PM ‘still doesn’t listen to top brass’

BRITAIN will keep making ‘stupid military decisions’ unless David Cameron acts like Winston Churchill and listens to top brass, a senior Tory MP warned last night.

Julian Lewis, chairman of the defence select committee, said heads of the Army, Navy and RAF had been ‘sidelined’ from giving advice, causing ‘un-strategic’ decisions to be made about Libya and Syria by a ‘bunch of politicians who have a bee in their bonnet’.

Wartime leader Churchill seldom ignored the counsel of all his chiefs of staff, he said.

His blistering attack follows revelations in the Mail yesterday in which the Prime Minister was accused of ‘doing an Iraq’ in Libya and of rank incompetence over Syria by former Chief of the Defence Staff General Sir David Richards. Former defence minister Nicholas Soames attacked him over cuts to the Royal Navy. Dr Lewis’s comments yesterday were echoed by two former major generals.

Major Patrick Cordingley, who led the Desert Rats in the Gulf, said Britain’s errors in Libya were ‘unnecessary’ and the result ‘predictable’. He said: ‘Prime ministers seem to want to be seen to be taking action on the world stage. The result has been a disaster in each and every intervention since 003.’

Major General Julian Thompson, a military historian who commanded 3 Commando in the Falklands War, said: ‘Libya is entirely our fault. We topple regimes without thinking about what might replace them, which might be worse than what was there originally.’

He added: ‘I’m not sure that the mechanics of government when it comes to deciding military and foreign policy are as good as they used to be.’