Spooky Season

As she prepared for Prime Minister’s Questions, let Kemi Badenoch consider that Liam Byrne, Dame Anneliese Dodds and Sir Chris Bryant were all Privy Counsellors, yet Richard Holmes and Camilla Turner write:

Senior Labour MPs asked planted questions in Parliament after being lobbied by a former MI6 officer, The Telegraph can disclose. The MPs included Liam Byrne and Anneliese Dodds, both former ministers, and Sir Chris Bryant, a Cabinet minister. They spoke in the Commons after being lobbied by Christopher Steele, the former spy behind the infamous Trump-Russia dossier. They made claims about individuals conducting espionage, having secret ties to Russian spy agencies and having illicit financial dealings. Several of the allegations were later found to be inaccurate. In some cases, the questions directly benefited paying clients, a whistleblower has claimed. Statements made in Parliament are protected by law, and MPs cannot be sued for defamation – a rule known as parliamentary privilege – leaving targets without legal recourse. There is no suggestion Mr Steele knew the information he shared was inaccurate, or that he acted recklessly.

In 2013, Mr Byrne called for a debate on the alleged links between the Kremlin and Fraser Perring, a British financier whom he described as a “not infrequent visitor to Moscow”. This comment was based on a briefing from Mr Steele. Documents suggest Mr Steele was working with a private intelligence agency, which was acting on behalf of one of Mr Perring’s business rivals. Mr Perring claims never to have been to Moscow. Many of those targeted in Mr Steele’s briefings are on the political Right. Speaking in Parliament in 2018, Sir Chris accused Christopher Chandler, whose company backs GB News, and his brother Richard of taking money from “decidedly dodgy sources” then attempting to conceal this through “money-laundering”. These allegations were based on a briefing by Mr Steele, and were later found to be false.

Ms Dodds, a former foreign minister, raised questions in Parliament in 2022 about a Tory donor after a briefing by Mr Steele. She claimed a donation was made by a businessman with links to Russia. The Electoral Commission later dismissed the allegations. A spokesman for Ms Dodds said she had “raised questions in the Commons based on information taken in good faith”. A Labour party spokesman said that Mr Byrne, Ms Dodds and Sir Chris have never received money to ask questions in Parliament. Complaints submitted to the Labour Party, the Cabinet Office and Parliament’s Standards Commissioner have all been rejected because of parliamentary privilege.

‘We need rules for MPs’

The revelations raise questions about whether MPs had been carrying out sufficient checks before making allegations that could damage innocent people, and whether parliamentary privilege might be open to abuse. Under current rules, ministers and permanent secretaries of government departments must declare any meetings with lobbyists. However, no such rules exist for back-bench MPs. Dame Margaret Hodge, the Government’s anti-corruption champion, said: “The Telegraph’s investigation has demonstrated that we need rules for MPs – I would go further to say that a register of lobbying for all parliamentarians should also be explored and implemented.” Lord Young, director of the Free Speech Union, said: “Parliamentary privilege is an ancient right that protects democracy and free speech. But its survival depends on MPs checking their sources and facts, and being careful not to put damaging allegations into the public domain unless they are well founded.”

Liam Byrne

Documents seen by The Telegraph reveal that in 2023, Liam Byrne, a former Treasury minister, was briefed by Christopher Steele before he accused Fraser Perring, a British trader, of being a Russian agent working with the Kremlin. Mr Perring, a short-seller who finds overvalued companies and bets that their share prices will fall, was “a not infrequent visitor to Moscow”, according to Mr Byrne. The Labour MP, who was the author of the infamous note in 2010 telling the incoming coalition government there was “no money” left, is now chairman of the business select committee. Mr Byrne called for a debate in the Commons and urged MPs to stop short-sellers from becoming “another weapon in Putin’s arsenal”. 

A statement was written for him by Mr Steele, who was paid on behalf of a private intelligence firm, Audere International, a whistleblower claims. Its client was Steward Healthcare, a now-defunct hospital giant based in Texas and accused of fraud by Mr Perring. Later bankruptcy filings by Steward show millions of dollars of payments to Audere. The Telegraph has seen evidence that Walsingham Partners, Mr Steele’s management consultancy, was subsequently given £29,000. According to communications seen by The Telegraph, Audere drafted the question for Mr Byrne, and was particularly keen to ensure it named Viceroy Research, Mr Perring’s company. Mr Steele said he had “slightly modified” the text and sent it to “Liam” for “consideration”. The next day, Mr Byrne submitted a written parliamentary question about foreign short-selling threats against defence manufacturers. Two weeks later, he took to the Commons floor and explicitly named Viceroy and Mr Perring. 

Afterwards, Penny Mordaunt, then leader of the House of Commons, raised the allegations with Tom Tugendhat, Britain’s then security minister. An Audere associate sent a copy of this letter to the company’s founder, Charles Blackmore, who responded with, “Top banana! Well done”, and forwarded a message from “the client”, Steward Healthcare, praising the “great work”. A source close to Mr Steele said his businesses had never been “contracted” by Audere and had never engaged with or been aware of Steward Healthcare.

Mr Perring staunchly denied the allegations and said he had never been to Moscow. He was later sacked from the board of a renewable energy company, which said the allegations made his employment “untenable” and could “significantly inhibit” the firm’s ability to raise funds. Mr Perring has filed complaints with the Parliamentary Standards Commission, his local police force, and the Cabinet Office, urging them to investigate the claims and the motivation behind them, but no investigation has been launched. Regulators and the police said parliamentary privilege was a block to any meaningful inquiry. Mr Byrne has not corrected the record or offered an apology to Mr Perring.

Sir Chris Bryant

In May 2018, Sir Chris Bryant wrongly accused Christopher and Richard Chandler of taking money from “the Russian people” or “decidedly dodgy sources” then attempting to conceal this through “money-laundering”. He added that the Chandler brothers’ money had “infected our country’s political system” and warned that this “should be a matter of concern for us all”. He accused the brothers of “maintaining relations” with a “Chechen mafia figure, who was expelled from Monaco”. However, the claims were false. Sir Chris was forced to issue a rare apology for making them. He had been briefed by Christopher Steele, as were a handful of other MPs who spoke in Parliament about the Chandler brothers. Ben Bradshaw, a Labour MP at the time, called for an “urgent investigation by the UK authorities”. Bob Seely, a Tory MP at the time, claimed Mr Chandler could be “vulnerable to malign influence”. 

Claims about the Chandlers were first made in a written report in 2002 by Donald Berlin, an American private investigator. It included allegations of “illicit activity” by the brothers, including claims they were money-laundering “on behalf of high-level Russian officials and Russian organised crime”. These claims were false. A source close to Mr Steele said he was aware of the report but did not possess a copy. They added that neither he nor his company had been “paid for expressly targeting the Chandlers”. Mr Chandler is the chairman and a founding partner of Legatum, the private investment partnership, which is an investor in GB News. He ultimately won a defamation case against Mr Berlin and was awarded $8m (£6m) in damages in 2024 by a US court. 

After the debate in Parliament, Sir Chris repeated the claims in a letter to Liz Truss, the then foreign secretary, which he published on X. Unlike his comments in the Commons, this was not covered by parliamentary privilege. After being contacted by lawyers acting for Mr Chandler, he posted an apology: “It was not my intention to repeat those allegations which I accept have subsequently been disproved.” He agreed to correct the record in Parliament, and said he “regret[s] any distress caused to Mr Chandler”. He was required to make a charitable donation of £1,000 to settle the case, instead of a substantial damages award to Mr Chandler. Sir Chris, who has been a Labour MP since 2011, served as a junior minister under Gordon Brown’s Government. He is now a Cabinet minister, serving as Northern Ireland Secretary. Mr Chandler declined to comment.

Anneliese Dodds

In May 2022, Anneliese Dodds stood up in Parliament to claim there were “genuine questions to answer” about whether a donation to the Conservative Party from Sir Ehud Sheleg had links to Russia. At the time, Ms Dodds was the Labour Party chairman and a member of the shadow front bench. After Labour won the election, she was made a Cabinet minister by Sir Keir Starmer. Sir Ehud, a British-Israeli businessman and art dealer, gave £3.8m to the Tories between 2017 and 2020, making him one of their main donors. He was appointed Conservative Party treasurer in 2019 and spent two years in the role before stepping down. 

Ms Dodds asked a series of questions about Sir Ehud in Parliament, some based on an article published days earlier in the New York Times that alleged Sir Ehud received a substantial gift from Sergei Kopytov, his father-in-law, before donating to the Tories. However, some of Ms Dodds’s questions appeared to be based on new information that had not previously been in the public domain. These included questions about a Mercedes car apparently used by individuals involved in the Russian state, and the Sheleg-Kopytov family’s alleged connections to the Russian state. Ms Dodds claimed in Parliament that Mr Kopytov was a “former senior pro-Kremlin politician in Ukraine”. She then asked whether electoral law had been broken and whether Britain’s national security had been compromised.

