When Andy Burnham announced his first cabinet in July, few would have had Wes Streeting marked down as a likely defence secretary. Not even Wes. And no one is more bullish about Wes’s life chances than Wes. It just didn’t seem a natural fit. Defence secretaries tend to be more the unsmiling types who operate in the shadows. Politicians like John Healey, with the pallor of someone who has spent too long in underground bunkers with military chief of staffs. People who slide in and out of rooms without making a fuss.
Wes has always been someone who likes to be noticed. Enjoys the theatre of Westminster. The first to arrive at a party and the last to leave. A natural gossip. “Psst – you’ll never guess what Zelenskyy just said to Trump.”
But in the past few months, Wes has had something of a personality change. At the recent Labour party conference, he kept his appearances distinctly low key. No longer the life and soul of Liverpool, out till 2am before getting up to do the media round just four hours later. It can’t be long before we see him driving a tank somewhere near the Russian border. Wes is gonna be Wes.
He also has the distinct advantage of not being Penny Mordaunt, the former Tory minister who has done more to terrify a nation than any living defence secretary. A few weeks ago, Sky broadcast The War Game, a reality show for superannuated politicians in which Michael Gove was cast as the prime minister and Penny as defence secretary. The set up was that Russia had torpedoed a ship off Scotland, with the politicians and the military placed in a mock-up Cobra meeting and left to come up with responses as the situation developed.
Appearing on Sky’s The War Game, Penny Mordaunt – pictured here practising in anticipation of the annual World Conker Championships – was hell-bent on escalating the reality show’s fictional conflict. Photograph: Jacob King/PA
This could have been the moment to restore faith in our democratic institutions. To admire the insight and clarity with which our leaders handle a crisis. To see how they repay the trust and power which we bestow on them. In which case, you should think again. What actually emerged is that politicians are no brighter than the rest of us. They just have egos which make them believe they are the right people in the right place at the right time. And that we are lucky to have them.
To put it bluntly, The War Game was a total shitshow. Just one bad decision after another. For the first two episodes, The Govester was like a rabbit in the headlights. Completely clueless as the UK came under increasing levels of attack. The best he could offer was to repeat back the last thing that was said to him and bark “ASAP!”
Penny, though, was a total menace to herself and the country from the word go. If this is really how defence secretaries behave, we should all be out digging bunkers in open land and stocking up on tinned food. Not that it would do much good. From the outset, Penny was hell-bent on escalating the conflict despite being told Britain’s military defences were totally threadbare and that the UK was only a middle-ranking global power. She couldn’t wait to use up the UK’s arsenal of weapons, and by the end two nuclear warheads were 20 minutes away from annihilating two major cities. Bye bye Britain. Still, at least she would go down as our last ever defence secretary.
So Streeting’s first appearance before the defence select committee was, first and foremost, a moment to give thanks he wasn’t Penny and that we are all – more or less – still here. And Wes looked as if he was now thoroughly bedded in at the MoD. He now talks mainly in letters – SDR, DIP and NAD – and jargon that is designed to be unintelligible to most mortals. Mostly, he wanted to get through the entire session by saying as little as possible and to send any stray reporters who had wandered into the committee room by mistake to sleep. He’d have liked to be more open, he said. But if he was, he’d have to kill us. For the first time in his life, Wes is enjoying keeping secrets. If not exactly his happiest place, then still a happy one.
Streeting’s appearances at the Labour party conference had been distinctly low key Photograph: Annabel Lee-Ellis/PA
Wes began by telling the committee that the UK and its Nato allies were facing their gravest threat since the cold war. Given that, you could understand why he wan’t particularly keen on telling us just how unprepared we were for some kind of an attack as our enemies might be listening. When Streeting had taken on the defence job he had spent most of the first week telling the media that he would – like his predecessor – resign if he thought the money being allocated was inadequate.
Three months on and he was rather dancing on the head of a pin. He couldn’t say how, when or even if the commitment to reach 3% of GDP by 2030 would be met. We just had to keep the faith that somehow it would all work out OK. John Healey said it would all end up OK, and if John Healey said so then we ought to believe him. After all, it wasn’t just a question of spending more money – it was also about spending the money he did have better.
It also turned out that some of our defence capacity was largely illusory. Both because it took six years for most military contracts to be delivered, by which time there was a fair chance the hardware would be obsolete, and because much of the increased spending had been backloaded until after the next election. Politicians never tire of passing on costs to future governments.
The MoD’s permanent secretary, Jeremy Pocklington, spent at least five minutes trying to persuade the committee that backloading wasn’t really backloading even if it looked like backloading. For that kind of mind-numbing bullshit, Jezza has been awarded the Companion of the Most Honourable Order of the Bath. Still, Wes did say at one point that he “wasn’t keen on fighting a war”, which I suppose is a start. Gives him the edge over Penny at the very least.