Labour’s Starmtroopers are convincing nobody

A party that campaigned to make Jeremy Corbyn PM can’t claim to be the true party of the Nato alliance

John Healey, Labour’s shadow defence secretary is, without doubt, a member of the party’s sensible tendency. He oozes moderation and reasonableness, but his article in the Telegraph yesterday on Nato cannot go unchallenged.

Healey called Labour “the party of Nato” and it is true that Ernie Bevin, foreign secretary in Attlee’s government, was instrumental in helping to form the alliance in 1949. Labour has also furnished it with a secretary-general, the former defence secretary George Robertson. But it would be absurd to pretend that the party has always been united in its support of the trans-atlantic alliance.

Healey’s problem is that he and Keir Starmer were, until 2019, both campaigning to make Jeremy Corbyn prime minister, a man who has never been shy in expressing his opposition to Nato’s very existence.

In his defence, Starmer has made much in recent weeks of the fact that, even under Corbyn, Labour never formally abandoned its official policy of supporting Nato membership. But you’d have to be a political innocent to believe that would have meant anything had Corbyn won the general election. It would have been one of the first policies to be ditched by Corbyn’s inner cabinet of John Mcdonnell, Diane Abbott and Richard Burgon. Would Starmer have lifted a finger to oppose them? We can only speculate.

In his Telegraph article, Healey then made this ludicrous claim: “Our leadership in Nato could be at risk as Britain falls behind allies in responding to the Ukraine invasion.”

It beggars belief. Britain has been at the forefront of the European response to the Ukraine war. We’ve been training Ukrainian soldiers since 2014. Has any other EU country been doing this? We’ve provided more arms to Ukraine than most of the rest of Europe put together. France has supplied close to zero, and the Germans have looked for every excuse to break their commitment to do so.

Does Healey have a clue what he is talking about? Or is he just another one of the Starmtroopers, politicians so blinded by their refusal to accept that we have left the EU that they just cannot move on?

Labour isn’t the only party with 

problems on defence. The SNP’S Westminster leader Ian Blackford was on TV on Sunday morning tying himself up in knots over his party’s position on Trident. “We should have been getting round the table,” he said. With Putin. I kid you not. But there would be no negotiation because the SNP’S position is to give away our deterrent. That’ll go down well on the streets of Auchtermuchty.

Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in the early 1990s. Does anyone think Russia would have invaded if Ukraine still had nukes? Of course not.

For obvious reasons, Boris



Johnson’s political position is more tenuous than it was this time last week. The Commons tearooms are again rife with leadership speculation, and one name is coming to the fore. It’s not the usual suspects who are agitating. It’s not the mad, the bad and the sad. There’s no Brexiteer or Remainer plot. It’s not the Right or the Wets. And that should be a worry for the Prime Minister.

His strength, though, is that there is no King or Queen over the water. Rishi Sunak’s ambitions have been seen off. Few believe Liz Truss could reach the last two among MPS. What many MPS are looking for is a return to sensible, competent leadership.

Step forward Jeremy Richard Streynsham Hunt. In 2019 he didn’t make it because he didn’t have the charisma of the eventual winner and he was viewed with suspicion by Brexiteers, despite him having told me in 2017 that he’d now vote Leave. But now we’re out of the EU, and many MPS have had enough charisma to last them a lifetime.

The question over Hunt is whether he would be hungry enough to stand a second time. He’s enjoyed his life since 2019 and may take some convincing to put himself forward. The longer Johnson’s political death by a thousand cuts lasts, however, the more likely it is the party will turn to someone who hasn’t dipped their hands into the blood of the Johnson Cabinet.

I am one of the few people next 

Thursday who will genuinely be voting on local issues. Which means I won’t be voting Conservative. My local council in Kent has been under Tory control for many decades, although a recent by-election has deprived it of an overall majority. Good. It has become arrogant, lazy, inefficient and immune to the views of local people. So much so that an independent alliance has taken several seats.

While I continue to oppose proportional representation for national elections, I wonder if it’s time to have a debate about it for local elections to stop these one-party states from continuing to let down their communities. It is possible to rid people of long-time hopeless councils. The SNP showed it could be done in Glasgow when they ousted Labour some years ago. But PR would mean these one-party states couldn’t wreak their damage in the first place.