Thursday was a bad day at the office for Sir Keir Starmer. The Prime Minister is already fighting fires on several fronts: the forthcoming Makerfield by-election, which is likely to return Andy Burnham to the House of Commons; an outbreak of anti-immigrant mob violence in Northern Ireland; the cost of living rising due to the ongoing US/Israel/Iran conflict; the continuing toxic fallout from Starmer’s appointment of Lord Mandelson as British Ambassador to the United States.
Starmer has been under sustained fire over the grotesquely late Defence Investment Plan (DIP) and the level of additional public expenditure on defence it contains for some time. The government has not been taking defence spending seriously enough and seemed to be turning a blind eye to the weaknesses with which the armed forces are riddled. A three-way struggle between the Ministry of Defence, HM Treasury and 10 Downing Street has been going on since at least December last year.
The core of the problem is that most people accept that Healey’s critique is correct
Something had to give, and on Thursday it did. John Healey, Secretary of State for Defence, resigned, writing to the Prime Minister to explain why in quietly devastating terms. Healey had seen the final financial settlement of the DIP on Monday, and it is clear he simply could not live with it:
You have been unable, and the Treasury has been unwilling, to commit the resources that the nation needs to defend the country at this time of rising threats… [the DIP] falls well short of what is required for defence and the country at this dangerous time… I am being forced to make decisions that would reduce the readiness of our Forces and increase the risk to personnel on operations, and could make the country less safe.
Healey is not one of nature’s rebels. He held the defence brief for four and a half years in opposition, and in the past 25 years, the only period he was not on the front bench was from 2011 to 2015 when he wanted to spend more time with his family as his son began sixth form. Healey is benignly but tribally Labour, which makes his criticisms cut all the deeper.
The loss of his defence secretary does not put Starmer on the back foot – he was there already – so much as cut his feet out from under him. The crisis was made more acute by the resignation later in the day of the armed forces minister, Alistair Carns, a highly decorated former colonel in the Royal Marines.
The Prime Minister’s response to Healey’s letter was a charade. He was ‘proud of our record on funding’ and would ‘always do what is needed to keep our country safe’. The latter claim cannot possibly be true: he could have delivered more funding in the DIP and he could have done more to make good the capability gaps in the armed forces, which range from a complete lack of medium helicopters and reducing the Royal Artillery to 14 guns (yes, 14) to depriving the Royal Marines of proper amphibious assault ships. He could have, but he did not.
Starmer asserts that the DIP ‘will provide the resources our military needs to keep us safe’. Healey manifestly disagrees. Others must look to their own judgement, but I know which of them I am more inclined to believe, and it is not the Prime Minister. Finally, he reaches for the empty nonsense which ministers, in desperation, now rely on: Labour has brought about ‘the highest sustained increase in defence spending since the Cold War’. It is a meaningless metric, as we are not fighting the Cold War, and there is a broad consensus that our current expenditure of less than 2.5 per cent of GDP is just not enough.
For his new defence secretary, Starmer has turned to 53-year-old Dan Jarvis, previously minister for security across the Home Office and the Cabinet Office. Part of the Prime Minister’s motivation is obvious: Jarvis was in the British Army for 14 years, leaving as a major in the 1st Battalion, Parachute Regiment; served in Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Iraq and Northern Ireland; was a company commander in the Special Forces Support Group; and was awarded the MBE for his service.
Jarvis’s military credentials are unimpeachable, and Starmer must hope this will insulate his new defence secretary and – to an extent – the whole government from the criticism of retired service personnel. It may soften the blows, but it will not deflect them entirely, especially when there are other former military men and women in the House of Commons on all sides.
The government is now in a dilemma. If the full DIP is published and proves to be along the lines expected, Jarvis will now have to defend a settlement his predecessor said ‘does not give our Forces the resources they need’. On the other hand, if somehow significantly more money is found in the next few days, critics will ask why this could not have been done before and how far the Prime Minister’s writ runs through Whitehall when he seems buffeted by demands from HM Treasury and the Ministry of Defence.
The core of the problem is that most people accept that Healey’s critique is correct. The armed forces do not have enough money and almost every week we see some new and embarrassing demonstration of this. Starmer is trying to sell a prospect that does not ring true and he is doing it at a time when two-thirds of voters regard him as untrustworthy. Not even Major Jarvis MBE, late 1st Para, can get him out of that situation.
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