Since his days in Aden with the SAS, Charles Guthrie liked to operate behind enemy lines. In April 1997, when even John Major believed he would lose the coming election, Guthrie, then chief of the defence staff (CDS), arranged to meet Tony Blair privily. It was not so much that he thought New Labour were the enemy, rather that Blair was an unknown quantity.
Guthrie, for whom Islington would have been terra incognita, invited him for breakfast at Claridge’s. There, to his dismay, he discovered just how little the next prime minister knew about defence. As Blair was enthusing unrealistically about special forces, Guthrie asked him how many men he thought there were in the SAS. Blair guessed: ‘Forty thousand?’ Guthrie told him to take off two noughts.
But it gave him the opportunity to raise his principal concern: who would be the next secretary of state for defence. The shadow secretary was David Clark (now Lord Clark of Windermere), an ‘Old Labour’ man elected by the party to the shadow cabinet. Guthrie said the Ministry of Defence (MoD) needed a big hitter. When Blair named his cabinet after the election the following month, the defence secretary was George Robertson, later Lord Robertson of Port Ellen and Nato secretary-general.
Guthrie and Robertson got on well, just as Guthrie had got on well with the Tory defence secretary Michael Portillo and, when he was chief of the general staff (CGS — head of the army), with Malcolm Rifkind.
Whatever natural rapport there was between Guthrie and these markedly different personalities was beside the point: he believed firmly that unless there was a good working relationship, defence would suffer. Ministers, and above all the prime minister, to whom as CDS he was principal military adviser, had to be confident that when he said ‘No’, it was for incontrovertible military reasons.
Nevertheless, Guthrie was regarded by some, both inside and outside defence, as a ‘political general’. The epithet had first been used of Sir Henry Wilson in the First World War, but whereas Wilson was said to become sexually aroused whenever he saw a politician, Guthrie always maintained an Olympian cool, enhanced by the SAS wings on his sleeve. In his memoir Peace, War and Whitehall (2021), a reflection on the soldier’s art as much as a chronicle of his life, Guthrie discounted the ‘political’ jibe as facile: he was “not a political general but a strategic one”’.
To many, though, he remained ‘Tony’s general’. He certainly admired Blair’s willingness when the need arose to take decisions that risked high casualties. Events did indeed test Blair’s nerve and Guthrie’s judgment. First, in 1999 in the aftermath of the Bosnia war, came the US-led Nato bombing of infrastructure targets in Serbia to halt Slobodan Milosevic’s ethnic cleansing of the mainly Muslim province of Kosovo. Guthrie defended the Nato action on the grounds that it would achieve the required effect more quickly and less expensively in terms of lives lost than any ground campaign. It was a high-risk strategy, as there was no example in history, save that of Japan in 1945, of a bombing campaign alone bringing a country to heel.
Simultaneously, however, Nato had built up a 50,000-strong force for post-conflict occupation duties (KFOR), with the implicit threat of offensive action if the Serbs did not agree to quit the province.
Whether offensive action had ever been a serious proposition remains debatable. Guthrie recalled how, after KFOR had entered Kosovo, he visited the headquarters of the British brigade, where lunch had been arranged for him to meet the commanders of the French, Italian, German and US contingents.
‘After exchanging the usual small talk at the first course, I fixed them with a stern look and said, “Will you fight if it comes to that?” The French brigadier responded with a typical piece of Gallic cod-philosophy: “Until you spread your wings, you will never learn to fly.” The Italian pretended not to understand the question, and the German said, “No.” The US brigadier looked at me and said, “You can count on us.”’ Guthrie would later say that this exchange convinced him of the utter impracticability of a single European army.
Milosevic had been subdued and had withdrawn his irregulars (and at Guthrie’s urging would be brought to account at the International Court of Justice at The Hague), but no sooner was Kosovo settled into a peaceable enough operation when civil war escalated in the former British colony of Sierra Leone.
