UK's ex-army chief triggers a storm with new book

London: The former head of the British Army accuses Tony Blair and Gordon Brown of badly letting down the Armed Forces during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In a damning verdict, General Sir Richard Dannatt accuses Brown of being a "malign" influence by failing to honour guarantees on defence spending during his time at the Treasury, and charges Blair with lacking "moral courage" for failing to overrule his chancellor.

Gen Dannatt's book, Leading from the Front, which began to be serialised in The Telegraph yesterday, is the first major public critique of the Blair/Brown administration by a senior outside figure who served under both men. He was Chief of the General Staff from 2006-09. He describes his efforts to persuade Blair and Brown that the Army — fighting in both Iraq and Afghanistan and suffering heavy casualties — was facing almost unbearable pressures as "pushing a rock up a steep hill almost all the way through".

His book is further evidence of the cripplingly dysfunctional nature of the relationship between Blair and Brown, which Blair spelt out in his own memoir, A Journey, published last week. The general also reveals in his book and in interviews for the newspaper that by early 2009, at a time when the Army was suffering a punishing casualty rate in Afghanistan, he had not had a face-to-face meeting with Brown for six months.

Eventually he was forced to ‘ambush' the prime minister during a chance meeting in Horse Guards Parade to get his concerns across. The 1997-98 Strategic Defence Review (SDR), which set out a "good framework" for future defence policy, could not cope with troops being committed to Iraq and Afghanistan at the same time and was "fatally flawed" through being underfunded.