Announcing a £75bn rise in military spending is the easy bit, Rishi

As Rishi Sunak struts the world stage, winning plaudits for his patriotic bolstering of Britain’s defence budget – and leaving others to field the tricky questions about which services to cut to pay for it all – Professor Tim Bale says the prime minister won’t be the last leader to court admiration abroad while being derided at home

Rishi Sunak with soldiers during a tour of the Julius Leber barracks in Berlin (Getty)

Question: when is fully funded not fully funded? Answer: when your much-vaunted plan to significantly increase annual defence spending over six years is supposedly going to be financed from shrinking the size of the civil service and upping the MoD’s share of government research spending.

No one doubts that new geopolitical realities mean that the UK, like other European members of Nato, is going to have to devote more money to all things military. A combination of Russian revanchism, chaos in the Middle East, China’s rise, and a possible Trump presidency, mean that the post-Cold War “peace dividend” is long gone.

But, in stark contrast to the Cold War years, and with Brexit likely to have made the UK’s economic prospects especially bleak, we’re now in an era of low growth – or even no growth.