Can Starmer protect the country (and himself)?

Coffee House Shots

The Spectator

News, Daily News, Politics

4.4 • 2.2K Ratings

🗓️ 16 February 2026

⏱️ 23 minutes

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Summary

Following a weekend at the Munich Security Conference, there have been reports that the Prime Minister is set to sign off on a huge increase in defence spending. While this comes at a time of increasing threats to Britain, it isn't just the UK's position that's under threat but Keir Starmer himself – who continues to face questions about his leadership. Defence secretary John Healey has been talked about as a potential 'unity' candidate between the left and right flanks of the Labour party. But Labour's internal problems continue to grow, with reports that journalist – and friend of Coffee House Shots – Gabriel Pogrund was the subject of a malicious investigation by Starmerite think-tank Labour Together. Tim Shipman joins James Heale to discuss all the developments.

Produced by Megan McElroy and Patrick Gibbons.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots. I'm James Seal and I'm joined by Tim Shipman.
0:09.0	Now Tim, overnight there's been reports about the government potentially considering
0:12.1	increasing dispense spending up to 3%, which would be about 17.3 billion extra a year.
0:17.7	How credible are they likely that the government's going to be increasing that by 2029? Well, look, it looks very difficult because they've been hard up against it in terms of how
0:25.9	much money we've got to spend. But I think it's quite telling that people in the government have
0:30.3	felt the need to start saying this. And, you know, this is a report by James Landale at the BBC,
0:35.4	who we all know has got good contacts and would not have
0:37.6	written something this bold unless it had a degree of credible briefing behind it. You know,
0:44.9	the Prime Minister pledged to get us on a pathway to 5% of defence spending, three and a half
0:51.8	on the sort of hard defence stuff and one and a half of things that
0:55.8	they could claim was defence spending. But even that was punted well into the next Parliament.
1:00.7	And the significance here is that they'd be bringing forward the target to 2029, and that makes it
1:06.4	in this Parliament, and that makes it a problem for Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, to find
1:10.7	the money. I think what's interesting about it, James, is that we it a problem for Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, to find the money.
1:11.3	I think what's interesting about it, James, is that we've heard a lot about John Healy in recent
1:15.9	weeks. The Defence Secretary has long been seen as a good safe pair of hands and, you know,
1:21.5	a decent chat, but not someone who exerted great influence with Downing Street. I took a call
1:26.5	this morning from someone saying, well,
1:27.8	isn't it interesting that the second John Healy starts being mentioned as a potential Prime Minister,
1:33.4	a stand-in, sort of compromise character between those who want West Streeting and Angela Rainer.
1:38.4	And suddenly, it sounds like Downing Street are listening rather more to John Healy.
1:43.2	The other point, of course, being that the Prime Minister has just put at the Munich Security Conference.
	...

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