Hermione Hobhouse at the Albert Memorial

Hermione Hobhouse, who has died aged 80, was an architectural historian and conservationist who was noted for an acclaimed biography of Thomas Cubitt, the leading master builder in London in the early 19th century and the architect of Osborne House on the Isle of Wight.

She also wrote a pioneering study of the destruction wreaked by modern architects and bureaucrats on London’s architectural heritage and, as general editor of the Survey of London, shifted the focus of the century-old project from the smarter boroughs of central London to their less prosperous eastern neighbours.

Her Lost London, published in 1972, was a heart-rending pictorial survey of architectural violence against the city, from the loss of Sir John Soane’s original Bank of England to the destruction, in 1961, of the Euston Arch, built in 1837.

As the first mainline terminus in any capital city, Euston and its arch had, if nothing else, Hermione Hobhouse argued, historical significance. Yet such considerations cut no ice with the British Transport Commission, the London County Council or the Macmillan government who were determined to demolish the arch as part of a modernisation programme, and refused to spend the £180,000 it would have cost to save it. In 1994 the historian Dan Cruickshank discovered much of the arch had been dumped in the River Lea .

The arch’s imminent demolition had sparked a protest in which Woodrow Wyatt, John Betjeman and Nikolaus Pevsner were prominent , and which generated a wider movement to preserve much-loved landmarks. Hermione Hobhouse’s book, and she herself in the capacity of secretary of the Victorian Society from 1976 to 1982, did much to inform and stimulate the campaign.

In a review of her book in The Spectator, Benny Green wrote that in some pages he had seemed to hear “the sibilance of banknotes changing hands, the squelch of palms being greased, the tiny patter of shares being transferred”, as well as “the dull thump of bureaucrats jumping to conclusions”.

For 11 years, from 1983 to 1994, Hermione Hobhouse was general editor of the multi-volume Survey of London, which had been founded in 1894 by Charles Robert Ashbee, an architect and social thinker who wanted to record and preserve London’s ancient monuments. There she completed the volume on southern Kensington begun under her predecessor Francis Sheppard, but set out to move away from its emphasis on the orderly great estates of the West End to look at more humble areas of the capital.

The first volume published under her aegis was a study of County Hall, reviving the Survey’s occasional monograph series. However the bigger challenge was Poplar, then being comprehensively redeveloped under the London Docklands Development Corporation.

The research and writing of the two volumes on Poplar, issued in 1994, were a challenge because the area was changing dramatically. The Survey was forced to broaden its remit to include modern buildings and infrastructure, but the new approach clearly chimed with popular demand; since the Survey volumes were put online, Poplar has received more hits than any other area of London.

This fresh thinking would bear fruit in another project, on Clerkenwell, finally published in two volumes in 2008 long after Hermione Hobhouse’s retirement, under Philip Temple’s editorship.

^{Hermione Hobhouse (right) at the Prince Albert Exhibition at the RCA in 1983, with the Prince and Princess of Wales}

Mary Hermione Hobhouse (always known as Hermione) was born on February 2 1934 at Hadspen House, Castle Cary, Somerset, the daughter of Arthur (later Sir Arthur) Lawrence Hobhouse, a local Liberal politician who is best remembered as the architect of Britain’s system of National Parks.

She was educated at Cheltenham Ladies’ College and at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, where she read Modern History.

After graduation she worked for eight years as a television researcher and writer , before leaving to devote herself to writing and teaching.

Her first book, Thomas Cubitt: Master Builder (1971) set the achievements of the famous speculative builder in the context of urban, business and social history, and the history of technology. But she lightened up the narrative with fascinating reflections on Cubitt’s personality from diaries and plays as well as from The Builder magazine and official records. The book won her the Hitchcock Medal of the Society of Architectural Historians.

^{Thomas Cubitt by an unknown artist (1835)}

From 1973 to 1978 Hermione Hobhouse was tutor in Architectural History at the Architectural Association School and she lectured extensively on town planning and urban history, Victorian architecture, and on Prince Albert, publishing Prince Albert: his life and work in 1983 and The Crystal Palace and the Great Exhibition — Art, Science and Productive Industry: the history of the Royal Commission for the Great Exhibition of 1851 in 2002.

For many years she was a member of the 1851 Commission and, through that, a trustee of the Albert Hall. She was also a member of the Council of the National Trust and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London.

Hermione Hobhouse had an incisive intellect and a strength of personality that occasionally led her into confrontation, but she had an infinite capacity for sociability with a wide circle of friends.

