Defence chiefs were warned three weeks ago that RAF Brize Norton could be targeted
Bungling defence chiefs were warned about the threat of disruption at RAF Brize Norton less than three weeks ago but failed to shore up the crucial base's defences.
Armed Forces top brass were said to be left speechless after pro-Palestinian supporters entered the base unopposed and sprayed red paint into the engines of RAF Voyager aircraft.
Shocking footage shared by the group Palestinian Action showed protesters storming across the RAF runway in Oxfordshire on electric scooters.
Bodycam images then show them spraying red paint into the turbine engines of the air-to-air refuelling tankers which the RAF say are 'vital for enhancing the operational reach and flexibility of Britain's military air power'.
But the recent Strategic Defence Review (SDR) published earlier this month warned about the danger of 'disruption' to RAF Brize Norton, with the logistic supply line being targeted.
It called for greater resilience at the base and named the RAF Voyager as one of several aircraft which should be protected.
Under the SDR chapter entitled Air Domain on page 114, the review states: 'The changing nature of the threat to UK and allied security means that RAF logistic support arrangements must be more resilient to disruption and military assault.
'Particular attention should be given to contingency planning for RAF Brize Norton, the main hub in the UK for much of what the RAF delivers globally.'
One senior RAF source last night told The Mail on Sunday: 'This failure of security simply beggars belief. Where was the security? This is the responsibility of the RAF Police dog patrols and the RAF Regiment. This time it was misguided protesters, next time it could be terrorists or Russian agents.'
Air Marshal Greg Bagwell, a former RAF jet pilot and senior RAF officer added: 'This is another wake-up call for our domestic security on bases – whether it be enemy drones or activists on e-scooters, we need to be better prepared and protected.'
Brize Norton is the largest RAF base in the country, with around 5,800 service members, 300 civilian staff and 1,200 contractors.
A spokesman for the Ministry of Defence said: 'We strongly condemn this vandalism of Royal Air Force assets. We are working closely with the police who are investigating. Our Armed Forces represent the very best of Britain. It is our responsibility to support those who defend us.'
A bitter 'sexism' row erupted last night over claims that the female commander of RAF Brize Norton bore responsibility for the security lapse.
Group Captain Louise Henton faced calls to quit yesterday from former servicemen who said she lacked the experience to run the RAF's largest base.
One critic mocked her as a 'woke wing commander' whose main RAF career had been in personnel infrastructure management and administration. He added: 'She should quit over this security breach.'
But Labour MP and ex-RAF squadron leader Calvin Bailey dismissed the criticism as 'sexist', insisting the security failings were not her fault. He said: 'She's been handed a base that has for generations not been invested in. It's an organisational choice – it's got nothing to do with the individual in situ now.'
A Ministry of Defence source called the 'woke' allegations 'nonsense'.
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Telegraph
33 minutes ago
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Hero police officer loses job after speeding on way to work
A police officer who won a commendation for rescuing a toddler from a burning house has been sacked after speeding while dashing to work during a staffing crisis. Custody Sgt Tim Perrin was dismissed by Devon and Cornwall Police after being accused of dishonesty when he attempted to appeal against a speeding fine. The father of two, who had a 20-year unblemished career in the police, was sacked last week over the single incident that occurred almost two years ago. The 43-year-old, who is now working as a maintenance man in Torquay, said the experience has completely shattered his faith in the police misconduct process and makes him fear for the future of the service. The case comes after Pc Lorne Castle was dismissed by neighbouring Dorset Police for swearing at a teenage knife-wielding thug during an arrest in Bournemouth in January 2024. Mr Perrin accused Devon and Cornwall Police of putting more resources into investigating his case than trying to solve real crimes. He said: 'I am not surprised they came to the decision they did in the end as cancel culture in the police is rife. There is a huge over-reaction to things nowadays. 'The pendulum has swung completely in the opposite direction and forces are just desperate to show that they are squeaky clean. Officers are no longer given the benefit of the doubt. 