War news: With Lord Robertson, a proper Labour patriot, having accused Sir Keir Starmer of ‘corrosive complacency’ on defence, how did the defence select committee pass the morning? It obliged the heads of the Navy, Army and RAF to spend two hours discussing women’s rights.
World War Three could be a trigger finger away but our top brass had cleared their diaries to discuss period products and ‘role-model positive behaviours’.
Committee chairman Tan Dhesi (Lab, Slough), dim as dawn, knew he could not entirely ignore the Robertson thunderbolt. He therefore asked one v. brisk question about it at the start. Jesse Norman (Con, Hereford) later tried to return to it but Mr Dhesi said women’s rights should not be sidelined by a mere war. Defence minister Louise Jones sat alongside the gold-braided defence chiefs. She didn’t much fancy commenting on the Robertson hoo-hah.
When Mr Dhesi gently raised it she started licking her lips, as if about to be sick. Ms Jones stiffly leaned her head towards her right shoulder and jabbered, ‘Of course I’ve got a great deal of respect for Lord Robertson’. (This was blurted twice). She continued: ‘We are progressing at pace. We’re working very hard.’ Looking, as football managers say, for positives, she added: ‘It’s great that people are urging us to go further and faster.’
Then she closed her eyes to signal that there would be no further reference, please, to the apostate Robertson. Mr Dhesi was happy to drop the matter. Seconds later we were on to Ms Jones’s ‘personal journey’ as an intelligence officer a decade ago.
The First Sea Lord, Gen Sir Gwyn Jenkins, insisted ‘We’re all gripped by the significance of this’. By ‘this’ he meant the women’s-rights whatnot, not the piffling old war.
Sir Gwyn’s interest was understandable given that his predecessor as First Sea Lord abandoned ship after hanky-panky with a junior officer. Chasing the ratings is not encouraged these days. Unless you work at the BBC.
Smooth-talker Sir Gwyn had docked himself beside the minister. To his left hovered Air Chief Marshal Harv Smyth, surely the first Chief of the Air Staff to be called Harv. On the minister’s other flank lurked Gen Sir Roly Walker, DSO, Chief of the General Staff, a short, gritty figure sporting a cut on his hooter – a wound quite possibly sustained while galloping over, or through, a hawthorn hedge on some hunter.
Ex-SAS officer Sir Roly squinted at the committee like a chap scanning enemy positions. He put up a bit of a blooper by suggesting women’s rights were ‘not the most important thing’ in military life at present. He also became entangled in a minor skirmish with Michelle Scrogham (Lab, Barrow & Furness), mainly because she spoke softly and Sir Roly – who was once blown up in an armoured car by Johnny Taliban, playing buggery with his eardrums – couldn’t hear the fella.
Further difficulties arose when Sir Roly suggested to the MPs that one reason the Army still had trouble persuading male recruits not to make improper advances (military term) on female colleagues was that society at large is infested by sex maniacs. However, you do not become an SAS man without learning to extract yourself from mortal peril and Sir Roly eventually persuaded the MPs that his heart was in the right place.
Fred Thomas (Lab, Plymouth Moor View) caused a ripple of interest by noting that the Royal Marines’ Commando base at Lympstone, Devon, is nowadays a hotbed of God-bothering, with Marines being christened in a water tank in the chapel.
Sir Gwyn, aware that the British political establishment doesn’t do God, claimed to have no knowledge of this.
A Whitehall ‘conduct, equity and justice’ woman leapt in to stress that today’s MoD also now employs ‘non-religious chaplains’, as well has having Muslims and Jews. ‘It’s a broad church,’ she gassed.
Given the size of the fleet, the baptism tank may be the closest some Marines get to the water.
