The British Army has serious manning problems, but in one recruiting area it is blessed with an overabundance of volunteers. Every year tens of thousands of young Nepalese compete for the chance to serve in Britain’s Brigade of Gurkhas.

The British recruiters select about 200 from as many as 28,000 applicants, so they can afford to pick the best and the fittest. Selection is one of the proudest moments of a would-be Gurkha’s life.

How sad then, that in recent years the Gurkhas, who have played such courageous roles in British military operations over the past 200 years, have been enmeshed in court cases and campaigns to try to improve their rights.

On the face of it, the decision to allow only those Gurkhas who had joined the British Army after 1997 the right to settle in the UK had some logic to it. Before 1997 the Gurkhas had been based in Hong Kong. But after the handover of the colony to Beijing on July 1 of that year, the Nepalese soldiers became a British-based force and their ties with this country strengthened. It seemed appropriate at the time to set July 1997 as the cut-off point.

Those who had been long-servers in Hong Kong before 1997 were expected to go back to Nepal, on a pension designed to guarantee a reasonable standard of living.

Bureaucratic logic, however, began to look like injustice when representatives of the 2,000 Gurkhas who fell into the pre1997 category argued that they had risked their lives on behalf of the British Army in the same way as those who had joined after 1997 – and that Britain owed them a similar debt of gratitude.

In this era of increasing individual rights, it was always going to be difficult for the Government to maintain the position that only some Gurkhas should be given the right to settle in Britain. It’s just a shame that it has taken a judge to force the issue.

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