Eliot Wilson

There was a grim inevitability about this. 'Whitehall sources', which is almost always code for the government rolling the pitch with the media to prepare for bad news, have suggested that a decision about when to increase defence expenditure will probably not be made for another year. The announcement will be part of the government’s Spending Review, which some had anticipated would be published in the spring. Now, though, the mood music from Andy Burnham’s administration is that it will take place in autumn 2027 so that it can sit alongside that year’s Budget.

We have to start with the ritualistic part of any consideration of an apparent attempted terrorist attack. We do not know the whole story behind the arrest of five men on terrorist charges near RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire on Sunday morning. Anyone old enough to have played Chinese whispers as a child knows how quickly information can become distorted or mangled. The ubiquity of social media has potentiated this a thousandfold. So we ought to be cautious. This is what we do know. At 12.45 a.m. on Sunday, Gloucestershire constabulary received a call concerning 'three suspicious vehicles' moving in the direction of RAF Fairford, a Ministry of Defence facility operated by the US Air Force.

The Ministry of Defence is a frustrating organisation, secretive, slow to change, often hidebound by process. In one regard, however, the department is always 110 per cent and reaching for the stars: the relentless positivity of its press office. It is not unreasonable to sense the Panglossian hand of the MoD press office behind a recent story in the Times, for which the paper’s New York correspondent, Will Pavia, went to woodlands outside Sandhurst. Here he observed elements of the Household Cavalry on exercise, in slightly surprising circumstances which he summed up elegantly: The soldiers were taking part in an exercise with a personnel carrier found to be capable of moving stealthily through rough, wooded terrain while emitting only a modest infra-red heat signature.

Sir Keir Starmer’s premiership was already in crisis on 11 June this year when John Healey submitted his resignation as Defence Secretary. A quiet, unshowy, widely liked and respected Yorkshireman who had spent most of the past 25 years on Labour’s front bench, Healey had applied himself seriously to the defence brief, shadowing it for four years before being appointed to lead the Ministry of Defence in 2024. Healey resigned because he took the view that the Defence Investment Plan (DIP), the dreadfully delayed document which would set out the financial implementation of last year’s Strategic Defence Review, was simply inadequate. It did not provide for defence expenditure to rise quickly enough to match the threats facing the United Kingdom.

It is not always easy to guess what lasting effects a prime minister will have. With Sir Keir Starmer’s announcement that he is leaving parliament – he was only ever a backbencher for four months when first elected, and he clearly does not care for it – immediate thoughts are of an ignominious end. But Starmer may leave behind a profound change. Today the House of Commons will take the remaining stages of the Representation of the People Bill, then send it to the House of Lords for its scrutiny there. It is a hugely significant piece of draft legislation but has largely disappeared in the fog of everyday political war. Representation of the People Acts are generally major statutes because they regulate the electoral system and how the House of Commons is composed.

Russia's threats towards Britain in recent weeks of 'consequences' for its continued support of Ukraine have allowed the government to start warning the electorate of the scale and nature of the new dangers the UK faces – from Russia and from its allies. The baton has now been taken up by the First Sea Lord, General Sir Gwyn Jenkins. Appearing on the Defence Talks podcast, Jenkins warned of potential 'catastrophic events'. Nato, he said, would currently 'struggle to contain' Russia’s maritime strength in undersea warfare. This covers a wide spectrum, from conventional crewed submarines familiar from our conception of the Cold War to autonomous underwater vehicles – drones of the sea rather than the sky – operating from and in concert with crewed motherships.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. When the Cold War ended and the main rationale for enormous stockpiles of nuclear weapons largely disappeared, it seemed natural that their spread would become a thing of the past. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 upended that Whiggish march of history. Throughout the conflict, President Vladimir Putin and his proxies, including the more-idiot-than-useful Dmitri Medvedev, have threatened the use of nuclear weapons, both tactical and strategic. He has hinted at strikes against Ukraine, Poland, Germany and the United Kingdom. In 2024, Putin amended Russia’s nuclear doctrine to lower the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons from facing an 'existential threat' to a 'critical threat to Russia’s sovereignty and territory'.

