He warned that the changes reflected underlying damage to the relationship between the public, the Government and the armed forces. "We had a consensus about the use of force for most of the last 200 years," he argued. "When we went to war it was assumed that we would obey certain conditions: it would be rules-based; we would be likely to prevail; and the outcome would be largely beneficial. With Napoleon and the two [world] wars of the 20th Century those conditions were largely met. In 2003, with the Iraq invasion, the consensus was broken and has yet to be reconstructed. Maybe it won't be."About Remembrance Day, he says:
"There is some of this that is good and laudable, and there is some that is pretty mawkish," he said. "It is a question of trying to celebrate what is good and trying to avoid the Diana, Graceland stuff."He goes on to praise Help For Heroes as a desire for the public to reach out to the Forces "over the heads of the intervening elites" of politicians and generals. He doesn't actually say that this is a result of the disgust felt by many people over the way that the last government treated the Forces, but I think that was his general drift.