Her other books include History of Regent Street (1975) and London Survey’d: the work of the Survey of London 1894-1994 (1994). She also contributed to architectural journals.

She was appointed MBE in 1981.

In 1958 she married the architect Henry Graham. Though the marriage was later dissolved they remained friends. She is survived by her son and daughter.

Hermione Hobhouse, born February 2 1934, died October 17 2014

I believe that Jonathan Jones’ critique of Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red installation at the Tower (1 November) does a disservice to the many people who have been moved by the poppies, and the important consequences of expressing those feelings, in passing on a shared memory. My great-uncle Frank died in 1917, serving in the Royal Flying Corps. No one in the family ever spoke of him and there is no one left to ask. After some research, I learned that he drowned when the Aragon was torpedoed outside Alexandria harbour. When I heard that a roll of honour was being read each evening at the Tower I submitted his name.

One summer evening, I stood in a large crowd overlooking the poppies. Most were in family groups, talking softly about those whose memory they had come to celebrate. Older people were explaining to young children the circumstances in which their far-distant relatives had died. As the sun went down, a yeoman warder read the names. There were few officers: Frank was the only air mechanic in that evening’s list. A bugler played the Last Post and the crowd dispersed quietly.

The people attending those ceremonies and flocking to look at the poppies may not share Mr Jones’s deep understanding of history but they certainly know the horror of war, through their own family histories. Indeed, Mr Jones uses his own family’s experiences to illustrate his argument. Children who have been taken to see the poppies will remember the family stories they are told there. This seems to me to be a valuable endeavour.
Laura F Spira
Oxford

• Jonathan Jones says a true work of art about the first world war “would need to be as obscene as cancer”. In 2014, surely a true work of art about war, in any place, at any time, would capture the miserable nature of men so incapable of resolving their differences that they slaughtered each other in their millions in order to win. Win what exactly? To be top dog for a while? Isn’t it time we grew up?

Art seems to be forgetting its job, to tell the story of the time we live in, and to truthfully show us ourselves and our nature within that time, including contemporarily reviewing the past. Artists now, as never before perhaps, need to be emotionally mature in their perceptions to be able to accurately depict this in whatever medium they choose with any depth. And critics need to be equally perceptive about what artists are endeavouring to express in order to usher their work into the public consciousness. A cool mind, please, JJ, it’s an important job you do. This war of words over the difference between what is an artwork and a memorial is in fact a war of words over art itself. Discuss.
Judy Liebert
Nottingham

• Congratulations to Jonathan Jones for his robust defence of his earlier critique (The Tower of London poppies are fake, trite and inward-looking – a Ukip-style memorial, theguardian.com, 28 October) of the poppy memorial. The Daily Mail, which criticises him, was a cheerleader (along with the Times and Telegraph) for Britain entering the first world war, as shown in the excellent new book by Douglas Newton, The Darkest Days (Review, 20 September). These newspapers, aided by politicians such as Churchill, spewed out anti-German and militaristic rhetoric in the days leading up to the outbreak of the war, hence undercutting the chances of a peaceful resolution to the crisis. The last thing we need is more memorials which encourage poignancy; we need memorials to remind us that, as Newton argues, the only uplifting element in the story of that war is in the struggle to avert it.
Professor Jim Tomlinson
University of Glasgow

• Anyone looking at the 888,246 poppies cannot but be moved that so many lives were lost. Many, like me, will be reinforced in the belief that war can only ever signify failure. This is not to deny the reality. But if huge numbers are moved to ask why, then the ceramic poppies are far more than the art installation Jones sees.
Peter Young
Banchory, Aberdeenshire

• There are many truths about the Great War and Jonathan Jones is correct in saying that the display of poppies around the Tower of London is not a balanced summary . Pretty though it may be, the poppy installation does communicate one truth, that unfathomable numbers of beautiful beings were lost in that tragedy. Somehow these ceramic poppies do this more effectively than any array of pale gravestones or lists of names have done.

In contrast, Jones cites work by Otto Dix and Wilfred Own that gives us hazy glimpses of a different and uglier reality, that war involves horrors that we in our safe suburban lives can barely imagine. But had these works succeeded in communicating and connecting with people in the way the Tower’s massed poppies have done maybe we would be less inclined to think of war as an acceptable evil.
Richard Evans
Winchester

• Jonathan Jones’s arguments, his passion and his opinions deserve respect. So too do the opinions of others. Like many people, I do find poignancy and relevance in the field of poppies at the Tower of London. Flowers symbolise loss and also regeneration: they too wither and die and are replaced by new growths. Graphic art and harsh words may depict horrors in a more forthright manner – and yet are still only representations of actual events. What is essential in any art work is its capacity to move the human heart; for me, the red poppy symbolises the blood of the lives lost and its beauty enhances rather than diminishes that awareness.

