A morally poor ruling class has shamefully run down Britain’s defences at a time of warfare. Now I title ALL the responsible males, by STEPHEN GLOVER

Sir Keir Starmer‘s failure to send a warship to the Mediterranean until our base in Cyprus was attacked by Iranian drones has angered millions of people. The pitiful state of the Royal Navy should make us weep.

The nation that throughout the 19th century had by far the largest and most effective navy in the world (usually at least twice the size of the next biggest) has become a laughing stock.

Earlier this week, Sir Richard Shirreff, former Deputy Supreme Allied Commander, NATO, suggested in these pages that World War Three has already begun. Yet it is blindingly obvious that, as a result of three decades of underspending on defence, our Armed Forces are in no state to protect Britain.

As I was reading in this newspaper on Wednesday morning about the almost unbelievably appalling state of the Royal Navy, I thought of all the politicians since the turn of the century who have let this country down.

And I remembered a short polemical book that burst upon the world in July 1940. It was called Guilty Men. Politicians who had neglected to build up Britain’s defences, while appeasing Adolf Hitler, were named and shamed.

Britain was fighting for its life, and many wondered whether it would be able to defend itself. We stood alone against Nazi Germany. France had fallen. The United States wouldn’t enter the war for another 17 months.

A defeated, bedraggled British army had weeks earlier been evacuated from Dunkirk. Winston Churchill had become prime minister on May 10. In the skies above southern England, the heroic pilots of Fighter Command were engaged in a life-and-death struggle against the Luftwaffe.

Within days Guilty Men sold 50,000 copies. Some 200,000 were bought by the end of the year. The book did what the title promised. Fifteen politicians were singled out, of whom Tory statesmen Stanley Baldwin, Lord Halifax and Neville Chamberlain (who had just been replaced by Churchill) were the most comprehensively eviscerated. Their reputations never recovered.

The authors of Guilty Men were three young journalists: Michael Foot, who four decades later became a Left-wing leader of the Labour Party; Peter Howard, a former captain of the England rugby union team, who had flirted with Oswald Mosley’s fascists before joining the Tories; and Frank Owen, then editor of the London Evening Standard, who became editor of the Daily Mail after the war.

There was a feeling, even among supporters of Churchill, that publishing such a diatribe in the midst of war was divisive. Some shops refused to sell the book, and it attracted only a handful of reviews, mostly unsympathetic.

The critics had a point. July 1940, when Britain was fighting for its survival as a free and independent nation, was not the perfect time to start throwing rotten apples at one’s fellow countrymen, however greatly at fault they had been.

And that is why I propose that we name the guilty men (and one woman) of our own era now, while we are still not officially at war.

My list begins with Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. David Cameron’s name, written in bold, is then added, joined by that of George Osborne, who served as Chancellor of the Exchequer from 2010 to 2016. These men were the architects of our downfall.

Then we come to the present Labour Cabinet, whose culpability is even greater because the threat is more immediate. And yet, while giving the impression of being proactive, they do virtually nothing.

Sir Keir Starmer stands at the pinnacle of blame because he has correctly identified the dangers facing us but does so little to address them. He sometimes speaks like a man of action, but always thinks like a human rights lawyer who puts abstract principles above British interests.

Our deficient Prime Minister had to be jolted out of his slumbers to send a destroyer to the Mediterranean to defend the sovereign British base at RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus after the drone attack, almost certainly unleashed by terrorists in southern Lebanon who are Iranian puppets.

Incredibly, even a single warship couldn’t immediately be found, partly because we have so few of them after decades of low defence spending, and partly because several of the handful we do possess are holed up in port, experiencing lengthy repairs. HMS Dragon may finally set sail next week – long after the Greek and French navies have got to Cyprus.

The Prime Minister’s friend, human rights lawyer and Attorney General Lord Hermer, is another guilty man. It was he who advised ministers a week ago that use of British bases should be denied to the United States which, for all Donald Trump’s absurdities, remains our closest ally on whom we depend militarily in all sorts of ways.

Then there is the Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, who is reportedly resisting Starmer’s belated attempt to increase Britain’s defence expenditure beyond the pitiful 2.5 per cent of GDP, which he promised just over a year ago would take effect in 2027.

And yet this guilty, deluded woman had the brass neck to say, when delivering her Spring Statement on Tuesday, that in ‘an increasingly dangerous world, I am proud to be the Chancellor that is delivering the biggest uplift in defence spending since the Cold War’. She is a mouse pretending to be a lion.

The sole Cabinet member whom I exempt from blame is Defence Secretary John Healey. He is a patriot who admitted in October 2024 that British Armed Forces would be unable to prevent an invasion. Unfortunately he lacks the clout in the Cabinet to stand up to Starmer, Reeves and the rest of the lily-livered crew who won’t defend this country against the coming storm.

