Why Fleet Street can no longer mount an effective campaign against defence cuts
Last week the government made one of the most momentous announcements of this Parliament. Geoff Hoon, the Secretary of State for Defence, unveiled unprecedentedly swingeing defence cuts. Nearly a quarter of the RAF is to be axed. The navy will lose 5,000 men and 15 vessels. The army will have to give up a quarter of its main battle tanks. Four out of 40 infantry battalions will go by April 2008, and several regiments will be merged. Overall the armed forces will be reduced by a tenth as a reward for having performed so creditably in the second Iraq war.
In former times such an announcement would have set off a political explosion, and Mr Hoon, who is a very undistinguished man, would have been hard-pressed to defend himself. As it was, the armed forces were literally decimated without either the opposition or the press raising much more than a grumble. Twenty years ago the Tory backbenches were brimming with MPs who knew about defence, and had not infrequently served in the forces. When the Thatcher government announced cuts to the navy in the early 1980s, a group of Tories led by Keith Speed, a former navy minister, put up a partly successful rebellion. One gets the impression that modem Tories, with their recently uncovered Notting Hill faction, do not know very much about defence, and care even less. Their defence spokesman Nicholas Soames, who appears to be in a permanent grump, could hardly make much headway given that Oliver Letwin had pledged to freeze defence spending in the first few years of any future Tory government.
What concerns me most here is the reaction of the press. Every newspaper criticised the defence cuts, mainly on the basis that it is always better to have as many boots on the ground as possible. and Mr Hoon was cutting numbers. But most of them brought little energv, and even less expertise, to bear in their coverage of these extraordinary cuts. The Daily Telegraph, the Financial Tunes, the Guardian and the Times did think fit to run a front-page story, with the Telegraph offering the most voluminous and authoritative coverage on its inside pages. With its rather Groucho Club view of life, the Independent consigned the story to page 16, though it ran a critical leader, while the Guardian, despite its front-page piece, was leaderless on the subject. The Daily Mail and the Sun (which likes to regard itself as the squaddies' paper) both carried 'spreads', though the Dad)' Mirror managed only one page plus a leader. But all in all one could complain less about the amount of space devoted to the story than the absence of expert analysis and real concentrated rage. To most newspapers this was just another story. To the armed forces and, I would submit, for the country these cuts are catastrophic. Mr Hoon. who is nothing if not cunning, may have helped himself by making his announcement at a time when the few remaining analysts of distinction were on holiday. The Telegraph's John Keegan was not to be found in his newspaper's pages. Robert Fox was missing from the London Evening Standard, though Andrew Gilligan filled his boots ably. There were a few peripatetic exgenerals, but they do not always have the strategic overview or the biting pen that is required on these occasions. Just as the Tory benches have been denuded of defence experts who know what they are talking about, so Fleet Street lacks authoritative voices such as those that served it so well in the past.
There was one exception — our old friend Sir Max Hastings. This column and Sir Max have sometimes gently crossed swords over the years. I seem to recall that he once blackballed me from a club. Let us, for the moment at least, put all that behind us. Following Mr Hoon's announcement, Sir Max became a one-man defender of the British armed forces, and a rather more effective one than his friend Nicholas Soames. First he wrote a passionate 1,800-word essay in Saturday's Daily Mail in which he interpreted the defence cuts as 'sounding the death knell for the British warrior heritage'. The following day he was to be found performing on the centre pages of the Sunday Telegraph, where his theme (expounded by him in various newspapers, but no less true for that) was that the armed forces are paying for expensive and largely otiose hardware such as the Eurofighter, while the defence budget also suffers from incompetently administered procurement programmes.
Alas, Sir Max's fulminations were lonely explosions in a battle that has otherwise fallen silent. Geoff Hoon can do more or less what he wants to our armed forces and get away with it. On the morning after the cuts, the Sun carried a photograph of Nancy Dell'Olio (Sven Goran Eriksson's former squeeze) on its front page, while the Daily Minor plumped for someone called Abi Titmuss, whose provenance we should not even bother about. It would be difficult to find two more ghastly women if we scoured the country for a month. The Independent's front page was concerned with the most recent crime figures, while the Guardian thought Blair's idea of sending soldiers to Sudan was more interesting. (Where is he going to find the soldiers for his foreign capers? I don't suppose he has thought about it.) Sir Max is right. This country has changed, and so have its newspapers. We nod to the armed forces as they pass, we may even regret that they are being cut again, and then we cheerfully turn the next page.
C't n Tuesday Michael Howard announced that the Tories believe that too much investment is going into wind farms. He said that local people should be given more say before they are put up, and that the government should spend more time investigating the possibilities of wave and tidal power.
Perfectly reasonable, you might have thought. Wind farms are a ghastly blot on the landscape, and they produce only a tiny fraction of the country's electricity needs. The BBC, however, appears to take a different view. BBC1's Ten O'Clock News sent its reporter Wyre Davies to a wind farm in South Wales. Incredibly, he reported that he could not find a single person to speak out against it. One woman who was interviewed said that she and her children were happy as larks about the wind farm, and did not at all mind the noise. The whole tone of the report was one of condescension towards what was plainly regarded as the Tories' latest hopeless plan.
The BBC evidently managed to discover a freakish community of halfwits who happen to be in love with wind farms. But I am sure there are thousands of people who live in their shadow who do not like them, and millions of others who do not want new wind farms plonked in their back gardens. The Tories' suggestion that these people should be consulted is hardly controversial. The government is committed to an enormous expansion of wind farms, and in opposing its plan the Tories, according to this news item, do not have any public support whatsoever. I simply don't believe it.
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