsibility and innovation go together.

A cleaner world and a richer world are not contradictory goals. They are mutually reinforcing. The same markets, the same innovation and the same freedoms that generate prosperity can also deliver environmental progress and national security.

The alternative is a politics of symbolic sacrifice that delivers little while costing a great deal.

Instead, imagine a different future:

• Cheaper, more plentiful power.

• Stronger manufacturing.

• Faster innovation.

• Greater investment in clean technologies.

• Lower bills for households.

• A cleaner environment.

• A more secure Britain.

That is the Conservative environmental vision.

Not direction, but choice.

Not constraint, but abundance.

Not conservation through restriction, but conservation through innovation.

A repairing lease asks us to leave the house in better condition than we found it: strong walls, a sound roof and clean, abundant power running through the wiring.

That is what stewardship means.

And as Sam never tired of reminding us, we hold this country on a full repairing lease.

It is time we remembered what that responsibility—and that freedom—truly demands.

Thank you.

Soldiers in the trenches used to sing about the staff officers playing leapfrog in the chateaux miles behind the lines. As they died in the mud, the staff sat safe playing games for career advancement. It wasn’t entirely fair. The determination to win was clear in every historical record.

I wish it wasn’t true in Westminster today. For the fifth time in 10 years we will have a new Prime Minister, without an election, in a party coup that people have no say in. Meanwhile, our country is being disarmed, and its people are getting poorer.

These games give a lie to the political cynic’s line that politicians know what to do but just don’t know how to get re-elected if they do it. The truth is simpler, and starker. No one has set out a real agenda for government in a decade. We’ve just had swings between managerialism and radicalism; the first without a purpose, the second without plan and we’ve ended up like a pilot on autopilot – asleep and dropping slowly into the sea.

Even when there was supposed to be a battle of ideas, those ideas were meaningless. In 2017 we were offered Brexit means Brexit, a tryptic of tripe. The only real idea, social care reform, was dropped the moment it met the public. In 2019, the line was simpler still: I really mean it about Brexit. Again, once that was done, there was no agenda for change, no mandate for reform, and Covid sent everything haywire. Then in 2024 we got one line: we’re not the Tories. Ok, so what? What are you planning for the country? Again, there was nothing about the country we need to rebuild.

It’s hardly surprising that the reaction to purposeless managerialism is to crave a wrecker, but that’s just swapping a flood for a fire. The manager has no purpose: the radical has no rules.

It’s like being led by a lazy general who uses sweeping gestures without understanding the implications or the details. As the army puts it: big hand, small map.

Andy Burnham’s vibe-based victory is just that. He has fought his way back into Parliament not with a programme but with a mood. He will turn the tide, seize the change moment, and scale something he calls Manchesterism to a whole nation. Ask for the route and you get silence because he’s no idea what the trade-offs are, or the real destination, and has no notion of the ground he has to cover.

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Soldiers don’t trust idle commanders who aren’t careful with their lives. Hearing amateurs talk of moving a hundred miles before lunch without the professional understanding of the ground that will bog the vehicles, the tree-line that hides the enemy, the bridge that can’t take the weight, and the basic questions of food and fuel doesn’t bring confidence. Wars aren’t won by the sweeping gesture but the careful plan set out in advance, the same is true for a country.

In a democracy the whole country needs to know the plan. We can’t just order the bond markets to hand over cash, whatever Labour MPs think. After all, they’re lending us their money and they don’t have to. We can’t order investment or growth. That happens when you set out a plan people understand and build trust in the future by sticking to it. And people will only go along with it, by turning up to work, investing in hiring people, training for the new economy, if they feel part of it. That’s why democracies are, or should be, a battle of ideas.

That’s not what’s happening now. Or has been happening for a while. Instead we’re seeing a coronation with the only electorate being a tearoom tribe. This isn’t a battle of ideas, it’s a popularity contest, but even school councillors have to set out a longer manifesto that the Labour leader.

Keir Starmer may have removed the last of the hereditary peers from the House of Lords but the whole of Westminster has turned into an aristocracy. Strip the ideas out of politics, reduce it to charm and style, and settle things among ourselves and we have become not tribunes of the people but a court, a witan electing a regent from the council of earls.

Burnham would be the seventh prime minister in barely a decade, the latest to take power promising new vibes with old votes.

There is an alternative to these purposeless princes and unplanned radicals and its emerging from the oldest democratic movement in the world. Kemi Badenoch, with less ego than the self-righteous left, and less fanfare than the welfare-right is setting out more than a direction, a plan.

Going line by line through the tax bill and the government spending, Badenoch is cutting 47 billion named and costed pounds from a bloated civil service and welfare system that treats a quarter of adults as disabled. She’s set the direction to a smaller state and is working through the ditches and treelines that will stop her.

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For now, she’s the only one doing the work. Labour wants the state bigger; the Liberal Democrats want it wetter; the nationalists don’t care so long as it’s theirs; and Reform, beneath the insurgent costume, just wants to spend more. They’re each arguing who should wear the crown, only Kemi is asking to shrink it.

It’s essential we have this debate now. We can’t go round this buoy again hoping to get a different answer. Because the truth is, it doesn’t matter who‘s in charge if they haven’t got their party onside and the country understanding the direction of travel.

The men in the trenches knew exactly what the staff officers’ games cost them, so do the voters. We all know a democracy demands a choice of ideas, put honestly to the people, not a crown passed round in private while we all get poorer. For the first time in years, one party is drawing the map, the rest are still playing games.

The newly elected MP for Makerfield, Andy Burnham, and the former First Minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon both have a touch of Dickens about them. It may be six months before the Christmas ghosts return to us but their careers are both cautionary tales.

In their different ways they expose the weakness of British devolution and the abuse that regionalism can hide. Now that Our Andy is returning to Westminster, it’s worth learning the lessons of Manchester, and the other centres of devolved power.

St Nicola, patron saint of the incurious, appeared on Laura Kuenssberg’s Sunday show to explain away the chains that bind her to the past. Unlike Marley, she would not own her sins. Her husband, the auditors, even her own party were all, somehow, more responsible than she was.

She may have lived with Peter Murrell but when he pleaded guilty to embezzling more than £400,000 of party funds, spent on a camper van, cars and assorted luxuries, Sturgeon still told Koonssberg she had no conscious memory of the motorhome and rejected outright the idea that anyone had tried to warn the party. She says she feels she is serving a sentence for a crime she did not commit. A remarkable thing to say of a woman who ran Scotland for the better part of a decade, led her party throughout, and noticed nothing.

She was, she claimed, just another woman taking responsibility for the actions of a man. Though having read her gender legislation it is hard to know quite what she means by that.

A few hundred miles south, Our Andy has tried a gentler version of the same trick. Do not look at the Department for Transport, then run by Conservative ministers, whose Bus Services Act 2017 handed him the power to franchise Manchester’s buses. Ignore the devolution deal George Osborne struck in 2014, and forget the quarter century of rebuilding under Sir Richard Leese, who led the council from 1996 to 2021. Look instead at Andy.

Looking at Andy is rather the point, because there is not a great deal else to look at. The metro mayoralty sounds like an executive office and is costumed as one, but it is nothing of the sort. It commands no great department. It raises almost none of the money it spends. It answers for very little that cannot be blamed on someone in London.

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That is the weakness, and it is not Burnham’s alone. It is the office, and it is the same office in every city we have handed a mayor. What it offers instead is a microphone, and Burnham works it better than most.

He is the standard bearer of Manchesterism, a politics of the announcement, the photograph and the grievance, performed from a stage built for claiming credit and shifting blame in roughly equal measure.

It is not the private sector revolution that brought Manchester a century of prosperity, opportunity and growth. It is the nationalised tribute act, without the prosperity, without the opportunity, without the growth, and without the power to deliver a single one of them.

Both have hidden from scrutiny for years. Only now, one cornered by a criminal husband, the other by a larger ambition, are they finally being asked what really happened.

They are not the first devolved leaders to have hidden their incompetence in plain sight. Travel to Belfast and you find the same pattern with the accelerator pressed to the floor. The Renewable Heat Incentive, the cash for ash scheme, paid claimants more in subsidy than their fuel costs, so the rational thing to do was to burn it. Taxpayers’ money quite literally went up in smoke, the better part of £500m of it, and the minister responsible, like Sturgeon, blamed her officials. The scheme brought down the devolved government in 2017 but the bill is still being paid today.

The common thread is not party; it’s structure. This is political ventriloquism with power projected in one place and the money raised in another. The mayor spends; the Treasury collects. The First Minister announces; the taxpayer funds. Credit is local, cost is national, and accountability belongs to no one.

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Wire the incentives that way and you would have to be an idiot, at every level, not to behave exactly as they have. Promise generously, demand more from Westminster, and pass the blame to the centre when your promises come to nothing. After all, it’s their fault for not stumping up the cash. The ratchet turns one way only: more spending, more state, more dependency, election after election, whoever wins.

That is how you make a country institutionally Left-wing. Not by argument and not by vote, but by wiring. We have built a machine in which the rational choice, in Edinburgh, in Manchester, and once in Belfast, is always to ask Westminster for more and answer for less. And because most of us are more worried about what is taken from us, the media scrutiny is on Westminster too.

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So we see unwatched politicians, posing as leaders while luxuriating in irresponsibility. That’s why promises of devolution must be matched with accountability.

The press cannot hold power to account while so much of it sits inside the very local patronage networks it is meant to watch or is focused on Westminster alone. And real devolution cannot stop with Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast making new unitary states; it has to travel all the way down, to communities and to councils, and it has to carry the duty to raise the money as well as the pleasure of spending it. The United Kingdom is not a fire-and-forget system of one-way disbursement.

Now that Andy is marching on Number 10, vibe coding a policy agenda without a true mandate, it seems we’re going to test the next tale in our literary canon: The Government Inspector, by Gogol, in which an entire town convinces itself that a minor clerk is an important government official. Everyone colludes in the delusion because they alternative is… well, irrelevance.

Perhaps that has more parallels for the Labour MPs now pinning their hopes on the former mayor of Manchester than even Dickens.

The last minister to resign over national security was Lord Carrington. In 1982, Margaret Thatcher’s foreign secretary took responsibility for the Foreign Office’s failure to anticipate or prevent the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands. His integrity gained him the respect of the nation.

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Now John Healey has done the same. Across politics, many will recognise the burden of the choice. Healey has been living and breathing defence for years, and his commitment has drawn respect from all parties, including mine. But he knew what needed to be done and that’s exactly why he has gone. Healey can see what is coming and, more importantly, what is not.

His resignation letter is the most damning document published by a departing minister in decades, even more so because it convicts the Prime Minister out of his own mouth.

“You spelled out the threats last week,” Healey reminds him, “‘it is our intelligence assessment, and the assessment of other countries in Nato, that there could be an attack by Russia on Nato as soon as 2030.’” That doesn’t leave room for complacency or delay.

“You know what defence needs. You made the argument for this powerfully in your speech at the Munich Security Conference back in February.” “You have been unable, and the Treasury has been unwilling, to commit the resources that the nation needs to defend the country at this time of rising threats.”

Those two words – unwilling and unable – are this Government’s obituary. It’s not a minister falling out with his Prime Minister but a minister telling the country that Sir Keir Starmer knows what he should do, but is too weak to do it.

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The numbers make it clear. The Defence Investment Plan financial settlement, which Healey “was first given in full on Monday afternoon this week, falls well short of what is required for defence and the country at this dangerous time. The extra support is backloaded when the pressure of operations and imperative to speed up readiness to fight is in the first two years and it rises to just 2.68 per cent of GDP in 2030, when we will reach 2.6 per cent next year with the investment we are already making”.

This is the detail that matters because it collapses every promise made and statement given.