'But the result is that experienced officers are leaving in their droves. They have just had enough and forces are having to replace them with young inexperienced recruits. It is bad for policing and bad for the public.' The incident dates back to August 2023 when Sgt Perrin's boss asked if he would be able to travel to Plymouth the following morning to help cover a staffing crisis in the custody suite there. The car journey from his home near Torquay would normally take around 45 minutes but just before he was about to set off he said he received a message from an officer at the Plymouth station asking him to hurry as things were getting out of control. Heeding the call, Sgt Perrin admitted putting his foot down in order to get there as soon as was safely possible. But at some point during the journey he was flashed by a speed camera doing 48mph in a 30mph zone. A few days later he received a notice of intended prosecution in the post but decided to appeal against the ticket on the basis he believed had been fulfilling a valid policing purpose. His boss agreed he should challenge the ticket, but when the appeal was rejected Sgt Perrin accepted the decision, paid the fine and took the points. He assumed that would be the end of the matter but then in January 2024 he was informed he was being investigated for gross misconduct over his allegedly 'dishonest account'. The force's department of professional standards had raised suspicions over some alleged inconsistencies in his account and suggested he had lied about receiving a call urging him to get to Plymouth as soon as possible on the day of his speeding offence. Mr Perrin said: 'To receive gross misconduct papers for only trying to do my job and help out my colleagues was quite a shock but initially I thought, well, I haven't done anything wrong so this won't go anywhere. 'I was interviewed in April or May last year and asked to give a very detailed account of the incident, which was almost a year earlier. 'I have made that journey to Plymouth dozens of times so being asked to recall every aspect of a specific day was very challenging. 'They tried to speak to officers who had been on duty at Plymouth who might have made the phone call to me but there was nothing remarkable about this and so understandably they could not recall whether they had spoken to me or not. 'Throughout all this though I still thought 'well it will be ok, the system will see me right'. 'But when I was informed that they were taking it to a hearing I began to worry because I know how these things work.' 'They discredit you' Sgt Perrin faced a misconduct panel on June 16 where, on the balance of probabilities, the case against was found proven and he was dismissed. He said: 'The barrister who was representing the force grilled me for several hours, ridiculing and patronising me. It just felt that the sole purpose of the exercise was not to get to the truth but to get me sacked. 'They discredit you and make you look like you have done something wrong. 'I tried to explain that perhaps my account was poorly worded in places and left open to interpretation for people who worked outside of the custody environment but in no way had I been dishonest. 'It was found that gross misconduct had been proven on the balance of probabilities and as this was an honesty and integrity issue, the only outcome could be dismissal without notice. 'Despite all the good character evidence put forward, despite the huge impact this would have on my ability to look after my family and pay my bills and how well I was respected in my local community, I was sacked. 'I do not understand how being dismissed is proportionate to the circumstances. I have been treated worse than any criminal, the time and effort to investigate this is far beyond what the force would invest into investigating actual crime. 'I would estimate the cost to the public would be well over six digits yet there are no resources or money to actually attend burglaries or shopliftings, for example.' String of commendations In 2008 Mr Perrin received a string of commendations after he entered a burning building to rescue a toddler who had become trapped on the third floor. In a glowing citation the local fire chief wrote: 'Pc Perrin and his colleagues placed themselves at considerable risk and are commended for their bravery in saving the life of this child.' On another occasion, he won praise for being part of a Taser crew who successfully tackled a man believed to be armed with a shotgun and he received a third commendation for bravely rescuing a man who had fallen down a coastal cliff during a storm. Mr Perrin said the outcome has had a devastating impact on him and his partner, Lisa, who is also a serving police officer. He added: 'Things have changed for the worse. Officers are not allowed to make mistakes any more. It is one strike and you are out.' A spokesman for Devon and Cornwall Police said: 'Following a two-day gross misconduct panel hearing this week, Mr Perrin was found to have been culpable for gross misconduct and dismissed with immediate effect. 'Mr Perrin was found to have breached standards of professional behaviour in terms of honesty and integrity and discreditable conduct. 'This related to his reply to a notice of intended prosecution following a speeding offence in his private vehicle. The panel did not accept the account provided by the officer to be true and found the actions of this officer were deliberately misleading for personal gain representing a lack of integrity and undermining public confidence in the police service. 'As with all cases of this nature, a full report from the gross misconduct panel chair will be submitted to the force in due course, provided to Mr Perrin and published on our website.'