During the Kosovo crisis, Blair had made a speech in Chicago outlining his ‘Doctrine of the International Community’, advocating humanitarian intervention — armed force to protect the civilian population, rather than narrow national interests — where a strong moral case could be made. Sierra Leone fitted the Blair criteria. British troops intervened under UN mandate, at first with the limited objective of protecting foreign citizens, but were soon drawn into clashes with the insurgent militia groups, not without bloodshed on both sides.
Guthrie deftly handled the intervention, which was judged a success. The downside was that, on top of Kosovo, Blair seemed to develop a belief in the automatic success of virtuous intervention. This would run into the buffers two years later, after Guthrie had stood down as CDS, in Iraq.
While Guthrie was successful in his operational challenges — it was said that he could see what was and was not doable in an instant — he was notably less successful with the Treasury. When Labour came to power, Robertson initiated a strategic defence review, the results of which were generally welcomed as a step change from the 1990 ‘Options for Change’ review that still retained — if prudently, expensively — considerable Cold War capability. Robertson, however, had become secretary-general of Nato within a year of the review’s being published, leaving Geoff Hoon to implement it.
The Treasury wanted a greater ‘peace dividend’ and the chancellor, Gordon Brown, dragged his feet. In his memoirs Guthrie said he tried to get Blair interested but the reply was always, ‘You’ll have to speak to Gordon.’
Eventually he did. It was a fractious meeting, with at one point Brown saying, ‘General, I do know a bit about defence, you know’, to which Guthrie replied, ‘Chancellor, you know f*** all about defence.’ Brown remained unsympathetic, but when he became prime minister he approved funds for two aircraft carriers, which were to be built in his next-door constituency and which Guthrie always scorned as terminally vulnerable ‘behemoths’.
Charles Ronald Llewelyn Guthrie was born in 1938, the son of Ronald Guthrie, a City businessman, and Nina (née Llewelyn). Although his father was a Wykehamist, Guthrie’s prep school headmaster suggested that Harrow would be a better fit. Guthrie captained the Harrow first XV, played for English schoolboys and became head of school. The latter came with the privilege of tea in the headmaster’s study with Churchill after ‘Songs’, and organising the maiden visit of the young Queen Elizabeth and conducting her round the school.
Churchill asked him what he intended doing after leaving, to which Guthrie said, ‘joining the navy, sir.’ A faint smile crossed the great man’s face. However, after paying a familiarisation visit to a destroyer at Portsmouth, Guthrie concluded that he was not suited to oil and salt water and instead turned to the army.
Although the family was of ancient Scots lineage, an uncle had served in the Welsh Guards and said he would ‘have a word’. After an interview at the Guards Club, Guthrie received a letter saying that the regiment would be delighted to accept him as an officer, provided that he passed the selection board for Sandhurst and that his exam results that summer were ‘along the right lines’. Not inclined academically, he showed it to his housemaster, an Oxford triple blue who had also played cricket for Worcestershire. The master reckoned that ‘along the right lines’ meant anything above a straight fail. Guthrie was commissioned two years later, in 1959.
Platoon command in London and Germany followed, during which he captained both the regimental and the Army rugby teams and played polo for the Welsh Guards’ winning team in the Combermere Cup (aided by the colonel of the regiment, Prince Philip, playing at the critical No 3).
An unexpected benefit as a young officer in Chelsea Barracks was the introduction to opera, which developed into a lifelong love. A century earlier Queen Victoria had supposedly declared that the extras at the Royal Opera House were too weedy-looking and that her guardsmen should be employed instead. In the 1960s the going rate was 30 shillings for two hours and 50 minutes, with double the rate for anything above. A quiet word with the electrician to short a fuse usually did the trick. Guthrie’s operatic high point was in Tosca with Maria Callas and Tito Gobbi (in the firing squad).
