The Ministry of Defence was unaware of the incendiary device lobbed by the Chief of the General Staff until it went off. Tony Blair and his inner circle were in St Andrews for the Northern Ireland talks. The first they knew of the looming explosion was a call from the BBC on Thursday night asking for comment as the newspaper was rolling off the presses.

Three days earlier, the general had sat down for an hour and a half with the journalist Sarah Sands to discuss Iraq, Afghanistan, the army princes William and Harry, and army pay. Some at the MoD say that they questioned the wisdom of talking to the anti-Government Daily Mail, but that the general wanted to press ahead.

The military press officer present during the interview did not, apparently, believe that the remarks were sufficiently controversial to merit warning Downing Street. Ms Sands said that General Dannatt was giving an opinion that “wasn’t intended to be political”.

The newspaper was in no doubt about the political newsworthiness of what it had. The story was catapulted to the front page on Thursday night, and the BBC was alerted before the 10 o’clock news to ensure the widest possible coverage.

Downing Street went into damage-limitation overdrive. General Dannatt was staying overnight on the South Coast, and copies of the article were faxed to him. In a tense midnight conversation with Des Browne, the Defence Secretary, the general said that he had intended to defend the Army, not to open a rift with the Government.

The general then volunteered to take to the airwaves; had he not done so he might have been frogmarched on to them. In a series of interviews, he maintained that his remarks had been taken out of context, that he had said nothing remotely newsworthy, and that the resulting row was a lot of “hoo-ha”. He saw “eye to eye” with Mr Blair, he insisted.

Yet he did not back down from the essence of his remarks: that the attempt to turn Iraq into a beacon of liberal democracy was “naïve” and ill-planned, that the military presence in Iraq exacerbates the violence, and that there is a direct link between the Iraq invasion and the “Islamic threat” in Britain. The general’s stance may have surprised and enraged Downing Street, but it has elevated him to hero status among army personnel.

Associates of General Dannatt, 55, describe him as a highly professional, shrewd, dedicated, risk-taking soldier who has seen active service in Bosnia and Northern Ireland during a 30-year career. Cerebral and courtly, he is in some ways an unlikely soldier, with the mien of bank manager in the Captain Mainwaring mould. But he is driven by twin, interlocking beliefs: in God and the Army. As one friend observes: “He’s the kind of person that, if he heard there was a soldier in Iraq who needed a flak jacket, would personally get in a taxi and go out there to deliver it. On the other hand, it is almost impossible to imagine him holding a gun or fighting anyone.”

Despite his unassuming demeanour, the general won a Military Cross at 22 for “gallantry during active operations against the enemy”. The details of how he won the award have not been made public, but at the time he was engaged in an undercover counter-terrorist operation.

Five years ago, when he was deputy commander (ops) of Nato’s Stabilisation Force, the general masterminded a spectacularly daring bank raid in a night-time military operation to uncover evidence of money-laundering in Bosnia. Those involved in the planning said yesterday that he approached the operation as a master tactician, using British troops, including special forces, as well as former professional safecrackers and locksmiths flown in to assist.

Yesterday the general was spearheading another operation, this time in Whitehall, to “contextualise” his controversial remarks. But in many respects, he appears to have chosen his battlefield intentionally, deliberately picking a fight he believes he can win.

Long before this week’s row, he had been marked down by the Treasury as a new “hard man”, demanding more cash and openly campaigning to improve army pay and equipment. Commissioned into The Green Howards, a regiment (now amalgamated) that has spawned numerous generals, the general did not take long to let the Government know that this particular service chief was not going to be kept quiet by the Whitehall apparatchiks.

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