A former First Sea Lord turned Home Office minister voiced his strong disapproval yesterday at the prospect of General Sir Richard Dannatt being appointed a defence minister in a future Conservative government.

Admiral Lord West of Spithead who accepted the offer from Gordon Brown to be Security Minister, said the current Service chiefs would have been “hacked off” if he had been appointed a defence minister instead of being given a frontbench role at the Home Office.

General Dannatt who retired as Chief of the General Staff in August but does not officially leave the Army until next month, is to be a military adviser to the Conservative party. David Cameron announced that he would be given a peerage and could become a minister if the Tories win the election next year.

Lord West made it clear in evidence to the Commons Public Administration Committee that as a former Service chief there was a difference between accepting an appointment as a minister in the Ministry of Defence and joining the Government in another Whitehall department. He told the MPs he would never have accepted a ministerial job at the MoD.

“I know a huge amount about defence, if I may say so, but it would have been wrong to do that,” he told the committee.

“And I would have been thoroughly hacked off if I had been the new First Sea Lord, or indeed any of the chiefs of staff, to find that West has suddenly logged in as a minister there,” he said.

Lord West retired as First Sea Lord and Chief of Naval Staff in 2006 after four years in the post and was appointed Security Minister in June 2007 as part of the Prime Minister’s plan to have a government “of all the talents”.

General Dannatt’s appointment as a military adviser to the Conservatives has been widely criticised - partly because he accepted the post before his army career had officially come to an end and partly because it has been viewed as “politicising” the Armed Forces.

Lord West agreed with the opinion of other retired service chiefs - General Lord Guthrie of Craigiebank, a former Chief of the Defence Staff, and General Sir Mike Jackson, a former Chief of the General Staff - who have said publicly that the appointment of General Dannatt was wrong. Lord West said it was a “terrible error”.

He described General Dannatt as a “superb officer”, but he added: “I think he made an error of judgment. He’s still on full pay as an army officer, so he’s fully in the Army.

“If he’s a member of a party and there is an intention to make him a minister within the MoD... I think that is a terrible error,” he said.

“It was 14 months after I got my final pay packet from the ministry that I was asked by the Prime Minister to come in and even then that was one of the issues I thought about when I was thinking about it,” Lord West told the MPs.

“I thought ‘this is quite close’, but he was asking me in a very different area, where all of my skills and expertise that I got within the military helped, but it wasn’t directly in that department,” he said.

Lord Turnbull, a former cabinet secretary and head of the Civil Service, last week described General Dannatt’s appointment as a “major error of judgment”.

The Public Administration Committee is inquiring into Mr Brown’s appointment of non-politicians into the Government.

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