First, it is astonishing that the defence secretary was first shown the funding of his own plan only three days ago, more than a year after the plan was commissioned. Second, the offer appears to be a rise of 0.08 percentage points of GDP over three years, roughly £2bn a year (or two destroyers) in today’s money by the end of the decade.

So, using the Prime Minister’s own intelligence assessment that a Russian attack on Nato could come by 2030, the plan would deliver… almost nothing. And worse, it would only deliver what little it did in the year the attack is expected. Nothing in advance. Nothing to prepare.

As Healey says, the whole point of the plan is readiness in the first two years to deter an attack. So it’s clear: the promises are fake, and the man responsible for keeping them has told us so in the most public way possible.

This isn’t just accounting tricks. As I wrote in this paper only a few weeks ago, Britain holds around eight days of war stocks and is often down to one or two operational frigates or destroyers. The Iran war and Hezbollah’s attack on Cyprus exposed our nakedness and reminded us that conflict isn’t distant. It is already happening in the Mediterranean, the High North, and the North Sea, and much sooner than 2030.

So what does this say about the Government if its first duty is to protect the realm? It says it’s over.

Through weakness and capitulation, Starmer has put welfare ahead of warfare.

And what does it say about the prince in the north? In the week the defence secretary resigned because he couldn’t fund readiness needed to protect us,

Andy Burnham chose to back the WASPI campaign, a pledge costed at £10bn that everyone in Westminster knows will never happen. Burnham is spinning stories while Healey is grounding facts.

Starmer’s choice to lose Healey will cost us even now. We know that Russian ships are surveying our cables and communications infrastructure. If they strike, it won’t just be the cost of repair that matters but the reputation of the state. Britain’s credibility will be the collateral and our borrowing costs will rise and inward investment fall as those who trusted us will question our commitment to protecting them, too.

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We’ve all now looked into the soul of the British state and what we see is a void. In a straight fight between the First Lord of the Treasury, as the Prime Minister is properly titled, and the Chancellor, it was the Prime Minister who blinked. It’s not Number 10 in charge but the accountants at Number 11. The chiefs saw it, too. That is presumably why the Chief of the Defence Staff wrote to Starmer this week. We have to assume that the secretary of state walked so the chiefs don’t have to, yet.

So what next? Carrington resigned after Argentina had invaded the Falklands, while Healey resigned before the bill has come due. That is the difference, and it is the only mercy in yesterday’s news. The warning has been given, in writing, by the man who knows best. The question Healey’s letter leaves hanging over Downing Street is the one that Starmer must now answer: if the Prime Minister knows all this, and will not act, what is he for?

First published in the Telegraph 12 June 2026

Armies go on operations, but it’s nations that go to war. That means industry, academia, in fact, the whole of society – not just the military. At present, our divided society is our greatest vulnerability.

We are seeing our freedoms exploited every day to destroy the trust that holds us together, but too few of us are facing the reality of the challenge that our enemies are massing against us. We have chosen not to believe in the devil, but as we see every day in Ukraine, and particularly in the massacres of Irpin and Bucha, he is alive and walks among us. Evil exists and we need to be ready to fight.

What we have seen consistently not just under Vladimir Putin but under Russian rulers for centuries is the violent ambition of the tyrant. They have murdered millions and tortured more. Again and again we have seen a corrupt princeling in Moscow look with envy on the successes of the free nations of Europe and suffered the violence that has followed.

That’s the reality frontline states like Finland, Poland and the Baltics have always known. In London and other capitals, some grew comfortable and complacent. The nations of Eastern Europe never did. Estonia and others in the region have been carrying their share of the burden this whole time.

Tallinn spends some 3.4 per cent of GDP on defence today and has committed to spending 5.4 per cent from 2026-2029. And its neighbours have done the same: Poland is at 4.5 per cent today, rising to 4.8 per cent next year. Latvia is at 3.7 per cent, and Lithuania is at 4, having committed to between 5 and 6 per cent from 2026.

Then of course there is Finland. Outside the alliance until recently, Helsinki has never forgotten what it took to stop the Soviets and has never dropped its guard. When they joined Nato, they didn’t just add to our security, they brought an attitude and approach we in Britain need to learn from. And, along with Sweden, they shifted the alliance north – reminding me of the bonds we shared in the past under Viking kings or Hanseatic treaties.

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The threat we face

For years now, Russia has been conducting warlike acts against every European democracy, trying to undermine our freedom. We have hidden behind diplomatic dances and weasel words because honesty would have forced us to make choices we wanted to avoid.

I’ve had enough of the obfuscation and evasion. It’s time to say it clearly: the Kremlin is at war with Europe and its allies in Beijing are helping. The evidence is clear.

In 2006, the FSB murdered Alexander Litvinenko in London using a chemical so toxic traces from it were later found at more than 40 sites across the city, including on the British Airways flight his killers flew in on.

In 2016, Russian military intelligence plotted to seize the Montenegrin parliament on election night, assassinate the prime minister, and install a pro-Russian government to halt the country’s accession to Nato.

In 2018, the GRU poisoned the Skripals with a nerve agent in Salisbury. The perfume bottle they left behind still contained enough Novichok to kill a British mother-of-three. In fact, if it had been raining and the bottle tipped into the water supply, it contained enough to kill thousands.

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And in 2024, the Kremlin spent more than $200m – the equivalent of one per cent of Moldova’s GDP – on interfering in the country’s presidential election and EU referendum. President Sandu has said her government has evidence that 150,000 votes were bought, with the target having been twice that number.

That’s not all. That same year, the GRU sent incendiary devices disguised as pillows through the DHL network. One caught fire in a warehouse in Birmingham, another at a hub in Leipzig. German intelligence said the only reason a cargo plane didn’t come down over Europe was because the flight had been delayed.

Germany also faced more state terrorism in 2024. US and German intelligence disrupted a Russian plot to assassinate Armin Papperger, the chief executive of Rheinmetall, Europe’s largest producer of artillery shells. He was one of several European defence industry executives on a Russian target list.

The record in Estonia is just as serious. In 2007, it was the first Nato member subjected to a coordinated, state-directed cyber-attack when three weeks of denial-of-service operations targeted ministries, banks, and broadcasters.

And in 2014, Eston Kohver, an Estonian Internal Security Service officer, was dragged across the border by FSB agents and paraded on Russian state television before being sentenced to 15 years in a penal colony.

But many have barely responded to Russia’s violation of our sovereignty and threats to our peace. Time and again, the alliance barely moved. We expelled a few more diplomats. We imposed a few more sanctions. We issued a few more statements. Usually, Moscow barely noticed and saw us as easy to push around.

Complicity at home

In 2014, France’s Rassemblement National party took a loan from a small bank in Moscow after other European banks declined to lend to it. When the bank collapsed, the debt was passed to a Russian aviation company that the German Marshall Fund’s analysts have linked to Russian intelligence. A French parliamentary committee subsequently found that the party had operated as a relay for Russia in French politics.

In 2024, Moscow so corrupted the Romanian elections that the first round of the presidential polls had to be annulled when its agents got an unknown candidate within touching distance of the presidency. Russia didn’t do that alone. It was a coordinated TikTok and Telegram operation with China’s hands all over this new online army.

They have been helped by useful idiots and corrupt co-conspirators. Former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder joined the boards of companies used by Putin to rob his own people and bribe ours. Former Austrian foreign minister Karin Kneissl abased herself with the deepest curtsey to Putin at her wedding and now degrades herself propagandising for Russia.

In Britain too we have our own traitors. Shamefully, the former leader of Reform UK in Wales got more than 10 years in prison for spouting the Kremlin’s rubbish for cash.

Vladimir Putin hopes to convince our fellow citizens that we can’t trust each other, that our democracies can’t protect us, and that we’re all the same. You have to admit, he’s doing better than any of us would like. That’s why the truth matters. It’s what sets us apart from Moscow.

Learning from Ukraine

The war we see being fought in Ukraine is still not the war we are preparing for. Not just in our defence ministries, but in our wider society. We are integrating the lessons too slowly and not alerting our people to the realities of modern conflict.

What Ukraine has achieved is not a procurement story, but a lesson in national mobilisation. It has produced drones cheaply and at scale, redesigning them in weeks not years, with software updated by civilian programmers and factories in homes and barns across the country. Kyiv has shortened the feedback loop so the link between a frontline platoon commander and the start-up founder equipping him runs in hours, not months.

And, again, the Baltic states, Sweden, Finland, and Poland have been applying these lessons faster than anyone else in Nato. The Estonian defence industry has expanded beyond recognition in three years. Companies like Milrem Robotics, Frankenburg Technologies and Threod Systems are now exporting capability to allies that a decade ago would not have known where to find Tallinn on a map.

Estonia is also upgrading how it thinks about war. Only last month, the Estonian government cancelled a €500m programme to replace its infantry fighting vehicles and redirected the money to drones and air defence. It looked at Ukraine and drew the obvious conclusion.

Meanwhile, in London, it’s reported the Ministry of Defence has pushed through a helicopter contract when the Army wanted drones. That’s not good enough.

We need to be like Poland, and break old supply chains building newer, faster and getting what we need. Poland went to Seoul for tanks because Berlin and Paris could not match Korean delivery times. The K2 line builds 180 tanks in three years. The German Leopard 2 line takes five years to build 50.

Mass at speed has always beaten the exquisite and slow. Re-engaging our home-grown industries is vital for resilience, but what matters most is people. Sweden has sent a pamphlet titled “If Crisis or War Comes” to every household – twice. Like Taiwan’s version, it includes an important warning: don’t believe enemy rumours, and don’t repeat them. Again, they understand the power of lies. So does Putin and so does China’s Xi Jinping.

Finland trains its civilians through structured courses they can fit around their working lives. And Estonia has built the digital infrastructure to keep the basic functions of citizenship running even under occupation.

If citizens don’t know where to go and what to do should the worst happen, you’re not preparing for a crisis, you’re ensuring chaos. As Kyiv shows, the price of conflict is so much higher than the cost of deterrence. Ukraine didn’t have a choice. We do.

Britain’s complacent Government

The obstacle isn’t the British people. Last year more than 170,000 young Britons applied to join the Army alone. Fewer than 10,000 made it through. We needed more. We do not lack for interested, motivated young people who want to serve our country.

As Major General Nick Cowley, the commandant of the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst said, the claim that there’s a snowflake generation is absolute rubbish. But there are signs even our Government is finally waking up.

Legislation currently before Parliament proposes to raise the recall age of service personnel to 65 and lower the threshold under which reservists can be called up. Both are welcome. But we need to go further.

Around 95,000 people are on a contingency list, including me, ready to be called back to duty if needed, but you can bet it’s not up to date. The practice of staying in touch with them, of knowing where they are and what they can still do, fell away after the Cold War ended.

In Britain, national service is something of a dirty word. We have only forced men in uniform into war, but what if we looked at the problem differently? What if we asked young people what they could do to help their families, their communities, their country?

Military service may not work, but public service could bring the country together and ensure we are ready. With youth unemployment rising, AI taking jobs (or so it’s said) and many asking for work experience to show a future employer, a year or two of structured service in which a young person could choose the Army, the health service, fire and rescue, agriculture, the local council or civil defence work could make a difference. Such a scheme would be especially attractive if it came with a discount on university fees or other support.

Today, Britain leads the Joint Expeditionary Force, but that leadership has been more in name than in fact. There are roughly 1,000 British troops in Estonia today, rising over the next five years to about 2,000. Given the threat we face, and the lessons in drones and mass the Russians are learning in Ukraine, these numbers aren’t enough of a deterrent.

A serious contribution would mean a continuous rotation of British troops, in greater numbers, through Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, backed by a reserve force worthy of the name. It could conduct joint exercises to prepare for conflict and deter.

