The Prescience of Mr Powell

As yet the consequences of the use of sarin nerve gas as a weapon against civilians in Syria are far from clear. For the present, it looks as though the UK will not be involved in any punitive attack by the Western powers. In the days since the recall of the House of Commons and the vote by MPs on 29 August which forced the government to drop its plans to participate, there has been extensive media comment. Much of it is in the “damned if we do, damned if we don’t” vein, but not all. In an article in the Daily Mail on 31 August, A savage defeat for Cameron... and he brought it on himself, Max Hastings, avoided coming down clearly on the side of “Don’t”:

… the only proper test of a policy for Syria is not whether it will make David Cameron feel better about himself, but whether it will assuage the plight of the Syrian people. On this measure, the Government’s current ‘short, sharp shock’ proposal fails comprehensively.

Moreover,

Once the first cruise missile lands on Syria, we would have been in the struggle up to our necks. Cameron claimed that any strike would only be a little one, but you cannot do a little bit of military intervention. Once the United States and its allies start shooting at the Assad government, they are committed to regime change, and it is a gross deceit to pretend otherwise.

What worried Hastings was the UK’s longer-term position:

… in my view there’s no doubt the Prime Minister has made a colossal fool of himself, on a matter of the utmost gravity – that of war and peace. Almost the worst part of the fiasco is that one day we shall need to deploy our shrunken armed forces against a real threat from a real foreign enemy. And because our leaders have so often deceived us in the past, crying wolf amid their own hubristic delusions and pretensions, the British people will not believe them. That will indeed be a tragic day, and Mr Cameron has followed Blair in bringing it upon us.

But it was this passage which interested me most:

A couple of months ago, I was due to meet a British general for a routine chat when I received an embarrassed email from him, saying that all such meetings must now be approved by the Defence Secretary’s office. This had been refused. I wrote first to Philip Hammond, and then to David Cameron, asking why they were seeking to kill the sort of private dialogue with the armed forces that I have had for more than 40 years. Both the Prime Minister and Defence Secretary wrote back, defending their gagging decision. They said that there has been far too much military leaking to the media, and they are determined that this must stop. This sort of clumsy control-freakery derives in part, of course, from the fact that our leaders know that our professional soldiers are contemptuous of their antics on security policy generally, and Syria in particular.

It reminded me of something I had posted in January 2011, but which took almost the opposite point of view, quoted from Jonathan Powell’s The New Machiavelli: How to Wield Power in the Modern World, published in 2010 (Powell was Tony Blair’s Downing Street Chief of Staff from 1997 to 2007 and his book, he said, was not a memoir but combined a present day evaluation of the applicability of Machiavelli’s maxims, lessons on leadership and power based on his experience in Number 10 and supporting anecdotes for the use of future historians):

... When Mike Jackson retired as chief of the general staff in August 2006, the MoD sent over to No 10 the CV of his proposed successor, asking for the prime minister's agreement. Tony's foreign policy and defence adviser Nigel Sheinwald came to see me and we agreed that it wasn't worth consulting Tony about such a trivial subject, and Nigel wrote back to the MoD agreeing to the appointment on the basis of Mike Jackson’s recommendation. A few months later we faced a serious problem with the new chief, Richard Dannatt, when he chose to attack the government through the pages of the Daily Mail while we were in St Andrews engaged in crucial Northern Ireland peace talks. Tony complained about him to me, and I, forgetting what had happened earlier, said that it was his fault as he had appointed him. He denied that he had and said he had never been consulted. I went back to the files and discovered that he was right and had to confess to Tony. (pages 89, 90)

Powell returns to this incident later in the book:

General Dannatt's attack on the deployment of British forces in Iraq caught us completely unawares in 2006. Tony and I were engaged in delicate Northern Ireland negotiations in St Andrews. When we were told the news of the interview he had given to the Mail, saying that the presence of British forces in Iraq made things worse and they should get out soon, we couldn't get hold of anyone. Des Browne, who had succeeded John Reid as Defence Secretary, was in a plane on his way up to Scotland. The Chief of the Defence Staff was in Australia and unreachable; the Vice Chief was giving a lecture and couldn't be disturbed. And Dannatt himself was refusing to return calls. We thought for a moment about sacking him but concluded that that would just make him into a martyr. His comments certainly didn't help our troops in Basra; Muqtada al-Sadr's JAM militia leaders celebrated, claiming that his comments proved that their efforts were working and that they should redouble their attacks on British forces. We immediately received complaints from the NATO Secretary General, the Americans, Australians and other countries with forces serving in Iraq. Although some of the responses in the military internet chat rooms were favourable, his fellow chiefs were furious with him. In the aftermath, we arranged for Tony to have a sandwich lunch with the service chiefs in Jock Stirrup's office at the MoD. Dannatt insisted on talking, and after a few minutes it was quite clear to me that he was unsuited to his job. Tony explained to those present that politicians would not support maintaining a first-division army if they were caused too much political pain by serving generals speaking out against their mission. It was always easier for politicians not to risk soldiers' lives". But I fear he was too subtle for Dannatt, who was divinely convinced of his own rightness. (pages 269, 270)

Perhaps Cameron and Hammond aren’t being quite so foolish as Hastings seems to think. Nor was the development which peeved Hastings entirely unheralded. During the Libyan operations in 2011, Cameron was quoted as saying about the military chiefs "There are moments when I wake up and read the newspapers and think: 'I tell you what, you do the fighting and I'll do the talking'." But on revisiting Powell’s book, it was the next paragraph which caught my eye:

The sort of surprise attack that Dannatt launched will make political leaders think twice if military action is proposed in future, certainly if the military engagement is likely to be sustained over a year or rnore. Our armed forces will no longer be deployed so regularly and will lose their cutting edge. We will gradually become more like Germany and other Continental countries, unable to put our armed forces in harm's way. That is a choice, but one we should make consciously and not just stumble into it. It would be another step towards losing the ability to control our destiny as a country, a far more important one than sharing our sovereignty in NATO or the EU. (page 270)

The UK seems to be in danger of stumbling in the direction Powell so presciently identified three years ago (or possibly four, when actually writing it). So far I haven’t come across any comments by him on the situation the coalition government now finds itself in.

New Year Predictions 2013

In January 2011, not long after starting this blog, I posted three predictions (see below) which had surfaced in 2010 and might prove worth revisiting in time. At the beginning of January 2012 I posted three more which had come up in 2011. So what came along in 2012?

Firstly, the future of the UK coalition and the outcome of the next election. On 11 March Max Hastings opined in the Financial Times:

The prime minister [David Cameron] himself looks every inch a king, playing the part of national leader with an assurance Gordon Brown and John Major lacked. Few doubt he will remain tenant of Downing Street after the next election.

But a few weeks later on 1 April, Ed Miliband took the line that might be expected in an interview for the Observer:

Ed Miliband predicts that the Conservatives will be thrown out of office by Labour after one term in Downing Street, … … he said that while his party had much to do, and he was far from complacent, he was now confident the Tory-Liberal Democrat coalition would be a one-term government. "Opposition is a long and difficult haul," he said. "It is going to be a one-term haul, I am confident about that."

On 27 June, Tony Blair, with nothing to lose by being cautious, was interviewed by Sarah Sands for the London Evening Standard:

What are his predictions for the next election? “I think the Lib-Dems will struggle at the next election. My advice to the Labour party is to sort ourselves out with a strong modern policy. Frankly you can’t tell what will happen, if there will be a Coalition or not, but I suspect it will be far more of a two-party fight next time.

Secondly, the future of the euro. And two views on the same day, 20 May. Hamish McRae in the Independent on Sunday:

… I thought it might be helpful to sketch my own most probable outcome. The first thing that seems inevitable is that Greece will leave the eurozone. … an exit in the next two years is going to happen. When it does there will be huge political pressure on the rest of the eurozone to hang together. That could work for a while. The most exposed members, Portugal, Spain, Ireland and Italy, will be bullied and bribed to stay. … These countries have to leave the eurozone. I would guess this will be within five years, so let's say 2017.