Telegraph
34 minutes ago
- Telegraph
Dominic Cummings: The British state is fundamentally broken
'He's the angriest man you'll ever meet,' Noel Gallagher once said of his brother, Liam. 'He's a man with a fork in a world of soup.' For those who don't know him, Dominic Cummings often appears afflicted with the same helpless rage – a maverick, furious with the broken world around him and armed with little more than the wrong cutlery. I don't even know if Cummings likes Oasis, the rock band that made Liam and Noel so famous in the 1990s that Tony Blair invited them to Downing Street. But one thing is true, Cummings is quietly plotting his own version of a comeback tour. The World of Soup beware. We meet in his elegant Islington town house, where he lives with his wife, the Spectator journalist Mary Wakefield. It's situated bang in the middle of the metropolitan, satisfied, liberal, elitist enclaves of the city he so regularly excoriates. The downstairs kitchen is a jumbled mess of family life, a rusting child's bike in the garden, comfy battered chairs and a list of school packed-lunch arrangements for his young son chalked on a blackboard. At the end of the garden hangs a large illustration depicting the final scene of the film Modern Times, where the Tramp, played by Charlie Chaplin, is seen walking into the distance with the Gamine, his companion. For a movie about the dehumanising risks of early-20th century industrialisation, it strikes a hopeful note of a better future. Next to it in the garden is a boxer's punch bag. And that sums up Dominic Mckenzie Cummings – a man motivated by a frustration so deep that one feels he often wants to hit something. And also a deeply held sense of optimism that there is something different and better both possible and coming. We can get there the easy way, or the hard way. 'The elites have lost touch' 'There's a bunch of obvious, relatively surface, phenomena, like the NHS, or the stupid boats, that are the visible manifestations of things not working,' Cummings, the former adviser to Boris Johnson and a man so divisive he could go by the title Lord Marmite, tells me. 'But I think what's happening at a deeper level is we are living through the same cycle that you see repeatedly in history play out, which is that over a few generations, the institutions and ideas of the elites start to come out of whack with reality. 'The ideas don't match, the institutions can't cope. And what you see repeatedly is this cycle of elite blindness, the institutions crumbling – and then suddenly crisis kicks in and then institutions collapse. 'In the short term no one can, I think, be reasonably optimistic about politics because the old system is just going to play out over the next few years. 'But there are reasons for hope though, right? One obvious reason for hope is that Britain is pretty much unique globally for having got through a few hundred years without significant political violence.' That seems a pretty low bar – the fact that the UK hasn't suffered a bloody revolution or a fascist or communist takeover. Following the Southport riots and the more recent events in Ballymena, Northern Ireland, I ask if the risks of widespread disorder are increasing – some have even spoken of civil war, a brutal revolution. 'Ummm,' Cummings pauses. '[Violence] is definitely a risk, but a lot of these things are very path-dependent. Countries that repeatedly have violence are more likely to have violence in the future. 'And countries that are good at avoiding it have a better chance of avoiding it. I think that the long term cultural capital that's built up over centuries is an important factor and gives us some chance of avoiding the fate that you can see [elsewhere] of just spreading mayhem all over the world.' It's hot sitting overlooking the garden and Cummings, 53 and 'fit-skinny', provides water in glasses better suited for a fine Burgundy. I point out that he is wearing Berghaus foot warmers despite the temperature nudging 30C. 'I don't get hot,' he replies. My colleague Cleo Watson, with me to record an edition of The Daily T podcast, says that he was known as the Vampire when they worked together in No 10, given his appearance of living in a body five degrees colder than everyone else's. Like Prince Andrew, he doesn't seem to sweat. When the production team's cameras overheat, Cummings is immediately up offering solutions of a fan jammed messily down the back of a sofa. Cummings is what management consultants would describe as 'a solutions-focused, completer, finisher'. Where there is a problem, he believes there is a fix. Whether it's overheating hardware or the dinghies bringing ever more people to the shores of England, all sensible (and clever) people need to do is prioritise it, work out the remedy and implement without fear. 'Stopping the boats is simple – but we need to leave the ECHR' 'Stopping the boats' – Rishi Sunak's promise to the voters which even he now admits was a three-word slogan too far – is now a lead weight around Keir Starmer's Government. The Prime Minister's 'smash the gangs' has been as hollow a claim as what went before. Both are metaphors for the deep malaise across politics, the visible manifestation of an inability to 'do anything'. 'Starmer has literally done exactly what Sunak did,' Cummings says, pointing out that the Labour election pledges of 'putting the grown ups in charge' and 'change from the chaos' has not stopped the forces of political and economic failure and decline. 