Sir Ehud’s spokesman said the claims were false. They said Mr Kopyotov was “a Ukrainian victim and ... no Putin ‘ally’” who had sought refuge in the Czech Republic after losing his civil service job when the Russians annexed Crimea. The Russians planned to seize and nationalise his assets. The spokesman added: “Mr Kopytov has not made a donation to the Conservative Party, whether through Sir Ehud or by any other means. It’s completely untrue.” The Electoral Commission examined the allegations and concluded there was “no evidence that the party has committed an offence”, so it would not investigate.

Before Ms Dodds raised these issues in Parliament, she met Christopher Steele in her parliamentary office, where he presented her with research on Sir Ehud. This research included claims about the Mercedes. Documents seen by The Telegraph reveal that in early 2022, Mr Steele contacted one of his most trusted researchers about a particularly “sensitive” assignment: “The subject/target of interest is Sir Ehud Sheleg or, more specifically, his possibly Russian or Ukrainian second wife (further details unknown) whom he married in 2014. Can you identify her and any links she might have, especially familial, with the Russian authorities and particularly the political leadership in Crimea?” His researchers gathered information about Sir Ehud, his wife and his father-in-law, including their movements and business interests. The New York Times article alleged that Barclays Bank flagged a “suspicious activity report” with the National Crime Agency (NCA) over Mr Kopytov’s gift to his son-in-law.

‘Challenging potential foreign interference’

Sir Ehud’s lawyers said at the time that this was “entirely separate” from his political donation. The NCA ultimately said the donation was from a “permissible source” and took no action. A spokesman for Ms Dodds said: “Anneliese Dodds has a strong track record of challenging potential foreign interference in our politics. In 2022, Anneliese raised questions in the Commons based on information taken in good faith – the vast majority of which had already been reported on in the media.” A Labour source said that several MPs had previously raised questions about Sir Ehud as part of the “legitimate scrutiny that should be expected by MPs seeking to safeguard our democracy”. They added that the “vast majority” of information that had shaped the questions Ms Dodds asked in Parliament had already been in the public domain.

Christopher Steele

After spending more than two decades working for the British secret services, Christopher Steele now runs Orbis Business Intelligence, a private-investigation firm specialising in Russia. He is also a director at Walsingham Partners, a management consultancy. He came to public attention as the writer of a highly controversial and contested report about Donald Trump, which was leaked in 2017. It contained contested allegations that members of the US president’s campaign team had conspired with Russia to interfere in the presidential election in 2016 and that the Kremlin had kompromat, including a tape of prostitutes performing a sex act for Mr Trump in a Moscow hotel. A federal criminal investigation into Russian interference in the election, led by Robert Mueller, the special prosecutor, did not verify the existence of such a tape.

Mr Trump said the dossier was “fake” and contained “totally made up facts”, claiming that it was politically motivated. It later transpired that Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign had helped to fund the dossier via intermediaries. The FBI launched a criminal inquiry into the report’s claims, which in turn led to Mr Trump ordering an investigation into the FBI and Mr Steele’s involvement. The US department of justice’s inspector-general published a report in 2019 stating that the CIA had dismissed the Steele dossier as little more than “an internet rumour” and that the FBI had only been able to corroborate “limited information” from it, much of which was publicly available. Mr Steele told journalists that he believed the contents of the dossier to be between 70 and 90 per cent accurate, with certain aspects – including the claim that prostitutes had carried out a sex act in Mr Trump’s presence – as little as 50 per cent.

‘Entirely normal and proper’

Mr Bradshaw said: “As one of the first MPs to raise concerns about hostile Russian interference in Britain, I was approached by several experts who shared my concern that the then Conservative government was not taking the Kremlin threat seriously, including Chris Steele, a former UK intelligence officer, Russia specialist and someone of integrity for whom I have the utmost respect. “Our concerns were subsequently borne out by events and the 2020 report by Parliament’s intelligence and security committee which found the Government had ‘taken their eye off the ball’ and ‘seriously underestimated the Russian threat’.”

Mr Steele declined to comment. A source close to him explained that Orbis Business Intelligence had commercial clients and was contracted by them for their benefit, which was “entirely normal and proper in business”. They said Walsingham Partners was run on a not-for-profit basis and funded by donors who did not gain from its work, or from engagement with parliamentarians or others, adding that all of Walsingham’s donors in recent years had been British citizens. They added: “In no case would Orbis or Walsingham provide parliamentarians with intelligence or assessment which we believed was not produced from credible sources.”

Damian Collins, the former Tory MP who is now a non-executive director of Orbis, told The Telegraph: “Orbis Business Intelligence does not engage in lobbying as defined by UK law. Furthermore, in my experience, MPs who have met Christopher Steele are fully aware of who he is and the nature of the professional services his company provides. In any case where information obtained by Orbis Business Intelligence through a commercial relationship with one of its clients has subsequently been shared with an MP, that client relationship has also been disclosed to them.” He said Mr Steele had “considered it his patriotic duty to make such information available to trusted contacts in Parliament when requested”. He added: “The use of that evidence, whether in reports published by Parliament or in statements made on the floor of the House, is ultimately the responsibility of MPs and their decision alone.”

Meanwhile, Kit Klarenberg writes:

Private messages show show Hamish De Bretton-Gordon, a top British pundit on the Salisbury poisoning incident, was a close associate of the MI6 officer who handled the Russian intelligence defector at the center of the scandal — and reaped considerable benefits from his proximity to the case.

This September, a former British Army officer named Hamish De Bretton-Gordon filed a column with the UK Telegraph complaining that “Russian bots” had “tried to make out that I’m part of a security service conspiracy.” Having shot to prominence as a media commentator on chemical and biological weapons after the alleged poisoning of turncoat Russian spy Sergei Skripal, De Bretton-Gordon dismissed accusations that he collaborated with UK intelligence as the product of the “Kremlin’s malign tactics.”

Despite his fervent denials, leaked emails reviewed by The Grayzone indicate that De Bretton-Gordon has spent years privately coordinating his public statements with senior British military and intelligence figures. The correspondences show him training operatives in Turkey and instructing Israeli military figures on Syria’s still-elusive stockpile of chemical weapons, “and a bit of Novichok,” referring to the Russian toxin supposedly used to poison Skripal.

They also suggest he stood to profit personally from exaggerating the threat posed by Russia. In the emails, De Bretton-Gordon described his day job as “flogging gas masks” to British military and law enforcement. He seemingly grew his firm’s business with outlandish warnings of imminent Novichok hand grenade attacks by Russian agents. As his prominence grew, the BBC hired De Bretton-Gordon to serve as an advisor on a drama about the Skripal poisoning.

His principal contact listed in the emails is Pablo Miller, an MI6 officer and veteran of the Royal Tank Regiment. Miller is widely believed to have recruited and handled Skripal before the Russian GRU defector was allegedly poisoned in Salisbury, England in March 2018 under questionable circumstances.

After the Salisbury incident, the British government issued a D-notice to prevent mainstream reporters from investigating Miller’s relationship with Skripal. Despite being an obvious subject of interest, Miller went completely unmentioned during the rolling coverage that dominated British media for months as a result.

The emails show Miller was nonetheless following that coverage closely. In June 2018, he wrote to De Bretton-Gordon thanking him for his “sterling media work” during what he called the “dark days of March and April.” During that period De Bretton-Gordon appeared in British newspapers and television reports on the poisoning on a near-daily basis, consistently attributing blame to the Kremlin without evidence and emphasizing the chemical weapons threat he claimed Russia posed.

The next month, De Bretton-Gordon sent his MI6 pal a lengthy Telegraph article warning of potential all-out chemical and biological wars with “rogue” states. De Bretton-Gordon’s commentary featured extensively in the piece, which framed Britain as a sitting duck in the event that Moscow were to target the country with missiles equipped with nerve agents or other toxic weapons.

When not hyping up De Bretton-Gordon’s apocalyptic warnings of potential Russian chemical weapons attacks, the article functioned as a long-form infomercial for his then-employer, Avon Protection Systems. The firm, which manufactures protective equipment for military, law enforcement and fire personnel, stood to profit handsomely from inflated perceptions of what governments call Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear (CBRN) threats. De Bretton-Gordon’s email signature at the time identified him as the company’s Managing Director for CBRN.

