Dear oh dear. Mr S offers his condolences to anyone who tuned into Defence Secretary John Healey’s car crash interview with LBC’s Nick Ferrari this morning. The Labour man stumbled his way through a rather excruciating conversation, in which Ferrari took him to task over his defence plan’s figures.
Starting on submarines, the LBC host quizzed Healey on whether the UK government’s defence plans were cast-iron commitments or merely aspirations: ‘You talk about the nuclear submarines and to develop ‘up to’ 12. What does ‘up to’ mean? That could mean one.’
JH: These are… long-term decisions first of all.
NF: How many is it, Secretary of State? I could lose up to 30 pounds of weight – but I might lose six ounces. This is the reality. So what does ‘up to’ mean?
The Defence Secretary launched into waffle about how currently the number of attack submarines in the UK’s ownership stands at seven. But then his argument promptly fell apart, as he faltered: ‘That will allow us… that will allow us to grow the number of attack submarines and meet our Nato commitments in the future.’ That’s still not committing to a figure though, eh?
Moving on Ferrari turned to the cost of the Aukus-class subs that the government have scheduled to be put in the water in the late 2030s. ‘How much does each Aukus sub cost?’ he asked Healey. Again, the Defence Secretary couldn’t quite manage to answer the question. Quelle surprise…
JH: At the moment we’re designing and looking at how the components put together…
NF: You don’t know?
JH: You say yourself, it’s 2030s into the 2040s before the first of those subs…
NF: I know, but you must have an idea. So, we don’t know how many and we don’t know the individual cost?
JH: To be quite frank with you, we can’t tell the precise cost of what those…
NF: You must have a working estimate?
JH: We’re doing that now. But most importantly…
NF: So you’ve commissioned submarines and you don’t know the cost? So we don’t know how many submarines, we don’t know the cost.
Ouch. Watch the clip here:
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