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Armed forces face Brown's fury
Sunday Telegraph Link
Sunday Telegraph Link
Defence chiefs believe that the Armed Forces are now viewed by senior Labour figures as a "Tory organisation", leaving them at risk of incurring the wrath of Gordon Brown, the Chancellor.
Senior officers fear that relations with Labour are so bad that the Chief of the Defence Staff will have to issue official orders at senior level, banning the leaking of stories damaging to the Government.
Months of unofficial briefings by senior commanders have sparked increasing fears that the Ministry of Defence will be left the "poor relations" of Government spending, with defence budgets slashed during this year's Comprehensive Spending Review.
The crisis has been fuelled in recent months by a deluge of leaked documents and a series of bitter attacks on the Government's defence policy by senior military figures, complaining that the Armed Forces are under-resourced but over-committed on operations around the world.
Defence chiefs are also understood to be deeply concerned that the leaking of documents will appear to the wider Labour Party as part of a "corporate strategy" to extract more money from the Treasury ahead of the review.