Jarvis also underlined that he wants to stay in the job once Burnham takes over, saying his previous two years as security minister were the “perfect apprenticeship” for the defense secretary post by giving him a good view of the Russian threat.
“I know what they’re like, I know what they can do, I know what they’ve done, I know what they want to do, and it’s our job to guard against that,” he said.
But his last task in the current government will be accompanying Starmer to Ankara, where the reception from allies is unlikely to be kind.
“The whole world, certainly NATO, has seen the row in the British government which led to the resignation of John Healey, and that will have left a message of instability, and that the British government collectively is not prepared to spend enough money on military to meet what its army chiefs say it needs,” said Bronwen Maddox, director of the Chatham House think tank.