Reflections: David Lammy, the centre-right in France and a new Anglo-German missile

Three disparate stories from the past fortnight corralled so that neither I nor any interested readers let them go unmarked

It has been a busy week, with not one or two but three defence-related articles in The Spectator; my regular weekly City A.M. column dealt with reforms to defence procurement; and at long last I finally finished and published a long essay on this platform on who the next Chief of the Defence Staff might be and how the Prime Minister’s choice might affect the implementation of the still-imminently-being-published Strategic Defence Review.

Despite all that, I have been, as always, keeping my eyes open for those smaller stories which may or may not blossom, or sometimes simply take their place in a larger overall pattern but on which it can be useful to say a few words. The ones I’ve chosen below have been sitting for a little while but remain relevant and have not been overtaken by events, so it is still worth rounding them up at this stage.

A-B-C: Always be closing

Last week the Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, revealed that he was arranging for a group of senior diplomats to tour the United Kingdom in July, “to gather investment ideas they can then pitch around the world”. In April a senior official at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office wrote to our ambassadors to China (Dame Caroline Wilson), India (Lindy Cameron), Japan (Julia Longbottom), Norway (Jan Thompson), Germany (Andrew Mitchell) and France (Dame Menna Rawlings), among others, requiring them to return to Britain for what the government is calling a “domestic roadshow”.

(Incidentally, it is a sign of the rapid progress in the Diplomatic Service that all but one of the ambassadors mentioned are women, though Dame Caroline and Dame Menna are both soon to be replaced by men.)

For two weeks, these ambassadors (or high commissioner, in Lindy Cameron’s case) will travel around the UK meeting members of the devolved administrations, local mayors and representatives of businesses seeking to expand into overseas markets. “Our main aims for these roadshows are to strengthen the [FCDO]’s links with the UK regions, focusing particularly on supporting [the government]’s growth mission,” the letter explained. This builds on a speech the Foreign Secretary gave at the British Chambers of Commerce Driving International Trade conference on March, in which Lammy underlined the commercial imperative behind the government’s approach to foreign policy.

Starting this job I said the FCDO would be the international delivery arm of this Government’s missions, the first of which is kickstarting economic growth. This department must play its important role and its full part in rebuilding Britain’s economic foundations and putting more money into people’s pockets in every part of the UK as part of this government’s Plan for Change… I have asked the Department to turbo-charge the relationships which will generate the greatest returns on investment for UK PLC in the medium-term.

He wants to reshape in significant ways not only the functions British diplomats cary out but the way they see themselves in the context of the wider world.

The 21st century diplomat needs a very different set of tools from their forebears. Greater economic and technological expertise at all levels. More links with high-growth sectors. Far deeper understanding of the UK’s nations and regions, as well as sub-national economies overseas. There are some good examples of this happening already including through close collaboration with the BCC’s own global network… I want to deliver a new and systematic approach to driving growth within the FCDO… my top Ambassadors and experts will regularly share insights with the UK’s top international businesses to hear your experiences and challenges and address them… From the next financial year all ambassadors in priority markets will be assessed against their delivery of trade and investment wins overseas. From now on I have told my ambassadors that they should give equal weight to their contacts in business as well as in politics.

The mantra of “growth before anything else” is deeply embedded in ministers, even if they have not considered it as deeply as they might (this recent article by Janan Ganesh in The Financial Times demonstrated that he had thought more carefully and rigorously than most members of the government). Sometimes it feels like ministers have almost hypnotised themselves with incantations like “growth” and “Plan for Change”, robbing them of much of their meaning.

Let me make two contrasting admissions, both of which are true and both of which are necessary context. The first is that I find David Lammy a vaguely preposterous figure, exciteable, self-righteous and windy, and what talents he may have—that is a debate for another time—strike me as rendering him particularly unsuitable to be Foreign Secretary. He speaks without thinking and tends to make his language more rather than less intense and absolute.

A minor but telling illustration of this came during the conclave in March 2013 which elected Pope Francis after the abdication of Benedict XVI. A message by the BBC on Twitter had asked rhetorically “will smoke be black or white?” (black, of course, indicating the end of a round of voting in the conclave which has failed to choose a new pope, while white smoke indicates that the Sacred College of Cardinals has agreed on a candidate). Lammy, responding from the chamber of the House of Commons and therefore perhaps distracted, saw the words “black” and “white” and needed to see no more before responding.

This tweet from the BBC is crass and unnecessary. Do we really need silly innuendo about the race of the next Pope?

