Liam fox

A second letter from the Defence Secretary to the Prime Minister has leaked out. Tomorrow’s Times reports on a note that Liam Fox sent to the Prime Minister opposing the government’s plan to legislate for Britain to spend 0.7 percent of gross national income on overseas development aid. It won’t come as a huge surprise to anyone that Dr Fox is sceptical of aid spending. But for another letter from him to the PM to reach the press will further strain relations between the MoD and Downing Street. There will be those in the Cameron circle who think that it is not a coincidence that both of the missives that have leaked out have

Is the defence budget the most chaotic in all Whitehall? George Osborne said as much last October — and he’s still dealing with its hellish intricacies now. The main problem, as so often in military matters, is one of overcommitment. Thanks to various accounting ruses on Labour’s part, large parts of the MoD’s costs were hidden in the long grass of the future. It was buy now, pay later — with Brown doing the buying bit, and the coalition doing the paying. The number that William Hague put on it last year was £38 billion. The MoD was spending £38 billion more, over this decade, than had been budgeted. Even

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

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 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

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.

Here we go. Spurred on by Pete earlier, it’s time for that essential, although often regrettable, end-of-year ritual. Not the prosecco-fuelled partying, but rather something with far more embarrassment potential: predictions for next year. That’s right, amateur guesswork dressed up as serious-ish journalism. Some scribes are better at this than others. Ex-blogger Iain Dale hit the nail on the head by predicting the election of Ed Miliband as Labour leader. In a German aquarium, Paul the Octopus nailed all eight of his predictions for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. By contrast, Mike Adams from NaturalNews probably ought to stop trying to channel Nostradamus. Last year, he predicted that

The Telegraph’s latest Lib Dem revelations are embarrassing for the ministers concerned, but won’t cause the coalition much trouble. Ed Davey is caught being critical of the announcement to take child benefit away from higher-rate taxpayers and expressing concerns about the changes to housing benefit. Michael Moore, the Scottish Secretary, is captured expressing regret about the Lib Dem u-turn on tuition fees and saying he couldn’t work with Tories like Liam Fox “for very long.” Steve Webb, the highly numerate pensions minister, was trapped into revealing that he had written to the Chancellor about the child benefit changes because “the details aren’t right.” There are, the Telegraph tells us, more

Gary Gibbon has just reported that Liam Fox’s visit to Sri Lanka has been ‘postponed’. His private visit this year has been replaced by the promise of an official visit next year. It was never really tenable that a Cabinet Minister could visit a foreign country to deliver a speech while claiming that the visit was private. William Hague has apparently now persuaded the Defence Secretary of this without damaging the relationship between the two men. When Fox does go to Sri Lanka, it’ll be fascinating to see what he says. Friends of Fox say that he really does believe that the Sri Lankan government’s actions have been justified. But

There is no sign of the heir to Blair at the Commons Liaison Committee this afternoon; in fact, David Cameron has been possessed by the ghost of Gordon. So far the Prime Minister’s answers have been cumbersome and statistic-heavy; and his delivery has had the dexterity of a three-legged elephant. He will have expected cannons to the left of him, but to the right as well? If he imagined that Tory backbenchers would coo appreciatively he will have been sadly disabused. Andrew Tyrie, James Arbuthnot and Bernard Jenkin have eviscerated him over the conduct of the strategic defence review. They deplored the culture of leaks and counter-briefing and probed Cameron