MPs who know Dan Jarvis are not surprised he accepted the cursed job of defence secretary – even knowing he may last only a few weeks in the job. The former paratrooper, once touted as a leadership contender, has long seemed destined for that role, having worked his way diligently through ministerial ranks, a South Yorkshire mayoralty and the shadow cabinet.
“He’ll have done it out of a sense of duty,” said one MP who knows him well. But they said he would “no doubt” be hoping that a successor to Keir Starmer would keep him on in the role.
Jarvis’s reputation for calmness will quickly be put to the test. He has stepped into a nightmare situation that could mean accepting a defence investment plan that his departing predecessor, John Healey, and the former armed forces minister Al Carns say is not enough money.
That view is also shared by top brass at the Ministry of Defence and in the senior echelons of the military, making the department extremely difficult to govern. Jarvis will then be expected to turn up at next week’s Nato meetings to defend the UK’s plans to be ready for war, knowing that many experts think No 10 and the Treasury have not provided an adequate settlement.
But rather than mocking his decision to become the most loyal Starmerite of all, as the administration enters its rockiest period yet, Labour colleagues do not appear to blame Jarvis for stepping into Healey’s shoes.
The most criticism that fellow MPs venture about the new defence secretary is that he is of “middling” talent, and they are not entirely clear on where he stands politically, or how he would be different from Healey.
One former minister described him as “as centrist as a person can be” but said he did not involve himself in typical political drama in Westminster. “He’s a bit like John Healey but in fatigues. Straight shooter and in no way a rabble rouser.”
A string of Labour MPs used similar language about Jarvis, seeing him as “honourable, which you can’t say about all colleagues”, and “generally a good bloke”. He is also considered more humble and less boastful about his forces past than some of the other former military MPs.
Others, though, are fed up with the “good bloke” types with little in the way of definable politics dominating the top of the Labour party.
“He was the start of a trend to find men in uniform because we think it covers up Labour’s lack of security credibility … It’s more of the ‘men who talk with confidence’ rather than political leadership,” said one female Labour MP who has worked with Jarvis in the past. “It doesn’t make Dan a bad person but that was why we went through this in 2015 and decided he shouldn’t be the one to stand for leader.”
Jarvis’s military pedigree means he was once considered a hot contender to succeed Ed Miliband, but ultimately he chose a different path.
In 2015, Jarvis said he was “ready to serve” as Labour rebuilt but felt it was “not the right time for my family” to run for leader. He said his “eldest kids had a very tough time when they lost their mum and I don’t want them to lose their dad”.
Jarvis had lost his wife to cancer in 2010 and then given up his military career, having served in Kosovo, Northern Ireland, Iraq and Afghanistan, to become an MP in 2011. He subsequently remarried.
“I need some space for them, my wife and our youngest child right now, and I wouldn’t have it as leader of the opposition,” he said at the time.
In 2015, he blamed the Labour party’s failure to win against David Cameron on allowing the Conservatives to appear “more serious than us about spreading wealth across the country”.
“Never again can we allow ourselves to be painted as having a problem with people eager to work hard, get on and succeed,” he said then. “They should know that Labour will always be their champion.”
The leadership contest was won by Jeremy Corbyn, on the other side of the Labour spectrum, making a very different and more leftwing argument.
In the years afterwards, the Barnsley Central MP decided to stand for mayor of Sheffield city region and won a battle with Labour bosses to stay on as an MP throughout his time running the region.
During this period, he found himself on the same side of many of the same arguments as his fellow northern mayor Andy Burnham – now a leading contender to succeed Starmer.
Early in the job, he told parliament that Treasury rules were stacked against fair infrastructure investment across the regions. “In the words of my friend and neighbour, the mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham – himself a former chief secretary to the Treasury – the government have ‘a tendency to shovel more and more into the areas that are already doing well’,” he said.
When he stepped down as mayor, some expected Jarvis to be a shoo-in for cabinet, but he served a rung down as security minister without many missteps.
As the new defence secretary, the risks are huge and his credibility is on the line if he is seen to agree to a defence investment plan that Healey and top military brass rejected.
His chaotic appearance at the launch of a new drone-testing facility in Swindon on Friday, where businesses present were told not to mention the defence investment plan, highlighted the difficulty of stepping into a complex brief at the last minute.
But with Starmer’s future in the balance, the defence investment plan delayed and Burnham’s return to Westminster likely next week, it may be that some of the tricky decisions pending on defence will never be his to make.