But Niall Ferguson took a different view in the Sunday Times (£):

… “I am not a federalist,” he says. “But the costs of the single currency disintegrating are really so high and would impact so many people, that the only responsible thing for me to do is to argue urgently for the next step to a federal Europe. I see no alternative at the moment that isn’t a great deal worse.” He has no truck with the increasing number of people, both commentators and politicians, who entertain the possibility of an orderly exit from the euro for Greece. “It’s too late to unravel the single currency,” he says. … “There has got to be a possibility that this [monetary and fiscal union] will all go horribly wrong with a Greek exit, but it has got to be in the 10% to 20% range [of probability] because this would be so costly to everybody. It would be a massive act of self-immolation and I don’t think they’re that crazy.”

And thirdly, the global shape of things to come in the form of a tweet from Rupert Murdoch on 10 November:

@rupertmurdoch: 2012-2016 changes. Iran gets bomb, china begins major reforms, US crash as bond market revolts, N Africa explodes, etc. What next?

Happy New Year!


The Previous Six

10.1 “It will be fascinating to see whether the coalition conceived after the 2010 election holds. It may, since the Lib Dem desire for electoral reform is so intrinsic to them. But if that doesn’t come about, I doubt the coalition will last long. However, I may be wrong ...” Tony Blair, now, more than half-way through the coalition’s intended five year life, so looking as though he was “wrong”.

10.2 “whoever wins this [2010] election will be out of power for a whole generation because of how tough the fiscal austerity will have to be” Attributed to Mervyn King, who may still be proved right in that many aspects of the UK’s fiscal austerity have yet to be realised.

10.3 Prince Charles will never be King and that William would succeed his grandmother. Attributed to Princess Diana – too soon to tell.

11.1 Adam Posen predicted that UK inflation would fall below 1.5% by the middle of 2012. Oh dear!

11.2 Henry Kissinger worrying that after ISAF withdraws from Afghanistan, an India-Pakistan war may ensue. We will see.

11.3 My suggestion that the Queen might retire in April 2016 after her 90th birthday. Again, we will see.

With no particular place to go

So near and yet so far: Goering and German top brass regard the
White Cliffs of England from the French coast on 1 July 1940

Max Hastings could never fairly be accused of over-optimism. Writing in today’s Daily Mail he contrasts his family’s recent enjoyable day on a Devon beach with Europe’s being, as he sees it:

… in the early stages of what will probably prove its gravest and most frightening tumult of our lifetimes. Our political leaders have not mentioned this, not told us Europe is up the creek without a paddle, because half of them are in denial about what is going on, and not one has a sensible idea what to do about it.

Turning to where it leaves Britain, he concludes that:

I seldom pity politicians, but ours deserve some sympathy, as almost impotent spectators of unfolding disaster. Since we are not eurozone members, there is little a British Government can usefully do or say.  

… My own strong hunch — and I say this without any pleasure — is that within a decade Britain will find itself outside the European Union. … The bust-up could come quite swiftly if Chancellor Merkel persists with her determination to impose a Europe-wide financial transaction tax to fund the next stage towards eurozone integration. This, in turn, would devastate the City of London.  

… Though our separation from Europe looks increasingly plausible, I do not share the enthusiasm of those of UKIP’s persuasion, who see this as a glorious liberation. The Germans at the conference I attended in April warned repeatedly that we would find life alone, out in mid- Atlantic, remarkably chilly. On this they are probably right. In a world of giant economic blocs, and especially up against China, Britain looks ill-fitted to compete on its own. But what else can we do if a statist, over-regulated, undemocratic and unaccountable Europe remains bent on economic and political suicide in a mindless, obsessive pursuit of the euro-ideal?

An alternative to the metaphorical mid-Atlantic might be to move even closer to the US East Coast; in the extreme, as David Aaronovitch suggested at the end of 2011, “the nations of the United Kingdom become the 51st, 52nd, 53rd and 54th states of what might be known as the United States of America and the East Atlantic.” Though I doubt whether Hastings would find that prospect particularly attractive. In a previous Mail column “Turning our backs on Britain's fallen: How a new generation believes it was just U.S. troops that won World War Two thanks to Hollywood” (as much a précis as a header), he clearly approved of how on the anniversary of D-day:

François Hollande made a gesture of reconciliation with ‘Perfidious Albion’. He became the first ever French president to visit a British cemetery in Normandy.

He concluded that article:

We should learn to value our heritage, as French governments cherish theirs. The Continent today is threatened not by war, but by greater turmoil and dissension than it has known for half a century. Only by knowing and understanding its past history, and our part in it, can we hope to come to terms with its present and future.

