Montgomery could call on the accumulated capabilities of the British Empire to support him Dannatt had to beg Gordon Brown’s miserly Treasury for enough funds to buy his soldiers helicopters. Not since the days of Montgomery had a chief faced the prospect of conducting two major land wars at the same time. In August 2006, as British forces were being overwhelmed in southern Iraq while simultaneously preparing for major operations in Helmand, Afghanistan, Dannatt was appointed chief of the general staff – the professional head of the British Army. Dannatt had fought the Queen’s enemies at home (in Northern Ireland) and abroad (Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan) to end up here in Norfolk, back to the East Anglian land where his family has lived and farmed for hundreds of years, in a room that might have appeared in a Country Life spread.ĭannatt, now a crossbench member of the House of Lords, is probably the most famous English general since Viscount Montgomery, though for less glorious reasons. Behind him were regimental trinkets, and a cushion decorated with the pattern of his monarch’s crown. His is the commanding voice of a man used to being obeyed. He explained, in a serious, placeless baritone, why strawberries should only ever be eaten seasonally.

Ruddy, stout, outdoor healthy gilet fleece over what looked like a Charles Tyrwhitt shirt. When we spoke over Zoom earlier this week he looked like the stock image of a gentleman farmer. Retired now for over a decade, he has traded his gun for a ploughshare. Richard Dannatt, like Oliver Cromwell, is all three. The Dannatts are East Anglian stock, from a corner of England that has supplied the nation with generation after generation of Christians, soldiers and farmers. He signed himself away between the morning and afternoon sessions of a cricket match in Colchester. Dannatt was born in 1950 in Broomfield, Essex, and, after flunking a Cambridge entrance interview to study law, became a soldier on a whim in 1969, when a day’s pay in the army was still called, as it had been for centuries, “taking the Queen’s shilling”. If one man embodies the impossible choices, the unforced errors and the relentless disappointments of Britain’s participation in the War on Terror, then it is General Richard Dannatt.

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