The collective loss of millions of men is not represented in the moat; only those from these shores. Perhaps we need, from time to time, to consider those losses within our immediate family of nations, just as at times of individual grief families sometimes close their own doors. Not a deliberate act of exclusion, therefore, rather an opportunity to consider those who fought for us and provided us with the opportunity to remember them now, in this way, in this country.

The brutality of war, the barbed wire and the bones – these must not be forgotten. Neither must hope be forgotten, for is it not hope – for an end to war, for a future without war, for a more reasonable way of solving differences – that motivated these men as they fought?

Bones and bloodshed, poetry and poppies. Respecting Jonathan Jones’ opinion is what matters most of all.
June Lowe
Brighton

• The way the poppies spill from the battlements into the moat will remind many of William Blake’s poem London: “And the hapless soldier’s sigh / Runs in blood down palace walls.” You don’t even need to know Blake to see the blood.
Paul Stephenson
London

• Many of Jonathan Jones’s comments might apply to Wilfred Owen’s cultivated, generally “tasteful”, Keatsian verse. Owen rhymes. He uses metre. Imagery. There aren’t many who don’t: but Jones might have chosen a more skeletal poet such as Richard Aldington or Wilfrid Gibson – one who didn’t have the popular emotional uplift that he calls sentimental. One of the finest trench poets, Edmund Blunden, who endured more than most, surviving the Somme and Passchendaele, captured the war in poetry and prose that is a veritable torrent of ceramic poppies. He understood the power of artifice, of beauty indeed, as well as he understood the bones and mud of the battlefield. Not every war requiem has to be atonal.
John Greening
St Neots, Cambridgeshire

• Ernst Jünger is not “all pure horror”: in Storm of Steel there’s also camaraderie, heroism, excitement, even exhilaration. More substantially, the catastrophist notion that the war “smashed the modern world off the rails and started a cycle of murderous extremism” overlooks what “the modern world” had been doing in colonial contexts for decades before 1914: the murderous battle of Omdurman (1898) prefigured the Somme, but the victims, being proto-Islamic extremists, get overlooked. Likewise the Herero genocide of 1904-07 anticipated atrocities in Europe and Asia. It might be better to say that, post-1914, murderous extremism came home to roost.
Alan Knight
Emeritus professor of history, Oxford University

Why should the poppies at the Tower of London be viewed, and then judged, as an artwork that somehow fails to tell the truth? They are not there to communicate the horrors and bestiality of war, in the way that Otto Dix’s skull does. Why should they? They are a memorial – a commemoration of the hundreds of thousands of (predominantly) men of these islands who died during the First World War. The poppies bring their deaths to our minds and help us to commit their sacrifice to memory.

Do we condemn Laurence Binyon’s For the Fallen because it is not Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est? I hope not.
Philip de Ste Croix
Clayton, West Sussex

• Arguably the most worrying outcome of the ceramic poppy installation at the Tower of London is that the taboo on challenging the tainted symbolism of the red poppy is now being enforced even more obsessively than in previous years. This supposed work of art manages to be both overbearing – swamping our sensibilities with a single non-negotiable image; and fragile – composed as it is of brittle and delicate material. In both respects it might be said to reflect the attitude of those who over the course of 2014 have hijacked the debate about the first world war and prevented the nation from having a proper reasoned discussion about the true nature of that terrible conflict.

Historical soul-searching is not something we Brits are good at. Sometimes in life we make bad decisions. When this happens we can either admit it, put our hands up and reverse the decision; or we can exacerbate the situation by doing more of the same. In doing the latter we necessarily construct a kind of edifice of self-delusion and false belief, and this edifice can become so important to our psyche that its collapse is synonymous with the collapse of the psyche, and must therefore be prevented at all costs. Our society is morally rigorous – we are judged harshly on the smallest misdemeanour – yet Somehow the edifice of delusion which we have created around the first world war manages to explain away 888,246 grisly deaths and the criminally insane decisions which brought them about, as some sort of sad political necessity. No-one has ever called us to account as the Germans were called to account, and so the delusions persist. We rename what is essentially murder as sacrifice, implying that there was a moment, somewhere, when each of these young men was actually able to make an informed and heroic choice whether they wished to live or die.

