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Strategic Defence and Security Review

It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Barrow and Furness (John Woodcock), and he will not be surprised to hear that I agree with almost every word—no, actually with every word—that he said about the nuclear deterrent. I hope that that does not damn his political career for eternity. He paid generous tribute to my hon. Friends the Members for Fylde (Mark Menzies) and for Lancaster and Fleetwood (Eric Ollerenshaw) for their maiden speeches, which I am happy to endorse. Perhaps I can cheer the hon. Gentleman up a little by letting him into a secret. When my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister was aspiring to the leadership of our party, he held a series of interviews with his hon. Friends, of whom I was one. When I went in, I asked him only two questions. One need not concern us today, but the other was about his attitude to the nuclear deterrent, and I am delighted to say that he was extremely robust about it. If the hon. Gentleman and other hon. Members care to check the response of our current Prime Minister to the statement of former Prime Minister Tony Blair on the subject in December 2006, they will see that it was once again extremely strong. That was the only occasion when I was ever called in to have anything to do with drafting a response to a Government statement. Our current Prime Minister made two alterations to what his speechwriter and I had drafted between us, both of which were to toughen up his response, not to weaken it. Although our coalition partners may hope to chip away at the edges on this matter, if I know the Prime Minister as well as I think I do, at least on this subject, they will undoubtedly be disappointed. As hon. Members on both sides of the House will undoubtedly be aware, in the mid-1920s, a glassy-eyed rabble-rouser called Adolf Hitler was incarcerated in Landsberg prison, putting the finishing touches to ““Mein Kampf””. At the same time as, sad to say, that man was pre-determining future history unregarded in that cell, the chiefs of staff of the armed forces were trying to decide what they would have to defend Britain against in the future. So incapable were they of predicting the future, understandably, that each of the armed forces prepared its hypothetical contingency plans against an entirely different potential enemy. The Royal Navy—understandably, because Japan had a large navy—felt that we should prepare against possible Japanese aggression in the far east. The Army—understandably, because Russia had a large army—felt that we should prepare against possible Russian aggression somewhere in the area of the Indian subcontinent. The Royal Air Force was a little bit stuck, but eventually came up with an idea. Because the French had a rather large air force, it decided that we should prepare against a possible war with the French. Not one of the three wise men heading the three services, which had eventually done so well in the final stages of the great war, predicted that the real enemy that would face us, only 15 years later or less, would be a revived Germany led by that man scribbling away in a cell in Landsberg prison.