Grant Shapps keeps the show on the road

The defence secretary has been in Japan signing an agreement to collaborate on building fighter aircraft, while Westminster has convulsed itself over Rwanda

I am no particular partisan for Grant Shapps. He has made himself a slightly ludicrous figure with his multiple personae and business activities, and his natural enthusiasm and, let’s be honest, lack of much sense of shame has often led him to do things which do not cast him as a serious statesman: this social media clip, made when he was transport secretary and promoting the still-to-be-launched Great Britain Railways, was well-intentioned and agreeably larky, but hardly suffused with gravitas.

His appointment as secretary of state for defence on the last day of August caught me by surprise. Ben Wallace, who had been a very good occupant of the post for four years but understandably wanted a break, and is leaving the House of Commons at the general election, had signalled his departure months before. When I looked at potential successors ahead of the summer recess, however, I confess that Shapps was not on my radar. I considered Tom Tugendhat, the security minister, and John Glen, now paymaster general, as possibilities; suggested that Penny Mordaunt, who had done the job before, would be a sound choice; and even thought radically and discussed Sir Julian Lewis and former chief of the General Staff Lord Dannatt. Shapps blindsided me, but I take comfort from the fact I was not alone.

It was, after all, Shapps’s fifth cabinet post in the space of a calendar year, a year which included six days as home secretary (incredibly, not the shortest tenure: Earl Temple held the post and that of foreign secretary for four days from 19 to 23 December 1783). As critics were swift to point out, Shapps had no background in defence or foreign affairs. Described by The Guardian as a “thrusting, sharp-elbowed entrepreneurial type”, he was an international development minister for six months in 2015 after being demoted from cabinet, where he dealt mostly with sub-Saharan Africa, development finance and anti-corruption. Looking at his portfolio for City AM, I was cautious: I noted that he was effectively a caretaker departmental head until the general election, and that his main task would be to protect the defence budget, despite the fact that the British Army is being reduced to its smallest size for two hundred years. I added that his “vaunted communications skills will need to be directed towards his colleagues as well as the electorate to remind them of the need to maintain at least current levels of spending”.

Perhaps I was too harsh on Shapps. He has said and done some interesting things in his three-and-a-half months at the Ministry of Defence. In September he travelled to Kyiv and met Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. His speech to the Conservative Party Conference in Manchester in October reiterated the UK’s strong support for Ukraine, although he ended on a jarringly partisan note when he quoted Field Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck before the First Battle of El Alamein and talked of taking “the fight to Say-Anything-Starmer”.

Last weekend, he visited Israel and the Palestinian Territories to press for more humanitarian aid for Gaza and the release of the hostages held by Hamas. He also met the Israeli defence minister, Yoav Gallant, and the interior minister of the Palestinian Authority, General Ziad Hab Al-Reeh. This week he hosted the Norwegian defence minister and his chief naval commanders, and the two nations announced maritime support for Ukraine to bolster its capabilities in the Black Sea. At the press conference, however, he addressed what many treat as the elephant in the room, Europe’s heavy reliance on American resources and personnel for its protection.

I actually genuinely do think Europe needs to step up and look after its own security. We can’t carry on expecting the US to always ride in to the rescue of Europe.

This is not innovative thinking, but for the UK defence secretary to say it out loud is interesting. Everyone is aware of the possibility of a second Trump presidency, of the 45th president’s scepticism about the efforts of America’s European partners—especially in terms of defence spending, which remains scandalously and pitifully low in most NATO members states—and of the challenges that the alliance might face from 2025 onwards. (I wrote about this for The Hill in August.)

The last few days, as Whitehall and Westminster have talked of little but Rwanda and the prime minister’s leadership, Shapps has been in Japan. It is his second visit in a matter of weeks, as he met his counterpart in Tokyo last month, but yesterday he had a trilateral meeting with Minoru Kihara, the Japanese defence minister, and Italy’s defence minister, Guido Crosetto. They signed off on the next stage of the Global Combat Air Programme, a sixth-generation stealth fighter which is expected to enter service in 2035, replacing the Eurofighter Typhoon with the Royal Air Force and the Italian Air Force and the Mitsubishi F-2 with the Japanese Air Self-Defense Force. The statement issued after their meeting announced that the programme’s headquarters will be in the United Kingdom, the first chief executive of the GCAP Agency will be Japanese and Italy will supply the head of the joint business construct.

This was marked by the signing of a formal agreement. Be in no doubt: GCAP is a hugely ambitious project. It is already employing 9,000 people across 1,000 suppliers; the UK has committed £2 billion so far, with another £800 million coming from industry partners, while Japan has earmarked ¥72.6 billion (£400 million) for the next fiscal year, and this is merely the concept and assessment phase. Its importance goes further than merely the procurement of an aircraft, however. As I wrote in September, this one of several major steps Japan is taking to increase its military capability and reach, allowing it to become a much more significant security partner for Western nations in the Indo-Pacific region. The US knows this too, as the recent meeting between secretary of defense Lloyd Austin and his Japanese and Korean counterparts in Seoul demonstrated.

The GCAP programme may have even wider impact. Saudi Arabia is interested in joining the consortium, but, while the UK and Italy are supportive, Japan opposes Saudi involvement: although the Japanese government scrapped its ban on arms exports in 2014, it feels that the presence of Saudi Arabia in the project would make the issue of selling weaponry to third parties too complicated. There are also concerns among all three partners about cyber security and the sharing of sensitive information. However, no irreversible decisions have been made, and the UK is conducting a review of its cooperation with Saudi Arabia to understand more fully the kingdom’s industrial and military objectives, and hopes to complete this work early in 2024. Shapps pointed to the UK’s relationship with Saudi Arabia, which is “very deep and goes back many decades”, and noted that the involvement of any further nations beyond the initial three would be an “interesting conversation”.

The other issue which Shapps’s visit to Japan highlights, for a purely domestic audience, is that while the political community slides boozily towards Christmas, trying to put aside for a week or so the bitter partisan battles we have been seeing, the business of government goes on, and can consist of serious policy-making and substantial public spending or plans for such spending. All UK parties are now more or less on an election footing, or will be once we arrive in the New Year, but Shapps has been dealing with issues which will be live a decade and more hence. Even on the dramatically unlikely assumption that the new aircraft enters service on schedule in 2035, a new Labour administration could have arrived and quite conceivably left office again before the first plane is seen.

As long ago as 1886, Joseph Chamberlain, then still a Liberal, remarked that “In politics, there is no use in looking beyond the next fortnight”. Jim Hacker explained the day-to-day struggle of government to his wife Annie in Yes, Prime Minister when she supposed that nurses’ pay was much more important than that of Members of Parliament.

No, much less serious. Nurses and teachers can’t vote against me till the next election—backbenchers can vote against me at ten o’clock tonight.

At the same time, however, ministers must sometimes assume the persona of an eternal hand on the tiller, a unity of purpose comprising everyone who has held their post, and make decisions and commitments which have an enormously long timeframe. This is especially true in defence procurement. The troubled Ajax armoured fighting vehicle, which will enter service with the British Army (if at all) in 2029, has its origins in a Ministry of Defence requirement known (impenetrably) as the Future Rapid Effect System dating back to 1998’s Strategic Defence Review.

I will be honest: if the choice had been mine in August, I still wouldn’t have chosen Shapps as defence secretary. But he has had barely a moment’s rest in his short tenure, and he is feeling perhaps more than any other minister the tension between the here and now, and the far-off tomorrow. His problem, and that of all ministers, is that neither will go away: both demand immediate attention.