Blair Mayne: Posthumous Victoria Cross

Alison Hume Excerpts

Tuesday 8th April 2025 Commons Chamber

[Alison Hume (Scarborough and Whitby) (Lab)]

Let first draw Members’ attention to my membership of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain.

I am delighted to have been called to speak in this debate about the merits of awarding a posthumous Victoria Cross to Lieutenant Colonel Robert Blair Mayne, best known as Paddy Mayne. I know that the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) feels passionately about this issue, and he spoke about it very eloquently. I am a member of the Backbench Business Committee, which hears applications from Back Benchers for debates on all kind of topics, and I have to say that this application caught my particular attention.

I was a television screenwriter before I was proudly elected to this place, and I am a huge fan of the hit television drama “SAS: Rogue Heroes”, created and written by Steven Knight. It is a vivid retelling of the story of the formation and achievements of Britain’s Special Air Service, which was formed by David Stirling as the ultimate military disrupter. In the second world war, the SAS changed the nature of the fight against the Nazis in Africa and beyond. The drama is among the best illustrations of why the United Kingdom is a powerhouse of the creative industries. The writer, cast and crew of “SAS: Rogue Heroes”, working for the production company Kudos, created a hit show that captured the irreverence, humour and bravery of the SAS, and retold the story of those brave men for a new generation.

I am sure that as I make this speech, bots will be crawling over Steven’s fantastic script to train artificial intelligence models, just as they have crawled over my scripts and those of thousands, indeed millions, of other screenwriters. They will be stealing copyrighted material, hard written and hard won by real humans, scraping it from under our noses, without permission, to make money for their AI companies. If only we had the AI equivalent of “SAS: Rogue Heroes” and the likes of Paddy Mayne to protect us! We will just have to rely on something that is a little more tame but still has teeth, and that is good legislation.

Paddy Mayne is unforgettably played in the series by Jack O’Connell, who brings the character to vivid life. The producer of the show, Stephen Smallwood, told me that shooting in the Sahara desert in July at 50° made O’Connell and the other actors think that they were just as hardcore as the SAS—until they were reminded that they had an air-conditioned hotel and a cold beer to return to that night. The conditions in which Paddy Mayne and his colleagues operated were truly beyond anything that we can imagine now. The raids that Paddy led in Libya were followed by legendary outings in Italy and Sicily, before he demonstrated outstanding courage by rescuing wounded men trapped in a Nazi ambush, clearing a machine-gun position and clearing a path for the allied advance. That is truly the stuff of legend. That outstanding bravery earned him a citation for a Victoria Cross, but it was downgraded to a Distinguished Service Order—his fourth—which has caused puzzlement ever since.

Although Lieutenant Colonel Mayne was one of the very few recipients of a rare third bar to the DSO, my hon. Friend the Member for Strangford is not alone in thinking that that is not enough, and that he should be posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross. I understand, however, that it is a key tenet of the British honours and awards system that such honours are not granted retrospectively, so that decisions made by peers and commanders at the time are respected. How and why the citation was overturned may never be fully understood, but let me say to the hon. Member for Strangford that although the pen strokes of a bureaucrat may be lost in the mists of time, Paddy Mayne’s legacy lives on in the democracy and the values that we now take for granted, but which were won by the sacrifices of Mayne’s fallen colleagues and the wider armed forces. His legacy lives on in the celebrations next month, when we will mark the 80th anniversary of victory in Europe, VE Day, and then in August, when we will mark the 80th anniversary of victory in Japan, VJ Day, commemorating the end of the second world war.

I am sure that if he were alive today, Paddy Mayne would be looking to us in this place to do right by the men and women who serve and risk their lives for this country. I am proud to be part of a Government who are committed to strengthening support for our veterans and armed forces community by putting the armed forces covenant fully into law and ensuring that veterans have secure homes.

Millions of people around the world have now learned about Paddy Mayne’s courage and leadership through the TV show. Seventy years after his untimely death, Paddy Mayne has officially passed into legend, and his phenomenal bravery will live on forever in the motto of the SAS: “Who dares wins.”