Charles Guthrie, Field Marshal Lord Guthrie of Craigiebank, who has died aged 86, was head of the British army then chief of the general staff during some of the most turbulent times of Britain’s modern armed forces in the early years of the Tony Blair government.
Regarded by some as a political general, for his closeness to the prime minister during the peak of Blair’s humanitarian phase, which included interventions in localised conflicts in Kosovo and Sierra Leone, Guthrie insisted that he was not so much political as strategic in defending Britain’s armed forces.
