22 Sep 2015

David Cameron criticised by top military figure, book claims

David Cameron’s foreign policy record has been criticised by a top military figure and a high profile Conservative, Lord Ashcroft has claimed in his explosive biography.

David Cameron’s foreign policy record has been criticised by a top military figure and a high profile Conservative, Lord Ashcroft has claimed in his explosive biography.

The latest serialisation of the unofficial biography “Call me Dave” quotes General Sir David Richards criticising Mr Cameron’s experience and skill in military matters.

It is also claimed that the former chief of the defence staff told Lord Ashcroft that he told eventually told Mr Cameron that “being in the Combined Cadet Force at Eton” did not qualify him to decide the tactics of complex military operations.

Sir David – now Baron Richards – also said he had to point out to the Prime Minister that military interventions were more complicated than “good guys” versus “bad guys”, the extract of the book claims.

The extract also says that the toppling of Colonel Gaddafi is also described as “the Prime Minister’s Iraq” by the former Conservative chairman Michael Ancram, who says that the country is now more dangerous than before the dictator was removed.

Baron Richards, who left the military in 2013, is quoted in the book: ‘We never really analysed things properly. ‘Our instinct is knee-jerk support for the underdog, without doing the analysis that would necessarily legitimise that course of action.

It comes as earlier claims from the biography that Mr Cameron took part in a debauched university initiation ceremony dominated newspapers and social media.

The book, which is being serialised in the Daily Mail all week, appears to have reignited a feud between the Prime Minister and Lord Ashcroft who claimed that he fell out with Mr Cameron after he was passed over for a top job in the 2010 coalition.

Lord Ashcroft, who has donated more than £8 million to the Conservatives and was responsible for getting the party’s finances back on track after the 1997 election defeat, was disappointed by Mr Cameron’s offer of a junior post in the Foreign Office which he rejected.

In further potentially damaging claims the book extract also says that Mr Cameron’s foreign policy expertise had been questioned by the US after he failed to negotiate the 2013 military action against Bashar al-Assad in Syria through parliament. The vote was lost after Labour failed to back the action.

It quotes an “Obama administration insider” who described the vote as “one of those astonishing displays of incompetence that sort of leaves you wondering about how, you know, have we all go this far?”

On Monday, Downing Street declined to comment on the book’s contents.

Isabel Oakeshott, the former Sunday Times political editor and co-author of the book defended her decision to publish a paragraph about a debauched incident with a dead pig’s head as part of the account of Mr Cameron’s life.

She told Channel 4 News: “This story first came to us via a respected Tory MP who is a contemporary of David Cameron’s at Oxford University. When we first heard the story we assumed it was a joke, that source continued to repeat that allegation on a number of subsequent occasions.

“Now we couldn’t get to the bottom of that sources allegation so we merely reported the account that the source gave us — and it is up to other people to decide whether they give it any credibility or not.”