He had, of course, completely misunderstood the situation, and to his credit apologised for “tweet[ing] from the Chamber with only one eye on what you’re reading. Sorry folks, my mistake.” But there are two issues to note here: the first is that a shooting-from-the-hip, careless haste is not a welcome quality in a foreign secretary, who has the capacity to cause incidents which cannot be defused with a simple apology; the second is that it is revealing of his mindset that he was so quick to assume a stain of racism in a wholly innocent remark. Again, a foreign secretary who does not take the time to consider what others may have meant is a foreign secretary who is not well-suited to the role.

On the other hand, while I have significant reservations about David Lammy as Foreign Secretary, I do not dispute the fundamental basis for what he is saying, that our diplomatic network must engage with business, industry and finance, here in the UK to understand what British companies require in order to succeed, and in their posts so they have a thorough understanding of the opportunities for British enterprise to flourish. I emphatically do not sniff disapprovingly at the very notion of “trade” like a Victorian duchess. Economic growth has to be the foundation, or the enabler, of everything else we do as a nation, and while I have deep, irreconcilable ideological differences with this government, and, in her own unique way, with Liz Truss, both it and she did manage to identify, if not analyse or achieve, that simple fact.

However (there was always going to be a “however”), the role the diplomat is one of nuance, whereas by contrast I think the Foreign Secretary is a stranger to nuance: he sees only, as he would no doubt chide me for saying, in black and white. Ambassadors are not just travelling salesmen for “UK plc”, as Lammy frames it, not carney barkers to bring customers to look at our wares. They have to engage with their host societies across the full spectrum of public policy and that means they will not always be able to subordinate everything to the UK’s economic and commercial interests. The idea that heads of mission “will be assessed against their delivery of trade and investment wins overseas” seems to me a textbook example of setting up rigid but oddly meaningless metrics and attempting to quantify something often unquantifiable against them. Where is the recognition for building a relationship of trust with a previously suspicious government, for cultivating influential connections in civil society, for becoming a candid friend and moving a régime into our orbit and out of that of our opponents?

Lammy has, like many ministers in the current government, fallen under the spell of a strange, leaden, almost other-worldly jargon in which often-repeated words and phrases are mashed together with hardly any connective tissue, resulting in indigestible slabs of buzzwords. Consider this paragraph from the Foreign Secretary’s speech to the British Chamber of Commerce:

From now on all ambassadors in our most significant markets will work much more closely with regional Trade Commissioners to deliver on priority opportunities across the Industrial Strategy’s growth-driving sectors producing Strategic Economic Growth Plans identifying key deliverables in each market and implementing them via Growth Mission Boards drawing together cross-Departmental teams at Posts.

Anyone who can either write or read that aloud and believe it to be elegant or clear or insightful or motivating or even informative has no feel for communication.

This matters, because the clumsy and thoughtless construction reflects clumsiness and thoughtlessness of policy. Lammy—and in this respect the Prime Minister is often the same—has a general if indistinct notion of what he wants to achieve but no grasp of what it will involve, how achievable it is and what he and others must do in pursuit of his goal.

Clarity is essential. In Book XIII of the Analects, Confucius is asked by Zilu, one of his most faithful disciples, what would be his first action if the ruler of the state of Wei were to give him control of the government. “It would have to be rectifying names,” Confucius responds. Zilu scoffs at the detachment and irrelevance of this, but Confucius explains.

If names are not rectified, what is said will not seem reasonable. When what is said does not seem reasonable, nothing will get accomplished… thus when a gentleman names something, the name can surely hold up in speech. When he says something, his words can surely be carried out in action. When a gentleman speaks, there is nothing casual or careless about what he says.

That is the critical importance of language. To speak in comfortably unquantifiable generalities and hazily positive abstract terms can shield a politician from being held to account—if no-one can ever quite say what you promised to do, you can never be condemned for failing to do it—but it also makes tangible progress more difficult to achieve, or, worse, simply irrelevant.

Allons enfant de la patrie/Le jour de gloire est arrivé

At the weekend, it was announced that Les Républicains, the once-dominant and much-renamed centre-right Gaullist party in France, had elected a new leader. Bruno Retailleau, Minister of the Interior under Prime Minister Michel Barnier and now François Bayrou, overwhelmingly defeated former party president Laurent Wauqueiz to take the leadership with three-quarters of the vote. He is regarded as a conservative, critical of uncontrolled immigration and lack of community cohesion, and has described citizens of foreign origin who fail to integrate as being Français de papier, “French by paper”. Retailleau is sceptical of engagement with China and wary of becoming dependent on the country’s technological products, a staunch supporter of Israel and critical of the failure of President Emmanuel Macron’s policy towards Africa.

