I made this point over on t'army means last night, so apologies to anyone who's seen this twice - but the Air League Slessor Lecture does not a last minute panicked appeal to MPs make...
Also, I suspect that graduates of ACSC11 will recognise that the lecture is of similar structure to the 'Air Power According to Timo' lecture delivered at the start of that course (and ACSC 12, IIRC) - and it was 'according to Timo', rather than one which was written for him. I note that the story appears to have somehow slipped off the Telegraph's homepage and is actually quite difficult to find now. By the by, as this is an Air League lecture, might the 'leak' not in fact be a transcript put out for wider information??
FWIW, CAS has responded:
I would like to make clear that this was egregious misreporting, factually inaccurate, and spun to make a political argument which was not there. The speech was in fact given by the Director General of the Military Aviation Authority, Air Marshal Timo Anderson. It was a robust articulation of the roles of air power, and what the RAF is doing on operations today. It was cleared by the Defence Media and Communications Director and was not seen as political or an intervention in the Strategic Defence and Security Review [SDSR] debate.
"In the full speech, you will see that the Telegraph has spun the words in the speech for its own purposes to make a story angle that did not exist. It was certainly not an attack on the Prime Minister's comments or intended to be a late public intervention into the SDSR considerations (which continue).