A debate on the viability of a “mid-Atlantic” United Kingdom (with or without Scotland) is probably overdue. Are we trapped in the invidious position, primarily in population terms, of being too large to occupy a niche, but too small to be a player? Or are there ways in which the UK could make itself too big to ignore? Perhaps this would be by leveraging our time zone and language advantages. We could also adopt a ‘smart’ and selective policy for immigration which would allow entry to talented and skilled people from anywhere, but particularly Europe if the train wreck anticipated by Hastings actually happens. This could in the short to medium term help overcome the deficiencies of our educational system. The UK could also take advantage of its status as a (relatively) ‘safe haven’ and sell gilts to fund infrastructure such as very high speed broadband and develop the regions to compensate for the over-development of the South East.

20 JULY 2012 - An update to this post is here.

Après elle, le déluge?

Apart from a tongue-in-cheek post last year about the Queen retiring at 90, I’m not much interested in the Royal family. So this post is another exception to the norm and also an excuse to upload an image the Bristolian street artist Banksy has donated to the public domain.

On 6 June Britain went back to work after four days of Queen’s Diamond Jubilee festivities. Even so, The Times that morning, as well as pull-outs and wrap-overs, gave pages 1 to 13 over to Jubilee reporting. Reality finally intruded on page 15 under the headline, Germany must take action to save world economies, warn finance ministers.  Any irony in its being the anniversary of D-day (6 June 1944) was avoided since the media coverage of the latter was minimal.

Whether the additional public holiday on Tuesday 5th (Monday’s Bank Holiday, as they are called in the UK, was part of the normal quota) was really needed to celebrate appropriately, or even sensible given the country’s economic situation, doesn’t seem to have been the subject of much debate. Last year an extra Bank Holiday was thought necessary to mark the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. Perhaps we can manage for the next few years with the usual public holidays and avoid worrying about the impact of any extra ones on economic growth.

The media coverage of the Jubilee and its royal participants was mostly fawning and shallow, so Max Hastings’ cooler view in the Financial Times on 2 June was an exception. Headed Long may she reign – with dignity and endearing dullness, (and subheaded Many want her to go on and on; some fear for what is next, in the paper but not on the website) it made the point that:

Most of Queen Elizabeth’s subjects want her to reign for ever, partly because they cherish the continuity she represents in a turbulent age, and partly because of unease about what might follow if her son succeeds her. The Prince of Wales conspicuously lacks his mother’s discipline and discretion; he pursues eccentric causes with messianic zeal. Courtiers assert soothingly that if he assumes the crown he will relapse into Trappist silence, accepting its constraints. But there seem grounds for doubt whether, as a sexagenarian, he will suddenly acquire the prudence that characterises his mother. If he attempted to change the character of the monarchy, to make himself more assertive, trouble could quickly follow. It seems mistaken to confuse widespread public respect for the Queen with inalienable support for dynastic rule. History shows how suddenly and dramatically hostility to the royal family can erupt, if its members behave unwisely. …  

[The Queen] has understood the most important thing about a modern constitutional monarch: that he or she is judged for what they are, rather than for what they do. This is something that the Prince of Wales, forever eager to tackle huge issues beyond his intellectual capacity, has never grasped. While it is true that he sometimes puts himself on the virtuous side of public controversies, the proper function of the royal family in a constitutional monarchy is to stay out of controversy altogether. … the Queen’s successor will do well to consider her conduct a template for his own, rather than indulge perilous notions about creating a “new-style” monarchy.

Not that Hastings is the only commentator in the last few years to express some apprehension about Prince Charles’ future kingship. But there may be a more fundamental problem lurking in the background. A couple of days after Hastings’ article, the FT reported Luxury market set to hit $1.5tn and explained:

The market for luxury, such as yachts, frocks and safaris, is set to hit $1.5tn this year, roughly matching the entire economic output of Spain or Australia, as the income inequality gap widens across the globe. … money is increasingly going on luxury experiences, from spas to safaris, rather than tangible products. Spending on experiences grew 50 per cent faster than on goods last year, according to Boston Consulting Group. The management consultancy expects the overall luxury market to expand 7 per cent this year, a deceleration on the past two years’ 12 per cent but still comfortably ahead of projected growth in global economic output.  