It is easy—and may turn out to be correct—to regard this as a minor story. Les Républicains hold only 45 seats of the 577 in the National Assembly, though they are a stronger presence in the Senate, with 115 of the 348 senators. At the last presidential election in April 2022, the party’s candidate, Valérie Pécresse, finished fifth with only 4.7 per cent of the vote, trailing far behind the re-elected President Macron, Marine Le Pen of the National Rally and Jean-Luc Mélenchon of the hard-left La France Insoumise, and some distance even from the far-right Éric Zemmour of Reconquête. At the legislative elections a few weeks later, Les Républicains lost half their seats in the National Assembly, dropping from 130 to 64.

There was more trauma at last year’s legislative elections. The party president, Éric Ciotti, who had come to the leadership in the wake of 2022’s electoral disasters, announced shortly before the most recent elections last June and July that he favoured an electoral alliance with the far-right National Rally. This breached the cordon sanitaire which mainstream French political parties had traditionally maintained around the National Rally and its predecessor the National Front, the equivalent of the “firewall” or Brandmauer which prevents political parties in Germany from cooperating with the Alternative für Deutschland (and which is currently still more or less in place).

The decision was unacceptable to many mainstream conservatives, and Ciotti was ousted from the leadership and expelled from the party. However, a court overturned his expulsion and he remained a candidate for the National Assembly. He and 62 other LR candidates reached an agreement with the National Rally that they would not be opposed, the group being labelled the Union de l'extrême droite, “Union of the Far Right”, for electoral purposes by the Ministry of the Interior, and Ciotti was one of 17 of this group to be elected. In September last year, he announced he was leaving Les Républicains and transformed the group known as l’Association des Amis d’Éric Ciotti into a new party, the Union des droites pour la République or Union of the Right for the Republic (UDR). Since then, Les Républicains have operated an interim collective leadership consisting of François-Xavier Bellamy, a Member of the European Parliament, Annie Genevard, Minister of Agriculture and Food Sovereignty, Alpes-Maritime deputy Michèle Tabarot and Daniel Fasquelle, long-serving Mayor of Le Touquet-Paris-Plage. Retailleau has now replaced that quadrumvirate.

The decline of the Gaullists is a cautionary tale for Conservatives here while Reform UK enjoys buoyancy in the polls. Les Républicains are the natural successors of the Union pour un mouvement populaire, the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), which was created by President Jacques Chirac in 2002 when he united his own conservative Gaullist Rassemblement pour la République (RPR) with elements of the Union pour la démocratie française (UDF) founded by former President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. The RPR itself was the successor to the short-lived Gaullist Union des démocrates pour la République (UDR), which in turn had taken the place of President de Gaulle’s Union pour la nouvelle République (UNR). This was in some ways a spiritual successor to de Gaulle’s original Rassemblement du Peuple Français (RPF), founded in 1947.

This may seem like alphabet soup, but the underlying point is that, contracting occasional alliances with other centre-right groups, the UNR/UDR/RPR/UMP/LR lineage was one of the dominant forces in French politics from the establishment of the Fifth Republic in 1958. It was the home of Presidents de Gaulle (1958-69), Georges Pompidou (1969-74), Jacques Chirac (1995-2007) and Nicolas Sarkozy (2007-12), and was allied with Valéry Giscard d’Estaing (1974-81). For the first half-century of the Fifth Republic, only François Mitterand (1981-95) was able to break the Gaullist grip on the presidency.

The UMP suffered an electoral setback in 2012’s legislative elections, dropping from 313 seats in the National Assembly to 194, but after rebranding as Les Républicains in 2015 the party’s slide accelerated: they won only 112 seats in 2017 and then 61 in 2022, when they were overtaken by the National Rally. The potential parallel with the UK, of a long-established mainstream conservative party losing ground to a newly energised populist and nationalist organisation, is not hard to discern.

Does it matter that Retailleau is now leading Les Républicains? He has enjoyed a surge in popularity since becoming Interior Minister last September, even if the Barnier and Bayrou governments have been fragile and contingent, struggling to pass major legislation. A recent poll indicated that Retailleau would win 16 per cent of the vote in the first round of a presidential election (which will be held, let us remember, in April/May 2027, hardly imminent but now less than two years away). That is still short of the support he would need to be confident of progressing to the second round of the presidential contest; in the past two elections, Marine Le Pen won 23 per cent (2022) and 21 per cent (2017) to progress, and was still defeated by Emmanuel Macron. In 2022, her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, pulled off a shock result by edging out the Socialist Party’s Lionel Jospin and squeezed through to the run-off with just under 17 per cent of the vote, but was then routed by Jacques Chirac.

