Speeches by Martin.

“Yes.”

“I am just trying to get to the bottom of this. You asked for an ordinary injunction, where the contents of what the notice covers is to be kept secret, but the existence of the injunction itself is not. That is what you asked for, but is it fair to say that the judge looked at the reasoning in your submission—”

“A former Deputy Prime Minister of the UK described to me the MoD’s approach to information security as “Stalinist”. Do you agree with that characterisation—as we have been discussing—and why do you think that is?”

“Correct.”

“Absolutely retentive and close hold, and nothing shared whatsoever. You have just been describing it.”

“You were the Minister and the senior civil servant in the Department. If you guys wanted it to happen, who was holding it back?”

“Everyone would accept that the nuclear deterrent needs to remain confidential, but as we have discussed, there is a huge amount of other stuff that does not even make it to this Committee or parliamentarians. I note for Hansard that Mr Heappey is nodding his head behind you. This is not about particular politicians or …”

“That is fine until you have a security crisis and then your military is exposed. Mr Heappey is nodding, again—for the benefit of Hansard. You have a white tie there—”

“And fixes our forces in Ukraine.”

“If I get made the Chancellor, that is going to be a real turnaround for the Labour party—but I look forward to it.”

“How do you crack that open?”

“Trump is certainly an unreliable and unpredictable ally, and his comments yesterday about the Norwegian leadership make us all wonder whether he is of sound mind, but what can we do? We have to deal with him. I am sure it has not escaped the Foreign Secretary’s notice that the messaging from Congress is quite different…”

“Thank you, Chair, and thank you for coming, Air Chief Marshal. I want to pick up the theme that Jesse Norman and Tan have spoken about. The family of plans is asking for more, there are higher requirements from NATO, and we are talking about more deployments, about the coalition of the willing in Ukraine and perhaps ab…”

“Sorry, but where is the risk if we put 20,000 troops into Ukraine?”

“You are right: it is absolutely about asking, “Is that bridge built to do X under duress?” A mindset shift is needed as well. I am an MP for a constituency that has suffered repeated water outages, including for two weeks before Christmas. Towards the end of that outage, bad actors were playing in the social media spac…”

“But would you say that it is letting the side down not to have one, in terms of our allies and partners?”

“Are you aware of any other NATO countries that do not have national defence plans?”

“We are mandated to have that plan, right? We have signed a treaty that says we will.”

“When are we going to have the plan?”

“Shouldn’t we?”