Similarly, most of the revisionist arguments seeking to justify this slaughter are centred around “the greater good” and the implication that Germany would have otherwise conquered and enslaved us all. Like all such arguments, this is one of those reverse-logic postulations which starts from the necessity to prove something and then manipulates the facts to fit, even to the extent of placing so many thousands of horrific deaths in the balance with a highly doubtful selection of what-ifs and letting the what-ifs win.

So perhaps the sea of poppies is not about the war of 1914-18, but about a very different conflict, which is still raging in 2014. I mean, of course, the conflict between those who want us to believe that everything is all right (even if some bad things happen) – that everything that was done in the last 100 years turned out okay in the end, and will continue to do so; and those who know in their hearts and minds that things are not okay – that the events of the past decade, whether about banking, climate change, poverty or war, are signals to us that we need to do things differently. Perhaps a dried-up castle moat full of enormously expensive fake flowers is a very potent symbol after all – just not the one the artist intended.
Nick Moseley
Chesham, Buckinghamshire

Two judgments given in October will impact on all council-tax payers, magistrates courts, local authorities and governmental consultations of the public. On 29 October the supreme court decided that the London borough of Haringey’s 2012 council-tax consultation was unlawful. On 10 December 2012 I had written to the leader of Haringey council: “I am shocked that no alternative to hitting the fragile incomes of the poorest residents of Haringey [with council tax] … was included in the recent consultation.” Declaring that consultation unlawful, Justice Lord Wilson wrote: “The protest of the Rev Nicolson in his letter … was well directed.”

Alternatives to the council’s preferred options must now be put to the public in a future consultation. In all fairness there must be an alternative to local government taxation of benefits that are being shredded by central government (Cameron accused of getting sums wrong on cuts, 31 October).

On 7 October the high court gave me leave for judicial review of the £125 costs for a summons sought by Haringey council from 28,882 late or non-paying households in 2013-14. The costs are imposed by Tottenham magistrates against benefit incomes on top of inevitable arrears.

I have deliberately allowed my council tax to become a civil debt. I was duly summoned to court, which allowed me the opportunity to ask the magistrates how they arrived at that £125. Haringey council has now withdrawn a summons against me, “as a matter of prudence during this period of on going litigation” and waived the £125.

The council has not replied to my letter inviting them to cease issuing all summons until it has reviewed the rationality and legality of that £125 it asks the magistrates to impose. Maybe all magistrates and councils in England and Wales should take notice.
Rev Paul Nicolson
Taxpayers Against Poverty

Will Hutton makes some telling points about the cross-border tasks that Europe needs to tackle co-operatively – climate change, air traffic control, overfishing, etc (“This crude assault on Europe strikes at the very heart of Enlightenment values”, Comment). But his obsession with the need for open borders blinds him to the real threat to a progressive future for Europe, which is the rising insecurity of its population. This is the inevitable consequence of ever more open markets, a global obsession with international competitiveness and the ability of big business to use the threat of relocation to cow governments into lowering taxes and allowing real wages and conditions to deteriorate for the majority. We need a debate about replacing the neoliberal Treaty of Rome with a progressive “Treaty of Home”. At its core, this would allow governments to take back control of their economies by grouping together, rejecting international competitiveness and maintaining their borders to allow local economies to flourish. This regained ability to overcome economic insecurity might even tempt today’s resentful electorate back to being genuinely pro-European.

Colin Hines

East Twickenham

Cameron mute on tax dodgers

David Cameron goes red in the face and thumps the lectern protesting about the EU’s £1.7bn bill (“Cameron fury over budget risks alienating European partners”, News). But where is his fury about the money denied the Treasury by legal tax avoiders such as Amazon, Topshop, Vodafone etc, estimated at about £35bn in total? Your leader (“Don’t be evil, tech giants. Pay your taxes”) describes clearly the slimy manipulations these and many other companies and individuals make. By refusing to contribute to the very society that provides their obscene profits, these unethical companies display a greed that acts, through its magnitude, as a key driver of unnecessary public service cuts leading to ever-increasing levels of inequality, poverty and exclusion. Cameron doesn’t care, and this is an open goal for Labour – will they take it?

