The fact that our Prime Minister offered his service for free to prosecute troops who served this country is shocking, even to me
Daily Telegraph 27/01/25
In my efforts to dismantle their approach over the past 10 years, I have often tried to understand what drives politicians who continually advocate for the endless hounding of troops who serve this country on operations.
They can’t claim to represent the British public. Unfortunately for politicians, the public are not stupid. They understand the fog of war, that things go wrong, and that nothing is black and white. They want those egregious cases of serious wrongdoing prosecuted – we run professional Armed Forces, have built our country on their legacy and are deeply proud of their service.
But the public cannot understand this almost insatiable desire from some quarters to harass British soldiers.
That The Telegraph – which I have worked with for more than 10 years on this subject now – revealed that Sir Keir Starmer, our Prime Minister, offered his service for free in this pursuit, was shocking, even to me.
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I’ve spent some time trying to understand why Sir Keir has gone back on almost everything he personally said to me in the past about veterans, and why he is so determined to continue to persecute British troops after their service.
It’s clear that he was personally involved in unleashing the witch-hunt against British troops that I’ve spent the past decade dismantling. He offered his services for free, harassing men like Sgt Richie Catterall, who served his country in Northern Ireland, Iraq and Afghanistan. Sir Keir should apologise.
Sgt Catterall during his time as a soldier in Northern Ireland Credit: Athena Picture Agency
Working with the Prime Minister, of course, was Lord Hermer, the Attorney General, who even praised human rights lawyer Phil Shiner at the time, despite Shiner already being under investigation by the Solicitors Regulation Authority. I later reported Shiner to the National Crime Agency, and in 2023 I attended his trial, where he was convicted of fraud.
The human costs of all this are grotesque. It breaks my heart to recount them. Sgt Catterall’s experiences are the latest to come to light.
Now cared for by his daughter, he has made multiple attempts to end his life. Under-equipped, scared, in a war so unpopular that one million British citizens marched against it before the invasion, Sgt Catterall did his duty in Iraq, as commanded by his own government.
A government which then chose to take the word of our enemies over our own people, establish an Iraq Historical Allegations Team to look at thousands of cases that had been invented, pay out £92m of taxpayers’ money to Iraqis and human rights lawyers, use civilian companies to investigate and spy on veterans trying to deal with the effects of the war, and keep soldiers under investigation – in Sgt Catterall’s case, for 13 years.
Our Prime Minister fought for this process.
Inevitably, Sir George Newman found that when the case was examined in detail, Sgt Catterall had acted entirely lawfully in self-defence, and he could place “no confidence” in the evidence presented against him.
All this matters because Sir Keir is at it again, on Northern Ireland. The Legacy Act, which I pushed through against immense opposition and came into law in 2023, was not perfect at all. It was the best of a bad set of options for a legacy process which had cost millions of pounds and almost never found out what happened for families, but made human rights lawyers such as Sir Keir and Lord Hermer very rich indeed. But it worked. It ended inquests – almost always the starting point of the nightmare for elderly veterans.
It encouraged participants to take part by removing the threat of prosecution, so that families might find out what happened to their loved ones.
The act also maintained the ability to prosecute those who refused to take part in a truth and reconciliation process. Sir Keir’s assertions in Parliament this week that the IRA was offered a ceasefire were a lie, and he knew it.
He also knew we were likely to win the inevitable legal challenges that the act faced by a court in Northern Ireland. He chose to relinquish that fight and declare it “unlawful”.
Our own Prime Minister, along with his Attorney General, prosecuted British soldiers serving in Iraq for free.
Sir Keir now wants to rewrite legislation to allow this process to continue prosecuting British soldiers who served in Northern Ireland. There used to be a word for those who choose to side with the enemy.
It’s in his DNA. He can’t help it. Perhaps if he is shown how politically fatal going to war with his own veterans is, he may change course. We can live in hope. The British people are not stupid.
Johnny Mercer is the former Conservative minister for veterans’ affairs
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