Not that the press wanted his legal advice on the Prince’s Afghan posting. Instead, they wanted a comment from the Crown resident in his capacity as chairman and co-founder of the British Armed Forces Federation (BAFF), Britain’s first professional association for the services.

Yet, though he has served as a senior officer in conflict zones in Europe and the Middle East, Douglas himself is no career soldier.

Now a self-employed consultant, his main job was as a solicitor for local authorities in Moray and Highland as well as in private practice, but for more than 30 years he combined his legal career with service in the Territorial Army, which he joined in 1966.

Douglas, whose late father Robert was a Burma veteran and chairman of the organisation’s Highlands and Islands branch, was commissioned four years later and commanded the Inverness Battalion of the TA, but in 1990 he was granted a short service commission and served in the headquarters of the UK’s 1st Armoured Division throughout the first Gulf War.

“I was one of the first to volunteer for Iraq, but I only did that on the promise that they needed me,” he explained. “It wasn’t an easy thing to do, but I’m glad I did it.”

Five years later he was sent to Bosnia and, as a lieutenant-colonel, served as a senior liason officer with the NATO mission in Sarajevo for more than a year.

Within months, he was back in the Balkans as a member of the UK Kosovo Diplomatic Observer Mission.

“There were shootings and so on, but we were pretty successful in getting them stopped,” he said.

“I know we saved many lives and on occasion we had to do investigations.

“One in particular, a family found remains which turned out to be the father who had been kidnapped the previous autumn. I carried out the investigation and produced the statements which went to the Hague.

“That was a sad one because I knew the family quite well. We had a number of experiences like that.”

These included the murders of two local interpreters. One, an Albanian, was killed in a massacre by Serb militia. The other, though a Roma (Gypsy), was closer to the Serb community and disappeared after being kidnapped by Albanians.

Douglas, who was mentioned in evidence at the trial of Slobodan Milosevic, also collected statements from refugees in the Macedonian capital Skopje, screening them for potential war crimes witnesses.

These experiences later fuelled Douglas’s support for the BAFF’s campaign to ensure interpreters and other Iraqis who have worked for British forces can be given safe haven in the UK and he hopes the organisation will be as successful in this aim as it has been in others.

“It’s in a way remarkable, given the short time that we’ve been in existence, but we’ve played a major part in changing legislation,” he said.

One of these successes actually predates BAFF, but became the catalyst for its creation.

In 2005, Douglas and other former and serving personnel decided to take action after it emerged many service personnel were not registered to vote in that year’s General Election.

“We ran a campaign encouraging people to register,” Douglas explained.

“We also highlighted a number of serious flaws in electoral legislation and what the MoD (Ministry of Defence) was doing to inform the forces community about voting. That got a lot of publicity and was taken up in Parliament with cross-party support. We produced a very detailed paper which analysed all the problems and following the election all the specific demands that we made were consented by the MoD and the electoral process itself.

“That campaign brought together a lot of people who stayed together.”

This gave them an advantage when it came to forming the BAFF, enabling it to succeed where previous attempts to form a similar federation for UK armed forces had foundered. Yet many nations have professional associations representing the needs of their fighting men, including most of the UK’s European partners and the USA, whose influential Association of the United States Army dates back to 1950.

The major exception to this was Britain itself – until BAFF’s creation in 2006.

Douglas Young co-founded the British Armed Forces Federation which, he claims, has helped shape positive legislation. Gary Anthony

Its membership now numbers in the low hundreds with representation in all three services, including several members in the combat zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, among them members of BAFF’s executive council.

Members are represented throughout the ranks, from rating, private or airman to brigadier and included a retired air marshal, the late Tim Garden, the Liberal Democrat defence spokesman in the House of Lords.

“We have now achieved being taken for granted, but it was a very radical thing when we first came up with it,” Douglas acknowledged.

So controversial that concerns were raised in Parliament, but the federation has also received cross-party support and Douglas makes it clear that the federation would do nothing to interfere with or undermine the chain of command or do anything to discourage anyone from a military career, nor should BAFF be confused with a union.

“Nobody should think it is about battles stopping for tea-breaks or anything like that,” he said.

“There were some fears that we would make things difficult for the chain of command, balanced by a fear in other quarters that we were in the pocket of the chain of command – ex-officers in regimental blazers and so on.”

The other major legislative success the federation has won was in changing the ruling on eligibility for local authority housing.

Before BAFF’s intervention, anyone who left the forces would only be placed on a council house waiting list where they had “a local connection”. Under then current rules, this is not where the applicant left or had spent the majority of their military service, but where they joined up.

“Many people, particularly if they find themselves leaving the forces unexpectedly, will have a much better chance of picking up their life and getting employment in the area where they already are,” Douglas said.

Again, the Government has accepted the rules should be changed.

BAFF has raised concerns about a variety of issues, from treatment of personnel with post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental health issues to concerns about accommodation, the reliability of forces mail – and whether its members had any concerns about Prince Harry’s front-line service.

What it will not comment on are the rights or wrongs of UK involvement in Iraq or Afghanistan.

“We see that as a national decision and we neither support nor criticise. But given that we have forces involved, we expect the Government and the nation as a whole to support these forces and their families,” he said.

He agreed, however, that the current strain placed on the armed forces by the commitment to these conflicts had been a spur to BAFF’s creation and had certainly led to much press interest in the young organisation.

“We’ve actually had a huge amount of media interest given how new we are,” Douglas said.

Asked how much time is spent on BAFF, he admitted: “Too much. It’s very expensive in terms of my own time.

“Most of the issues we speak on are not operational issues. We may comment on vital medical services and so on, but unlike most of the other usual suspects, we tend not to comment on whether the British forces should be equipped with this helicopter or that armoured vehicle.

“What we say about resources in general is that commanders on the ground must be given what they say they need.

“We are not always happy that has happened. There have been disgraceful deficiencies.”

c.macleod@inverness-courier.co.uk 

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