'He stood up and said: 'This is a complete disaster. It's extremely bad for the country, and I am putting my personal authority behind solving it.' 'So are you going to actually stop the problem? No, of course not. Our actual priority is staying in the European Convention on Human Rights. You're not going to stop the boats, and the boats are just going to be a daily joke on social media and on TV.' Cummings is often criticised for lacking a nuance button – a bulldozer eyeing a system that needs the skill of a surgeon. Sunak said that the boats slogan made a complicated matter seem simple. Just like 'Take Back Control' and 'Get Brexit Done' – the three-word campaign rallying cries for the 2016 referendum and the 2019 election of Johnson both driven by Cummings. Cummings disagrees, seeing unnecessary complication as part of the ancien régime 's defence plan. Make everything appear un-fixable in order to maintain the bureaucratic system that keeps thousands of pen-pushers in their jobs. 'Solving the boats is both trivial and tricky in two different dimensions,' Cummings says. 'I went into this in extreme detail in 2020. Operationally, it's obviously simple to stop the boats. You can deploy the Navy, you can stop the boats. 'The entire problem is legal and constitutional. It's the interaction of how the European Convention on Human Rights and the Human Rights Act and judicial review system works. 'There is complete agreement between specialists who studied this subject that it is not possible for the British Prime Minister now to deploy the Navy and do the things that you need to do in order to stop the boats. The courts will declare it unlawful because of the Human Rights Act. 'So you have to repeal the Human Rights Act. You have to state that you are withdrawing from the jurisdiction of the Strasbourg Court [the ECHR], you deploy the Navy and stop the boats and you say nobody is landing from these boats. Everyone we pick up will be dropped on an island somewhere. 'No one will be coming to mainland Britain. The boats will be destroyed and the people organising the boats are going to be put on a list for UK special forces to kill or capture the way that we do with various terrorist organisations.' Cummings is in his flow: controversial, blunt, clear. The questions tick over in my mind. How much will it cost? Which 'island'? 'Kill or capture?' via which legal authority, or maybe none. What about the laws of the high seas and the duty to rescue? For Cummings such probing is all so much 'blah, blah, blah' and that, in the end, all challenges can be worked through. The opposite, endless inaction and failure, Cummings argues – where we are now with a crisis on our shores – is worse. And voters can see it. 'As soon as you announce that is your policy and take serious steps to do it, the boats stop straight away because the people doing this are not ideological terrorists who want to die and get into a fight about this,' he continues. 'They're there to make money. So as soon as they realise, oh, an island nation is actually just going to stop these stupid boats, they're obviously going to send the people somewhere else.' 'Whitehall is fundamentally broken' He has a question for Starmer, for our MPs, for the Civil Service. 'Do you actually want to get to grips with the fundamental legal problems and security problems we have in this country or not? The consensus amongst MPs has been for 30 years – no. 'The country doesn't agree with them. Both parties have tried to keep going with the old way and tried to persuade people that it can be done differently. They failed, they've lost the country. The country wants these problems solved. It's going to happen. The ECHR is toast and we'll be out of it.' Starmer's U-turn on the need for an inquiry into the grooming gangs scandal is another case of system failure. Cummings points out that child sexual assault and rape perpetrated by predominantly Pakistani-heritage Muslim men was being raised by people like Tommy Robinson years ago but being ignored by the state. 'The whole wider Whitehall system is fundamentally broken and the people don't know what they're doing,' he says. 'I think in principle it's obviously correct that the country gets to grips with this absolutely horrific nightmare [which] the old system has essentially tried to ignore for many years, decades. 'However, the kind of inquiry is very important […] I think that any kind of normal inquiry led by a judge will be mostly a farce. It'll be easily played by Whitehall. They'll destroy documents. They'll delay and evade – the normal Whitehall approach will be applied.' Cummings says politics now is about priorities – what do you want to solve first and how do you solve it. Starmer's premiership 'vaporised on contact with Whitehall' because he does not understand the need for fundamental change in the whole system. 'There will be a lot of talk about how Starmer can reset, but at the heart of it, I simply think that – like Sunak – Starmer's fundamental core software patch ['tech lingo' for a computer update] is optimised for pats on the head from permanent secretaries [senior civil servants]. That's what he will keep tuning to, because he can't do anything else.' The Conservatives are holed, probably below the water line. 'The Tories are obviously going to get rid of Kemi [Badenoch]. The only question is whether they do it in the autumn or whether they wait until they're smashed up in the May elections. 