Plan for UK to buy Svalbard that got a frosty reception

BRITAIN considered buying an area of Svalbard, in the Arctic Circle, to provide a listening post for spies and to increase its post-Brexit fishing waters.

Tobias Ellwood, the former foreign minister, pursued attempts to buy land in the Norwegian archipelago, the last inhabited place before the North Pole.

The plans were disclosed by Sir Alan Duncan, Mr Ellwood’s former colleague in the Foreign Office at the time when Boris Johnson was foreign secretary.

Sir Alan’s diary of his time in office, titled In the Thick of It: the Explosive Diaries of a Former Tory Minister, was serialised yesterday in a newspaper.

In an entry dated Feb 1 2017, Sir Alan wrote: “[Tobias] Ellwood has a nutty proposal that the UK should buy Svalbard, the archipelago between Norway and the North Pole – he wants it to become a UK spaceport. He’s bonkers.”

Yesterday Mr Ellwood confirmed he had tried to persuade the Government to buy a section of the main island in the archipelago for $250million (£180million at current rates) in a deal that would have come with rights to fishing waters as well as any oil and gas reserves.

Mr Ellwood, now chairman of the defence select committee, described the plot of land, which was privately owned and offered through a broker, as “a serious bit of real estate”.

He claimed that both David Cameron, when he was prime minister, and Mr Johnson had liked the idea.

He told The Sunday Telegraph: “From a strategic and military perspective I thought it would be very useful to have.

“As a listening station it would have been quite incredible. My concern was to deny China the purchase of a strategic land base.”

The Foreign Office declined to respond to The Telegraph’s questions.