Who is Dan Jarvis? A look at Britain’s new defence secretary

Dan Jarvis has been appointed secretary of state for defence following a day of upheaval in which his predecessor, the armed forces minister and a parliamentary aide all resigned in protest at the government’s defence spending plans.

The Barnsley North MP, a former Parachute Regiment officer who served in Northern Ireland, Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan, was confirmed in the role by Downing Street on Thursday evening, less than an hour after armed forces minister Al Carns walked out of government and just hours after John Healey dramatically quit as defence secretary in a dispute with Number 10 and the Treasury over the funding settlement behind the long delayed Defence Investment Plan.

His appointment makes him the first defence secretary since Ben Wallace to bring direct military experience to the post, and he arrives with arguably the deepest operational background of any holder of the office in the modern era.

How the day unfolded

Mr Healey resigned on Thursday morning after receiving a financial settlement for the Defence Investment Plan which he said fell well short of what the armed forces require, and which he claimed the prime minister had been unable, and the Treasury unwilling, to improve.

Under the proposal, defence spending would rise from 2.6% of GDP next year to just 2.68% by 2030, which is understood to amount to an uplift of around £13.5bn, less than half of the £28bn that service chiefs had reportedly said was needed to fund the transformation set out in the Strategic Defence Review.

In his resignation letter, Mr Healey warned that the settlement would force him to take decisions that would reduce the readiness of the armed forces, increase the risk to personnel on operations and could make the country less safe. He argued that while the government has committed to spending 3.5% of GDP on defence by 2035, the trajectory set out in the plan moved far too slowly, with the heaviest pressure to improve warfighting readiness falling in the next two years rather than over the next decade.

Mr Carns, a former Royal Marines officer, followed him out of the door on Thursday evening, telling the prime minister in a blunt resignation letter that he had sat in the rooms, seen the assessments and spoken to the commanders who would be asked to do more with less, and that he could not in good conscience stand at the dispatch box and defend a level of investment he knew to be inadequate to the task. He added that a serious country funds its defence to meet the threat it actually faces rather than the threat it wishes it faced, while parliamentary private secretary Pamela Nash also resigned, citing the delays and difficulties in securing funding for the plan.

Sir Keir Starmer rejected the criticism, insisting that the Defence Investment Plan will provide the resources the military needs to keep the country safe, along with the clarity the British defence industry needs to plan and the certainty required to attract private finance. Announcing the appointment of Mr Jarvis, the prime minister said his first duty was to keep the British people safe, and described his government as delivering the largest sustained increase in defence spending since the Cold War.

That is the political backdrop against which the new defence secretary takes office, because he must now own, finalise and defend in parliament the very settlement that prompted two fellow veterans to walk out of the department he has been asked to lead.

Who is Dan Jarvis?

For readers of this publication, Mr Jarvis requires considerably less introduction than most politicians who arrive at Main Building.

Commissioned into the Parachute Regiment, he served as a platoon commander with 1 PARA, as aide-de-camp to General Sir Mike Jackson and as adjutant of 3 PARA, before working as a staff planner at the Permanent Joint Headquarters and at Army Headquarters following his promotion to major. He went on to command a company in the Special Forces Support Group, and he was appointed MBE for his military service.

In 2011 he became the first person since the Second World War to resign his commission in order to contest a parliamentary by-election, which he won to become the Labour MP for Barnsley Central. He served in a series of shadow frontbench roles, sat on the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy between 2017 and 2019, and in 2018 was elected the first mayor of South Yorkshire, steering the region through the pandemic and severe flooding before returning to the Commons full time.

He was appointed shadow security minister in September 2023 and, following Labour’s victory at the 2024 general election, served as security minister in the Home Office, where he led on counter terrorism policy including the Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act, better known as Martyn’s Law. Boundary changes mean he has represented Barnsley North since 2024.

Where he stands on defence

His record suggests a politician planted firmly in the mainstream of Labour’s pro-defence tradition, and one who has at times been well ahead of his party on the issue.

He voted in favour of renewing the nuclear deterrent, backing the replacement of Trident with a new system during the 2015 to 2016 parliament, and during the Corbyn years he went as far as hinting that he might have to leave the party altogether if it abandoned its commitment to the deterrent. In December 2015 he was one of the most prominent Labour voices making the case for RAF airstrikes against the so-called Islamic State in Syria, arguing publicly that the case for action outweighed the case for inaction, a position that drew heavily on his own experience of commanding troops in Afghanistan.

His wider voting record shows a loyalist, with TheyWorkForYou recording a 97% alignment with fellow Labour MPs over the past year across more than 300 divisions, although he has rebelled when he judged it necessary, most notably by opposing a second Brexit referendum at a time when most comparable Labour colleagues supported one. During the Corbyn era he was repeatedly touted as a potential leadership challenger from the moderate wing of the party, although he ultimately declined to enter the contest.

The in-tray

The new defence secretary inherits a formidable workload, with the immediate priority being the Defence Investment Plan itself, which the government had reportedly hoped to publish this week before the resignations intervened. Beyond that sit the delivery of last year’s Strategic Defence Review, the task of sustaining support to Ukraine, the need to reassure allies ahead of key NATO engagements, and the longstanding pressures on personnel retention, equipment availability and readiness that his predecessor cited on his way out of the building.

He will also need to steady a department in which, by the accounts of those who have just left it, military chiefs believe the funding on offer falls dramatically short of the task, while veterans’ organisations have already warned that personnel will be looking for leadership in the wake of Mr Healey’s departure.

There is an obvious personal political risk in accepting the job, because his credibility in Westminster and within the armed forces community rests substantially on his service record and on his reputation for speaking plainly about defence. If he concludes, as Mr Healey and Mr Carns did, that the settlement is inadequate, he will face the same choice they faced, and if he defends it, he will be asked why his judgement differs from that of two fellow veterans.

What is not in doubt is that the Ministry of Defence is once again led by someone who has carried a bergen, commanded soldiers on operations and planned campaigns from inside PJHQ. Whether that experience translates into a better settlement for the armed forces is the question on which his tenure, and arguably the government’s wider credibility on defence, now depends.