Posing in one of our few tanks, Liz, is not the same as being an Iron Lady
IWAS there. We all gasped as Mrs Thatcher appeared in the turret of a British Army Challenger tank, dressed like Lawrence of Arabia in flowing prophetic white garments and a cruel-looking pair of goggles. No doubt she was wearing high heels too, whatever the Army might have advised her about how unsuitable they were in a tank. She was a woman in the tradition of Boadicea and the first Elizabeth, and she was not going to get herself up in battledress and pretend to be a man.
As I recall the day in September 1986 at Fallingbostel, amid the war-scoured bleakness of Germany’s Luneburg Heath, the Cold War was still pretty cold. About a million Soviet troops sat a few miles to the East, and Moscow was deploying menacing SS-20 medium-range missiles which made the danger of nuclear war a lot bigger. Silly Left-wingers were camping at Greenham Common to stop Nato from responding to this threat.
The occasion was an attempt at friendship between her and the German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, a lover of cream cakes and vast meals, who had somehow crammed his considerable bulk into a German Leopard tank to take part in an officially good-natured shooting contest. The guns boomed. Mrs Thatcher won, of course. The shell she fired would not have dared to miss, and Herr Kohl, who was terrified of her, knew his place.
SO YOU will have to forgive me if I laugh when people say that the Foreign Secretary, Liz Truss, resembled the Iron Lady when she clambered into a British tank in Estonia last week. Poor Ms Truss, despite the efforts of her official photographer, was engulfed by the warlike garments she had unwisely donned. Lefty liberals, such as she is, never look quite right in combat gear.
The ugly helmet she was persuaded to wear made her look as if a tortoise was nesting on her head. She looked much more like the failed US presidential candidate Michael Dukakis, who in 1988 unwisely rode on top of a US Army tank to try to look tough. Most people cackled at the sight.
As for the circumstances, oh goodness. In 1986, Estonia was a Soviet possession and the idea of Nato tanks within a day’s drive of what was then Leningrad would have given the Kremlin kittens.
It does now, actually. It is, after all, not that long since the Nazis besieged that city and starved many of its people to death. Russia, lacking any natural frontiers, has been invaded a lot (even we have done it), and it likes to keep its possible enemies at a safe distance. In 1986,
Britain had a serious Army, reasonably well equipped. This was no bad thing, because in those days we faced, as we do not now, the colossal, sprawling iron might of the Soviet Union, with giant armed forces deep inside Germany, driven by the aggressive dogma of Communism.
Today, Ms Truss says she wants a strong Nato. Back in the 1980s, as a child, she was singing CND songs at Greenham with her mum, campaigning for a weak Nato, and if anyone had paid any attention to her, the USSR would still crouch menacingly
on the eastern horizon. Now, as we posture as the defenders of Europe against a much-touted Russian threat which may or may not exist, Britain has a mere 227 Challenger tanks and is busy reducing its Army from 82,000 personnel – already a record low in modern times – to 73,000.
If we really believed the speeches we made, would we actually be cutting our Armed Forces as we are?
You tell me, but I have always thought that actions spoke louder than words.
I note there is also an official drive
to double the number of women in the British Army and to ‘tackle its male-dominated culture’. Well, such quotas usually lead to a lowering of physical standards, and, as most women aren’t especially keen on being soldiers, the main outcome is that more weedy men can join up.
I can promise you that the Russian Army continues to have a ‘maledominated culture’, to put it gently, and does not plan to tackle it any time soon, and I am concerned about what might happen if our feminist forces ever actually clash with it.
EVIDENCE now pours in of growing numbers of injuries caused by e-scooters. Sometimes it is their riders, more often it is pedestrians struck by them as they speed and weave along paths and pavements.
They are inherently unsafe and are illegal for a good reason. I have had narrow escapes, on foot and on my bike. I now see them almost all the time and the numbers grow daily.
Yet Transport Secretary Grant Shapps seems not to have noticed. His ‘experiments’, which allow some rental scooters to be used legally, simply confuse both public and police and undermine the law.
This Christmas, thousands of these things will be sold and given as presents, even though their use on any public highway or pavement is illegal.
This will lead inexorably to their being fully legalised.
When that happens, millions who are now complacent will angrily ask: ‘How did we allow this menace? Why are pavements no longer safe?’
It will be because you did not protest now.
Write, please, to your MP and your local Police and Crime Commissioner, saying that the experiments should stop and the ban be kept – writetothem.com will tell you how. A few minutes’ effort now could save you from years of regret later.