Shortly after Christmas — about six months after work on the strategic defence review began — there was a tense meeting in the Ministry of Defence. John Healey, the defence secretary, wanted an update from the three external reviewers he had been brought in to conduct it in a move that had irked his senior military chiefs.
General Sir Richard Barrons, a former head of joint forces command who narrowly missed out on the top military job years earlier, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, who served as secretary-general of Nato from 1999 to 2004, and Fiona Hill, formerly the top Russia expert in the White House, were frank.
A problem was looming. There was not enough money to pay for the current programmes, let alone transform the military.
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Even before the reviewers made any recommendations, the plan for defence was unaffordable, they told him.
“The reviewers were making recommendations about what you would have to cut,” a senior defence source said. They told Healey it was “really hard”.
“They looked again and again to find a way of making it work, but the laws of physics hadn’t changed,” the source added.
The Labour government was spending 2.3 per cent of national income on defence — a figure that irritated the Americans, who were spending more than 3.4 per cent — and had only made a vague commitment to spend 2.5 per cent at some point during the current parliament.
At one point, it is thought a proposal to increase defence spending to 3 per cent was raised. The outlook was bleak.
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The issue came to a head on February 12, at Nato headquarters in Brussels, when news got round that Pete Hegseth, the US defence secretary, was about to warn that the US would no longer be the primary guarantor of security in Europe.
Someone — rumoured to be Healey, who had had a meeting with him that morning — persuaded him otherwise. In the end, he went with a notably toned-down version. He said he was “here today to directly and unambiguously express that stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe”.
Some believe that John Healey persuaded Hegseth to tone down his speech in Brussels
JOANNA GERON/AP
But the damage was already done. His comments, coupled with President Trump’s rhetoric on the need for Nato allies to spend more on defence, shifted the dial in Whitehall.
“Hegseth showed the Americans were serious about moving out of Europe” a second source close to the defence review said. “They [the UK government] saw the necessity for all sorts of reasons. And they changed the defence funding paradigm.”
A few days later, before Sir Keir Starmer’s trip to Washington to meet Trump in the Oval Office, he announced defence spending would increase to 2.5 per cent from April 2027, years earlier than planned. He also stated an “ambition” to reach 3 per cent during the next parliament.
That enabled the reviewers to work to a 3 per cent target, allowing them to set out a transformative programme for overhauling defence. “They could review their work with a certain spring in their step,” the second source added.
The next task was to turn that ambition into a reality.