King’s Speech

Lord Houghton of Richmond Excerpts

Thursday 21st May 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Houghton of Richmond (CB)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Lamont, now a fellow traveller on the International Relations and Defence Committee. I draw the attention of the House to my relevant defence-related commercial interests, particularly my role as chairman of Defence Holdings PLC and as European defence adviser to Blackstone.

Unsurprisingly, I want to confine my comments on the gracious Speech to defence-related issues, and with due humility, because whenever I stand to speak and look around this Chamber I still feel young. I thought I might start by offering some thoughts on leadership. Among the many famous dictums on leadership sits Napoleon Bonaparte’s view that a leader when faced with a difficult or indeed potentially catastrophic situation had a duty to his army and his country to do two things. The first was to establish the truth and the second, in the context of that truth, was to offer hope. To explain this a little more fully, the truth I am talking about is not some sort of confected delusion or some exercise in self and public deception; rather, it is the ugly reality that only brutal honesty can lay bare.

Only in the context of unvarnished truth is it possible to offer practical hope. To explain, the hope that I am talking about is not some passive form of wishful thinking akin to optimism, nor some alchemy dreamed up by the authors of the defence strategy publications. Rather, the military idea of hope is a combination of desire, positive expectation and some action. Hope is a motivating force that provides both strength and resilience in uncertain times.

In the context of defence, the gracious Speech undoubtedly nodded in the direction of some truth. It talked of dangers and threats, but the narrative of peril was completely neutered, because it so obviously sat in the wider context of government inaction on funding the latest strategic defence review. We need to do much better.

I offer some selective views on both truth and hope. The first truth is that the dangers we face are more complex, active and potentially existential than we realise. I say this because the threats are not only military ones that can be identified and physically defeated; rather, they are also threats to the resilience of our critical infrastructure, the integrity of our society and the values we hold dear and want to live by.

The second truth is that our defence capability is in a mess. Not only are our Armed Forces woefully underresourced, but they have been procured for a different world, age and mindset. We remain the prisoners of our remarkable national story. We cling to the totemic symbols of global authority: our nuclear deterrent, aircraft carriers, fifth generation jet fighters and exotic platforms—the global projection of hard power. I am not saying that many of these things are not needed, but by the time such things are paid for, there is little left over for the conventional combat readiness which is the baseline requirement of credible deterrence on a localised basis.

This leads to the third hard truth: our pretensions to NATO leadership, a core aspiration of the last defence review, are frankly laughable. The same is true of some of our other pretensions; for example, to the status of a technological superpower. In short, the British public have been subject to 25 years of delusion and to quote my friend—he has been oft quoted today—the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, we now find ourselves

“underprepared, underinsured and under attack”,

and we are not safe—that is the truth.

In respect of hope, however, I can offer some more positive thoughts. In respect of the threat, I do not personally worry that Russian paratroopers are imminently going to land in Kent or roll tanks up to the gates of Paris. The wars in Ukraine and now Iran have demonstrated the inherent advantages of defence over attack. We can triage the threats of the moment and should prioritise our support to Ukraine and the desperate need to build national resilience and ameliorate the more critical risks to our societal integrity.

We need to spend more on warfighting readiness to contribute to more credible deterrence, to help build back some international respect and to better justify our leadership credentials. I do not accept this as being unaffordable. Affordability is a political choice. Moreover, if the future promises on defence funding are realised, our challenge is more one of timing than money. I am intimately aware that private equity recognises the need for, and mutual benefit of, investing in defence and the stability it helps ensure, and it is keen to make that investment quickly.

Finally, we should all continue to recognise that, in human terms, and despite the neglect we have subjected them to, we continue to have in our Armed Forces a most remarkable national asset. We owe it to them to tell the truth and to offer them some hope—the hope that their service deserves. So I am not downhearted and without hope, although I am mightily frustrated that the political elite of my nation seems to spend the majority of its time convulsed in wholly meaningless distractions. There is an urgent need to be honest with the nation about our predicament and to offer it hope through practical action. This should now be the Government’s cohering purpose.