David Davies is the MP for Monmouth and on the Home Affairs Select Committee. He’s a thoroughly sensible chap who is cursed by having to write back to thousands of invitations for speaking engagements to delicately check if he’s been mistaken (again) for THE David Davis, one time Shadow Home Secretary and now backbench scourge of the enemies of civil liberties. Writing on ConservativeHome’s Platform section, he calls for Ministers to attend the funerals of those who have fallen on the battlefield. Please allow a few quotes with why TheEye disagrees.

Mr Davies writes eloquently of the funeral of a local Master of Foxhounds and those of several soldiers…all celebrated and remembered in their own ways and all very moving and poignant affairs. Then within a few paragraphs he ruins a great image of mourning.

The experience of sitting a few feet away from the mother, father, brothers, sisters and wife or girlfriend of a young man who has lost his life because of decisions taken by Parliament is sobering. I walk away asking myself a lot of questions about the rightness of those decisions and whether things could be done differently. Now more than ever we need to be asking those questions. For that reason alone, if the families are happy for us to do so, MPs have a duty to try to attend these funerals.

Agree entirely. Good also that he questions himself and questions others. These things should never be taken on the nod, and certainly should never be blindly persevered with as circumstances change. Importantly he recognises that attending should only be with the permission of the family.

For the same reasons, if not more so, Ministers should be present at as many funerals of service personnel as possible. Currently it is their policy to attend none. That is reprehensible.

No. Completely disagree. A local MP has a reason to attend. He/she may well know the family and friends, connections between local schools, churches, community organisations and so on. A Minister will only be attending as a political token, a man on a rota, a symbol of the Government. And what if that Minister happens to be Aintworthalot? Could you stomach that pitiful waste of skin at the funeral of your brother? Your son? No, if it wasn’t a funeral you’d probably punch him. Repeatedly.

The MoD claim, ludicrously, that attending funerals would give publicity to the terrorist cause. Nonsense.

Yes it is nonsense, and you’ve set up a straw man argument which you spend three paragraphs knocking back down.


They should pay their respects to those who have died trying to carry out those decisions. If they are confident that their objectives in Afghanistan are logical and correct, and if their consciences are clear over the money they have spent trying to achieve those objectives, then they should be happy to sit at the front of the church in a military funeral listening to the eulogies of those who have fallen trying to enact their will.

He writes at some length and quite elegantly along these lines but builds his argument from a false base. A Minister has no reason to be there except to represent (in theory) The Crown but in practice as a PR exercise for the Labour Government. And this isn’t a party political point…no Minister of either main party should attend.

By all means go to RAF Lyneham and attend the military repatriation of the bodies (and Brize Norton when Lyneham closes) but leave family and friends in peace to mourn a life cut cruelly short.