Grant Shapps is the UK’s new defence secretary – but is he up to the job?

Good morning. The UK awakes today with a new defence secretary and yet another cabinet job for Grant Shapps – his fifth in the space of a year.

Shapps began last September as Boris Johnson’s transport secretary, spent a week as Liz Truss’s home secretary, replaced Jacob Rees-Mogg as business secretary after Rishi Sunak became prime minister, and then in February was demoted to energy secretary. Now he is in charge of the Ministry of Defence (MoD) at a moment when – as his predecessor Ben Wallace said in his resignation letter – the world will only get “more insecure and more unstable”.

But is Shapps – a man who, let’s not forget, used a fake name after becoming an MP to pose as a “multimillion-dollar web marketer” for his second job running a get-rich-quick scheme, and then lied about it for three years – up to one of the most sensitive jobs in government? And what will he find in his in-tray?

For today’s newsletter, the Guardian’s defence and security editor, Dan Sabbagh, talked me through the issues as he made his way back from a reporting stint in Ukraine.

Five big stories

In depth: ‘He doesn’t have a bad rep – plus, he doesn’t flap in a crisis’

Why did Shapps get the gig?

“Rishi Sunak has gone for someone who is a solid public performer who doesn’t want to be prime minister,” says Dan Sabbagh. “He’s an experienced minister but not an issue specialist.”

Shapps’s lack of defence expertise will slow him down, said Lord Dannatt, the former general staff of the British army. “It’s a complex portfolio. It will take him quite some time to get up to speed,” he told Sky News.

Dan agrees. “The first thing that happens when you become defence secretary is that you get a lot of quite intense briefings about what your powers are – what force you can authorise and what will happen on the nuclear side, even though it’s not your job to push the button.”

Shapps has a decent reputation as a minister, says Dan: “He doesn’t have a bad rep, and is viewed as quite good behind the scenes. Plus, he doesn’t flap in a crisis. That’s really important if you are defence secretary.”

Though Shapps has no military experience, he has a pilot’s licence and last week visited Kyiv to pledge UK support to fuel Ukrainian power plants through the winter.

First on the agenda: Ukraine

Shapps was one of several cabinet ministers who took in a Ukrainian family after the invasion last year, so will need no persuasion that Ukraine continues to require UK military support.

Accepting the job, Shapps said he was “honoured” to take on the role as defence secretary, “continuing the UK’s support for Ukraine in their fight against Putin’s barbaric invasion”.

Overseeing British support to Ukraine will be at the top of Shapps’s to-do list, says Dan. “Wallace was quite an important figure in securing a pathway of sorts for Ukraine to join Nato, and in securing the G7 long-term guarantees of support for Ukraine.”

Wallace, the longest-serving Tory defence secretary since Winston Churchill, went to Ukraine multiple times – often in private, says Dan: “Sometimes, even with the best western security, you need to have conversations face to face. The Americans don’t go there because the White House doesn’t want the Russians to frame the war as ‘us against Washington’. Wallace played a key liaison role between Ukraine and the US.”

Next up: battling with the Treasury

The Conservatives’ 2019 manifesto promised to continue to exceed the Nato target of spending 2% of GDP on defence and increase the budget by at least 0.5% above inflation every year.

The UK is one of just nine Nato members to have met this target in 2022, spending 2.1% of GDP on defence. “Boris Johnson said he was committed to increasing that to 2.5% by 2030,” says Dan. “Liz Truss, in a moment of hysteria, said she would raise it to 3% in the same time frame (which few viewed as realistic). Then Rishi Sunak committed to 2.5% but without saying by when.”

Shapps will be under pressure to get Sunak to nail down that commitment.

Then: China

Shapps will also have to decide how to deal with China, which by some measures now has the world’s largest navy and poses serious national security risks to the UK. The foreign secretary James Cleverly’s visit to Beijing this week, as we talked about in yesterday’s First Edition, suggests a move towards a “more constructive engagement” with China, says Dan.

Shapps will also have to keep tabs on the so-called Aukus deal to help Australia build a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines to patrol the Pacific. It is a tripartite agreement along with the US, which is forecast to cost up to £188bn between now and the mid-2050s.

Finally, he will have to deal with “legacy” issues relating to the UK’s military activities in Iraq and Afghanistan. Most pressing is the public inquiry into alleged war crimes committed by British SAS soldiers in Afghanistan, which will start hearing evidence in autumn.

In his resignation letter, Ben Wallace talked about the defence job carrying a “24/7 duty to be available at almost no notice” which imposed “a personal toll to me and my family”. At the very least, Grant Shapps can expect one thing for certain: a lot of sleepless nights.

