He was determined, he said, to ‘tell the truth as I saw it, even when it was not always convenient’
Admiral of the Fleet Lord Boyce, who has died aged 79, was the Chief of the Defence Staff between 2001 and 2003 who challenged the Blair government’s legal authority in the run-up to the Second Iraq War.
In 1997-98, Boyce was Commander-in-Chief Fleet, Commander-in-Chief Eastern Atlantic Area and Commander Naval Forces North Western Europe, taking up these offices shortly after Tony Blair had become Prime Minister. For a few weeks in early 1998 he also became acting First Sea Lord while his predecessor Sir Jock Slater was ill, and formally became First Sea Lord in late 1998.
Boyce found this period “comprehensively knackering”, but was successful in the Labour government’s Strategic Defence Review in helping to shift British defence policy towards an expeditionary role and away from land-based campaigning, in particular a defensive position on the central front in Germany.
Blair authorised several small-scale military interventions, and in a speech delivered in Chicago in 1999 he announced his so-called “ethical foreign policy”, advocating greater use of armed forces to protect a civilian population, rather than exclusively to protect national interests. Boyce thought that Operation Palliser in May-June 2000 – British intervention to end the civil war in Sierra Leone – was an exemplar of this new policy: “a quick in and out, and not too much mission-creep”.