Ukrainian drones knocked out three of Russia’s largest grain terminals last week. One of them Novorossiysk handled up to a third of Russia’s grain exports, or at least it did until missiles and drones put some five million tonnes off the global market, a third of the port’s yearly output.

The Kremlin claims that Kyiv is trying to provoke chaos. Extraordinary. From the nation that invaded Ukraine and continues to murder their farmers and sailors, it’s a bit rich to blame others for the consequences.

For years Moscow has attacked fields and farms, cities and docks. The past month has seen vicious attacks on Odesa, the Black Sea port that feeds so much of the Middle East, and now Russian drones have hit Izmail near the Romanian border, damaging Ukraine’s largest harbour on the Danube and one of its last shipping routes out.

In July, alone Russia launched 35 attacks against ships in port, 22 against ships at sea, and 67 against port infrastructure. But it didn’t stop there.

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A German bulk carrier had its steering disabled off the coast of Odesa and shipowners have stopped asking their crews to risk their lives by calling into Ukrainian waters. Traffic into Ukraine’s ports stopped for a fortnight at the peak of harvest time, leaving grain at risk of destruction by Moscow and dragging exports down 76 per cent in the first half of August.

Russia, the world’s biggest wheat exporter, fared little better, shipping 1.5 million tonnes in July against a five-year average of 3.1 million. That’s not just down to Ukraine. In a self-own of epic proportions, Russia has hit Turkish ships and Ankara has responded by withholding Dardanelles transit permits.

This isn’t just about the belligerent nations. Grain from the region feeds mouths around the world and the effect is already being felt far away. Wheat prices are up 30 per cent this year and the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation Food Price Index averaged 131.1 points in July, its highest in over three years.

For context, and to bring home the warning that should be flashing in capitals across the world, in February 2011 it read 137.7, shortly before Hosni Mubarak of Egypt was toppled. That may not have been directly Russia’s fault, but the heatwave of 2010 led to Moscow banning grain exports, triggering an increase in prices in the streets of Cairo and Tunis.

British crop yields are expected to be down because of the heatwave and the war in the Persian Gulf raising the cost of fertiliser.

Wheat is a carbon crop, at least it is if we want the amounts needed to feed half the world. For the kind of output that keeps prices low and volumes high, farmers need nitrogen, and industrial nitrogen is made from natural gas.

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This year, that’s been a problem for everyone. The Strait of Hormuz closed on Feb 28, isolating roughly a third of the world’s traded urea, a widely used nitrogen-release fertiliser. In April, the price of urea nearly doubled to $850 a tonne.

To date, food prices have not spiked as they did in 2022, but it’s worth understanding why. A lot of fertiliser was bought before the Gulf closed, the gas market has behaved better than it might have, and lorries have trucked product overland around the choke-point. But the grim truth is that all this is in the past.

A fertiliser shortage or a shipping disruption doesn’t raise the price of bread immediately. The former lowers the yield of next year’s harvest and the latter draws down the grain silos and doesn’t see them refilled.

With the Arab Spring, the bill took a year to arrive. In Britain, next year may be tougher than it should be. Not just because our last ammonia plant closed years ago but because our carbon border adjustment mechanism means we’ll be paying for the carbon in imported fertiliser, discouraging farmers from spreading it on their fields and boosting yields. That’s another reason to listen to Kemi Badenoch when she says net zero isn’t delivering a lower-carbon future but is costing us all.

It would be too simple to say food prices cause revolutions, there’s always more going on before someone suggests that the peasants eat cake, but prices can be a trigger. From Paris to Cairo, rising prices of staple foods have brought down leaders.

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There are no quick fixes, but there are actions we can take now.

First, just as the International Energy Agency requires member states to keep emergency stocks equivalent to at least 90 days of net oil imports, Britain could hold fertiliser reserves. The Department for Agriculture must think more strategically about inputs if we are to have the food security we need and recognise that nitrogen is a strategic commodity.

Second, we can buy the food aid now that we will likely need soon. The World Food Programme says 318 million people face crisis-levels of hunger and the organisation had only reached 45 million by midsummer.

Last time we waited, we saw food riots bring down presidents and trigger population movements that crossed continents. Unlike in 2011, we don’t have to wait to know the consequences of Russian and Ukrainian attacks on grain exports, we have seen it before.

It’s time to recognise the danger and stop hiding from the risks. Food prices matter to everyone.

First published in The Telegraph 17 August 2026

In the past week, Russia has destroyed dockyards in Odesa, targeted German ships in the Black Sea, and the Danube River’s port at Izmail. They have killed troops on the frontline, grain handlers in ports and sailors at sea. They have even targeted families, children and a market seller.

One technology has allowed them to do this: drones.

