It’s hard to put your finger on but you always get a sense that senior officers in the British Army don’t think it’s right that Labour, even New Labour, should ever be in government. A bit of residual class hatred always seeps out. So despite all the parades, “Armed Forces Day” and the unending paeans to the valour and glory of the imperial killing machine. General Sir Richard Dannatt went on  the BBC to tell the world that he would compile a “shopping list”. He’s the head of the British Army.

His boss, Chief of the Defence Staff, Sir Jock Stirrup (for  readers overseas that’s his real name. Their was also a General Sir Michael Jackson) then took to the airwaves to tell anyone who would listen that “the deployment of more helicopters to Afghanistan would save soldiers’ lives”. That was a direct contradiction of what Labour ministers had been saying all week when not explaining how they were going to increase the number of helicopters. Dannatt’s subtle response to this was to make it known that he’d been tootling rounding Afghanistan in an American helicopter because he couldn’t get a British one.

As a general principle it’s a good thing when high profile leaders in the public sector take to the TV to say that we need more social workers and that the money should be made available to pay the staff in care homes a decent wage and give them proper training. Admittedly it does not happen very often or maybe it does and the BBC just decides not to make it the lead news story several days running. As Seumas Milne has pointed out the BBC is scrapping the old impartiality fiction when it comes to war. “as its newsreaders warn “Britain’s resolve is being put to the test” and presenters speculate anxiously about what might happen if public “support” for the war “were to weaken”.

Somewhere in a safe in a cellar in Sandhurst there is an operations manual for how you run a coup. Chapter two probably comes close to what we have seen this week. Use a compliant press to humiliate a weak government on an issue on which it has made itself very vulnerable – both because it is doing something it shouldn’t, the Afghan war and because it accepts the officers’ political framework. The soldiers may not get all the hardware they want but they have done enough to make sure that additional money is going to be thrown at them in the next spending round. They have also managed to very effectively humiliate the craven New Labourites who are supposed to be their bosses. Jeeves would be proud.