The resignation of the UK defence minister John Healey, along with the armed forces minister Al Carns, has driven another nail into the coffin of Keir Starmer’s prime ministership. This was no inadvertent injury to the prime minister, but a signal on Healey’s part that he’s a leadership candidate – or at least a deserving member of any new prime minister’s cabinet. It’s very calculated: Healey is too smart to do anything by accident.

No less inadvertent is the damage he has inflicted on the prospects of the increasingly ill-fated Aukus nuclear submarine proposal. By leaving the Australian defence minister, Richard Marles, and foreign minister, Penny Wong, waiting in the wings while he got on with the business of domestic politicking, he demonstrated once again what had been clear from the outset: Aukus was never anything more than a political stunt, expendable once it had served its political purpose.

Conceived in secret and launched by the then prime minister Scott Morrison with maximum political fanfare in September 2021, Aukus was a hurried attempt to meet the quite divergent political objectives of three very distant countries.

For Australia, it was about creating yet another........

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