Today, the two most drone-capable nations are Russia and Ukraine. Without Kyiv to learn from we would be at real risk on a changed battlefield.

Back in March I was on a panel at Munich Security Conference where the threat was clear and one thing stood out. We all need Ukraine.

Kyiv have embraced electronic warfare and the improvised ingenuity of their nation has learnt to fight a superpower with whatever it can build or scrape together. All of it has become the embodiment of what is possible when the compulsion to act leaves no choice. A lesson that many of us may soon have to take to heart ourselves.

The admiration for this technological creativity stood in sharp contrast to the mood among Europeans. They spoke of alternatives to the American security umbrella, without real conviction, and I heard more than once the sentence that Europe would be in immediate danger should Ukraine fall to Russia.

That is true. But it is not the old Soviet shock army we need to fear, that armoured steamroller that a generation before us still dreamt of rolling through the Fulda Gap. Ukraine has shown us that this force is spent. What remains of Russia’s bungling troops is not military competence, they are dispensable even to their own generals, cannon fodder without value. What remains are monstrous powers of destruction.

The defence of Kyiv is the cheapest security purchase Europe will ever make.

Moscow has sent thousands of its own men to their deaths. Not for an ideal, but to beat out of Ukrainians the dream of a better future. Murder upon murder at home, rape upon rape abroad; that shows what this is really about, not military strength but carnal cruelty. That is the reality we must face. Spetsnaz battalions will hardly take Warsaw or Budapest. But they can turn those cities into hellscapes and let their political systems sink into the swamp of corruption. That is precisely why the defence of Kyiv is no act of charity, it is the cheapest security purchase Europe will ever make.

Some countries have grasped this faster than others. Poland, which shares a border with both Ukraine and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, is spending 4.8 per cent of its GDP on defence this year, more than any other NATO member. Warsaw is ordering tanks, howitzers, fighter jets and air defence systems at a pace not seen since the Cold War.

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Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk put it plainly: you cannot defend your border with a small budget deficit. He is right. Germany too, after decades of strategic slumber at the expense of American patience, is finally moving. The German defence budget for 2026 stands at 108 billion euros, nearly double what it was just three years ago, with the declared aim of reaching 3.5 per cent of GDP by 2029 and building the strongest conventional army in Europe. A permanent German brigade is being stationed in Lithuania. These are not symbolic gestures. They are the beginnings of something that should have started a generation ago.

For tanks and fighter jets are of little use when the enemy is already inside your walls. Russia does not only wage war. It corrodes. We have watched it in Georgia and Moldova. We are watching it across Europe, including in Austria. The defence against the Russian cancer of corruption and gangsterism is indispensable, not only to prevent military occupation but also to halt the creeping decay of those institutions that make democratic governance possible in the first place.

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We have all been targeted. In 2018, Russian agents poisoned Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury with a nerve agent that shortly afterwards cost the life of a British woman named Dawn Sturgess. A few months later, Austria’s then foreign minister, Karin Kneissl, invited Vladimir Putin to her wedding. They waltzed, and she even curtsied before the Butcher of Chechnya, Bucha, and Irpin, the murderer of Politkovskaya, Magnitsky and Nemtsov. Such abasement and cowardice was earned because Kneissl had been nominated on a ticket of the Freedom Party, which had signed a cooperation pact with Putin’s United Russia. It was a sign of who she really was.

Kneissl showed where her true loyalties lay when her government fell. She moved to France, then to Lebanon, and finally to Russia where she now runs a think tank at St Petersburg University. Kneissl herself is a marginal figure but she is a symptom of a corruption of Europeans and others and not an isolated case. A former Austrian intelligence officer is currently standing trial for espionage on behalf of Russia. Like many across Europe, Austrians were not merely influenced, some were simply bought.

That is why a term like neutrality is meaningless today regardless of the Soviet demands that committed Vienna to non-alignment in 1955. The world has changed. Finland and Sweden, neutral for decades longer than Austria, drew the honest conclusion after 2022: they recognised that they are inseparable from the free states of the European Union and not from the mafia regime in Moscow.

For the rest of the world this is obvious. In Austrian politics almost nobody is willing to say it. One exception is Veit Dengler, the ex-NEOS member of parliament who openly advocates Austria’s accession to NATO and describes neutrality not as protection but as an illusion. His own party has stripped him of the foreign policy brief for it and later expelled him for refusing to break his party’s manifesto promise to cut party funding. The fact that even a moderate party like NEOS takes taxpayer cash and vacillates over the best security citizens could have – NATO – says everything.

Ukraine and Iran show us that we must stand together.

And this is not a purely Austrian problem. Nationalist movements across the continent wave the flag in public and curtsy in private. Banking and energy networks that should long since have been severed still spread Russian influence across Europe and serve as levers for our subversion.

