2.3.2 – Collective Ministerial Responsibility
Keir Starmer received another hammer blow last week when his Defence Secretary, John Healey, resigned. Healey could no longer publicly defend the government’s defence-funding plans, and under the convention of collective ministerial responsibility a minister who cannot support government policy in public is expected to leave rather than dissent from within. Hours later, the Armed Forces Minister, Al Carns, followed him out of government. Coming on top of Starmer’s already weakened authority, the two resignations are a serious blow, and a dangerous one, because they are about the government’s central policy choices rather than any personal failing.
When Wes Streeting resigned as Health Secretary in May, it was a big story, but it was not a shock to the government. It was no secret that Streeting harbours ambitions to lead the party one day, and although he said he had lost confidence in Starmer’s leadership and that it would be dishonourable to remain, there was an unmistakable strategic calculation behind the timing of his departure.
Healey’s resignation feels different. He has been a Member of Parliament since 1997 and has held a string of posts in government and opposition since 2001. He is widely regarded as a highly competent minister, an honourable colleague and a good boss to those who worked under him. He also has no obvious leadership ambitions, which makes his departure far harder to dismiss as manoeuvring.
He became Secretary of State for Defence in July 2024. By then it was widely accepted that Britain’s Armed Forces had been underfunded for years, and against a backdrop of rising global threats this had become an urgent problem.
As often happens when a new government takes office, a Strategic Defence Review was commissioned. Published in June 2025, it set out an ambitious vision for the future of the Armed Forces. The obvious next question was how to pay for implementing its key recommendations, and it is this question that lies at the heart of Healey’s resignation.
The mechanism for answering it was meant to be the Defence Investment Plan (DIP). Promised after the review to deliver the vision the Review had set out, and intended to replace the old Defence Equipment Plan, the DIP was supposed to spell out exactly what the Ministry of Defence would buy, and how it would be paid for, over the coming decade. It was originally due in the autumn of 2025, but it was delayed again and again. Behind the delay sat a standoff between the MoD and the Treasury over a reported funding gap of around £28 billion. The drift drew sharp criticism. The Public Accounts Committee complained that the country had effectively gone years without a credible plan for military capability, while the repeated postponement damaged Britain’s standing with allies, undermined the morale of those serving and put defence suppliers at risk.
When Healey was finally shown the plan’s full financial settlement, by his own account only on the Monday afternoon of the week he resigned, he judged it well short of what defence and the country needed. It rose to just 2.68% of GDP by 2030, with much of the extra money loaded into later years even though the pressure on readiness was immediate. Healey had been pressing for a credible path towards spending 3% of GDP on defence. Rather than remain in Cabinet and defend a plan he believed left the country less safe, he resigned. Hours later Carns did the same, calling the DIP “not fit for purpose”.
Healey’s resignation letter said that:
“You know what defence needs. You made the argument for this powerfully in your speech at the Munich Security Conference back in February. Without a DIP that meets the moment in this way, I am being forced to make decisions that would reduce the readiness of our Forces and increase the risk to personnel on operations, and could make the country less safe.”
This is utterly damning for Starmer. Every Prime Minister insists that their first duty is keeping the country safe, and Healey’s letter says that Starmer is failing in precisely that duty. What makes it worse is that the warning comes from the one minister whose job it was to know.
A second problem for Starmer is who is doing the resigning. One of the most famous resignations in British political history was Sir Geoffrey Howe’s departure from Margaret Thatcher’s Cabinet on 1 November 1990. In his resignation statement to the Commons on 13 November, he famously likened Thatcher’s approach to the EEC to “sending your opening batsmen to the crease, only for them to find, as the first balls are being bowled, that their bats have been broken before the game by the team captain”. What made Howe’s resignation so devastating was that it was so out of character for a man of his mild and loyal reputation. Healey falls into the same category. When a quiet, respected figure with no axe to grind walks out, people listen.
So how damaging is all of this? The honest answer is: very. Streeting’s departure could be written off as the manoeuvring of a leadership rival, but Healey’s cannot. It is a resignation made on principle, on the issue of national security, by one of the most respected figures in the government, and it was immediately echoed by his Armed Forces Minister. It also lands while Starmer is already fighting for his political survival, with scores of his own MPs having called on him to go, and it leaves the government’s defence plans in disarray only weeks before a NATO summit. For a Prime Minister whose authority was already draining away, that is about as damaging as a resignation can be.