The decision to allow the Navy
hostages to tell their stories
is foolhardy, says robert fox |
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It won't be long before the Royal Navy and the Ministry of Defence regret their decision to allow the 15 former hostages to sell their stories to the media. The MoD say they decided to waive the rules because these are exceptional circumstances; bizarrely and crassly they compare the experience of the 15 sailors and marines to a soldier's winning the VC.
This feeble excuse has the whiff of a backside-covering exercise on a grand scale. The Navy and MoD might believe that they can have some control over how the story is told now, and hope to cover up some of the embarrassing details of how the 15 sailors and marines were caught in the first place, and their lack of preparation for hostile interrogation. But the truth is bound to come out through the unofficial news agency of the services' own blogs and websites.
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| The First Sea Lord and Des Browne have driven a
coach and horses
through the
Queen’s Regs |
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By sanctioning this exercise in cheque-book journalism, Defence Secretary Des Browne and First Sea Lord Admiral Sir Jonathan Band have driven a coach and horses through a mechanism called Queen's Regulations, which prevents service personnel talking to the press without permission.
Queen's Regs have served very efficiently as the military's omerta - the code of loyalty and silence by which the Cosa Nostra enforces discipline - and have been used shamelessly, for example, to prevent senior officers and NCOs speaking publicly about the continuing scandal of the conditions in the Selly Oak facility for treating the seriously injured from Afghanistan and Iraq.
But without Queen’s Regs, there would be a free-for-all. Every barrack-room lawyer would be able to bicker and complain about service life - which could seriously undermine operations and even risk lives.
This is not a piece of idle guesswork on my part. After the Gulf conflict of 1991 (over Kuwait), the British commander General Sir Peter de la Billiere wrote a memoir in 
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