It would mean training teams from Ukraine to help us, not going to Ukraine to help them. It would also mean a revolution in production at home.

We need to get better at predicting the future. Defence demands intelligence and the networks to collect and share it. That once meant secrets and spies, today it often means open data and open minds.

Take one example. In 2018, volunteers with the organisation Bellingcat working from laptops at home, with no government help, identified the GRU officers responsible for the Salisbury poisonings. The information they used wasn’t classified. It was scattered across flight records, passport databases, hotel check-in logs and telephone metadata pulled from commercial services or bought on the dark web and sold by corrupt bureaucrats.

The Buk launcher that shot down flight MH17 was matched to a photograph posted to social media. Its crew was tracked through fitness app data. The route the convoy travelled was reconstructed from dash cam footage uploaded by strangers who had no idea what their devices were recording.

The core role of information

Like Sweden’s crisis handbook, we need to know that information and lies are part of the battle. We see it online and we know that TikTok and other sites are created by and exploited by our enemies.

Since the attacks in 2007, Estonia is already ahead. Its Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence is formidable and Nato’s Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence in Riga does fantastic work. But we can build on that. We can support startups like Bellingcat and encourage citizen investigators to expose corruption and complicity.

We should create a new agency: MI7. While MI5 focuses on protecting our home, and MI6 on collecting vital secrets abroad. MI7 would exploit the sinews that connect and integrate those plots, helping to expose what is hidden in plain sight. Working with Estonians and Ukrainians, and other friends around the world, we would build a new network integrated from day one with civilian researchers, journalists and academics.

The US is right that many don’t pay their share to keep the peace for us all. It is easy for some in London to dismiss it as bullying, or as something about President Trump himself. It is harder to wave away when it comes from those allies who are already bearing the brunt of a threat.

If we want to lead, if we want to deter, if we want to stand with our allies and defend the border Nato has given us the luxury of pushing more than 1,000 miles away from our shores, we need to pay the bill and think again.

And we need to prepare our people, so that we can invest in the technology, the people and the skills to stand beside you watching across the Narva River and making sure the enemy doesn’t try to cross.

As I said, too many of us don’t believe in the devil, it’s easier to pretend he’s not there. But none of us can afford the comforts of childhood any longer. We are being attacked online and offline. People are being murdered and our politics corrupted. And the battleground is our people. This is war, just not as we’ve known it.

We need a new Northern Alliance, a new intelligence agency and cooperation, a new understanding of the threats we face and the urgency to deter them. We need to wake up and see what is clear and stand by our allies and rebuild the trust between us, and within ourselves.

It’s time to be serious again.

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First published in The Telegraph 24 May 2026

Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, repeats the lesson of the incarnation of Christ, that man stands at the centre of the work of the Divine, and renews the challenge for our own day.

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The Holy Father is clear that artificial intelligence now risks this elemental Christian theology threatening human dignity by turning the ownership of our data into a new form of slavery, just as cruelly as that ubiquitous sin did, and does, around the world.

The Pontiff says that, because of this harm, artificial intelligence cannot be governed by good intentions alone, still less by the consciences of the engineers who build it. He calls again and again for law: robust legal frameworks rather than ethics invoked in the abstract, independent oversight rather than the promises of the new pharaohs of Silicon Valley, and a human being who can be held to account when a machine decides who receives a loan, a job, a hospital bed or a place at a school. It is a bold challenge to parliaments the world over. But is it possible?

The Bishop of Rome wants the new electronic Curia regulated rather than quietly surrendered to a few private companies whose reach already exceeds that of most governments. He even commends, here and there, the courage to slow down. As a Catholic, I say amen to all of it. As a parliamentarian, I have to confess that the hardest part is not the principle. It is the clock.

The machine and the statute do not keep the same time. Artificial intelligence is built at the speed of the start-up, where the instinct is to move fast and break things, to ship first and patch later, to run a beta test on the rest of us and call it progress. The updates that transform it are not set only by the market or by the contest between Claude and ChatGPT; they are driven by the pace of mathematical innovation, in Shenzhen and in a thousand laboratories besides.

There is a deeper reason than speed, and it is one every legislator should learn early. You cannot pass a law against mathematics. Parliament can govern what a person does, never what a person knows; it can forbid an act, but not a theorem, a discovery or an idea. A statute may regulate how a model is used, who answers for its decisions and what may be done with its results, yet the equations that make it possible will go on being written whether we consent to them or not. Law reaches actions, not ideas, and innovation is an idea long before it is ever an action.

Parliaments cannot keep up. Law, in democracies at least, moves at the speed of consent, which is to say, slowly. The lag is not a failure of management that some brisk minister might close over a weekend. It is deliberate. A democracy rests on the consent of citizens, not the custom of consumers. Move fast and break things works in startups. It costs lives in countries. When a company fails, another is born, but when that happens to a state we call it revolution, and the chaos costs lives.

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This is not the first time we have struggled to keep pace with innovation or with the changes it forces on our lives and our society. The printing press reached England in 1476, and it took the better part of 250 years before Parliament passed the Statute of Anne and gave copyright its first modern form. The telegraph transformed trade and remade empires long before any treaty governed the cables beneath the sea.

Closer to home, the European Union spent years grinding out its Artificial Intelligence Act, and our own Parliament spent the best part of five years on the Online Safety Act, by which time the harms it was drafted to meet had bred new ones, and a generation of children had grown up inside them. We have always been behind the innovation curve. We will be again.

Anyone who has nodded through a committee session knows why. Legislators must weigh the risks and not only the opportunities. They must hear the engineer and the ethicist, the company and the customer, the union and the investor, the bishop and the unbeliever, the mother afraid for her child and the founder afraid for his firm. Cut that listening short and you are left not with a settled law but a stalled one, as the bitter passage of the assisted suicide bill has shown.

A democracy is not merely a tyranny of parliamentary arithmetic; it must take evidence, publish drafts, suffer amendment, survive challenge and emerge with something that commands enough assent to be obeyed without constant compulsion. That is not dithering. It is the difference between a law and a decree.

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A democracy is slow because it governs by cooperation; a tyranny is quick because it governs by command. Speed may appear to give answers, but it opens fractures, and it remains brittle. Authoritarian states legislate on artificial intelligence at a pace no Western cabinet could match, yet a regime that cannot admit what happened in Tiananmen Square in June 1989 cannot teach its machines the truth about its own past, and so forces deceit into its models.

Rule by fear corrupts its own knowledge at the source, with consequences that fall on everyone, as the Covid crisis showed the world. Our system, for all its exasperating slowness, rules by argument and agreement, which, when we are honest enough to conduct it, gives the more enduring answer.

And yet the Bishop of Rome, spiritual guide and temporal prince upon the throne of St Peter, shares the frustration of many that our inaction can look like complacency. It is not. Every few months OpenAI and Anthropic release versions that remake what a computer can do, and there is no way a legislature can keep step. Even if every MP and every congressman grasped the finer points of large language models and stochastic parrots, they could not win consent for the changes, nor reconcile the benefits that pull against one another, fast enough to matter. And our rivals, in China above all, would feel bound by none of the same constraints.

So the slowness is not merely a weakness to be apologised for. It is the discipline of free people. St John Henry Newman, whom this very Pope proclaimed a Doctor of the Church only last November, saw it when he wrote that to live is to change and to be perfect is to have changed often, and that the institutions which last are precisely those that can change while remaining themselves. The genius of parliamentary government is that it lets a nation alter its laws without losing its soul, carried by institutions that remember why an earlier generation chose as it did.

So what should guide us, if not the law alone? It is not enough to say that the law is too slow, for that leaves the field open to a cavalier handling of the most consequential inventions of our age. Nor can the task be surrendered to the princes of technology, whom the Pope names without flattery, those who raise cathedrals to their own ambition and ask no one’s leave. The temptation to build Babel is not confined to our rivals. It is alive in our own boardrooms and our own vanities.

The Holy Father sets against that tower the figure of Nehemiah, who rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem not by command but by summoning the families and giving each its length of wall to raise. That is the truer image of what we must now do, and it was not legislation but inspiration. What raised those walls was not a statute but a shared conviction, a people persuaded that the work was theirs and that it answered to something higher than their own interest.

Who can summon such builders today? Perhaps that is the real answer Magnifica Humanitas gives. It is Rome. Which other spiritual leader can corral presidents and princes, tyrants and technologists, and make them weigh the questions we all face? Legislators cannot. If the Pope is looking for a new Nehemiah, perhaps he should start with himself.

First published in The Telegraph 27 May 2026

Six hundred years ago, at Agincourt in northern France, King Henry V’s outnumbered, English army faced the flower of French chivalry. French knights were expensive, each warrior the product of many years of training, his armour and warhorse a major investment for him and his family.

Henry’s archers carried longbows that cost little, drawn by men trained in every village across the kingdom. When the volleys came, the knights fell quickly. Quantity overwhelmed quality, and the mud helped. France lost the battle, but defeat in the war came not just because the knights had died, bowmen had been killed too, but because the knights could not be replaced.

We’re seeing the same in the Iran War today. Patriot interceptors are exquisite, a wonder of engineering, the product of decades of accumulated technical mastery, each one the labor of hundreds, perhaps thousands. The Iranian drones they intercept are arrows: cheap, plentiful, made in bulk.

Since February, the US has fired more than 1,300 Patriot interceptors against Iranian missiles and drones. Each interceptor costs around $4 million to destroy weapons that cost between $20,000 and $50,000. Based on the most recent rate of production, it will take two years for Lockheed Martin to replace what has been fired in the past 2½ months. That is the economics of defeat, and our adversaries understand it.

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Each Patriot is also a creature of supply chains we don’t fully control. The US-made guidance chips depend on helium, supplies of which have been disrupted by the war in Iran. Even if Congress voted the funds tomorrow for 10,000 new interceptors, the metal and the gas would still have to be found, the workforce trained, and the production lines tooled. We are running short of the raw materials for our exquisite weapons while our adversaries flood the battlefield with cheap drones.

Next-generation fighters, multibillion-dollar carriers and so much more mean that although each is a marvel, we have too few, and they’re too hard to replace, making them too valuable to risk.

Sophistication has become our vulnerability. Ukraine shows the alternative. More than 1,000 interceptor drones roll off Ukrainian production lines every day, at $1,000 to $3,000 apiece. The bodies of Kyiv-built attack drones are redesigned within months, not years, their engines even more quickly, and their guidance software within a matter of days. By keeping costs down and rapidly iterating simple technology, at scale, Ukraine is delivering a devastating effect.

Behind this show of force sits a market the government built. Programs like Brave1 connect investors directly to startups and to the user on the front line, giving fast feedback. That’s how a country at war fields more than 2,000 defense companies and runs production cycles from outline to front line in months, not years.

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Ukraine produced four million drones last year and plans to produce seven million this year, 10 times its output three years ago.

We’re not the only ones who have noticed. Gulf monarchies, which have bought American for decades, are looking at Kyiv as the partner for drone warfare. Their models are cheap, quick to produce and still in active development on the Donbas front.

While the U.S. is cautious about allowing even close allies to use cruise missiles, Ukraine has an alternative. See Spider’s Web, the June 2025 operation that smuggled more than 100 drones deep inside Russia and struck four air bases and 41 aircraft, including several bombers, causing an estimated $7 billion in damage.

For Ukraine, that’s the economics of victory: billions of dollars of weapons destroyed by drones that cost around $2,000 each.

The cure to what ails the North Atlantic Treaty Organizations’s militaries isn’t another exquisite platform. It’s an industrial base that can take an idea and turn it into a million in a year. That means pivoting civilian production lines to defense and giving contracts to the manufacturer that can deliver 100,000 drones a month, not the one that delivers a dozen platforms in a decade.

