Eliot Wilson

Your starter for ten: what is the difference between an ambition, a promise, a certainty and a commitment? If you can work it out, send a postcard to 10 Downing Street, SW1A, and you may have clarified the government’s plans on defence spending. Today, ten months after it was launched and following a weekend of drip-feeding of various elements by ministers, the Strategic Defence Review will be published today. The prime minister launched it – a demonstration of his strange literalism – at a dockyard, rather than risk anything so exacting as announcing a major policy review to parliament first. Already, however, ministers are coming badly unstuck over how much money they are planning to spend to implement it.

When Sir Keir Starmer was elected leader of the Labour party five years ago, it must have been a feat of imagination to picture himself as prime minister. It would surely have gone beyond his strangest fever dreams to think he would be dealing more or less weekly with defence policy. That he would be making spending decisions with an eye to placating President Donald Trump probably would have caused some kind of internal short circuit. Yet here we are. It is five weeks until Nato’s annual summit, held this year in The Hague, the first such gathering since Trump returned to the White House.

Fans of the classic British sitcom will feel a warm glow, as details of the forthcoming strategic defence review (SDR) were revealed this weekend. It leads with a proposal for a 'home guard' of civilian volunteers to protect the UK’s critical national infrastructure of power plants, airports, telecommunications networks and subsea connectors. Predictably, this cued up references to Dad’s Army, Captain Mainwaring and the Local Defence Volunteers (LDV) raised in the dark days of 1940.

I’m old enough to remember the last years of the Cold War. There were definite signs of a thaw by the time of my childhood – there were weary sighs when I wrote about the Reykjavík Summit for my prep school magazine – but the threat of genuine conflict still hovered over West and East, and we all understood that such a conflict could be existential. If nothing else, it currently provides a tinge of nostalgia to the strategic frostiness with Vladimir Putin’s Russia. The Telegraph reports that officials have been instructed to update contingency plans for a direct attack on the United Kingdom by a foreign power.

Ever since the beginning of March, when Sir Keir Starmer chaired what was called the 'leaders meeting on Ukraine', I have felt as if I have been occupying some kind of parallel universe. The summit was the genesis of what has become known as the 'coalition of the willing', a loose alliance of 31 countries pledged to provide a peacekeeping or 'reassurance' force in Ukraine, with the United Kingdom and France making most of the running. Now, disaster! The Times reports that Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, the chief of the Defence Staff, asked his European counterparts whether collectively they could generate a force of 64,000 to deploy to Ukraine in the event of a peace settlement.

You’re being ridiculous, they kept saying. Why do you keep talking about fish? The Brussels lobby could scarcely conceal its disdain when rumours emerged that the price of Britain concluding a defence agreement with the EU at next month’s London summit might be concessions on fishing rights. Defence secretary John Healey chided Labour’s critics for their 'Brexit rhetoric'. Daniel Zeichner, the food security minister, could hardly have been clearer when he appeared in front of the House of Commons Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee at the beginning of April. He dismissed the idea of defence being negotiated as part of a wider conversation about the UK/EU relationship, including access to fisheries: 'No decisions have been taken and there is no linkage'.

‘Join the Army and see the world’ used to be the War Office’s boast. In those inter-war years it meant Egypt, Malta, Jamaica and Hong Kong, but for a lucky few recipients of the King’s shilling their next deployment will be to organise rubbish collections in Birmingham. The government has announced that a ‘small number of office-based military personnel with operational planning expertise’ will assist Birmingham City Council in dealing with the effects of a month-long strike by refuse workers. At the end of March the council declared a major incident, with up to 20,000 tonnes of rubbish lying in the city’s streets and reports of rats the size of cats roaming with impunity.

On Tuesday, the United States Senate Committee on Finance met to question Jamieson Greer, Donald Trump’s Trade Representative. The subject – a masterpiece of senatorial understatement and restraint – was ‘The President’s 2025 Trade Policy Agenda‘. What it meant, of course, was the sweeping and stringent tariffs unveiled by the President in the shabbily glitzy game show atmosphere of ‘Liberation Day’ the week before. The extent of the new tariff regime has unsettled many congressional Republicans. Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin noted to Greer: ‘We want fair trade, but I hope you reocgnise tariffs are a double-edged sword, I would argue, a somewhat blunt instrument’.

Mark Rutte, the Nato secretary general, has a reputation for genial flexibility and an ability to evade trouble. During his record-breaking 14 years as prime minister of the Netherlands, he earned the nickname ‘Teflon Mark’. But while Rutte has previously demonstrated a rare ability to mollify Donald Trump, is the Nato chief in danger of being too complacent about what the president might mean for the future of the alliance? Rutte has no excuse for being caught unprepared: he came to the job at a highly challenging time, a month before Trump was elected to a second term as president. Rutte, more than anyone in Europe, knew the extent of Trump’s antipathy towards the alliance.

When it comes to defence procurement, there are no minor decisions. Complex technology, long time frames and staggering sums of money mean that any acquisition is a significant commitment. Sometimes, though, events conspire to turn that decision into a microcosm of the hard questions facing overall defence policy. The Royal Air Force is about to lose a significant proportion of its combat strength. It currently has a total of 179 fighter/strike aircraft, 143 Eurofighter Typhoon F2s and FGR4s and 36 Lockheed Martin F-35B Lightnings. However, almost a quarter of those – 32 Typhoons from the original Tranche 1 – will retire this year.