“How did Liz Truss make this job look so easy?!”

Saturday Night Live UK – ‘Starmer and Lammy discuss calling Trump’ sketch

A sharp line, in a clever sketch, in a better than expect launch show, seems to have tickled President Trump so much he actually posted it online. He’s gone from liking, to lambasting, to laughing at Keir Starmer.

As you read this, the PM is about to chair a meeting of COBRA – or more accurately in Cabinet Office Briefing Room A – where whether involved or not war comes to bite you at home, on your latest ‘number one commitment’, the cost of living.

This page is too small to count the times over the years Trump has embarrassed his country, himself, and his own family so I’m not blowing the trumpet for him here, but it’s not good for either when a US President is laughing at a UK PM.

It’s particularly awkward because after twenty months of demonstrating – as the skit has him saying, with a savagely accurate parody of his grating nasal tones – “I’m out of my depth here” he’d actually been clawing back some modicum of credibility for not ‘giving in to Trump’ a man more unpopular here than our most unpopular PM and astonishingly it would seem less popular that an actual despotic Ayatollah.

There was a stirring of what’s left of life-in-the-left-for-Stamer last night as some argued it was simply disrespectful of Trump to belittle Britain. Unhappily I suspect this defence sits solidly in Kemi Badenoch’s response some months ago when Starmer said she was running the country down: “I’m not talking the country down; I’m talking him down”

His life raft idea of trying, at every single opportunity to pretend Badenoch is some missile riding warmonger who just can’t wait to get  stuck into Iran is undermined not just because it wilfully bends what she actually said but more importantly, our service men and women are involved and in harms way whether our PM likes it or not, and most of all “not being involved” has had no dividend whatsoever in the eyes of the Iranian regime.

Season 5 of the Chagos Islands – where the story is surely getting more and more surreal on the future of the deal itself – has seen Yvette Cooper  acknowledge an Iranian attempt to strike the Diego Garcia base but keep broadcasting how we are not involved and won’t be involved to all our allies.

Those allies in the Gulf and elsewhwere are definitely watching, and I can tell you they aren’t impressed. The incident creating as big a target for more satire as the airbase ownership saga has become. A former Tory MP quipping:

“The PM is probably consulting Lord Hermer on the correct level of compensation to offer Iran for the loss of their missile”

One of which that we did not deal with but the US did.

As one of our non-political yet very highly qualified and peer acknowledged defence and strategic minds pointed out to me

“Healey has disappeared. Cooper is transparent. And Starmer cannot say a sentence without contradicting himself. Good grief. It’s like they’re systematically failing not just at reading the international room. They’re systematically failing at any basic political instinct about it”

Of course looking at their polling – and no I’m not ignoring Conservative numbers – and Labour’s predicted results in May, a lot of their comments are not about an international room but domestic voters. But the compromise won’t work. The dividend of ‘not being involved’ won’t stop Labour votes going elsewhere especially the Greens.

So I understand. This is ConservativeHome, maybe I would say all this wouldn’t I? But such an observation would be to ignore the signs and issues coming from inside Labour itself.

There’s a satire to be done on the hunt for Morgan McSweeney’s mobile. One wag on X asking if anyone had looked in Louise Haigh’s handbag. But it means the stink about the way the PM appointed Mandelson and gamed the process just won’t go away.

A political Poirot has ensued; when was it stolen? in what circumstances? where is the record of it being reported to police – The PM’s Chief of Staff’s phone gets stolen? Trust me that would be a big red klaxon to all so some record should exist, and anyway why aren’t the McSweeney-Mandelson WhatsApps recoverable or in the cloud.

If everything is rosy in the red rose brigade why is Al Cairns talking about where he learned leadership, and Angela Rayner being helped by a Labour donor (who once tried and utterly failed to have yours truly ejected from a London hotel for ‘being a Tory’) to rain fire on the Starmer project and programme?  Why is whatever Starmerism is getting systematically targeted by increasingly transparent attempts to bring it down from within.

I’m going to talk more about my weekend at the Freedom Festival at the Margaret Thatcher Centre at the University of Buckingham in my next piece – but to conclude this one I was struck by something a close friend of Lady Thatcher discussed with me there.