De Bretton-Gordon’s big break 

The Telegraph noted the company’s business was “booming,” with orders “flooding in” from government clients the world over, supposedly reflecting how “a new age of poison weapons is upon us.” Later in the piece, an Avon executive boasted that the Salisbury incident and other recent alleged CBRN usage had “been good for us.” Britain’s elite SAS were among the cited customers for the “sinister looking” gas masks sold by Avon Protection Systems, which were said to be “worthy of Darth Vader.” At no point did the Telegraph article mention De Bretton-Gordon’s employment by Avon.

But thanks to his newfound media prominence, De Bretton-Gordon wouldn’t have to stay with the company much longer. In January 2020, he emailed Pablo Miller bragging that he had “been offered a fellowship” at Cambridge University. De Bretton-Gordon wrote that he’d decided to accept the role because, in his words, “it beats flogging gas masks!” Four months later, De Bretton-Gordon founded a dedicated personal “CBRN and bio security” consulting firm, in an apparent attempt to derive profit from his talent for stoking public fears of looming chemical and biological catastrophe.

De Bretton-Gordon helps MI6 officer avoid media scrutiny 

The leaked emails show De Bretton-Gordon quickly emerged as a preferred adviser for the BBC, and repeatedly served as a go-between for Miller and the British broadcaster, whose journalists had apparently become aware that Miller was an MI6 officer. Correspondence from November 2018 shows De Bretton-Gordon was also rewarded for his relentless media appearances with a position as a “senior CBRN mentor” in Britain’s Ministry of Defence. Though the work was unpaid, he received an MOD ID card and Ministry railcard, saving him substantial sums on train travel. De Bretton-Gordon wrote Miller to inform him of his new title, noting that he was currently advising the BBC on what he derided as “CBRN ‘pisch’” for a forthcoming “drama on Salisbury.”

“I’ve been asked by the writer if you would be interested in contributing,” he mentioned to Miller, adding that he’d told the British broadcasters that the spy was unlikely to agree. The MI6 veteran responded, “you correctly guessed my answer to the BBC question… it would not be appropriate for me to comment in public on the issue.” Miller lamented that the British state broadcaster’s cognizance of his clandestine involvement with Skripal indicated his “true professional provenance” had “long ceased to be much of a secret.” But he wished De Bretton-Gordon good luck, telling his colleague that he was sure the drama would succeed given his “expert guidance.”

The next January, De Bretton-Gordon explicitly described Skripal as Miller’s friend when forwarding him a Forces News article on the removal of the roof of the Russian defector’s former home, excitedly informing him, “I see your mate is in the news again!” De Bretton-Gordon was quoted liberally in the report, explaining it was necessary to remove the roof as it had allegedly accumulated “enough Novichok to kill thousands of people.” The chemical warrior claimed British authorities were now “much better prepared to deal” with future CBRN attacks in the aftermath of the incident. 

Weeks later, De Bretton-Gordon emailed Miller to warn him Salisbury “will be awash with journos” on the March 4 anniversary of Skripal’s poisoning. In response, Miller thanked his friend for the “heads-up,” and wrote that he’d likely be leaving the country to ensure he was far away from the city while it filled up with reporters. 

The correspondence also reveals how close the two men had become, and how their relationship had begun to blur into commercial territory. In October 2019, Miller asked De Bretton-Gordon to help publicize a Kickstarter for his daughter’s theatre production — a personal favor suggesting a friendship rather than a purely professional engagement. But Miller refused to let media contacts anywhere near it, explaining that following the Salisbury incident his daughters were forced to close their social media accounts after being relentlessly hounded by the press. 

During the same exchange, De Bretton-Gordon reminded Miller he’d been contracted for an upcoming BBC drama on Salisbury, and once again offered him a role. Miller declined, saying he was firmly opposed to playing “any part for any BBC show. Ever.” De Bretton-Gordon defended his participation in the project by revealing that the MOD had specifically requested he “help on the Salisbury piece… to make sure the military bit looks right.”  The production in question was a three-part BBC One series that aired in 2020 called “The Salisbury Poisonings.” The project’s IMDB page lists De Bretton-Gordon as a “military advisor.”

De Bretton-Gordon wants critics “prosecuted for treason” 

As The Grayzone previously revealed, De Bretton-Gordon played a deeply malign, multifaceted role throughout the Syrian dirty war. On top of endless media appearances as a bogus “expert” on CBRN matters, he was part of a covert MI6 effort to smuggle soil samples out of opposition-controlled areas in an effort to prove the Syrian government used chemical weapons. A report on this initiative in the Mirror tabloid made clear the purpose of British intelligence was prodding the US into military intervention against Assad.

It seems plausible whatever samples De Bretton-Gordon gathered in Syria were concocted, perhaps by his own hand. He provided evidence to a number of official investigations into purported chemical attacks during the conflict. In at least one instance – an OPCW/UN Joint Investigative Mechanism (JIM) probe into an alleged April 2014 toxic gas strike in Talmenes – videos submitted by an opaque NGO De Bretton-Gordon founded called CBRN Taskforce were found to show clear signs of falsification. 

De Bretton-Gordon’s communications with his spy buddy contain references to him visiting Turkey, “to do a bit of training.” The country was the central hub for MI6 and CIA operations during the dirty war on Syria. It is an open question whether his training sessions covered staging chemical weapons attacks, and if other states in the region were taught in this dark art.

The self-styled CBRN expert also bragged about sharing his purported expertise with the Israeli military. In an email sent in December of 2018 De Bretton-Gordon boasted to Miller that he’d just returned “from Israel,” where he said he’d been “briefing the IDF (and no doubt others!) on Syrian [chemical weapons] and a bit of Novichok.” He was clearly impressed by the Israelis, crowing, “Those boys don’t mess about!” De Bretton-Gordon’s work overseas was apparently taking a toll on his day job, however. In an email that month to Miller, he explained how he was “always on the edge of sacking with all my ‘extra’ activities.” These machinations also put him in conflict with Peter Ford, Britain’s ambassador to Syria from 2003 to 2006, who’d become an outspoken critic of the dirty war against Damascus.

After De Bretton-Gordon authored an op-ed for The Telegraph in May 2019 demanding the West intervene to prevent Syrian government forces from recapturing Syria’s Idlib, Ford issued a response nailing his failure to acknowledge that the province was at the time under the control of the MI6-supported Al Qaeda affiliate, Hayʼat Tahrir al-Sham. In response, De Bretton-Gordon emailed Miller a note deriding Ford as a “complete See You Next Tuesday” who parroted “Assad and Putin propaganda.” He called for Ford – and the members of a now-defunct collective of antiwar academics known as the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media – to be “prosecuted for treason.” De Bretton-Gordon seemed particularly piqued that the academic collective had poked holes in the narrative he’d spun about Syrian chemical attacks.

De Bretton-Gordon cheers as his enemies “exposed” 

In August that year, De Bretton-Gordon contacted Miller to celebrate The Times publishing a hit piece on David Miller, a member of the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media. “Glad to see that some of Assad’s and Putin’s ‘useful idiots’ who try and give me a hard time are being exposed,” De Bretton-Gordon cheered, before suggesting “must get more of them out in the open.” This prompted a wider discussion about the so-called “stooges” who publicly challenged established, MI6-approved media narratives on Syria and Russia.

For his part, Pablo Miller expressed disgust over a recent “fawning evaluation” of Putin’s 20 years in power by dissident journalist Mary Dejevsky. Miller derided Dejevsky as one of many media figures who foolishly believed “Putin was the answer to Russia’s woes,” and suggested without evidence that she was likely “taking Moscow gold.” Thankfully, he added, events “Crimea, Syria, and Salisbury” had managed to “wake the twits up.”

The slanted manner in which these events were framed in the media did indeed coincide with a perceptibly negative shift in public sentiment towards Russia throughout the West, helping make a world-threatening standoff with Moscow a fait accompli. At every step, De Bretton-Gordon and other intelligence-aligned commentators acted as military and intelligence propagandists, ensuring the media and popular culture was constantly deluged with paranoia over a multi-spectrum Russian “threat.” Those who question the narrative are denigrated as “useful idiots,” and much worse.

This August 6, De Bretton-Gordon based an entire op-ed for The Telegraph on a conversation he’d recently had with an unnamed “Western intelligence officer” of his acquaintance. Could that anonymous spy have been Pablo Miller? The self-styled chemical warfare expert was clearly not keen to discuss his relationship with the MI6 man. De Bretton-Gordon immediately hung up the phone when I reached him and identified myself as a journalist.

Competent Authorities

Here:

We, the Patriarchs and Heads of Churches in Jerusalem, condemn the heinous attack carried out on Saturday, 17 October, by masked settlers in Taybeh against local residents during the olive harvest, and against the foreign guests, including diplomats and officials from European countries, who were with them in a visit of solidarity to the areas sustaining continuous attacks by similar groups of settlers.