Max Fishel

Bromley

In praise of UK hospices

Ed Cumming’s article (“Should we do anything we can to keep people alive? This surgeon says no”, In Focus) disjointedly combined the stories of the difficult deaths of two British women with the views of an American surgeon (with a book to promote). He apparently advocates “improved hospices, of a sort that have begun to crop up in America… [which] concentrate on quality of life, with pets, music and other activities for residents”. An American surgeon might not know that the British hospice movement has been flourishing for 50 years, providing all of this combined with expert pain and symptom control, compassionate care and clinical research. But a British writer should have found this out and it would have been useful to readers to hear this.

Rosemary Cook

York

Yet more rich consumers

In January last year, the Royal Society published a paper called Can a collapse of global civilisation be avoided?. The message was that civilisation is under threat from the burdens of consumption and population growth. Now your article “High-fliers have more babies, according to study”, (News) tells us wealthy, high-powered women are having large families, up to nine, because they can afford to employ cleaners and nannies. So now we have the biggest consumers producing lots of little big consumers, increasing both population and consumption in one go. And all that an economist can find to say is that it’s “good news for growth”. Oh, joy!

Roger Plenty

Stroud

Problems of Portsmouth

I have lived my whole life in Portsmouth and worked here for most of it. I love it but I recognise many of the problems identified by Mark Townsend (“The Pompey jihadis”, News). Portsmouth is a city whose history and economy has been built on warfare. It is, I suppose in the DNA. Think of Portsmouth and you think perhaps of the country’s most topsy-turvy football club but probably you think of centuries of naval history. Other English cities can be recalled and imagined through their representations in popular culture or art. But Portsmouth? Almost nothing. Alasdair Gray once wrote: “If a city hasn’t been used by an artist, not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively.” Portsmouth may be in the leafy, privileged south but it is not a part of it. Perhaps at last you see that you ignore us at your peril.

Dr Dave Allen

Portsmouth

You don’t need money to get fit

Last week, Barbara Ellen condescendingly asserted that poor people can’t attain or maintain physical fitness because doing so is a prohibitively “expensive and complicated business” (“Poverty, not gluttony, is the cause of obesity”).

A quick look at the world outside of the middle-class professional bubble suggests otherwise. Human beings have always kept in shape in a variety of ways without need for personal trainers, private gym membership, DVDs or flash clothing. What’s more, they still do: are we expected to believe that, for example, the many world-beating athletes from rural Ethiopia and Kenya are either from affluent backgrounds or are unfit? Try exercising the grey matter, Ms Ellen.

Sean Cordell

Whalley Range, Manchester

Sir, The Home Office minister Norman Baker presented the latest review of effective policy across the world as though it was a “seminal” report (“Drug laws don’t work, ministers admit”, Oct 30). It is not. The charity the Police Foundation previously did a detailed and robust assessment of UK policy and evidence from elsewhere. Regrettably, the debate was not taken forward and the lessons from what is working are often set aside.

For the past 15 years, there has been a welcome trend (with the exception of legal highs) in the consumption of drugs (from Class A to Class C), and a switch away from criminalisation into treatment.

This is not about “decriminalising” dangerous drugs. It is about a common sense approach which ensures that where treatment is sought, it is available. A decade ago policy was adjusted to ensure that those apprehended by the police as users (as opposed to dealers) would be offered treatment as an alternative to imprisonment. This has worked.

Perhaps if people did not take rigid positions so quickly, it might still be possible to debate these matters more rationally.

Rt Hon David Blunkett MP
House of Commons

Sir, You contend (leading article, Oct 31) that UK policies on drugs are working and cite a substantial decrease in cannabis use over the past decade. The reality is that since the UN Conventions and the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act enshrined prohibition as the policy orthodoxy, drug use in Britain has soared. Abuse of prescription drugs has become a serious problem. Some 280 new psychoactive substances (NPS) have been recorded by the European Monitoring Centre.

The costs of prohibition are prodigious in public spending, policing, corruption, social exclusion, violence and suffering. As a member of the Home Affairs Select Committee, David Cameron said, “Politicians attempt to appeal to the lowest common denominator by posturing with tough policies and calling for crackdown after crackdown. Drugs policy has been failing for decades.” Legalisation, strict regulation, honest provision of information, education and sustained help for addicts would mitigate the harms caused by drugs.

Lord Howarth of Newport
House of Lords

Sir, Laws prohibiting drug use have created a raft of criminality which does far more harm to society than the drugs themselves. Take hard drugs out of the hands of gangsters and put them back into the hands of pharmacists and doctors. In so doing, we will be helping addicts who will be properly supplied and monitored in their drug-taking and, as a result, will stop committing crimes to feed their habit. At the same time, we will be putting out of business the murderous thugs who run the illicit industry. Finally, we might put a modest tax on popular drugs to fund drug rehabilitation clinics.

