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.
He believed a general needed to be close to those in power to advise and explain what was possible and could be achieved, and what was not and needed avoidance. He headed off suggestions of invading Zimbabwe to topple Robert Mugabe, and by the time of the ultimate Blairite open-ended interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, Guthrie had retired. He later said he thought the Afghan invasion was “cuckoo”.
With craggy features and a blunt manner – he had played rugby and polo for the army and was once described as like a rhinoceros in armour – Guthrie stood his corner in defence of military spending, particularly against the Treasury, which was looking for savings following the so-called “peace dividend” after the end of the cold war. While he got on well with Blair and his defence secretary, George Robertson, who went on to become secretary general of Nato, his relationship was rather less warm with the chancellor, Gordon Brown.
He complained that the latter had only been interested in attending a briefing about naval shipbuilding in his constituency. When Brown told him at one meeting that he knew a bit about defence, Guthrie bluntly replied: “Chancellor, you know fuck all.” Brown, as prime minister, approved the order for two aircraft carriers to be built in his part of Scotland, which many defence analysts beyond the navy regarded as expensive white elephants, out of time for modern defence requirements. Guthrie predictably described them as terminally vulnerable “behemoths” as the nature of warfare evolved.
He was born in London, the son of Nina (nee Llewelyn) and Ronald Guthrie, a City businessman from a Scottish landed family. Charles was educated at Harrow where he captained the rugby XV, played for English schoolboys and he became head of school, on one occasion taking tea with the school’s most famous old boy, Winston Churchill, and also escorting the Queen on a visit.
Guthrie joined not a Scottish regiment, as might have been expected with his ancestry, but the Welsh Guards, after a maternal uncle who had served in the regiment secured him an offer of a place on completion of training at Sandhurst. He graduated from the military academy in 1959 and took up his commission.
He was posted first to Aden, Yemen, then to London where, like other junior guardsmen, he occasionally acted as an extra with walk-on parts during Covent Garden operas, a long-established tradition originally ordained by Queen Victoria that gave him a close-up view of stars including Maria Callas and Tito Gobbi in Tosca, and instilled a lifelong love of opera.
In 1965, Guthrie was selected for the SAS and became a troop commander, serving in Aden, then the Gulf, Kenya and Malaysia before being posted back to his regiment, to Germany and then Belfast in the early period of the Troubles. Rising further, he became military assistant to the chief of the general staff – a first taste of Whitehall – for two years, then back to the Guards, where he oversaw the ceremonials for the Queen’s silver jubilee. Regimental command of the Welsh Guards’ 1st brigade in Berlin followed, then one of the army’s toughest postings to the so-called “bandit country” of south Armagh in winter; service which brought him to the attention of the prime minister Margaret Thatcher, and his appointment as OBE for his drive and inspirational leadership.
By contrast, this was followed by a posting from the general staff in 1980 to a joint Anglo-French operation to frustrate a coup on Espiritu Santo in the Pacific islands of the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu). It was not much of an uprising, but it did at least give Guthrie the opportunity for future tales of being probably the last British officer to have had a spear thrown at him.
Further postings in Germany and to the Ministry of Defence followed, where he became assistant chief of the general staff (ACGS), an appointment concerned largely with downsizing the army. This was followed rapidly by promotion to army CGS in 1994 after the chief of the defence staff, the RAF’s Sir Peter Harding, resigned following tabloid revelations of an affair.
The appointment coincided with the escalation of the war in Bosnia, and when three years later Guthrie succeeded to the CDS role, the promotion occurred just as Blair became prime minister. The Kosovo crisis erupted, followed by intervention in Sierra Leone, both of which Guthrie endorsed, including the bombing of Serbia.
These were the high points of Blair’s doctrine of humanitarian intervention – Guthrie maintained that bombing Belgrade brought a swifter end to the war – but he was also left with an aversion to the idea, then prevalent, of the creation of a European army. Much later, although a signatory of a letter with 12 other senior military figures supporting Britain remaining in the EU during the Brexit campaign, he publicly changed his mind because of what he saw as the likely creation of an ineffectual joint army operating separately from Nato.
Guthrie retired in 2001 and was made a life peer, sitting as a crossbencher in the Lords. He would also become an honorary field marshal in 2012, though the customary award of membership of the order of the Garter eluded him, perhaps because he was a Catholic. He was given the arcane title of Gold Stick in Waiting to the Queen, and became honorary colonel commandant of the Intelligence Corps and colonel of the Life Guards, suffering the indignity of fainting and falling off his horse during the trooping of the colour in 2018 at the age of 79.
He became a director of the merchant bank NM Rothschild (2001-10), chancellor of Liverpool Hope University (2013-19) and a visiting professor at the department of war studies at King’s College London. In 2007 he and the former senior civil servant Sir Michael Quinlan published Just War, a study of the ethics of warfare, and in 2021 his memoir, Peace, War and Whitehall.
In 1971, Guthrie married Catherine Worrall, the daughter of a colonel of the Coldstream Guards; she died in 2022. He is survived by their two sons, David and Andrew.
• Charles Ronald Llewelyn Guthrie, army officer, born 17 November 1938; died 18 September 2025
