I recently asked a senior Labour figure what Andy Burnham’s defence agenda might look like. “He doesn’t really have one,” came the reply – offered not so much as a criticism of the UK’s prime minister in waiting, as a statement of fact. Given that Keir Starmer’s resignation came after a mutiny within his own government over inadequate defence spending, some may view Burnham’s lack of direct defence experience as a worrying liability.

But beyond the UK, Starmer was at least viewed as a statesman for his commitment to the defence of Ukraine. Leaders in western Europe’s other capitals may now fear that Starmer’s untested successor will be more focused on “No 10 North” than on Nato and European security.

In fact, Burnham has the potential to be a transformative leader on defence precisely because he did not emerge from the foreign-policy seminar rooms of SW1. Burnham made his name as the mayor of Manchester fighting central government on behalf of the city, not building a Whitehall foreign-policy career. But that supposed gap can be his advantage. He should lean into his proven strength from his time running the UK’s second city: domestic resilience.

The broader problem for Britain, like most western nations, is that it still views defence as something that occurs elsewhere: a question of carrier groups, Nato summits and armies massing on someone else’s border. But the threat is not remote: the UK is already under attack. Maybe not from bullets or bombs, but from more than a decade of Russian psyops, bot farms, cyberhacks, sabotage, assassinations on British soil and the buying of political influence.

Even the prime minister himself has come under attack. For months, Starmer faced a campaign of online vitriol and disinformation; when he resigned, Vladimir Putin’s special envoy Kirill Dmitriev crowed “We did it” – certainly overstating Moscow’s influence, but a telling boast all the same.

In May last year, a car and two properties linked to Starmer........

© The Guardian