It is 70 years since Donald McLachlan’s Daily Telegraph leader urged prime minister Sir Anthony Eden to demonstrate 'the smack of firm government', and there has always been an element of the British electorate which thrills at the idea. This is a constituency Nigel Farage knows well and has long courted, the same one that looked at the chaos of the mid-1970s and wondered whether activist groups calling for a 'strong leader' might have a point. Reform UK has returned to this mood music once again as it sets out new policies on illegal migration. Its home affairs spokesman, Zia Yusuf, has been laying out the basic features of what is posturingly dubbed 'Operation Fortress': Britain is being invaded. Tory and Labour governments responded with a free ferry service and free hotels.

It was a bare-bones demonstration of politics as theatre. Today, the Prime Minister went to Barrow-in-Furness on the Cumbrian coast to visit BAE Systems Submarines. The shipyard there has built all but three of the Royal Navy’s nuclear-powered submarines – the others were turned out by Cammell Laird of Birkenhead – and are undertaking the construction of the four Dreadnought-class ballistic missile submarines which will carry Britain’s nuclear deterrent through the 2030s and beyond. The theatricality came from the fact that Andy Burnham went to Barrow to make an announcement which was inevitable and predictable.

Reshuffles vary in significance. When John Healey was spotted in Downing Street yesterday, there was an obvious question: was Andy Burnham reinstating him as defence secretary? Was this a coded message that Healey had been right on the need to increase defence spending beyond that in the Defence Investment Plan (DIP) and Keir Starmer wrong? It was more surprising than that. Healey became Chancellor of the Exchequer, a move unanticipated by a commentariat watching a two-horse race between Ed Miliband and Shabana Mahmood. When the bottle stopped spinning later last night, 43-year-old Wes Streeting was the new Defence Secretary.

Sir Keir Starmer attended his first Nato summit in Washington, DC four days after becoming Prime Minister in July 2024. Now, almost exactly two years later, he will join alliance leaders in Ankara with probably less than a fortnight until he leaves Downing Street. There is a certain piquancy, either sad or laced with schadenfreude, according to your point of view, in Starmer’s premiership being bookended by major defence summits. He has spent a great deal of time and effort on foreign affairs and security, including a heavy burden of international travel, and Ankara will be his 47th and final overseas visit in 24 months.

When the incumbent prime minister – presumably Andy Burnham – lays a wreath at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday this year to honour 'the glorious dead', he will potentially be joined by a record number of the glorious undead. If everyone who is eligible attends, there will be nine former prime ministers at the ceremony. Yes, nine: John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer. This is a statistically significant proportion of the 59 prime ministers there will have been since Sir Robert Walpole established the position on his appointment as First Lord of the Treasury in April 1721. Their average age is just under 65, still too young for the state pension. What does a former prime minister do?

It can be hard to believe, but it is only three weeks since John Healey resigned as defence secretary, saying that Keir Starmer had proven himself, ‘unable… to commit the resources that the nation needs to defend the country at this time of rising threats.’ It is insanity to give the armed forces half the funding they need and expect them to deliver all the missions to which they are committed The financial settlement for the Defence Investment Plan offered an additional £13.5 billion for the armed forces. The Ministry of Defence had said that it would need £28 billion.

Sir Keir Starmer came to office in July 2024 on a manifesto which played heavily on defence. The Labour party, it proclaimed, had an absolute commitment to the UK’s independent nuclear deterrent and, 'as the party that founded Nato… [would] maintain our unshakeable commitment to the alliance'. It would also 'apply a Nato test to major defence programmes to ensure we meet our obligations in full'. The party would conduct a Strategic Defence Review (SDR) within its first year of office, 'set out the path to spending' 2.5 per cent of GDP on defence and publish a Defence Industrial Strategy. It is hard to overstate the degree to which Starmer's government has fallen short of its lavish and tough-talking promises.

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 Strategic Defence Review (SDR), published a year ago and meant to be the fundamental framework of the government’s defence policy, was not a faultless document. On one issue at least, though, it was very clear: the United Kingdom’s steadfast commitment to Nato should be the primary focus of its strategic posture. The primacy of the alliance was emphasised so often it almost felt like subliminal suggestion. Keir Starmer’s foreword promised Britain would 'lead in Nato'; the Defence Secretary John Healey said 'our defence policy is "Nato First’", referred to 'our unshakeable commitment to Nato' and pledged to 'provide leadership in Nato'. Meanwhile, the SDR's authors said that 'Nato is the bedrock of our defence' and 'at the forefront of the UK’s many valuable alliances'.