“The gap in income inequality is growing, which is unfortunate, but as a result there are more and more millionaires every year,” said Jean-Marc Bellaiche, a senior partner at BCG and co-author of the latest report. Millionaires, he adds, account for an estimated 45 per cent of the market. Some analysts have questioned how long the inexorable rise of luxury can continue as swaths of Europe are engulfed in economic and financial turmoil and the US remains fragile. …

A major challenge for Western politicians is likely to be finding a suitable response to increasing tensions between the few percent who are on the right side of the ‘income inequality gap’ and the rest of us on the ‘unfortunate’ side. Although the Queen appears in the Sunday Times Rich List (257th equal at an estimated £300m), her wealth has never seemed to be an issue which provokes popular ill-feeling. No doubt this is partly because, as Hastings describes,

Always financially prudent, she has swallowed economy measures at her palaces, together with the scrapping of the royal yacht without replacement, and agreed to pay income tax on her private fortune.

Also, the Queen appears to share an austere streak with many other people who experienced life in Britain during World War 2 and the difficult years which followed it and shows little inclination towards extravagances out of keeping with her role as head of state. However, some of the younger royals, and there are quite a few, seem to have more of a taste for the clothes, cars, houses, holidays and other things that make up the luxurious ‘lifestyles of the rich and famous’. That this could alienate many of the public if times get much harder for the majority is obvious.

Robert Hazell, Professor of British Politics and Government and Director of the Constitution Unit at University College, London (no less), surfaced on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on 7 June to explain ‘the significance of the balcony photograph conceived by Buckingham Palace as the last image of the Jubilee celebrations’. He seemed to think that it signalled a focussing on the core members of the royal family, those in the line of succession. Although he didn’t say so, reducing the public profile of the rest could be a sensible precaution. A similar line came from The Times (£) the same day in an unctuous piece about Prince Charles by Valentine Low, which concluded:

If Charles’s speech was one of the significant moments of the Jubilee weekend, so too was the balcony appearance at Buckingham Palace on Tuesday afternoon. The slimmed down team that went out to wave to the crowds, just six of them including the Queen, was an obvious attempt to concentrate on the core members of the Royal Family. As such, it chimes in exactly with Charles’s view that the Royal Family should be pared down to a much smaller team than it is at present. Buckingham Palace would, no doubt, like people to believe that all such decisions were taken by the Queen. The Prince of Wales, however, is not to be ignored. And increasingly he won’t be.

So perhaps Hastings’ misgivings about Charles are ill-judged, and certain problems a future Prime Minister could well do without will never arise.

Max Hastings: the Falklands war in context

The 30th anniversary of the Falklands War of 1982 has led to several documentaries on British television in recent weeks. The existence of a large amount of contemporary reporting in colour obviously must be helpful to these kinds of productions, as is the readiness to be interviewed of some of the participants, now in healthy-looking late middle age. On 1 April BBC2 screened The Falklands Legacy with Max Hastings, the journalist and military historian who sailed with the Task Force in 1982 and reported on the Falklands campaign first-hand.

On this occasion, Hastings (who with Simon Jenkins wrote a well-respected account of the war in 1983) gave only a brief account of the 10 week operation in the South Atlantic, choosing instead to spend time putting it in its historical context. His thesis was that years of British post-imperial decline were halted by the victory in 1982. (A post here last year was about Denis Healey’s “liquidation of Britain's military role outside Europe” and cancellation of the Royal Navy’s strike carriers.) Also reversed was the unpopularity of the Conservative government under Mrs Thatcher, transforming her into “Maggie”, Iron Lady and winner of the 1983 and 1987 elections. However, in Hastings’ view, the Falkland conflict’s swift success (‘The Empire Strikes Back’ as Newsweek’s cover put it), although it improved Britain's sense of pride and its image abroad, tempted later politicians into prolonged and unpopular involvements in Iraq and Afghanistan. Added to these experiences, the current economic constraints meant a gloomy outlook for the UK’s future aspirations for ‘hard power’.

