You know what the SAS’s problem is, according to Monica Grenfell, a civil servant who worked at their HQ? They ‘swear all the time,’ she said, which was not acceptable in other workplaces, adding: ‘You can’t go into M&S and say [someone] is a f***ing c***.’  As she put it, ‘there are nasty characters there and nasty characters who really ruled the roost.’

I am not making this up. She really did say it in an interview with the Times. It hasn’t had anything like the attention it needs as an illustration of how far some of our public servants have lost contact with reality.

I hate to break this to Monica Grenfell, but soldiers of all regiments swear a lot. The SAS have a quite different job from sales assistants in clothes shops. And much though Ms Grenfell may wish this, it seems unlikely that we could have, for instance, saved the lives of the Iranian embassy hostages by knocking on the door and asking nicely, or even by passing an emergency resolution at our local branch of the Woodcraft Folk.

We actually do need people who can be nasty – indeed, God forbid, violent – to our enemies

Upsetting as it may be to gently-brought-up civil servants, we actually do need people who can be nasty – indeed, God forbid, violent – to our enemies. We need them to protect us from still greater violence and nastiness to innocents, such as the hostages. We should be very grateful that there are still those who are prepared to do this on our behalf, despite the views of individuals like Monica Grenfell, and we should grant them due leeway.

That leeway should not, of course, extend to cold-blooded murder, of which members of the SAS are accused in Afghanistan. The effective application of state violence depends on discipline. If the allegations are proved, it will stain the regiment. But Ms Grenfell, one of the witnesses to the inquiry into events in Afghanistan, doesn’t seem able to distinguish between different kinds of violence, may not indeed believe that there are different kinds. That undermines her testimony about the regiment’s delinquency.

Ms Grenfell is also upset by the fact that an officer joked about the deaths of three SAS reservists on an exercise in the Brecon Beacons, saying that ‘dying on selection is nature’s way of saying you have failed’, at which others laughed. But black humour is one way in which soldiers cope with the toll the work takes on them, something else Ms Grenfell doesn’t understand. She is described as a ‘whistleblower’ in the newspaper. Maybe her next revelation will be that members of the SAS do not always put the seat down after leaving the lavatory.

You have to ask yourself: how did someone like this ever keep a job in the headquarters of the SAS? (Although the newspaper’s description of her as a ‘civil servant’, though strictly accurate, perhaps overstates her role: she was a kitchen worker, then a storekeeper.) Maybe she just kept her views to herself. But maybe it’s another example of how Britain’s institutions are being destroyed from within by people who do not understand what they are for.