Toy soldiers: politicians in uniform

Sir Keir Starmer visited a NATO base in Estonia this week, was given a camouflage jacket to keep him warm, and some people are furious about it...

With Christmas looming, Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, headed to the snowy Baltic region this week, to visit NATO personnel serving close by the border with Russia. The alliance has among its resources at highest readiness eight Enhanced Forward Presence battlegroups, multi-national units ranging in size from around 1,000 personnel to more than 11,600 and deployed along or behind NATO’s eastern frontier.

The United Kingdom leads the EFP battlegroup in Estonia, known by the Ministry of Defence as Operation CABRIT, and around 900 British soldiers of 1st Battalion, The Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, make up the bulk of the battlegroup. The rest of the force is made up of 300 personnel from 1er Régiment Étranger de Génie, an engineer unit of the French Foreign Legion, a contingent of Estonian soldiers. The battlegroup is based at Tapa, the country’s largest military facility, so it was natural that Starmer should make a courtesy call on the British soldiers there. With him was John Healey, MP for Wentworth and Dearne, who has been shadow defence secretary since Starmer took over the party leadership; he was a junior minister for nine years under Blair and Brown and, while he is a relatively low-key politician in presentational terms, he has performed extremely well to manoeuvre Labour into a position in which it is trusted to approach defence seriously but has avoided having to make major concrete commitments.

The visit to Tapa gave Starmer the opportunity to make a few broad policy points. He described Vladimir Putin as a “real and constant threat to Europe”, and stressed that the UK and its allies “need to be prepared [and] need to deter” Russian expansionism. The armed forces were, he said, “standing tall in the face of Putin’s aggression”, a “beacon of hope and freedom”. He and Healey reiterated Labour’s support for Ukraine, though it is worth noting that Starmer, like the prime minister, has not committed to an additional £2.6 billion in military assistance which the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has requested.

This is all standard fare. Predictable, anodyne remarks, everything designed to reassure and present Starmer as a leader in waiting, a serious figure who will slip seamlessly into high office. Then something curious happened. Starmer was pictured wearing a camouflage jacket, obviously lent to him by his hosts—it carried the flashes of 1 Fusilers and the EFP Battlegroup—as it is cold and wintry in Estonia. This led to an extraordinary outburst from Ross Clark in The Daily Telegraph, who penned a furious article under the headline “Keir Starmer is a disgrace for wearing military clothes”.

Something had touched a nerve. Clark seemed to think that Starmer was cosplaying some kind of generalissimo, raging that “you are a Labour leader auditioning to be PM; you are not leading a military junta”. The costume was “laughable”, but also (this seemed a stretch to me) flew in the face of supposedly progressive anxieties about “cultural appropriation”. Of course, there was a cynical political calculation at work, Clark continued.

Labour’s strategists know that defence is traditionally one of Labour’s weak points and they want to get the message across that their leader is pretty tough.

Before he concluded, he noted witheringly:

There is no point in wearing camouflage indoors, either. It is there to help make you blend into the grass and bushes, not concrete. 

This might have had some validity, except that the jacket in question had been worn outdoors too. But even then its camouflage qualities were suspect, as shades of green will not conceal you in the snowy fields of Estonia.

At first I thought this was something that had simply irritated Clark on a day when he happened to have a column to fill and a deadline looming. But the narrative—that Starmer is somehow pretending to be something he is not—has taken hold in parts of the social media universe. Martin Daubney, a former Brexit Party MEP for six months, who now presents a show for GB News, endorsed Clark’s sentiment and said that many veterans had told him the same thing.

All this ‘politicians wearing soldier fancy dress’ business really sticks in the craw. This cos-play has hit the roof since Zelensky came on the scene.

Daubney is not a wholly unbiased source. Once a leading light of the “lads’ mag” scene, he found himself in the Brexit Party for long enough to sit in the European Parliament and stand for Westminster in the 2019 general election. He then drifted to Laurence Fox’s Reclaim Party, of which he was deputy leader for 11 months, representing it in the North Shropshire by-election on December 2021. For the last year, he has been an anchor for GB News.

Another to wade in was journalist Mark Seddon, who tweeted that Starmer’s “wearing military gear” was “absurd posturing”. He went on to point out that his own father had served in the army and was entitled to wear uniform “but would prefer not to”. Seddon’s attack is more like friendly fire; he worked for Gordon Brown during the 1992 general election, served on Brown’s Economic Policy Commission after 1997 and was a long-time member of the Labour Party’s National Executive Committee. He has, however, become disillusioned with Starmer’s régime, castigating him for lacking “verve, colour, charisma, inner steel and morality”.

