There are still people out there – with access to the full gamut of unblunted cutlery – who maintain that Sir Keir Starmer is one of the great public servants of our time, cruelly brought down by unfair events. One easy way to disprove this, in the unlikely event that this theory’s proponents are susceptible to appeals to reason, is by pointing to his government’s defence record. The person who was in charge of this department, John Healey, resigned rather than be held responsible for the total abandonment of the nation’s defences.
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One of these Starmer defenders is Rachel Reeves. Or at least she is one of them now that it’s become clear Burnham will sack her as quickly as you can say ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’. She and Dan Jarvis, the recently appointed defence secretary who was considered craven enough to be the face of the catastrophic spending plan, were chosen as Starmer’s warm up acts for his big speech, set to be one of his last major policy announcements. Given she’ll be out of a job soon, Starmer should offer to take her with him wherever he goes, so she can be a sort of Ruprecht the Monkey Boy, designed to make him look confident and palatable by comparison.
