I've been attempting with appreciable success to not give two hoots about this Harry and Meghan factor. However a element of their departure from
I’ve been attempting with appreciable success to not give two hoots about this Harry and Meghan factor. However a element of their departure from the royal orbit bothers me. It arises from Harry’s give up of his royal patronages, a part of his transfer to stop being an HRH and turn into a plain outdated duke.
That element is that this: the Captain Normal of the Royal Marines is resigning his submit to be able to spend extra time on Instagram.
And that, bluntly, is a reasonably shabby factor. You should not have to be the kind of red-faced harrumphing traditionalist who approvingly reads Day by day Telegraph editorials over marmalade in your outdated rectory in Wiltshire to assume that this says one thing unedifying about responsibility and repair and the way in which empty movie star tradition has seeped into British nationwide life like damp and began to weaken the brickwork. (I used to put in writing these Telegraph editorials, by the way.)
Sure, I do know there are causes for all this and that it makes logical sense for a person who acquired a submit as a result of he was a senior royal to surrender that submit when he ceases to be a senior royal. However I can not keep away from the conclusion that his choices suggests a set of values which can be far faraway from those who underpin the ethos of the Royal Marines.
Principally, the Royal Marines deserve higher, and never simply from Harry.
I first encountered the Marines – 42 Commando, to be exact – in Sierra Leone in 2000, the place they’d been a part of British forces that had stopped a insurgent group who appreciated chopping the legs and arms off civilians. Over the following decade and extra of writing periodically about defence, I got here throughout bootnecks in numerous locations, together with in Basra the place the final British commander was Andy Salmon, a Marine.
Over that point, I shaped some views of the Royal Marines, essentially the most related of which is that they typically get handled fairly poorly by the nation they serve and presumably much more poorly than different bits of the armed forces.
There are remarkably few Marines, barely 6,500 nowadays, but they contribute disproportionately to Britain’s warfighting capabilities. Relying on who you speak to, these 6,500 contribute as much as half of all British Particular Forces personnel; the opposite 175 per cent are Paras (congratulations to all those that acquired each the jokes there).
But the Marines by no means fairly appear to get the help and standing their contribution calls for. Since they’re a part of the Royal Navy, they in the end fall beneath a command construction whose senior officers are instinctively extra fascinated about huge metallic boats than in blokes with weapons. When the Treasury comes on the lookout for defence cuts, it’s arduous to keep away from the suspicion that successive First Sea Lords and senior RN officers have fought much less arduous for the Marines than for the floor fleet. The 2010 defence assessment, which successfully ended the Marines’ skill to deploy at brigade energy, is an effective instance.
Such issues have led the Marines to fairly a grim place. In 2018, the Commons defence committee investigated the corps and located poor morale, falling numbers and main questions concerning the Marines’ long-term viability. The report was entitled Sundown for the Royal Marines? and deserves contemporary consideration because the Captain Normal does a runner.
In opposition to that background, will probably be no shock if the following defence assessment – which must be this yr – considers once more the choice of folding the Marines into the Military and possibly even merging them with, sure, the Parachute Regiment.
In brief, issues had been trying depressing sufficient for the Marines, and now their supposed chief has introduced he’s quitting to go to America to promote tupperware on YouTube or one thing. Which is one other joke, however not a really humorous one.