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.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 3.

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Newscast · Why Has Defence Secretary John Healey Resigned? · 11 Jun 2026 podcast

So, yeah, there you go.

Goodbye and goodnight.

Right, Shashank, let's go back to John Healy's letter, the first letter we're looking at.

And I've lost track of which paragraph it is, but there's one where he just talks about the trajectory for defence spending in the next decade or so, which Chris alluded to just before you came onto Newscast.

Just talk us through the numbers that are being tossed around there.

And just to remind people, we're talking about spending on defence as a percentage of the overall country's economy.

This isn't about 3.5% of the government's budget.

This is 3.5% compared to the whole economy.

So that's why it's such huge sums, even though the actual percentage increases don't sound like huge numbers.

It all works out when you apply it to the whole economy.

Yeah, Chris, and I mean, that is quite damning, that paragraph, isn't it?

Because then John Healey links that to the Prime Minister sort of not sticking to his word and the word that he sort of gave to the whole world.

Completely that.

Or at least all the NATO members.

Completely that.

And...

That sense that it just wasn't a credible plan, that it wasn't believable and that it was, you know, beyond the the extent of this parliament and therefore could easily be be seen as kind of pie in the sky and just not amounting to a credible plan.

programme to deliver the very promise that the Prime Minister committed to at that NATO summit in The Hague of a year ago and just weeks before the next annual NATO summit, which is in Ankara in Turkey in about three weeks' time.

And from Mr Healey's perspective, there's been a lot of focus politically on next Thursday because of the

Small matter of that by-election.

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