Military Monthlies

Jeremy Corbyn has been the Leader of the Labour Party for two months, and there have been two interventions by Generals threatening this or that if he were ever to become Prime Minister.

The Old Right (the heirs, lest we forget, of the Cavaliers rather than of the Roundheads) used to be all for the Armed Forces because most of them were abroad most of the time.

The Left has always been profoundly affected by the experience of the lions led by donkeys, just as traditional Tories were by the loss of a generation of landed Classicists in the war among Europe's Liberal bourgeoisies, which have ruled almost continuously ever since.

Soon after that, the Left came to harbour, well within its mainstream, a strong strain that suspected that a truly left-wing Government would always be overthrown by a military coup.

The defining experience there was Spain, followed by Chile, and by the persistent rumours, which of course turned out to have been true, about Britain in the 1960s.

Mind you, this has come to be self-fulfilling. That there has never been a coup against a Labour Government has come to be held up as one among the many proofs that there has never been a Socialist one.

No, General Houghton is not planning a military coup.

As a man whose interview proved that he was obviously not cut out for politics, and that is not a criticism of his character, he is no doubt horrified that any such inference has been drawn.

In any case, thanks to this Government, he would not have the manpower to hold the country once he had taken it.

The anonymous General in the Sunday Times might, however, be less realistic. Who can have given him false hope?

"The Tories!", everyone replies. "These people are working with the Tories!" I doubt that very, very much.

Overcompensating for their pasts as Stalinists, Maoists and Trotskyists, none of which Corbyn has ever been, the New Labour lot had a weird infatuation with the Armed Forces.

Their total lack of nuance, perspective or proportion on, say, Syria, or Trident, indicates that they are still as far away with all of that as they ever were.

Suggest any war, and they are always in favour of it. Suggest any weapons system, and they are always in favour of it. And so on.

Not that New Labour treated the Armed Forces any better than the present lot does, but there we are.

From the hawkish thinktanks, to certain media interests, to the closely connected boards of the arms companies, the ties between the military top brass and that of what was once, and to some people still is, "The Project" are very strong indeed.

It is they who hate Jeremy Corbyn enough to suggest a military coup against him. And it is they, with their old harebrained schemes to reintroduce conscription or what have you, who have a long record of not knowing when to stop.