Soldiers: Army Lives and Loyalties from Redcoats to Dusty Warriors. Richard Holmes

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 explicit political purpose.

      For most of the army’s history its officer corps was closely aligned to the social class that sent members of parliament to Westminster. The proportion of serving officers sitting in parliament fell away substantially as the nineteenth century went on, but the two world wars of the twentieth century packed both houses with an unusually high number of folk with wartime service. That generation has now moved on, though in the second decade of the twenty-first century there are again MPs with direct links to the military. Modern wars have never been more political and senior officers are inevitably politically ensnared.

      CHAPTER 4

      BRASS AND TAPES

      ARMIES ARE HIERARCHIES, their structure given daily prominence by costume jewellery and codes of behaviour. Even those that, in the white heat of revolutionary ferment, destroy the titles and badges associated with status tend to reinstate them once the tumult is over. The Red Army, which had gleefully done away with epaulettes – hated symbol of officership under the tsars – brought them back in 1943 to reinforce its identity at the height of the Great Patriotic War. Chinese officers, for so long dressed in drab and rankless Mao jackets, now sport big shoulder-boards modelled, for such are the ironies of military fashion, on the same tsarist pattern as Russian epaulettes. Although the detail of rank varies across ages and nations, the most crucial distinction has been between officers, who hold a commission signed by the head of state, and other personnel who lack this crucial document.

      For most of the British army’s existence there was a rough congruence between social status and military rank, although this never prevented, on the one hand, the phenomenon of the gentleman ranker, serving as a private soldier against the grain of his background, or, on the other, the rise of the humble but talented. A striking example of the former is the Hon. Michael Francis Howard, son of the Earl of Carlisle and formerly a lieutenant in the Scots Guards and 18th Hussars, killed as a private at Passchendaele in October 1917. Conversely, William Cobbett, that steadfast enemy of privilege, admitted that

      When I was in the army, the adjutant-general, Sir William Fawcett, had been a private soldier; General Slater, who had recently commanded the Guards in London, had been a private soldier; Colonel Paton, who I saw at the head of his fine regiment (the 12th, at Chatham) had been a private soldier; Captain Green, who first had the command of me, had been a private soldier. In the garrison of Halifax there were no less than seventeen officers who had been private soldiers. In my regiment the quarter-master had been a private soldier; the adjutant, who was also a lieutenant, had been a private soldier.¹

      Samuel Bagshawe, whose papers are a valuable resource on the army of George II, also blurred conventional distinctions. He was a young man with excellent prospects but ran away from his tutor in 1731 after being reproved for extravagant habits, and enlisted as a private in Colonel Philip Anstruther’s Regiment of Foot. He spent seven years in the ranks of the Gibraltar garrison, becoming a quartermaster sergeant. Bagshawe eventually restored himself to family favour by writing to his uncle and guardian, begging him to

      Imagine a youth who for some fancied distaste flings himself into the sea, in his fall he sees his folly, but when he views the miseries that surround him (though sensible it is owing to compassion alone if he is taken in) with all his might he strives to regain his ship; you may easily conceive the earnest desire I have to repossess a happiness … which, the more I reflect upon the more I am confounded and the more I hope to recover.²

      His uncle arranged for him to be bought out of the service. Two years later family connections secured him an ensign’s commission, and he died a colonel, a rank gained by raising a regiment at his own expense.

      Nonetheless, these exceptions scarcely bend the general rule. Lieutenant General Sir John Keir, writing in 1919, emphasised that Britain was at that moment ‘a nation in Arms’, with the chance of creating, for the first time in its history, ‘a real National Army.’ Hitherto, he argued,

      The regular army consisted of two main groups, patricians and proletarians. The officers were patricians, or patricianists; the men almost entirely proletarians. Between these two extreme poles of the social system there was no shading off. A gulf separated the two classes.³

      Some of the army’s friends, and even more of its critics, see a similar gulf today: the Irish writer Tom Paulin condemned British soldiers as ‘thugs sent in by public schoolboys to kill innocent Irish people’.⁴

      The British have never used the American terminology of officers and ‘enlisted men’, having initially differentiated between officers, standing outside the formed body of the unit, and the ‘rank and file’ within it. They then preferred officers and ‘other ranks’, wisely jettisoning the latter term, with its demeaning overtones, for ‘soldiers’ in the 1960s. The line of cleavage became evident from the regular army’s earliest days. Sergeant Nehemiah Wharton was an earnest puritan and former London apprentice who served in Denzil Holles’s Regiment of Foot, fighting for parliament in the Civil War. He wrote his last surviving letter