Eliot Wilson

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 Senate rejected a resolution to halt further action. Meanwhile, President Trump has been alarmingly indifferent to the question: Whatever the time is, it’s

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

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

Long before he was president of the United States, Donald Trump was a caricature. Producer Mark Burnett approached him to be the lynchpin of The Apprentice precisely because he was a cartoonishly bombastic, ‘greed is good’ era figure addicted to displays of gold-plated opulence. Since occupying the White House, Trump has also frequently acted as a stereotypical

The United Kingdom’s allies in Europe are concerned that the British government is not allocating enough resources to defence and that our armed forces’ capabilities are already suffering as a result. No one likes to be openly chided by their friends – and it stings all the more because it is true. Last week, the

Sir Keir Starmer’s announcement last February that the government would increase defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP from April 2027 seems a long time ago. It was trumpeted as the ‘biggest sustained increase in defence spending since the Cold War’, but in fact represented a very modest rise from the 2.3 per cent

The current conflict in Ukraine has frequently been compared to the first world war. There is an echo of the same grimness and intensity: the huge artillery barrages, the sprawling network of trenches, the horrifying casualty rates. Amid all that, Sir Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron, clinging on to their ‘coalition of the willing’, are

Kemi Badenoch has announced a series of commitments on defence spending that she would implement if she were to become prime minister. This is an important and sensitive issue as the war in Ukraine continues and there are repeated warnings about the heightened threats to the UK. The Conservatives would reallocate £17 billion of public

‘Full steam ahead’: That was the verdict on the Aukus alliance from Defence Secretary John Healey after the United States concluded its review of the alliance this week. US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth delivered the good news to Healey and Richard Marles, Australia’s Minister for Defence, in Washington this week. But there’s a catch: