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From the moment David Cameron started agitating for a no fly-zone, he’s been looking for allies. France and Denmark look like they will support him, with Russia and India opposed and China perhaps willing to abstain at the United Nations. But what about closer to home, inside the coalition? Since the formation of the coalition, every policy has been tested by what will it do for relations between the parties? Oddly, however, there has been no such test about Libyan policy. Newspapers have not been writing about splits, differences and agreements. That may be because Lord Ashdown went on the Today Programme and voiced conditional support for a no-fly zone.

All hands to the Defence Select Committee this afternoon, for questions about the nation’s security apparatus. Of course, most onlookers were not remotely interested in the answers. For them, this gathering was convened to see if William Hague might regain his “mojo“. He didn’t get the chance. This was Letwin Hour. Or Letwin’s Two Hours, to be precise. After a difficult fortnight for the government, the brain behind Cameron’s premiership high-jacked proceedings. In insouciant tones, he explained the manifold complexities of the government’s security policy to the committee. Real terms defence spending is likely to increase after the next spending round and Trident will be replaced; both are a response

The government has been damaged by its response to the Libyan crisis and the SAS incident in particular. William Hague has been branded a ‘serial bungler‘, and the FCO’s response was condemned as slow and ill-prepared. The consensus is that heads should roll at King Charles Street. Many commentators have also argued that the Prime Minister was too quick to call for a no-fly zone over Libya. Nobody, not even government loyalists, could argue that the last few weeks have been David Cameron’s finest.   However, one can be too critical. Let’s start with the SAS mission. Something obviously went wrong, but it is hard to believe that ministers could

Everyone knows that a media narrative is a difficult thing to change. So No.10 must be annoyed that so many newspapers, from the Telegraph to the Independent, are suggesting that David Cameron’s response to the Libya crisis has been “embarrassing,” and rejected by the US. But the Prime Minister would do well to stay the course and ignore the media for a number of reasons. First, just because US Defence Secretary Robert Gates is sceptical about a policy does not mean it is wrong. Somehow, the US Defence Secretary’s words are now taken as gospel in the British media and the PM is meant to repent immediately. Why? So what

Daniel Finkelstein makes a simple but important point in the Times today (£): a Prime Minister’s foreign policy is determined by events more than by instincts. The revolts in the Middle East are defining David Cameron’s diplomacy. The emerging policy is a realistic expression of Britain’s current domestic and international capabilities. Cameron’s speech to the Kuwaiti parliament did not match Harold Macmillan’s ‘winds of change’ speech because Britain no longer disposes of continents. Likewise, Tony Blair’s messianic tendencies belong to a past era. Colonel Gaddafi’s murderous stream of conscious could have given cause to evoke the moral certainty of an ‘ethical foreign policy’. Cameron still empathises with Blair’s cause in

There’s a quite remarkable op-ed by Paddy Ashdown in The Times (£) today which goes public with a lot of the griping about Liam Fox that one heard behind the scenes at the time of the Strategic Defence Review. Ashdown remarks that the ‘problem with the SDSR was not speed, but lack of political direction.’ He then details how ‘Sir David Richards, then head of the Army and now Chief of the Defence Staff, had to bypass the whole process (and his Secretary of State) to appeal to the Prime Minister to avert catastrophe in the Army.’ Before concluding that: ‘The decisions made in the SDSR, with some notable exceptions,

As shocks go, Politician Uses the Correct Statistic is not particularly electric stuff. But I was struck nonetheless by Cameron’s claim in his speech earlier that, “we still have the fourth largest military budget in the world.” You see, Gordon Brown used to exaggerate this figure by various sneaky methods – and so, by his account, we’d be second in the military spending league table, rather than around fifth. Whereas Cameron had it spot on. Here’s what the latest top ten looks like, going off the best measurement that the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute knows (see their explanation here): On the face of it, this would appear to be

Labour is often seen as having presided over the erosion of the British military, squandering money on Cold War equipment and sending under-equipped soldiers to far-away battlefields. But away from the public’s scrutiny an even greater lapse occurred – the nation’s cyberdefences were left undermanned while the threat grew daily. As William Hague will tell the Munich Security Conference: “Along with its numerous benefits, cyberspace has created new means of repression, enabling undemocratic governments to violate the human rights of their citizens. It has opened up new channels for hostile governments to probe our defences and attempt to steal our confidential information or intellectual property. It has promoted fears of

As Cairo smoulders, it’s easy to forget about one of the most combustible ingredients in the Middle Eastern cocktail – Iran. Yet the threat still exists, as Tony Blair and Liam Fox have been keen to remind us. James Kirkup reports that the Defence Secretary has warned a Commons committee that Iran could have a nuclear device as soon as next year. Fox isn’t the first to make the 2012 claim. The director of the CIA did so last year. And a recent article by the former UN weapons inspector David Albright and Andrea Stricker – which I arrived at via Jeffrey Goldberg – explains just how Iran might pull

Few government jobs are as demanding as that of Permanent Under-Secretary, or PUS, in the Ministry of Defence. With Liam Fox as your boss, General David Richards as your colleague, and an exhausted, overspent department to run, it is no surprise that when Bill Jeffrey retired many of the government’s most senior officials – including, it is said, No 10’s Jeremy Heywood – balked at the challenge. Forward stepped Ursula Brennan, who until then had held the ministry’s No 2 job before a career in the Ministry of Justice, and what is now the Department for Work and Pensions. Here, Mrs Brennan has kindly agreed to answer a few questions

There are contrasting images of Nimrod the Hunter: the mighty king of the Old Testament, and the less fearsome figure of Elmer Fudd. Through no fault of its own, the Nimrod spy plane, the most advanced and versatile aircraft of its type, seems destined to belong in the Fuddian category. Several senior officers have written to the Telegraph, urging the government to reconsider its decision to scrap the aircraft. They argue, not for the first time, that Britain’s defence capabilities are being pulverised by political calculations. (Con Coghlin adds his strategic concerns in the same paper.) The top brass have found an ally in Unite, some of whose members build

Most of my 2010 predictions did not come to pass; and many of the ones I made a few weeks ago for 2011 might not either. But one seems to have been a good bet. I wrote:  “Liam Fox will come under renewed pressure when it becomes clear that the defence budget cannot afford both aircraft carriers.” OK, so I phrased it provocatively. The Defence Secretary is an able and canny politician and will deal with any pressure that may arise. But my point stands; namely that the Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR) may not the last word, given some of the problems faced by the example the Army.

Before they left office, Labour laid a number of contractual IEDs, primed to blow up sooner or later. Last year, the SDSR revealed that the Government had to buy the two aircraft carriers – whether they were needed or not – lest the taxpayer lose even more money. Now the Sunday Telegraph reveals that the coalition is powerless to stop money from Britain’s overseas aid budget being spent on hosting coffee mornings and salsa dancing to “raise awareness” of poverty abroad. Keen to scrap all such schemes, International Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell has found to his frustration that contracts signed by the Labour government cannot simply be scrapped, but need

Today’s Wikileaks will make uncomfortable reading for all parts of the British defence establishment – ministers, both old and new, and the senior military leadership. As a senior military officer told me, “this isn’t going to be good.” The diplomatic cables reveal that US officials and President Hamid Karzai at some point thought that British forces had bitten of more in Helmand than they could chew. The US NATO commander, General Dan McNeill, is quoted as saying three years ago that British forces have made a mess of Helmand. This is backed up by a comment, more than a year later, suggesting that President Karzai also agreed that British forces