Ukraine shows us why this must stop. Iran shows us that we must stand together. Britain and the European Union signed a security and defence partnership last May the first formal framework since Brexit. Poland is rearming, Germany is spending on a scale unthinkable five years ago. But arms are only half the battle.

The most important currency of containment is the will to confront corruption in one’s own country, to follow the money wherever it leads, and to accept that neutrality in the face of this kind of aggression does not make us safe, but defenceless. If Ukraine falls: good night, Europe. The question is whether we are awake enough to prevent it.

First published in Die Presse 28 March 2026

There’s an airport in Asia almost nobody has heard of, being built next to a city most people won’t know, and sits opposite an island that has been forgotten by many – but it tells us everything we need to know about Communist China’s ambitions.

Kinmen Island is known for its seafood and rural calm – it’s very peaceful compared to so many other parts of the region. It is home to some 150,000 people who remained loyal to Chiang Kai-shek, the nationalist leader, when the Communist Red Army swept through China during their civil war. That means it is part of Taiwan, as the Republic of China is commonly known. It has its own small airport.

Just a few miles of sea across from Kinmen is the Chinese city of Xiamen. There, the new airport is being built. That’s not surprising, for Xiamen’s population of five million is growing and their current airport is not fit for purpose. The new international hub will have three runways and is expected to open later this year.

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This is where the trouble starts, because this isn’t a story about infrastructure but about power and how the People’s Republic of China is using development to bully the Republic of China (Taiwan).

It’s a warning to, and a reminder of, what’s really at risk with a global power shift to the Middle Kingdom.

Why? Because Beijing isn’t playing by the rules, it’s exploiting them.

It’s not unusual to have two civilian airports six miles apart, nor to have overlapping airspace. But there’s a well-understood solution to the challenge: share data, agree procedures, and set up a hotline.

Taiwan’s civil aviation authority has been asking to do just that for years, but it has been ignored.

In 2024, China went further and unilaterally activated new commercial routes, thus cutting the buffer between the two sides’ aircraft to about a mile. That’s dangerous, but it’s not a coincidence.

The refusal to coordinate is not an oversight in the project. On the evidence, it is the point of it. This isn’t about deconflicting airspace, it’s about conflicting sovereignty.

Seeing the construction from the bridge of a Taiwanese customs cutter tells you more about how Communist China intends to treat the rest of the world than any speech Xi Jinping has ever given.

The Kinmen playbook is repeated widely. Chinese coast guard ships ram and water-cannon Philippine vessels resupplying a garrison inside Manila’s own exclusive economic zone. Fishing militias form floating barriers miles long. Military jets harass Taiwanese aircraft, including a medical evacuation flight near Kinmen last year.

Earlier this month a Chinese nuclear submarine fired a ballistic missile about 4,500 miles into the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone, which was established by a treaty whose protocols China signed in 1987. New Zealand received a few hours’ warning and the United States, Taiwan, and Japan received none. You don’t have to be a hawk to find that threatening.

So what’s behind it? Why is Xi looking at a world that buys his country’s goods and supplies so much of its food and fuel, and choosing aggression over co-operation?

Beijing’s rulers are mirroring the structures abroad that they have lived with at home, and the friction between that authoritarian model and our own is causing tremors.

Every empire inherits the roads and rules its predecessors built. Today’s world, created from the ashes of 1945, is, by historical standards, strange. The winners didn’t choose to extract tribute but to export hope.

Democratic accountability, open trade, and rules instead of force were all part of ensuring the capital got rich by seeing the satrapies prosper.

The UN and global institutions were created to share power under the norms we, the victorious powers, made. China, then governed by the nationalists, was a founding member.

You can see the success all around us. With notable exceptions, the world has been more prosperous and peaceful in the past 80 years and few have profited more from the system than the People’s Republic of China.

But Beijing now looks like it wants to destroy the platform on which its wealth is built and instead return to the old style of empire that Xi’s predecessors in the Forbidden City would have recognised: tribute and subservience, not cooperation and engagement.

Just look at Hong Kong. Despite the guarantee of “one country, two systems” until 2047, in a treaty lodged with the UN, Xi has turned the city state into a state-run city. “One country, one system” was made complete by the National Security Law in 2020.

China’s rulers are trying the same central control across the UN system.

Taiwan attended the assembly of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) as recently as 2013, and the World Health Assembly until 2016. Beijing has since forced it out of both. That makes no sense, except as a display of power.

Excluding an island that sits on major air routes from the world’s aviation safety body makes Chinese airliners less safe too. And excluding Taipei from the global Covid response when it was one of the first to act endangered the whole world.

When a policy harms its own author, it’s not about safety or efficiency. These decisions are about erasing Taiwan from international life, whatever the cost.

