Eliot Wilson was a House of Commons clerk, including on the Defence Committee and Counter-Terrorism Sub-Committee. He is contributing editor at Defence On The Brink and senior fellow for national security at the Coalition for Global Prosperity
The symphony of criticism aimed at the government for failing to live up to its promises of boosting Britain’s defences came to its crescendo this week. The lead author of last year’s strategic defence review (SDR), former Labour defence secretary and Nato secretary general Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, gave a speech at Salisbury’s Guildhall
The old joke runs that you can tell when a politician is lying because his lips are moving. It is unfair – our elected leaders rarely indulge in flat-out, unambiguous untruths – but part of politics is certainly about presenting complex issues in a favourable light. The current government has its own strange and maddening approach to
The Royal Navy has not had a good few weeks in reputational terms. It was nothing short of humiliating that it took three weeks to get the destroyer HMS Dragon to the eastern Mediterranean after RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus was attacked by Iranian drones on 1 March. The ship was the only one of six
Theodore Roosevelt, the blur of energy who occupied the White House for the first years of the 20th century, famously advised statesmen: ‘Speak softly and carry a big stick.’ Sir Keir Starmer is increasingly performing a morbidly fascinating inversion of this, and pursuing a policy of speaking loudly (and piously), while having no stick at
With Donald Trump’s threat that ‘a whole civilization will die… never to be brought back again’ looming on Tuesday night, a temporary two-week ceasefire between the United States and Iran was agreed. The arrangement, mediated by Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, is fragile, but showed who the leading players in the current conflict are. Starmer
Around dawn on Friday, a McDonnell Douglas F-15E Strike Eagle from the US Air Force’s 494th Fighter Squadron was shot down over south-western Iran. Although the Iranians initially talked about a ‘massive explosion’, it seems that anti-aircraft fire tore off the F-15E’s tail fin, causing it to crash; but the two crew members seem to
Donald Trump has never liked the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato). Disagreements have been managed before and problems deferred, but his recent rage at Nato over what he sees as a lack of support for his war against Iran is now threatening to bring the issue to a head. When he was still a candidate
There are those who will claim that Sir Keir Starmer has handled the UK’s response to America’s war with Iran skilfully and diplomatically. That said, one in ten of the population believes in astrology, so fringe positions will always attract some support. I would not even be sure the Prime Minister himself belongs to this
It has not required advanced training in detecting nuance or reading between the lines in recent days to understand that Donald Trump is annoyed. A man who wears his demands, if not quite his heart, on his sleeve, he has made it abundantly clear that he wants America’s allies, especially but not exclusively the leading
As soon as Operation Epic Fury, America’s latest campaign against the Islamic Republic of Iran, got underway on the last day of February, political, military and economic minds around the world should have turned their attention to the Strait of Hormuz. The waterway provided the only shipping route from the Persian Gulf to the Gulf
It was good news, albeit good news of the your-house-hasn’t-burned-down variety. Last week, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) announced that Leonardo UK had been selected for a £1 billion contract to provide the armed forces with a new medium helicopter, thereby securing the future of the company’s factory at Yeovil and 3,300 jobs dependent on
With Operation Epic Fury in its sixth day, it is hard to tell how long the current United States military campaign against Iran will last. It may not be swift; yesterday, the US Senate rejected a resolution to halt further action. Meanwhile, President Trump has been alarmingly indifferent to the question: Whatever the time is,
Being one of America’s closest allies – which Britain remains – is like having a very rich friend. You are invited to meetings and parties to which you might not otherwise have access, and people listen to you because of your connections. Sometimes, though, your friend will expect a favour in return which you know
Britain’s armed forces lack the mass, readiness and resilience needed to produce a credible deterrent in an era of intensifying threats. The danger comes not only from an aggressive and expansionist Russia but from a reckless and murderous Iranian régime with its back currently to the wall, while China continues to use any means at
Last week could have been worse for Sir Keir Starmer, but only because he remains Prime Minister – for the time being. After the tawdry relationship between Lord Mandelson and the late child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein surged back into the headlines, Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, was forced to resign as a burnt offering. For
Micheál Martin, now in his second stint as Ireland’s Taoiseach, is by our standards a political veteran, having led Fianna Fáil for the past 15 years. But like our Prime Minister Keir Starmer, after finding domestic politics ever more challenging, he is finding solace on the international stage. Micheál Martin’s response was simply not the
Parliament is pointless without debate. It is there in the definition of the word itself: the Old French parlement derives from parler, to talk or discuss. Parliament is a forum in which our elected representatives debate how we live as a society and a nation. It has not been as effective or interested in that
Keir Starmer has been seized by a dogged determination he does not always exhibit and has announced that he is seeking to revisit the UK’s participation in the European Union’s defence fund, SAFE. Established last May, Security Action for Europe (SAFE) is a fund designed to provide €150 billion (£130 billion) in competitively priced, long-maturity
Sir Keir Starmer is the most distinguished barrister to occupy the premiership since H.H. Asquith more than a century ago. His legal career, however, has repeatedly bowled him difficult balls he has struggled to defend. The latest googly is that in 2007 he was leading counsel for an intervention to the House of Lords by a
The government’s treaty with Mauritius to hand over sovereignty of the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT), including the joint UK/US military facility on Diego Garcia, has caused anger and fierce debate since it was signed in May last year. In the latest setback, it appears to prevent the United States from handling or storing nuclear