But we mustn’t forget the earlier guilty men whose unremitting, deliberate starving of our military has made us so desperately weak.

Look at our poor navy. Both our aircraft carriers are out of action. HMS Queen Elizabeth is being refitted, having last been on the open seas more than a year ago. HMS Prince of Wales has been under maintenance for three months. Both ships, neither of which has enough aircraft due to lack of funds, have passed much of their short lives out of the water.

HMS Prince of Wales has had a particularly chequered career and has probably spent at least a third of its existence under repair. It has suffered at least two major self-inflicted disasters. On one occasion there was a flood in the engine room after a fire main burst, causing huge damage to electrical switchboards.

Have the manufacturers of these carriers, which include BAE Systems, Thales Group and Babcock International, given value for money? Has anyone at the Ministry of Defence (which with 62,000 civil servants has almost as many employees as there are soldiers in our much diminished army) been made to walk the plank? We know the answer to both questions.

A full audit of guilty people would include senior civil servants who have cheerfully presided over the dismantling of our Armed Forces, manufacturers who have produced dud equipment, and top brass who have acquiesced in savage cuts. Some of these, of course, have spoken out, increasingly in recent years.

Can you believe that half the navy’s ten remaining destroyers and frigates are out of action, being fixed? When I was a young journalist, having 40 of these ships (most of which worked in those days) was considered a bare minimum below which it would be folly to go.

The inventors of the amusing 1950s radio sitcom The Navy Lark would never have dreamt up a plot in which half the ships in an implausibly tiny navy – and I haven’t touched on the few remaining submarines we have – were unable to go to sea.

The regular army is in no better shape. It numbers just over 70,000, less than half its size as recently as 1990. And there are no plans to increase it.

On Wednesday morning, Robert Wilkie, who served in Trump’s first administration, spoke mournfully on BBC Radio 4 about ‘the decline of British military power’, pointing out that the Tories were in government ‘for most of this time’. He said that the British army could ‘almost fill Wembley stadium’, and a single military base in North Carolina has ‘more active duty troops’.

As for the RAF, it too has been cut to the bone. It boasts about 130 active fighter jets, down from some 850 in 1989. The overall size of the RAF’s fleet has continued to fall in recent years – from 724 aircraft in service in 2016 to 564 in 2023, a reduction of 22 per cent.

So: back to the guilty men. I start with Blair and Brown because during New Labour’s 13-year rule they committed British troops to major wars in Iraq and Afghanistan while barely increasing defence expenditure. This rose fractionally from 2.2 per cent of GDP in 1997 to 2.4 per cent in 2010.

David Cameron is in a category all of his own. The Tory-Lib Dem coalition he led slashed the defence budget by eight per cent in 2010. The number of tanks was reduced by 40 per cent at a stroke, while dozens of aircraft, and several frigates and destroyers, were scrapped.

Yet in the next few years more hard-pressed troops were despatched to the futile and unwinnable conflict in Afghanistan, in which 457 British service personnel lost their lives.

Cameron’s friend and lieutenant, George Osborne – lounge lizard and determined non-combatant, except in the halls of wealth – steadily reduced spending on defence, which fell to 1.8 per cent of GDP in 2016, the lowest level on record. Yet Cameron’s administration relentlessly increased overseas aid until it reached roughly a quarter of the size of the depleted defence budget.

Some may say that neglecting defence was understandable given the lesser threats we then faced. That’s not true. Russia grabbed the Crimea from Ukraine in 2014. China was building up its military at a rapid pace, though that didn’t prevent Cameron and Osborne from hobnobbing with President Xi Jinping. There were submerged dangers all around us. Iran had long been a belligerent state.

No, we have been ruled for a generation by a pampered, blinkered ruling class that is so ignorant of history, and perhaps of human nature, that they have prioritised a soaring welfare budget (and, until recently, burgeoning overseas aid) over the need to defend our country. They repeat ad nauseam that sound defence is the first duty of government without discharging that duty.

And now look around. The latest generation of guilty people is more concerned with international law than in meeting our obligations to our closest ally. Do they imagine that Vladimir Putin invariably consults a human rights lawyer before he sets about murdering the next batch of civilians in Ukraine?

Is it too late? To a degree, the authors of Guilty Men were unfair because they ignored the fact that Neville Chamberlain’s administration increased defence expenditure sharply in the last years of peace so that it had reached about 9 per cent of GDP by the outbreak of war. Britain was not completely unprepared in September 1939.

Looking at Starmer and Reeves and the rest of them, I don’t have much confidence that they will suddenly wake up to the danger of our predicament. Their minds are elsewhere. They can’t, or won’t, understand. They are not attuned to the terrifying world of pitiless tyrants in which we find ourselves.

All one can say is that if our ruling class fails us again, history will judge them even more harshly than it has the Guilty Men of 1940.