By 1965 Captain Guthrie was adjutant of 1st Welsh Guards during the latter end of the Radfan campaign in the Aden protectorate. Having seen the SAS on operations astride the Yemeni border, he subsequently applied for selection and was fast-tracked into troop command, again in Aden. In one notable operation his patrol infiltrated the Parsi cemetery on the edge of the volcanic crater that was part of Aden town for a vulture’s eye view of the streets and alleys. For days they lay in searing heat close to four corpses placed there for excarnation, observing and reporting the rebel movements below.
After Aden came tours in the Gulf, Kenya and Malaysia, and acting command of G (Guards) Squadron, before returning to regimental duty and command of the Prince of Wales’s Company in Germany, and with it an emergency four-month tour of duty in Belfast. During this time he also managed both to marry and to pass the staff college entrance exam, no mean feat. Catherine (Kate) Worrall was the daughter of a Coldstream Guards colonel and sister-in-law of one of Guthrie’s fellow officers. Lady Guthrie died in 2022. Their two sons survive him: David, an entrepreneur, and Andrew, who runs a polo team in Switzerland.
The marriage, the proverbial making of many an officer, brought an unusual and rapid dividend. At staff college the following year, Guthrie was selected along with another officer to be interviewed for the star job on passing out: military assistant (MA) to the CGS. The other contender was a cavalryman and Oxford graduate reckoned to be the cleverest on the course.
The CGS, Sir Michael Carver, had been called away when the two presented themselves for interview, and so the decision rested with the senior MA, Lieutenant-Colonel David (later General the Lord) Ramsbotham. ‘The Ram’, as he was (generally affectionately) known, reckoned that the cavalryman, being a bachelor, would probably have his mind elsewhere in the evenings, and worse still at weekends. Guthrie won a precious two years in the MoD observing how to and how not to do things.
A second stint as a company commander with 1st Welsh Guards followed, and then battalion second in command, followed by promotion to lieutenant-colonel for the post of brigade major of the Household Division (Guards rank is notoriously eccentric), responsible for everything that happens — including a great deal of ceremonial — in London District. It was the time of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee and, Guthrie always maintained, the hardest he ever worked in the army.
Command of the 1st Battalion followed, first in Berlin and then notably in South Armagh in 1979: bandit country. Margaret Thatcher, after being briefed by him at Bessbrook Mill, the battalion’s headquarters, said to her private secretary: ‘That Colonel Guthrie, he’s going to the very top of the army.’
On promotion afterwards to colonel in the MoD’s military operations directorate, he had responsibility for ‘the rest of the world’, the two other colonels looking after Europe and the UK. The three posts were notoriously deskbound but a flare-up in the Anglo-French island condominium of Espiritu Santo in the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu) led to the deployment of an ad hoc Anglo-French task force that Guthrie was sent to command alongside a French général de brigade. Peace was soon restored, for which he received a medal with a canary yellow ribbon instituted originally by Queen Victoria for loyal tribal chieftains.
Command of 4th Armoured Brigade in Germany followed in 1982, a time of heightened tension, followed by the appointment of chief staff of 1st (British) Corps under General Sir Martin Farndale, one of the most attentive senior officers of the last decade of the Cold War. Next came command of the 2nd Infantry Division, and then return to the MoD as assistant chief of the general staff (ACGS).
Guthrie wrote nothing in his memoirs of his time as ACGS, saying it was ‘boring’ (he had a notoriously low boredom threshold). It may have been boring, but it was crucial in shaping the future army programme, the budget. His inter-service battles for resources were marked by considerable cunning but he abhorred the long hours to which the MoD staff were seemingly addicted, believing that it smacked of lack of imagination and delegation, or else having nothing better to do. When he in turn became CGS he once asked his ACGS, a conspicuously cerebral officer, ‘If you’re so terribly clever, why do you have to work so late?’
Release from boredom came two years later, in October 1989, with command of 1st Corps just as the cracks in the Berlin Wall began to appear. Two years later, on promotion to (four-star) general, he took command of the British Army of the Rhine as a whole, from which peacekeeping troops for the former Yugoslavia were being drawn.
