The post you are reporting:
Max Hastings writing in the Times.
Defence chiefs assemble tomorrow in Westminster Abbey, for what some people think a bizarre occasion. Clergy will confer a religious blessing upon 50 years of the Royal Navy’s submarine nuclear deterrence. Yet the brass now has a pleasing opportunity to rebrand the service: as a thanksgiving for delivery from Gavin Williamson. Nobody will mind getting down on their knees for that. The sacked defence secretary inspired heroic disdain among those obliged to work with him, ministers and public servants alike. He represented a mismatch between ambition and ability that seemed striking even by the standards of this government.
Williamson believed that he could use his office as a launchpad from which to propel himself to the premiership. He advanced personal initiatives - for instance, to restore Britain’s “out of area” capabilities, projecting power far afield - which exasperated both Downing Street and service chiefs. His personal behaviour was crass: he scrawled an obscenity about Mrs May on a written rebuke from her office, which shocked his own staff as much as it will startle historians, when eventually they get the chance to read it. I know no one in the defence and political loop who is not confident of Williamson’s culpability for the leak from the National Security Council which has now cost him his job. Indeed, their anger focuses upon the prime minister’s refusal to trigger a criminal investigation, for a breach of the Official Secrets Act for which he might well be convicted by a court.
But Williamson is now the past. What matters, or anyway should, to a government capable of thinking beyond Brexit, is the future. Although the British people wallow in sentimentality about their armed forces, they stand idly by while prime ministers delegate a procession of inadequates to serve as secretaries of state for defence. The last first-class incumbent left the MoD two decades ago - Labour’s George Robertson, who quit to become secretary-general of Nato. Thereafter, Tony Blair and then Gordon Brown appointed placemen, preoccupied with their own political survival from one Monday to the next. Ten years ago, when David Cameron was poised to form a government, I wrote him a private letter, beseeching him not to make Liam Fox defence secretary. Much more important people than me were convinced that Fox lacked both the intelligence and judgement to make a fist of it. He got the job anyway, because of his status as a shop steward for the Tory right, but remained the only person in the MoD who thought himself fit for it.
Following his enforced resignation, his successors Philip Hammond and Michael Fallon interpreted their responsibility as being to conceal from parliament and the British people the mismatch between defence commitments and funding. Both men worked harder at running a reign of terror against leakers of the truth, than at devising a credible national security policy. Hammond, ever the accountant, proved a whizz at massaging defence cash numbers for public consumption, while making no attempt to confront the ongoing spending crisis, which persists to this day. No defence secretary has admitted publicly (though most do so privately) that the Royal Navy’s giant aircraft-carriers, commissioned by Gordon Brown as a job-creation scheme for Scottish shipyards, represent a strategic nonsense.
For years, it has been assumed that the second behemoth would be mothballed or sold - most plausibly, to India - immediately on completion. Instead the ship is now approaching sea trials, because Gavin Williamson would not stop them. Many thoughtful people in the defence world, not all of them senior soldiers, believe that sustaining a deterrent on the scale of Trident represents a unaffordable big willy gesture for a nation of Britain’s 21st Century status. No defence think-tank can come up with a credible scenario for its use, or threat of use. But it will sail on, like the carriers, because nationalistic fantasies demand it.
The greatest blessing that the new defence secretary can confer on the armed forces will be to act as if she cares about doing the job for its own sake, rather than as a mere boring way-station until another government job comes her way. She can improve upon her predecessors’ record merely by telling the public some part of the truth about our defence predicament; and by seeking to judge issues on their merits, rather than by merely paddling in a sea of fudge. The army is chronically under-funded, and gets more so every year. The Navy needs a substantial number of cheap and cheerful warships, rather than giants that are mere yachts for admirals. The RAF should focus on a future that will be dominated by unmanned ground attack aircraft.
We are sorely in the need of allies. Paying lip service to the Nato and the Anglo-American relationship will not resolve the threat of post-Brexit isolation. The last US defense secretary told the British in a frank private exchange just before he left the Pentagon, that we should expect nothing from this US president, however many state visits we offer him. The choice facing those charged with our security is always the same. Is defence policy to continue to be founded upon gesture strategy - spending plans mostly designed to serve political purposes, to appease the Tory Right ? Or will it be determined by a realistic assessment of the threats facing us in the coming decades? Penny Mordaunt will deserve support and respect if she starts by admitting the problems, even if she cannot produce easy answers, because they do not exist.