Within his first few days as a junior education minister in Tony Blair’s government, officials reassured John Healey that a New Labour scheme to fund adult education through “individual learning accounts” was a “roar-away success”.
“Don’t worry about them – in fact, you know, we’ve exceeded our targets by about five or six times already,” he recalls a civil servant reporting to him. Within two months, it was evident the taxpayer was being defrauded of tens of millions of pounds.
“The most senior grade 3 official came into my office and said, ‘Individual learning accounts, I’m gonna have to close them’,” says Healey. “What had been one of the sort of flagship successes in the very early years of a Labour government was suddenly one of the biggest fraud programmes.”
With Keir Starmer’s party 25 points ahead in the polls, and Rishi Sunak seemingly unable to unite the Conservatives, the bookies are sharply shortening the odds on a Labour government, but few in the party’s top ranks have been in government before and can point to the scars to prove it.
Healey, 65, now the shadow defence secretary, holds a unique spot in the Labour Venn diagram. Along with Ed Miliband, 54, Yvette Cooper, 55, Hilary Benn, 70, and Pat McFadden, 58, he was a frontbencher in the Blair-Brown years. But he was also a loyal member of the shadow cabinets of Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn and now enjoys Starmer’s confidence.
It is a consistency that speaks to Healey’s natural reticence to become embroiled in Labour’s regular bouts of internecine warfare. But for an unshowy politician, his advice to colleagues new to potential ministerial office might surprise: “If we go into government, the one thing we’ve got to remember is to remain political.”
The mechanics of government can dull the drive for radical change. “You’d be put into a room in the bowels of Westminster or in the Cabinet Office and, essentially, you’d have perhaps eight or nine ministers from different departments around the table,” he says. “And, too often, people simply read out their departmental line rather than as government ministers with a sense of what we were trying to achieve.”
Labour frontbenchers have been having “coaching” dinners with top Whitehall mandarins and former cabinet ministers in recent weeks in a sign of the lack of in-house knowledge in the party’s top ranks. But Healey has been able to offer advice within his shadow team.
“Within civil service, you have some of the very best people you’ll ever come across”, he says. “And very quickly, you need to find out who they are. And you need to be able to also identify those who are really not capable of doing what you need them to do.”
Sue Gray, the former senior civil servant who is now Starmer’s chief of staff, evidently has earned Healey’s faith. Labour’s line on the war between Israel and Hamas, with a strong defence of a right to defence giving way to demands for an immediate “ceasefire that lasts”, has been contentious.
Healey points to Gray’s influence on the frontbench in keeping a disciplined position. “She’s great, 100% fan,” he says. “Instead of operating [as] different shadow teams in dealing with the whole period through the Hamas attack on 7 October, she’s consistently brought the key shadow cabinet members and our key staffers together to help keep on top of developments, develop our thinking, give … the best advice that we can.”
Healey’s experience of government includes supporting and voting in favour of the invasion of Iraq, a war whose opponents included the then Commons leader, Robin Cook – and, indeed, Starmer. Healey says a lesson learned was that military intervention is not sufficient for successful regime change. Like Blair, however, he is reticent about describing the war as an error. “I can’t say that, you know, the decision that was taken at the time, that I was part of, wasn’t sound at the time,” he says.
Given what we now know? “I’m not quite sure where you go with that sort of, well, 20 years on, ‘What if, and, and how?’ I mean, having made that decision, we didn’t have the fully fledged, beyond the military, sort of plan for the future. We didn’t follow through with the diplomatic, economic redevelopment regeneration and long-term security for Iraq or that wider region, which was required. And, you know, some of the consequences of instabilities now do have roots in that period.”
Healey says he did not pick up any mistrust within the military. Of greater difficulty, he contends, was the perception in previous elections that Corbyn did not believe in defence. “Certainly in 2019, the hardest doors to knock on in that election were those with Help for Heroes or British Legion stickers in the window,” he says. “We were an opposition party that really didn’t recognise the first duty of any government is to defend the country. Keir Starmer does.”
The defence secretary, Grant Shapps, has been talking up spending 3% of GDP on defence and making headlines with claims of his flight being targeted by Russian electronic warfare. The last government to spend even 2.5% of GDP on defence was the Labour one in 2010, Healey says.
He has opposed Shapps’ reduction in the size of the army to 72,500 in 2025, from just over 75,000 today, and campaigned on the dreadful condition of military accommodation. But as to what Labour would do, as in most briefs it largely remains a black box, with a strategic defence review in 2025 acting as the catch-all answer to questions.
In response to the Guardian photographer’s praise of the fit of his suit, Healey discloses that he is an “M&S man”, attracted by the advantage of buying two pairs of trousers for a jacket. Pragmatic, with an eye for the bottom line. After years of political tumult and showmanship, it might well be what the country wants in a defence secretary.