This wild attack on the Christian village of Taybeh and against its peaceful population is not an isolated incident. In the past weeks the Palestinian villages of the West Bank have been exposed to a wide-scale terror by settlers, which is reaching a peak during this time of the olive harvest, when families go to their lands to collect what they need to live and renew their generations-long bond with their lands. In this regard, we consider the religious ruling recently published, allowing Jews to take the olives of Palestinians, as unfounded, very worrying and dangerous, and absolutely unacceptable. We very much appreciate that several rabbis and Jewish voices have publicly rejected it.

We thank the President of the State of Israel Mr. Yitzhak Herzog for his words of condemnation. Unfortunately, the facts on the ground show that these attacks continue because of the impunity enjoyed by those who commit them. We recognize the action taken by the Israel Police and the arrests carried out following this attack, and we express our hope that this enforcement will continue in a serious and consistent manner and will not remain an isolated measure.

We call upon the competent authorities to bring those responsible to justice, and we urge the international community to intensify its efforts to ensure the protection of the people of Taybeh and the West Bank, as well as all those who visit these areas to express their solidarity.

We renew our full support to the community of Taybeh and its churches, and we will continue, as in the past, to do everything possible to preserve the Christian presence there.

We lift up our prayers for the people of Taybeh and for all the people of the Holy Land, that they may live in safety, justice and peace.

+ The Patriarchs and Heads of Churches in Jerusalem

But not, alas, here:

The UK government has rejected a call by Jeremy Corbyn MP for an independent inquiry into “British complicity” in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The former Labour leader wrote to Prime Minister Andy Burnham in July calling on him to back a bill for a public Chilcot-style inquiry into British military, economic and political cooperation with Israel over the course of its ongoing onslaught in Gaza which began in October 2023.

The bill, which was rejected by former Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government during its second reading last year, specifically sought a probe into the British government’s “supply of weapons, surveillance aircraft” to Israel as well as its use of Royal Air Force bases. The independent MP revived the bill in July, following Starmer’s resignation, and called on Burnham for his support.

But Burnham’s government rejected the call in response to a written question on Monday, saying that a tribunal isn’t necessary as there are “extensive mechanisms already available for parliamentary accountability and oversight”. “Andy Burnham rightly said that the last Labour government ”got it wrong” over Gaza,” Corbyn said in a statement on Tuesday. “However, his words will mean very little if he doesn’t break with the last government’s shameful record of complicity, secrecy and evasion.”

The UK has supplied Israel with arms during the course of its military operation in Gaza, which is confirmed to have left more than 74,480 people dead and has involved ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their homes in various parts of the territory. Britain’s Royal Air Force has also conducted hundreds of surveillance flights over Gaza and supplied Israel with intelligence for its operations. “Delaying scrutiny will not make questions about British complicity in genocide disappear,” Corbyn wrote. “The public deserve to know the full extent of Britain’s military, economic and political cooperation with Israel, including arms supplies, surveillance flights and the use of RAF bases. It’s not complicated: if the government has nothing to hide, then why block our efforts to expose the truth?”

Aux Armes, Citoyens?

Bloody hell, it’s cold. Oh, to be in Paris. “The bourgeoisie of the world, which looks complacently upon the wholesale massacre after battle, is convulsed by horror at the desecration of brick and mortar.” And which brick or mortar? Those rightly bemoaning the damage to the Hôtel de Ville at Limoges, a manifestation of the Third Republic, have shed no tears for the desecrated Christian holy sites of Palestine, Lebanon and Syria. Much less have they wept for the schoolgirls of Minab.

The Left, you say? Well, it does have form for this sort of thing in France. But who doesn’t? October is the month of 13 Vendémiaire. And the last riots in Britain were firmly on the Right, being largely centred on Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who, if his latest legal costs were indeed being paid by Elon Musk, needs to account for his previous crowdfunding of them. Based on his appearance on recent hours, that money went straight up his nose. An additional charge of fraud would seem to be in order. Meanwhile, note that the British Right copied, if rather comically, the attempted revival of the spirit of Boulangism and Poujadism in the summer of 2000, yet the British Left shows no sign of seeking to imitate the rediscovery of 1789, 1848 and 1968.

No State Has A “Right To Exist”

Jonathan Cook writes:

Israel has no right to exist. That’s the position in international law. It has nothing to do with hatred of Israel or antisemitism. In fact, no state – none – has a “right” to exist, including states busy extolling their democratic credentials. If the UK had a “right” to exist, for example, it would mean that Scotland could not be allowed to vote for independence. Why? Because such a vote would break up the UK. It would be a violation of the UK’s supposed “right” to exist as the UK. Which is precisely why the UK has no “right” to exist. 

Peoples have a right to exist. When that right is abused, it invariably involves very serious violations of international law – often through crimes such as apartheid, ethnic cleansing or genocide. States, by contrast, don’t have a “right” to exist. They simply do exist as a matter of fact – until they suddenly don’t. Like apartheid South Africa. Like Rhodesia. Like Czechoslovakia. Like Yugoslavia. Like Nazi Germany. 

This is so obvious it should not even need stating. Were states to have a “right” to exist, completely arbitrary factors such as their borders, demographic make-up and political institutions would be sacrosanct. Inviolable. It would be impossible for minorities to secede, for territories to be transferred, for apartheid structures to be overturned . Any such change would be a transgression of the state’s “right to exist” as it is. 

And yet every single journalist employed by an establishment media outlet is suddenly playing dumb on this most elementary of issues. They’ve all suddenly had a collective lobotomy. They insist Israel must be the exception to the rule that no state has a “right” to exist. Watch, for example, the BBC’s Nick Robinson berating Green party leader Zack Polanski for refusing to affirm Israel’s “right to exist”. Polanksi correctly argues instead that Israelis and Palestinians have a right to live in equality.

Incendiary stupidity

Why all this incendiary stupidity from our supposedly brightest and best journalists? Their doltishness is not accidental. A Green party motion last week determined that Zionism – the ideology that created and sustains Israel – is racism. That brought very unwelcome attention to the question of what kind of state Israel is. I have written at length on why Zionism is a form of racism, so I won’t rehash the arguments. You can read them here. But what Robinson and the rest of the media are insisting on is a unique carve-out for Israel. They argue that Israel has an exceptional right – one that no other state enjoys – to exist as it is and in perpetuity.

The implication, the one they want you to infer without them having to spell it out, is that any attempt to end Israel as a racist state, and reform it into a democracy where Israelis and Palestinians have equal rights, is a violation of its supposed “right to exist”. They also want you to assume that anyone who denies Israel’s “right to exist” is calling for the mass murder, the genocide, of Israeli Jews – and possibly all Jews. In their telling, those calling for the extermination of Jews include Zack Polanski, the Jewish leader of the Greens, and Stephen Kapos, an elderly Holocaust survivor and one of the proposers of the motion.

What these journalists are doing has nothing to do with protecting the Jewish population that live in Israel. It’s about setting in stone a highly militarised state that subjugates Palestinians, both in the occupied territories and inside Israel itself, that refuses to define its borders, that has been judged to be committing the crime of apartheid by the world’s highest court, and that is carrying out a genocide in Gaza according to a consensus of legal and human rights authorities and genocide scholars.

If apartheid South Africa had no “right” to exist, Israel has no “right” to exist either. Its crimes are far graver than apartheid South Africa’s, as the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a Nobel peace laureate, famously observed after he travelled around the occupied territories – and did so long before Israel started committing genocide in Gaza. Like that other famous apartheid state, Israel must be reconstituted as a democracy so that it no longer poses a danger to the Palestinian people it has spent decades dispossessing, oppressing and now genociding. 

‘State of Gaza’

Every time I make this argument on social media, Israel’s apologists excitedly exclaim that I have been hoisted by my own petard. If Israel has no right to exist, they jabber, then a Palestinian state must have no right to exist either. Yes, that’s right. Let me say it again: no state has a “right” to exist. And that may prove a very good thing for the Palestinian people. Imagine Donald Trump’s Board of Peace decides to rebuild the tiny enclave of Gaza along the lines of his stated plan: as a Mar-a-Lago resort on the Med, where Palestinians live effectively as guest workers, servicing wealthy Gulf Arabs with restaurants, AI data centres, casinos and brothels. Trump might choose to call this madhouse the state of Gaza. 

