Speeches by Lewell.

“Out of the coalition of the willing, why do you think other members have not given the same commitment that the UK and France have given?”

“What I am trying to pin you down on, Secretary of State, is that you accepted those recommendations, so are the things that I have just read out going to happen?”

“I just want to move on to Ukraine and the coalition of the willing. Secretary of State, do you have a strategy for parliamentary engagement in advance of a vote on the coalition of the willing? As you will know from your statement in the House, there are multiple unanswered questions regarding the actual detail of the …”

“What if things are fast-moving and it is recess or that is just not possible? There is every likelihood that troops could be deployed without a vote in Parliament under royal prerogative, is there not?”

“Is the money there for all those things, Secretary of State? Because that is a lot of costly items.”

“So will they be in the Defence Investment Plan?”

“Just a quick one from me, and it might seem a bit obvious, but since the Government accepted all 62 of the recommendations in the SDR—which included 12 new F-35As, the 12 SSN-AUKUS nuclear subs, six munitions factories, £6 billion in munitions procurement, 7,000 long-range missiles, and £1 billion for homeland air defe…”

“I am looking at the terms of reference from the SDR now and what you are saying does not align with them. What Calvin and I are trying to understand is what changed from the terms of reference to the SDR being produced?”

“Secretary of State, if I can try to simplify it because I tend to speak quite bluntly and straight. The SDR was supposed to identify reprioritisation but it did not; the reviewers were clear with us that that had been removed. Why did the SDR go from its terms of reference saying that it should identify what defence sh…”

“If that does happen, would you commit to coming back as soon as possible afterwards to give the details?”

“I will call Liz Jarvis to move the motion. I will then call the Minister to respond. I remind other Members that they may make a speech only with prior permission from the Member in charge and the Minister. As is the convention for 30-minute debates, there will not be an opportunity for the Member in charge to wind up.”

“I am immediately imposing a four-minute time limit on Back-Bench speeches, so not every Member will get to speak. However, if Members keep their speeches shorter, more people will get in.”

“That is what I was driving at. Ministers will rightly apologise for things and be held to account, but who else was accountable for this? Have they been held to account for what happened here?”

“Sorry to interrupt, but the Chair is conscious of time. In any organisation, if you make an error on this scale and are not held to account, you are likely to make it again.”

“The point I am trying to make is that, if the right people have not been held to account, it does not negate things like this happening in the future. From what I am hearing from you, you do not think that everyone has been held to account. I do not want to paraphrase you, but it sounds like you are saying that not eve…”

“Do you think the right people have been held accountable for the data breach and its consequences?”

“Thank you. Sorry for cutting you off; I know the Chair is very keen to conclude.”

“I have lots of constituents who still do not know whether their wider family are alive or not. That haunts me. Do you think the Department actually understands that? I know that you left not long after the breach became known, but was the culture there that people understood the wider implications of all that? Did peop…”

“We now know that the breach involved risk to life for thousands of Afghans and cost the UK public purse hundreds of millions, if not billions, of pounds. Continuing on my colleagues’ theme, how were you assured during your time in office that the Department genuinely got it, understood the impact of the breach and had …”

“On what basis, though? What advice were you getting that, in that short space of time, the situation would have changed?”