1960s the front benches were packed with men who had fought in the world wars, and, certainly as far as the Conservatives were concerned, having had the proverbial ‘good war’ was almost a sine qua non of political success. But a man’s service record did not determine his political stance. Denis Healey had been at Balliol College, Oxford with Edward Heath (the men remained friends) and was commissioned into the Royal Engineers, serving as military landing officer at Anzio in 1943. He gave a ‘barnstorming and strongly left-wing’ speech, still in uniform, at the 1945 Labour Party Conference. But although he made a massive dent in the traditional Conservative majority at Pudsey and Ottley that year, he was not elected till 1952.
In 1962 it was estimated that 9 per cent of MPs were former regular officers, and that military representation in the Commons was nearly a hundred times greater than in society more broadly.13 Conscription endured till 1962 and, until the sharp cuts of 1967, the Territorial Army was over 100,000 strong: both factors helped maintain military experience in parliament. Margaret Thatcher selected all her secretaries of state for defence from former officers. Michael Heseltine, who held the post in 1983–6 was the least martial. Son of a Second World War lieutenant colonel, Heseltine was called up in 1959 in the dying days of National Service and commissioned into the Welsh Guards. From 1945, serving officers were suspended from duty when they ran for parliament, and were required to retire if elected. Heseltine contested the safe Labour seat of Gower in 1959, and was not required to resume service after his defeat. It was not until the appointment of Malcolm Rifkind in 1992 that this chain was broken. No subsequent secretaries of state for defence have had military service, although John Reid, first-rate minister for the armed forces 1997–9 and secretary of state for defence 2005–6 owed part of his affinity with the military to his family ties, for his father had served in the ranks of the Scots Guards.
The passing from politics of the Second World War generation was underscored by the last of the ‘good war’ Tories. Lord Carrington had been commissioned into the Grenadiers in January 1939, and fought from Normandy into Germany with the Guards Armoured Division where he earned a Military Cross commanding the first tank across the great bridge at Nijmegen. Foreign secretary in 1982, he resigned, with characteristic probity, to acknowledge his department’s failure to predict the Argentine invasion of the Falklands. William Whitelaw, ex-Scots Guards and awarded a Military Cross in Normandy, 1944, held a variety of government appointments. He exercised huge influence over Margaret Thatcher, who made him the first hereditary peer created for eighteen years after her victory in the 1983 election. His resignation in 1987, on grounds of ill-health, deprived her of a major steadying influence.
The Parliament whose life ended with the general election of 2010 contained 43 MPs with military service of some sort. Eighteen were ex-regular army officers, ranging from Michael Mates, sometime lieutenant colonel in the Queen’s Dragoon Guards, to Andrew Mitchell, who had held a ‘gap year commission’ between school and university. There were thirteen Territorials, one of them an ex-regular army officer and another a former member of the RAF; seven former members of the RAF; one of the Royal Navy; one who transferred from the Royal Navy to the Royal Naval Reserve; and another naval reservist. One, Rudi Vis, Labour MP for Finchley and Golders Green, had served in the Dutch Armed Forces in his youth. This constituted 6.6 per cent of a house of 646 members. The breadth of the definitions above, which includes both an MP who served in his university’s Officer Training Corps forty years ago, and another medically discharged after a brief period of regular training, underlines the thinness of real military experience, though at least two of the Territorials have been mobilised for service in Iraq or Afghanistan.
To enable peers and MPs without military service to speak with more knowledge of the armed forces, Sir Neil Thorne, a Conservative MP and Territorial colonel, founded the Armed Forces Parliamentary Scheme (AFPS) in 1987. ‘The whole purpose of the scheme,’ he writes, ‘is to enable Members of all parties to speak in debates on the Armed Forces from a position of experience’.14 The scheme lasts a year, during which participants are expected to spend at least 21 of 30 offered days with the armed forces, selecting the service of their choice. They are initially given status roughly aligning them with majors or their equivalents to enable them to spend time with soldiers, sailors, and airmen, rather than to receive the two-star status normally accorded to MPs visiting military units.15
The AFPS makes it possible for participants to return, ‘at four levels from Major to Brigadier equivalent’. At least one, Dr Julian Lewis, Conservative MP for New Forest East, spent some time at the Royal College of Defence Studies, writing a 10,000-word dissertation that was rated in the top ten for his year. In all about ninety MPs have participated in the scheme. The opinion of serving army officers on its usefulness is divided, with some contributors to the invaluable Army Rumour Service website arguing that anything that brings MPs into closer connection with the services can only do good. The facts that the scheme has flourished despite its lack of official funding, and attracts both peers and MPs who take it very seriously, underline the perceived need to remedy the progressive demilitarisation of parliament.
Political allegiance and holding a senior military position have existed independently of each other at many points in history. Most military and naval MPs still sitting immediately after 1688 were Tories, although they were soon outweighed by Whigs. It was, by then, possible for an officer to be opposed to the government and to enjoy senior command. Major General James Webb won a useful little victory at Wynendaele in 1708, ensuring that a vital convoy got through to Marlborough who was besieging Lille. Webb was a Tory and the Tories were in opposition. His supporters in the Commons at once complained that he had been insufficiently rewarded for the Wynendaele exploit. The credit seemed to have gone to Marlborough’s chief of staff, William Cadogan, who sat in the Whig interest for Woodstock – the town adjacent to Marlborough’s country estate, Blenheim Palace.
Ministers were assailed by those who shook the tree of patronage to get commissions, promotions, and appointments for family, friends, and clients. As time went on, ministers became more reluctant to intervene save where they could do so with probity. The papers of the hard-working William, Viscount Barrington, Whig secretary at war 1755–61 and 1765–78, show how patronage worked in the high eighteenth century. In 1760 George, Duke of Marlborough wrote asking for ‘a troop of Dragoons, or a company [captaincy] in an old regiment for a gentleman whose name is Travell: his father was a very zealous friend to us in the late Oxfordshire election … he may stick some time unless your Lordship will favour him with your interest to get promoted.’16 Marlborough’s insistence on an ‘old’ regiment was intended to ensure that Travell did not get appointed to a junior regiment that would be disbanded at the first opportunity, shoving him off onto half-pay. Barrington failed to oblige the duke, for Francis Travell soldiered on unpromoted, and the 1800 Army List has him as a half-pay lieutenant in the now-disbanded 21st Light Dragoons.
Barrington was unusually scrupulous in refusing to break the army’s rules even when pressed hard. In 1771 he told Lord North, then Prime Minister, that although he valued the influential Scottish Whig Sir Gilbert Eliott just as much as North himself did:
Yet I must not assist you in getting a company for his son.
Two invariable and indispensable rules of the army are that every man shall begin military life with the lowest commission, and that he shall be at least 16 years of age till he shall obtain any …
Mr. Elliot was not I believe ten years of age when he had a commission of lieutenant & soon after he was most irregularly made a captain. At the reduction [disbandment] of the corps, he was not kept on any list, or kept on half pay … What shall I say to the friends of Mr Stuart, or Price, or a great many others if Mr Elliot is a Captain before them? I shall be told with great truth that his former commission is a nullity though it still remains in his possession. The whole world will condemn me, and what is worst of all, I shall condemn myself.17
There was a growing belief that an officer should not be penalised, in his military capacity, for opinions expressed as a Parliamentarian. Yet there were still some serious upsets.
