THE SPECTATOR’S NOTES
CHARLES MOORE
Hitler said, ‘I know my enemies. I met them at Munich. They are little worms.’ He turned out to be wrong, thank goodness, but the impression that his enemies gave him emboldened him for war. The Iranians must now think that we, the British, are little worms; and on the basis of our conduct in the last ten days, they would be right. They are emboldened too: no sooner had they let our captives go than they proudly announced their membership of the nuclear club. Here are some reasons why the fiasco of the ‘Shatt-al-Arab 15’ is even worse than the critics have said.
1. Comradeship. The Sunday Times quoted one of the captives, Dean Harris, an acting sergeant in the Royal Marines, asking for £70,000: ‘I know Faye has been offered a heck more than that. I am worth it because I was one of only two that didn’t crack.’ So the prospect of the money encourages one to denigrate others. It also penalises those, apparently including the Royal Marine lieutenant Felix Carman, who say that they will not take any money. Comradeship is far more important in the mentality of the armed services than overt patriotism. The mutual support of comrades is what saves their lives. Now the comradeship is broken.
2. The woman question. Leading Seaman Faye Turney did crack (as, in effect, did all of those captured). In captivity, she wrote a letter to Members of Parliament, which the Iranians published. It admitted that she and her companions had strayed into Iranian waters, though they hadn’t, and asked, ‘Isn’t it time for us to start withdrawing our forces from Iraq, and let them determine their own future?’ Nevertheless, it was Faye Turney who got the most money for her story. Presumably this was because she was a woman (and the mother of a three-year-old), and therefore of special interest. Turney told the Sun that she had supported Iran’s lie about the waters because ‘I knew it was my one chance of fulfilling a promise to Molly [her daughter] that I would be home for her birthday on 8 May’. So, by own account, her love of her child overcame her duty. That is very understandable, but what would happen in a war if everyone said they must give the enemy what they wanted in order to get home for their children’s birthdays? The implication is that this behaviour was permissible for Faye Turney because she is a woman. If women are excused in this way, the traditionalists must be right that their presence in dangerous jobs in the armed forces is a menace. So, far from 3. Media handling. No one, least of all newspapers, can say that it is necessarily wrong to pay for the stories of soldiers and sailors — where would our island story be without them? But problems can arise with the effect on military discipline and morale. That is why payment is normally allowed only for people who have left the forces. It is up to the authorities to consider the interests of the services in the matter, and then decide. Their decision here was wrong because it offended the families of dead servicemen. This has been pointed out. But it was also wrong because it allowed the money and media exclusivity to skew the presentation of the facts. When the sailors and marines were put up by the MoD to speak to the press at Chivenor, Faye Turney was absent, presumably because she was being bought by the Sun and ITV. She later said she had rejected higher offers because she preferred the Sun. Did the MoD encourage her towards the Sun? If so, why? How was the public — as opposed to Mr Blair’s — interest served by letting one tabloid paper have the best of the story? There was something particularly morally obtuse about the counter-argument that, because a small percentage of Faye Turney’s takings would go to her ship’s charity, everything was all right. To the world, it looked as if the MoD was trying to orchestrate its own set of lies to blast back at the lies of the Iranians. I am not so disillusioned that I believe this, but I can see why, outside this country, many people would. 4. The duty of care. In a way, Faye Turney and her companions are victims of the payment policy. For all our nastiness, the media are usually restrained in what we say about serving soldiers, sailors and airmen. We are aware that they do things which we would never dare do, and that the public respect them for it. We reserve most of our criticism for the top brass and the politicians. But once the captives, encouraged by the MoD, took the money, they lost this protection. If they accept fiveand sixfigure sums to talk about what they did, they can be attacked for their words and actions. The line of Faye Turney and others that ‘we had no choice’ but to kowtow to Iran is not true. They had a hard choice, but one which other British servicemen, at other times, have made differently. Now they can be criticised for making that choice. The premise on which the press pays so much money for such stories is that the people telling them are ‘heroes’. But now we have read them, we can see that they are not heroic at all. In fact, no one could think well of Faye Turney after her interviews. The MoD have encouraged the sailors to humiliate themselves.
5. The state of the navy. It is comforting to speak, as I have, of the MoD, because that suggests mere bureaucrats; but it is clear that the original capture, the propaganda broadcasts from Iran, and the selling of the stories are more to do with the Royal Navy itself, and the quality of those who serve in it, than with any decision in Whitehall. There is always great service rivalry, and people in the army have not been slow to gloat, but unfortunately the gloating appears to be justified. The navy looks incompetent in action and weak in esprit de corps. I don’t remember thinking that about any of our armed services ever before in my life. Twenty-five years ago, their conduct in the Falklands proved exactly the opposite. Today, something really bad is happening, and it is a problem that runs deeper than the defects of New Labour.
At least we are not dealing with a completely unprecedented problem, though: ‘I must say that I think that an officer serving in a campaign should not write letters [i.e., articles] for the newspapers or express strong opinions of how the operations are carried out.’ This was the Prince of Wales writing in 1898 to a soldier who had sold his story of the battle of Omdurman to the Morning Post. The soldier’s name was Winston Churchill.
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