Our starting point was that if Starmerism is really dead, it should be no more mourned than the ‘Blairite settlement’ that is also definitively dead. Part of that settlement was an assumption that you build a broad coalition of voters piece by piece, issue by issue, focus group by focus group, with promises for almost all to get that landslide.

In less than two years we’ve seen those groups peel away as the conceit unravelled on first contact with reality. They had won in 2024 because people were extremely fed up with the Conservatives and argued they simply didn’t know what they stood for anymore.

And there was where we discussed that bit of Thatcherism very much worth still keeping in mind, like Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty being thrown on the table and the silencing of the room with “This is what we believe!”

Today that means, no lawyerly language to seem present but not involved, but say our alliance is with America not one man.

To probe, how and why, because it genuinely matters, a man who remained friends with the world’s most infamous paedophile and sex trafficker was sent to be ‘our bridge’ to that ally, and wasn’t an instant principled driven ‘no’.

To say to her party, once Thatcher’s now Badenoch’s, with clarity and conviction: “this is what I believe in, this is what I’m going to do. It will be honest and direct. It may not always be easy to hear but it will be the right thing to do. This is what we believe and if you do too, vote for it”

Starmer tried to be the more moral, more principled, more straight, more genuine, to get to be Prime Minister but it was a façade built to appeal to the widest possible section of an ultimately fragmented network of niche wishes. Be honest and authentic – where the voter goes away and doesn’t have to like you but respects you – because they know exactly who you are and what you believe.

I’d take that path any day and it limits the amount they’ll ever end up laughing at you.

Alexander Bowen is a trainee economist based in Belgium, specialising in public policy assessment, and a policy fellow at a British think tank.

 The Hereditataries are no more – or at least in a month and a half, when this sitting closes, they will be no more. Gone with these hereditary peers then is the last of our living link with 1341 – the first Parliament to meet with the Church and the Peerage separated from the rest.

These peers had survived five religious settlements, four civil wars, one in which the other chamber disbanded it for being “useless and dangerous” and executed its de facto leader, the transition from farm to factory, however many ‘people’s budgets’, and even, unlike for example Saddam-Hussein, Tony Blair, but they could not survive Keir Starmer. After one thousand years it would be Keir Starmer who would stand up for the working man’s right to be quasi-useful in a quasi-useful body – so long as said working man had furnished him with quasi-tailored suits or quasi-effective comms advice.

I, for what it’s worth largely agree with these governing crusaders, in outcome if not in spirit, the presence of hereditary peers was indeed largely bizarre. Appeals to the ‘living embodiments of one-thousand years of history’ and tales of the Norman Conquest are pleasant enough, when the Bayeux Tapestry arrives in London I shall be one of the first in the egregiously long queue, but the legitimacy and purpose of a governing system is defined by the outcomes it delivers for the era in which it operates not by the symbols it once devised. Those outcomes are, as I think we can clearly see, in the category of ‘not good’ at best.

Where I object however to Keir’s culling is in its inconsistency. If our great modernisers are to commit to their own long march through the House of Lords, removing the 92 hereditary peers, then ought they not on their own principles – that these Lords were unrepresentive, unelected, appointed elites with little merit – turn their weapons to the Lords Spiritual? Do they really serve any greater purpose? Why then do they remain?

On any historic basis they ought to be a perfect target for a Labour government committed to symbolic scalps – fox hunters, hereditaries, private schools, farmers with excessively large landholdings. Do Bishops in their Palaces not warrant the same treatment? Was the Church of England not once said to be the Conservative Party at prayer? If for Sieyès Starmer the third estate is everything then why only dismantle the second?

It is, I think, largely because the Church of England has for its part adopted a kind of ecclesiastical Starmerism – doing much to win over those with little interest in it, and little to keep those who have been its demographic. As a shadow for Starmer’s 12 per cent approval, the Church enjoys its 2 per cent attendance.

It is an idea mostly clearly embodied in the concept of ‘Faithism’,  that is the belief that faith underpins communities, and their religious practices are, if not identical, largely interchangeable with history condensed into peculiarities.

