🚨 F O R C E S 🚨

Dogbox

On beating swords into ploughshares

They say that dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, however it is even sweeter and more decorous to not die for one’s country, and then having survived to bang on about it incessantly.

Yes readers, today we will examine the pernicious role that former (and possibly on occasion, fictitious) junior officers and NCOs play in our public life.

FORCES

From 1940 through to 1979, every British prime minister with the exception of Harold Wilson had served in the Army or Navy during the First or Second World War. Wilson’s exception is hardly dishonourable: having volunteered to join the military on the outbreak of war he was seconded to the wartime Ministry of Fuel and Power as a civilian expert economist and statistician, a job he performed with distinction. A majority of Thatcher’s first cabinet had war service (one in Korea, another in the Malayan Emergency, the rest in the Second World War) and those that did not had all served in the military during National Service excepting only Thatcher herself, for obvious reasons.

Despite the ubiquity of what Americans would call “combat veterans” in public life well into the 1980s, it was rare for a politician’s war service to be mentioned. A possible exception might be Edward Heath, who following a distinguished wartime service in which he was mentioned in despatches and appointed MBE, served as a Lieutenant Colonel in the Territorial Army (TA) concurrently with his career as a politician. As Prime Minister he also inspected troops wearing his regimental uniform (this was regarded as being rather déclassé). Prime Ministers and leaders of the opposition would wear their medals at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Day, but beyond that military service did not loom large in political discourse. The reason for that is rather obvious: Most men of military age during the First and Second World Wars and National Service thereafter served in the military, and so the mere fact of military service was not at all distinguishing.

In recent years, a much smaller, professional army has been deployed on several major operations of varying intensity, and this has produced a relatively select cadre of “veterans” with war service. From this small pool of steely-eyed-dealers-of-death (and TA Int Corps officers) the Conservative Party and latterly and increasingly even the Labour Party has fished, and the phenomenon of the FORCES MP has been born.

FORCES

It is difficult to say who the first FORCES MP was. Sometime TA SAS Trooper David Davis used to flash the occasional bit of ankle. Ian Duncan Smith (late of the SCOTS GUARDS) briefly tried to play up his military credentials, but at the time no one was much interested, and controversies over other CV embellishments made by Conservative Central Office, made the naturally wooden IDS become increasingly diffident when talking about his background. We must therefore probably trace the genesis of FORCES MPs back to the 2005 intake.

The class of ’05 saw (among others) the election of Tobias Ellwood, Ben Wallace, and for the Labour Party, Dan Jarvis. Ellwood, late the R GREEN JACKETS, and currently serving as an officer in the Army Reserves (as the TA is now known) is easily one of the least intelligent men in Parliament. In the early days of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine he called for the RAF to establish a “No-Fly Zone” over Ukraine, which is a circuitous way of saying he wanted everyone reading this article to be embraced within the soothing arms of an atomically induced pyroclastic surge. Ellwood’s 5 year military career was sufficient to secure him several junior ministerial positions in the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign Office before his appointment as Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee where he became an ornament of the Mother of Parliaments, issuing selfie-stick videos praising the Taliban, and encouraging them to adopt solar energy and be wary of the Chinese.

Readers may recall the near-spherical ex-Scots Guards officer Ben Wallace, who was rarely seen without his Brigade of Guards tie, and who despite rising to the high office of Defence Secretary, and once being touted as a potential candidate for the leadership of the Conservative Party, is most famous for something or other that abruptly meant that he no longer felt that he should run, for whatever reason.

Dan Jarvis (late the PARAS) was at one time the Great White Hope for Labour centrists, who hoped their creed of wan managerialism could be reinvigorated if delivered by a muscular FORCES man. Jarvis turned out to be something of a damp squib, but if he baptised with water, the one who would follow him (who we will get on to later) will baptise with fire and the Holy Spirit.

What distinguishes this intake of MPs as the first FORCES MPs is that they were the first generation of parliamentary candidates to really stress their military credentials in their public personas and campaign literature, with their leaflets and websites festooned with pictures of them in uniform.

From left to right: Photo from Tobias Ellwood’s website, Ben Wallace giving a speech in an MTP smock worn over a lounge suit, photo from Dan Jarvis’ website.