And imagine that, under intense international pressure, Israel finally allows the remaining territorial shards of the West Bank it hasn’t colonised with illegal settlements to hold elections tightly regulated by Israeli military officials. The fragmented West Bank government has no control over its borders or airspace, it has no territorial integrity, it has no army, it is separated from Gaza and East Jerusalem, and it has no access to the outside world without Israel’s permission. Israel decides to call this hell-hole the state of Palestine. Does this “state of Gaza” have a “right” to exist? Does “the state of Palestine” have a “right” to exist too? Would any struggle by Palestinians living there to assert real control over either of these states and reform them violate those states’ “right to exist”? For the sake of the Palestinian people, let’s hope not. But that is precisely the argument being advanced by Israel’s apologists. If the current state of Israel has a sacrosanct “right to exist” as it is, then any supposed state Trump imposes on the Palestinian people, on whatever terms, would enjoy a similar “right to exist”.

Dignity and security

The mistake being made here is to associate the state as it exists with the people it is supposed to represent. Israelis have a right to exist – they have a right not to be oppressed, ethnically cleansed, genocided – and the state that represents them is legitimate so long as its role is to protect them from these kinds of threats. So long as it provides them with a degree of dignity and security. But Israelis lose the right to maintain their state as it is if that state is used to oppress, ethnically cleanse or genocide another people, like the Palestinians. Then it becomes an illegitimate state, just like apartheid South Africa or Nazi Germany. It must be reconstituted in ways that regain its legitimacy.

That is not “singling out” Israel. The Palestinians have never had a modern state. They have lived under various occupiers – including the Ottomans, the British and Israel. They were entirely excluded from the decolonisation process that followed the end of the Second World War. They cannot be judged as having a legitimate or illegitimate state because they have no state. They need a state precisely to protect them from being oppressed, ethnically cleansed and genocided by the state representing Israelis. 

The armed groups in Gaza are not a state, and neither are the so-called “moderates” in the West Bank. They are not even proper governments. They are either quislings or resistance movements fighting for their people’s liberation, a right accorded to the Palestinian people under international law. The Palestinians are fighting to have a state that represents them, to remove an occupier that abuses and murders them.

That representation might come via a Palestinian state, or it might come via a confederated or unitary state in which Israelis and Palestinians enjoy equal rights. Even that state won’t have a right to exist. It will have to earn its place in the hearts of Israelis and Palestinians by serving to protect their collective dignity and security better than any other arrangement. That is a lesson we could all do with remembering as we ponder whether the states that claim to represent us really do so.

The Prize Was Peace, Sold Before We Got Home

Paul Knaggs writes:

I served in the British Army during the Cold War, in a regiment whose entire purpose rested on the darkest calculation of that age: that the final line against nuclear escalation was the absolute certainty of what would follow it. Mutually assured destruction. MAD. A terrible doctrine, but one designed to prevent an even more terrible reality. Our purpose was never to win a nuclear war. It was to ensure nobody dared start one. We trained for a war that must never happen. And it didn’t.

The Warsaw Pact dissolved. The Soviet Union ceased to exist. The Third Shock Army, which we had spent our working lives preparing to confront, folded up and went home. And when the Cold War was over, our regiment was disbanded. Its job was done. There is something in that transition which our political and military institutions seem to have forgotten: when the threat that justifies an institution’s existence disappears, its continued existence ought to be questioned. We had spent years preparing for the worst, but when the worst never came, we stood down. 

That was the victory. Not the destruction of an enemy on some European battlefield, but the fact that the battlefield never materialised. I have never been sentimental about the Cold War, but we had won something worth having: the prospect of a peace dividend. Not another parade or another defence contract. Schools. Hospitals. Housing people could afford. Universities that didn’t bury young people in debt. Sports centres in towns that have since lost theirs. The wealth spent preparing for a European war could finally be directed toward building a better country for the people who had paid for those preparations. 

The man who understood this best was no pacifist. He was a five-star general who had commanded the Allied forces in Europe. In April 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower told American newspaper editors that every gun made and every warship launched represented a theft from those who were hungry and cold. He called it The Chance for Peace. He understood what happens when a war economy outlives the war it was built to fight. We had that chance. We squandered it.

An Alliance in Search of a Reason 

NATO had sixteen members when the Soviet Union collapsed. Today it has thirty-two. While regiments like mine were disbanded because the Cold War had ended, the military alliance created to confront the Soviet Union chose a different path. Rather than asking whether its original mission had been accomplished, it expanded eastwards. In June 1997, Senator Joe Biden addressed an audience of admirals, generals, and committed Atlanticists in Washington. He was not exposing a secret conspiracy; he was explaining a policy he supported. What makes the video remarkable today is how openly he laid out the prospectus: the product, the territory, the price list, and the terms. 

The product was the enlargement of NATO into the former Eastern bloc. The territory was everything between Germany and Russia, with the Baltic states to follow once the ground had been prepared. The price list came from a Pentagon study of February 1997: nine to twelve billion dollars in direct costs over twelve years, of which Washington would carry fifteen per cent, the new members thirty-five, and the existing European allies half. And the terms were these, in his own words to the room: candidates for membership must assume the financial burden of making their armed forces interoperable with NATO’s, on top of modernising their militaries. 

Read that sentence again. Every former Warsaw Pact air force flew Soviet aircraft, fired Soviet calibres and spoke to Soviet radios. Interoperability meant replacing all of it, with Western kit, over decades, on borrowed money. Biden told the room he had asked one military leader how he intended to pay. If you want to fly first class, he told him, you have to buy a first class ticket. “This is not a charity operation.” Nobody in that room needed the hint explained.

The honest question of that moment was never seriously put in public: what is a military alliance for once the army it was built to fight has gone home and gone bankrupt? Biden answered it with unusual frankness. The Senate, he said, divided into three camps, and his own camp held that the issue was not whether NATO stayed the same or grew, but “does it expand or does it die”. He said it plainly. The alternative to expansion was not a smaller alliance. It was no alliance, no budget, no command structure, no seat at the table, and no reason for an American general to be headquartered in Belgium. Biden was equally frank about what did not justify it. He told the room that nobody mildly informed believed the Russian army was poised to pour through the Fulda Gap, and that the Russian army was in such a state it could not subdue Chechnya. He said he had met Russian politicians across the spectrum, communists, liberals and nationalists, and had not found one who believed enlargement constituted a military threat to their country. He put Moscow’s objections down to lost empire and wounded pride. And asked about the candidate countries themselves, he said that not one of the four he had visited, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovenia, felt the least bit threatened at that moment.

So here is the architecture, stated by one of its architects. No military threat. No frightened applicants. An alliance that must grow or dissolve. And a bill running into billions, to be met by the publics of countries that had just emerged from forty years of command economies. George Kennan, the architect of Cold War containment, warned in the New York Times that expanding NATO would be “the most fateful error of American policy in the post-Cold War era,” predicting it would inflame Russian nationalism and recreate European divisions. Biden knew Kennan’s argument, cited it directly, and set it aside. Washington gambled that Russia was too weak to resist, and that the long-term strategic consequences could be managed indefinitely... Biden named Kennan’s argument from the podium. Then he set it aside.

That is the real charge against the room, and it is worse than the one usually made. Nobody in it was predicting war, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. They were doing something more dangerous: deciding, on the basis of a weak Russian army and a wounded Russian mood, how much provocation the other side would absorb. Biden even named the expiry date on his own assessment. Never is a long time, he told them, and Russia’s current weakened condition is sure to improve. He knew the army would recover. He assumed the politics would be settled before it did. Wars rarely begin because somebody planned one. They begin when men who are certain they have the measure of the other side discover, years later and with the budget already spent, that they never had it at all. 

The Market and the Machine 

Within weeks of that speech, the New York Times published an investigation by Jeff Gerth and Tim Weiner under a headline that has aged into prophecy: “Arms Makers See Bonanza in Selling NATO Expansion”. American defence contractors, it reported, were travelling central Europe like diplomats, because every new member would have to re-equip, and because the companies that made the equipment had just lost their Cold War market.

At the centre of the lobbying sat Bruce Jackson, president of the US Committee to Expand NATO, the outfit that wined, dined and whipped the Senate towards ratification. His day job, as documented at length since, was vice president for strategy and planning at Lockheed Martin. He did not conceal it. Nobody treated it as disqualifying. A man whose employer stood to profit from a strategic decision ran the campaign to secure that decision, and the arrangement was published in the newspaper of record and then absorbed without consequence. 

What followed shows how the circuit worked. In December 2002 Poland chose Lockheed Martin’s F-16 over the Swedish Gripen and the French Mirage, and in April 2003 signed for forty-eight aircraft at three and a half billion dollars, the largest arms contract ever placed by a former Soviet bloc country. It was financed by a United States government loan of three point eight billion dollars, interest only for the first eight years. Poland’s then finance minister, Grzegorz Kolodko, estimated the servicing cost alone at around one point two billion. Paris complained that Warsaw had bypassed European industry entirely. 

