Who Dares but doesn’t win?

QUICK Twitter chat with James Deegan, former regimental sergeant major of the SAS, who points out not a single VC has been awarded to the elite regiment – odd, given their daily diet of danger. Curiously, Blair Mayne – keeper of the Who Dares Wins flame after David Stirling was captured by Rommel’s Afrika Korps – had a VC awarded in Germany in 1945. It was later downgraded to a third bar to his Distinguished Service Order. Deegan, an Edinburgh boy who spent 17 years with ‘the Blades’ and whose debut novel Once A Pilgrim is out this month, is terse about why Special Forces are so hard done by. ‘Politics,’ he says. Roger and out.