The Defence Investment Plan is Keir Starmer’s last significant act as Prime Minister, and nobody in Westminster is talking about defence.
They are talking about who comes next.
Starmer announced his resignation on 22 June after Labour’s local election results wiped out the party at council level. Andy Burnham, who won the Makerfield by-election on 18 June with 54.8 percent of the vote, is the only declared candidate for the Labour leadership. Nominations open on 9 July. If he remains unchallenged, he enters Downing Street on 17 July, one day after the Commons rises for recess.
He is already prime minister in everything but the paperwork.
Kemi Badenoch held a press conference on Monday morning. She said Britain was heading for “a summer of chaos” and warned that “all major policy and spending decisions have been put on hold.” She called Starmer “a caretaker prime minister, barely in office, definitely not in power” and acknowledged that “Burnham is already the prime minister in everything but name.” She previously dismissed Burnham as “a pair of eyelashes and a fancy T-shirt.” Ed Davey said Burnham had “a very short window to turn this government around” and warned that “people have heard fine words before only to be let down badly because nothing really changes.”
The defence plan illustrates the problem. Starmer is publishing a £298 billion spending commitment that the next prime minister will have to deliver. £4.7 billion of it is unfunded. The chancellor who has to find that money will not be Rachel Reeves if Burnham wins and reshuffles the Cabinet. The Defence Secretary who has to implement it, Dan Jarvis, was appointed by Starmer after Healey resigned. Whether Burnham keeps him is unknown. The plan was written by one government and will be executed by another, led by a man who has not yet been asked to approve it.
This is the interregnum problem. The country has a sitting Prime Minister who has announced he is leaving, a presumptive Prime Minister who has not yet been elected, and a government publishing major spending decisions that bind the successor without his consent. Badenoch is right that the situation is chaotic. She is wrong to pretend the Conservatives would handle it differently. They changed leader four times in six years. The difference is that Labour is doing it in public with a transition timetable, while the Conservatives did it through ambush, resignation and 49 day implosions.
Burnham has three weeks. The country has a Prime Minister governing on borrowed time, publishing plans on borrowed money, for a government that will not be his by the time they are implemented.