London Playbook: Seconds best each other — NATO
number fudging — Sending Case packing
BY EMILIO
CASALICCHIO
June 29,
2022 8:07 am
POLITICO
London Playbook
By EMILIO
CASALICCHIO
Good
Wednesday morning. This is Emilio Casalicchio on the Playbook train for this
morning and Thursday. Eleni Courea will be back on Friday morning.
DRIVING THE
DAY
SECONDS
BEST EACH OTHER: It’s battle of the deputies this afternoon as Dominic Raab and
Angela Rayner face off at Prime Minister’s Questions. The second-in-commands
hold the fort as Boris Johnson juggles a domestic row about defense spending at
the NATO summit in Madrid. The PM landed in Spain last night with a Donald
Trump-esque demand for fellow members to contribute more to the alliance — but
the dispute among top Cabinet ministers about cash for the armed forces
threatens to overshadow his big NATO gambit.
Lost in the
defense digits: There are numerous numbers about defense spending flying about
in the papers this morning. Playbook will try to clarify what’s what — and
please don’t come at me about the U.S. spellings.
Defense
headache #1: Speaking to reporters on his tiny little plane en route to Madrid,
Johnson resisted calls for big hikes in military spending to ensure Britain
continues to meet its NATO obligations. The PM has faced behind-the-scenes
pressure from Defense Secretary Ben Wallace (or someone posing as him) to boost
cash for the armed forces or risk missing the NATO target of spending 2 percent
of GDP on defense as a result of rocketing inflation (more on that from
POLITICO’s Cristina Gallardo). The Sun’s Harry Cole reports that at least £4
billion more will be needed, according to some defense watchers, to avoid
missing the target by 2025.
But but
but: “Expenditure should not be judged by quantum but by output,” Johnson told
hacks during the flight in a line reported in the Times. He swerved questions
about whether he would support a 2.5 percent target, as some have called for.
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Defense
headache #2: Johnson and NATO officials appear to be at odds over what
percentage of its GDP the U.K. is spending on its armed forces at the moment.
The alliance said Britain is on course to spend 2.1 percent of its GDP on
defense in 2022. But Johnson insisted the true figure was 2.3 percent when the
£1.3 billion sent to support Ukraine is included. When hacks on the plane
pointed out the difference, Johnson insisted: “We’re right.”
Defense
headache #3: Amid concerns that inflation is eating into the U.K. defense spending
target, things are going to get worse before getting better. Also on the
flight, Johnson and his team made clear that the latter part of the 2019
Conservative manifesto promise to “continue to exceed the NATO target of
spending 2 percent of GDP on defense and increase the budget by at least 0.5
percent above inflation every year of the new parliament” was dead in the water
now that inflation is headed towards double digits.
This is how
delicious fudge is made: Johnson insisted the 0.5 percent above inflation
target would be met, but measured over the long term instead of on an annual
basis. “We have been running way ahead of that target for a while now,” he
said. “We’re confident we will beat that this year. You don’t look at inflation
as a single data point, you look at it over the life of the parliament, and
we’re confident that we’ll make that.” The Guardian has those lines.
Blame
COVID, innit: “The manifesto was written before £400 billion had to be spent
locking people up for their own safety because of the global pandemic,” a
government source told all the hacks on the plane, arguing there has since been
“a reality check on things that were offered in a different age.”
Let’s see
how all this goes down with … Ben Wallace, who is on the morning broadcast
round right now.
Even so …
Johnson will tell NATO members how to manage their own defense cash during the
summit, despite his own house not being quite in order. A press release from
Downing Street released overnight said the PM will argue the 2 percent target
(which members agreed to hit from 2024) should be a minimum, and he will push
for discussions on a new target from 2024 onwards in the wake of the Russian
invasion of Ukraine.
In his own
words: Johnson will tell the summit that “over the next 10 years the threats
around us are only going to grow. We need allies — all allies — to dig deep to
restore deterrence and ensure defense in the decade ahead. The 2 percent was
always meant to be a floor, not a ceiling and allies must continue to step up
in this time of crisis.”
TODAY AT
NATO: Leaders will arrive from about 8.15 a.m. Spanish time, Cristina Gallardo,
who is on the ground at the NATO summit, texts in. There will be an official
photo at 10.25 a.m. before the meetings kick off. POLITICO’s live blog is
kicking off shortly here.
On the BoJo
agenda: Johnson has bilats with the leaders of Australia, Turkey and the
Netherlands. He then has a trilateral with the leaders of Sweden and Finland,
after the Turks dropped their veto for the two nations to join NATO. It’s a big
moment, and one Johnson will relish after pressing Recep Tayyip Erdoğan over
the past couple of weeks to drop his opposition. The PM tweeted about the news
last night, and will appear in a TV clip sometime this morning. POLITICO’s Lili
Bayer and Cristina Gallardo have the details.
ALSO
HAPPENING AT NATO: Foreign Secretary Liz Truss is kicking around too and is
participating in a panel event with the Belgian, Australian and Spanish prime
ministers. Watch it here from 9 a.m. Spanish time.
LONELY
PLANET: With the PM now on the final leg of his diplomatic grand tour, my
colleague Esther Webber has charted Johnson’s quest for love on the world stage
as things unravel at home.
