Best Of

Sounds like testing the water for a leadership run:

In his resignation letter, Al Carns said: “Too many working people in this country feel insecure even when they are doing everything right. They work hard, contribute, pay their taxes and still feel one setback away from trouble. Public confidence in our institutions is weakening and politics increasingly looks performative while everyday life gets harder.

“The machinery of government itself has been left to decay. Decisions that should take days, take months. Departments fight each other instead of the problem. Officials and ministers who know the truth are not always rewarded for telling it. We are trying to govern a more dangerous world with processes designed for a calmer one, and the gap is now showing in the things that matter most.

“National resilience is about more than defence in the narrow sense. A strong country is not simply one with capable armed forces. It is one where working people feel economically secure, public services function, energy is resilient, communities are stable and young people can see a future worth working towards.”

As a Tory I could vote for that pitch, just depends on the route to that.

Sounds like it was written by AI?

I think Carns just don’t want to end up as a cartoon in a cartoon graveyard so he’s getting ahead of it.

So, we are spending nearly £60bn on defence this year. We struggle to put a single ship to sea. Our carriers seem to spend all their time in dock. We have a pitiful number of planes. Our army is one of the smallest we have ever had and almost certainly incapable of putting 5k soldiers on the front line for anything other than the briefest of times (which is how long their ammunition would last anyway).

John Healey may well be right that we need to invest in defence but what, as Secretary of State, has he done to improve our return on that £60bn. Last time I checked we had something like 31 flag officers for that frigate that we managed, with a fair bit of effort, to make seaworthy. According to CoPilot, the British Army currently has three full generals, nine lieutenant generals, and approximately 44 major generals on active duty. How many of these are in charge of a platoon? The money blown on the Atlas vehicle is almost beyond belief.

This chronic waste of resources is by no means all Healey's fault, of course, but I see precious little evidence that he has done much, if anything, to improve this chronic situation.

I am sorry but the “more admirals than ships” nonsense is unworthy of you. “Large, complex, organisation operating complex machinery requires senior managers” is not news and not the problem.

Compare us with our peers and we do better than most, and much the same as the French (the best comparison). This stuff is just hard, and expensive.

Can improvements be made? Of course. Is there some deep underlying scandal? Nah. Well maybe Ajax.

I would question whether a navy the size of our current fleet actually requires a single admiral. Its simply too small and the resources used for their staffing etc needs to be deployed to the front line. The Admiralty is a complex organisation that would cope with a much, much larger navy than we are ever likely to have again. We need to downsize our administration and focus on fighting capability.