How, as Mayor, I would help our brave troops -

Boris Johnson is appalled by the indifference towards veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. Whatever our views, we should honour those who have performed their duty -

Even if the story is exaggerated, the underlying psychology is convincing. It is reliably reported that last month a woman in her thirties was doing her daily laps of the pool in Leatherhead, Surrey, when she became aware of an obstacle.

A section of the swimming-pool had been roped off to allow 15 wounded soldiers to receive the therapy needed for their rehabilitation. It is hard to know what went through the young woman’s mind, but she must have grasped that these disfigurements had been incurred in Iraq and Afghanistan. She understood in a flash that she was not only being inconvenienced; she was being inconvenienced by the British military, the people who (as she no doubt instinctively conceived it) had brought havoc to the innocent civilians of Third World countries.

In her imagination she suddenly became a victim, and the interruption of her daily yuppie swim was collateral damage caused by the unrelenting stupidity of British military adventurism. So she got out of the pool and started berating the soldiers. ‘I pay to come here,’ she cried, apparently shaking with indignation, ‘and you lot don’t.’

Among the soldiers and their trainers there was, as you might expect, panic. If you are permanently injured, you must reconcile yourself to a lifetime of stares. It surely requires real courage to take off your clothes and expose your mutilated body in a public swimming-pool; and the last thing you expect is to be shouted at by a fit young woman — one of the very civilians on whose behalf you thought you were fighting.

So how did it end, the battle for the Leatherhead shallow end? It is a sign of the topsy-turvydom of our world that this termagant got her way. No one rebuked her. No one told her to shut up and show some respect to people who had lost so much for their country. The 15 injured soldiers scrambled or were helped out of the pool. The woman got on with her laps. For many people in Britain’s armed forces this is the kind of incident that sums up the relation between the British civilian population and the 100,000 troops who have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan since 2003. I don’t say that it is completely impossible to imagine a ghastly scene like that in America; but it is surely far less likely.

The Iraq operation is Britain’s biggest overseas engagement for 50 years, and yet the people who are fighting it on our behalf seem to inspire nothing much more than apathy, verging on embarrassment, verging in some cases on distaste. How many bumper stickers have you seen urging us to support our boys? How many yellow ribbons, of the kind that are ubiquitous in America?

One of the pledges Gordon Brown made in the run-up to his ectopic election was that the troops would be home by Christmas. That suggestion seems to have evaporated; but even if it had been honoured, it is hard to imagine that we would have turned out, as a nation, to shower them with confetti. A victory parade? Toes across Britain would have curled at the thought. There is a very simple reason for this embarrassment, and for the humiliating deference shown to the tantrums of the female swimmer of Leatherhead; and that is the unpopularity of the war.

We as a nation have been deeply shamed by our treatment of our Viet Nam soldiers. This kind of incident would never have happened here, or, if it did, that moronic selfish b*tch would have been forced by public outcry to apologize. When will the British feel shame?

"It is reliably reported that last month a woman in her thirties was doing her daily laps of the pool in Leatherhead, Surrey, when she became aware of an obstacle."

This is written really stupidly. HOW could she not notice that the pool was roped off until she started swiming her laps??

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