It was a day of huge consequence, to which everyone involved was somehow inadequate. In the previous 24 hours, we had seen our most important ally standing shoulder-to-shoulder with our greatest enemy. The Nato alliance was in tatters. Now the prime minister was telling us our response would be a great national mission. Although, he felt obliged to say in the next sentence, he could achieve this without any of us noticing.
Keir Starmer’s announcement that defence spending would rise to 2.5 per cent of GDP in 2027 was hardly a statement to the chamber that the British Empire would fight on, if necessary for years, if necessary alone, but it was something. Sitting next to him, Rachel Reeves gulped. Any hopes she might have had of spare money for nice things had disappeared.
The statement was generally welcomed, but there was an air of unreality about the discussions. Ministers are still pretending they can do everything they want without raising taxes or borrowing, and the Conservatives, unable to argue for either of these things, are pretending to believe them.
The day had begun with what we were told would be a “major speech on foreign policy” from Kemi Badenoch. The prime minister’s statement meant the Tory leader’s speech wasn’t even the most important one before lunch, but even in a news desert, it would have struggled. Pressure of events means there simply isn’t space to deal with it as it deserves, but there’s time for a flavour.
“We can no longer hide behind vapid statements,” Badenoch began, and this at least was a point she would prove in the ensuing minutes, though probably not in the way she intended. “No one owes us a living,” she said, which turned out to be a quote from Yes Prime Minister. In the sitcom, the next line was: “Who wrote this rubbish?”
“Irving Kristol talked of a conservative being a liberal mugged by reality,” she said. “And, on foreign policy, that is exactly what I have always been: a conservative. Not a liberal. Not a neo-con.” In fact, Kristol’s line was about neo-conservatives, so Badenoch’s use of it made no sense. That line had been briefed in advance, and her error had been extensively discussed online. It says a lot about the Tory leader that she went ahead with it anyway.
“We cannot waste effort on trivia such as declaring our pronouns or trying to redefine what a woman is,” she said. “Every single second that we spend on these matters is a second lost while our adversaries are advancing.” That might have been a worthwhile point if the prime minister had spent a single second of his hour and a half in the Commons on the subject, but he didn’t. Really the only person wasting seconds on the subject on Tuesday was the Tory leader.
The best way to understand Badenoch’s speeches is that her natural level is “online commentator”. If being leader of the opposition meant knocking out 600 words to sit under the headline “Woke Starmer Can’t Keep Britain Safe”, she would be perfectly suited for the role. Not really newspaper columnist material, you understand: she has neither the fluency nor the willingness to do research. But if you need a boilerplate rant against an imaginary Labour party to fill a spot on the website, she’d be perfectly adequate.
Which is a shame, because there was plenty to pick apart in the actual Labour party’s position, as Badenoch’s backbenchers showed. “It’s a start, not a finish,” Iain Duncan Smith observed. “We will find we have to be raising defence spending further.” Bernard Jenkin urged the government not to focus too much on the spending target. “The benchmark for the success of the Defence Review is not some arbitrary percentage of what we’re spending,” he said. “It’s whether we are spending whatever is necessary.”
Then there is the question of how all this will be paid for. There were voices raised in criticism of the cut to international aid, but all sides of parliament are still in the realm of comfortable fantasy. Badenoch urged Starmer to make “difficult decisions”. That she is still arguing that wealthy pensioners should get winter fuel payments suggests she’s not even ready for easy ones.
The Conservatives propose that everything can be paid for by cutting the welfare bill, which they completely failed to do when they had the chance, and not giving away the Chagos Islands. It’s hard to know what Tory foreign policy would be if there were no Chagos deal. They talk about it so much that I’m starting to wonder if they only began the negotiations over the islands as a trap for Labour, although there is simply no other evidence that the last government had that level of competence. By the next election the Tories will be promising a new house and a ride in a hot air balloon for every voter, all funded by junking the Chagos deal.
And what of the man currently touting himself as “Britain’s next prime minister”, Nigel Farage? What was his position on this vital matter, perhaps the most vital of all matters: national security? As on Monday, he wasn’t there. Of Reform’s MPs, only Lee Anderson turned up at all, and he had disappeared within half an hour, only to return half an hour later. Quick sandwich? Urgent call from the Russian embassy? We’ll never know.
The SNP’s Stephen Flynn denounced Reform as “Putin’s poodles”, a line that as a poodle owner, I resent. But it is notable that Team Farage has gone very quiet since the US president went full Putin. You have to feel sorry for Reform: there really were very few clues that Donald Trump would be like this.