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Exclusions of Taiwan are based on the so-called “one China” policy that supposedly ties our hands. The idea, repeated at every opportunity by Beijing, is that there is only one Chinese state and that Taiwan is a renegade province.

In 1972, Britain acknowledged Beijing’s position that Taiwan is a province of China. Taiwan, which held China’s seat at the UN until 1971, does not claim to be independent but to be the legitimate Republic of China – not the People’s Republic governed from Beijing.

But words in communiqués are chosen by lawyers for a reason. So we “acknowledge”, we do not “recognise”, and we do not “endorse”. We do not agree with Beijing and we do not disagree; we take no position.

But we also trade separately with Taiwan, recognise its passports and officials, and engage with it on security and technology. Our conversations with Taipei are not brokered through Beijing.

That is not unusual. In other disputes, we acknowledge one side’s position to work with them where we can without conceding a point – whether or not we share it, even in Europe. The EU holds the position that all European states may join it. Brussels aspires, openly, to a one-Europe policy. They’re free to do so, but that didn’t stop us leaving.

And unlike Britain, which once fell under the Roman Empire, one fact is worth stating plainly: the People’s Republic has never governed Taiwan. The Dutch, the Qing, the Japanese and Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists all have. Communist Beijing has not, even for a single day.

Still, the Chinese Communist Party is trying, through propaganda and aggression, to make the result feel inevitable. That is hard to square with reality.

Two pieces of history and a few basic facts make the fatalism premature.

In October 1949, Xi’s hero, Chairman Mao, landed thousands of troops on Kinmen’s beaches at Guningtou. Within three days the force had been destroyed. In 1958 nearly half a million shells fell on the island in six weeks, and it did not fall. Kinmen’s blacksmiths still forge the casings into kitchen knives and sell them as souvenirs. Deterrence at that particular spot has held for more than 75 years.

Since then, China has hardly become more united. The central control of the Mao era has given way to corruption on a scale that sends the children of the elite – Xi’s daughter among them – to be educated at Harvard. There they live like princes while Xi’s government arrests its own military commanders for theft at home.

There are suggestions that what troubled Xi was not the theft itself, since so much of the state is on the take, but the discovery that the generals, like Russia’s, had left the military denuded.

Any invasion of Taiwan would be hard enough – a 100-mile crossing of rough seas on to the few beaches suitable for a landing, perhaps 14 in all, with every one of them prepared.

The truth is that Beijing’s aggression is self-defeating, but recognising that truth is not comforting. An empire run Xi’s way rather than ours would make us all poorer and life harder for everyone, and still they press on.

Chinese communism impoverished and killed on a vast scale. It was not communism that lifted 800 million people out of poverty; communism put them there. Prosperity arrived when Deng Xiaoping opened the country in 1978 and joined the institutions of the free world that the Party now undermines.

Powers that set fire to the ship that saved them tend to regret it. The Mongols smashed the qanats that had watered Persia for a millennium. Historians argue about how much of the region’s decline to lay at their door, but no one argues that Merv recovered. It is still a ruin.

This is not about remote cities lost to history, but about us today.

In the South Atlantic, Chinese fleets are harvesting so many fish that they are making marine deserts, just as they did in their own waters. And the organisations we created for everyone’s benefit are being twisted for political gain. At one point Beijing’s officials simultaneously ran four of the 15 UN specialised agencies – more than any other country – and that is before you count the client states that vote as directed.

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Consider what that capture already costs us. When Britain’s own government hunted for reasons to surrender the Chagos Islands, its central excuse was that the International Telecommunication Union, an agency run until 2022 by a Beijing nominee, might one day be used to challenge our control of the spectrum that keeps Diego Garcia operating.

I said at the time that the argument was baseless, and it is. But notice what it reveals: capture the institutions and you win battles you never have to fight.

The mere shadow of bodies Beijing has bent was enough for a British government to talk itself out of British territory. Taiwan’s expulsion from ICAO, an agency then also led by a Chinese official, worked the same way. Of course it did.

Since then, Taiwan’s president wanted to fly to Eswatini, one of the countries with which it maintains full diplomatic relations, but Mauritius denied access to their airspace.

It’s hard to square the British government’s position on the continued security of the Chagos Islands with the would-be owners’ acquiescence to Beijing’s demands to disrupt Taipei.

That’s why the airport near Kinmen is not a lesson for Taiwan alone, but for us all.

So it is about time we made a few things clear. Britain takes no position between Taipei and Beijing on Taiwan’s final status, and nor should we. But taking no position is not the same as letting one side bully us into making its claims real.

Our one China policy does not commit us to rejecting Taiwan’s participation in ICAO or the World Health Assembly. Both are matters of safety, not politics. And the island-building, life-threatening attempts to intimidate Pacific democracies are a threat not just to them, but to all of us.