What’s in
the box: Esther finds remnants of his international appeal — apparently
managing to make the notoriously austere Rwandan President Paul Kagame crack a
smile and joking with Jamaican PM Andrew Holness about which man looked more
like James Bond in their dinner jackets. But there was not much of the global
Britain tub-thumping you might have expected on his visit to Rwanda, which was
overshadowed by the row with Clarence House and the two by-election defeats.
No regrets:
On both fronts, the PM appeared unrepentant. A Downing Street adviser
contrasted the weight of pressure on Johnson with that on the prince and his
aides, noting that the PM had limited time to spend on “humoring men in
tights.”
MORE SUMMIT
SUM-UPS: Elsewhere, my POLITICO colleagues Karl Mathiesen and David Herszenhorn
have filed a damning take on the G7 summit Johnson just left. “As they wrapped
up their talks, the world’s most powerful leaders seemed to be tinkering at the
margins and failing on all fronts — powerless to stop Russia’s war or stop
prices from racing out of control, unable to stop the Zugspitze glacier from
melting, or to even to end the blockade of millions of tons of Ukrainian grain
vitally needed to feed the developing world,” the pair write. Better luck next
time, eh?
BEYOND GOOD
AND EVIL
CHECK YOUR
PRIVILEGES: The privileges committee is expected to appoint Harriet Harman as
its chair and kick off its probe into whether Boris Johnson lied to the House
of Commons like the Downing Street press team lied to journalists about
lockdown parties in No. 10, according to Chris Hope in the Telegraph. In the
Times, Henry Zeffman and George Grylls note that the committee will meet to
work out the logistics of the probe, including whether sessions will be public.
Yes please!
Speaking of
public hearings about ethics … the sketch writers give top civil servant Simon
Case both barrels in the papers this morning following his rather bleak
appearance at the public administration and constitutional affairs committee.
Sending
Case packing: In the Guardian, John Crace was astonished at the Case admission
that he spends up to 30 percent of his time on whether the PM and others have
broken rules: “Imagine. Nearly a third of your job is spent making sure that
you and those around you are behaving vaguely decently and upholding the law.”
Taking its
toll: “Two years ago Case exuded smooth modernism,” writes Quentin Letts in the
Times. “The rimless spectacles remain trendy and the beardy stubble is no less
designer but he is now less Zen, more weathered, and sometimes transparently
theatrical. His grief at the COVID rule-breaking was wonderfully bogus.”
Here to
serve the public (and test a few boundaries): Rob Hutton in the Critic noted
that the Johnson-covering Case “was working for the Royal Family that time that
the prime minister lied to the queen.” He ribbed the mandarin’s line that
Johnson believes he has “a mandate to test established boundaries.”
COMING
ETHICS ATTRACTIONS: The bloodbath that is the PM undergoing a grilling from the
liaison committee will start at 3 p.m. next Wednesday and feature (drum roll)
integrity in politics as one of its topics, according to new details released
by the panel. Also to look forward to is the result of a probe into whether a
minister was sacked over her apparent “Muslimness,” which Insider’s Henry Dyer
notes is imminent.
IS THERE A
TORY CHAIRMAN JOB GOING? I HADN’T NOTICED: Disgraced former Health Secretary
Matt Hancock happens to have penned a piece in the Mail all about what the
Tories need to do to win the next election amid their current woes. His line on
lockdown parties is that “general elections are about the future not the past.
It will be about what the Conservatives are offering people for the second half
of this decade, not about past actions, glorious or otherwise.” Lucky,
that.
STATE OF THE UNION
CLEAR YOUR
DIARIES — MAYBE: Nicola Sturgeon’s team will be pleased to see that her
governance-distracting-pull-chord/bold-and-exciting-plan (delete as appropriate)
to hold an independence referendum on October 19, 2023 splashes all the
Scottish papers and a few of the U.K.-wide ones this morning. Catch up on the
details here. It’s gonna be a fun *checks notes* one year, three months and 20
days.
Cut-out-and-keep
guide to the Nat plan: 1)Wait for Boris Johnson to have an unexpected change of
heart or reject Sturgeon’s request for a referendum … 2) Hope the Supreme Court
rules that Holyrood does have the power to hold a referendum … 3) If not, argue
the outcome of the next general election in Scotland should count as a
referendum instead … 4) Hope the election result builds pressure on Westminster
to allow a proper referendum … 5) Rinse and repeat.
Does any of
this matter? For possibly the first time in a while when it comes to Scotland’s
independence debate, yes — writes Playbook’s Andrew McDonald in his deep dive
on Scotland’s day of drama. While a meaningful referendum next year and
independence itself remains a tall order, Sturgeon’s two-pronged plan succeeded
in giving both her supporters and the more impatient elements of the
independence movement something to unite behind. The most striking element of
her speech — the Plan B of using the next general election as a de-facto
referendum — may also have the unintended consequence of changing the electoral
game.
Awks:
Former SNP councillor turned Alba Party defectee Christopher McEleny pointed
out that he was booed off the stage when he proposed something almost identical
to Sturgeon’s Plan B at SNP Conference in 2019.
Now watch
this: Sturgeon and her deputy John Swinney are doing broadcast hits this
morning, with Sturgeon set to appear on ITV’s Good Morning Britain and Sky’s
Kay Burley. Scotland Secretary Alister Jack is in the Commons this morning
(from 11.30 a.m.) and might be worth a watch.
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