James Melville also aimed a barb at the Labour leader. “Ooh you’re hard”, he tweeted mockingly, before lamenting the “absolute state” of Starmer. Melville is more difficult to categorise. Founder and managing director of marketing consultancy East Points West, he advertises himself as a “liberal” and has written for the impeccably progressive Byline Times, as well as Qatari media brand Al Jazeera.

These are not tiny squalls among political obsessives. Seddon has 20,000 followers on X (formerly known as Twitter), Daubney nearly 150,000 while Melville is not far shy of half a million followers. They are clearly tapping into to some kind of vein of irritation, and even if I think it’s absurd—and, as I will explain, I do—that on its own is not enough to say comfortably it can just be ignored.

There are three points I want to look at in this regard. The first is the simplest, and, in truth, if you are short of time, it pretty much settles the matter anyway: Starmer borrowed a jacket. That’s it, that’s the story. He was in Estonia, where the temperature is hovering around the freezing mark, and his hosts, a military unit, gave him a jacket to wear. Unsurprisingly, the jacket available was a camouflage one, with the emblems of the British Army battalion and the UK-led NATO battlegroup on it. Granted, the green camouflage would be effective neither indoors nor outside, but everyone else is wearing it too (and actually it is quite rare for soldiers to wear all-white snow camouflage, as it’s only really effective in thick, long-lasting and reliable snowfall). So Starmer put on a jacket against the cold. He was not apeing Admiral-General Haffaz Aladeen in The Dictator.

If we really need to continue, we can point to any number of politicians, Conservative as well as Labour, who have for one reason or another been photographed wearing some kind of military clothing, often, like Starmer, a camouflage jacket. This point has already been made on social media, but guilty parties include Rishi Sunak, Liz Truss, Boris Johnson, Margaret Thatcher, Jim Callaghan and, perhaps most iconically, Michael Heseltine. The last was defence secretary from 1983 to 1986 and his camouflage-wearing was so striking that Spitting Image put his puppet in a similar jacket; it made him grow into the nickname “Tarzan”, though that had initially been given to him in the early 1970s by his Labour shadow, Stanley Clinton-Davis, on the grounds of his apparent resemblance to Johnny Weissmuller.

Another contemporary politicians who has often been seen in camouflage is Ben Wallace, who retired recently after four years as defence secretary. He seems to be avoiding very much fallout from the row over Starmer, perhaps because he actually was a regular soldier for seven years, serving as a subaltern in the Scots Guards and being mentioned in dispatches for his conduct in Northern Ireland. Wallace’s familiarity and ease with soldiers showed whenever he was in a military setting, and he adopted that kind of brisk, bluff brightness that Sandhurst tends to instil in junior officers.

Former military personnel are relatively numerous in the House of Commons at the moment, though it is striking that the overwhelming majority of them are on the Conservative benches. (A notable exception is Dan Jarvis, the Labour MP for Barnsley Central: he served in the Parachute Regiment for nearly 15 years, served in both Afghanistan and Iraq, was a staff officer at the Permanent Joint Headquarters at Northwood and retired a major, having been awarded an MBE.) In the main, those Tory MPs who have been in the armed forces have had commendable but middle-of-the-road careers, but there are one or two exceptions.

Bob Stewart, MP for Beckenham since 2010, is the highest-ranking veteran in the Commons. He served in the army for nearly 30 years and reached the rank of colonel, being awarded the Distinguished Service Order in 1993 for his leadership as United Nations Commander in Bosnia Herzegovina. In that role he developed a recognisable media profile as a straightforward, no-nonsense communicator whose obvious sincerity struck a chord with the public. His reaction to the aftermath of the massacre of more than 100 Bosnian Muslims by Croat forces at Ahmići in April 1993 was particularly affecting: elements of 1st Battalion, The Cheshire Regiment, which he commanded, discovered the scene and you can see the shock and anger in him as he tries to uncover what has happened.

Tom Tugendhat, the Home Office security minister, was commissioned into the Adjutant General’s Corps as a Territorial in 2003 but very quickly transferred to the Intelligence Corps. Over the following decade he served in Afghanistan and Iraq, advised on the creation of the Afghan National Security Council and was military assistant to General Sir David Richards as chief of the Defence Staff. He was promoted to lieutenant colonel in 2013 and awarded the Volunteer Reserves Service Medal after 10 years in the Territorial Army, after being awarded the MBE in 2010.

This brings me to the third point, which I think lies underneath the superficial screeching about Starmer and his camouflage clothing. It is about authenticity and pretension. I said that Ben Wallace’s wearing of military clothing tended to pass without comment, and I do think that was because he had, as it were, walked the walk as a regular officer. By contrast, the public is sensitive to politicians who try to appropriate reputation, achievement or renown which they have not earned.