Follow the money around that loop. Washington creates the requirement through enlargement. Washington lends the money. An American corporation takes the contract. The Polish taxpayer repays the debt with interest, for fifteen years, out of a budget squeezed to meet EU convergence targets. That is not a trading relationship between equals; it is the financial anatomy of a client state. Ninety years ago, Major General Smedley Butler boiled American foreign policy down to four words: war is a racket. In post-Cold War Europe, they didn’t even need the war. The threat alone was enough to run the business. 

The All-American Sales Team 

This was never a party matter. The selling was institutional, carried out by Democrats and Republicans alike, running directly through the State Department. It is a century-old American mechanism for projecting power through procurement. During the First and Second World Wars, the United States built the massive industrial apparatus that supplied and financed European armies, first the Russians and British, and eventually its own forces, leaving its allies bound by decades of debt. In the post-Cold War era, that same machinery was simply recalibrated for peacetime expansion. 

In October 2009, on a visit to Moscow, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton toured a Boeing facility and pressed Russian officials to buy American aircraft for a new state airline. She described her own intervention as a shameless pitch. In 2010 Boeing landed the contract, worth three point seven billion dollars. Two months later, as Fox News reported during her 2016 campaign launch, the company donated nine hundred thousand dollars to the Clinton Foundation, earmarked for rebuilding schools in Haiti. In 2012 Boeing paid Bill Clinton two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for a speech. The Washington Post reported that the State Department had set aside its own ethics guidelines, which first barred soliciting Boeing and then capped any gift at a million dollars, to accommodate a two million dollar Boeing contribution to the American pavilion at the Shanghai Expo. Boeing and the Foundation have consistently denied any connection between the donations and the diplomacy, and no finding of wrongdoing has ever been made. 

No finding is needed to see the shape of the thing. What the record establishes is that the American state treats its industries and arms manufacturers as a branch of foreign policy, and its foreign policy as a branch of sales, and that the people running it see nothing remarkable in the arrangement. Note the detail that ought to stop every reader dead. The customer Hillary Clinton was working hardest to win, in 2009, was Russia.

The Machine Requires The Threat 

Here I move from documented fact to political judgement, and it is right to say so. Look at what happened after the Cold War, because the sequence tells us something important about how military institutions survive. NATO has invoked Article 5, its collective-defence clause, only once in its history: on 12 September 2001, following the terrorist attacks on the United States. Those attacks were carried out by al-Qaeda, not by Moscow or any successor to the Warsaw Pact. Yet they provided NATO with a new mission, one that would take the alliance far beyond the European territory it was originally established to defend.

Afghanistan followed. Twenty years of war, thousands of lives lost and an extraordinary financial cost. Brown University’s Costs of War project estimated the American bill at 2.3 trillion dollars. Britain’s own military operations cost £22.7 billion to the end of 2019/20, according to the Ministry of Defence, and more than 450 British service personnel lost their lives. In August 2021, the Western withdrawal ended with the Taliban back in Kabul. After two decades of military intervention, the government NATO and its allies had spent billions supporting collapsed in a matter of days. Six months later, Russia invaded Ukraine. Six days before, Ukraine violated the ceasefire in the self-declared regions of the Donbas.

I cannot show you an instruction to manufacture a Russian threat, and I will not pretend one exists. What the record shows is something less theatrical and more durable: an alliance that had already concluded it must expand or die, an industry that needed a market, and a political class in which the two were the same people in different chairs. Institutions of that kind do not need a conspiracy. They need only a direction of travel, and every incentive in the structure pointed east. The decision to invade was made in Moscow. Responsibility for it rests with the Kremlin. But the invasion also transformed NATO’s political position. An alliance whose post-Cold War purpose had repeatedly been debated once again had a powerful adversary, an urgent mission and governments prepared to fund a dramatic expansion of military spending. There was a history behind that decision, and the West likes to conveniently forget that history.

Putin, Zelensky, Biden: the Harbingers of the Apocalypse

At Bucharest in 2008, NATO declared that Ukraine and Georgia would become members. It gave no timetable, no roadmap and no protection. It is difficult to design a policy better calculated to provoke Moscow while leaving Kyiv exposed, and the alliance adopted it anyway. 

What followed is the part now routinely deleted from the record. In November 2013 an elected Ukrainian government suspended its association agreement with the European Union, and a political crisis followed in which outside powers pursued their own interests with no great subtlety. Three weeks before President Yanukovych fled, a telephone call between Victoria Nuland, the US Assistant Secretary of State, and Geoffrey Pyatt, the American ambassador in Kyiv, was leaked. On it, the two of them discuss which Ukrainian opposition figures should be in the next government. Nuland’s verdict on her preferred candidate, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, was that “Yats is the guy”. Washington never disputed the recording’s authenticity, and Yatsenyuk became prime minister on 27 February 2014. Whatever else that is, it is not the conduct of a disinterested bystander, and the Ukrainians who were told their revolution was entirely their own were entitled to better. 

Then Crimea, then the Donbas, then eight years of trench war that Europe agreed to stop noticing. By September 2021, before a single Russian tank crossed in the invasion we now treat as the beginning, the United Nations human rights office had verified at least 3,393 civilian deaths in that conflict, and the total toll including combatants was commonly put at around fourteen thousand. The Minsk agreements that were supposed to end it were never implemented by either side, Kyiv never legislating the special status, Moscow never returning control of the border. Angela Merkel told Die Zeit in December 2022 that Minsk had bought Ukraine time to grow stronger, a remark the Kremlin has quoted ever since and which her critics read as retrospective positioning. In April 2019 Ukrainians elected Volodymyr Zelenskyy with 73 per cent of the run-off vote, on a platform of ending that war. He was not given the chance, and the capitals now lecturing us about resolve were not conspicuous in helping him take it.

So when February 2022 arrives, it arrives into a country already eight years into a war, and the honest left has two things to say rather than one. The first is that the decision to launch a full-scale invasion was taken in the Kremlin, that it is a crime under international law, and that tens of thousands of Ukrainians have been killed for it. Context explains a war. It does not absolve the man who started one. The second is that Western governments do not get to erase their own decisions from the record and present the catastrophe as though it fell out of a clear sky. Bucharest was theirs. The leaked call was theirs. The eight years of shrugging at the Donbas were theirs. A reckoning that begins on 24 February 2022 is not a reckoning. It is an alibi with a date on it. The room in 1997 had been assured there was no military threat and no prospect of a military reaction. It took twenty-five years for that assurance to be tested, and it failed in the only way such assurances ever fail, all at once and at somebody else’s expense. 

Notice what that invasion did to the structure. Within two years, Finland and Sweden had joined, the alliance stood at thirty-two members, and the question Biden was wrestling with in 1997, whether NATO could survive without an enemy, was answered permanently. Vladimir Putin delivered what thirty years of lobbying could not buy. If you built your career selling the proposition that Europe needs an armed bloc, 2022 was not a catastrophe. It was a product launch. There is a bleak symmetry here. In October 2022, the senator who had told that Washington room the alliance must expand or die was President of the United States, telling a fundraising audience that the world had not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis. He spent a quarter of a century helping to build the architecture, then stood at the top of it and described where it had arrived.

The invoice

The 1997 Pentagon estimate was nine to twelve billion dollars across twelve years. Hold it next to what Europe is now paying. At The Hague in June 2025, NATO members committed to five per cent of GDP on defence and related security by 2035, of which three and a half per cent on core military spending. The Secretary General’s annual report, published this March, records that European allies and Canada spent 574 billion dollars on defence in 2025 alone, a real-terms increase of twenty per cent in a single year, with total allied spending on core defence above 1.4 trillion dollars. At the Ankara summit in July, governments and industry announced more than fifty billion euros of new procurement deals at the summit’s own industry forum, plus a drones programme worth forty billion dollars over five years.

The European Union, an organisation sold to its members as a peace project and a customs union, now runs the financing. Its ReArm Europe plan, rebranded Readiness 2030, aims to mobilise up to 800 billion euros. Its SAFE instrument offered 150 billion euros in cheap long-dated loans and was oversubscribed by nineteen member states before a single euro was drawn, with the first thirty-eight billion cleared for eight governments at the start of this year. Romania alone took more than sixteen billion. These are debts, not grants, carried on national books. And when EU leaders needed ninety billion euros for Ukraine last December, the plan to fund it from frozen Russian assets collapsed against Belgian legal objections, so they borrowed it on the capital markets instead. European taxpayers are now servicing debt that was supposed to be paid by Moscow.

