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DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Now David Cameron is expected to signal a major shift in foreign policy towards Syria when he visits the UN this week.  It’s believed he will soften his stance slightly towards the Syrian regime and abandon his demand that Assad must go immediately to bring peace to the country.  Let’s talk to Bernard Jenkin, Conservative MP for Harwich and North Essex, he is a member of course of the 1922 Committee and a former defence secretary and he voted in favour of action in Syria back in 2013.  A very good morning to you Mr Jenkin, we heard from David Cameron didn’t we, previously, this is about the Syrian policy, that there would be a full spectrum response.  Have you any idea what that actually means?  

BERNARD JENKIN: Well actually at Prime Minister’s Questions earlier this month I asked him to produce a paper on what he means by full spectrum response because the West has not produced a full spectrum response to Islamic terrorism and the instability in the Middle East for at least ten or fifteen years now and we are witnessing a major failure of Western security strategy which is now arriving on our own shores, the consequences of it are arriving on our own shores and there is no sign that the United States and NATO and the European allies are getting a grip. On the contrary, it looks as though Mr Putin, the Russian President, is going to be setting the tone and setting the agenda.  How have we got into this position?  We need to get away from this binary question, should we have air strikes, should we not have air strikes, the question is what is the political and diplomatic strategy which the military is then intended to reinforce.  I think Mr Putin has got a very clear diplomatic and political strategy but he has also got the military muscle to back it up and that’s what we lack.  

DM: I mean you seem to be, when you talk about the binary approach, are you echoing some of what has been emerging in Lord Ashcroft’s book and Isabel Oakshott’s book about David Cameron when it came to Libya and some of the critiques from members of the armed forces and the military that he tends to see things as good guys and bad guys and it’s not as simple as that, far from it, it is much more nuanced.  

BERNARD JENKIN: Well the committee which I chair in parliament in the last parliament produced two reports about strategic thinking or lack of at the top of government and this short termism, this reactive nature of policy making is very, very poor.  There are countries, small countries that have very good strategic thinking like Singapore, Israel, countries like our own, like Canada.  I am afraid the United States is absolutely all over the place at the moment, President Obama is the most globally absent President in our lifetimes and the fact that Libya and Syria have happened on his watch with so little American engagement is a real, real condemnation of his presidency but I’m afraid the European Union is absolutely useless, we’re completely divided.  It is down to France, Britain, Germany, the United States to take a lead, we’ve got to get into a room and decide how we are going to deal with this.  Going off to the United Nations and letting President Putin set the agenda is just a further step backwards, a further step towards chaos.  He is going to be increasing his influence and hold over some of these Middle Eastern countries, he threatens us with chaos and ISIS if we don’t co-operate with him, what sort of foreign policy is that?  I remember William Hague saying there will be no strategic shrinkage – well we have strategically shrunk during the period of the previous coalition and it’s time that we started stepping up to the crease again.

DM: I just wanted to ask you, Mr Jenkin, as we discuss what a dangerous place so many parts of the world are, we’ve got a debate, we are expecting a debate about a debate at the Labour party conference over Trident, the Trident nuclear deterrent.  How do you view those exchanges and are there some questions that the Conservative party should be asking about its renewal?

BERNARD JENKIN: On the contrary, our policy of renewing Trident is absolutely a no-brainer under the present circumstances.  First of all people say it is very expensive, actually the cost of Trident, to run the Trident nuclear deterrent for a year runs the health service for a week, let’s get the cost of it in proportion.  It isn’t going to swamp the United Kingdom’s, the government’s budget.  Secondly, we have relatively few warheads, we have already cut the number of our warheads, Russia still has got thousands of warheads, they are building at least two successive generation nuclear weapon systems including a ballistic missile submarine system. The Chinese are expanding their nuclear weapons systems, you have got proliferation in countries like North Korea, we don’t know whether the deal in Iran will hold.  The danger is there are going to be more people with nuclear weapons. Most countries in the world are in some kind of an alliance which is protected by a nuclear weapons state, France and the United Kingdom and the United States are the only guarantors of European and transatlantic security through NATO with our nuclear weapons playing a part in that.  If we were to abandon our nuclear weapons system now the rest of the world would think we had gone mad.

DM: Mr Jenkin, great talking to you, we’re out of time, thank you very much indeed.  Bernard Jenkin there, live with us in Chelmsford.