Hastings’ journalism tends to be controversial and opinionated, and he can go astray, for example last year he was full of forebodings over intervention in Libya. But in this programme, perhaps under the guidance of its producer/director, Robin Barnwell, the case was well-made and convincing - up to a point. To my mind he omitted a key factor concerning Afghanistan: that, unlike in Iraq, the UK’s involvement has been that of a senior NATO member to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) which the alliance established soon after 9/11. He might also have emphasised that 30 years ago the UK, as a member of NATO then confronting the Soviet bloc, was spending over 5% of GDP on defence. This would be about £100 billion a year in current terms, ie the same size as the health budget, as opposed to £39 billion at present. Given the resources then available and the level of competence their ownership provided, the UK’s ability to generate the 1982 Task Force and its success is perhaps not so remarkable after all. David Miller in his The Cold War A Military History describes one of the UK’s significant NATO roles at that time:

One of the major achievements of the USMC [United States Marine Corps] in the Cold War was the plan to reinforce Norway. In this, the majority of the combat equipment required by a full Marine Amphibious Brigade [MAB] was pre-positioned in Norway, housed in specially built caves in the Trondheim area. … The task of the MAB, reinforced by up to two more USMC brigades, a Canadian brigade and the Netherlands-UK Amphibious Group, was to reinforce the Norwegian armed forces in repelling any Soviet invasion.

Although the logistics of deploying to the Falklands were far more demanding, various aspects of the Task Force’s role were analogous to the Norway reinforcement which the UK was committed to undertake if required. A final minor nit-pick, although Hastings quoted Acheson’s 1962 comment on Britain, “lost an empire and not yet found a role”, he did not mention the more damning opinion of General George Brown, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs, only six years before the Falklands expedition: “Britain is no longer a world power; all they have got are generals, admirals and bands”.

Some of the interviews relating to the political background featured characters who have already made an appearance in this blog. For example, Michael Cockerell, who in the middle of the Falklands campaign covered the 27 May Beaconsfield by-election, probably only remembered now because Tony Blair, then 29, was the Labour candidate in a normally safe Conservative seat. Cockerell asserted that Blair subsequently remarked to Robin Cook that “Wars make Prime Ministers popular” but didn’t tell us when this was said, and, of course, Cook is no longer with us to confirm or deny it anyway. Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles has been mentioned here before too, and he took the opportunity to make the point to Hastings that Generals, Admirals and Air Marshals are keen to assure politicians that they ‘can-do’ and that Chiefs of the Defence Staff manipulate Ministers and Prime Ministers accordingly. Hastings subscribes to the emerging view that it was a reaction to the perceived failure of the British in Iraq, (particularly Basra) that led to our attempting a subsequent over-ambitious involvement under ISAF in Helmand.

As far as the Falklands are concerned, Hastings concluded that the 1982 story isn’t completely over, given the current antagonism from the Argentinians and the UK’s diplomatic isolation in South America. Looking back, the 1982 war may have been our last popular conflict, the last imperial hurrah.

ADDENDUM 9 APRIL

Anyone who missed The Falklands Legacy with Max Hastings (no longer available on BBC iPlayer in the UK) might find two recent articles by Hastings of interest. The first, in the Daily Mail on 3 April, made many of the points in the programme, and concluded:

We could not again mount a campaign remotely on the scale of 1982. We sent 30,000 men to recover the Falklands, but when the current defence cuts are complete the army will be able to deploy only a single brigade group of 7,000-8,000 men for sustained operations overseas. We have no aircraft carrier; when the Royal Navy does eventually take delivery of the two new carriers now being built at Rosyth, it cannot afford suitable planes to fly off them.
Economic forces are driving our continuing relative decline, heedless of our martial prowess. I shall forever be grateful to have shared in that extraordinary 1982 odyssey in the South Atlantic, though I shall never forget the price paid for victory by such men as the Royal Marine whom I knew, damaged for life. But 30 years on, the war looks to me like a last imperial hurrah.

The second, in the FT on 6 April (£) covered some of this ground again but put more emphasis on future defence capabilities – or the lack of them. Again, he went for the carriers:

The most conspicuous symbols of this [defence mismanagement] are the two aircraft carriers under construction at Rosyth, for which nobody can see any useful purpose because we cannot afford appropriate aircraft for them. Some of us have for years pleaded for cheap, cheerful carriers to operate cheap, cheerful aircraft. But these behemoths were started to appease the ambitions of successive first sea lords and the last Labour government’s desperation to provide jobs in Scottish constituencies. This pork-barrelling threatens to cripple our maritime capability for decades, because the Royal Navy will be able to afford little else. Even now, I would scrap the ships, to save their huge downstream costs.

