OBITUARY: Field Marshal Charles Ronald Llewelyn Guthrie, Baron Guthrie of Craigiebank

The former head of the UK’s armed forces dubbed ‘Tony’s General’ for his closeness to the then Prime Minister has died aged 86.

Field Marshal Charles Ronald Llewelyn Guthrie, Baron Guthrie of Craigiebank, GCB, GCVO, OBE, DL oversaw successful military interventions in the Balkans and Sierra Leone during Blair’s premiership.

The deeply respected former SAS and Guards officer also claimed to be ‘probably the last British officer to have had a spear thrown at him in anger’. The spear throwing incident occurred in 1980 when he led an Anglo-French force thwarting a political coup on the island of Espiritu Santo in the New Hebrides.

He was also a crossbench member of the House of Lords and a successful British Army commander in Northern Ireland, Oman and East Africa.

Lord Guthrie was a senior officer of the British Army who served as Chief of the General Staff from 1994 to 1997 and Chief of the Defence Staff from 1997 until his retirement in 2001.

Guthrie’s military career saw service with the Welsh Guards and the Special Air Service; he was closely involved in military operations in Northern Ireland and provided advice to the British Government during the Bosnian War and the Kosovo War.

Born in Chelsea, London into a Scottish landed family, on 17 November 1938, Guthrie was the elder son of Major Ronald Guthrie and Nina née Llewelyn. He was educated at Harrow School and the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst.

He was commissioned into the Welsh Guards on 25 July 1959 and was promoted to lieutenant on 1 June 1961 and captain on 25 July 1965. In 1966 he became a troop commander with 22 Special Air Service Regiment serving in Aden, the Persian Gulf, Malaysia and East Africa and then in 1968 he became a squadron commander with 22 Special Air Service Regiment serving in the Persian Gulf and the United Kingdom.

He returned to the Welsh Guards in Münster in 1970 and, following his promotion to major on 31 December 1970, and was given command of a mechanised infantry company in the 1st Battalion. He became Military Assistant to the Chief of the General Staff in 1973 and, following a year as Second in Command of 1st Battalion Welsh Guards in London and Cyprus and having been promoted to lieutenant colonel on 31 December 1975, he became brigade major for the Household Division in 1976.

Guthrie was appointed commanding officer of 1st Battalion Welsh Guards in 1977 in which role he was deployed to Berlin. Promoted to colonel on 31 December 1979, he undertook a tour of duty in Northern Ireland in Spring 1980 for which he was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire.

After numerous assignments and further promotions, Guthrie went on to become Chief of the Defence Staff on 2 April 1997.In that position, he advised the British Government on the conduct of the Kosovo War.He also warned against a British invasion of Zimbabwe to undertake regime change against Robert Mugabe, saying “Hold hard, you’ll make it worse.”

After retiring from the British Army, he was created a life peer as Baron Guthrie of Craigiebank, of Craigiebank in the Dundee City council area, in June 2001. Lord Guthrie sat as a crossbencher in the House of Lords. He was one of several retired Chiefs of Defence Staff who spoke out in the House of Lords about the risk to servicemen facing liability for their actions before the International Criminal Court, particularly with respect to the invasion of Iraq.

In 2007 Guthrie co-authored a book on ethics in modern warfare with Sir Michael Quinlan, formerly Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Defence.

He was president of several charities, including Action Medical Research, the Army Benevolent Fund, Soldier On!, and the Progressive Supranuclear Palsy Association. Until 2019, he was also the president of London Youth (Federation of London Youth Clubs). He was also a Deputy Lieutenant for Dorset.

A Roman Catholic convert, Guthrie became a Knight of Malta and was a Patron of the Catholic homeless charities Cardinal Hume Centre and Caritas Anchor House. He became Chancellor of Liverpool Hope University in July 2013.

In a candid and lengthy interview with the National Catholic Register, Lord Guthrie said that his conversion to Catholicism was a lengthy process.

“Well, it didn’t happen like Saul on the road to Damascus,” Guthrie old The Register.

“It took quite a long time. My father had become a Catholic when he was 68, and we were always that way inclined. We went to church and all that, and it seemed to me that I would probably end up there … gradually, it got more and more obvious I should be a Catholic. I was influenced by various priests I knew, various army chaplains I knew. I was influenced by my wife. But I always think I’d probably have been a Catholic more quickly if I hadn’t been married to her.

“She really is a good Catholic who does an awful lot of things for the Church, but the reason I say that is because I wanted to be absolutely sure that I did want to be a Catholic not just because it was convenient to be a Catholic — you know, with only one car, who’s going to have it on Sunday, that sort of thing,” he added.

“I also was a general in Yorkshire, very near to Ampleforth Abbey, and I had a great friend, who’s still a great friend of mine, who’s a monk there and three or four people who really influenced me.”

Asked what aspect of the faith drew him to convert, Lord Guthrie explained that it was a spiritual awareness.

“Obviously, the Church does an awful lot of good, looking after the poor and the sick,” said Lord Guthrie, “But that wasn’t the reason. It was more of the spiritual side which drew me to the Church, and l look upon the work that people do as rather an extra, really.

“You can’t become a Catholic because there are a lot of poor people sleeping outside Westminster Cathedral. You’ve got to have a better reason than that.”

In August 2014, Lord Guthrie was one of 200 public figures who were signatories to a letter to The Guardian opposing Scottish independence in the run-up to September’s referendum on that issue. He initially supported the continuance of the United Kingdom’s presence in the European Union in the 2016 referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union, but suddenly switched to an advocacy of withdrawing from it less than a week before the vote was held, issuing a public warning of the ambitions inherent in the E.U. for the creation of a new “European Army”, which he stated “would be a disaster”.

On 8 January 2019, in an extraordinary intervention in the political sphere by figures from the military and intelligence services quarter, Guthrie sent a letter, co-signed by Sir Richard Dearlove, to Conservative Party Parliamentary Constituency Association Chairs, stating that the passage through the House of Commons of Prime Minister Theresa May’s Withdrawal Agreement of the United Kingdom from the European Union contained decisions which fundamentally undermined the integrity of the Defence of the Realm, and requested they take measures to discourage their parliamentary representatives from voting for it imminently in the Commons.

The letter as an alternative advocated the case upon national security grounds that the United Kingdom should fully withdraw from the European Union without an Intergovernmental relationship between the two persisting after the process.

On relinquishing his appointment as Colonel of The Life Guards and Gold Stick-in-Waiting, The Queen appointed Lord Guthrie a Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order on 7 June 2019. On 1 December 2020, he retired from the House of Lords

Lord Guthrie died from a cerebral aneurysm on 18 September 2025, at the age of 86. A devoted husband to Lady Guthrie, Catherine who predeceased him in 2022, he is survived by their sons David and Andrew, and two grandchildren.