'So she'll go, after which they'll either put in James Cleverly [the former Home Secretary], in which case, shut the party down – definitively game over. 'Or there will be one last attempt at 'are we over the cliff or are we not?' Can we somehow reboot ourselves?' I ask him if Robert Jenrick, the noisy, TikTok-friendly, shadow justice secretary who films himself apprehending fare dodgers on the Tube, could execute such a reboot. 'He's obviously the person who everyone's talking about for a simple reason – the rest of the shadow cabinet are literally invisible. No one even knows who any of them are. Even people who are interested in politics don't know who they are.' And so to the big question, Nigel Farage and the plausible route to No 10. The two famously fell out (Farage called Cummings 'a horrible, nasty little man') over the referendum campaign, but more recently a rapprochement of sorts has happened, with Cummings having dinner with Farage before Christmas and backing Reform in the recent local elections. 'I thought it was interesting that he wanted to talk about the Cabinet Office and how power really works,' Cummings said of the December meeting. 'He said: 'I've never been in government myself. I've never been a minister. I don't know how it works. I'm now an MP though, and I talk to other MPs and it's clear they don't understand how it works and they still seem very curious about it and it's odd that they don't seem to know how power actually works inside the Cabinet Office.' 'The fundamental question is, does Nigel want to be Prime Minister in 2029? And if he does, is he prepared to build the thing that you need to build to do that? Which intrinsically involves turning Reform into an entity that can go out and engage with the country and bring in all these wonderful people and get some fraction of them involved with politics at the senior level. 'That's the core question. If he does that, then the whole system will undergo profound shock and it'll be a big deal and I'll be irrelevant to it. And if he doesn't do it, he will just be signalling this is the same old shambles and something else will grow.' Like Margaret Thatcher in the 1970s, Cummings understands the need for deep policy work, deep management and delivery reform that means the end of a 'permanent' Civil Service and attention to how you communicate in a way that is truthful and that voters understand. Can Farage find the equivalent of the Centre for Policy Studies? Who is Reform's Sir Keith Joseph? Who is the Maurice Saatchi? I sense Cummings is not convinced Farage has the ability to move beyond 'the guy with an iPhone' and a provocative soundbite. I ask if he would help Reform and, though open, it seems, to any conversation, Cummings knows that Farage has his loyalists and many of them do not like the high-intellect of the guy with a first in Ancient and Modern History from Exeter College, Oxford University. Being a Reform Spartan brooks little room for compromise. 'Change means tearing down the old and building something new' So far, 2025 has been the year Cummings, who now runs his own consultancy, becomes a little more visible – a gentle public relaunch. The interviews are coming more regularly and two weeks ago he gave the Pharos Lecture at Oxford's Sheldonian Theatre. He has attached himself to the Looking for Growth group, a grassroots movement of entrepreneurs led by the academic, Lawrence Newport, who has also put his name to the Crush Crime initiative to radically rethink law and order failings. 'If, in a year from now, it's obvious things have just sunk even further and can't actually change, then I think you'll see a burst of energy from a whole bunch of people saying, OK, right, let's start something new,' Cummings, who is wearing a Looking for Growth cap throughout our interview, says. 'And I think you'll see people from Labour defecting to join it. I think you'll see Tories and Reform people – but, crucially, a whole set of people who are now not involved with politics. We can't go on like this in 2029, in the election, and then have another four years with a bunch of these bozos in charge.' Cummings has spoken of his own start-up party, which remains a possibility, though he gently side-steps whether it might happen any time soon. 'It will certainly not be led by me. And certainly not chaired by me,' is all he will say. I would wager a £5 note that he will be involved if and when the old parties irrevocably fail. Cummings' analysis has clarity. Close the Treasury and the Cabinet Office; rip out the stultifying conformity of the Civil Service and end the job for life culture; make presently 'fake' ministers responsible for the decisions they take; encourage in the young, new talent that presently sees 'tech, maths and money' as more appealing than running the country; bring immigration down 'to the thousands'; embrace AI ('Westminister is always the last place to see anything'); overthrow the stale old media, including the BBC; understand that the public see traditional politics as peopled by incompetents, liars and cheats, and build a new, liberal, libertarian world where the market of good ideas is all that matters. Maybe Dominic Cummings should be prime minister? 'That's a laughable suggestion,' he replies. But all the Labour, Conservative and Reform MPs who regularly contact Cummings 'for a chat' are sure he will have a role. Because the World of Soup is coming to an end. And we're going to need some people with forks to work our way to a new future.