It is a vision of religion I find slightly bizarre, not least because it seems to be underpinned by assuming your own view of religion is the view of religion, but it is a position that is at least rational. That we have special privileges that we would like to keep and that we can only reasonably defend them amongst our sort if we also extend them to sufficiently docile ‘co-religionists’. It is a kind of spiritual rent seeking – collaboration, potentially sincere, but nonetheless defined by a common attempt to ward off secularism. Like all cartels however, it is not one designed to serve the public interest.

Now I would not presume to know what is in the public’s interest as far as religion is concerned, faith cannot be measured nor evidenced, that is after all the point of faith, but it is at least worth looking at what the alternative to ecclesiastical Starmerism looks like. France and Québec offer that alternative – an alternative where instead of all faiths being privileged, none are.

France for its part defines itself as a secular country and actually means it. The Jules Ferry Laws remove religion from state schools – applied to Britain it means no more lying to nuns to try and get into a better school through the religious quota and no more Trojan Horses. The 1905 Law on Separation of Church and State – apply it to Britain and it means no more religious symbols in the public place, no more religious organisations for civil servants, no more voting in Churches or campaigning in mosques, and it means religious figures being as accountable as anyone else for inciting hatred.

Keep going further to 2004’s law banning conspicuous religious symbols in schools or 2021’s separatism law letting the government supervise and shutter religious groups that attack the basic values of France. Québec for its part has Bill 21 – preventing public religious affiliation by state employees, Bill 94 – preventing public religious affiliation by anyone who interacts with schoolchildren, and now Bill 9 banning public prayer.

That latter bill may be one well worth taking note of given the most discussed subject of the last week – Nick Timothy’s call to ban the public iftar in Trafalgar Square, a position that was naturally criticised by the Church of England’s faithist leaders. Nick Timothy, whatever one thinks of his specific conclusion and whatever wants to propose as a speculative motivation, though I don’t frankly think it particularly matters, is at least asking the right question. If the public square is our collective good, can it be privatised for one faith even temporarily?

The Church of England in preserving its privileges may say yes, but the rest of us needn’t.

James Cartlidge is Shadow Defence Secretary and MP for South Suffolk.

When I shared my policy plans for Defence with Conhome’s Tali Fraser last week, I stressed that we would learn the lessons from Labour’s big mistake – that is, do our Strategic Defence Review (SDR) in opposition, instead of paralysing the MOD as it waits for yet another policy document that will supposedly have all the answers.

I cannot emphasise this point enough: on coming to power Labour made a very specific choice on Defence. In essence, they put urgent rearmament on hold in order to boil the ocean, with all decisions subject to the SDR, which then came forward last June with no actual hard procurement choices – those were punted into yet another review, the Defence Investment Plan (DIP), promised for autumn 2025 but now months overdue.

Rearmament on hold, as war grips multiple fronts – that intolerable scenario has consequences, and causes.

On consequences, at a time when there is alarm at our apparent lack of warfighting readiness, Labour are burning through the months in which they could have seized a great opportunity to truly transform our military – learning the lessons from Ukraine to deliver a potent step change in lethality, which in the summer of 2024 we were uniquely placed to orchestrate.

By April 2024 the drone capability we were supplying to Ukraine was starting to show seriously impressive results on a real battlefield, against Europe’s peer military threat. Most importantly, this was not via the ‘business as usual’ of big primes taking years to produce over-budget, overdue capability; this was happening because of British SMEs delivering cheap, rapid, constantly adjusted drone and counter-drone tech.

And in February 2024 I’d published two strategies to take advantage of this – the MOD’s first Defence Drone Strategy, committing to adopt in parallel for our own armed forces the drone tech we were supplying into Ukraine; and a new procurement model, making the pursuit of ‘Minimum Deployable Capability’ the default for acquisition – not waiting an age to achieve perfection, but getting capability into use as soon as possible, and with most development occurring after adoption by the warfighter.

If this sounds theoretical, in April 2024 HMS Diamond was attacked in the Red Sea by Iranian-supplied Houthi drones and ballistic missiles. We were seeing then the same problem so visible in the Middle East today – relying on a limited stock of expensive missiles to intercept cheap drones. Our ground-breaking anti-drone naval laser weapon DragonFire will enable our warships to intercept drones for 10p a shot, protecting precious missiles stocks, so I ordered it to be procured via this fast-track Minimum Deployable Capability route – and the in-service date was slashed from 2032 to next year.