None of this is provocative. It is simply declining to let someone else exploit the benefits we built while denying them to others, and insisting on defending the true meaning of our own words.

The airport off Kinmen shows what happens when nobody does.

September's exercise in Nanyuki, where generations of British infantrymen have prepared in the African dust, will now be moved to Salisbury Plain. The climate and conditions are not, it's safe to say, identical. The Foreign Office pushed one on social media, but it's clear which one tells us about Britain's standing in the world.

According to the UK's chief diplomat, our relationship with China matters for our security, the economy and climate. Miliband talked with Beijing's envoy about Ukraine and the Middle East as part of what he called a 'consistent, long term and strategic approach'.

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That's all a very polite way of describing a deeply antagonistic relationship.

It is now clear beyond doubt that China is undermining our security, distorting our economy and poisoning our climate. The Russian drones killing civilians in Ukraine are coming from China, while those killing US service personnel and Arab civilians in the Middle East come from the same source, this time fired by Iran.

To Wang Yi these wars are an opportunity to test China's deniable weapons. To discuss both without raising Beijing's complicity in each isn't consistent with the long term peace of Europe or the interests of the UK. It's press releases with Chinese characteristics.

Of course Miliband should be there, ASEAN matters. And Kemi Badenoch's trade deal with the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership shows that Britain recognises that the Indo-Pacific matters and Britain should be there.

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But a good foreign policy must be able to walk and chew gum, as our American friends put it. We must be able to reach out to trading partners, call out hostile rivals, and perhaps most importantly, maintain relationships that have been strained by appalling actions by individual criminals, as ours were when a soldier was accused of murdering a woman in Kenya in 2012.

The truth is, all these actions are part of the same foreign policy, all connected, and all must be handled together. The trading system we built, the alliances we maintained and the hostility we deter were all one, right from the start.

In 1947, as the rubble from the Second World War was being cleared away, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade was signed. It was drafted by those who had witnessed the tariff wars of the 1930s, seen trade falter and stop, and watched the Great Depression feed the resentments that ended in conflict. They knew that trade was a defence against such a crisis recurring. But they also knew that a deal was defence, not just trade, and that depended on fairness and mutual respect.

China's growth is aurplus dumped abroad with state subsidy

They wrote rules to protect open societies from a vicious spiral of protectionism and dumping that had nearly destroyed them. It grew into the World Trade Organisation in 1995, as confidence that we could tear down the walls of division grew. Our countries agreed binding rules and dispute resolution systems to strengthen us, make us richer and share the benefits of victory the end of the Cold War had finally made possible.

They built a system that worked because its members accepted that the rules protected everyone, and we all had a stake in keeping them.

That was the open trading system China joined in 2001. Over the next quarter of a century, it has gained more from such openness than any other. Open trade made Beijing rich, not central planning and certainly not communism. Only when China's factories were plugged straight into Western markets, Western technology and Western capital could they flourish.

Today's holders of the Mandate of Heaven are burning the very boats that are carrying them across the trading oceans as they slowly destroy the system we built together. That's going to hurt us all, and sooner than most are willing to admit.

It's clear why. China's growth works because suppressed household consumption at home, combined with vast overinvestment in production, means Chinese families capture too small a share of what they produce, so factories churn out far more than their domestic markets need. The surplus is dumped abroad with state subsidy behind it to make it more than competitive. Electric cars, solar panels, machinery, and steel are all dropped on buyers in Europe who enjoy, briefly, the luxury of cheaper goods.

But this isn't the end of the process. The inevitable result is the closure of Western factories and growing struggles to keep up with Chinese advances in technology and production. So the result is not free trade, it is mercantilism with Chinese characteristics: trade used to create dependency and eliminate competition.

Some say Beijing is the master at long term thinking and this is a master strategy. I'm not sure. It reminds me of a conversation I had years ago in Cameroon, when a businessman explained to me that anyone who was not stealing from the company was a fool. Corruption was so complete that if you didn't steal it would make no difference: every business would fail, that was a given. The only question was whether you got your share before it did. That's the same short term result we're seeing from Beijing.

After just 25 years, and barely a decade since many Chinese families started to feel the benefits of wealth, we're already seeing the predictable and predicted response of tariffs, anti-dumping probes and friend-shoring as countries try to build supply chains that bypass Guangzhou. That will cost China very dear. Instead of the win-win policies Wang Yi so often quotes, this is lose-lose, with China's people set to lose the most of all, because Beijing treats the trading order not as a shared body to nurture but a carcass to strip, extracting everything it can before the collapse it's doing the most to make happen.

