Evening briefing Thursday 11th June

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0:35This is your Times Evening Briefing on Thursday the 11th of June. The former Defence Secretary, Lord Hutton, has told Times Radio John Healy's resignation is a car crash for Labour. John Healy says he was left with no other option than to resign in a disagreement about funding. He says the delayed Defence Investment Plan falls short of what's required to keep the country safe at this dangerous time. Lord Hutton says the successor is going to face a huge hurdle. It's a car crash, isn't it, really? I think in political terms, I don't think you could exaggerate the mess that we've found ourselves in.

1:07And I think for John's successor, it's a really difficult choice that he or she is going to face, because if the numbers remain the same, if it's 13.5 billion, netted off the 3.5 billion that the Treasury want to account for in efficiency gains, it's not a sufficiently adequate amount of money to do both things that need to be done, which is to point us in the direction of the SDR and its new capabilities that it says we need it. Meanwhile, the head of the UK's trade body for the aerospace, defence, security and space sectors, Kevin Craven, has said Healy quitting has sent us reeling, adding his resignation is truly a damning reflection on the current state of affairs.

1:44Meanwhile, Larissa Brown, defence editor at the Times, says today shows how frustrated John Healy has been. It's been an agonising wait for the defence investment plan. He thought that he was going to get£18 billion at one point over the next four years. and instead the number 10 is talking about 13.5 billion over the next four years, potentially even less than that. And that means John Healy was facing this situation where he's about to launch this defence investment plan, talk about increasing threats from Russia and what the military needs to do to rearm and yet he wasn't going to be given the money that he needed to be able to do that.

2:20A government source has said this country is safer because of the decisions Sir Keir Starmer has made And it's this Labour government and this Labour Prime Minister that's delivering the largest sustained boost to defence spending since the Cold War. In other news, rioters in Belfast have been targeting migrants overnight in disorder described by the Times as a modern-day pogrom. Northern Ireland Secretary Hilary Benn has condemned the scenes as racist thuggery. Police have condemned the intimidation of healthcare workers during recent disorder. Patricia McEwan, Northern Ireland Regional Secretary of Unison, has been providing support to her ethnic minority members.

2:56Unfortunately, it's not new because they went through this experience last year and they went through it the year before. This has been a particularly heightened racist programme. It's not recreational rioting. We know that when we see it in the city. It's coordinated, it's orchestrated. At the end of the day, there are grown-ups behind all of this and there is political leadership that is missing and there's community leadership that's missing. Donald Trump claims Iran will be hit very hard tonight again. He's also posted on Truth Social about capturing Karg Island, where a lot of Tehran's oil is stored in what he calls the not-too-distant future.

3:35But the US president says he isn't sure whether the American people have the stomach for an escalation in the war. The UK's first weight-loss pill has been approved by the medicines regulator and will be available privately within weeks. The daily Wegovi tablet is for obese adults with a body mass index of 30 or above. Trials showed when coupled with diet and exercise, people shed around a fifth of their weight. England's cricket managing directors refused to say whether or not Ben Stokes will return to the team. Stokes, as well as Gus Atkinson, have been dropped for the second match of their Test Series with New Zealand after they were involved in an incident at a nightclub after curfew on Monday.

4:11Rob Key has told TalkSport he now is not the time to review Stokes' captaincy. I need to look at actually, do we need to be tougher on these things, the protocols that we've put in? Should it be a case that they're drinking after a game, even if they win? Even if you think that these are grown men that can make good decisions, they need to show us, myself in this management position, as well as the ECB, that they can be trusted at the moment. They don't look like that. You can follow the Times Radio News Briefing on Spotify and listen live to Times Radio Online. That's your Times Evening Briefing on Thursday 11th June.

4:44This episode of the Times Radio News Briefing is sponsored by PwC. AI is everywhere. In the news, in our hands, but return on investment, not so much. So how do you get beyond the hype and deliver AI that powers reinvention and growth across your business? Strong foundations unlock AI's potential. That's why PwC takes you further with tech, strengthening the data quality, processes and workflows that shape how well AI performs. PwC turns innovation into implementation so you can accelerate from experiment to scale. Discover more at pwc.co.uk