Chris Gray
speaker
586 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 11 Jun
Chris Gray’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 3.
Appearances
Yeah, it has.
And we've been anticipating this defence investment plan for ages.
And it was forever sort of pushed back and it was pushed back for all the reasons that are now in clear daylight and have been...
increasingly clear to those of us prodding and poking around the Ministry of Defence and elsewhere in government, which is back to, you know, our old friend trade-offs and then the scale of those trade-offs, given the scale of additional money that the government outwardly has said it wants to put into defence.
And then the arguments that have been going on between John Healey and the Treasury and Downing Street, both the Treasury and Downing Street,
as we record, pretty bruised by all of this, as you'd expect, given what's happened.
Then the next sentence says, since then, you, Keir Starmer, have been unable and the Treasury has been unwilling to commit the resources that the nation needs to defend the country at this time of rising threats.
In other words, Treasury are wrong, Prime Minister, you're useless, and the combined effect is that Britain is less safe.
Yeah, and the argument that you hear back from folk in Downing Street and folk in the Treasury as they talk about, you'll be familiar with this line, the biggest uplift in spending on defence since the end of the Cold War, and an argument that says, look, we were still talking, we were still debating, we were trying to make this happen.
But in the end, obviously, the exasperation for John Healey has boiled over.
And I think that line in particular, the unable and unwilling line, that has a political...
zing to it because obviously it's referring specifically to defence, but it has parallels with a critique, firstly, that I've heard frequently in public from ministers for months, sorry, in private from ministers for months, and increasingly in the last month or so since those elections, we've heard from departing ministers in other parts of government.
In other words, a critique from those who have served within government that the government of Keir Starmer in the end is failing to deliver.
Oh, I've got the news on in the studio for once because I've left the TV on and Donald Trump has cancelled his planned strikes against Iran that he was threatening to do tonight.
So some other defence news just breaking as we're recording this episode.
Could do a whole other episode about that.
But let's stick with the subject we've got in hand right now.
Shashank, this is where it starts to get into number wang.
But is it true that the MOD and John Healey, the number that they wanted from the Treasury and Downing Street was about £28 billion over sort of three, four years?
Used by an ally of John Healy when they were talking about the figures he was presented with.
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