No British defence secretary has resigned in such an abrasive manner as the quiet man of the Ministry of Defence John Healey, who turned up the volume to pain pitch for a struggling PM.
Healey is no showy figure on the international stage but he is a familiar, trusted face. So, the news he had dramatically quit Keir Starmer’s government in the run-up to a vital summit of Nato leaders trying to keep an unreliable US onside and boost strategic capability ran like wildfire around Alliance capitals. “He hasn’t really gone?” one senior German military figure texted me in disbelief.
Most UK Cabinet upheavals have little effect abroad – the departure of Wes Streeting did not move the news ticker in Washington or Paris. But the UK, while a medium-size contributor to Nato in hard power terms, is a country with fighting experience and world-class integration of its intelligence services and military efforts – a massive boost to Ukraine, especially in the crucial early days of the fighting.
For that reputation to be so badly dented because of a clearly toxic mood between the figure heading the Government’s defence portfolio and a Prime Minister who has talked big and walked small on actual commitments is a huge loss of dignity for the UK. That is a risk he has decided to take – and it is hard to avoid the conclusion that his aim is to prise Starmer out of office as soon as possible.
I have followed Healey’s forging of the Anglo-German Trinity House defence agreement last year (which has hugely boosted drone production) close up – to the point of ending up on a joint pub visit in London, drinking pints with his German counterpart Boris Pistorius – also a figure embroiled in a bruising national political debate about defence. Healey joked to me in an interview that in one period of Nato tension with the Trump administration, “I saw my German colleague more often than I did my wife”. “Though not on the same terms,” shot back Pistorius.
US Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth, Australian Defence Minister Richard Marles, British Defence Secretary John Healey at the US Embassy in Singapore in May (Photo: Edgar Su/ Reuters)That bonhomie was a sign of the respect and familiarity Healey has gained as a defence secretary known in Western capitals for being calm in the face of a lot of provocation from Donald Trump. It’s telling that he has never been the personal target of the US President’s outbursts about the inadequacies of the UK’s military efforts, and a sign he is a figure who picked his fights cautiously – up till the moment he chose to shine a light on what he regards as a failure of national duty by the PM.
Remember too that Healey was the channel to the Zelensky team in Kyiv in both good and bad times in the war with Russia. He has also been a figure who has kept the Nato spending target of 3.5 per cent by 2035 intact. It has, however, turned out to mask such a wild internal disagreement that the UK looks like a country that says one thing on the floodlit stages of the Munich Security Conference and the communiques of Nato summits – but is incapable of delivering on it when the armed services bosses sit down with the MoD and Treasury to finalise how high the expenditure will be – and what it is to be spent on.
One beneficiary of this mess is the Trump administration, which has long argued that much talk about defence spending in Europe is a sham. JD Vance argued in a fiery take-down of European priorities in Munich in early 2025 that Europe was not serious about its own defence – and the trajectory since then has been towards a point where Nato planners openly discuss a very near future in which the US would not come to the defence of its allies under the mutual assistance clause of Article 5.
Healey has been a figure who has kept intact the Nato spending target of 3.5 per cent by 2035 (Photo: Stefan Rousseau/PA)Now, Starmer limps to the G7 meeting in Paris next week and the July Nato summit in Ankara with no decided defence policy and a rookie defence secretary in post. Other countries will be polite about the little local difficulty, but behind the scenes, they are aghast. “This summit is a crucial one for Nato to hold together,” says one European general. “It’s the worst time to be giving the Russians good news about domestic difficulties in paying for defence.”
For an erratic Trump administration, furious that the UK first refused to send help in the conflict with Iran, only to later allow use of military bases and minesweepers, this will be a further sign that those who preach the loudest about the need to boost Nato are incapable of living up to the pledge – or being clearly decisive when action is called for.
Healey’s painful calculation is that it is better these running sores are out in the open. Essentially, he is telling the Prime Minister and thus the rest of the world that he does not trust the UK Government to keep the country safe. The unsparing manner of Healey’s denunciation betray a lack of faith in Starmer to deliver a spending deal commensurate with the threats to the UK and Nato.
It is one of the most damaging ministerial swansongs in UK Cabinet history – and the message of anger and frustration it sends will be heard just as loudly in Moscow and Washington as it is in the turmoil of Westminster and Whitehall. To put it mildly: in a world of growing threats, this is not our finest hour.
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