Eliot Wilson

Sir Keir Starmer’s cherished agreement on defence with the European Union seems to have been high on the diplomatic agenda for a very long time without ever quite reaching its top. The Labour party’s manifesto for last year’s general election promised an 'ambitious new UK-EU security pact to strengthen cooperation on the threats we face'. We have heard the word 'reset' in terms of our relationship with the EU so often that it has lost most of whatever meaning it once had. Next week, however, the UK will host a summit for the Prime Minister to engage with EU leaders and, at last, approve this long-anticipated and discussed defence deal.

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.

It hardly feels like a serious discussion of the Conservative party’s future until Lord Frost has indicated where the leadership is going wrong. As Steerpike reported this weekend, the architect of the Brexit withdrawal agreement and former Scotch whisky salesman delivered a speech at the annual Margaret Thatcher Freedom Festival, and had some advice on the future relationship between the Conservatives and Reform UK. It is perplexing to understand how Lord Frost has become some kind of sage of conservative thought Frost argued that the door should be left open to some kind of electoral pact or agreement between the two parties closer to the next general election in 2028 or 2029.

We may look back to find Sir Keir Starmer partly defined by the phrase ‘coalition of the willing’. It is hard to fault the prime minister’s energy in rallying nations to implement a peace settlement in Ukraine, but there are issues to unpick. Who makes up the coalition? What is its role in Ukraine? What forces and capabilities will it need to fulfil that role, and where will it get them? The answers to these questions are both vague and subject to change, so let us see what we can establish. Only two months ago, President Zelensky told the World Economic Forum that enforcing a peace settlement would require a force of ‘at least 200,000… a minimum. It’s a minimum, otherwise it’s nothing.

Somewhere in an office on the south bank of the Thames, a man is writing in green ink and signing himself simply ‘C’. He is doing these things because all of his 16 predecessors have done so since 1909. Sir Richard Moore is Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), more popularly known as MI6, the only employee of the organisation whose name is made public, and he will soon step down after five years in the role. SIS is Britain’s foreign intelligence organisation, collecting and analysing human intelligence overseas to protect the United Kingdom’s national interests, inform the government’s strategic understanding of the global situation and support counter-terrorism, counter-proliferation and cyber security.