The goal is no longer the perfect weapon. You build the best you can. Then build it again, 90% as good, at 80% of the cost, in 50% of the time. Then do it again and again, a thousand times more. That not only fills the armoury; it creates a system to keep it full.

In the Iran war, we’re equipping like the French at Agincourt when what we need is an army of archers.

First published in the Wall Street Journal 19 May 2026

And in the years since I’ve left the Army, you’ve given me, kindly, a platform. And I’m grateful that today you are giving me a chance to share some thoughts on the dangers that we face, too many of our own choosing and exposed by a war we should have predicted that will have a much more fundamental impact on our lives than many that we choose to remember.

The Iran War has revealed in many ways the reality of the British way.

It has shown us to be legalistic, ill-equipped and unprepared. It has revealed our dependencies, not our partnerships, the risks that we’ve hidden, not the resilience that we’ve built, and, perhaps most gravely of all, our casual confidence of a return to a normal when the disrupted alliances and energy flows will do anything but.

We have come, in many ways, to a moment like William Stead’s in 1884, when he had to ask: What is the truth about the Navy? What followed was the realisation that the maritime power that sustained empire had rotted in port. What followed that was the Naval Defence Act of 1889.

We are at a similar moment as, if you will allow me, I hope to demonstrate this morning. In the past two months, let’s just look at what has happened.

Allies for the past century have wondered if our own legal constraints mean that we can be relied on, not just to plan operations from our bases, but to fly defensive sorties from theirs.

Our sovereign bases have come under attack and been defended not by British forces, but by French.

And the Defence Secretary has confirmed that Russian submarines spent much of March and April mapping our undersea cables, while the best that we could say was that we had watched them do it.

We have ceased to be a serious military nation, and if we fail to use the moment that this gives us to realise the challenges that we face, the next wake up call may cost us very dear indeed.

That’s why I wanted to talk to you today.

Now, many of us have known the truth about our defences for some time. The facts are not hidden and many of the gaps have been visible for decades, not just years. But today, with the threats to our allies in the Gulf, and to the communication cables around our coast, the risks are not theoretical.

They have already arrived.

We are no longer planning for an uncertain future, but a clear and dangerous present.

Without changing our approach we won’t be stocking up on self-built security, we’ll be panic buying whatever we can at the highest prices when the urgency demands immediate action. If there is one lesson from the Covid pandemic, it’s that behaving like that will cost us for generations to come.

And that is the reality of where we are now.

British defence, under governments of every political stripe over three decades, has deteriorated steadily, in plain sight, and as the end-product of a series of democratic choices whose cumulative effect was not so much concealed from the public, as simply unquestioned within it.

When the Iran campaign began, there were no Royal Navy vessels in the Gulf after the admirals were forced to choose between protecting our home waters or our vital interests.

And as the drones struck cities now home to thousands of Brits, the Royal Air Force was limited in its ability to defend our interests and our allies despite the United Kingdom maintaining four airbases in the Gulf.

Set that against 1982, when a Royal Navy task force capable of retaking the Falkland Islands at the other end of the earth was assembled in a weekend. That Britain and this Britain can hardly be called the same country.

The purpose of speaking to you this morning is not to diagnose any single failure of policy, because one attributable failure doesn’t exist.

I want to offer a rather fuller audit. A reckoning of where British defence actually stands and to argue that the accumulated evidence compels a diagnosis, and that that diagnosis, however unwelcome it will be, is the necessary precondition of any serious prescription.

That cure, a grand strategy backed by a clear-eyed understanding of how things really are, is what we have failed to achieve because the defence and security reviews – including the last one drafted by my friend John Bew and others – have lacked the resources they required.

For three decades we have been projecting an image of a Britain that no longer exists. Before it can decide what to do next, we must be prepared to look honestly in the mirror and realise the truth about ourselves.

I’m not just talking about kit.

Over the last few days we’ve seen stories that bring home the true erosion of the fighting capability of our forces that I first described in a report for this very organisation some years ago entitled ‘the Fog of Law’.

Over a generation, the legal expansion has enshrined a pharisaic approach, building fence upon fence around the law in the belief that this constitutes moral seriousness, mistaking the mechanism of legal process for justice itself.

The revelations published in the Telegraph in recent days confirm what many of us had long feared: the legal culture that grew up around operations in Iraq and Afghanistan was not, in its most aggressive expressions, a neutral application of principle.

It was instead the instrumentalisation of law, the deliberate use of legal process not to defend justice but to pursue a narrow political agenda, at the direct expense of the men and women ordered into battle by the British state.

The choice to fetter our forces with reams of red tape, and to help our enemies continue the fight when the guns go silent, has done more to weaken our country and endanger our future than any number of lost battles in foreign lands.

Let’s be clear what we have seen:

Soldiers fighting hand-to-hand against Iranian-backed militias in Iraq, being hounded by those same militias under a legal mandate carved out by solicitors paid by the very taxpayers who looked to these soldiers for protection from Iranian aggression, only to see that aggression empowered by the courts while their protectors are persecuted.

And that’s not just a one off.

Ever-higher fences of prohibition around every possible action, and then accountability for decisions made in the most confused and conflicting of circumstances has created a straitjacket leaving British forces constrained in ways that have no parallel in our own history and no equivalent among our closest allies.

This isn’t abstract or theoretical, it has direct operational consequences.

Soldiers are paralysed as both action and inaction leaves them liable to prosecution and danger.

Commanders are unable to react, changing tangibly what a force can accomplish and what it cannot.

And who pays for that? Not just the millions in legal fees, but what are the consequences? Well we know, don’t we, it’s the British people.

By treating our soldiers as scapegoats we have torn down our walls and punished our guards. Now we’re surprised that too often our friends ignore us and our enemies mock us. We shouldn’t be.

We have done more to undermine morale than any failure of accommodation or pay.

I will turn to the hardware audit but this is never discussed enough in procurement debates and it should be.

As Napoleon said, morale is three times more important than kit.

Two former SAS commanding officers and a former Chief of the General Staff have already exposed how corrosive this has been to unit morale as this inversion of responsibility has seen those who order an action washed of consequences as the burden falls on those ordered to act.

Those who order wars know what will follow. It is absurd that those who take the greatest physical risks are also those left most personally exposed to legal jeopardy for decisions made from necessity in the confusion of battle. It is no surprise so many are choosing to leave.

Just to be clear, none of this is an argument for immunity. Crimes happen in war and they must be prosecuted.

But the civilian law is pointless in battle. Actions essential to victory in war are absolutely intolerable in peace, and confusing the two simply leaves the vulnerable weak, and the tyrant strong.

We can all see it. That’s what makes the events following the Battle of Danny Boy in 2004 so offensive to us all.

British soldiers fought and survived one of the most intense engagements of the Iraq war and then spent years, in some cases the better part of a decade, under investigation for alleged unlawful killings.

The Iraq Historic Allegations Team pursued them and the Al-Sweady Inquiry consumed millions of pounds and caused immeasurable personal suffering to those soldiers who were caught up in it.

Its conclusion, when it finally came, was that the gravest allegations were not merely unproven but had been entirely false and based on “deliberate lies.” In effect, the Iranian IRGC had exploited our own system to punish soldiers for their courage and deter others from following them.

Can we honestly say, seeing the failure of recruiting today and the gaps in our defensive support to our allies in the Gulf, that their strategy failed? Can we honestly say that Russia and others having witnessed the example as an effective way to undermine morale of every soldier who may be sent against them won’t try and do the same?

And all this comes down to a fundamental misunderstanding. A soldier is by definition the state’s instrument of violence in pursuit of national policy.

They do not act alone or on their own behalf and their actions should be weighed as part of a whole. It is the nation that bears the responsibility for the use to which they are put.

Instead we have seen moral cowardice from politicians who asked soldiers to step up, and then left them to hang alone.

What is worse is the complicity shown in those who seek to poison the reputation of our forces by some of our most senior lawyers. What they have done is not just immoral, it is a betrayal.

Knowingly spreading lies about our forces, or recruiting others to do the same, or praising others who have done the same, leaves our soldiers more likely to face attack from those misled into hating them; and puts our country at greater risk.

You may have thought that praising the recruiting sergeant of His Majesty’s enemies would make you ineligible to serve in His Majesty’s Government. Well, apparently not.

The government asks why they can’t hit recruitment targets for our Armed Forces. They ask why half of our young people say they would never fight for their country. Well, they should start by looking at their Attorney General.

His position is completely untenable. He has prioritised – by choice, if also by ignorance – the interests of agents of the IRGC, a terror organisation.

Even if his action was unwitting, his belief that those who pursued prosecution of those we ask to protect us are more worthy of praise than the soldiers who risk their lives demonstrates a failure of judgement and raises real questions about the advice he offers this government.

Those who lie about our troops encourage others to kill them. That’s treason. No minister, no citizen, should praise that.

This new legal dominion is putting creed over need and doing more than just eroding our fighting power, it’s leaving our allies and friends wondering what we have become.

Just look at the words of our ministers.

In recent debates on European security and rearmament, Baroness Chapman, responding to contributions from Lords Godson and Verdirame, saw fit to criticise Lithuania for wishing to withdraw from the Ottawa treaty so that their small army could use landmines to protect their children from the Russian troops who we have seen raping and murdering civilians in Ukraine.

It is, frankly, extraordinary that a British minister should criticise a NATO ally for putting the safety of their children over a treaty which others – including, of course, Russia – have not signed.

To some it seems their aim is to be the most righteous soul in the graveyard. Those words come from those who do not understand war and do not believe in the devil.

Our government should support our friends, not lecture them with pompous piety about legal compliance.

Poland, Estonia, Finland – countries that have made admirable investments in their own defence, that have looked at the world as it is and responded with seriousness – do not need lectures from us, they need our commitment.

They need to know that if the moment comes, the British state will act with them, not judge them for the violence that has been brought to their homes by the enemies we all see.

In the United States, the lesson has been heard even more starkly. Senators who oppose the war in Iran, who judge the action unwise and the strategy unsound are appalled at the absurdity of Britain refusing to allow bases to be used against a nation that has spread death across the region and tried to murder even our own citizens.

There is a strong political argument against the war in Iran.

There is a powerful strategic argument against the war in Iran.

But the idea that there is no respectable legal argument for striking the missiles and bases of a regime that has killed British troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and murdered thousands, hundreds of thousands, across the region is ridiculous, as Professor Ekins and others have made clear and as the government itself has now conceded.

We need to choose – are we here to patronise or to partner? Unless you believe in miracles, only one of those will keep us safe.

Now I will turn to hardware.

Threats that the United States may consider leaving the NATO alliance have left many on this side of the Atlantic nervous, but it’s worth asking: who is really pulling us apart?

If we’re not capable of carrying our share of the burden, why are we surprised when others consider going it alone?

Let’s start with the Royal Navy.

Despite months of warning and the biggest military build-up since the Iraq operations, not one of Britain’s six purpose-built vessels capable of air defence was in position and ready at the start of the Iran War.

Three were stuck in Portsmouth for engineering work. One had spent more time in refit than at sea, and another was in maintenance.

The last one remaining was dragged from her dry dock to be dispatched leaving the region without a British naval presence for 17 days as the war began.

Now, that’s not a huge surprise. We commissioned 12, we built 6, we got missiles for 5 and parts for 4. Frankly, this is a Dutch auction of capability that is coming home to roost.

The same is true across the rest of the fleet. HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales are extraordinary ships built for a combined cost of approximately £7 billion, but that doesn’t include the planes.

Without the US Marine Corps’ F-35Bs and the Dutch and US escort ships, the Royal Navy’s flagships would have never been operational.