If Retailleau has some way to go before he could imagine making it to the second round of the 2027 presidential election, it should be noted that his polling already indicates a much better performance than Valérie Pécresse in 2022, with more than three times the support she won. He is seemingly finding some resonance with the electorate in taking a hard line on immigration and integration, and as Interior Minister has the opportunity to achieve results on that front. That, however, is a double-edged sword: if he can reduce immigration or change the prevailing societal and cultural conditions in the way he wants, it would be a powerful card to play in a presidential election, but at the same time he will be held accountable if there is no significant change in policy.

The key factor is that the next presidential election is unusually open and unpredictable. President Macron is ineligible to stand for a third term in office, and Marine Le Pen, following her conviction for embezzlement in March, was banned from seeking election to public office for five years. She is appealing against that prohibition, but as things stand she cannot be the National Rally’s candidate and is likely to be replaced by the party’s president, 29-year-old Jordan Bardella. That said, since Le Pen’s conviction, opinion polls have consistently shown Bardella attracting the support of around a third of voters and he is currently by some margin the most popular candidate, generally 10 points or so clear of Édouard Philippe, the Mayor of Le Havre and President Macron’s first Prime Minister (2017-20), who leads his own centre-right Horizons party, a member of the President’s Ensemble pour la République electoral coalition.

With two years to go, however, a great deal could change. The hard-left Jean-Luc Mélenchon is currently attracting the support of between 10 and 15 per cent of respondents in opinion polls, while the General Secretary of Macron’s Renaissance, Gabriel Attal, who was briefly Prime Minister last year, has scored in the high teens and the centre-left MEP Raphaël Glucksmann, a co-founder of Place Publique, has occasionally registered around 10 per cent.

We are also still at the stage of the process during which ambition and vanity can carry more weight than realism. As President of Les Républicains, Retailleau must of course have a strong chance of being his party’s presidential candidate but it is unlikely to be a coronation. Wauquiez’s hopes will have been dealt a blow by his heavy defeat for the leadership, and Pécresse has little to offer after her dismal performance in 2022. Xavier Bertrand, a minister under Chirac and Sarkozy and now President of the Regional Council of Hauts-de-France, was mooted as a potential Prime Minister last year and is thought to have presidential ambitions, but he backed Retailleau for the leadership, and was nowhere in the race for the party’s nomination three years ago, despite showing early promise. David Lisnard, the Mayor of Cannes and an influential figure in regional politics, also backed Retailleau. At his last mayoral contest in 2020, he won 88 per cent of the vote and Les Républicains won all 49 seats on the city council.

Despite being the shortest serving Prime Minister of the Fifth Republic, ex-Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier has still not fully abandoned the idea of occupying the Élysée Palace. Although he will be 76 by the time of the election, the old-school Gaullist conservative has tacked towards a tougher position on immigration recently, and in an interview on French television in April he spoke of how the hard-left and hard-right parties will have to “account for themselves” at the presidential election. It is not unreasonable to infer that he sees himself being involved in that process. He would have to overcome several hurdles: apart from his age and recent bruising premiership, he was only third in his party’s nomination race in 2022 and is polling well behind fellow former Prime Ministers Édouard Philippe and Gabriel Attal. Barnier may see himself as a figure of weight, gravitas and stability, offering a degree of respite to the French electorate, but his path to the nomination, let alone the presidency, seems very narrow.

Barnier is not the only blast-from-the-past nursing the flames of ambition. Former President François Hollande (2012-17) of the Socialist Party sidled back to frontline politics in last summer’s legislative elections as a deputy for Corrèze in central France; almost a decade after he decided not to seek re-election for fear of humiliating defeat, his dismal poll ratings (which fell as low as four per cent in late 2016), publicly rackety private life and general air of haplessness seem less acute in today’s dark times than once they did, and he has written and lectured regularly since leaving office. Interviewed by The Times last October, Hollande made no definite statement and played down the chances of a presidential run, but certainly closed no doors. Like Barnier, he must be very much an outside chance.