In July 1994, however, he was ‘short-toured’ in somewhat dramatic circumstances. The CDS, Marshal of the RAF Sir Peter Harding, suddenly resigned after lurid stories of an extra-marital affair were published in the News of the World. The CGS, Sir Peter Inge, immediately took Harding’s place, and Guthrie replaced Inge.
After three years as head of the army, dealing with the continued downsizing and reorganisation after ‘Options for Change’, and the escalating conflict in Bosnia, he took over from Inge as CDS, though not with the customary field marshal’s baton. The practice of promoting the CDS to ‘five stars’ had been discontinued as inappropriate for the downsized forces and Guthrie would have to wait a full 15 years until receiving his field marshal’s baton, and then only in honorary rank.
Indeed, at first he was told he would have to buy rather than receive his baton. ‘Spink & Son can make you one,’ said the Queen’s private secretary. Guthrie discovered that a new baton would set him back £75,000. Fortunately, not long afterwards he met Prince Philip on another matter and mentioned that the cost of a baton was pretty steep. ‘Oh, I’m sure there must be a few lying around somewhere,’ replied his erstwhile colonel, himself an honorary field marshal. A few days later Prince Philip’s private secretary rang to say that one had been found in an attic and the Palace was quite happy for him to have it.
Of average height and exceptionally tough both mentally and physically (he was likened to a rhinoceros in armour), Guthrie was quietly spoken, with a slight lisp, and rarely showed anger. A habitué of White’s and the Beefsteak, he was thoroughly urbane and moved effortlessly and authoritatively between palace and parapet. One honour eluded him, however: the Garter. Guthrie had married a Catholic, became a Catholic himself, and had been head of the British Association of the Knights of Malta. Speculation persists that the Queen, although a strong supporter in other respects, considered Guthrie ‘too high with the Catholics’ for the premier order of chivalry.
On leaving the army in 2001 he joined the City financier NM Rothschild and Sons as a director, in order, he said, to replenish the assets drawn down mercilessly by the obligations of years of duty entertaining. He played tennis with increased determination, having found that the gastronomic obligations of seniority had also taken its toll on his formerly athletic figure. And as Colonel of The Life Guards he was obliged to keep his horsemanship up to the mark for ceremonial occasions. In 2018, however, aged 79, Guthrie found himself in the headlines when he fell from his horse during Trooping the Colour, having fainted. The previous year he had become seriously ill in Thailand and had not wholly recovered.
He continued to advise Blair occasionally, entering No 10 via the back door to avoid embarrassment to his successors, notably acting as go-between with General Musharraf of Pakistan, with whom he had struck up a strong rapport when the future president was attending the Royal College of Defence Studies in London.
As a crossbencher in the House of Lords he spoke regularly on the realities of operations, and became the ‘go to’ on defence matters for many another peer. With 12 other senior military figures he signed a Downing Street letter in support of remaining in the EU but changed his mind shortly before the Brexit referendum in 2016, declaring that he was worried about the prospect of a European army, damaging to Nato and an expensive and unnecessary duplication. He stepped down from the Lords at the end of 2020, believing it had simply become too big to be truly effective.
In 2010, with Sir Michael Quinlan, the former mandarin, Guthrie published a monograph on the ethics of conflict: Just War. It was said (wishfully) to be an attempt to curb the appetite for intervention. Had Sir Peter Harding not had to resign, with the knock-on effect of Guthrie’s earlier-than-planned advancement to CGS and in turn to CDS, the author might still have been in post on 9/11, and even perhaps in 2003. Guthrie, the last grandee, big beast CDS, and the only one to have served in the SAS, would have supported intervention in Iraq, but with ample numbers to deal with the aftermath. History might have been different, including what followed in Afghanistan.
Obituary reproduced with kind permission from The Times.
