Has Starmer run into trouble with the defence investment plan?

One of the key rites of passage for all modern prime ministers is losing their temper a little during an exchange with Bernard Jenkin at the liaison committee. It happened to David Cameron, who would go rather pink and say ‘the thing is, BERNARD’ while trying to explain why he hadn’t implemented Jenkin’s committee’s plan on civil service reform. Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak had similar run-ins with the veteran Tory MP. Today, though, Keir Starmer lost his cool even more than the others had previously – and it was on a very telling topic.

Jenkin wanted to know why Britain was ‘not on a war footing’ and where the much-delayed defence investment plan was. Starmer told him that ‘we are finalising the investment plan’, and was accused of ‘enormous complacency’. The Prime Minister immediately snapped:

Well, this smacks of the fact that for years there was underinvestment by the last government, and the stripping out, the hollowing out of our armed forces, copyright Ben Wallace, who was the defence secretary.

Starmer insisted that the plan was on his desk and being ‘finalised’ and that it was his job to ‘resolve’ it. This suggests that reports of a row between the Treasury and Downing Street over the money behind the plan are not wide of the mark.

Starmer talks about Ben Wallace a lot when under attack from the Conservatives on defence. But his loss of composure today was still telling because it suggested real trouble with this defence plan, which had been due for publication in autumn last year. He has also spent much of the past couple of weeks congratulating himself for his position on the Iran war. Therefore, a reminder such as today that the government is in fact not fully nailing it on defence and foreign policy probably came as a particular irritant to the Prime Minister.

In the hearing this afternoon, Starmer also made clear he was concerned the war in Iran ‘could go on for some time’, saying he’d warned his team that they ‘mustn’t fall into the false comfort that there will be a quick and early end’ to the conflict. He insisted that ‘this is not our war, and we are not getting dragged into this war’, and ‘that’s the divide that I’ve kept very firmly in place’. But there were other questions where he avoided being firm or clear. When asked later in the session by the committee’s chair, Meg Hillier, which countries were being defended through the US use of UK bases to take out missile sites threatening shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, he replied merely ‘all of those in the region’, which sounded a little bit as though he wasn’t fully sure either.