How, as Mayor, I would help our brave troops

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.