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Ministers who have never seen active service should pay heed to the words of those who have
Only 13 of the 570 MPs who voted in the Commons on Monday opposed Britain's military action in Libya. Kris Hopkins, Conservative MP for Keighley, was not among them. Yet it was he who made the speech that stuck in the memory afterwards. Mr Hopkins was once a soldier, serving in Northern Ireland, Kenya and Germany, and he knows what war is about. He knows it is not romantic, not to be screened or written about as some kind of entertainment. In saying these things, he continued a precious parliamentary tradition. The House of Commons once used to be full of MPs who knew from ugly experience what going to war entails. Now there are few. During the Falklands crisis Margaret Thatcher despaired of her foreign secretary Francis Pym, who even when war seemed inevitable continued to seek a diplomatic solution. Yet Francis Pym was no defeatist: he had served in Italy and north Africa, winning the Military Cross. The famously belligerent Denis Healey also served in Italy and north Africa. His experience left him sceptical, sometimes hostile, towards any resort to war; he vehemently opposed Tony Blair's Iraq adventure. A second intervention on Monday came from Mr Hopkins's fellow Tory backbencher, Rory Stewart, once the deputy governor of a province in Iraq, who warned that, in military interventions, dipping your toes in may be the prelude to being involved up to your neck. Ministers who have never seen service themselves need this kind of advice.