Telegraph
34 minutes ago
- Telegraph
Britain's new breed of drone-racing soldiers will be more than ready to take on Putin
The Chief of the General Staff – the head of the British Army – General Sir Roly Walker has a plan to defeat the Russians. In a speech this week he made it clear that our Army is laser focused on the enemy, the Russian Army, and is not only learning from Ukraine but re-equipping and re-training itself at pace. The European Nato allies are also focusing East. Collectively, European Nato will soon over-match Putin's men, even without the traditional assumption of massive help from the US. Though the whole world seems currently focused on Iran in its struggle with Israel, Vladimir Putin remains the main threat here and we should not forget it. He is committing war crimes every week in his evil campaign against Ukraine's civilian population: the latest is the reported use of cluster munitions against residential areas of Kyiv. Not only are cluster bomblets devastating across wide areas against unprotected civilians, their use leaves unexploded bomblets scattered across the target area: effectively a field of landmines, and one that is difficult and dangerous to clear up. Against this background, the move of US air defence assets from Europe to the Middle East is dispiriting, and seems to indicate that President Trump has given up on European peace. He will probably seek instead to disable the Iranian nuclear programme, with most of the hard work done for him by the Israelis. But this is no help to us in Europe and most especially not to the brave Ukrainians who are keeping Putin's war machine tied up and so protecting us all. Bold Ukrainian secret-service operations have taken the fight to Russia and shown the world that Zelensky and his indomitable compatriots are a force to be reckoned with. Meanwhile here in Britain there is scepticism among journalists and commentators regarding the British Army's ability to stand up to Russia, and the willingness of our young people to fight for their country. But in fact there is no shortage of young Brits wanting to join – over a million have tried over the last ten years, but sadly some 75 per cent of them were defeated by the absurdly clunky recruitment mechanism. This is now being sorted out, and people are making it through: among them my own son, following in my footsteps at Sandhurst and probably doing it better! General Walker reminded us this week of Field Marshal Montgomery's memoirs in which he wrote: 'I shall take away many impressions into the evening of life. But the one I shall treasure above all is the picture of the British soldier – staunch and tenacious in adversity, kind and gentle in victory – the figure to whom the nation has again and again, in the hour of adversity, owed its safety and its honour'. Never a better word said on the British soldier and it is as true today as it was then, in my opinion. When it comes to lethality, General Walker explained how this will double in two years and treble by the end of the decade. The traditional heavy end, tanks, artillery and attack helicopters, will account for 20 per cent with the remaining 80 per cent expected to come from drones. Anybody who has dipped even the smallest toe into the Ukraine war would agree this is a good mix. Mass, still the main currency that ensures victory, can come from drones: thousands of them, AI enabled, with the tanks providing the direct 'thunder' when appropriate. There is also a realisation in Strategic Defence Review that he who controls the Electromagnetic Spectrum nowadays controls the battlefield. Electronic warfare capabilities are now a priority. The third element which guarantees success in battle is training, and British soldiers have been training like dervishes in this contemporary battlespace. Despite the Russians having a few 'islands of excellence' the rank-and-file conscripts of Putin's army are in the main untrained and used as cannon fodder. The meat grinder has now consumed over one million Russian souls. The British Army for its part is now a 'world of excellence', well trained, with excellent kit coming onboard, and still pound for pound the best fighters on the planet. In the past the British Army concentrated on a few very expensive drones, but we have now well and truly grasped the mass drone idea, so critical for success against the Russians. General Walker tells us that 3,000 drone pilots have been trained in the last 12 months, and we will have another 6,000 in the next 12 months. These will fly mainly the basic FPV drones, $500 a pop-ish, that will create the mass we need. The Army's newest sport is drone racing, which teaches FPV pilots the skills they need to manoeuvre on the modern battlefield. At the beginning of the war, we were teaching Ukraine how to fight, but we are now learning from them how to be very much more lethal in the battle space, and most especially against a Russian looking threat. Sir Keir Starmer may be Trump's buddy today, but I'm sure he realises his genuine friends are in Europe and this absolutely includes Ukraine. It is now up to us to enable Ukraine to get into a position to get a just ceasefire out of the Kremlin. I'd argue that the RAF jets stationed at eastern airbases on Nato missions and our troops forward deployed in Estonia are doing more for our national interests than the planes we recently deployed to Cyprus. President Trump does not need our help to defeat Iran's nuclear weapons programme, but President Zelensky does to stop the Russians and force them to seek peace. I believe that General Walker is on the right track and is delivering the Army the nation needs and that Nato needs. When war in Ukraine ends and Putin looks further westwards, he will see a very different picture to that of 2022. The British Army will once again be ready to take the advice of the great General Slim: 'Hit the other fellow as quickly as you can, as hard as you can, where it hurts him most, when he is not looking'.