But why was 2005 ripe for the birth of the FORCES MP , where 2001 had been barren for IDS?

The answer lies ultimately in a change made to British Army counter-insurgency doctrine. After a relatively poor showing in Mandatory Palestine in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War the British Army developed into one of the most effective counterinsurgency forces the world had ever seen. Officers like Gerald Templer and Frank Kitson used the opportunities provided by conflicts of decolonisation in Aden, Kenya, Cyprus, Malaya, Borneo and Oman to improvise and prove a system of “low intensity warfare” based upon using intelligence and special forces to identify, capture and coopt insurgents, and use them to kill or capture their erstwhile colleagues. This system reached its apotheosis in Northern Ireland, where half the leadership of the PIRA ended up dead or in prison, with most of the rest being on Britain’s payroll. However, it came to be recognised that this doctrine of counterinsurgency warfare was not politically correct and could not be reconciled with our national commitment to universal Human Rights. As such, for the conflicts in Afghanistan (2001-2014) and Iraq (2003-2011), the British Army developed a new doctrine.

This radical new departure in the British Army’s approach to counterinsurgency warfare emphasised loading up highly trained soldiers with roughly 100 lbs (or £5,000) of kit and equipment and sending them out to perform “ground dominating” foot patrols. The advantage of this tactic was that the presence of Friendly Forces (FF) might RESTRICT the Freedom of Movement (FoM) of Insurgents (INS) and DENY them the opportunity to PROJECT Shadow Governance (SH GOV) and therefore ISOLATE them from Local National (LN) population whilst positively INFLUENCING LN perceptions of security provision by Host Nation Security Forces (HNSF). The disadvantage of this tactic was that British soldiers kept getting blown apart by roadside bombs.

Every time a recipient of the modern equivalent of two thousand pounds of education was dropped to the modern equivalent of a ten-rupee jezail they were sent home (at vast expense of time and steam) in a Union Flag adorned pine box, which was delivered to RAF Brize Norton. Following a sombre ramp-ceremony at Brize, the coffins would be loaded onto hearses and driven to wherever the funerals were to take place. By accident of geography, this meant that the hearses had to drive through the small Wiltshire town of Wooton Basset, and soon local residents took to lining the streets in order to pay their respects to the fallen.

Now the British public has always had a somewhat ambivalent attitude towards squaddies and the Army. Prior to the twin wars of Iraq and Afghanistan the TA was perceived as a club for weirdos (see Gareth from the Office and Mike from Spaced) and the Regular Army was regarded as an extension of the Borstal system and an employer of last resort. But ‘it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Tommy, go away”’ and ‘It’s “Thank you, Mister Atkins,” when the band begins to play’. And so, when the band did begin to play, and the hearses started to parade weekly down Wooton Basset high street the British public started to react with straight forward patriotism. Charities like Help for Heroes grew up, their rubber bracelets becoming ubiquitous. Every week at Prime Ministers Questions it became customary for the Prime Minister, Leader of the Opposition, and Leader of the Liberal Democrats to pay tribute (in saccharine American style) to the latest recruits to the ghostly host of the Glorious Dead. And it should of course be remembered that this feeling was not just confined to the political mainstream. Tommy Robinson’s English Defence League (EDL) was formed in direct response to the Islamist Group Ahlus Sunnah wal Jamaah demonstrating against 1^st Battalion the Royal Anglian Regiment’s homecoming parade through Luton, following their 2008 deployment to Afghanistan.

It was in this context of extraordinary goodwill towards the military that the FORCES MP was born.

After the 2015 election the shining bounds of FORCES MPs did increase, with the significant additions of Penny Mordaunt and Tom Tugendhat.

Whilst Penny Mordaunt had no military experience when elected, once elected as MP for the naval constituency of Portsmouth North she decided to join her local Royal Naval Reserves unit as an Officer Cadet, and undergo training towards becoming a Royal Naval Reserves officer. Despite her failure ever to satisfactorily complete her commissioning course she was nonetheless appointed to the acting rank of Sub-Lieutenant and had fun dressing up in a naval uniform and inserting the word “cock” into Parliamentary speeches as a Mess dare. After 5 years without successfully commissioning, she was placed onto a reserve list requiring her to perform no further training, before she was eventually appointed to the honorary (senior) rank of Commander, and then Captain. Mordaunt’s moderately attractive appearance and her buxom (if expansive) figure, combined with her naval uniform made her irresistible bate for the horny old bastards (your dad) who read the Daily Telegraph, and for that reason alone she was consistently tipped as a Conservative Leadership hopeful, despite being functionally illiterate and being one of Parliament’s chief champions of wokish transgender nonsense.

