Fox, Osborne and Cameron engaged in Whitehall’s oldest battle

Tory on Tory is a brutal cock-fight when defence is concerned. After the leaking of Liam Fox’s now infamous letter and David Cameron’s measured retaliation, George Osborne has broken his silence. Making unspoken reference to the £38bn black hole in the MoD’s budget, Osborne tells this morning’s Telegraph that he was ‘not thrilled’ to learn of Fox’s ‘do we really want to cut defence this much letter’ and says that Labour left the MoD in ‘chaos’, signing Britain up to ‘expensive and pointless projects’.

The press will run this as a conference Tory splits story. There are clear differences between ministers, but they actually reflect entrenched positions within the MoD: should Britain exercise an expensive blue water strategy or concentrate on a petite professional army designed for home defence and limited expeditions?

This debate is not new: Henry Pelham and Pitt the Elder disagreed vehemently over naval expenditure, and the sides of debate were never obviously delineated: some admirals sided with Pelham the landlubber.