Chris Mason: Starmer defiant after defence spending row

Chris Mason: Starmer defiant after defence spending row22 minutes agoShareSaveAdd as preferred on GoogleChris MasonPolitical editorStarmer 'not going to walk away' from leadershipThis felt like a different kind of interview with the prime minister from the ones I tend to do.The big difference was time.Often, Sir Keir Starmer talks to the broadcast political editors when we are on trips overseas to international summits.We take it in turns to sit down with him, and often have six or seven minutes each.Needless to say, that isn't much time when politicians have the capacity to turn one answer into something lasting north of a couple of minutes.It is one reason why those interviews are often more scratchy and have more interruptions than they might otherwise have.Interviewers should interrupt to scrutinise and to challenge, but in those interviews we are often doing it because we are running out of time.It was made very clear to me in this interview that I had the time - and he wanted the time - to develop his answers.Perhaps little wonder: he has a lot of people to try to persuade.PA MediaAndy Burnham (left) and Wes Streeting are widely seen as two of Sir Keir Starmer's potential leadership rivalsDowning Street has rung me before when previous tenants appeared on the threshold of the last chance saloon: Boris Johnson and Liz Truss.This was Sir Keir feeling the necessity to take on the claim by the now former Defence Secretary John Healey that the country's national security could be imperilled unless much more was spent on defence.He pointedly said every cabinet minister, every government department, had contributed cuts to their long-term, so-called capital budgets, to provide more for defence. The prime minister himself was involved in plenty of these negotiations, I'm told - and some were pretty hard going, given it required reopening budget deals that had been assumed to have been already settled.The question for some is whether that...