Tugendhat is an even more interesting and egregious case. A major public schoolboy and son of a High Court Judge, who missed out on Oxbridge proper, Tugendhat eventually managed to get into Cambridge for post graduate study in Arabic, before working for an Arabic language newspaper in Lebanon. Tugendhat then obtained a TA commission into the (rather obscure) Educational and Training Services (ETS) branch of the Adjutant General’s Corps, before transferring to the Intelligence Corps and (most probably) performing a tour of Iraq as a seconded Arabic linguists to the SBS, the slightly less known but equally elite cousins of the SAS. It is extremely unusual for a TA Int Corps subaltern to have provided close support to a “Tier 1” (as the Americans would say) special forces unit, and the author would love to be able to out the awful Tugendhat as a Walt. However, all the available evidence strongly points to Tugendhat being the real deal.

This is unfortunate, because he is probably the most vulgar of the FORCES MPs when it comes to discussing his service. Produced below are two Tugendhat quotes, the first from Hansard following Biden’s Afghan rug-pull, and the second from an interview with the Times where he describes a conversation he had with a Helicopter pilot.

“Like many veterans, this last week has been one that has seen me struggle through anger, and grief, and rage. The feeling of abandonment of not just a country but the sacrifice that my friends made. I’ve been to funerals from Poole to Dunblane. I’ve watched good men go into the earth, taking with them a part of me and a part of all of us”

The first quote is so disgustingly sententious you might imagine it must have been uttered by an American in a TV movie. The US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 was a catastrophically and wantonly incontinent strategic error which directly led to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Iran’s conflict with Israel, but Tugendhat managed to personalise it to remind us all that he was in the Army. British soldiers traditionally go where they’re told in order to kill the King’s Enemy. They do not require any philosophical commitment or an outlook on international politics. To paint them as ideological crusaders and use their deaths to blackmail the public for yet more war is simply ghoulish.

Then the second quote:

“Were you in the first or second helicopter.’

‘I was flying the second one.’

‘Well your mini gunner nearly killed us. Luckily he’s a crap shot.’

That night we went to the bar and he bought the first round. I was standing next to the bar and he said: ‘Your round next.’

I said: ‘No mate, it’s your round forever. Because you tried to kill me and failed.’”

Could have been lifted from an unused script from Garth Merenghi’s Darkplace. What a Tugendtwat.

In the 2019 and 2024 intakes the ranks of the FORCES MPs were swollen yet further. A joyful omission from this crop was Tory twitter extraordinaire Ed McGuinness, a former Royal Artillery officer who served in Afghanistan after combat operations had ceased, but who cannot go five minutes without mentioning his time in the army. He was selected to contest a Tory safe seat and failed to win it. He was not the first McGuinness to fail to take up a seat in Parliament, but at least his namesake was able to win his. But McGuinness’s failure bucked the trend of the rise of FORCES MPs, and now seemingly half the Labour Party are ex-Int Corps officers. In all, approximately 40 arses on the green benches belong to FORCES MP, meaning they vastly overrepresent the number of British people who have served in the armed forces.

Joining the commons in 2024 was Alistair Carns DSO OBE MC, who may yet redeem the centrist promise for a messiah Dan Jarvis failed to fulfil. Carns had a seriously impressive military career. He joined the Royal Marines in the ranks straight from school but was identified as having officer potential and was subsequently commissioned. Few details of his career are known because he appears to have spent most of it serving in the SBS, whose activities are necessarily secret. That said, it is known that he was awarded the Military Cross (an award for gallantry) as well as a DSO (an award for exemplary leadership in combat). Prior to resigning from the Marines to contest a parliamentary seat he was due to be promoted to the senior rank of Brigadier, and he was probably the most decorated serving officer in the entire British military when he did so. Unsurprisingly, Carns was made an Armed Forces Minister in Keir Starmer’s government.