Let me be very clear: I don’t think for a moment this is what Starmer was trying to do. He wore a borrowed jacket in a cold country: to imagine he wanted people to think he had some kind of military background is absurd, especially as his professional career, as a human rights lawyer and then as director of public prosecutions, is very well known. I am quite happy to accept that Starmer and Healey visited Estonia at least in part to reinforce the image that the Labour Party is “sound” on defence, but the heavy lifting in that regard has already been done. It was a difficult subject under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, given his long-standing opposition to NATO, support for nuclear disarmament and willingness to give a hearing to almost any country which was anti-American, and Healey knows this. “Labour will never go into an election again not trusted on national security,” he said earlier this year.

Healey’s work should not be underestimated. In 2019, Labour lagged 25 points behind the Conservatives on defence and security, and by the time Starmer was elected to replace Corbyn in April 2020 that had opened further to 30 points. Earlier this year the difference had closed to six points, and had been as small as three; effectively within the statistical margins of error. This was achieved against Wallace as the incumbent defence secretary, affable and well-regarded, and in the context of the war in Ukraine, in which British support for President Zelenskyy had allowed UK ministers to strike heroic poses and talk of grave but impressive military matters.

So I think Starmer’s purpose was a relatively minor reinforcement of this message, more part of a broader effort to make him look like a plausible head of government. Any leader of the opposition must always think, on some level, “do I look the part?”, which is to say, are they the sort of person whom the voters can credibly imagine being prime minister. It was a relentless challenge for Jeremy Corbyn, and a hurdle which, for example, Iain Duncan Smith and probably William Hague never cleared (though both would go on to hold senior cabinet posts under David Cameron). It was also a charge often levelled at Neil Kinnock in his earlier years as Labour leader, and at Michael Foot.

Starmer has a little more weight, not least because of his former career. He a youngish-looking 61-year-old, which is a good balance, and he seems the very antithesis of recklessness. His image is certainly still problematic (I wrote in City AM this week that his favourability rating is dire except in comparison to Rishi Sunak’s, which is even worse, and a significant proportion of the electorate doesn’t know what he stands for nor does it trust him). But, for all of Boris Johnson’s sub-Wodehousian jibes—“Captain Crasheroonie Snoozefest” was a particularly cringe-inducing low—Starmer has never looked simply miscast.

I think Ross Clark was absolutely wrong in his splenetic fury about Starmer’s jacket, and he speaks for a group largely, but not exclusively, on the right who will criticise Starmer whatever he does. The public large is, I suspect, more generous, more indulgent and, perhaps, more cynical. There may have been some sarcastic eye rolls at Starmer supposedly seeking the mantle of Action Man, but they will have greeted Boris Johnson when he visited Ukrainian soldiers being trained in North Yorkshire in July 2022, donning a camoflage smock and posing with a variety of weapons. Equally, when Liz Truss, then foreign secretary, visited British forces in Estonia in November 2021, she posed in the turret of a Challenger 2 main battle tank, wearing a helmet and camouflage body armour; inevitably comparisons were drawn with Margaret Thatcher’s famous 1986 photo opportunity in a tank in Fallingbostel, West Germany, and inferences made about Truss’s leadership ambitions. However, a degree of albeit weary indulgence remained.

There is no great tradition of military coups or juntas in the United Kingdom. Oliver Cromwell, of course, used his position of strength in the Council of Officers to dissolve the Rump Parliament and the Council of State in 1653, going on to take effective monarchical authority as Lord Protector. Equally, George Monck used the power of army units under his control to open the way for the restoration of Charles II in the summer of 1660, though he did not seize power for himself. Once the king was on the throne, Monck was created Duke of Albemarle, sworn of the Privy Council and sent to Dublin as Lord Deputy of Ireland.

Since the 17th century, however, the military has respected the authority of the civil power. During both world wars, the chiefs of staff remained very firmly under the control of the government; even the appointment of Field Marshal Earl Kitchener as secretary of state for war in August 1914 was not a surrender of direction to a generalissimo. He was certainly regarded as secretive and high-handed within the War Office, but was no challenge even to the leadership of the weary and increasingly drink-sodden H.H. Asquith. During the Second World War, Winston Churchill drove some of his military advisers to distraction with his wayward and impulsive decision-making. General Sir Alan Brooke, chief of the Imperial General Staff from 1941, called him “quite the most difficult man to work with that I have ever struck”, but in truth he was the only senior general able to manage the prime minister, and was always in a position of subservience. Churchill summed up their relationship with superficial exasperation but profound affection.

When I thump the table and push my face towards him what does he do? Thumps the table harder and glares back at me. I know these Brookes—stiff-necked Ulstermen and there’s no one worse to deal with than that!

