As the clock struck just past midday yesterday, John Healey resigned as Defence Secretary in protest at the proposed Defence Investment Plan (DIP).
In a scathing letter to the Prime Minister, he lambasted the government’s failure to meet the country’s security needs. “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,” he wrote. The DIP financial settlement, he continued, “falls well short of what is required for defence and the country at this dangerous time.”
Within hours, Tory MPs had readied themselves for battle.
In a video statement on X, flanked by two Union flags, Badenoch put it bluntly: “This is where Keir Starmer has taken us. Labour is not funding defence because they want to spend all their money on welfare. They’re taxing everybody to pay for welfare, and this cannot go on.” She was joined by most of the Parliamentary Conservative Party. Shadow Defence Secretary James Cartlidge claimed Starmer was “paying the price for prioritising a bigger welfare state over a stronger armed forces.” Jack Rankin went further, arguing that “the PM’s political weakness meaning he cannot cut welfare is a national security matter.”
None of these criticisms are new.
Just take PMQs on Wednesday, when Badenoch used her six questions to put it directly:
“The Prime Minister is in this mess because he maxed out on spending in his first two Budgets. That is why the benefits bill is set to rise to over £200 billion by the end of the decade. He has things the wrong way round: he has a benefits plan until 2031, but no defence investment plan. Why not just cut welfare?”
Starmer’s response, as is his PMQs custom, was to dodge and reach for the textbook line. “We are not going to take lectures on defence from the Opposition after what they did to the armed forces.” Perhaps he should have taken the lectures, because just twenty four hours later, his own Defence Secretary submitted his resignation on much the same grounds as hers.
One imagines Badenoch is having to restrain herself from uttering: ‘I told you so.’
This is a verdict shared beyond Westminster.
One former official close to the MoD put it plainly to me. “Healey’s resignation shows that, when it comes down to it, Starmer won’t match his words on defence with action. He’s comfortable allowing the massive welfare budget to balloon even further, but won’t spend what’s necessary to keep the country safe.”
The pattern, in other words, is not accidental – it is a choice, made repeatedly and in full view.
Indeed, the argument Badenoch and the Conservatives have been making is neither complicated nor new. As threats facing Britain have mounted, with the war continuing in Ukraine and conflict spreading across the Middle East, this government’s response has been not to properly fund the armed forces, but to shovel money into the welfare budget instead.
As one defence expert told me, “It’s a disgrace.”
The result is a government, as Badenoch rightly put it, that is “paralysed.” Not only is the benefits bill heading towards £200 billion, but the fiscal headroom Reeves once boasted about has long since evaporated. Labour cannot borrow more without spooking the markets, cannot raise taxes without stifling what little entrepreneurial life remains, and cannot cut welfare without triggering a backbench revolt. Instead, it just sits there – motionless and without purpose. How depressing.
But this stagnation and inaction is not inevitable. Months ago, the Conservatives proposed an answer. To reinstate the two-child benefit cap and use the savings to fund 20,000 new soldiers. At the time, it was dismissed as cruel politics and austerity 2.0. Healey’s resignation letter makes it look rather less dismissible now.
Yet, it is worth being precise about what that resignation actually means. This was not some unpredictable catastrophe arriving from nowhere. It was a foreseeable outcome of deliberate choices. Labour chose to put welfare spending ahead of defence. Labour chose to delay the release of the DIP for the best part of a year.
No one forced their hand. This was a series of decisions, and the consequences belong to the government.
Now, I am sure that the usual criticisms will follow. That Badenoch is heartless for suggesting welfare cuts and that she is playing politics with people’s lives. But a government that fails to put the safety of its people first is not compassionate. It is negligent, risking lives to appease the vocal minority rather than making the difficult decisions the moment demands.
Proper governance has never been about easy choices. Starmer has treated it as though it were, reaching for the path of least resistance at every turn.
I think this all goes to a point about Kemi more generally, however. A phrase that will no doubt be hurled at her in the coming days is that a broken clock is right twice a day. That this was a moment of luck and coincidence put together, and that anything else reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the situation.
Yet I have heard it applied to her so repeatedly as of late that I find myself asking a simple question: if this supposedly broken clock keeps telling the right time, perhaps it isn’t broken at all.