In a dazzling naval career that took him from officer cadet to chief of the defence staff in 40 years, Michael Boyce, Lord Boyce, who has died aged 79, showed his true mettle in his last year of service by demanding a guarantee from the then prime minister, Tony Blair, that he was acting legally in sending British forces into Iraq in 2003.
Boyce was not the only senior establishment figure to feel uneasy about the second American-led invasion of Iraq in a dozen years. The doubters even included the attorney-general of the day, Lord Goldsmith, who as the government’s chief legal adviser was consulted about the legality of the operation but at first failed to produce an unreserved endorsement. The deputy legal adviser to the Foreign Office, Elizabeth Wilmshurst, resigned in March 2003, days before the invasion, because she believed it was illegal.
On the 12th of that month Boyce asked Blair for an unequivocal statement on the legality issue. The next day Goldsmith told Blair’s senior advisers that the war would be legal under UN Security Council resolution 1441 of November 2002, which stated that Iraq had not fully complied with its obligation to disarm under the ceasefire ending the first Iraq war of 1991. Boyce told the Observer in 2005: “My concern was always that the troops should feel absolutely confident that what they were doing was absolutely black-and-white legal.”
British diplomats in particular made frantic efforts to organise a second resolution endorsing action under 1441, but failed. Goldsmith, in a written answer to the House of Lords, outlined his argument that 1441 was enough in itself to justify action. Three days later, the first US missiles were fired at Iraq.
But the discontent of Boyce, based on the fear of legal actions against troops in the International criminal court, did not end there. As became clear from his evidence to the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war, given in December 2009 and January 2011, he also attacked the Treasury for inadequate funding of the war and failing to provide for the aftermath of the invasion, the Ministry of Defence for equipment shortcomings and its “Jejit” (just enough just in time) approach to procurement, and the government as a whole for not setting up a war cabinet to oversee Britain’s involvement.
Such have been the complaints of military leaders down the ages, but they are seldom aired in public or in such detail. “Drawing money out of the Treasury is like drawing blood out of a stone,” said Boyce.
Son of Commander Hugh Boyce DSC, and his wife, Madeleine (nee Manley), Boyce was born in Cape Town, where his father was serving in the Royal Navy during the second world war, and was educated at Hurstpierpoint college in West Sussex. He entered the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth as a cadet in 1961, rose to lieutenant in 1965 and saw service in three submarines, including HMS Conqueror, a nuclear-powered boat.
He passed the notorious “perisher” course for submarine commanders in 1973 and got his first command, of a diesel submarine, the next year. Promoted commander, Boyce was given charge of the nuclear submarine HMS Superb in 1979.
He was serving in the department of naval plans when the Falklands war took place in 1982, and was given his first surface command, the frigate HMS Brilliant, in 1983, in the rank of captain. By 1989 he was senior naval officer in the Middle East. He was appointed flag officer, sea training, in 1991 as a rear admiral. A year later he became head of Nato’s anti-submarine warfare strike force.
His rapid rise up the promotional ladder in a remorselessly shrinking navy, soon to be endowed with rather more admirals than warships, continued in 1994, when he was made vice-admiral, and then knighted the following year. After only 15 months he was elevated to full admiral and appointed second sea lord and C-in-C of naval home command. In 1997 he became C-in-C fleet, Nato C-in-C eastern Atlantic and commander of allied naval forces, north-west Europe.
In 1998, he was made head of the Royal Navy as first sea lord and chief of naval staff. After barely two years in the post, he became Britain’s most senior military officer, as chief of the defence staff, in 2001.
Even in retirement from the end of 2003, by which time he had been given a peerage, the honours kept coming. He was appointed a deputy lieutenant of Greater London and lord warden of the Cinque Ports, before being made a Knight of the Garter in 2011, and an honorary admiral of the fleet, a rank no longer awarded to serving officers, in 2014.
In 1971 Boyce married Harriette (nee Fletcher), with whom he had a son, Hugo, and a daughter, Christine. He and Harriette separated in 1994 and divorced in 2005, and in 2006 he married Fleur Rutherford (nee Smith); she died in 2016. He is survived by his children.
• Michael Cecil Boyce, naval officer, born 2 April 1943; died 6 November 2022
• Dan van der Vat died in 2019
