Normally when a select committee hearing or interview is described as ‘wide-ranging’, it’s because a lot was said, but none of it of much note. Today’s Liaison Committee session with Rishi Sunak was wide-ranging, but in an unusually newsy way. The Prime Minister was grilled by select committee chairs on immigration, Rwanda, Gaza, defence spending, China, online harms, pensions and local government. Almost all the topics yielded a line of note – though admittedly some of the lines were notable for what Sunak did not say.
On defence, for instance, an issue that is heating up again in the Tory party, the Prime Minister refused to go beyond the holding line that he and ministers (bar James Heappey, who used his last Defence Questions as a minister yesterday to make yet another call for more funds), have stuck to of spending rising to 2.5 per cent of GDP ‘when conditions allow’. He told Defence Committee chair Jeremy Quin that the government was investing in its defences, and pointed to the announcements made yesterday in Barrow about civil and military nuclear. But Quin responded:
I absolutely take the point that we are investing, but clearly a lot has happened since 2020, including Ukraine to which the chair referred, the Defence Secretary has referred to us entering into a pre-war world. Against that backdrop, when do we expect to be hitting our 2.5 per cent ambition?
Sunak replied: ‘We’ve said we will do that when the conditions allow.’ After a few more exchanges, Quin remarked politely: ‘I would have liked to have heard a date on 2.5: we will persist on that.’ Bernard Jenkin did so shortly after, asking Sunak whether he would put 2.5 per cent in the manifesto along with the triple lock, but the Prime Minister demurred, saying ‘I think we’ll try not to write too much of the manifesto in the here and now’.
I’ve done very well, says Rishi Sunak at select committee grilling
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26.03.2024
Normally when a select committee hearing or interview is described as ‘wide-ranging’, it’s because a lot was said, but none of it of much note. Today’s Liaison Committee session with Rishi Sunak was wide-ranging, but in an unusually newsy way. The Prime Minister was grilled by select committee chairs on immigration, Rwanda, Gaza, defence spending, China, online harms, pensions and local government. Almost all the topics yielded a line of note – though........
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