Starmer failed to choose between political, security and fiscal imperatives – the consequences will outlast him
4 min read
John Healey's job became impossible because the government refused to make a choice.
Whoever replaces Healey inherits the same three pressures: investing heavily in national security, demonstrating a domestic political dividend, and staying within the fiscal rules. The job is impossible until the government decides which one comes first.
John Healey’s resignation letter read like a letter of deep regret. Not anger, not score-settling. Regret that he was being asked to make decisions that, in his own words, could make the country less safe. And regret because Healey knows the Prime Minister understands the problem.
Starmer has himself attacked previous leaders for failing to rise to the moment. Now the same charge lands on him: he saw the threat, he said the right things, but he could not deliver. And the charge comes from a man who spent two years at the table trying to help the PM do it.
To understand why he reached that point, start with what this government gets right. It understands the world has changed. The old alliance with the United States now comes with a clear expectation: Europeans must invest in their own ability to defend themselves. The threat from Russia and technological advances mean investing at pace, not over decades. And shifting geopolitics means the UK has to act like the middle power it is, working closely with allies rather than pretending it can do everything alone. The Strategic Defence Review (SDR) said all of this. The diagnosis was right.
The problem was delivery. Defence policy was being pulled in three directions at once. The security imperative says invest more now, because capability takes years to build and the threat will not wait. The political imperative says the government must show the public that a big uplift in spending is delivering jobs and industrial capability at home. The fiscal imperative, enforced by the Treasury, constrains how much money is available at all.
The problem is simple: you cannot deliver all three at once. The government had to pick one and organise the other two around it. It never did. Healey’s resignation is the cost of that indecision.
Look at how it played out. The Treasury settled the spending review envelope with the Ministry of Defence, only for a £28bn shortfall in the existing programme to surface; a hole that had to be filled before the uplift bought a single new capability. Treasury and MoD officials then spent months in peacetime arguments about spending envelopes, while the Prime Minister was telling the country and our allies that we needed to be on a war footing. The rhetoric and the process were describing two different realities.
Meanwhile, our allies got on with it. Germany has rewritten its fiscal rules to fund defence. Poland is spending at levels not seen in Europe for a generation. Canada has stepped up. The UK’s Defence Investment Plan, the document meant to turn the SDR’s vision into actual orders and capability, sat delayed while Whitehall argued about affordability and credibility.
This is the recurring pattern of this government: ambitious words let down by unsatisfying compromises. The analysis is sound and the rhetoric strong. Yet the delivery gets negotiated down until it cuts against the ambition. In defence, that gap is not an embarrassment to be managed at the next reshuffle. It is measured in capability the country does not have.
The short-term politics are likely to dominate the fall-out: a cabinet resignation, a debate on spending totals, and a wounded Prime Minister with a challenger waiting in the wings.
But politics is the smaller issue. The bigger problem is that the national security challenges the UK faces are growing faster than our willingness to pay for the responses.
Healey's replacement, Dan Jarvis, inherits the same three pressures: investing heavily in national security, demonstrating a domestic political dividend, and staying within the fiscal rules. The job is impossible until the government decides which one comes first.
That is the choice Healey’s letter puts in front of the Prime Minister. His regret was that he could not get the Prime Minister to choose. The question now is whether his resignation can.
Jeegar Kakkad is defence and industries partner at Stonehaven