Stephen Porter
London NW6

Sir, There is talk of “evidence” from Portugal that drug use there had not increased after recent liberalisation.

Portugal is a country of ten million people. Britain has a much larger, richer population. Of course Portugal is a less interesting market for drug dealers. Politicians abuse the word “evidence” too much.

Peter Demetriadi
Diss, Norfolk

Sir, I doubt Hugo Rifkind (Ssh . . . lots of top people believe in drug reform”, Nov 1) is aware of the true dangers of cannabis.

Eighty per cent of the cannabis smoked in the UK is skunk with an average THC (the psychoactive ingredient) content of 16.2 per cent. THC persists in the cells of the brain for weeks. This affects the chemical messaging system. Vital connections are not made in the learning and memory processes. Few children using cannabis achieve their full potential. They are more likely to suffer from mental illness, move on to other drugs or become addicted. US rehab experts have told us that teenage cannabis dependence is the most challenging addiction to treat.

Mary Brett
Chairman of Cannabis Skunk Sense, Amersham, Bucks

Sir, I struggled not to laugh when I read that cannabis offenders “will be given advice by officers” (“Tougher penalties to replace cautions”, Nov 1) . Where will this “advice” be recorded? If someone is caught several times in possession by different officers, how are they linked? This is decriminalisation in all but name.

Nigel Price
Lisvane, Cardiff

Sir, Churchill was 23 in 1897 (“We shall not fight”, letter, Nov 1). How many 23-year olds have ever been listened to; let alone taken seriously?

Judy Macdonald
Newport Pagnell, Bucks

Sir, As you say, science-fiction writers have a record for prescience (“Future shock”, leader, Oct 31). After some years of research, I wrote three linked novels about a planet called Helliconia. The system has a small sun, much like our Sol, but all this is ruled by a much larger sun, known sometimes by the planetary inhabitants as Freyr.

Some astronomers regarded this as an impossibility. However, in 2011 Nasa’s telescopes discovered precisely a Helliconian system in space, containing two suns. This system is now known as Kepler 16B — not, alas, as Helliconia.

I should add that I undertook two years’ research before embarking on the writing of this trilogy.

Brian W Aldiss
Oxford

Sir, Ben Macintyre is wrong to link the cases of Alan Turing and Helen Duncan, the woman prosecuted under the Witchcraft Act of 1735 (“Churchill was right. Let’s pardon the witch”, Opinion, Oct 31). Prosecuting Turing for being homosexual was clearly wrong. The act referred to under which Duncan was prosecuted was designed to expose false witches. No one can doubt that Duncan was such a thing; nor, more importantly, that she also conned money from vulnerable, frightened and bereaved people at a time of war. Fraud might have been a more appropriate charge, but why should such a person be pardoned?

Robin Bowman
Woodbridge, Suffolk

Inspection: a British trainer watches carefully as Afghan soldiers parade at their training camp in Kabul Photo: EPA

SIR – General Lord Dannatt (“We are giving the Afghan people a chance at a better life”) says that we deployed British forces to Afghanistan to help the Afghans “get a life after two decades of bloody civil war”. That was not our purpose and would not have been a legitimate reason to send British forces to fight and die.

There was only one reason for this intervention alongside our American allies. Following 9/11, the world’s worst terrorist atrocity, in which more British citizens died than in any previous attack, the objective was to throw out or destroy al-Qaeda and to prevent the country from again becoming a base that international jihadists could use to attack the West.

The lack of clarity by generals and politicians on this singular objective was conditioned largely by a politically correct denial of the true purpose of military action in Afghanistan. It is summed up in the words of John Reid, defence secretary at the time of the British deployment to Helmand in 2006: “We would be perfectly happy to leave in three years and without firing one shot because our job is to protect the reconstruction.”

Lord Dannatt concludes that the 13-year campaign has been worth it. I agree with him, but not because I believe, as he does, that we have given the Afghan people the chance to lead a better life. Though at great cost in British, American and Afghan blood, we have achieved our objective in Afghanistan by killing and capturing large numbers of jihadists, many of whom would eventually have turned their attention to the West. As the previous director general of MI5, Jonathan Evans, made clear, British military action in Helmand has helped safeguard civilians at home.

Whether Afghanistan continues to resist international jihadists depends on the extent of continued Nato support to Afghanistan’s forces, which are not up to the job on their own.

Colonel Richard Kemp
Former Commander of British Forces in Afghanistan
London W1