And he concluded:

Intellectual rigour is what is lacking from defence policy-making, … We do not configure the armed forces according to what equipment we might need to defend ourselves, but by making arbitrary judgments about what bills the Treasury is willing to pay. … Ministers may live to regret treating defence as an optional extra because it swings no votes. Every conflict in which Britain has fought since 1945 – including Korea, Northern Ireland, the Falklands and the Gulf – has come from nowhere. The only certainty is that our children can expect more surprises, and more unexpected enemies, and we shall have precious few weapons with which to address them. Repeated random axe-blows mean not only that the armed forces are unable now to retake the Falklands – which is probably irrelevant – but, more fundamentally, that we shall own too little of anything to play an appropriate role in defending our vital interests – as we shall surely have to do before we are all dead.

Eagle – the 1950s Comic

The Works describes itself as Britain’s Leading Discount Book Store. I think that their branches are worth dropping into from time to time - good value on UK road atlases. When I saw this volume, and being a man of a certain age, I had to buy it, having fancied it when it first came out in 2007 - at three times the price I paid in The Works.

There is a good account on Wikipedia of Eagle and its seminal influence. It was a weekly comic printed in colour aimed at teenage boys, launched in April 1950. Every year Eagle produced an annual, so this volume’s title is a bit of a misnomer being a collation of material selected by Daniel Tatarsky from Eagle’s best decade, the 1950s. It certainly educated and entertained in a wholesome way, and with its emphasis on space flight (Dan Dare Pilot of the Future, subject of a recent Science Museum exhibition) and excellent cutaways of engineering achievements (in 1953 ‘British Cars for Export – the Vauxhall Velox’, but also in 1956 the German pocket battleship Graf Spee scuttled in 1939), it anticipated Harold Wilson’s vision of a Britain of white–hot technology. In fact, its editor had an exaggerated view of the rate of progress likely in aerospace, and a limited appreciation of the potential for the development of electronics and eventually IT. Reflecting its period, not much attention was paid to football, and none at all to pop music or TV, at least in this selection. Apparently works by the young Gerald Scarfe and David Hockney appeared in the Eagle, but not in this volume, as far as I can tell.

Some items which struck me:

The size of the Royal Navy at the time of the Coronation Fleet Review at Spithead in 1953 – numerous battleships (scrapped shortly afterwards), eight aircraft carriers in line and scores of lesser ships (pages 90/1). (Coincidentally, the Graf Spee had represented Germany at the previous Coronation Fleet Review in 1937.) For sure, there will be nothing like it ever again – even the French are now feeling sorry for the RN, despite Trafalgar and Mers-el-Kébir.

Numerous articles from the Eagle Special Investigator, Macdonald Hastings, father of Max, who has recently written about his upbringing in Did You Really Shoot the Television?: A Family Fable. Not quite the set-up that the parents paying for Eagle, anxious at the time to divert their grammar school-directed offspring from Beano and Dandy, might have expected.

A Reader’s Letter (paid 5/- ie 25p, but worth about £10 now) in 1951 (page 43) from a David Irving of Hutton, Essex: “I think it is a deplorable hobby for boys to throw messages inside bottles into the sea. When they reach the shore they invariably break and can thus cause many accidents.” This might be the writer, David Irving (b 1938), whose details can also be found on Wikipedia, for anyone not aware of him.

Fans of ‘The King’s Speech’ would like ‘The King Speaks’ (pages 40/1), a diagram of the Royal microphones, GPO land lines, BBC transmitters and control rooms etc. needed for ‘HM The King’s Christmas Broadcast’ to travel from Sandringham to the “four corners of the Empire” “with the same velocity as that with which light is transmitted from the sun. … so that His Majesty’s voice travels once around the earth in one-seventh of a second.”

Apart from its preoccupation with technology, some obsolescent even at the time, the attitudes and values which Eagle embodied seem to belong to a lost world. Oddly, the Eagle’s 1950s seem beyond halfway from the present to the 1890s (Sherlock Holmes's fictional heyday), even with the two world wars in the interim.

