Speeches by Jopp.

“And also, it sets the conditions, were we ever to do expeditionary operations in someone else’s country in the future. It is not just a short-term thing.”

“I do not know whether the Secretary of State gives instructions to his lead counsel on issues as important as this. Are you aware of the motivation for suggesting that the Speaker be read in? Was it so that, in some way at least, Parliament would “know”, in inverted commas? Or was it to thwart his granting an urgent qu…”

“No. Ideally we would win, so they could stay.”

“I have a quotation from something you have written, and I just want you to contextualise it, because it does not make a lot of sense to me: “The suggestion I was driving a new entitlement for those not eligible for ARAP or ACRS but affected by the breach is untrue”. Did you say that?”

“Your last remarks remind me of the great bit of advice that the higher headquarters is always an ass, and sometimes you have to know when to stroke the ass’s ears. It sounds to me like your officials had massively underestimated the gravity of the situation. As a result, you took quite a time-limited approach, wanting …”

“Going down a level from the institutional frustration and the butting of heads between the Home Office and the MoD, would it be right to say that the Domestic and Economic Affairs Committee of the Cabinet had wanted, basically, to limit any extension to the numbers eligible for resettlement to the lowest possible numbe…”

“We may come to this later but, on balance—given the numbers of people who were subsequently allowed in, the vetting, and the difficulty you had of getting ground truth—do you think that we probably did let some Taliban in? As you know, having been there and having served there, being “in the Taliban” is a pretty vague …”

“But I do not think that that answers my question, which is on what basis the judges were extending the remit, if they were only getting their information from the MoD. The MoD is the source of the knowledge of the threat to life.”

“You have characterised the judges’ decision making as increasingly activist. You have also said that they were also getting secret information from elsewhere.”

“We can examine that with the Secretary of State next week.”

“Can the Minister not hear herself, and not see how absurd it is for the Government to insist that they should treat the decision on the embassy as a quasi-judicial, independent planning question? It is not a planning question; it is a question of national security, and if the Prime Minister had any backbone, he would o…”

“I associate myself with the Prime Minister’s remarks, particularly about Iran. Visiting schools in my Spelthorne constituency is one of the great joys of this job, so I was, frankly, appalled to hear that the Labour Member of Parliament for Bristol North East (Damien Egan) was prevented from visiting a school in his co…”

“Q1. If he will list his official engagements for Wednesday 14 January.”

“3. What recent progress his Department has made on delivering 1.5 million new homes by the end of this Parliament.”

“In my Spelthorne constituency, as a result of action taken by the independent, Labour, Liberal Democrat and Green-led borough council, we have not had a local plan for a couple of years. It was finally submitted to the Planning Inspectorate on 25 November, but there has been a planning wild west in Spelthorne for the l…”

“We probably had a pretty similar briefing when the Committee went to Ukraine. What was so telling was the way in which they had completely bypassed a load of stuff in order to get the responsiveness to the ever-evolving threat. We looked at what they had cut out. They had effectively cut out the whole of the military c…”

“In about June 1943, one of your predecessors, Field Marshal Alanbrooke, wrote in his diary that the thing that was really vexing him was how he could beat Germany in such a way that it could be regrown to act as a counterbalance to Russia in the post-war conflict—obviously, long before Normandy and all that happened. M…”

“In response to Alex’s question, you said that you think that, as a result of defence reform, the building is better at doing military strategy—”

“You’ve announced them.”

“Announced!”