ANDREW NEIL: All hat, no cattle, Starmer is a phoney cowboy. And he is sidelined Britain for many years to come back

Keir Starmer has spent most of the week swanning around the Gulf in ‘world leader’ mode talking about a ceasefire, in which he played no part, and reopening the Strait of Hormuz, which he has no power to do even in concert with allies, since he has almost no naval assets to deploy for such a task.

Bluntly, the Prime Minister has more pressing defence matters to attend to: he should have stayed in Whitehall and convened a series of emergency meetings to revive and rearm Britain’s military. Trump’s War on Iran has revealed, for the world to see, the sad state of our armed forces — hollowed out by years of neglect and penny-pinching when in power by all three of what used to be our major political parties. Yes, Labour, Tories and Lib Dems are jointly complicit. It is now a national embarrassment — and Starmer’s failure to do anything about it a national scandal.

Yet, as usual, Starmer put saving his own political skin ahead of the national interest. Labour Party polling and focus groups show his refusal to join in Trump’s War and his growing criticisms of the President are just about all he has going for him when it comes to voter appeal.

So, with a Labour wipeout looming in upcoming elections next month, off he went to the Gulf to posture with local leaders and what few forces we have in the region, repeat ad nauseam this is not ‘our war’ (nobody is saying it is) and to sharpen his attacks on Trump (with whom he’s now ‘fed up’).

It was all so pathetically performative — and unconvincing, both for our Gulf allies (who are furious with us for making only a token contribution to defend them from Iranian attacks), and for the folks back home. If Starmer really thinks this ‘global statesman’ stuff will save his party from electoral oblivion come May 7th then he must also believe there are fairies at the bottom of the Downing Street garden.

It is depressingly clear that defence is not a priority for the Starmer government, despite wars raging in the Gulf and Ukraine, autocrats on the march and geopolitical tensions rising all over the globe. This week a YouGov poll found that defence was now the third most important issue for a third of voters (in 2021 only six per cent thought that), ahead of even the NHS. Not for the first time, Starmer has failed to read the room.

Instead, he continues to starve defence of anything like the budgets it requires, with the connivance of his Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, who (like her political hero, Gordon Brown, when he was Chancellor) has no interest or expertise in defence and no desire to fund it properly.

Defence spending has largely stood still under Starmer-Reeves at a lowly 2.4 per cent of GDP: up a mere £2 billion (before accounting for inflation) to £62billion in 2025-26, Labour’s first full financial year, and a paltry £3.5 billion (again in cash terms) in this financial year. We still don’t know when we’ll reach 2.7 per cent of GDP — which is meant to be the government’s near-term target — while ambitions for 3 per cent or 3.5 per cent remain mere pipe dreams for the next decade, if ever.

Trump’s War on Iran has revealed, for the world to see, the sad state of our armed forces — hollowed out by years of neglect and penny-pinching

Reeves will add another £75billion to welfare spending during the current parliament, taking the total to £390billion by 2030

The first thing a government that believed in defence would do is make firm spending commitments: 3 per cent by 2027-28, 3.5% by the end of the decade, 4 per cent by early in the 2030s. There is already a blueprint for how this money should be spent: Labour commissioned a strategic defence review on taking office and it was delivered early last June.

At its core is a fundamental shift in Britain’s defence posture to prioritise Euro-Atlantic security; create a high-tech integrated defence force of greater scale (with less emphasis on separate services —something I’ve long advocated); a permanent posture of war-fighting readiness for high-intensity conflict; strengthened homeland defence; and greater resilience by rebuilding our military-industrial base.

The day it was published I dined with the review’s chairman, George Robertson, a doughty Labour defence secretary from the Blair years who went on to become secretary-general of NATO. ‘Are you sure the money will be forthcoming for all of this,’ I asked him. ‘I’ve had a commitment from Starmer himself,’ he replied. A defence spending plan would be forthcoming by the autumn, he indicated.

Well, we’re still waiting. We still have no idea how — or even if — the Robertson review will be financed. At the annual London Defence Conference yesterday Defence Secretary John Healey still couldn’t say when the extra spending would materialise. He’s a decent man who believes in defence but happens to be defence secretary of a government that doesn’t. His audience of military folk and defence experts listened to him in frosty silence.

So there is much to do restore our own defences and play a pivotal role in a new post-America Nato. Sadly, Starmer is doing none of it

The delay is a disgrace. Reeves argues behind closed doors that there just isn’t the money — and she won’t breach her fiscal rules. That’s not true. It’s much more a matter of priorities. Reeves will add another £75billion to welfare spending during the current parliament, talking the total to £390billion by 2030. She’s managed to find another £40-60billion in public investment and subsidies during the same period to finance Ed Miliband’s net zero fantasies.

Radical welfare reform designed to get several million of the current 11m of working age who are not actually working back to work plus the scrapping (or at least delaying, as the Tony Blair Institute argued this week) of net zero targets would free up more than enough billions to repair our defences and rebuild our armed forces.

The need has never been more urgent. President Trump grows daily more hostile to NATO. He’s never been a fan. Now he’s out to wreck it because NATO allies did not come to his aid against Iran. Some of this is the usual Trumpian bluster. But he sees NATO allies as parasites and cosies up to NATO’s enemies.

So we should hope for the best — a gradual reduction in the US commitment to NATO — and plan for the worst — Trump just walks away. Given that scary prospect, Britain should be taking the lead in creating a post-America NATO through a reconfigured North Atlantic Council, which runs the alliance. It’s dominated by America and its Supreme Allied Commander is always American.

That needs to give way to a new NATO council run by the collective leadership of the leading European military powers: Britain, Germany, France, Poland, perhaps Scandinavia. Maybe the first Supreme Commander of the new NATO should be Polish, to show the Russians we mean business. It will not be easy and we would have to put our own house in order first. But it can be done. It will have to be done.

We should start by recognising our strengths. European NATO can muster 2m active military personnel, Russia 1.3m. European NATO has 1,600 modern jet fighters, Russia 1,000. Over 100 frigates and destroyers, versus 25 Russian warships. Collectively we spend three times as much on defence as Russia. There is no need to be on the back foot.

European NATO, of course, depends on vital US support, from heavy lift to satellite intelligence and much more. The new NATO will have to develop the resources to do all that itself. It is vital this is done through NATO and not the European Union, as some in the Starmer government crazily suggest.

For a start the EU has no experience or competence in military matters. A defensive alliance that requires unanimity and includes Ireland (neutral), Spain (hostile to defence spending) and Hungary (pro-Kremlin) would be neither agile nor coherent. Plus Britain, Canada and Norway must be key members of the new NATO: none is a member of the EU. If we leave defence to the EU we’ll likely all be speaking Russian by 2035.

So there is much to do restore our own defences and play a pivotal role in a new post-America NATO. Sadly, Starmer is doing none of it. He struts the global stage but achieves nothing because he has nothing to offer. As they say in Texas of phoney cowboys, he’s all hat and no cattle. Which is why, for at least the rest of this decade, we are condemned to growing irrelevance as the rest of the world leaves us behind. For the first time in centuries we will be no more than a spectator to historic events.