The Man Who Would Be a Peer: General Sir Richard Dannatt

Plenty of Tories are, it seems, cock-a-hoop about the news, still to be confirmed, that General Sir Richard Dannatt is to be elevated to the House of Lords where he will become a Tory defence adviser and, perhaps, a minister in the next Conservative government. And, in fairness, one can see why the Conservatives would be so pleased. There’s no-one on the Labour benches who brings as much firepower to the political battlefield as General Dannatt.

Yet if the government’s criticisms of General Dannatt were, at times, unseemly then so too was his very public dissension from (aspects of)  government policy at a time when he was, after all, in charge of implementing that policy. General Dannatt thought little of stepping outside the chain-of-command. If nothing else this set a precedent that the Conservatives may find troubling once they are responsible for foreign and defence policy. After all, the Tories have declined to “ring-fence” the defence budget, making one wonder just how they will provide all the “necessary resources” the army says it needs.