Article published in The Daily Mail, 15 June 2026. © Richard Kemp

Too little, too late. I’m afraid that was my instinct­ive response to news that a Rus­sian shadow fleet oil tanker had been boarded in the Chan­nel.

In an undoubtedly dar­ing six-hour oper­a­tion, Royal Mar­ine com­mandos took con­trol of the ves­sel Smyr­tos, one of hun­dreds of tankers used to trans­port Rus­sian oil and help fund Vladi­mir Putin’s war machine.

Little won­der, then, that Sir Keir Starmer was eager to trum­pet the mis­sion’s tri­umph. ‘This suc­cess­ful oper­a­tion deliv­ers yet another blow to Rus­sia and reminds those fuel­ling Putin’s war in Ukraine that we will not let them hide,’ he crowed on X.

Well, as a 30-year mil­it­ary vet­eran who also headed the Inter­na­tional Ter­ror­ism Intel­li­gence Team in the Cab­inet Office, this smacks less of a mean­ing­ful stra­tegic blow against Rus­sia than a belea­guered PM attempt­ing – if you’ll excuse the pun – to shore up his own defences.

Let us not for­get that Sir Keir first announced plans to crack down on Rus­sia’s shadow fleet back in March.

Yet accord­ing to Gov­ern­ment fig­ures, 184 shadow fleet ves­sels trans­ited Brit­ish waters between March and May without con­sequence.

Why, then, act now? You do not need to be a cynic to observe that this dra­matic inter­ven­tion has arrived at a par­tic­u­larly sens­it­ive moment for a Prime Min­is­ter.

Last week, his Defence Sec­ret­ary John Healey resigned, warn­ing that mil­it­ary spend­ing ‘falls well short’ of what is required to pro­tect Bri­tain.

HEALEY was fol­lowed by Armed Forces min­is­ter Al Carns, who said the defence invest­ment plans were not ‘suf­fi­ciently fun­ded’. Given those extraordin­ary ver­dicts, Sir Keir may well believe a dis­play of mil­it­ary resolve will help strengthen his pos­i­tion as ques­tions about his lead­er­ship grow ever louder.

Then there is the small mat­ter of the G7 sum­mit this week and the Nato gath­er­ing in July. Neither could come at a worse time for a PM des­per­ate to project author­ity on the world stage while avoid­ing the pro­spect of embar­rass­ment along­side an unpre­dict­able Don­ald Trump.

Let us not for­get the Pres­id­ent has already denounced Sir Keir as ‘not Win­ston Churchill’ after his refusal to per­mit the use of UK bases for the ini­tial US-Israel strikes on Iran. Against this back­drop, does this not look sus­pi­ciously like polit­ical pos­tur­ing? For when lead­ers find them­selves under pres­sure, the old­est trick in the book is to redir­ect atten­tion else­where and hope voters mis­take activ­ity for achieve­ment.

The uncom­fort­able truth is that, for all Sir Keir’s bravado, what unfol­ded in the Chan­nel was hardly the D-Day land­ings.

ANY board­ing oper­a­tion at sea car­ries risks, and I have noth­ing but respect for those who car­ried it out. But in mil­it­ary terms it was a lim­ited tac­tical action, not a decis­ive turn­ing point in the con­flict. Non­ethe­less, even lim­ited actions can carry con­sequences.

Is Sir Keir pre­pared for how Putin might respond? The Rus­sian leader is not known for quietly absorb­ing per­ceived set­backs.

More broadly, the oper­a­tion high­lights a recur­ring prob­lem with this Gov­ern­ment: a pref­er­ence for grand rhet­oric over sus­tained action.

When Sir Keir came to power in 2024 he spoke of a ‘cast iron com­mit­ment’ to increas­ing defence spend­ing to 2.5 per cent of national income.

Yet the Armed Forces con­tinue to face severe cap­ab­il­ity chal­lenges after years of under­in­vest­ment.

Which brings us back to the Defence Invest­ment Plan. For a Defence Sec­ret­ary to resign on the grounds mil­it­ary fund­ing is inad­equate is extraordin­ary. For an Armed Forces min­is­ter to fol­low him out of the door say­ing much the same thing is more extraordin­ary still.

What this demon­strates is that neither Sir Keir nor much of his wider party appear to grasp the scale of the threat Bri­tain faces – and that is not merely my view, either.

In April, George Robertson, one of the authors of the Stra­tegic Defence Review, con­demned the ‘cor­ros­ive com­pla­cency’ in the Gov­ern­ment’s approach to defence.

Sadly, those two words alone tell us far more about the true state of Bri­tain’s secur­ity than any sup­posedly dev­ast­at­ing ‘blow’ Sir Keir claims to have struck against Rus­sia.