rather a crisis that slid out of control, leaving the army’s professional head caught between the hammer of government policy and the anvil of military opinion. Few senior officers would necessarily have fared better at the point of impact than Johnnie French.
The army has faced nothing on the scale of the Curragh ever since. Although there have been suggestions that it would have resented being asked to carry out some tasks, like intervention to help enforce majority rule upon Rhodesia/Zimbabwe in the 1960s, all the evidence suggests that the army does as it is told. This is the case even when some senior officers have substantial moral and practical reservations about the task, as was undoubtedly the case with the invasion of Iraq in 2003. It is striking that none of them, well aware of the rules against making public pronouncements, spoke at the time, although some of the evidence given to the Chilcott enquiry makes the scale of their unhappiness evident.
Some officers suffered for the public expression of their views. In 1938 Duncan Sandys, Conservative MP for South Norwood, Winston Churchill’s son-in-law and a subaltern in a Territorial anti-aircraft unit, raised issues of national security that reflected his own military specialism. He was then approached by two unidentified men (presumably representing the security service) who warned him that he risked prosecution under the Official Secrets Act. Sandys at once reported the matter to the Committee on Privileges, which ruled that disclosures to parliament were not subject to the Act, although an MP could be disciplined by the house if, in its view, his disclosures were damaging or unwarranted. Sandys’ territorial career was unharmed. He was badly wounded in Norway in 1941, retired as a lieutenant colonel in 1946, and as defence minister in 1957 produced the Sandys Review. The First World War case of Sir Henry Page Croft MP was different. He went out with his Territorial battalion in 1914, and was first of the few Territorials to command a brigade. Frank reports on his dissatisfaction with the high command – delivered informally rather than on the floor of the house – caused sufficient controversy to get him recalled in 1916: all his political connections could not save him.
The army’s own regulations grew progressively sterner about the need for serving officers to gain formal clearance for their publications. They had once been very relaxed. Lieutenant Winston Churchill published his idiosyncratic Story of the Malakand Field Force in 1898. The first edition of The River War, his account of the Omdurman campaign, was highly critical of Lord Kitchener’s desecration of the Mahdi’s tomb and of the poor quality of some military supplies, notably the soldier’s boots. Kitchener was furious, and although Churchill left the regular army soon afterwards, he was recommissioned during the Boer War, then became a yeomanry officer and commanded a battalion when Kitchener was still secretary of state for war.
The rules were much stricter after the Second World War. In 1949 the future Field Marshal Lord Carver, then an acting lieutenant colonel, reviewed Field Marshal Montgomery’s Alamein to the Sangro for the Royal Armoured Corps Journal. He unwisely observed that it was ‘a high price to pay for a short book’, and was nearly court-martialled. Montgomery ordered Carver’s director to ‘tell him that a junior officer is not allowed to criticise the head of the army’. Later, when Carver had written his own book on Alamein he found it difficult to get permission to publish. Although he was by then an upwardly mobile brigadier, permission was actually refused for a chapter on training and doctrine which was to have formed part of a Festschrift to mark Basil Liddell Hart’s seventieth birthday ‘as it was clearly controversial’.28
A more recent case of a serving officer being disciplined for public criticism, this time of his own superiors rather than politicians, is that of Major Eric Joyce. He enlisted into the Black Watch in 1978 and subsequently attended Stirling University, graduating with a degree in religious studies. Joyce became a probationary second lieutenant while at university, attended the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst after graduation, and was commissioned into the Royal Army Educational Corps in 1988. His service took him to Northern Ireland, Germany, and Belize, and during it he obtained two master’s degrees. He was promoted captain in 1990 and major in 1992 – the year that the RAEC was amalgamated into the newly-formed Adjutant General’s Corps and became the Educational and Training Services branch.
In August 1997 the Fabian Society published a pamphlet by Joyce called ‘Arms and the Man – Renewing the Armed Services’, maintaining that the forces were ‘racist, sexist and discriminatory’. He had written it without getting the permission to publish required by Queen’s Regulations, telling The Times that ‘you can’t get radical ideas like this into the public domain if you go through the chain of command.’29 Joyce denied that he was being covertly supported by ministers, but argued that ‘what I’m saying is broadly in line with the modernising agenda which the government is promoting.’30 He went on to launch the Armed Services Forum, which was authorised by the military authorities but contained severe criticism of the forces. When at length the army moved to discipline him, he affirmed that it was ‘terribly important’ that soldiers should be allowed to speak freely. He also condemned the army’s obsession with an ‘officer class’, and argued that Queen’s Regulations, simply ‘a convention’, were not legally enforceable.31 The Conservative opposition saw the Labour Government’s hand behind Joyce’s continued survival. In December 1998 Keith Simpson MP, a former Sandhurst lecturer, told the Commons that the case ‘strikes at the heart of the important principle that our armed forces do not participate in party politics.’ He went on to argue that:
He has his own political agenda. As a serving officer, he has openly been a Labour party supporter and, for the past four months, has been actively seeking to become a parliamentary candidate. Not only has he repeatedly and blatantly broken every agreement that he has ever made, but he has become party politically partisan.32
Major Joyce was eventually directed to resign his commission and did so in 1999. He went on to become Public Affairs Officer at the Commission for Racial Equality (Scotland), and, unsurprisingly, a Labour MP after winning the Falkirk West by-election the following year. He served as parliamentary private secretary (PPS) to a number of ministers, and in September 2009 resigned as PPS to Defence Secretary Bob Ainsworth. As one of the few Labour MPs with recent military experience he had been a logical choice for the post, but his letter of resignation went to the heart of his old unhappiness:
The Conservatives … think they can convince the public that we have lost our empathy with the Defence community … I do not think the public will accept for much longer that our losses [in Afghanistan] can be justified by simply referring to the risk of greater terrorism on our streets … Most important of all, we must make it clear to every serviceman and woman, their families and the British public that we give their well-being the greatest political priority. Behind the hand attacks by any Labour figure on senior service personnel are now, to the public, indistinguishable from attacks on the services themselves. Conversely, in my view we should allow our service personnel greater latitude to voice their views on matters which make distinctions between defence and politics pointless.33
Joyce’s resignation was overshadowed by the fact that he had become the first MP to claim more than £1 million cumulatively in expenses. The website Army Rumour Service suggests far more resentment amongst serving officers of an MP on the gravy train, than sympathy for a former colleague with a reformist agenda. His case underlines two hard old truths. First, no government, whatever its persuasion, relishes serving members of the armed forces pointing to political failings. Tony Blair abolished the individual services’ directors of corporate communication to reduce the risk of senior officers briefing the press ‘off message’. In that climate Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, when Chief of the Defence Staff, declined a ‘non-attributable’ lunch with the distinguished author Sir Max Hastings, regretting that he could only attend if a civil servant was on hand to take notes of the conversation. When General Sir Richard Dannatt spoke, within a few weeks of his appointment as Chief of the General Staff, of the need to withdraw troops from Iraq, it was immediately clear that he would not, as had been expected, succeed Sir Jock as CDS. Second, the army itself remains profoundly uneasy about criticism from within its ranks, especially when that criticism has an
