A few days before the Runcorn and Helsby by-election, at a meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party, John Healey, the defence secretary, urged colleagues to campaign in a constituency that was in danger of being captured by Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. “It was too close to call,” he told them. Keir Starmer had been advised not to campaign in Runcorn but as MP for Rawmarsh and Conisbrough, in the districts of Rotherham and Doncaster in south Yorkshire, Healey understood the threat posed by the insurgent populist right in Labour’s old post-industrial heartlands. Rotherham was where one of the most notorious rape gangs operated and, in the event, Reform would take control of Doncaster council in a landslide victory at the local elections.  

Healey was present – wearing his obligatory red tie - at the count centre in Widnes that night when Reform’s victory was confirmed after a recount. Only one brick from the red wall had been removed but he knew the significance of the defeat: at the general election Reform were second in his seat and in 88 others won by Labour.  

What does this tell us about Healey, who has been touring the broadcast studios to promote the government’s long-delayed strategic defence review? The first thing to understand is that he defines himself as a “campaigner”, which means every seat matters to him, every hard-won Labour victory must be defended. “When you enter government, never forget to stay political,” he says. Secondly, loyalty defines his politics. He is deeply committed to the party, its arcane rules, procedures and alliances with the trade union movement through which he rose as a young Cambridge graduate. John Bew, the historian and former foreign policy adviser to three Conservative prime ministers, likens him, in style and resolution, to an Attlee era politician: “He has complete integrity and a kind of granite-like solidity.” A senior party strategist agreed. “John could have been the ballast in any Labour government since the war.”

I’ve heard Healey described as the hardman of the cabinet, an embodiment of “hard Labour” – not because he is brutal or fearsome but because as a cold-eyed realist there is indeed something unyielding and implacable about him, something granite-like. A refusal to bend or submit or be broken. He uses the phrase “hard graft” a lot in conversation. He is unflashy, studies his briefing notes before meetings as I observed when I accompanied him on a two-day trip to Nato HQ in Brussels, and refuses to play the Westminster game.

Dominic Cummings describes Reform UK as being little more than “Nigel Farage and an iPhone”. Something similar could be said of Healey when he was shadow defence secretary. Except that as well as an iPhone, he had a full-time adviser and confidante, Daniel Harris, now his “special” adviser; he sat near us on the train back from Brussels, listening to our conversation.  

It’s often said of Starmer that he had a strategy to win power but not a plan to govern. The same cannot be said of Healey: from the day he entered the Ministry of Defence in Whitehall and held an all-staff meeting, he was explicit that he wanted to “reset the nation's contract” with those who served in the armed forces and their families. “For the first time for decades,” he told me, “those serving in the forces felt that they didn't have the understanding and support of the British population for the service they were giving the country. And weren’t respecting them either! We were housing them in conditions that would have been condemned by local authority inspectors. We were freezing their pay. We were just not kitting them properly. We were just not respecting the unique commitment they give to the country and, in some cases, the unique sacrifices they give as well. These were the four fundamentals right from the start.”

Starmer aspires to lead a security government – one committed to national security in an era of intensifying geopolitical threat, security of housing and jobs, security against crime - but, like the Conservatives before them, the government cannot even control its borders; this year, illegal small boats crossing the English Channel are at a record high. No prime minister can claim to lead a credible defence-industrial-security government without border control. Healey accepts this.

In addition, he wants the government to commit to spending at least 3 per cent of GDP on defence; Starmer, who said on 2 June that Britain was moving to “war-fighting readiness”, claims to want the same, but his commitment remains open-ended, an aspiration rather than something fixed. “The way the Treasury functions is, unless you put a date on something, it will not plan for it,” Ben Wallace, the former Conservative defence secretary, told me. “And so, just like my government, there is this awful attitude, a modern phenomenon of politics, which is there is such a thing as a pain free way to spend more money on something. Threat should decide how much we spend, not some official in the Treasury. What matters is how lethal we can be.”

Wallace accused Labour of obfuscation and spin. “As defence secretary I was pretty belligerent. I had to change the culture of where defence sat in the country and in the government. I had the fight, to say, defence is not discretionary. This is the threat, and, you know what? I don't care about other people's stories. We have a very dangerous Putin. If we don't want to lead or be a big power, then that's fine, Number 10 should say it. Don't bullshit, don't spin.”

Labour’s commitment is to spend 2.5 per cent on defence by April 2027, but the UK already spends 1 per cent of its GDP on the nuclear deterrent. This leaves only 1.5 per cent to spend on the rest of the defence budget, which includes MI6 staff pensions and cybersecurity operations at GCHQ.

If you are seeking to revitalise a national defence industry, procurement is vital: Ukraine, for instance, is building 3.5 million drones this year and has 700 companies working on defence innovation. But the UK’s defence procurement system is, according to a cross-party inquiry, “broken”. It is excessively bureaucratic, ponderous and lacks transparency and accountability. The UK has been left with “an extremely limited reserve of fighting equipment, including warships, modern armoured vehicles or combat aircraft”.

Healey is too much of a Labour partisan to dissent publicly but he’s restless: Poland spends 4 per cent of GDP on defence; under its new chancellor, Friederich Merz, Germany is committed to spending 3.5 per cent by 2030; other European states are committed to spending 3 per cent or more. “They're all stepping up, and we are not,” Wallace said. “This is cheap, I know, but Starmer leads a coalition of the spinning.”

In 2010, the British army had 100,000 full-time troops; today it has 70,000, less a standing army than a militia. Without credible armed forces, deterrence becomes meaningless. “If you want a proper army you’ve got to invest in it; we’re less capable than Italy,” one strategist said.

“We’ve got to stop the haemorrhage, reverse the long-term decline,” Healey told me. “The challenge now is to demonstrate what we will do with it [increased defence spending], how we use that to modernize our forces, to equip them with what they need to be more ready to fight.”

John Healey – the hardman of the cabinet – understands we have entered a new age of war in Europe and that the alternative to modernising the armed forces and being prepared to fight is appeasement or, even worse, defeat.