The Defence Investment Plan was published! Some doubted the day would ever dawn. But just as when Odysseus’s mast was spotted from Ithaca on the wine-dark horizon, an epic journey was finally complete.

Defence Secretary Dan Jarvis made a Commons statement on the long-delayed Plan’s arrival. Rachel Reeves, beside him on the front bench, looked tearful. It must have been pride. Unless the poor sausage is having another of her wobbles.

The Plan was 80 pages carved from political bone and gristle, complete with an introduction by, and photograph of, Mr Jarvis. 

He has been in office for only two weeks. In that photograph he was sitting at an empty table, looking impatient, like a man about to say ‘bring me my dinnah’. Or perhaps ‘bring me my Plan’.

Before his Commons statement Mr Jarvis could be seen behind the Speaker’s Chair having an animated discussion (pretty sticky) with John Healey, his predecessor.

Mr Healey resigned a fortnight ago in protest against Ms Reeves’s bloody-minded refusal to cough up adequately for the defence of our realm. 

Now all the behind-the-scenes wrangling was over and the blasted thing was out, available free online for any devotees of Victorian melodrama. 

The publishing delay called to mind the case of an Illinois-born writer, Harold Brodkey, who for ages was said to be penning the definitive American novel entitled A Party of Animals.

When, after 19 years, he finally delivered the 2,000-page manuscript to the Manhattan offices of Messrs Farrar, Straus & Giroux, that development was a sensation worthy of a June 1976 story in the New York Times. The headline: Brodkey Delivers.

Defence Secretary Dan Jarvis seen making his Commons statement today on the long-delayed Plan’s arrival

After Rachel Reeves’ speech where she praised the Prime Minister, Keir Starmer walked onstage and hurled himself into her arms

The Plan’s arrival was greeted with scarcely less acclaim. Sir Keir Starmer, Mr Jarvis and Ms Reeves legged it to a drone manufacturing firm in Maidenhead for a midday announcement. Ms Reeves made a distinctly odd speech in which, with stretched grins, she boasted about her hapless stint as Chancellor.

She concluded by hailing ‘my friend, our prime minister, Keir Starmer’. He bumbled up on stage and she hurled herself into his arms. Their embrace lasted almost as long as the one he got from Lady Starmer after making his weepy resignation speech last week.

As with much modern fiction the Plan was prey to jargon, among it ‘tactical casualty care’, ‘collaborative combat’ and ‘lethality’, which is today’s preferred term for things that can turn the able bodies of enemy troops into little more than a pink mist. As far as political lethality goes, few weapons have recently matched the Plan.

It not only vaporised the ministerial careers of Mr Healey and his thick-necked sidekick Al Carns but also pretty much finished off the Starmer-Reeves government. Furthermore, it created intense grief for some of Whitehall and the Armed Forces’ most assiduously oily careerists.

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Dignitaries at the Maidenhead drone factory included Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton, Chief of the Defence Staff. Front row for him. At the end of the event he gave the Prime Minister a pat on the arm and a double mwaw-mwaw kiss to Ms Reeves. On the whole I preferred it when defence chiefs greeted a PM with a salute rather than an arm-squeeze.

Mind you, Sir Richard’s martial bravery is plainly not to be doubted. No one, at present, lightly moves in on Ms Reeves for un bisou. She could end up biting yer ear off.

The Commons was underwhelmed by the Plan. Too little, too late: that was the general view, not just from the Opposition but also from some Labour MPs.

Ms Reeves, v pop-eyed and droopy-jawed, endured the debate only so long before she drifted away. As she left she waggled little finger waves to a few Labour friends and the deputy Speaker.

We will close with Harold Brodkey. Despite the excitement engendered by his manuscript’s delivery, A Party of Animals never made it into print. The few extracts that saw the light of day received mixed notices.

All that anticipation for a few bum reviews.