The more it floods our markets and displaces our producers, the faster the barriers will rise and production shifts elsewhere. And while that will cost us, we can adapt. Beijing's entire deal with its people is that prosperity replaces participation in government. That prosperity depends on Western consumers keeping factories busy. If today's emperor, Xi Jinping, burns the bridges that connect those plants to our people he risks that deal, and that risks unrest in China. That's not strategy but a race to the bottom.

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Finally we are beginning to see it. The cheap Chinese goods that felt like a quick win for consumers, keeping down inflation as costs fell and quality rose, masked the true cost: industrial competence, skilled work, and the ability to make critical goods at home were all disappearing. Without our manufacturing base we won't just depend on Beijing for widgets but for everything we need to defend ourselves. This stopped being an economic question some time ago, and it's made clear in Ukraine and the Gulf.

Kyiv is building a defence industry at wartime speed precisely because strategic dependence meant it was under the control of others, including some who sided with Moscow. We've got no excuse to ignore the lessons we're seeing every day.

Which brings us back to the Kenyan bush and Nanyuki.

Because let's be honest: Kenya wouldn’t have done this if Britain were still its industrial partner of choice, that’s changed. The railway from Mombasa to Nairobi was built by Chinese firms with Chinese loans, and Beijing is one of Nairobi's biggest lenders and traders. When your economy speaks quietly, your soldiers get shown the door. Trade and defence are not separate files in separate departments, they’re the same conversation, and we’ve gone quiet.

Our defence relies on some basics done right: trained battalions, defence agreements, trusted allies, and capable industry.

The row with Kenya can be fixed, but fixing it means we need ministers who recognise that this defence relationship with a vital African partner is a first-order priority rather than an administrative inconvenience; and that the rules we wrote for the WTO don't create a feeding trough for those who ignore them, and only work if we all enforce them.

We know what quick wins really cost. Russia is showing it in the three-week operation now in its fourth year, and China is playing the same game at global scale. It's long past time to call it out or we will be left with a straightforward choice: either we rebuild the rules of the WTO that allow the shared prosperity once dreamed of; or we rebuild our industrial sinews, protect the sectors on which our security depends, and watch the trade routes that have made China rich and strong wither. The handshake in Manila suggests nothing has changed. The training in Kenya proves everything has.

As Andy Burnham visits HM The King today and walks out with the world at his feet, he will already feel the slight tremors of rebellion. That’s not him, that’s Parliament, it’s the way our democracy is works.

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That’s where the whips come in. They’re there to feel the vibrations like a spider on its web to know before trouble starts where it might come from. So when Andy says he wants to weaken the whips. But before I admire his reckless courage, might he just have a point? I mean really, is it possible?

Before the Chief Whip feels my collar and corrects my tone, hear me out. I think there is something in it. Just not quite what he thinks.

This week, as nominations opened for the leadership contest that gave him North Korean-style endorsement, Burnham wrote to Labour MPs promising that under him the whips’ office would be a human resources department. Chronos the spider and other instruments of fear will be banished and debate will be encouraged. The whipping system, he argues, disempowers the elected state making Westminster the servant of Whitehall and MPs spend their careers as cyphers not voices.

He’s not entirely wrong, is he? And let’s face it, the truth is pretty depressing. Just think of everything that goes into choosing a candidate. The hustings, the evenings in village halls and community centres, the questions about experience and ideas and character.

And what’s the point if the winner will blindly follow the whip. Save the time and the money and give each whip one vote for the whole flock. Does a shepherd ask the sheep for a proxy?

Of course that’s not what we need. We need the connection our parliamentary system creates.

Every week I get hundreds of emails and a few letters. There are heartbreaking problems and somewhat unusual rants. Those that matter, really matter to the person who sent them: a child needing a special needs place, a pension dispute that has dragged on and left someone desperate, even a small business drowning in the paperwork some official promised the minister would be “light touch”.

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MPs get thousands of messages like this every month and each means there is a direct connection between Westminster and every corner of the kingdom and makes it a place not, despite so many contrary examples, for lines to take but a place to champion the friends and neighbours who are our community. The whole point of our system is that power connects to somewhere and we, those elected to serve, are responsible to them not to Westminster or Whitehall.

Isn’t that what Manchesterism is supposed to be? He’s got the point of our constitution and spotted a weakness that undermines it. Which makes what he says next so very odd.

Andy Burnham says he wants proportional representation and will put it on the ballot for the next election. So he wants to scrap the whips but bring in party lists that mean MPs answer to party apparatchiks who choose them, not the people who elect them.

That’s the reverse of the independence Burnham claims to want.

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Today, a rebel can throw himself on the mercy of his constituents, who have been known to reward a bit of spine (though rarely a bit of grift). Under a list system, you lose that. Cross the leadership and you simply vanish. The whips wouldn’t even raise their voices. Why bother? Everyone would know who’s really in charge.

