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If Keir Starmer resigned tomorrow, the Labour party would be thrown into confusion. None of its factions has an obvious candidate to replace him. Yet some Labour MPs and commentators think they have found a solution. Why not send for Al Carns, minister for the armed forces, a former Royal Marines colonel, and MP for Birmingham Selly Oak since 2024? Carns, 45, who was briefly a candidate for the party’s deputy leadership last year, has built up a modest social media profile, posting videos of himself hiking, working out at the gym and training with reservists. One video saw him challenge a fireman to an impromptu pull-up contest, which Carns won 30 to 18. With Westminster in disarray, many think that these stern military virtues are just what the country needs.
Carns is not the first. For the past 15 years, parachuting in a military officer has been seen as the go-to fix for any political problem. In his 2023 memoir, Politics on the Edge, Rory Stewart – a former lieutenant of the Black Watch and possible ex-MI6 agent – is constantly champing at the bit to bring brigadiers and colonels into various ministerial departments. For close to a decade Dan Jarvis, a virtual cipher in parliament, was held out as a Labour leader-in-waiting purely by dint of his military service. In the Tory ranks, the same is true of James Cleverly, Ben Wallace, Tom Tugendhat and Penny Mordaunt, whose ex-Forces background was thought to entitle them to a frontline role in Westminster ipso facto.
It is often implied that these people’s ethos of barracks and drill puts them beyond the squabble of ordinary politicians. Contrasts are drawn between the populism of, say, Boris Johnson and the spirit of duty and service that these people are meant to embody. Ex-spies such as Mike Tapp and (allegedly) Sue Gray are now given leading roles. It is considered impolite to ask too much about their professional background. Professional soldiers and the military ethos are once again taking centre-stage in our politics. This new Cromwellianism may just be enough to bring Carns to Downing Street.
It turns some old ideas about Englishness on their head. The British always used to be cagey about their military. Memories of Cromwell and James II loomed large. From 1660 to 1715 there was a considerable debate over whether we should have a standing army at all. Only two career soldiers have ever reached the top of our politics: Marlborough and Wellington. Both found the experience faintly baffling. ‘An extraordinary affair,’ Wellington once said of the cabinet. ‘I gave them their orders and they wanted to stay and discuss them.’ Soldiers and the constitution did not mix.
Now Westminster teems with military men and women. The past 15 years or so have seen the growing moral authority of the armed forces, which has led to a reassertion of independence from the elected politicians. During the last Conservative government, the RAF let it be known that it would ignore orders to fly illegal immigrants to Ascension Island, and the Royal Navy has repeatedly refused to patrol the Channel to push back small boats. The British people are now expected to settle the military’s debts of honour as well. The decision secretly to settle 30,000 Afghan translators was defended by Wallace, then the defence secretary, as the fulfilment of a ‘bond of honour’, with the mere ‘politics’ of the issue being a sideshow.
More and more it is implied that matters of war and peace are not really our choice. It is felt that there are wider international obligations and strategic priorities that the frivolous civvies can’t grasp. Every month or so a military or intelligence figure pops up to inform us that we are on the verge of war with Russia or China. Late last year Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton announced that the country’s ‘sons and daughters’ must ready themselves to fight. A similar warning issued by General Sir Patrick Sanders in 2024 was downplayed by Downing Street.
For the past 15 years, parachuting in a military officer has been seen as the go-to fix for any political problem
It is not just the officers. Everywhere the talk is of fixed alliances, automatic ‘trip-wires’ that will involve us in a war by default. There’s a new breeziness in how the British right talks about conscription. On the left, the journalist Paul Mason has called for the whole issue of military planning to be ‘de-politicised’. It is easy to imagine, should there be some fresh crisis in eastern Europe or the South China Sea, that war would be presented to us as a fait accompli.
Where did this new praetorian spirit come from? The war in Ukraine is one factor. But there is a more profound reason. About 30 years ago, Britain’s literate middle classes lost their taste for civilian rule. Huge areas of policy were declared to be ‘above politics’ and given to courts or quangos, or made a matter of international treaty. All of a sudden there were fixed moral obligations like human rights that it was felt were beyond the power of elected politicians to change. It was impossible to watch Question Time without hearing that, for instance, the NHS should not be a ‘political football’. Eventually people were bound to ask whether war and peace should cease being a ‘political football’ too.
The past decade has seen constant, exaggerated claims of political chaos in the wake of things like the EU referendum and demands for sterner, statelier types like Theresa May and Keir Starmer, who claim to stand above the factions. This coarse anti-politics has now led to a strange clamour for generals and officers.
Experience should make us wary of the new militarism. If Starmer has taught us anything it’s that we should be suspicious of grand claims about duty and service, of an independence from ideology. War and peace are political choices, just as so-called human rights are; the idea that honour and international obligation bind us in either case ought to be resisted. Britain is not about to fall under the rule of major generals. But we should recognise that the enthusiasm for people like Carns is Starmerism by another name. What we need is more civilian rule, not less.
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