The resignation of John Healey, the instinctively loyal defence secretary, has pushed Keir Starmer’s government into what one political analyst called “the end times”. Healey told the Prime Minister in his resignation letter: “You have been unable, and the Treasury has been unwilling, to commit the resources that the nation needs to defend the country at this time of rising threats.” That single sentence, according to the New Statesman, amounted to a demand for the resignation of both Starmer and Chancellor Rachel Reeves.
Healey – a centrist who had worked closely with Starmer – reminded the Prime Minister that only last week he had said he believed “there could be an attack by Russia on Nato as soon as 2030”. “You know what defence needs,” Healey wrote. The letter was not a complex Westminster argument but a plain statement: Starmer had decided not to keep the country safe.
“Defence secretary John Healey resigns, accusing PM Starmer of failing to commit resources for national security.”
The resignation came after months of frustration across Whitehall over defence funding. The extra money eventually offered to Healey amounted to £10 billion – far short of the £28 billion the armed forces said was necessary just to stand still. Starmer and Reeves, the New Statesman noted, had seen intelligence warnings, heard leaders including President Zelensky spell out the threat, and witnessed the “threadbare resources of the Royal Navy” become globally apparent. They had commissioned and read the Strategic Defence Review, whose co-author, former Labour defence secretary and Nato secretary general George Robertson, had earlier attacked Starmer for “corrosive complacency”.
Even before Healey walked out, the publication of the Defence Investment Plan (DIP), expected next week, promised to be a political nightmare. The heads of the armed forces were prepared to denounce it as a recipe for cuts and retreat. Labour MPs were already conspiring to stop any cuts to welfare, the NHS or other domestic budgets, leaving Starmer trapped between the two sides just ahead of a crucial Nato summit in Turkey in early July, where Britain can now expect a ferocious battering from her allies.
“That sentence alone is, in effect, a demand for the resignation of both the Prime Minister, and Chancellor, Rachel Reeves,” the New Statesman wrote. “It comes from one of the most instinctively loyal and centrist members of the government, a man who has worked with Starmer close-up. And it is over the single most solemn duty of a prime minister.” After today, everything is far, far worse.