This is not the end, but it’s well past the beginning of the end, or even the middle of the end. It feels, with six days until the Makerfield by-election is expected to return Andy Burnham to Parliament, that we are at the beginning of the end of the end.
It is also well past the point of no return for Britain’s credibility on the world stage. Like the clockwork toy which goes off just as you have drifted off to sleep, Keir Starmer weathered an interview with the BBC on the departure of two ministers from the Ministry of Defence (and two ministerial aides) only to get an Exocet in the guts from the Americans.
Elbridge Colby is one of the Washington hawks, but he also has a respect for Britain. When David Lammy was foreign secretary and making new friends with the Trump administration, ‘Bridge’, as he is known, was one of his friendly contacts in DC. Which makes it doubly damning that Colby has been the one with his finger on the trigger today. In a post on X, the US Under-Secretary of War wrote:
If Burnham wins the by-election, Starmer can safely book a winter holiday far, far away
The United Kingdom has an extraordinarily proud military history. It commands our respect. There is again a great need for more British military strength in this critical time. We urge the UK to meet that need with urgency, scale, and determination.
A reminder: both John Healey, the defence secretary, and Al Carns, the armed forces minister, quit because, in Healey’s words, Starmer was ‘unable’ to deliver the funding the military desperately needs and Rachel Reeves was ‘unwilling’ to do so. If Starmer thinks this is wounding, imagine how he’s going to feel on Monday when he runs into Donald Trump himself at the G7 summit. In his resignation letter, Carns, a highly decorated former SBS man (MP is tellingly only the fourth of the suffixes to his name), made the case that Starmer’s legalistic approach to war has broken the military covenant with those in uniform.
And yet Starmer ploughed, nasally, onwards in his interview with Chris Mason, boasting that he is responsible for the biggest uptick in defence spending since the end of the Cold War. A reminder, Starmer himself has pledged to raise defence spending to 3.5 per cent of GDP by 2035 and Healey was demanding 3 per cent by 2030. Starmer and Reeves are planning for 2.68 per cent by 2030 – up from 2.6 per cent next year. At a time when most of Europe is rearming, this is untenable.
Starmer insisted he had made ‘hard-edged decisions’ in order to put ‘considerable’ money into defence already. And yet the row seems only to have put politics into suspended animation until Thursday’s by-election. A good case can be made that if SW1 were not Waiting For Andy, a decent number of ministers would have taken one look at Starmer’s vacillation and weakness on an area he personally vowed to make the centrepiece of his premiership and forced him out with a wave of coordinated resignations before Thursday.
The Prime Minister declared he was ‘not going to walk away’ and said: ‘I don’t think we should plunge the country into the chaos of a leadership election.’ Well, true. He probably won’t walk away, but when Burnham returns, he will be shoved pretty firmly in the direction of the door – and there is some possibility that Wes Streeting will see the writing on the wall and decide not to challenge Burnham. Either way, if Burnham wins the by-election, Keir Starmer can safely book a winter holiday far, far away. Though I wouldn’t advise him to head to Cyprus, or anywhere else with a British overseas military base.
Spare a thought too for Dan Jarvis, a decent and honourable man who has fought for his country and who has been appointed as deckchair attendant on a listing transatlantic liner / the new defence secretary. In his first public comments at a drone factory in Swindon, he said: ‘The character of warfare is changing, and it is changing fast.’
The same is true of politics. I rather suspect two of the things which will change before too long are the identities of the prime minister and the defence secretary.
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