What else we’ve been reading

Coco Khan takes a look at what happens when workers disclose how much they’re earning in the name of pay transparency, and the repercussions for those who lead the charge. Nimo

Jay-Z often claims to be the greatest rapper of all time, but which is his best ever track? Alexis Petridis ranks Mr Beyoncé’s top 20, from 99 Problems to Hard Knock Life. You can argue in the comments section over whether Empire State of Mind deserves a higher placing. Helen

Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan ends this week after providing a lifeline for millions for the last three and a half years. Rainesford Stauffer spoke to graduate parents about the difficulty they will be facing as the cost of living crisis continues to strain their budgets. Nimo

With pro-Russia commentators regularly appearing on TV, Italians are less likely to back Ukraine than people in most other EU states. Lorenzo Tondo investigates how the Kremlin infiltrated Italian media by exploiting the national love for an argument. Helen

Mary Tuma spoke to abortion care providers in Texas in the two years since the Senate Bill 8 wiped out almost all abortion care in the state. “I had to tell people there’s nothing I can legally do for you, unless you’re on death’s doorstep,” said Dr Jessica Rubino. “The law forced me to be a bad doctor.” Nimo

Sport

Premier League | Premier League: 10 things to look out for this weekend

There are crunch showdowns at the Emirates and at Bramall Lane while Manchester City already look imperious

Women's cricket | Alice Capsey and Mahika Gaur lead England past Sri Lanka in rain-hit T20

Alice Capsey smashed a 26-ball half-century for England in their 12-run T20 win over Sri Lanka on the DLS method after a rain-interrupted opener

US Open Tennis 2023 | Crowd-pleaser Carlos Alcaraz enjoys stress-free US Open win over Lloyd Harris

Carlos Alcaraz saved his best play for the biggest points in a stress-free 6-3, 6-1, 7-6 (4) win over the 177th-ranked Lloyd Harris to set up a clash with Dan Evans

The front pages

“School chaos as buildings are shut over collapse fears” leads the Guardian front page on this Friday morning. “Thousands of children face home schooling for weeks” – a headline in the i to sink any parent’s heart through the floor, while the Daily Telegraph raises the old spectre: “Lockdown returns as schools shut over fears of collapse”. “Why did it take 5 years to shut unsafe schools?” asks the Daily Express, while the Times has “Schools to turn pupils away over collapse risk”. “How callous can you get?” – the Daily Mail thinks that because of waiting lists, junior doctors and consultants should forgo their right to strike. Strikes too in the Daily Mirror, which says rail workers are putting it all “On the line” over ticket office closures. “Brit ‘gave his life to stop Putin’” – that’s the Metro after a UK volunteer fighter died in Ukraine. Top story in the Financial Times is “Adani shares lose $4bn as politicians demand action over hidden investors”.

Something for the weekend

Our critics’ roundup of the best things to watch, read and listen to right now

TV
Starstruck (BBC iPlayer)
Instead of a will-they-won’t-they, Starstruck’s third season becomes a please don’t, please don’t! The show has morphed into an anti-romcom, and it’s no wonder the genre has never taken off – it isn’t a great feeling when the driving force of a binge-watch is the desperate hope that love is eviscerated once and for all. The good news is that there is plenty to appreciate here that is completely unrelated to moping movie stars. Rachel Aroesti

Music
Romy: Mid Air
You could draw a comparison between the music on Mid Air and the house-fuelled tracks on Everything But the Girl’s 1996 album Walking Wounded. You may also pick up hints of Daft Punk’s filtered French house, and on the fantastic She’s On My Mind, breezy Euro-disco. But what the sonics most frequently evoke is the early 00s wave of ultra-commercial trance hits: the synth chords of Weightless come in chattering triplets; the icy synth stabs on Strong feel like a slightly more subtle version of Faithless’s trademark sound. Alexis Petridis

Film
Passages
Fiercely sexy and piercingly sad, Ira Sachs’s new movie is a tremendous return to form. It’s a love triangle in which two gay men and a straight woman find themselves in a polycule of resentment; a celebrated young film-maker cheats on his husband with a young woman, and then in an evolvingly weak and dishonest way, tries somehow to finesse a continuing desire for his previous partner with this new heterosexual relationship. Peter Bradshaw

Podcast
Good Bad Billionaire (BBC Sounds, episodes weekly)
Is there such a thing as a “good billionaire”? BBC business editor Simon Jack and Vice editor-in-chief Zing Tsjeng profile some of the richest 2,640 people on the planet to find out. They start with the obvious – Amazon founder Jeff Bezos – before digging into pop star Rihanna’s riches, and then the more secretive figures most of us don’t even know about yet who have incredible power. Hollie Richardson

Today in Focus

Cartoon of the day | Ben Jennings

The Upside

A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad

Local newspapers in the UK have been fighting for survival for years, with job cuts and dwindling resources becoming the norm in newsrooms across the country. One local news outlet that has managed to buck the trend is the Manchester Mill, a small media company that is providing high-quality, deeply researched reporting to its readership. It is now preparing to expand across the UK after being valued at £1.75m by a group of investors including the former New York Times boss Mark Thompson.

“What we’ve done is build up an unusually zealous and committed number of readers who want better coverage, better writing, better investigative writing,” said Joshi Herrmann, founder of the Manchester Mill.

Sign up here for a weekly roundup of The Upside, sent to you every Sunday

Bored at work?

And finally, the Guardian’s puzzles are here to keep you entertained throughout the day – with plenty more on the Guardian’s Puzzles app for iOS and Android. Until Monday.

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