Elsewhere on the left, Bernard Cazeneuve, briefly Prime Minister under Hollande, has proposed some kind of alliance to Raphael Glücksmann. The former Socialist quit the party in 2022 when it agreed an electoral pact with Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise and, like Xavier Bertrand, was on President Macron’s shortlist for Prime Minister last year. In 2023, he launched La Convention, very specifically described as a “movement” rather than a political party, which “aims to bring together women and men who wish to build a social-democratic, republican, humanist and ecological project for our country”. It has a strong whiff of what would in Britain be called the “centrist dad” tendency and his presidential ambitions are probably all-but-zero without the backing of a major party or coalition.

Other hopefuls who are occasionally managing to register a few per cent in opinion polls include the reliably mercurial and sulphorous Éric Zemmour of Reconquête, First Secretary of the Socialist Party Olivier Faure, journalist and author François Ruffin who was instrumental in creating the Nouveau Front populaire alliance last year but left La France Insoumise and now sits as a deputy for the Social and Ecologist Group, Fabien Roussel, National Secretary of the French Communist Party, and Les Écologistes’ National Secretary Marine Tondelier.

Perhaps the most unlikely tilt, although the man himself denies he is a candidate, is a possible entry into the presidential race by former Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin. An eloquent, erudite and cultured career diplomat, he became famous while serving as Jacques Chirac’s Foreign Minister for his vehement and articulate opposition to the United States’ invasion of Iraq in 2003. He launched his own centre-right, neo-Gaullist political party, République solidaire, 15 years ago but it is now dormant; de Villepin is in many ways an impressive public figure, but it is hard to see to what question in contemporary French politics he and he alone is the answer.

If the presidential election were held tomorrow, it is likely Jordan Bardella would win for the National Rally, probably at a canter from Édouard Philippe. But the election is two years away, not tomorrow. Bruno Retailleau faces an enormous, historic challenge which, at the moment, seems unlikely to succeed. However, if he can maintain the upward trajectory of his popularity, make concrete progress at the Ministry of the Interior and bring an exhausted mainstream centre-right political party back to competitiveness and take on the nationalist-populist right and the hard left, he will have no shortage of correspondents desperate to discover his secret.

The (un)Holy Trinity: Anglo-German munitions

At the time, I was very critical of the Trinity House Agreement on Defence which the United Kingdom and Germany concluded last October. I argued in The Spectator, in frustration but not, I still maintain, in error, that it was a virtually empty agreement, comprising mainly warm words and promises of consultation and discussion. It followed a joint declaration in July that was completely content-free, as I had also pointed out, and it was all then more frustrating, probably, because the two defence ministers, the UK’s John Healey and Germany’s Boris Pistorius, are straight-talking, pragmatic, earnest politicians a substantial cut above most of their colleagues in government.

(It is a testament to Pistorius’s abilities and the regard in which he is held that he has not only remained in cabinet as one of the SPD’s ministers in the new coalition government, but he has retained the defence portfolio and is probably as influential, in his own way, as his party leader, the Vice-Chancellor and Minister of Finance Lars Klingbeil.)

Last week, Healey and Pistorius met again in Berlin for the first Defence Ministerial Council provided for in the Trinity House Agreement, and, to be entirely fair, announced the deal’s first tangible results. There is still a lot of empty rhetoric and oratorical padding, but I have been to enough international conferences to accept that this is their stock in trade. Much of it is awkwardly and stiltedly phrased, though that may partly be a function of working in two languages. Nevertheless, further to my criticisms of David Lammy earlier, this sort of prose will not be entered into treasures of wordsmithery:

The agreement set out our shared commitment to improve and further enhance bilateral defence co-operation to better meet the common challenges of the 21st century and to best secure the common interests of both countries in defence.

There is mention of the ongoing procurement by the British Army of the Boxer armoured fighting vehicle, being supplied by ARTEC, a joint venture between Rheinmetall Landsysteme, Rheinmetall Defence Nederland and KNDS Deutschland (formerly Krauss-Maffei Wegmann), and largely manufactured in the UK. The Boxer programme is grotesquely behind schedule, not helped by the UK pulling out of the joint venture in 2003 and rejoining in 2018, and by the time the vehicle reached full operational capability with the British Army in 2032, it will be an inexcusable 39 years since the initial requirement was identified. Still, we are where we are, as the phrase has it. I have anxieties that Boxer will end up too big, too complex and, crucially, too heavy for the battlefield it faces in the early 2030s: in practice it will weigh around 40 tons, the same as a Second World War Sherman tank and a good 10 tons more than the tracked Warrior infantry fighting vehicle it is replacing. Perhaps it is for the best that last week’s declaration touches on Boxer only briefly.

