Above All I Will Pay Tribute to Our Armed Forces

As with the donkeys of the Somme, the paternal pride with which the Reverend Tony and his chums regarded their boys in the armed forces did not preclude slicing through the occasional bit of politically-correct health-and-safety red tape here and there. The charmingly named "harmony guidelines" - the official limits beyond which troops are deemed to be at unacceptable risk of post-traumatic stress - were blithely disregarded in the interests of faster and more frequent recycling of IED-fodder. "The issue of the potential pressure on service personnel," according to the Chilcot report, "was not a consideration in the decision" to join the chimp's tea-party in Iraq; and the Ministry for Wog-Bombing admitted in 2004 that the guidelines were breached for almost a fifth of the army troops then participating in the crusade. Some senior military officers raised objections, which were brushed aside by politicians doubtless preoccupied with composing appropriate eulogies for those killed in action. Adam Ingram, the Minister for Supporting Our Boys, emitted a lengthy whine about all the military obligations which the UK had incurred, self-evidently through no fault of its own: "However, what was the solution? That [Iraq] was then something we had to attend to." Duty is duty, after all.