The Dan Dare Corporation owns the global media rights to the Eagle comic and the comic strip 'Dan Dare'.

No Bonapartism Please, We’re British

In an article in The Times on 22 April, ‘Job done. It is time to get out of Afghanistan’, Paul Gibson argued that rather than fighting on in Afghanistan until 2014, most British troops could, and should, be withdrawn this year. He concluded:

The wind of change blowing through the Middle East should also be blowing through the Ministry of Defence. Afghanistan is yesterday's war. The Prime Minister needs to bring our troops home now, so we can be balanced for the next one, which may not be far away.

After all in Libya:

If a humanitarian assistance force or UN peacekeeping force is required, current form suggests that Mr Cameron will want to be in the lead and the Armed Forces need to be ready. Apart from the powerful humanitarian arguments, intervention in Libya is clearly in the UK's strategic interests because of its Mediterranean littoral, its oil and potential for trade.

Not everyone shares Gibson’s view on the value to the UK of the Libyan involvement. For example, Max Hastings in the Daily Mail on 23 April, who thought that for the UK to be:

preparing to undertake a long-term military training mission to empower the Libyan rebels to look after their own security, shows the Government still floundering deeper into the swamp it has entered.

and

The longer this bloody business drags on, the more willing the world will become to blame Britain for the humanitarian tragedy, for which we chose to assume responsibility, rather than Gaddafi who is of course the perpetrator. Finally, there is another, British dimension. As a strong supporter of the Cameron government’s domestic programme, which faces plentiful difficulties of its own, I regret that the Prime Minister has chosen to take such risks in Libya, where Britain has no vital interest.

… We have got ourselves into a fine tangle. Our objective now should be to escape from our folly through a political deal, not a military victory.

Hastings had taken a similar line a few days earlier in the Financial Times:

The western allies are in a fine Libyan pickle. The real mission of the British and French military “advisers” being dispatched to the rebel camp is to explore what the west might do to get out of it. The declared objectives of the national leaderships are much larger than the means available to achieve them. It was because defence chiefs on both sides of the Atlantic foresaw this that they were reluctant to intervene in the first place.

Hastings referred to senior military opinion again in his Daily Mail piece:

From the moment we started bombing, every senior soldier I know on both sides of the Atlantic took it for granted that we had picked up the burden of what happens to the country hereafter.

Hastings' views seemed to be at variance with Gibson’s insiders in The Times:

The understandable focus on Helmand has distorted our defence horizons and ambitions. This must be rectified. The Army must build bridges with the other services, which feel particularly bruised by the cuts to their capabilities caused by ring-fencing the Afghan operation. Inter-service rivalry is an enduring feature of the Armed Forces but the recriminations have plumbed new depths after the flawed Strategic Defence and Security Review and - threaten our ability to conduct joint operations. In Sierra Leone, Brigadier David Richards, now a general and Chief of the Defence Staff, led a world-class operation in which paratroopers were supported by guns from HMS Chatham, Harriers from HMS lllustrious and RAF Chinook helicopters. We must be able to repeat that success - possibly quite soon in Libya.

Hastings’ opinions are based on his extensive experience as a journalist and war historian, but not on military service. The Times’ contributor on the other hand was described thus: “Brigadier Paul Gibson is a former Director of Counter Terrorism and UK operations”. But presumably Gibson is retired, as surely it would be inappropriate for a serving officer to be publicly so at odds with government policy? In particular on the timescale for leaving Afghanistan, criticism of SDSR, and identifying strategic interests for the UK in Libya (oil and potential for trade) in terms way outside the scope of UN Resolution 1973.

Gibson’s photograph in The Times presumably dates from his time in uniform, as he probably doesn’t wear combat gear in retirement.



While the UK is hardly likely to succumb to Bonapartism*, perhaps former military people should encourage the revival of the description “(retd)” attached to descriptions of their quondam rank. Then, when they are expressing their personal opinions in print, dead tree or virtual, readers will not be left under any illusion as to their status, or who they are speaking for.

*According to Wikipedia, "the replacement of civilian leadership by military leadership within revolutionary movements or governments" – not that the Coalition are that revolutionary!