The main outcome of the meeting, however, is that the UK and Germany will cooperate to develop a new Deep Precision Strike Capability. The nature of this “capability” has not yet been determined: the intention is for it to have a range in excess of 2,000 kilometres, but it could be a cruise missile, a ballistic missile or some kind of hypersonic weapon. The work will be carried out within the European Long-Range Strike Approach, an initiative established by Germany, France, Italy and Poland last year and which Sweden, the Netherlands and the UK subsequently joined.

One striking lesson of the war in Ukraine has been the importance of artillery, but especially the critical role of long-range missiles. Russia has used a range of missiles against infrastructure and military targets (and, it must be said, relatively indiscriminately against civilian targets), while one of the recurring themes of Western support for the Ukrainian armed forces has been the supply of cruise and ballistic missiles and the limitations the donor countries have placed on their use. The United States has supplied MGM-140 ATACMS tactical ballistic missiles which were first used in combat in October 2023, but it was another 13 months until Ukrainian forces were allowed to use them against targets deep inside Russian territory. Similarly, the UK and France supplied air-launched cruise missiles known as Storm Shadows in British service and SCALP-EG by the French; the weapons began to be delivered in May 2023 and were used to great effect against Russian targets in Crimea. President Macron announced in May 2024 that SCALP-EGs could be used against certain targets within Russia but it was not until November last year that Sir Keir Starmer, under pressure from the Chief of the Air Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton, allowed the Storm Shadows to be fired into Russia proper rather than the area around the border.

These missiles are designed for ranges well beyond the capacity of conventional artillery. The AS-90, the British Army’s 155 mm self-propelled gun most of which have now been donated to Ukraine, has a range of around 15 miles, while the newer RCH-155, which is expected in service with the Royal Artillery around 2030, can hit targets nearly 35 miles away. BAE Systems developed the experimental M1299 for the US Army’s Extended Range Cannon Artillery programme and stretched the range to 70 miles.

ATACMS, which are relatively short-range weapons by missile standards, can strike targets 190 miles away. Storm Shadow has a range of up to 340 miles. This is a different dimension of firepower; and the new UK-German deep strike project is using a baseline of 1,240 miles. Obviously this enahnces capability at both ends: not only can cruise and ballistic missiles reach targets further away and well behind the front line, but they can be launched from the relative safety of sites further from combat. One of the reasons Ukraine was so keen to be able to use Western-supplied missiles at targets well inside Russia was that it would force the Russians to pull their own installations further back and therefore limit how far into Ukrainian territory they could reach. It becomes in part an exercise of each side keeping the other as far at bay as possible.

Western armed forces are sorely lacking when it comes to a range of missiles. ATACMS is being replaced in United States service by Lockheed Martin’s Precision Strike Missile (range around 300 miles), and the company has also developed the Operational Fires hypersonic missile (1,000 miles) and the Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon, known as Dark Eagle, with a range of 1,725 miles. Among European countries, however, apart from Storm Shadow/SCALP, Germany and Spain use the Taurus KEPD-350 air-launched cruise missile (310 miles), which Sweden is also soon to adopt. MBDA is overseeing a Anglo-French project, which Italy joined in 2023, called Future Cruise/Anti-Ship Weapon (FC/ASW) or Futur Missile Anti-Navire/Futur Missile de Croisière (FMAN/FMC), more catchily SPEAR 5, which will replace Storm Shadow and SCALP as well as Harpoon and Exocet anti-ship missiles.

This is a tiny selection compared to the weapons Russia and China have in their arsenals (the only NATO member other than the US to have a significant range of missile systems is Turkey). So the new Anglo-German weapon will address an important capability gap. It is little more than a concept at the moment: not only has no decision been made as to whether it will be a cruise, ballistic or hypersonic missile, the launch platform is undetermined, though it is likely to be designed to be as flexible as possible and compatible with land, air and maritime launch.

Do I retract my critcism of the Trinity House Agreement? No, insofar as I remain of the view that it was a grand performance based on very little foundation. The Deep Precision Strike Capability is the first tangible product, but even that will come under the auspices of the wider European Long-Range Strike Approach. It is not at all clear to me that this is a project which would only have developed through the Trinity House Agreement; but we have the agreement, and the project did develop through it, and it is a capability we need. So that, at least, is good. Now it is time to see whether the seven-country consortium can produce an effective weapon on schedule and on budget. At least the project demonstrates that our military and civilian leaders are conscious of the need for more weapons in this category. It suggests we are learning at least some of the lessons emerging from the battlefields of Ukraine.