This is in stark contrast to our history. In 1982, Admiral Leach was able to assemble a task force capable of retaking the Falkland Islands in a weekend. 127 ships set sail to reassert Britain’s commitment to global order, and to defend our people.

Today the Royal Navy has 13 frigates and destroyers, not 17 Mr Healey, down from 59 back then.

The standing tasks – the work we must do just to play our part in NATO and keep ourselves safe, requires more hulls than actually exist.

Now, every First Sea Lord has known this for decades but it has taken the actions of this February to make it clear to the world.

After needing the army to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, of course surely that must be different? Right?

Wrong.

The British Army is down to approximately 74,000, from 109,000 in the year 2000. That’s the smallest force since Bonaparte threatened invasion. That’s regiments gone and battalions disbanded, eroding capability and cohesion.

Some have been replaced with tech, and the advances that have been made by the Army are impressive, but people still matter.

Poland is building a standing army of 300,000 and Germany has announced 460,000 trained personnel as its target. We’re not even close.

Worse, we’re not even close to what we promised.

NATO’s Force Model expects Britain to contribute a corps headquarters and two divisions. That’s simply not credible. We’d be hard pressed to deploy a brigade and as a General who commanded a brigade in the 1990s told me, the entire fire power of the British Army is less than he had in his brigade then.

The Falklands, Cyprus, Brunei, Gibraltar, Diego Garcia, the Ukraine training mission, and the enhanced Forward Presence in Estonia each demands troops and is only possible if every other operation remains quiet.

That’s a strong bet in this world.

At least the Air Force, the home of innovation for a century, will have what it needs? No.

Royal Air Force fast-jet numbers couldn’t sustain a campaign at the scale of recent operations. F-35 deliveries remain below the programme’s own ambitions and the RAF has gone from 54,600 personnel in 2000 to 31,940 today, the steepest cut of any of the three services and not all of this is down to automation.

Amongst that is an ambition for an air-launched nuclear weapon, adding cost when we can’t even resource what we have today.

Even our allies are wondering what comes next. The Global Combat Air Programme, a strategic partnership with Italy and Japan and an initiative that this country should support, is years from delivery, underfunded by the Treasury, not by Tokyo or Rome, and dependent on them for its continued progression.

Alliance brings strength, dependency breeds resentment.

Across all three services we are seeing budgets of billions delivering outputs that leave us short of personnel and power.

This isn’t about housing or pay, it’s about mission and purpose, and neither are possible without the vision we’re lacking.

The Strategic Defence Review of 2025 tried to fix this with a reset in ambition. But since it was published, each of its authors has pointed out that without corresponding spending commitments the review is just a wish list, not a strategy.

That’s not good enough. Since the end of the Cold War, we have slashed the defence budget and failed to re-equip for the world as it is, not as we wished it was.

For all our talk of hitting 2.5 percent, and now boasting of the largest increase in the defence budget, let’s face it we’re just not being honest.

Ever since the nuclear deterrent was included in the defence budget in 2010 and pensions added in 2016, we have really been spending about 1.7 percent, now that’s much closer to the derided Spaniards than the prepared Poles.

From 2027, the Single Intelligence Account, £4.6 billion this year rising to £5.4 billion by 2029, will be reclassified as NATO-qualifying defence expenditure, to push the defence budget, in name only, to 2.6 percent.

In other words, we are busy playing accounting tricks in the purser’s office of the Titanic. Do you really think that anyone believes that Treasury tricks make us safer?

It’s a con and we can all see it. And worse, when the Prime Minister goes to the States, or sees our NATO allies, they see it too. He’s selling them a lie.

But that’s not all.

There is another number that every officer and analyst in this room I’m sure already knows, but must be repeated constantly to burn the shame of it into the hearts of those who can change it - that number is Eight.

The United Kingdom can sustain major combat operations for approximately eight days. That’s it.

Eight days.

The Chief of the Defence Staff didn’t contest this figure when pressed on it in the Defence Committee. Others have reported it clearly. We now have, according to some, the thinnest munitions stockpile of any first-tier NATO state.

In Ukraine, Russia is firing up to 10,000 shells a day and has learned to use drones at scale. Ukraine is said to be building as many as 9 million drones this year.

We’re losing credibility and as history shows, not least when we last left the Falkland Islands unguarded, weakness is provocative and costs many many times more than deterrence.

Let’s just look at what’s happening at home.

We have no integrated short-range air defence protecting critical national infrastructure.

We have no contracts or budgets allocated to repair our airfields if they’re damaged or destroyed.

The seas that carry the vast majority of intercontinental data that powers our economy through undersea cables are being systematically surveyed and mapped by Russian naval vessels, and may already be being sabotaged.

As the Russian tankers breaking sanctions through the English Channel show – we’re not really deterring that much.

Just imagine, if you will, the frustration of those who are capable of intercepting our enemies, but are forced to watch – restricted not just by kit but by the quiet suffocation of overcautious legal interpretations.

That doesn’t stop our enemies or encourage our forces, and our civilian resilience sadly is no better.

The National Health Service has no mass-casualty plan designed for industrial-scale warfare. The Cold War infrastructure that provided such a plan was dismantled in the late 1990s on the assumption that it would never be needed.

Indeed, when 9/11 happened, Number 10 couldn’t even find the key to the Prime Minister’s bunker.

We have made choices and saved pennies until the gap between what we say and who we are has become a chasm.

That’s not bad luck. That is the bill for 30 years of choices, arriving all at once.

Now, the hardware can be fixed with cash. What’s harder to change is the understanding that we need to make tough choices – now.

So let’s be honest – this isn’t just about politicians, we have our own share of the guilt. It’s about all of us and the kind of country we want to be.

In 1990, as the Berlin Wall came down, most people wanted to cut defence. Of course they did. Peace allowed us to spend more on our wants not our needs.

And that switch in focus – the so-called peace dividend – has left us disarmed but it wasn’t imposed on an unwilling electorate; it was demanded.

Successive governments delivered what was consistently asked of them.

In forced-choice polling even today, defence ranks eighth out of 13 priorities, behind the NHS, pensions, disability benefits, education and policing.

The question is not whether Britain can afford to do better than this. We can. The question is will we choose to change our priorities to make sure we stay safe.

While we’re spending just over £63 billion on defence, we spend more than five times that on welfare – more than 10 percent of our GDP.

The state pension costs taxpayers £146 billion and other pensioner-related benefits bring the total to about £180 billion.

Health and disability benefits cost £76 billion, more than we spend on deterring war, and that’s likely to rise to £100 billion by the end of the decade because the demographics are just so unforgiving.

Now today, there are three and a half working people supporting each pensioner. By 2050 there will be only two.

I don’t believe our economy can shoulder more taxes than today’s peacetime high. That’s why I argue we need to look again at where money is going.

By 2030, the Triple Lock will cost £15.5 billion more a year than if it were linked to earnings – that is three times the original forecast.

In cash terms, that’s the equivalent of a 20 percent increase in the entire defence budget.

A pensioner-protecting alternative which still tracks earnings but smooths out the volatility would save £6 billion a year by the end of this decade.

That’s five frigates, or 70 F-35s. Every single year.

That’s not all. As Fraser Nelson has shown, the number being moved on to sickness benefit has surged to a scarcely-believable 5,000 a day against 2,000 a day when Labour took office.

Around 90 percent of those granted sickness benefit were still on the benefit, and not working, two years later pushing the annual sickness and disability bill higher by £20 billion since 2019 alone.

That’s how much we spend on every soldier currently serving in the British Army, nearly four times over.

Let’s be clear, those bills are not being paid through taxation but debt. The costs are falling on our children.

What we owed cost us approximately £49 billion in 2019, today it’s £110 billion. Quantitative easing, Covid and welfare all racked up the bill. And it keeps rising.

That’s why this can’t go on. We can’t promise pension rises or sickness benefits that leave us so exposed.

We won’t be able to pay for anything if our cables are cut and energy is severed. The Triple Lock and health demands of a generation that should be at work, not off work, have left us living on a prayer.

These choices haven’t been foisted secretly upon an unknowing electorate. They’re the cumulative product of government policy, the legal culture, and our public discourse – and now we’re here living with the consequences of those choices.

We can blame others and play politics but that will change nothing.

This is our watch and the seas have turned rough.

It’s time that we were honest with ourselves.

At one time, we were.

When Britain helped write the rules of the post-war world we knew we had to help enforce them.

Along with other free nations, we invested in the Bretton Woods framework, the Atlantic alliance, the United Nations, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the Commonwealth, and so much more.

British diplomats drafted the language that British ships, garrisons and planes made count. We knew that soft power was the velvet on the mace – softening the ask, veiling the threat.

Rule-writers and rule-enforcers were the same countries, because the architects of the post-war settlement understood that words without weapons are just wishes.

After the end of the Cold War, we forgot that we still had to pay the bill.

The speeches from Number 10, the Foreign Office and the MoD have barely changed, but the ships, planes, people and bases; the factories and stockpiles, have all dwindled.

We told ourselves fairy tales, we remembered the glorious past that was written in our history and pretended that that would automatically lead to a gentle future forgetting the price of peace.

Our diplomats, the BBC, the British Council, the City of London, the English language itself are all soft power. They can, we are told, carry a load that, until 1990, had needed steel and strength.

We’ve forgotten the truth:

Soft power is not just weaker than hard power, it depends on it.

The institutions through which soft power operates – the alliances, the multilateral frameworks, the treaty bodies – derive their authority from the order that hard power maintains.

Britain didn’t trade hard power for soft power, we sold it, just as a banker has sold the gold that underpins a currency and is now surprised when there is a run on his trust.

The consequence, as every senior civil servant involved in multilateral diplomacy privately acknowledges, is that Britain has fewer seats at the tables where the rules are made.

Because power is not hereditary. It’s bought with ships, aircraft, battalions and the industrial capacity to make them and the willingness to act.

As I warned when I took over the Foreign Affairs Committee 8 years ago, you can’t hide behind treaties and pretend peace is eternal. You will be found wanting.

Now, with the world in flux and the tide going out, I’m reminded of the words of Warren Buffett: we’re finding out who has been swimming naked.

For a trading nation that depends on the sea, there’s a threat, not just to our influence but to our economy. For a rules-based state that needs to shape the words that constrain us, our voice is quieter than it has been for generations.

We’re spending our children’s inheritance and we’re not securing their tomorrow but comforting our today.

The evidence is now too great to be ignored.

France defends British sovereign territory.

The United States takes decisions that determine our future without consulting us. And the reason is clear.

We have too few ships, too few soldiers and too few planes.

We have factories receiving too few orders and the armouries holding too few stocks. And worst, we have a government too keen to punish those who try to protect us. Those are not opinions. They’re facts.

But I’m not going to end on that.

I think there are three tests for us to turn around where we are:

The first, is a short term test: the ‘Falklands test’ if you will. Britain must be able to assemble a credible task force within 72 hours and deploy it to any sovereign British territory within the time window required to prevent its loss.

Second, is the medium term test: the ‘Technology test’, if you will. Britain must be able to match and defeat a modern, fully equipped peer adversary in the air, on land, at sea, and in the electromagnetic and cyber domains, with the drones, integrated air defence, long-range fires, and the resilient command-and-control that contemporary warfare actually requires.

And the third, in the long term: the ‘North Atlantic test’. Britain must be the most capable European power in the most important domains for our national life: the North Sea, the Baltic approaches, the North Atlantic, and the GIUK Gap securing our energy and communications connections.

Over the coming weeks I’m going to be setting out the choices we must make beyond the tax changes and legal reforms that have been demanding our attention for so many years. What must be built is the work of the speeches that I will draft in coming days.

We face an industrial question: can we restore the sovereign capacity to produce the ships, the steel, and the munitions on which hard power depends?