But a question hovers over Carns. It has been reported that a significant number of operators in D and G squadrons, 22 SAS, have resigned due to being hounded by lawyers conducting war crimes investigations with the government’s blessing, with over 120 active SAS personnel having been interviewed. It is the belief of some in government and the media that our special forces acted outside of the framework of human rights law when operating in Afghanistan, and indeed another ex-

FORCES MP who has not been mentioned so far, Johnny Mercer, campaigned for more Afghans to be imported into the country so that they could give evidence against British special forces operators in a war crimes probe. Now, if it is the case that British special forces were regularly committing murder in Afghanistan then once must ask Col. Carns whether he ever witnessed the commission of such murders, and indeed whether he committed any himself. If, conversely, this is all total nonsense, then we must ask Col. Carns why he is content to remain a minister in a government that subjects its serving and retired special forces troops to persecution by left wing lawyer parasites.

We must also make brief mention of the preposterous 2024 MP Mike Tapp. Tapp was a Int Corps corporal of no distinction, who somehow became a Labour MP and now serves as a junior minister in the Home Office. His chief responsibly seems to be producing short videos where he borderline abuses his dog “Scooby” by feeding him carvery roast dinners. Despite or because of his vapidity, Tapp’s military connection is used by Labour to project a sterile vision of Starmerite patriotism, and Labour party literature is filled with images of him walking poor Scooby whilst inexplicably wearing his medals and corps tie.

The forgoing has descended into an unstructured rant against various individual FORCES MPs, and we have lost the sense of them being a coherent group, defined by a discernible common identity. Let us therefore now try to locate the colours under which this Lost Legion marches. For the most part the FORCES MP is rarely a distinguished or successful member of the military mainstream. They were usually relatively junior in their military careers when they left, rarely rising above the rank of Captain, and indeed many were in the Reserves. As such, they can offer a necessarily limited perspective on matters such as military strategy, international politics, procurement, and defence futureproofing.

What they must do, however, is constantly remind people that they were in the Army. The way that they tend to do this (and this is particularly true of Ellwood and Tugendhat) is to ensure that they are constantly on the airwaves or giving speeches in parliament (to be clipped for social media) whenever there is a matter that has the slightest connexion to the military in the news. As such, they have little more dignity than Instagram prostitutes and their main stock-in-trade is to traffic in alarmism. Figures like Tugendhat and Ellwood, both of whom served as ministers in a government that in effect drastically cut the military by playing around with what was included in the defence budget, are seemingly constantly advocating for war variously with China, Russia and Iran. We must hope these figures never get near enough to power to make good on their Talk TV appearances.

A party contesting the local elections recently touted the recruitment of a veteran to their Swale & Mid Kent Branch. The photograph depicted someone in a business suit wearing medals which inexplicably included the NATO ISAF medal which British forces are not permitted to wear (as every soldier knows), and a Royal Anglian beret with a felt capbadge backing that looked like it had been cut by a toddler using safety scissors for use in a collage. Now of course this young man may in fact genuinely be a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan as his medals suggest, and he may simply be a little confused about when NATO medals may be worn, and how to cut a cap badge backing. In any event, clearly he thinks it is of sufficient political significance to be worth signalling his military background in 2026.

Why do they feel the need to make so much of their time in the FORCES? The author ventures the following answer:

Until 2014, when British forces handed over the Central Helmand “battlespace” to the US Marine Corps and combat operations were wound down, the British Army had been continuously at war since 1939. Most senior officers at that time will in their junior days have served under senior officers who had served in Malaya, Borneo, the Falklands, etc., and those senior officers in turn will have served under senior officers who faced Rommel in the Western Desert, or stormed the beaches of Normandy, or broke the Burma Area Army’s back at Meiktilla. 75 years at war, had made the British Army was of the few parts of the British state that was efficient, a distinction it perhaps shared only with the Security Services. At a time when the British state is visibly decaying around us, the idea that there is a secret backroom where the adults sit waiting, is a comforting delusion. By playing on their alleged connexions to the Army, they can promise their followers that with a “battalion [sic]” of Royal Engineers, they can solve our migrant crisis overnight.

And perhaps they are right, and what finally awaits us after Keir is a Juntaship of All the Talents led by Alistair Carns and Tom Tugendhat.

Dogbox is a pseudonym. Dogbox was a high decorated member of his school’s CCF.