Two senior defense officials have quit in the span of hours because the government won’t give the military enough money. The defence secretary, the armed forces minister, and apparently everyone with a clipboard have all decided this particular budget meeting was worth throwing their careers into the bin. Sir Keir Starmer, already looking like a man who ordered decaf by accident, is now visibly weaker while insisting he will definitely keep the country safe. The math here is simple: we cannot afford defense, but we can afford the political chaos of admitting it on live television.
What exactly is the problem with the funding plan? It falls well short of what the military needs, according to the people who just quit over it. Badenoch, naturally, used this as a PMQs cudgel to accuse Starmer of dithering. The government has a cabinet-wide battle raging about how to actually pay for military investment, which is the kind of internal screaming match usually reserved for private WhatsApp groups, not national security policy. Starmer’s response was to promote Dan Jarvis, a man whose main qualification appears to be “not having resigned yet.”
The truly beautiful part: these ministers are shielded by the exact same budget constraints they’re resigning over. They can’t get more money because the government won’t allocate it. They resign because the government won’t allocate it. The government won’t allocate it because admitting the problem exists would require actual spending decisions. Nobody has solved anything. Everyone looks worse. The military still doesn’t have enough funding. This is what peak Westminster dysfunction looks like when it forgets to close the door.