Perhaps this easy separation of civil and military, which we take for granted, is a result of the mediating influence of the monarchy. Sailors, soldiers and airmen are, after all, loyal to the crown rather than the specific government of the day, and the Royal Family always has strong and extensive ties to the armed forces, its leading members often wearing uniform.

Oddly, Winston Churchill almost alone of British prime ministers was often pictured in military uniform. He had served in the army, graduating from Sandhurst and being commissioned into the 4th Queen’s Own Hussars in 1895. He then used his contacts in London to switch to the 21st Lancers (Empress of India’s) so that he could participate in Kitchener’s campaign in Sudan, though, bizarrely, he managed also to be an accredited journalist for The Morning Post; embedded journalists indeed. He then returned briefly to active service after resigning from the cabinet in 1915. Briefly attached to 2nd Battalion, The Grenadier Guards on the Western Front, Churchill was then promoted to lieutenant colonel and given command of 6th Battalion, The Royal Scots Fusiliers, stationed near Ploegsteert in Belgium.

Always fond of a costume and a pose, Churchill wore a number of different uniforms during the war. In 1939, he was appointed Honorary Air Commodore of 615 (County of Surrey) Fighter Squadron in the Royal Auxiliary Air Force, and sometimes wore the uniform which accompanied the position. In 1941, he was named Colonel of his old cavalry regiment, the 4th Queens’s Own Hussars. In addition, he was Honorary Colonel, 4th/5th (Cinque Ports) Battalion, The Royal Sussex Regiment. So he had plenty of choice. He wore the uniform of the Hussars in Egypt and Italy, and of the Royal Sussex at Yalta, Berlin and Potsdam. Yet there was never any question that he remained a civilian, that his authority was that of the King’s first minister, appointed because he commanded a majority in the House of Commons, and this was given its most eloquent expression when he left Downing Street in July 1945, having been defeated at the general election. As the great man is supposed to have remarked, “The people have spoken. The bastards.”

I’ve come a long way from Sir Keir Starmer wearing a camouflage jacket. My smaller point was that I think he was doing very little more than putting on an outer layer against snowy weather. The broader issue is, though, significant. The fears of a creeping militarisation of British politics simply doesn’t ring true. (The notion of a coup against Harold Wilson, first in 1968 and then in 1974, each time with an idea of installing Admiral of the Fleet Earl Mountbatten of Burma as a figurehead in his place, are notable for their rarity, and I may come back to the subject, but neither plot ever came anywhere close to a threatening degree of reality.)

This allows us to give our politicians a degree of leeway. Even when Winston Churchill attended international conferences in full military uniform, it was never regarded as sinister or inappropriate. We should be glad of this, as it is a freedom and a lack of worry which many countries do no have.

The United States Constitution was framed at least in part as a reaction against arbitrarily imposed military authority, and American political theorists still fret about civilian control of the military. Germany, of course, quite apart from its defining trauma of Nazism, had experienced considerable interference from the army in politics well before that; General Kurt von Schleicher became a very influential figure throughout the 1920s and reached his apogee as chancellor of Germany for just under two months in 1932-33 before he was succeeded by Adolf Hitler.

Meanwhile our French cousins, somehow characteristically, found itself with a reluctant soldier statesman: General Charles de Gaulle had been under-secretary of state for national defence and war for less than a fortnight when he arrived in Britain from France in 1940, was the only conceivable choice for chairman of the Provisional Government of the French Republic 1944-46 but waited until the crisis of 1958 to declare himself prepared to return to power if he was required. He brushed off accusations that he would be authoritarian by asking “Who honestly believes that, at age 67, I would start a career as a dictator?” He was appointed prime minister and minister of defence in June 1958, then won the presidential election of December that year and became 18th president of the French Republic. De Gaulle ruled for a decade, resigning in April 1969.

There is little generous levity in politics at the moment. We can be cynical, and we mock, but we do it with bitterness and a lack of affection. Here we should realise we are extraordinarily lucky to have a comfort zone: we can poke mild fun at Sir Keir Starmer if we like, imagine him zipping up his camouflage jacket and practising his “Blue Steel” expression as he looks solemnly into the middle distance. There is no harm in this. But we should do it with an essential kindness, do it knowing, because we do know, that there is no militaristic intent lurking under Starmer’s smooth, blank surface, no fever dreams of marching soldiers and waving flags. We can do this because our history is comfortingly free of government at the barrel of a gun. If we try to picture uniformed fascism on the streets of Britain, it is as likely to be Roderick Spode and his Black Shorts as the dystopian vision of Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta.

Keir Starmer went to Estonia. It was cold, snowy, the ground frozen hard. He put on a jacket given to him by his hosts. Maybe we can leave it at that.