So it’s a bit odd, though completely on brand, to hear Burnham condemn whips for being cyphers while proposing the system that would make them less than nothing. He must know, after a decade in Westminster, that he can abolish the whips if he the party has absolute control over an MP’s future.

The point of the whips, at their best, is not a punishment but ensuring you can keep a promise while maintaining independence. People do not vote for 650 free spirits and not nor can each of them be masters of every schedule and clause of every bill; they vote for a programme, set out in a manifesto, and they are entitled to expect the party they elected to deliver it. An MP who stood on that programme and then wanders off is not a romantic independent. They’re in breach of contract with their own voters. The scandal of recent years is not that whips existed but that they were used to drive through things no manifesto ever promised, dreamt up in departments and defended by ministers who privately agreed with the rebels.

So the answer is not to abolish the whip, and it is certainly not to elect a Commons of list appointees. It is to choose better people.

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That’s what Kemi Badenoch has got right. She has asked for candidates with the five Cs: clever, charismatic, able to communicate, full of conviction and, above all, Conservative. Leaders and thinkers, doers and makers. People who know the truth about hard work and where the money actually comes from. Independent minds accept the discipline of a shared programme when they helped shape it and believe in it. That is the difference between an army and a chain gang. Both march in step but only one volunteered.

That really sums up the problem with Burnham’s vibes. He has asked the right question about Westminster and has a feel for the problem but his answer would make everything he complains about worse. No surprise given he was a Whitehall minister for years and never once rebelled. Perhaps he knows better than anyone how the straitjacket feels having stitched a fair few himself.

Connections drive growth. Roman and Inca roads, the Mon­gol horse relay, naval sig­nals and, even­tu­ally, the global tele­graph net­work were all essen­tial for the suc­cess of their civil­isa­tions because know­ledge is power. For 100 years, Bri­tain led the world because Bri­tons were the first to know.

The suc­cess of 20th-cen­tury Bri­tain relied on a ground­break­ing under­wa­ter net­work of thou­sands of miles of cop­per cables: the All Red Line, com­pleted in 1902 by the East­ern Tele­graph Com­pany, con­nect­ing every ter­rit­ory of the Empire back to Lon­don.

Fast-for­ward a cen­tury and things couldn’t be more dif­fer­ent. The coun­try that wired the planet can no longer con­nect itself.

A few months ago, I left Paris on the Eurostar with a stack of work for the way home. French coun­tryside rolled by, yet I noticed noth­ing bey­ond my laptop screen. Fields that we’d fought over a cen­tury ago flew by unnoticed. I had my head down, slog­ging away, until we emerged, blink­ing, from the tun­nel.

That’s when I stopped to look up. Not because I wanted to, but because I was forced to. From the Chan­nel coast to Lon­don, my phone sig­nal came and went. Unin­ter­rup­ted tele­phone calls were impossible, and the inter­net was non-exist­ent.

That’s not just true of Kent. Just over a week ago, I was in Dul­wich, one of the wealth­i­est corners of Lon­don, the world’s fin­an­cial cap­ital. I had an after­noon’s work and a phone to do it on, but man­aged noth­ing because the sig­nal was use­less.

In my exper­i­ence, the cap­ital today has worse con­nec­tions than Kabul did when I was based there with the Brit­ish Army over a dec­ade ago. And I’m not alone in noti­cing.

After my day in Dul­wich, I pos­ted about it on X. Hun­dreds of people replied, report­ing sim­ilar exper­i­ences. A cam­paign group, Buf­fer­ing Bri­tain, was set up this year to tackle this grow­ing prob­lem.

To under­stand how we got here, I must first explain that all mobile sig­nals work in the same basic way: your phone com­mu­nic­ates with nearby radio towers using invis­ible radio waves. Stand­ard mobile recep­tion allows you to text and make calls, while more recent sig­nals like 3G, 4G and 5G allow devices to con­nect to the inter­net. But all come from the same cell towers.

EACH cell tower con­tains mul­tiple anten­nas, with each one trans­mit­ting a dif­fer­ent type of sig­nal or fre­quency band. Your phone con­nects to the antenna and fre­quency that best matches your net­work and device.

Sev­eral mobile net­works can also use the same tower. While the mast is shared, each pro­vider broad­casts on its own licensed fre­quen­cies, allow­ing EE, Voda­fone, O2 and Three cus­tom­ers to con­nect to the same struc­ture without their sig­nals becom­ing mixed up.

But the power of the sig­nals received on your phone is based on your loc­a­tion and, cru­cially, net­work con­ges­tion.

That’s why, if you’re amid the crush of a sold-out sta­dium, or at a music fest­ival in a remote field, the local net­work may buckle under the strain – leav­ing users with a patchy phone sig­nal.

