The Faint Hearted Suitor

Carns had everything he needed to be Labour’s next leader. Then he blinked.

There is an old saw, so worn by use that it has lost none of its edge: faint heart never won fair lady. In Westminster, as in courtship, the maxim holds. The prize goes to those who press forward when the hour is dangerous and the outcome uncertain, not to those who calculate the odds, find them uncomfortable, and quietly excuse themselves from the field.

Al Carns has just excused himself from the field. Without even the dignity of saying so.

His absence from the Commons vote on the Veterans and Armed Forces Bill, unannounced, unjustified, and unresigned, tells you everything about how he sees the game. He did not vote against legislation he believes inadequate. He did not resign the Veterans Ministership in principled protest. He did not stand at the despatch box, or outside it, or anywhere within range of a microphone, and say: “this is wrong, I cannot be part of it, and I will not pretend otherwise”. He simply was not there. A ghost. A gap in the voting record where a man of principle might have stood.

This matters because the alternative was so obviously available to him, and so obviously correct. Resignation, clean, public, argued, would have been an act of political courage with a genuine double dividend. For Carns personally, it would have established him as a serious figure: a minister who puts conscience above career, a veteran who will not lend his name and his credibility to a Government that is failing the people he is supposed to serve. For the veterans themselves, it would have been an act of solidarity of the most powerful kind, a man who walked away from office rather than walk away from them.

He chose neither. He chose absence.

Because here is the thing about Keir Starmer: he is a busted flush, and everyone in the Parliamentary Labour Party knows it. The poll ratings tell one story. The local elections will tell another. The Government stumbles from one self-inflicted wound to the next with the cheerful persistence of a man who has not yet noticed he is bleeding. Whoever positions themselves correctly in the next eighteen months will have a serious claim on the succession. The leadership is there to be won.

Carns could have won it. He has the profile. He has the background. He is, in the most literal and unimprovable sense, a veteran, a man who served, who wore the uniform, who understands what it means to ask another human being to place themselves in harm’s way on behalf of the rest of us who will not. In a party that has historically treated the armed forces as a necessary embarrassment, he represented something genuinely different: a Labour politician who could speak about defence and duty without sounding like he was reading from a briefing note he had first encountered that morning.

And the veterans issue, his issue, his ground, his territory, has become one of the defining moral scandals of this Parliament. Lord Hermer and the expanding jurisprudence of military accountability have created a situation that would have been unthinkable a generation ago: elderly men, long since returned to civilian life, dragged before the courts for decisions made in the fog of conflict, under fire, in circumstances that no courtroom can ever fully reconstruct. The locking up of old soldiers for doing their duty is the kind of story that should make any politician of conscience incandescent.

It has made Carns absent.

The special forces dimension compounds the scandal. Operations whose very existence depends upon deniability are being unpicked in open proceedings. The chilling effect upon those currently serving is not hypothetical. Men and women are asking themselves whether the state that deploys them will protect them. The answer, increasingly, appears to be no. Carns knows all of this. He has said all of this. He has used the language of betrayal and abandonment, directed, quite properly, at the Government’s failure to legislate with sufficient robustness. And then, when the moment came to stand in the lobby and force the issue, to be the man who could say “I was there, I voted, I held the line”, or better still, I resigned rather than be complicit, he offered the nation an empty chair.

There is a word for this. It is not strategy. It is not positioning. It is cowardice, the small, careful, career-preserving kind that leaves no fingerprints and no legacy.

The Labour Party is a fair lady in considerable distress. She is battered, confused, led by a man whose authority diminishes by the week, and desperately in need of someone with the combination of authenticity and ambition required to restore her fortunes. She rewards boldness. What she cannot abide, what no fair lady can abide, is a suitor who declares his devotion in eloquent terms and then fails to appear when the moment demands he make good on his words.

Carns could have resigned. He should have resigned. The veterans he claims to champion deserved that much. His own ambitions demanded it.

He did neither.

The leadership of the Labour Party will go to someone made of sterner stuff.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​