Eliot Wilson was a clerk in the House of Commons 2005-16, including on the Defence Committee. He is a member of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).
The contest to be the next leader of the Conservative party, which has six entrants and will last until November, by necessity involves a great deal of reflection. It could hardly be any other way, in the wake of the party’s worst defeat in its 200-year history: every aspirant is right to understand that there
John Simpson, the BBC’s world affairs editor, is a distinguished broadcaster whose career spans seven decades, from interviewing the exiled King Mutesa II of Buganda to covering the post-Gaddafi civil war in Libya. Like any of us, however, he is not immune from a poorly considered opinion. This week, on Twitter, he stumbled awkwardly over
It is possible to have some sympathy for the Defence Secretary John Healey, despite the irritating self-serving mantra of Rachel Reeves that the Conservatives have left a £22 billion fiscal ‘black hole’. Healey, generally a straightforward and sensible politician, has inherited a department with huge cultural problems, and real financial issues. In March, the House
It’s hard to keep track of Elon Musk. The X/Twitter boss has been busy taunting ‘TwoTierKeir’ Starmer over his handling of the UK riots, asking ‘What the hell is going on?’ in Britain. Musk has also launched legal action against a group of advertisers and major companies – including food giants Unilever and Mars –
The British Army’s Field Army Threat Handbook has warned soldiers of potential Russian espionage at UK sites where Ukrainian military personnel are being trained. Possible methods identified include ‘the use of remotely piloted aircraft systems, mobile and foot surveillance, virtual and physical approaches to training providers and interest from investigative journalists’. This is a threat
On Friday night, I watched the news with a sick heart. I watched masked men in Sunderland throw bricks and beer cans at the police and chant racist slogans. I recognised the setting. I grew up in Sunderland: I spent 15 years of my life there and still have family there. I was in Keel
Nigel Farage was elected as MP for Clacton by a solid margin of 8,405. Four other Reform UK candidates were returned, and the party won 4.1 million votes. This surely was the beginning of a great change, the breaking of the mould of right-wing electoral politics. Farage spoke excitedly of creating a ‘bridgehead in parliament’
As the Conservative leadership contest gets underway, the various candidates are busy talking up their differences. But most of the candidates – from Kemi Badenoch to Robert Jenrick – hold one thing in common: they realise that the Tory party needs to change if it is to recover from its electoral wipeout. A key part
The new cabinet cannot be accused of laziness. John Healey, secretary of state for defence, has just been on a 48-hour tour of France, Germany, Poland and Estonia, all of them important military allies in different ways, trumpeting the new government’s ‘Nato-first’ defence policy. The highlight of Healey’s breakneck trip was his meeting with the
Keir Starmer has been in office for less than three weeks, but his government has spent an unusually large amount of time and energy on matters in Northern Ireland. With his newly appointed secretary of state, Hilary Benn, the Prime Minister visited Belfast within days of kissing hands, despite a schedule which also included the
While this new government’s approach to many issues – the NHS, prisons, China policy – seems to start with a ‘review’, a re-examination of defence policy seems reasonable. New Labour launched a Strategic Defence Review shortly after taking office in 1997. The coalition did a defence review in 2010, and David Cameron’s Conservative government undertook
When the agenda for this week’s Nato summit in Washington DC was announced, one of the items on it was funding for the alliance. This was no surprise: the need to financially supporting Ukraine since the Russian invasion in 2022 and the possibility of a second Trump presidency leading to a lower US commitment have
In Westminster, Sir Keir Starmer is still in the honeymoon period as Prime Minister. In Washington, where Starmer heads for the start of the Nato summit today, the welcome is likely to be somewhat less warm. The new British team, made up of Starmer, foreign secretary David Lammy, defence secretary John Healey, and Nick Thomas-Symonds,
Next summer, David Lammy will celebrate 25 years as a Member of Parliament. At 51, he has just been appointed Foreign Secretary after three years shadowing the role. Despite rare and valuable ministerial experience, he is an unlikely candidate for Britain’s chief diplomat. His first pronouncements as foreign secretary stress change: ‘a reset on Europe,
The voters of Northern Ireland are used to being an impenetrable afterthought to most mainstream commentators in Britain. The general election has, however, delivered a series of enormous shocks, many of which are in danger of being overlooked. One of those is that Sinn Féin has seven Members of Parliament and is, for the first
No-one really thought that Klaus Iohannis, Romania’s president since 2014, was going to be the next secretary general of Nato. Iohannis put himself forward in March as a candidate who would bring a new perspective to the leadership of the alliance, but it was never a plausible bid. When Romania’s Supreme Council of National Defence
Nigel Farage likes to see himself as a reliable pal, so it was very much in that spirit that Reform UK’s new leader said that he was endorsing two Democratic Unionist Party candidates, Ian Paisley Jr in North Antrim and Sammy Wilson in East Antrim. Both are DUP stalwarts. Both are very likely to be
Rishi Sunak’s decision to leave Thursday’s 80th anniversary commemoration of D-Day in Normandy was extraordinary, stupid and disrespectful. He accompanied the King to a British ceremony at Ver-sur-Mer in the morning, at which Sir Keir Starmer, the leader of the opposition, was also present. But Sunak returned to the UK before the afternoon’s international event
The Conservative party is returning to defence and security for another election pitch and has unveiled a series of measures to support armed forces veterans. The proposals include a Veterans’ Bill enshrining rights, cheaper railcards for former service personnel and tax allowances for those who employ them. Taken with a plan to introduce a form
Still haunted by the memory of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, Keir Starmer has devoted today to reassuring the electorate that he is committed to maintaining nuclear weapons. The Labour leader is determined not to be seen as unreliable on defence and national security, so has announced that HIS government will introduce a ‘triple lock’ on the nuclear deterrent. A ‘triple