A technological question: can we keep up and overtake the advances in drone warfare, artificial intelligence, and open-source intelligence being demanded by today’s battlefields?

A diplomatic question: can we reawaken the partnerships that will endure for another generation or more and remember the ties that bind?

And lastly we have a legal question: can we rebuild a framework of laws allowing British forces to operate in the world as it is, not as we wish it had become?

I will be addressing each in turn.

Now this has been pretty bleak, but let me be clear, it’s not too late.

Poland has tripled its defence spending in a decade because successive Polish governments made the case and argued the need.

Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia all spend more than we do as a proportion not because they want to, but because their leaders said the hard things clearly, and their citizens, who want peace as much as ours do, chose to be serious when presented with the reality of the choice before them.

What we need now is not just the money or the mass; most importantly, we need politicians willing to say, clearly and repeatedly, things that for thirty years have been thought unsayable.

The diagnosis has not been comfortable and the remedy won’t be simple or cheap. The evidence, however, is clear. And the choice, for the moment at least, remains ours to make.

The last remaining question is whether the national conversation that reinforced our predicament is capable, in the years immediately ahead, of producing that cure. Now that question, well that’s really for all of us to answer in our own way.

Thank you.

The Iran war has revealed the reality of the British way. It has shown us to be legalistic, ill-equipped and unprepared. It has revealed our dependencies, not our partnerships, the risks we’ve hidden, not the resilience we’ve built, and, perhaps most gravely of all, our casual confidence of a return to normal when the disrupted alliances and energy flows will do anything but.

We have come to a moment like William Stead’s in 1884, when he had to ask: what is the truth about the Navy? What followed was the realisation that the maritime power that sustained empire had rotted in port. The Naval Defence Act of 1889 was the fix.

We are now at a similar moment. In the past two months, let’s just look at what has happened. Allies for the past century have wondered if our own legal constraints mean we can be relied on, not just to plan operations from our bases, but to fly defensive sorties from theirs.

Our sovereign bases have come under attack and been defended not by British forces, but French. And the Defence Secretary has confirmed that Russian submarines spent much of March and April mapping our undersea cables, while the best we could say was that we had watched them do it.

We have ceased to be a serious military nation. If we fail to use this moment to realise the challenges we face, the next wake up call may cost us very dear.

Many of us have known the truth about our defences for some time. The facts are not hidden and many of the gaps have been visible for decades, not just years.

But today, with the threats to our allies in the Gulf, and to the communication cables around our coast, the risks are not theoretical. They have already arrived.

Without changing our approach we won’t be stocking up on self-built security, we’ll be panic buying whatever we can at the highest prices when the urgency demands immediate action. If there is one lesson from the Covid pandemic, it’s that behaving like that will cost for generations to come.

That’s the reality of where we are now.

Visible decline

British defence, under governments of every political stripe over three decades, has deteriorated steadily, in plain sight.

It is the end-product of a series of democratic choices whose cumulative effect was not so much concealed from public view as simply unquestioned within its gaze.

Just look at the past several months. Our military bases in Cyprus have come under rocket attack, but the anti-missile batteries deployed to defend British sovereign territory were not British. They were French. So that’s French crews and French equipment defending British soil.

When the Iran campaign began, there was no Royal Navy vessel on station in the Gulf after the admirals were forced to choose between protecting our home waters and our vital interests.

And as the drones struck cities now home to thousands of Britons, the Royal Air Force was limited in its ability to defend our interests and our allies, despite the UK maintaining four air bases on the Gulf littoral.

Set that against 1982, when a Royal Navy task force capable of retaking the Falkland Islands at the other end of the Earth was assembled in a weekend. That Britain and this Britain can hardly be called the same country.

The accumulated evidence compels a diagnosis, and that diagnosis, however unwelcome it will be, is the necessary precondition of any serious prescription. That cure, a grand strategy backed by a clear-eyed understanding of how things really are, is what we have failed to achieve because the defence reviews have lacked the resources they required

For three decades, the country has been describing a Britain that no longer exists. Before it can decide what to do next, it must be prepared to see clearly what it has become.

This is about more than kit. The revelations published in The Telegraph in recent days confirm what many of us had long feared: the legal culture that grew up around operations in Iraq and Afghanistan was not, in its most aggressive expressions, a neutral application of principle.

It was the instrumentalisation of law, the deliberate use of legal process not to defend justice but to pursue a narrow political agenda, at the direct expense of the men and women ordered into combat by the British state.

Soldiers are paralysed as both action and inaction can leave them liable to prosecution or danger. Commanders have their confidence eroded, reducing speed of action and changing tangibly what a force can accomplish and what it cannot.

The government asks why they can’t hit recruitment targets for our Armed Forces. They ask why half of our young people say they would never fight for their country.

Well, they should start by looking at their Attorney General, Lord Hermer. His position is completely untenable. He has prioritised – by choice, if also by ignorance – the interests of agents of the IRGC.

Even if his action was unwitting, his belief that those who pursued prosecution of those we ask to protect us are more worthy of praise than the soldiers who risk their lives demonstrates a failure of judgment and raises real questions about the advice he offers the government.

Those who lie about our troops encourage others to kill them. That’s treason. No minister, no citizen, should praise that.

It’s no accident then that pride in Britain’s history has fallen. The reason isn’t lost in the enigmatic mystery of our national character, it’s what a country looks like when it has spent 30 years telling itself that defence is someone else’s problem.

Since the end of the Cold War, we have slashed the defence budget and failed to re-equip for the world as it is, instead of how we wished it were.

And for all our talk of hitting 2.5 per cent, and now boasting of the largest increase in the defence budget, we are simply not being honest. Ever since the nuclear deterrent was included in the defence budget in 2010 and the pensions included in 2016, we are really spending about 1.7 per cent. That’s closer to the much derided Spaniards than the prepared Poles.

Shrinking Royal Navy

The reality of decline is visible in every service. Let’s start with the Royal Navy.

Despite months of warning and the biggest military build-up since the Iraq operations, not one of Britain’s six purpose-built vessels capable of air defence was in position and ready for the start of the Iran War.

Three were stuck in Portsmouth for engineering work. One had spent more time in refit than at sea. Another was in maintenance. The last one remaining was dragged from her dry dock to be dispatched leaving the region without a British naval presence for 17 days as the war began.

The last one remaining was dragged from her dry dock to be dispatched leaving the region without a British naval presence for 17 days as the war began. That’s no surprise. We commissioned 12, built six, with missiles for five and parts for four. Our Dutch auction of capability is coming home to roost.

Britain’s two aircraft carriers, HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales, are extraordinary ships built for a combined cost of approximately £7bn – but that is without the cost of the planes.

On its first major deployment, HMS Queen Elizabeth didn’t carry a full British fast-jet air wing. The United States Marine Corps provided the F-35Bs.

The escort ships (without which a strike group cannot operate), were also provided by the US, as well as… the Dutch. In other words, the platform exists but without our allies it is a stage without the full cast.

The escort picture is starker. In 1982, Admiral Leach had a task force assembled capable of retaking the Falkland Islands in a weekend. A force of 127 ships, 43 of them Royal Navy warships, set sail to restate Britain’s commitment to our place in the world.

Today the Royal Navy has 13 frigates and destroyers overall, down from 59 in 1982.

The standing task list – the work we must do just to maintain forward presence, protect the carriers, and deter our enemies from cutting our energy and communications cables, leaving us cold and silent – requires more hulls than exist.

Every First Sea Lord and Chief of the Naval Staff has known this for years but since the American campaign against Iran began in February it became clear to the world: not a single Royal Navy vessel has been in the Gulf. Not one. Two months on, that hasn’t changed.

Dependency does not bring strength

Surely, though, the Army is in better shape, given it was needed to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan? No.

The British Army’s regular strength stands at approximately 74,000, down from 109,000 in 2000. That’s the smallest force since Bonaparte threatened invasion.

Since 2010, we’ve lost 23 regiments through amalgamation masking battalions disbanded and capability not replaced. Meanwhile, Poland is constructing a standing army of 300,000 and Germany has announced 460,000 trained personnel as its target. We’re not even close.

Nato expects Britain to contribute a corps headquarters and two divisions. But that’s not credible. We’d be hard pressed to deploy a brigade. Alliance brings strength, dependency does not.

The reserves are also under-strength, under-trained, and poorly integrated into any realistic mobilisation plan.

But that’s not all. One further figure, which every officer and analyst in this room already knows, and which should nonetheless be stated aloud at every address on British defence until the picture changes is the number eight.

The United Kingdom can sustain major combat operations for approximately eight days before running out of bullets. Eight days.

Meanwhile, in Ukraine, Russia is expending up to 10,000 artillery shells a day and has learnt to use drones at scale. We’re losing credibility and that erodes deterrence. And weakness is provocative and can cost us at home.

At the same time, Royal Air Force fast-jet numbers couldn’t sustain a campaign at the scale of recent operations. F-35 deliveries remain below the programme’s own ambitions and the RAF has gone from 54,600 personnel in 2000 to 31,940 today, the steepest cut of any of the three services (and not all of that is due to automation).

As for the ambition for an air-launched nuclear weapon, it adds further cost when we can’t even resource what we have today. Further, we have no integrated short-range air defence protecting critical national infrastructure.

The National Health Service (NHS) has no mass-casualty plan designed for industrial-scale warfare. The Cold War infrastructure that provided such a plan was dismantled in the 1990s on the assumption that it would never be needed.

Let’s be honest. This isn’t just about politicians. It’s about all of us and the kind of country we want to be.

Welfare, pensions and the NHS

When 9/11 happened, Number 10 couldn’t even find the key for the prime minister’s bunker.

We have made choices and saved pennies until the gap between what we say and who we are has become a chasm. That’s not bad luck. That is the bill for 30 years of choices, arriving as one.

Successive governments delivered what was consistently being demanded of them. In forced-choice polling, even today, defence ranks eighth out of 13 priorities, behind the NHS, pensions, disability benefits, education and policing.

While we’re spending just over £63bn on defence, we spend beyond five times that on welfare – more than 10 per cent of GDP.

The state pension costs taxpayers £146bn and other pensioner-related benefits bring the total to about £180bn, nearly three times what we pay on defence.

Today, health and disability benefits cost £76bn, already more than we spend on deterring war, and that’s likely to hit £100bn by the end of the decade because the demographics are unforgiving.

Today, there are three and a half working people supporting each pensioner. By 2050 there will be two.

I don’t believe our economy can shoulder more taxes than today’s peacetime high. That’s why I argue we need to look again at where money is going.

By 2030, the triple lock is projected to cost £15.5bn a year more than if it were linked to earnings – three times the original forecast. In cash terms, that’s the equivalent of a 20 per cent increase in the entire defence budget.

As for debt, it is still rising and the interest bill, which was approximately £49bn in 2019, has nearly trebled to £110bn annually because of quantitative easing, Covid and welfare.

And it keeps going up. With inflation-linked debt likely to drive costs higher we are set to go beyond double the defence budget on paying the interest on what we owe.

That’s why this can’t go on. We can’t promise pension rises or sickness benefits that leave us exposed.

Soft power is not enough

It’s time we were honest with ourselves. At one time, we were.

When Britain helped write the rules of the post-war world we knew we had to help enforce them. Along with other free nations, we invested in the Bretton Woods framework, the Atlantic alliance, the United Nations, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the Commonwealth, and much more.

We knew that soft power was the velvet on the mace – softening the ask, veiling the threat. Rule-writers and rule-enforcers were the same countries, because the architects of the post-war settlement understood that words without weapons are just wishes.

After the end of the Cold War, we forgot that we still had to pay the bill. The speeches from Number 10, the Foreign Office and Defence have barely changed, but the ships, planes, people and bases; the factories and stockpiles, have dwindled.

