There are still people out there – with access to the full gamut of unblunted cutlery – who maintain that Sir Keir Starmer is one of the great public servants of our time, cruelly brought down by unfair events. One easy way to disprove this, in the unlikely event that this theory’s proponents are susceptible to appeals to reason, is by pointing to his government’s defence record. The person who was in charge of this department, John Healey, resigned rather than be held responsible for the total abandonment of the nation’s defences.
One of these Starmer defenders is Rachel Reeves. Or at least she is one of them now that it’s become clear Burnham will sack her as quickly as you can say ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’. She and Dan Jarvis, the recently appointed defence secretary who was considered craven enough to be the face of the catastrophic spending plan, were chosen as Starmer’s warm up acts for his big speech, set to be one of his last major policy announcements. Given she’ll be out of a job soon, Starmer should offer to take her with him wherever he goes, so she can be a sort of Ruprecht the Monkey Boy, designed to make him look confident and palatable by comparison.
Reeves stood awkwardly and barked a speech at the unfortunate attendees which mostly consisted of her making up words, like an illiterate playing Scrabble. Such an example came when she tried to explain her own philosophy: ‘It’s an approach I called securenomics’. Cue a pause in which she looks around with a deranged smile, like an escapee from an institution for the criminally insane. ‘That idea has become increasingly real and valid’, she added. Leaving aside Rachel’s implied belief that there is some sort of sliding scale of reality, the idea that her economic approach is receiving any kind of validation felt particularly surreal.
‘His absolute moral clarity in the face of the threats we face as a nation will go down as part of his legacy’ continued Reeves. Undoubtedly the defence debacle will be part of Starmer’s legacy, just not quite in the way she was assuming.
Finally, Reeves shut up and the Spam in the High Castle himself arrived for what is now a rare public appearance. After the two shared a weirdly long embrace onstage, he began with some statements on the defence industry; looking to one side, he said he was impressed to see ‘this workhorse drone’. I can’t be totally sure that he wasn’t gesturing at Reeves and Jarvis.
Starmer gave a list of the challenges facing Britain. ‘Foreign states are targeting our nation,’ he said, ‘stoking disorder, spreading lies and undermining democracy.’ One wonders whether he was perhaps thinking of Manchester more than he was Moscow.
Much of his speech consisted of an extended whine about how there wasn’t any money and hard choices had to be made, but he still claimed that the statement was offering ‘decisive action on defence’. I suppose that’s true; John Healey’s decision to resign as soon as he’d read it was pretty decisive. Starmer spoke of his ‘clear ambition’ to increase defence spending to 3 per cent of GDP… ‘in the next Parliament’. He claimed again and again that they had considered every line of the budget and costed every penny. Tellingly, this is not something that Labour ever claims about welfare.
Over to you, Andy!
What Starmer neglected to mention is that almost a third of the total of which he boasted hasn’t been found at all. Instead, a Burnham-shaped landmine lurked in the document, in a promise that ‘£4.7bn over four years will be confirmed at Budget 2026’. Over to you, Andy! This was – hilariously – followed by an insistence that this would all be done ‘in a fair and balanced way’. Today was reportedly the first Burnham heard of the impending budget black hole. The whole saga would almost be funny if it weren’t so tragic.
Elsewhere, there were the typical inserts of meringue-weight rhetoric: apparently the defence spending document would help establish ‘a deeper sense of meaning’. There were pained strangulations about making ‘difficult but important’ decisions. Unsurprisingly he used the word ‘legacy’ a lot, as he inevitably now has both eyes on the exit. In fact, this was the perfect Starmer legacy event: insubstantial, self-indulgent and likely to be U-turned on in about six months’ time.
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