Sir Keir Starmer is unmoved by the resignation of his defence secretary and his parliamentary under-secretary for the armed forces. The prime minister told the BBC: “There will always be people saying, ‘I would do this’, ‘I would do that’, ‘I would do the other’. The question back to them is, ‘What is it you wouldn’t do?’ Because government is about trade-offs.”
He said that he disagreed with his critics, and argued that he was moving as quickly as possible to ramp up defence spending, given that he had already raided the foreign aid budget and was now having to siphon money out of other departments’ capital budgets.