We told ourselves fairy tales, myths of our glorious past and gentle future forgetting the price of peace. Our diplomats, the BBC, the British Council, the City of London, the English language itself are all soft power. They can, we are told, carry a load that, until 1990, had needed steel and strength. We’ve forgotten the truth:

Soft power is not just weaker than hard power, it depends on it. The institutions through which soft power operates – the alliances, the multilateral frameworks, the treaty bodies – derive their authority from the order that hard power maintains.

Power isn’t hereditary. It’s bought with ships, aircraft, battalions and the industrial capacity to make them and the willingness to act. As I warned when I took over the Foreign Affairs Committee eight years ago, you can’t hide behind treaties and pretend peace is eternal. You will be found wanting.

The evidence is now too great to be ignored: France defends British sovereign territory; the US takes decisions that determine our future without consulting us. And the reason is clear.

We have too few ships, too few soldiers and too few planes. We have factories receiving too few orders and the armouries holding too few stocks. And we have a government too keen to punish those who try to protect us. Those are not opinions. They’re facts.

But I’m not going to end on that. There are three tests for us to turn this around.

It is not too late

First, in the short term: the “Falklands test”. Britain must be able to assemble a credible task force within 72 hours and deploy it to any sovereign British territory within the time window required to prevent its loss.

Second, in the medium term: the “technology test”. Britain must be able to match and defeat a modern, fully equipped peer adversary in the air, on land, at sea, and in the electromagnetic and cyber domains, with the drones, integrated air defence, long-range fires, and the resilient command-and-control that contemporary warfare actually requires.

Third, in the long term: the “North Atlantic test”. Britain must be the most capable European power in the most important domains for our national life: the North Sea, the Baltic approaches, the North Atlantic, and the GIUK Gap securing our energy and communications connections.

It’s not too late. Poland has tripled its defence spending in a decade because successive Polish governments made the case and argued the need.

Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia all spend more than we do as a proportion not because they want to, but because their leaders said the hard things clearly, and their citizens, who want peace as much as ours, chose to be serious when presented with the reality of the choice before them.

What we need now is not just the money or the mass; most importantly, we need politicians willing to say, clearly and repeatedly, things that for 30 years have been thought unsayable.

The diagnosis has not been comfortable and the remedy won’t be simple. The evidence, however, is clear. And the choice, for the moment at least, remains ours to make.

The last remaining question is whether the national conversation that reinforced our predicament is capable, in the years immediately ahead, of producing the cure. That is a question for all of us to answer in our own way.

First published in the Telegraph on 29 May after the speech was given at Policy Exchange.

In May 2004, at a checkpoint in southern Iraq, the British had named Danny Boy, an ambushed British patrol fought the Mahdi Army hand-to-hand for three hours. Twenty-eight insurgents were killed. No British soldier died, and five were awarded the Military Cross.

What came next did not happen on the battlefield but in Birmingham. Phil Shiner of Public Interest Lawyers paid fixers in Maysan to find Iraqis willing to accuse British soldiers for money. By 2008, he was holding press conferences claiming British soldiers had captured 20 Iraqis alive at Danny Boy, taken them to Camp Abu Naji, and executed them.

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The claims were extraordinary. If true, there would have had to have been a conspiracy among the British troops at the base, reaching from the commanding officer and the padre to the most junior soldier. Still, the Al-Sweady Inquiry sat for 169 days and cost the taxpayer £31m before Sir Thayne Forbes found every serious allegation to be the product of deliberate lies, reckless speculation and ingrained hostility.

Shiner’s firm had by then been the source of around 65 per cent of the Iraq Historic Allegations Team’s 3,392 cases. IHAT cost the taxpayer some £60m and was disbanded in 2017 without a single prosecution. Shiner himself was struck off, bankrupted, and in December 2024 sentenced on three counts of fraud. But he had also defrauded the British people by accusing the soldiers who had defended them.

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This week, The Telegraph published its investigation, having scoured 25,000 pages of papers from the Al-Sweady case. It showed that the lead counsel for eight of Shiner’s Iraqi claimants was Richard Hermer, now Lord Hermer, the Attorney General of the United Kingdom, He took the brief not under the cab rank rule, but on a conditional fee arrangement with a success uplift: he deliberately chose to do this work.

What’s more extraordinary is that he chose to continue even after he suspected the claims might not be credible. In 2008, Hermer advised Leigh Day on a draft press release. His own suggestion, which we have in writing, was that a particular wording would “give us some wriggle room if the killings did not in fact happen”, and that the release needed to be “slightly more explicit” about “executions of prisoners” to “generate sufficient interest”. Shiner replied: “I think R is right, so let’s up the ante.” A line alleging torture and execution of witnesses was duly added.

Those allegations weren’t just lies: they put British troops at risk. Those words were recruiting sergeants for those who saw our troops not as friends trying to protect Iraqis from Iranian-backed militias, but enemies come to murder their sons. How many soldiers died as a result of what was said at that press conference? We will never know.

Five years later, as the case collapsed around him, Hermer didn’t back down. Instead of encouraging the claimants to go quietly, he was advising that they seek settlements of between £45,000 and £55,000 per claimant. Not to vindicate his clients, whom his correspondence with his solicitors shows they doubted, but to conclude settlements before Sir Thayne Forbes gave what was ultimately his damning judgment. That is not service to the country.

The Prime Minister himself worked the same seam, pro bono, for interveners including Amnesty International and Liberty. Out of choice, not obligation, Starmer and Hermer brought to bear the full weight of the British human rights industry against the junior soldiers their own leaders had already shamefully abandoned.

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I wrote about this betrayal as the first thing I did on leaving the Army, in The Fog of Law with Laura Croft for Policy Exchange in October 2013, and in Clearing the Fog of Law with Richard Ekins and Jonathan Morgan two years later. I could already see what was coming.

The operational consequences are no longer speculative. Lieutenant General Sir Paul Newton observed a decade ago that commanders at every rank were registering creeping risk aversion, pre-empting the inquiry they knew would follow any decisive action. The question had shifted from what the enemy would do to what the judges would say. That is not a framework in which wars are won, the weak protected, or lives saved. It is one in which they are slowly, expensively, lost.

Hermerism today is the defining creed of our Government. It is the clerical dogma that democracy is subservient to an eternal law interpreted by a cult that puts the security of the British people under the most expansive reading of human rights law. It is the luxury belief only possible among those who have no understanding of true danger and the cost of war. It leaves us weak, unable to protect ourselves, and empowers those who are willing to use force and ignore the pompous piety of the legal priests.

Not content with emasculating our forces, Hermerism is also neutering our foreign policy. In a Lords debate last April, pressed by Lords Verdirame and Godson, Foreign Office minister Baroness Chapman defended her Government’s “regret” at Lithuania’s withdrawal from the Convention on Cluster Munitions and at Poland and the Baltic states’ withdrawal from the Ottawa landmines treaty. Frontier democracies preparing for a Russian army that has raped and murdered innocents were being reproached by a British minister for defending their own soil.

It’s no surprise that in Washington, British soldiers – who once stood as America’s most trusted wingmen – are now seen as little different from the Dutch peacekeepers who cited their rules of engagement and stood by as the men and boys of Srebrenica were marched away to be murdered in 1995.

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The hypocrisy is complete. These lawyers claim courage as they pursue 80-year-old paratroopers for decades-old allegations long since disproved, then fall silent when the Uyghur community in Xinjiang asks for protection from China, or the villagers of Darfur for protection from the Janjaweed. If courage costs nothing and pays well, perhaps it has another name.

People are busy. They do not follow every disclosure or tribunal ruling, every email released five years too late, and every allegation, but they know recruitment is down, and those they respect are walking away from uniformed service. We all know something is wrong.

When I first wrote about this poison, I could see its effect on the young men and women who were risking everything in battle. Their lives, in the heat and confusion of combat, weighed less than the views of lawyers in the cool and order of a courtroom. Now the poison, like Wormtongue at Théoden’s ear, sits at the heart of Government.

British people value rights and will fight to defend them. We welcomed Ukrainians whose lives were at risk and offered sanctuary to Afghans who fought alongside us. It is not justice the public recoils from, it’s the con: the rights of the nation’s enemies placed above the safety of its children, and the lawyers who claim to defend the weak profiting from legal tricks against those who stand between us and the devil.

These revelations must mark the end. Parliament should derogate from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) in deployed operations, as Article 15 expressly permits. It must legislate a clean doctrine of combat immunity, and restore the primacy of the Geneva Conventions, not of civilian courts. And Parliament should not repeal the Northern Ireland Legacy Act. It should keep it, strengthen it, and apologise to the octogenarians it was written to protect.

Lance Corporal Brian Wood of the Princess of Wales’ Royal Regiment, awarded the Military Cross for Danny Boy and then falsely accused by Lord Hermer’s clients of executing prisoners, has called this week for the Attorney General’s resignation. He did not fight his heroic battle so that the lawyers who called him a murderer could run the country that sent him.

It wasn’t just soldiers who were used. Iraqi families who wanted nothing to do with the militias were exploited, their grief hired out, their dead made into props in a litigation business.

The industry that committed these legal atrocities calls itself the defender of human rights, and its most accomplished practitioner is the Attorney General of the United Kingdom. It is nothing of the kind. It is the slow, deliberate crippling of the only hand that, when the screaming starts, has ever reliably been raised to stop it.

First published in The Sunday Telegraph 26 April 2026

Who is in charge of the clattering train? asked Edwin Milliken, writing in Punch after the fatal crash at Eastleigh in July 1890. His answer was simple. Death was at the controls.

The axles creak and the couplings strain. As the train careered through the night, no one was driving.

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The same question could be asked in Westminster today. The footplate is empty and the driver is missing.

Some are pointing the finger at Sir Oliver Robbins. But where does that lead?

Robbins has left his post as Permanent Under Secretary at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office after it emerged that Peter Mandelson had been appointed Britain’s ambassador to Washington despite failing his developed vetting. The civil servant, it is said, overruled the security professionals and failed to tell the Prime Minister. His political judgment was off, they say, and he must go. And go he has.

But what is the order of things? And what should have happened?

By the time Robbins arrived, we could already say: the pace is hot, and the points are near. Mandelson’s appointment had been announced publicly before Robbins took up his post. That key fact determines everything.

A public announcement of an ambassadorial appointment is not an invitation for discussion. It is a statement of fact, made only after agrément, the formal acceptance of a representative from a foreign state, has been received from the host government.

The announcement, made on 20 December 2024, meant, or should have meant, that the White House had already confirmed it would accept Mandelson as His Majesty’s representative.

That is not a bureaucratic formality but a formal diplomatic exchange between sovereign governments. You do not request agrément before vetting is complete, because to do so is to state, on behalf of the British Government, that the candidate is suitable. It is not an opinion. It is a statement.

Once given, agrément is extraordinarily difficult to rescind without a diplomatic incident.

So what was Robbins supposed to do? He arrived in post in January and read a file that, in all likelihood, said nothing new. The signals had flashed through the night in vain. The cautions in that file had already been communicated to Number 10 by journalists and, as the Prime Minister confirmed in Parliament, the security services before the appointment was announced.

But no one was listening. Sleep had deadened the driver’s ear. The Prime Minister had been told of the concerns, understood the reputational risk, and proceeded anyway. He judged Mandelson’s commercial and political usefulness in managing the early Trump relationship outweighed the warnings. Or perhaps he just owed Morgan McSweeney a favour. That is a political judgment, and it is, in the end, the Prime Minister’s to make.

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Which brings us to the constitutional question. If Robbins had walked into the Foreign Secretary’s office with the file and said the appointment could not proceed, what exactly would he have been doing? He would have been a civil servant vetoing a political decision taken by an elected Prime Minister who had been informed of the relevant facts. That is not his role.

