This report is from this week’s CNBC’s UK Exchange newsletter. Like what you see? You can subscribe here.
Speeches from 80-year old politicians who last served in government more than a quarter of a century ago seldom have an impact.
That makes the speech delivered nine days ago by George Robertson, defense secretary in former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s first administration and later the 10th secretary-general of NATO, all the more extraordinary.
Robertson, who in July 2024 was asked by the then newly-elected PM Keir Starmer to undertake a “root and branch review of U.K. armed forces,” delivered what the Financial Times described as “a devastating political attack” and what Deborah Haynes, the respected defense and security journalist, called “the most significant intervention on defence spending since the end of the Cold War.”
Robertson, in unusually blunt language, accused Starmer’s government of “corrosive complacency” towards defense. He delivered his strategic defense review to ministers as long ago as June last year but noted they have yet to provide a 10-year plan to fund it in what he described as “vandalism” by “non-military experts in the Treasury.”
