Thank you so much for making yourselves available. I very much appreciate your presence here today.
I’m looking forward to a fruitful association with the service chiefs and the military more generally.
I guess when you ask yourself, the roles of government – economic strength, social cohesion, national security – and obviously, you are at the heart of ensuring that we maintain our national security.
I want to congratulate you on the extraordinary professionalism of our armed forces. Our armed forces are certainly not large by international standards but they are universally admired as being as good as anyone in the roles that we play and that’s very much to your credit.
So, look, thank you. I hope you will let your services know that the new government wishes to work in ways which will respect their professionalism which will improve their capabilities and which will allow them to do their job at least as well in the future as you’ve been able to do in the past.
So, thank you so much.