Of this, Lord Boyce commented: "What a desperate expression of hope over bitter experience. The people serving on the National Security Council must have been asleep for the past decade or so. We have no problem today because we have no emerging crisis. That can change in days..." And so it did. Already the Korean shelling incident has provided the first strategic shock since SDSR where the option of a naval task group would have been handy. 

For technical military reasons, the SDSR authors may have given up essential capabilities for ever. With that affected knowingness familiar to all university teachers of those "winging" it in defending an under-prepared essay, they declare that they (meaning we all) will "take a gap" in Carrier Strike. 

But this is not an undergraduate essay crisis. And in my direct experience, it is being discussed among core Conservative voters in Middle England: in the village shop, in the barber's chair and particularly after the Remembrance Day service, in a constituency similar to Letwin's. Plainly, we meet different sorts of people. The ones I meet were at first bewildered. But scrapping the Harrier in particular has crystallised that bewilderment first into suspicion and now into anger. The anger bleeds across via the sudden and puzzling French Treaty into that related issue, so toxic in the English heartlands for Cameron, which is the rolling, imploding finale of the "EU" episode in Europe's history. Why needlessly accept such damage?

Once the full incoherence of the SDSR was public, a group of senior retired naval commanders (Lord West, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Julian Oswald, Vice-Admirals Blackham and McAnally), felt obliged to protest on behalf of serving officers at the single most dangerous cut. It now appears that the scrapping of Ark Royal and its Harriers was inserted at the very last minute, when Sir Jock Stirrup, the former Chief of the Defence Staff and Air Chief Marshal Sir Stephen Dalton, Chief of the Air Staff, went to the National Security Secretariat to reverse the scrapping of the Tornado strike aircraft which the RAF bitterly disliked. 

I understand that one argument deployed was that only the Tornado offered a contribution to possible near-future new coalition operations. The RAF rushed to decommission the Harrier force. It is all a prime example of what has gone so badly wrong with the NSS/SDSR exercise. For the more you examine it, the more strategically and financially perverse it is. Lord Astor, the Parliamentary under-Secretary of State for Defence, confirmed in the House of Lords that to retain the Tornado alone and (as Lord Craig, an airman, put it) "to squander the Fleet Air Arm's future in the fixed-wing carrier role", will cost several billion more over a decade than to retain the judicious mix which we have preserved hitherto.