David Cameron initially chose David Richards, now Lord Richards of Herstmonceux, to be his chief of the defence staff to succeed Jock Stirrup precisely because he wanted a forthright figure. The more emollient Nick Houghton had to wait his turn for the top job, to which he succeeded when Lord Richards stood down in 2013. It is possible that Mr Cameron might have regretted his choice yesterday when he found his foreign policy had been savaged by the man he personally chose as his military chief.
Lord Richards has accused the prime minister of having no coherent strategy for dealing with the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, has called into question the prime minister’s courage and has said that, if only his advice had been taken, then the barbarians of Isis would never have spread across the region, slaugh-tering the innocent and destroying its heritage.
The general’s claims are open to doubt on at least two counts. First, it is not simply a matter of the virility of the prime minister whether Britain now goes to war. Formally, that does remain the position. When he was leader of the opposition, Mr Cameron suggested to his own party’s Democracy Taskforce that it might recommend stripping the prime minister of the royal prerogative power to commit the country to military hostility but, in theory at least, that power remains. As a good conservative, however, Mr Cameron knows that tacit knowledge and practice matters more than what it says in the book. Unnoticed by Lord Richards the convention has changed and the Iraq war changed it.
It is often forgotten that Tony Blair chose to go to the House of Commons to seek parliamentary approval for British involvement. Coupled with the way that conflict has not gone to plan, it is now surely not politically practicable for a prime minister to declare war unilaterally, whatever the constitutional position may be. Indeed, when Mr Cameron did commit British troops to Libya he did so with the approval of his parliamentary colleagues. So he did when he sought the same in Syria, although on that occasion without success.
Therefore, if it is true, as Lord Richards has told David Cameron’s biographer Anthony Seldon, that in 2012 Downing Street knocked back the proffered military plan to put British boots on the soil of Syria to fight Isis, it seems unduly harsh to say that this was because the prime minister lacked the “balls” to act. Mr Cameron had shown the relevant quality in Libya and it was not for want of his trying that Britain stood idly by while Syria descended into chaos.
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Lord Richards claims that the appalling dominance which Isis is gaining in the region would have been averted if his plan had been enacted. There was and is a case for intervention. But the experience of conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya should have alerted him, of all people, to the difficulty of clean outcomes. Perhaps a military intervention would have helped; to claim it is as obvious as all that is simplistic and unfair.
It also says more about the general than it does about the prime minister to say that “too often it seems to be more about the Notting Hill liberal agenda rather than statecraft”. Likewise, the insinuation from John Sawers, the head of MI6, that the prime minister was insensitive to the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Syria is unfair. In an era in which the top brass are hauled before inquiries as frequently as politicians, this may be a case of the military getting in an early strike.
This assault smacks of the military fighting its own corner, dirtily. That is partly about resources and partly about authority. The government is slowly inching towards a rational settlement of the armed forces to ensure that they protect national security and yet live within their means. If retired generals cannot make constructive suggestions, a period of silence would be appreciated.