A busy day and one, regrettably, where I voted against the Government for the first time in this parliament. After a routine morning, I entered the Chamber for the start of the Telecommunications Bill. I, and about 20 other Conservative MPs, had put down an amendment asking the Government to be far more specific about its commitment to Huawei, a Chinese owned telecommunications company which has been given the green light to provide 5G in the UK. Mainly for security reasons, and for others which Iain Duncan-Smith again repeated today in the Chamber, we do not believe this should go ahead. The number of MPs on both sides of the House who concur is growing and shone through later in the day when the Government won the vote by only 24. Because the Minister could not give us the assurance we sought, Mr Duncan-Smith called the amendment and we voted on it. None of us took any pleasure in doing this, but the security of the realm is of paramount importance and Huawei is too much of a risk. I could only stay for the beginning of the debate as I was due in the Wilson Room for the first official meeting of the newly formed Defence Select Committee. With both a spending and capability review due shortly, we want to gather evidence as how best this can be achieved. Too many mistakes have been made over the years, not least cutting our armed forces, which I think is a disaster. Our three contributors were of the highest calibre and most fascinating to listen to. We had Professor Malcolm Chalmers, Deputy Director General, RUSI, Douglas Barrie, Senior Fellow for Military Aerospace, and Tom McKane, DG for Strategy and Security Policy for the MOD between 2008 and 2014. With a vast richness of experience, they gave well informed answers to our questions, which were held in public and televised. Afterwards, I dropped down into PCH to meet the Project Director of Portland's MEMO project, Sebastian Brooke. He'd come fresh from Michael Gove's office where he lobbied for £26 million. Sebastian said his project was received well by Mr Gove and now we need to keep the pressure on to see if we can get this funding. We'd dropped to one line late afternoon, so at about 1900 I headed out to supper.