The General was actually squeaking with indignation ... but Dave returned fire
LORD Cameron, international schmoozer, intimate of executive jet lounges, looked in on Parliament for an hour or so. Good of him. It was just a House of Lords committee. An afternoon net against slowish bowling.
‘I know you’ve come a long way to be with us,’ said Lord Ashton (Con).
Too right. His lordship was enjoying a grand tour through Outer Mongolia and ‘the Stans’ (Tajikistan, Kazakstan, Kyrgyzstan – they use consonants as lethal weapons in that part of the world) in a £42million Embraer Lineage when his young honey of an aide rose from her white-leather seat and said ‘don’t forget the Lords International Relations and Defence committee next Tuesday, minister’. Lord Cameron: ‘Groan, those old boobies. I bet Houghton whinges about defence spending.’
General Lord Houghton (Crossbencher) is a former chief of defence staff. He now earns goodish nosebag advising Thales, a French arms manufacturer. Sure enough, he was furious – actually squeaking with indignation! – that Rishi Sunak’s recent £75billion increase in defence spending had not been bigger.
He called it ‘late on parade’ and expressed surprise that Lord Cameron ‘put such a low price on conventional deterrence’. Put a low price on arms? Thales would never do such a thing.
Lord Cameron returned fire and basically told Houghton he should be cartwheeling all the way to the bank. If displeased by that answer, the general should go into the international aid world. They’re getting masses of our moolah, too. Lord Cameron was delighted to say that our generosity to Africa was geysering almost as extravagantly as in the old days. Mr Sunak cut aid spending but that was ‘not my policy’, said Cameron. ‘I am working with the Government to improve matters’ and ‘Britain is back in Africa’. It sounds expensive.
Incidentally, Lord Houghton was not the only committee member who declared a financial interest in the arms trade. Lord Ashton did, too, on behalf of his wife who apparently has a slice of the action at BAE Systems and is said to answer to the nickname of ‘Bomber’.
Dave’s committee appearance was not the only foreign affairs excitement of the day. Andrew Mitchell, deputy foreign secretary, earlier took questions in the Commons. He was just in from Manhattan, having attended some United Nations beano on population and development. The time and money wasted on these shindigs is worthy of the reign of Nero. Sir Julian Lewis (Con, New Forest East) put Mr Mitchell in his box quite neatly by raising some Ukraine matter and asking him to ‘take this message back to his boss’. Mitchell the gentleman’s gentleman.
Giles Watling (Con, Garrick Club) also brought Mr Mitchell down a few thousand feet by inviting him to join him and that old tusker Sir Edward Leigh (Con, Gainsborough) on a trip to Calais.
One imagines such an expedition might include rather a lot of clanking plastic bags from Duty Free and a post-prandial stroll on the ferry deck. Mr Mitchell turned a greenish tinge and called Brother Watling’s offer ‘an unbelievably tempting offer’, though he was not quite heard to accept it.
WE ALSO had a former head of MI6, Sir Alex Younger, at the Commons Foreign Affairs committee. Sir Alex was wonderfully smooth: expensive cream shirt, a soft drawl (hard to overhear in hotel lobbies), crinkly eyes, flashes of a sad, unconvincing smile. He opened by asking the members to introduce themselves. It’s normally the other way round. The MPs meekly gave their names and constituencies. How easy to take these bozos psychological captive.
He spoke without notes in elegant sentences, greasing the pan with some self- deprecation (‘ I was head of counter-terrorism for a reasonably significant time’). He admitted the Iraq War spawned terrorism. He thought ‘the threat environment’ was ‘ deteriorating’. And he used words like ‘sanguine’ and ‘ interplay’ and ‘ disaggregated’ and ‘fissiparous’. The committee’s chairman Alicia Kearns blinked a bit at that last one. Fissiparous? Isn’t that a resort in North Cyprus?