But increas­ingly, this is hap­pen­ing in less crowded spaces too, leav­ing us without net­work recep­tion in a traffic jam, in major cit­ies and on com­muter trains.

The data con­firms it. A report by net­work test­ing spe­cial­ist MedUX car­ried out in 2024 ranked Lon­don rock bot­tom for over­all 5G mobile ser­vice in a list of 15 major cit­ies in Europe, brand­ing its speed, reli­ab­il­ity and avail­ab­il­ity ‘sub-par’ com­pared with cit­ies such as Stock­holm, Porto, Copen­ha­gen, Paris, Munich and Ber­lin.

Accord­ing to the net­work cov­er­age map­per Street­wave, only 55 per cent of Bri­tain’s land mass has accept­able cov­er­age.

The UK ranks 59th in the world for mobile down­load speeds, behind Kaza­kh­stan, Peru and Viet­nam. South Korea’s net­work is three times faster than ours.

What has gone wrong? Surely the UK, a G7 coun­try without a major war in almost a cen­tury, can’t struggle where Afgh­anistan, hardly the poster child of devel­op­ment, has suc­ceeded? Well, it can.

Often, angry neigh­bours are louder than those who would bene­fit

And the explan­a­tion is down to the same reason so much else in our national life is para­lysed: plan­ning.

Bri­tain’s plan­ning sys­tem makes new masts extraordin­ar­ily dif­fi­cult to build. The over­all plan­ning approval rate in Eng­land is 86 per cent but for tele­com masts, it is just 51 per cent.

In some local author­it­ies, rejec­tion rates exceed 80 per cent. Even suc­cess­ful applic­a­tions can take months, with some known to take up to 500 days.

And that’s not tak­ing into account the applic­a­tions aban­doned before the pro­cess has even star­ted, thanks to the risk of rejec­tion. Too often, angry neigh­bours are louder than the wider com­munity who would bene­fit from a new mast.

The path of least res­ist­ance, there­fore, is for local politi­cians to oppose new masts. Those rejec­tions are made easier partly because of how we meas­ure cov­er­age. An area can count as ‘covered’ even if mobile data is very slow, simply because it is tech­nic­ally pos­sible to con­nect to the phone net­work there.

Worse, masts can be eas­ily torn down by land developers and only need repla­cing within three years.

State con­trol and taxes stran­gu­late mast com­pan­ies and mobile net­works, too, mak­ing it ever more dif­fi­cult for them to invest in new infra­struc­ture.

This ludicrous web of state inter­ven­tion is not just killing an industry, it’s killing our coun­try.

None of this is inev­it­able. In France, for example, the reg­u­lator demands net­works main­tain cov­er­age along high-speed train lines with fibre laid into the tracks.

Nor are our troubles down to the decision to remove China’s Hua­wei from our net­works. France did the same. They star­ted rip­ping Hua­wei out in 2021, but their net­work is still bet­ter than ours. So what can we do?

First, we must grant auto­matic plan­ning per­mis­sion. If mobile

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Min­is­ters must accept phone sig­nal is the plumb­ing of national life

oper­at­ors see the need for a mast, plan­ning should be gran­ted – unless there are novel and dis­tinct grounds for object­ing.

Second, we need shared access. Net­work Rail has been in pub­lic own­er­ship for years and my pro­posal is simple: when a track will be closed for planned work, net­work oper­at­ors should have guar­an­teed rights of access to upgrade equip­ment on the net­work. If we’re pay­ing for that dis­rup­tion already, we should be able to bene­fit from bet­ter con­nectiv­ity after the work is done.

The Gov­ern­ment will point to Project Reach, its part­ner­ship with Net­work Rail and private firms to do exactly that. But it cov­ers only the East Coast, West Coast and Great West­ern lines, leav­ing South East­ern Main Line, the route through my own con­stitu­ency and the gate­way to the Con­tin­ent, with noth­ing. That must change.

My last demand is for the Gov­ern­ment to put a min­is­ter in charge of the rol­lout – this isn’t a ques­tion of tech­no­logy but of will.

None of this needs the Treas­ury. It simply needs min­is­ters to accept that phone sig­nal sits along­side water and power as the basic plumb­ing of national life.

It could not be more crit­ical as Bri­tain mod­ern­ises. Waymo, the self-driv­ing car com­pany, is plan­ning to launch in Lon­don later this year – something that could be hampered by the city’s poor sig­nal. In the coun­tryside too, the self-steer­ing tract­ors that are cru­cial to mod­ern farm­ing can­not work without decent con­nec­tion.

BT reck­ons a full 5G rol­lout could add £230bil­lion to the eco­nomy by 2035. But the truth is, it could unlock growth bey­ond that.

We led the world once because we chose to con­nect – and our fail­ure to keep up is cost­ing us all.

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