When Keir Starmer was told his pledge to raise defence spending to 3 per cent of GDP in the next parliament was not enough to fund his vision for the armed forces, as outlined in the strategic defence review (SDR), he put his head in his hands and snapped: ‘Why are you doing this to me? I thought this was costed!’

That striking image of a leader on the edge was widely talked about at the Munich Security Conference over the weekend. Three senior defence figures relayed it to me. Remove the self-pity and it is still a telling insight.

The SDR, drawn up by George Robertson, the former Labour defence secretary, retired General Sir Richard Barrons and Fiona Hill, an adviser to both George W. Bush and Donald Trump, outlined a ten-year plan to bring our forces to ‘war readiness’ when it was published last June. But there were always going to be gaps in funding for the next couple of years before the new money began to come through. ‘The report was clear on that,’ says a senior Labour figure.

Yet Starmer seemed unaware of this when defence chiefs warned John Healey, the Defence Secretary, and the PM in November that there was a £28 billion black hole in the budget. One Brit in Munich declared Starmer ‘a manikin’ and observed: ‘He’s been living in a storm of blissful ignorance in which people have told him he’s very good at foreign policy.’

‘The army has never been as small as it is now since the days of Cromwell’

‘The army has never been as small as it is now since the days of Cromwell’

Starmer has set a target of spending 2.5 per cent of GDP on defence by April 2027, with an ‘ambition’ to raise this to 3 per cent after the general election and then to 3.5 per cent, with another 1.5 per cent spent on defence infrastructure – matching the 5 per cent Donald Trump has demanded of Nato countries.

Instead, the Defence Industrial Plan, due out in November, on how the money is split between the three armed services and the order in which weapons systems are built, is not finished. General Sir Nick Carter, the chief of the defence staff between 2018 and 2021, says Munich was ‘the first time I’ve been to a major European event when I’ve actually felt a bit dispirited about being British because I don’t feel that we’re stepping up to the plate as fast as we should be’.

Remove spending on the Trident nuclear deterrent – a quarter of the MoD’s budget and a third of its equipment budget – and Britain is spending just 1.75 per cent of GDP on defence, around the same level as Spain and Portugal. The UK is on course to fall to 21st in Nato spending as a proportion of GDP on conventional forces. We were once second.

The Japanese complain Britain has failed to commit funds to a stealth fighter jet project called GCAP, the Global Combat Air Programme, being worked on by the UK, Japan and Italy.........

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