John Healey’s resignation letter revealed much about his time as defence secretary – and about him. A fundamentally decent man who believed in his mission, he was ultimately thwarted by external and internal actors who could not or would not be controlled. Al Carns, the armed forces minister, seems to agree with him.
His note to the Prime Minister starts with the usual list of accomplishments during their shared time in office. I would question the substance of some – the treaties signed to deliver a better future alongside allies were only “pledges on account”, as was the imaginative and correct Strategic Defence Review. However, the account turned out to be overdrawn and the bank manager proved unsympathetic.
Healey has much reason to be annoyed as he was promised that financial leeway would be forthcoming: after all, the Prime Minister very publicly backed his assessment of the expanding landscape of novel threats and the military modernisation needed to address it.
But as Healey wrote, Starmer was unable to control an unwilling Treasury. The promised support was denied, and he was left having to accept the belittlement or deny it by resigning.
Healey could, though, have helped himself better secure his own position. He arrived with a well-developed policy for fundamentally altering the pattern of incentives in the Ministry of Defence head office that had seen such gross procurement failures in recent decades: the “fifth largest defence budget in the world” bought nowhere near the fifth most capable armed forces.
These proposals had been well-trailed and briefed, initially in a detailed, public presentation at Policy Exchange when Healey was in opposition; his section of Labour’s manifesto was atypically specific. MoD officials could not credibly claim they had not been warned in good time.
But despite valiant efforts by some around him, the usual forces of institutional inertia and turf-preservation conspired to make his Defence Reform programme one more honoured in its breach. He demanded a military strategic headquarters to grip the military outputs, and a new national armaments director to be responsible for building and securing a strong defence industrial base, in all its wartime dimensions.
And that is a great shame, as Healey’s Defence Reform would, if fully executed, have made named senior individuals accountable for actual, real-world outcomes. The topography of incentives would then have been reset to take account of the requirements of the warfighting whole – rather than each of the individual Services gold-plating their own independent kit requirements in order to maintain a separately derived vision of their unique role in the defence cosmos.
Without that reform of defence, and a demonstrable change in its effectiveness and efficiency, the Treasury could plausibly claim it was prudent not to throw good money after bad. Recent events in the Gulf highlighted the desperate state of our frontline. It was shown to be an international embarrassment; and Healey hadn’t yet demonstrated that his department was credibly addressing the fundamental flaws revealed. To an extent, therefore, and this is not to excuse the PM, Chancellor or Treasury, Healey was also let down by the dumb insolence of some senior officers and officials in slow-rolling his manifesto commitments for too long.
As Policy Exchange has been pointing out for some time, there is a “Say-Do Gap” at the top of government when it comes to the country’s defence. We acknowledge, promise and pledge, but then carry on managing the decline. That gap is now obvious to all, and it is now so big that it has swallowed John Healey.
He can take great credit, however, for correctly identifying what ails UK defence and prescribing the right medicine to make it better. It is a shame that the machinery of government was not up to meeting his challenge. In honorably resigning, he is making abundantly clear what now must be done.
Air Marshal Edward Stringer CB CBE is a Senior Fellow at Policy Exchange and a former Director-General of the Defence Academy
[Further reading: Starmer in crisis as second minister resigns]
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