When Andrew Wilson was defence correspondent of the Observer in the 1980s, I received a complaint from the defence secretary, Michael Heseltine, that Andrew appeared at his press briefings wearing a CND badge. This irritated the minister because he was engaged in a public battle with CND over the deployment of cruise missiles in Europe. The complaint reached me via Anthony Howard, my deputy editor, who had been a friend of Heseltine since their time at Oxford. I told Howard to tell his friend that I would suggest to Andrew that in future he should wear his Military Cross instead.
He had been decorated after commanding a troop of flame-throwing tanks in battles from the Normandy beaches to Arnhem. Your obituary covered Andrew’s war career, but failed to mention the MC, about which he was so reticent that most of his friends and colleagues didn’t know about it. Needless to say, he continued to wear his CND badge at MoD briefings.