Civil servants advise, ministers decide. The moment a Permanent Secretary substitutes his judgment for that of an elected government on a matter that government has already considered and determined, he is undermining British democracy. That is far more serious than any failure of process.

There is a second question. Why, having identified the vetting failure, should Robbins have escalated it? To what end? The decision was taken. The agrément had been given and publicly announced. Broadcasting the concern at that stage would not have protected national security. The appointment was already in train and the envoy already on his way to Washington. Robbins’s principle would have been vanity. He would have achieved nothing but the undermining of a British ambassador, depriving him of the authority he needed to do the job the Prime Minister had sent him to do. That is not governance. It is petulance, and it damages the nation.

The real sequence of events is now coming into focus, and it is rather different from the narrative Number 10 has offered. The Prime Minister made a political judgment about a twice-disgraced candidate whose vulnerabilities we all knew. He assured the White House the candidate was suitable by seeking agrément before he could have been confident that what he was instructing the King to say was true. Vetting was not complete, or at least the failed result had not formally communicated to him. Then he announced the appointment publicly before the process was concluded.

In short, the Prime Minister is not right when he says that “process was followed.” It was not. Against the advise of the then-Cabinet Secretary, Sir Simon, now Lord Case, Starmer announced before the vetting had been completed.

By overriding the Foreign Office advice politically, and announcing publicly a result while the process was ongoing, he removed the brakes from the clattering train and silenced the signals. He stripped officials of any practical ability to act on an adverse finding and ensured one outcome.

That is not a failure of process by the Permanent Under Secretary. It is an evasion of process by the Prime Minister himself.

As the red-tape-tied lawyer always explains when he doesn’t know what to do and gets himself into a tight spot, process must be followed. In this case the sequence is long established: internal selection (always conditional and subject to vetting), then vetting, then agrément, then public announcement. That’s not bureaucratic conservatism. It is the architecture of accountability. Each stage is a brake, allowing officials to slow the train and warn of danger. Collapse the sequence through political override and the brakes become decorative. Officials are left powerless.

Keir Starmer has said he is furious. He has called it staggering and unforgivable that he was not told. But look at the timeline. What more was there to say? Did he need another letter for the file repeating the caution he had already received, reported in the newspapers, broadcast in so many podcasts, and judged acceptable? Would a note formally recorded in a file have had more power than the massed ranks of the British press? Should he have been told that the process he had already short-circuited had produced the result that short-circuits tend to produce?

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Milliken was right, and the change of centuries has changed nothing. It was not the points or the flashing signals that drove the train to destruction. It was the inattention of the driver.

In this case the driver was not asleep, but he might as well have been. The Prime Minister heard the signals and saw the lights, but the train careered on. That is the charge that matters, and no resignation by any Permanent Under Secretary can hide it.

Who is in charge of the clattering train?

The axles creak and the couplings strain,

And the pace is hot, and the points are near,

And Sleep has deadened the driver’s ear,

And the signals flash through the night in vain,

For Death is in charge of the clattering train.

The first few hours on the run are exhilarating; everything seems to happen at once. The noise and the danger are so present that the drills kick in and for a while, time seems to slow down. Later, as the adrenaline wears off, exhaustion and fear take over. That’s when resilience and courage are needed.

Alone, without a team, the US F-15 airman who crashed in Iran would have needed every ounce of his training and strength to continue to hide, move, communicate and pray for rescue. He wasn’t on the run for a night with his team, as I was 20 years ago, but for two days with no one. That’s tough.

Though the details are sparse, what is becoming clear is that the US combat search and rescue team have achieved a remarkable success. Across hostile ground, with a local population aware of the prize within their grasp, and with capable units tracking and searching for him, the airman was brought out.

That speaks to a military team of huge power and resourcefulness. There’s no other nation that could have done it. Fifty years ago, even the US wouldn’t have been able to do it.

One of the defining moments in recent Iranian-US relations was the attempted rescue of the so-called Iran hostages. In those first days after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, it wasn’t clear that the regime would be so hostile to Washington. The cries of “Death to America” were yet to be heard on every street. Many in the Iranian military, which had switched allegiance from the Shah to the ayatollah, had trained alongside US troops or at US bases.

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The first attack on the US embassy that February by a Marxist guerrilla group was condemned. After storming the mission, capturing a Marine and threatening to kill the ambassador, the Iranian government helped retake the compound and restore US control. In September, another Communist group tried again, but the Islamic regime restored order. That’s what made the kidnapping of the 66 American men and women working at the US embassy in November so surprising.

This time, the assailants weren’t Leninist atheists, but Khamenei-supporting students who had not been stopped.

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What followed was Operation Eagle Claw, the catastrophic failed rescue attempt that left eight American rescuers dead and ushered in the end of Jimmy Carter’s presidency, the election of Ronald Reagan, the creation of the Special Operations Command (SOCOM), and the beginning of four decades of hostilities between Tehran and Washington.

It also saw a young Donald Trump saying in an interview: “That this country sits back and allows a country such as Iran to hold our hostages, to my way of thinking, is a horror.”

With a history like that, in hunting for the missing airman, Iran’s forces were looking for a prize to remind the US of the price of failure. While Americans were desperate not just to find their comrade, but also to ensure they could avoid a repetition of Iran’s capture of British Royal Navy personnel in 2004, and again in 2007.

No one was in any doubt that the stakes were as high as they could be from the moment the airman ejected. Every element of the US military machine would have been devoted to his recovery. The US has always seen the protection of its own forces as a key moral element of its fighting capability. Since the Second World War, pilots and special forces operators have been issued with silk maps that can be folded up and sewn into uniforms, and gold coins that can be taped to belts or hidden in boots, to help them orientate themselves and bribe their way out of trouble. No doubt, this airman had them too.

Maps were not only good for directions. They contained words written in all the languages that were likely to be useful, including requests for help and promises of reward. And the maps themselves would have their own value. Some armies promise their troops that should the serial number on the map be matched with a name, it can be turned into thousands of dollars at any embassy in the world. Again, a way of making it easier for them to hide or escape.

But the key is to remain hidden. In the desert, where few people are around and any outsider would be noticed, that’s not easy. After 24 hours, he would have been looking for water, not food. And while it wouldn’t have been too cold, he would have needed to hide from watchful eyes.

Still, technology would have made that easier. The airman would almost certainly have been carrying a personnel recovery device capable of sending encrypted bursts to satellites overhead, allowing rescue teams to track his position without him needing to break cover or risk a voice transmission. And drones would have been redirected to watch over him, marking threats and mapping routes in the area.

When the opportunity finally came, the combat search and rescue team, which was likely to be a mix of air force pararescuemen and special operations helicopters who had rehearsed this scenario hundreds of times, would have been sent in.

That’s why this succeeded while Operation Eagle Claw failed. In 1980, the teams hadn’t trained together, the helicopters broke down. Most fundamentally of all, the command chain was confused, leading to conflicting assumptions and orders. The disaster at their forward base, Desert One, was a system failure that the US military has corrected.

This rescue is proof that the years of integration and leadership that SOCOM offers have prepared the American military better than any other. That deep understanding of joint operations and relentless rehearsals has made US special operations the most capable in the world. Losing a C-130 and a helicopter won’t matter, so long as everyone is brought home.

For Britain, there is a harder lesson. We couldn’t have done it. We do not have the platforms, the satellites, the reach or the mass. Our rescue plan, if the airman were British, would be to call the US. Our only choice would have been reaching out to Washington or capitulating to Tehran.

The Americans got their man out because they decided, decades ago, that they would never accept the alternative. That’s given them a power that demands respect. Britain once had it. Like America, we could decide to have it again.

First published in The Telegraph 05 April

Stirling Castle controlled Scotland throughout the 16th century. Its position, scale and splendour spoke of a monarch dominating his kingdom with military and moral power.

That was no accident. James V was in his pomp when he called artists from across Europe to make his new French wife, Mary of Guise, feel welcome. The palace he built, begun in the 1530s, was the first Renaissance palace in the British Isles.

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French masons carved the façade. German engravings supplied the patterns. Scottish ambition paid for it all. Walk outside the Royal Palace today and the statues still stare down at you. Warriors line the south parapet. Below them stand the full-size figures: Venus, the goddess of love and fertility, is rendered twice for emphasis but it is no coincidence that the first of these is Abundance.

James V had understood what too many have forgotten: his legitimacy came not just from God, but from his bounty. He knew that he needed to provide for his people. Abundance was not a luxury; it was a doctrine.

Today, across Europe and here at home, too many have replaced the pursuit of abundance with the management of constraint and this fundamental defeatism is costing us all.

Energy, the foundation of every industrial economy since James Watt, has been deliberately restricted through carbon targets, planning vetoes, and a regulatory apparatus that treats the production of power as a problem to be contained rather than a capacity to be unleashed.

Britain’s Grangemouth refinery is closed, North Sea plans are vetoed, and the Gainsborough Trough sits untapped for its gas. In Germany, the story is similar: shuttered nuclear plants and American gas imports at four times the price it once paid for Russian supplies.France alone is resilient with its own nuclear plants, but even they depend on other sources.

The continent that launched the industrial revolution is choosing to make energy expensive and is surprised when industry leaves.

In Britain, we’re doing the same with capital. Pension funds that once financed railways in Scotland and bridges in Wales, creating the infrastructure to connect a growing economy, have been herded by regulation into government bonds.

The money isn’t destroyed but nationalised: extracted from productive investment and lent back to the state to fund its own consumption, generating the returns of the bureaucrat, not the entrepreneur.

That is, starving companies that might have grown cannot find backing. The heirs of Adam Smith look elsewhere as the savings of millions of working people are converted, silently, into gilts that fund today’s spending rather than tomorrow’s prosperity.

James V would have recognised the parable of the talents enacted as fiscal policy, but seen us as the foolish servant who was scolded, not the wise ones who returned a profit.

The result is invisible but can be felt: Europe today is ageing and protecting the past, instead of aspiring to the future. That’s not just bad for the young; it hurts us all.

Emigration is as important as immigration and seeing rural communities from the Scottish Highlands to southern Italy leave is heartbreaking.

To the family, it’s a lost connection; to the state, it’s a debt paid in education now uncollected in taxes. That’s no way to build a future.

Losing abundance has also unbalanced our relationships, as Henry Kissinger saw decades ago. In 1966, he warned that it was in neither America’s interest nor Europe’s that Europe should become “the Greece to our Rome, a political backwater, interesting culturally but unable to play an active role”.

Hegemony without allies is demoralising, he argued, and the only way for America to sustain its influence was to share both the costs and the responsibilities of the common defence.

The alternative was that its allies would simply shift those burdens onto Washington. That is precisely what happened. And now Washington is deciding, not unreasonably, that it has had enough.

Stirling Castle is a museum now and tourists, many American descendants of those who once built it, walk through rooms where James V once danced. It is beautiful, lovingly restored, and entirely powerless.

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That is the fate Kissinger described, and it is the fate Europe is choosing: culturally interesting, strategically irrelevant, a playground for visitors – underwritten resentfully by another’s protection.

This is bad for Europe, for America and bad for the West. A world in which the United States carries the full burden of defending the liberal order is brittle. Alliances work when every member has something to offer and something to lose.

A Europe that has outsourced its energy, nationalised its capital, and hollowed out its defence industrial base has very little left to contribute and very little leverage with which to shape its own security.

The statues at Stirling Castle depicted abundance because James V understood that abundance is the precondition of power. We have chosen scarcity, called it virtue, and wondered why the power followed the energy to where it is welcome. It is time to build again.

First published in The Telegraph 23 March 2026