Philip Hammond

Many of the Saudi coalition's air raids were conducted with British-built aircraft and bombs.

At the start of the war then, Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond declared that the UK would support the Saudi military in every practical way short of engaging in combat, including the resupply of spare parts and ammunition.

The British state and its arms industry lived up to this promise.

More than 6,000 government and contractor personnel worked throughout the war to support and maintain the Saudi Air Force, enabling it to continue operating.

The pension triple lock has been where pensions rise in either inflation, 2.5% or wage growth.

Just amongst former Conservative chancers, Jeremy Hunt, Kwasi Kwarteng, Philip Hammond, Ken Clarke, Norman Lamont have all said it needs to be looked at again.

Are they all wrong? Well, you could ask why many of those former chancellors didn't do it in the first place.

I will tell you why we're not making that our policy.

That was the problem, though, was that basically conservatives didn't really buy it.

Philip Hammond was the chancellor, and his view of that was, yeah, no.

[laughs]

Uh, you ended up with, uh, something more personal, therefore, things like the sort of burning injustices, stuff like that.

But Gordon Brown, I suppose, had a bit of tub thumping kind of like vision and zeal.

Philip Hammond, he was pretty boring when he held spreadsheet field, but he kind of lent into that.

It's early days with this fellow.

But I guess my point is, is if you're doing the this is who I am speech, I'm introducing myself to the media and a wider audience.

And my ears also pricked up when he said something else on the program this morning.

He was talking about the sort of big economic picture, and he said for decades there'd been a lack of honesty about What really needs to happen in the economy, and of course, I suppose you include lots of your former conservative colleagues, you know, Jeremy Hunt and Philip Hammond, and he basically had quite a pop at successive governments, including conservatives, for not really getting to grips with the fundamentals of the economy, which he sees overall as, you know, a massively too big state that's grown and grown, and questions about welfare and debt that haven't really been resolved.

Self-evidently, this has gone back a number of periods over a number of different governments of a number of different flavors.

The Conservative Party is under new management.

You know, she sets the infected blood inquiry going.

She sets the... bishop jones uh you know reports on on how to stop another hillsborough going she does have it at a sort of it's almost more individual level but she didn't quite have the sort of the structural sense of it at least that she could get past people like philip hammond her chancellor then liz truss has a sense of it but it's kind of bug-eyed zombie Thatcherism, 40 years out of date trying to do what Thatcher didn't do, which is do it all in the sort of smash and grab hurry, fire Tom Scholar and ignore the ABR.

Thatcher was far, far more cautious than that because she knew she had time.

Truss is sort of at the very sort of fag end of that, trying to do it again in a hurry.

By the way, both Dennis Healey and...

Philip Hammond were good defence secretaries and good chancellors and that's an unusual thing to say but Healy's just done the same thing.

Moody's going to have to make better use of the money that it's got and that probably means spending less on quite wasteful big high prestige programmes The leaks that have been coming out to particularly the Financial Times, which is very well informed on this, are that if he has a priority, it will be to fill the hole in the defence investment plan, which is about a billion a year for five years.

And then they'll worry about the 3.5% later.