Al Carns resigned as armed forces minister on Thursday, an hour after appearing on television and saying his job was to “steady the ship”. The reversal landed while Sir Keir Starmer was already under fresh pressure from John Healey’s resignation as Defence Secretary.
Carns had gone on air on Thursday night and sounded determined to hold things together. In one interview with Chris Mason, he said: “my job is to steady the ship.” He also said: “if someone fires a starting gun, I’m not scared of gunfire.” An hour later, he was out, turning a show of composure into another sign of strain inside the Labour Party.
That matters today because the government now has to find a new armed forces minister at the same moment it is trying to recover from Healey’s exit. In his resignation letter, Healey said the level of military spending proposed by Starmer “falls well short” of what is needed to protect the country. The political damage is not just the loss of one minister. It is the image of a defence team that cannot hold its line for a full evening.
Starmer had wanted the Defence Investment Plan to project direction and delivery. Instead, it has become a source of criticism from departing ministerial critics, and the government has still not been able to sell the defence deal to the armed forces, defence ministers, the rest of government or the public. That makes Carns’ exit more than a personnel change; it is another crack in the case the prime minister is trying to make.
The oddity is that Carns was still in post when he spoke, which gave his promise to “steady the ship” an almost immediate expiry date. Whatever changed between the interviews and the resignation letter, the timing undercuts the message. It leaves Starmer and Dan Jarvis looking for a replacement before Jarvis goes to a Nato defence ministers meeting next week, with the government already having to explain why two senior defence figures went in the same day.
Starmer is due to head to the G7 summit in the south of France in the coming days, which means the row over defence will travel with him. Carns, meanwhile, now joins the list of ministers whose public confidence lasted only as long as the broadcast slot. For a government trying to look steady, that is the part that will sting.
