What I really said to Gordon Brown: Field Marshal Lord Guthrie sets the record straight

A headline in the Mail on Sunday, taken up eagerly by the BBC’s Today programme, claimed recently: ‘The SAS is getting worried that not enough posh officers are applying for jobs.’ Having hooked those shocked by the thought that the SAS should draw such distinctions, as well as those appalled that oiks are applying at all, the piece actually went on to explain that one officer failed the selection because he ‘lacked the sophistication’ to be able to brief cabinet ministers on operations.

No lack of sophistication ever attached to Charles Guthrie. When, as head of school at Harrow, you’ve had tea with Winston Churchill in the headmaster’s study, planned the young Queen Elizabeth’s visit and then conducted her round the hill, a mere cabinet minister, or prime minister for that matter, is hardly going to faze you. Guthrie was an SAS captain at 27 and a squadron commander (major) at 29. He was also — he would say primarily — a guards officer. Urbanity was his trademark. This and formidable physical robustness combined to produce the idealised SAS officer, described in the MoS piece by one Hereford NCO as ‘confident, relaxed, bright and unflappable’.

And yet when the time came and he was given the choice of command of the Welsh Guards or the 22nd Special Air Service Regiment, he chose the former. What followed was the classic route to the top in Cold War days: a stint in the military operations branch of the MoD, command of an armoured brigade in BAOR and then a division, then back to the MoD as assistant chief of the general staff — about which he writes nothing, saying it was ‘dull’ (he has a low boredom threshold) — followed by command of the 1st British Corps and then Nato’s Northern Army Group, afterwards becoming CGS (head of the army) in 1994, and finally, in 1997, chief of the defence staff.