AND ANOTHER THING
When the nut-cutlet brigade start snapping at the heels of Achilles
PAUL JOHNSON
Once you look at it in detail, the Guardian's campaign against senior com- manders in our armed services enjoying what it calls their 'millionaire lifestyle' is not impressive. Its sandal-clad readers in NW3, who exist on a meagre diet of nut- cutlets and parsnip cordial, plus generous helpings of envy, class-warfare and self- righteousness, may think it outrageous that the Second Sea Lord should have domestic staff costing the taxpayer £173,200 a year and that £63,000 was spent in 1993 on maintenance of 'his £500,000 home'.
But the dreary reality behind these large sums is that the 'home' does not belong to the Admiral at all. It is an unlovable official residence in which he has no equity, relin- quished instantly he is retired from service. The choice, upkeep and furnishing of these dumps is festooned with bureaucratic red tape of every kind and staffing is deter- mined by the personnel department. The provision of official quarters for officers is a snare. It encourages delusions of grandeur and discourages them from buy- ing a house of their own.
Once they are bowler-hatted they come crashing down to earth with a bump and often find themselves in financial trouble, as countless angry old salts and dugouts in Bath, Cheltenham and Tunbridge Wells will tell you. But who listens to them? As Mary Crawford sighed in Mansfield Park, there is nothing more tedious than retired admirals with a grievance, and she knew all about it, having been brought up surrounded, as she was pleased to put it, `by vices and rears'.
My guess is that the brass hats, if fairly polled, would show a large majority in favour of ending the official residence sys- tem, in exchange for a fair housing allowance for overseas postings. In the United Kingdom, senior officers are often stuck in inconvenient historic quarters, cas- tles or forts, which cost the earth to main- tain and clean, and are no more a home than the Mansion House. Giving a brass hat an official residence is an excuse for keeping up the dreary round of duty enter- taining and landing the harassed C-in-C with countless unwanted dinners, recep- tions, and cocktail parties in honour of ministers and bureaucrats, tiresome for- eigners, municipal worthies, minor royalty and, not least, visiting MPs, who are the loudest in protesting at any lack of hospital- ity and the first to complain about its cost, as in this instance. You'd have thought that the Guardian, with its vaunted concern for women, would have had something to say about the role of the wives in this nonsense. They are com- pelled by their marital status to serve as unpaid housekeepers of these official prop- erties as well as providing free hostess ser- vices for endless government entertaining. They get no thanks, not even a gong after 40 years' unpaid work. Diplomatic wives are in the same position, which is becoming increasingly humiliating. Most of these women have to abandon their careers as soon as their husbands are posted abroad. The higher their status the heavier their unpaid work and the less likely it is they can earn even pocket-money. They will not put up with the system for much longer, that's for sure, and a 'progressive' newspa- per ought to be looking into their plight, instead of niggling about the wages of the door-keeper at Portsmouth's Admiralty House.
What worries me more is whether we offer sufficient financial incentives to clever youngsters to join the services. As any stu- dent of the Falklands campaign can tell you, the amount of technical expertise a successful commander must now possess is awesome, in addition to all the traditional qualities of valour, dash and cerebral fire- works. With even a Conservative govern- ment shamefully starving the services, and with the threat to civilisation from savage and heavily armed predator-states increas- ing, we have never been more in need of the best and the brightest to put in charge of such defences as we still possess.
Our forebears had more sense. One rea- son Britain used to count for so much in the world — and ruled a quarter of its sur- face as recently as when I was a boy — is that brilliant, ambitious men could still secure glittering prizes with their swords quite literally in the case of naval prize- money, which transformed penniless cap- tains and admirals into millionaires. The two frigate captains who took the Spanish `How can Cain get a fair trial with all this publicity?' treasure-ship Hermione in 1762 received £65,000 each, about £13 million in today's money; every lieutenant involved in the action became a rich man. In those days Parliament took a more generous view of military prowess. It gave John Duke of Marlborough, the most expensive palace ever built in Britain ('We have nothing like it', as George III later acknowledged). His widow, instead of eking out a pittance, as do general's ladies now, was — as Winston Churchill put it — 'the richest woman alive in any country, having at least £40,000 a year in the commanding currency of those days'. Likewise, Parliament bought the princely estate of Stratfield Saye for £263,000 and presented it to the Duke of Wellington. His prize-money for Waterloo alone was £60,000, of which he magnani- mously returned two-thirds to the Treasury. The nation thought it absolutely right that its greatest living soldier should live in Aps- ley House, postal address 'Number One, London'.
Even as late as the first world war, Parlia- ment was still setting up generals and admi- rals as landed noblemen. Douglas Haig, by no means a great commander, was not only given the OM and an earldom (having turned down a viscountcy as inadequate), but voted by Parliament the sum of £100,000, worth £20 million today. A public subscription presented him with his ances- tral estate of Bermersyde as a bonus. I am not suggesting we should do this kind of thing now. But we ought to recognise, as all our recent military experiences prove, that our armed services are now the most effi- cient, as well as far-stretched, in our histo- ry, run by an exceptionally accomplished, self-effacing and dedicated group of men. While ministers, politicians and journalists are seen as guttersnipes by the public, and even the royal family and the judiciary — not to speak of the episcopate — are now held in low esteem, our service comman- ders somehow, and justly, contrived to keep their lustre.
Until recently, that is. The horrible Max Clifford, in conjunction with a Spanish har- lot, managed to bring low an air marshal who behaved, it must be said, no worse than the Iron Duke — and now the left- wing media is presenting the entire military hierarchy as greedy parasites. It is a mon- strous injustice and I wish someone who carries more weight than I do would rise to their defence.
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