What it costs in Barnsley 

In Britain, the invoice has an address, and it is not the Ministry of Defence. On 30 June this year the government published its Defence Investment Plan: an extra fifteen billion pounds over four years, taking total planned spending to 298 billion by 2029/30. The Treasury has identified where ten point three billion of that extra money comes from. Four billion is a one per cent levy on the capital budgets of every other government department. Two billion comes from the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero. Up to seven hundred million comes out of roads funding. Around a billion comes from selling off the military estate. The remaining four point seven billion will be confirmed at the Budget. 

The government’s own explainer says this is achieved “without taking resources away from day-to-day spending on frontline services”. Read it twice. Capital budgets are the money that builds the school, the hospital wing, the social housing, the grid connection. The claim is technically accurate and politically dishonest, and it follows the method already used in February 2025, when the rise to 2.5 per cent of GDP was paid for by cutting overseas development aid from 0.5 to 0.3 per cent of national income. Meanwhile, 63 billion pounds goes to the defence nuclear programme over four years, ringfenced, consuming between a fifth and a quarter of the entire MOD budget. 

Britain reaches 2.7 per cent of GDP by 2027/28, and then the plan goes quiet. There is no indication whatever of how the country travels from there to the three and a half per cent it has promised NATO by 2035. That is not an oversight. That is the bill falling due after the next general election, which is precisely when no voter will be asked about it. Two ministers, John Healey and Al Carns, resigned in June over the settlement behind an earlier draft of the plan. Which brings us back to the man in the Washington function room. Biden ended that evening by invoking Vietnam, and said that no foreign policy, however well fashioned, can be sustained without the informed consent of the American people. Thus far, he added, the American people had neither been asked for their consent nor informed of the costs.

Thirty years on, the policy has been sustained magnificently. It is the consent that was never collected, on either side of the Atlantic. Jeffrey Sachs, in remarks published this month, calls the European turn Keynesian militarism and puts the objection in nine words: quality of life does not come from building missiles. Eisenhower got there seventy-three years earlier, and he had the advantage of having commanded the armies of the West when he said it. A missile is fired or it rusts. It does not insulate a house, generate power, treat a patient or carry freight. Rearmament does make real jobs in Barrow and Filton and Glasgow, and I will not pretend otherwise. But it is the only major public spending in Britain that currently requires no business case the public is allowed to read, and the only industrial strategy our political class will fund without an argument. 

The argument against me 

The strongest case for the other side is not made in Washington. It is made in Warsaw, Vilnius and Tallinn, and it deserves better than caricature. Poland was carved up in 1939 by agreement between Berlin and Moscow, then abandoned by its guarantors. The Baltic republics were annexed in 1940 and their people deported in their tens of thousands. Budapest was crushed in 1956, Prague in 1968. These nations did not join NATO because a Lockheed executive bought their foreign ministers dinner. They joined because they had read their own history and drawn a settled conclusion about what happens to small countries between great powers without a hard guarantee. Russia’s conduct since 2014 has, in their eyes, vindicated that judgement entirely. Any left politics that cannot say so plainly is not serious.

But their fear was real and the market was real at the same time, and the honest charge is not that the fear was invented. It is that the fear was monetised, that the one solution ever placed on the table was the solution that also generated the largest contracts, and that alternatives built around the OSCE, neutrality guarantees or European Union accession without the military bloc were never seriously tested, because nobody stood to profit from testing them. And whatever one concludes about 1999, nothing in that history licenses the settlement now being imposed. Those countries made their choice in their own parliaments and referendums. Nobody voted for five per cent of GDP until 2035. It was agreed by heads of government at a summit and handed down as a fact of nature. It is not one. Spain has declined the target, capped its spending at around two per cent, cited its welfare commitments, and remains a member in good standing. 

The machine will not be controlled. It has a life of its own. It feeds the banks that underwrite the borrowing and collect on the coupon. It feeds the energy companies that did very well out of the crisis while our constituents sat in cold rooms. It feeds the manufacturers, the executives whose bonuses track an order book rather than a national interest, and the politicians who pass between all three without ever once having to explain themselves. And at the far end of it, where the money finally turns back into something real, it feeds the meat grinder. Young men, in numbers no government on either side of this war will publish honestly, fed into trenches by people who will never see one. That is the thing we are being asked to fund until 2035. Not security. Appetite.

So the demands are modest, and they are democratic. Parliament should vote explicitly on the path to three and a half per cent, with the departmental losers named in the division lobby rather than buried in a funding explainer. The Ministry of Defence should publish, contract by contract, how much of this money leaves the country and which foreign shareholders receive it. The revolving door between ministers, procurement officials and arms manufacturers should be shut by statute, not guidance. And since the OSCE still exists and diplomacy still works when anyone bothers to attempt it, ministers should account in public for what they have actually proposed to end the war now being used to justify all of this.

The Cold War ended in 1991. The institutions built to fight it never stopped growing, and the industry that armed it never stopped selling. In that Washington room in 1997, a senator told a foreign officer that if he wanted to fly first class, he would have to buy a first class ticket. Europe has been flying first class ever since, and the working class has been paying for the seat. I was there for the end of it, and I can tell you what the victory was worth, because I watched what was done with it. We won the Cold War. The peace was the prize, and it was sold before any of us got home.

A Gauntlet Being Thrown Down

Frances Ryan writes:

Back in 2009, months before the coalition government unleashed sweeping austerity, the then Conservative backbencher Iain Duncan Smith produced a study that would go on to lay the foundations for the rollout of universal credit. Now, nearly two decades later, Duncan Smith and his thinktank, the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), has published State of Dependency: a landmark report promising to expose “the full scale of Britain’s worklessness crisis”.

The study paints a picture of mass benefits reliance: it identifies 3,400 local areas where more than half the working-age population are on out-of-work benefits, or “economic opiates”, as the authors call them. They’ve even provided an interactive map (in the yellow and black colours of a road hazard sign, no less) so members of the public can type in their postcode to see if their neighbourhood is “a welfare hotspot”.

This is not just another ugly social policy report from a politically sidelined former minister – it is a gauntlet being thrown down ahead of Britain’s big benefits debate. Next month, the government is expected to release two major reports into the social safety net: the Timms review on personal independence payments (Pip), which pays for some of the extra costs of disability in England and Wales, and the Milburn review into young people who are out of work.

It wouldn’t be overstating the importance of Westminster reviews to say their recommendations could shape the future of our welfare state for decades to come. With almost 1 million young people not in education, employment or training (Neet) and the disability benefits bill rising in cash terms, Andy Burnham will face immense pressure to use the proposals to launch a once-in-a-generation overhaul of the social security system.

An overhaul in itself is no bad thing. Disabled people applying for benefits face a debilitating mess of bureaucracy and barriers, while too many young people have been abandoned, facing greater obstacles and fewer services. The question is, will the overhaul actually improve conditions for the people who rely on it, or buckle to the anti-benefit sentiment that’s been bubbling up for months? 

That the right is not currently in power won’t stop it from wielding significant influence on what’s to come, in large part thanks to its dominance of Britain’s media ecosystem. Legacy media are not even hiding their attempts to shape November’s reforms before they are announced, with The Times this week launching a “welfare inquiry” to investigate the impact of the benefits “crisis” on public finances.

Some of this is made up of concrete policy proposals, such as the Daily Mail’s pitch to radically means-test Pip. But increasingly much of it is just vibes, a vague sense that this disability problem is getting out of control (or having one is becoming “cool”, as the Telegraph recently put it), and that disabled people – particularly the young – are somehow grifting “perks” while everyone else struggles with rising bills.

The changes in how people consume media since the last major benefits reforms in the early 2010s mean the risks of misinformation and outright bigotry are even greater. Last week, Nigel Farage announced plans for a new video studio in Westminster for the launch of Reform TV on YouTube, with the party’s proposed £50bn benefits cuts presumably being lined up as viral content.

Keep an eye out too for a revival of the striver v scrounger rhetoric as energy and housing costs are set to lead to the worst living standards in modern times by 2029-30. There are few easier ways to convince workers that the unemployed should go hungry than when they’re cutting back on their own food shop. It is telling that the CSJ study includes a section directly comparing “economically inactive claimants” with workers: someone on minimum wage would have to work six days a week to match “the security, cash and ease” a disabled person gets from a package of state benefits, it proclaims. About 1.4 million foreign nationals receive working-age benefits, it ominously adds. Divide and conquer never gets old.

A Labour government is no guarantee these divisions – worker v claimants, old v young, migrant v citizen – won’t be espoused from the cabinet table. No recommendations by Timms or Milburn have been confirmed yet, but Whitehall sources say there are potential plans to scrap a key part of universal credit for under-25s and replace it with a multi-billion pound package to get people back into work.

