Dan Jarvis Appointed Defence Secretary After John Healey Resigns
3 min read
Dan Jarvis has been appointed as Defence Secretary following the resignation of John Healey on Thursday.
Healey resigned from cabinet warning that Keir Starmer's military spending plans fall way short of what was needed to keep the country safe.
He said he had been "left with no other option" but to stand down after being presented with details of how much additional money the government was planning to spend on defence.
Healey is considered a Starmer loyalist and his resignation represents a major blow to the Prime Minister.
His resignation was followed by armed forces minister Al Carns, who resigned over the government's plans on defence spending and its Northern Ireland Legacy Bill, claiming "the deal this country makes with the people who serve it" is "broken".
Healey's private parliamentary secretaries, Pamela Nash and Rachel Hopkins, also quit.
Jarvis is a former Army officer who has served as security minister since 2024, and as a Cabinet Office minister since 2025.
In his resignation letter to Starmer, Healey singled out the Treasury for criticism, saying it was "unwilling" to "commit the resources that the nation needs to defend the country at this time of rising threats".
Before his own resignation, Carns was reported by Times Radio to have said that the Defence Investment Plan (DIP), which the government had been expected to publish in the coming days, was "not fit for purpose" and Starmer had to "sort this out".
The PM and Chancellor Rachel Reeves are under pressure to significantly increase defence spending in response to global threats to the UK. Last year, the Prime Minister pledged to raise military spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2027, with the ambition of increasing that figure to three per cent in the next parliament.
However, NATO allies have also pledged a new baseline for military spending to reach 3.5 per cent of GDP. Starmer has promised to achieve this goal by 2035.
At the Munich Security Conference in February, which Healey references in his resignation letter, Starmer said: "To meet the wider threat, it's clear that we are going to have to spend more, faster."
In his letter of resignation to Starmer, Healey said the DIP financial settlement, which he was first given in full on Monday afternoon, "falls well short of what is required for defence and the country at this dangerous time".
"The extra support is backloaded when the pressure of operations and imperative to speed up readiness to fight is in the first two years and it rises to just 2.58 per cent of GDP in 2030, when we will reach 2.6 per cent next year with the investment we are already making."
The implication was that Starmer had offered Healey just a 0.08 per cent rise in spending.
He added: "Without a DIP that meets the moment in this way, I am being forced to make decisions that would reduce the readiness of our Forces and increase the risk to personnel on operations, and could make the country less safe.
"After explaining to you that I would not be able to accept a DIP settlement that does not give our Forces the resources they need, I am now left with no other option than to submit my resignation as your Defence Secretary."
Responding to Healey's resignation, Defence Committee chair and Labour MP Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi said: "That a defence secretary of his integrity and commitment has felt compelled to resign in response to the inadequacy of the proposed defence settlement is a grave moment. The government must take that warning with the utmost seriousness."
Former Labour defence secretary, Lord Hutton, told PoliticsHome that Healey's resignation was a "colossal failure of government" and that Starmer and Reeves would have to "revisit" their defence spending plans.