So this really matters to the here and now. The Defence Drone Strategy promised to learn the lessons from Ukraine’s extraordinary success against the Russian fleet in the Black Sea, by delivering “maritime strike uncrewed systems” for the Royal Navy. Just imagine if Labour had stuck at it, instead of putting procurement on hold, and we now had drone arsenal barges ready for deployment.

That said, such uncrewed warships would still need missiles.

As we reflect that reportedly we have relied on a US destroyer to intercept one of the Iranian ballistic missiles headed for Diego Garcia, I recall how Labour also parked the Munitions Strategy that I had developed with MOD officials – and which was the top priority for the fully funded plans contained in our July 2024 manifesto.

Replenishment of munitions shouldn’t be controversial – we have a strong consensus with the Government on supporting Ukraine, but we can all see that the entirely justified scale of our support has left major gaps in our own arsenal. Again, this matters now – our Munitions Strategy would have supported major procurement of air defence capability.

Take Sea Viper, the system our own Type 45 destroyers rely on to intercept incoming missiles. I’ve repeatedly called for the Government to accelerate its upgrade, known as ‘Sea Viper Evolution’, to enable interception of the most advanced ballistic missile threats.

In January I received the inevitable response via written answer. Yes, the Government sees how important Sea Viper Evolution is, especially in the context of “the Royal Navy’s pivot to a Hybrid Fleet”, with “new and novel approaches to ballistic missile defence”, i.e. arsenal barge drones as envisioned above. But then the killer sign-off – continued progress “remains subject to the Defence Investment Plan”.

So what of the cause for all this paralysis?

In their heart of the hearts, the Labour Government has never truly prioritised defence spending where it matters – in HMT, Cabinet Office and Number ten. The Budget red book detailed exactly how much Labour would spend u-turning to scrap the two child benefit limit, right out to 2031 – but there was no such information for Defence spending; no such certainty for an MOD desperate to know where it stands.

That’s where Kemi’s bold leadership comes in; a leader willing to take tough decisions to make our country stronger. Thus, as our spring conference was opening earlier this month, I joined Kemi at a factory making the British Army’s Boxer armoured vehicles in Stockport, to confirm just how serious we are about reversing the trend of defence spending trailing behind welfare.

Kemi confirmed that a future Conservative Government would restore the two child benefit cap and spend the savings on our armed forces – specifically, delivering 20,000 more troops over the next Parliament. That is, 6,000 extra regular soldiers and14,000 reservists, totalling 80k and 40k respectively – and what would amount to the biggest net increase in the size of the Army under any Prime Minister since 1945.

Importantly, the plan would include the cash needed for training, basic equipment and upgrades to Single Living Accommodation, i.e. barracks – but those new soldiers would also have the drones and counter-drone tech critical to modern combat. This follows the announcement of our Sovereign Defence Fund in December, ringfencing £17bn of public funding for Defence – including by repurposing billions from Ed Miliband’s costly net zero projects – to procure drone tech at massive scale, ultimately ensuring every part of the British armed forces could be trained as war is actually fought today.

I don’t pretend these extra soldiers would deliver infantry ‘mass’. As I wrote in the Defence Drone Strategy, mass in future will be found “in the uncrewed space”. Rather, it would be about delivering an Army that was credible and deployable, with regiments up to strength, filling key positions that deliver deployability – e.g. engineers and logistics.

Nor do I pretend that recruiting such numbers would be easy. As part of our ongoing policy work, recruitment will be a key focus – and that starts with recognising the challenge of holding on to those personnel we already have. That’s why in Government I took the decision to buy back the Defence estate, and in Opposition have committed to an Armed Forces Housing Association to ensure that restoring the MOD’s power to rebuild service accommodation actually delivers ‘homes for heroes’.

Above all, it’s why we’ve fought tooth and nail to stop Labour putting our veterans back in the dock and trashing Army morale; and why at last year’s Party Conference I confirmed that a future Conservative Government would restore full legal protections for our veterans.

Cutting welfare; investing in Defence; focusing on actions that can boost our military readiness right now – this is how we start to deliver a stronger country, with a stronger armed forces.

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