Sure, it’s depressing if ministers are tempted to bow to the prevailing political winds by pulling cash from young people, but it’s not exactly surprising. For decades, the right has set the boundaries for what Britain’s safety net can be, resulting in little more than subsistence-level benefit rates, an ever crueller culture of testing and a sicker population. 

The conventional wisdom has always been that change can only go one way: the benefits system can repeatedly become more punitive and error-strewn, but never more compassionate or accurate. For a leader who has defined himself as someone unafraid of large-scale change, Burnham is well placed to challenge that orthodoxy – if he wants. The opportunity to transform the benefits system does not come up often, and it is rarer still for a Conservative prime minister not to be at the helm. 

It’s unfashionable to say it out loud but the truth is that Labour has the power to radically improve the disability benefits system: introduce more evidence-based assessments and reduce the need for mass appeals against incorrect decisions; stop using public money to line the pockets of private companies; and end unnecessary reassessments for lifelong disabilities. Similarly, ministers can address why more people need disability benefits in the first place: by investing in threadbare mental health support; addressing NHS waiting times and poor preventive health services; fixing Access to Work; and tackling employer attitudes to disabled candidates. 

The right has long believed it has a monopoly on Britain’s benefits system, as if it were still paternalistic Victorians punishing and pitying the lower orders. But check the calendar and it is 2026. There is a Labour government in office and two big wads of research coming that can at last lay the groundwork for remaking our safety net. The millions who rely on it must hold their breath to see whether that chance will be grabbed or thrown away.

As The Turning Point In This War

Wolfgang Munchau writes:

After Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin met in Anchorage, Alaska, last year, there was a brief moment when it appeared possible that the US would enforce a peace on Russia and Ukraine. But the conditions for a deal were not in place. Neither Putin nor Zelensky would compromise over the status of the Donbas, the Russian-speaking region in eastern Ukraine of which Russia has occupied 90%. Putin wants it all, and Zelensky refuses to hand over any unoccupied land.

Then Trump turned toward Iran. The Russia-Ukraine war dropped in US foreign policy priority list. Now, because of oil and gas, it’s back at the top again. Trump realised that he cannot be at war with two of the largest oil and gas countries in the world. Iran may only be seventh on the list of the world’s largest oil producers, but by closing down the Strait of Hormuz, Iran indirectly affects some 20% of global oil production.

Russia, however, is the world’s second largest producer of both oil and gas. The Europeans dismissed the recent US-Russia diesel deal as another stunt by Trump, and it’s true that it won’t affect gasoline prices in the US by much. If it had been an isolated deal, I wouldn’t have paid much attention either. But it wasn’t. Trump followed up with actions he had hitherto shied away from.

The first sign came last Wednesday morning. Ukrainian media reported that, overnight, the country’s forces had experienced sudden restrictions on Starshield, the military part of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite system. Ukrainian drones were losing signal when they travelled faster than 160 kilometres per hour. The sudden throttling of the service disrupted several Ukrainian drone missions.

The presumption within Ukraine was that SpaceX had imposed those restrictions on behalf of the US government. And the next day, Reuters reported that the order came directly from the White House, which had been angered by Ukraine’s continued targeting of Russian refineries. So this was not a technical service disruption, but a ruthless application of the kill switch. All we got from the White House, though, were news leaks. No official statements. Not even a tweet. For the Trump administration, this is not normal.

Along with the news of the throttling of Starshield came suggestions that the US had ended intelligence sharing. On the night of 12 October, Russia launched a volley of ballistic missiles at Ukraine. Normally, US intelligence would give the Ukrainians a warning. But on this occasion, there was no heads-up — and the results were horrendous.

Until that point, intelligence sharing had been one of the most important components of the defence of Ukraine. The Americans have satellite-based infrared systems that can detect ballistic missile launches, and the Ukrainians could rely on it.

But things had changed. Two days after the attack, it was reported that the White House had discussed ending the sharing of intelligence. John Ratcliffe, the CIA director, wanted to continue sharing intelligence — but others, it seems, didn’t. Trump denied that the US had cut intelligence sharing. Indeed, it is possible that Russia may have used weapons that resisted detection. We should at this point treat the disruption of information flows as suspicious, but unexplained, even if that flow now seems to have definitively resumed.

Then, late on Friday, Trump used an executive order to waive the implementation of sanctions against Russia under the Graham Act, whose goal was to deprive Russia of financial resources that allow it to wage war against Ukraine. Named after the late Senator Lindsey Graham, Trump had signed it into law only last month.

The secrecy, the reports of meetings inside the White House, the reports from Ukraine itself, and the suspension of the Graham Act: together these developments give us a coherent picture, even if some of the details are still missing. They tell us that the US is no longer actively engaged in the defence of Ukraine.

That’s different from the situation in late February last year, when Trump and Zelensky clashed in the White House. After that meeting, the US paused weapons deliveries and financial assistance. The White House also cut off intelligence sharing for a week, but then resumed it.

But what the Americans are doing now is far more coordinated. And it presents the Europeans with a conundrum. They will attempt to mitigate the effects of this change in US policy, however, there is not much they can do. They can offer intelligence from their own satellite network, but this will not match the communication quality Ukraine’s fast drones require to function as intended.

Nevertheless, Zelensky turned up at the European Council in Brussels last week, where EU leaders took another opportunity to show their solidarity with the Ukrainian leader. He is a regular guest there. But beneath the bonhomie, tensions are rising. Ukraine is running out of money faster than the Europeans had expected. Last December, the Belgians vetoed the sequestration of Russian funds that are sitting, frozen, in a Belgian bank. The EU reluctantly agreed a €90bn loan to Ukraine, money they themselves borrowed, pretending that Russia would eventually have to pay back this loan. The loan was supposed to plug Ukraine’s funding gap for this year and next.

As it turns out, Ukraine now needs another €70bn. Marine Le Pen, the front-runner in the French presidential election race, has promised that, if elected, she would cut off all support for Ukraine. Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, has promised more funding, but this money is not showing up anywhere in his government’s own budgets.

While Zelensky revels in the public admiration of Europe’s leaders, then, the foundations of Western support have been getting shakier. Now it is getting even harder, because the US is actively conspiring against Europe. The deal under which the US buys 4.8 million tonnes of diesel from Russia looks like an attempt to restart commercial relationships. I expect this will be the first of several natural resources deals between the US and Russia.

I could, for example, see a deal struck over Russian gas. Envoys have been discussing extending their new commercial partnership to the defunct Nord Stream pipeline that used to carry gas from Russia to Germany. This would be an ironic twist, because it was the first Trump administration that placed sanctions on the German and Russian operators who were building Nord Stream 2, a successor pipeline.

In September 2022, the section of piping that runs below the Baltic Sea was sabotaged. A Ukrainian commando is accused of being behind the explosion. The trial against one of the suspects started in Germany last week, and it promises to give us a lot of details of this operation, including information about the extent of Zelensky’s involvement.

Germans will be watching closely. Like Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, the hard-Right Alternative for Germany is also opposed to Ukraine aid. The AfD has, over the past year, enjoyed a fast rise in the opinion polls. The Ukraine war is one of the themes most central to its campaign, and the trial will be a gift to them that will keep on giving.

Trump’s negotiators recently pressed the Europeans to release parts of the frozen Russian assets: to make them available for a special Ukraine investment fund, rather than directing them toward further fighting. The Europeans rejected this request, because their plan is to fund Ukraine’s war with Russian money. I am reminded of the old Thatcher joke about why socialism does not work: because socialists run out of other people’s money. If the EU got its wish and were able to sequester the Russian money, given how fast Ukraine is spending money, it would not last for long.

Additionally, the EU is exploring the possibility of giving full membership of the bloc to Ukraine, but membership can only help fund the reconstruction of Ukraine if accompanied with large fiscal transfers. Right now, Germany is leading a group of countries that are opposing a plan by the European Commission to increase the size of the next EU budget. The Europeans say one thing, but do another: a classic case of revealed preferences clashing with stated preferences.

Politically, and financially, the room for manoeuvre by the Europeans is decreasing. The Europeans need the US, but the US, having enthusiastically supported Ukraine under Joe Biden, has become first a reluctant supporter and now a country that no longer pretends to support Ukraine. I doubt very much that, come 2029, even a Democratic president would expend political capital on a war, which by then would have been waged for seven years.

Wars usually end when one side is running out of food, oil, or other critical supplies. It is delusional to think that with an oil price at $110 a barrel, the world’s second-largest oil producer is running out of money. The war will end eventually, most likely with a dirty peace deal that will leave the Europeans in shock.

I suspect that it will happen during the remaining two years and three months of the Trump administration. Trump has been too inconsistent for any such forecasts to be made with complete certainty. But I am confident that last week’s decisions will go down as the turning point in this war.