Military veterans have called on Lord Hermer to resign after it emerged he insulted British troops facing war crime allegations that were later found to be false.

An email obtained by The Telegraph revealed that the Attorney General had told a human rights lawyer they had done more good for society than the decorated soldiers they had falsely accused of murder and torture.

The comments have provoked outrage among retired commanders and former senior members of the Special Air Service (SAS), who demanded Lord Hermer’s “immediate resignation”, while others say Sir Keir Starmer has no option but to sack him.

Lt Col Richard Williams, a former head of 22 SAS, told The Telegraph: “Hermer demonstrates, by this message of cynical disrespect and misplaced personal superiority, that the country’s wars are nothing more than an opportunity to persecute gleefully those that fight, sacrifice and die to protect it.

“I can only assume that he looks at the brave defenders of Ukraine in the same way, and that war is nothing more than another legal business opportunity. With disloyalty of this, there can be only one cure – his immediate, unconditional resignation.”

George Simm, who served as a regimental sergeant major of 22 SAS, called Lord Hermer a “village idiot” and said the Attorney General’s behaviour was “not acceptable”.

Mr Simm, who was twice decorated for bravery and was a linchpin in the special forces, told The Telegraph: “If he had any moral backbone, if he had a principle in his body, he would resign.”

The Attorney General is facing scrutiny for his “substantial” role in the scandal around the 2004 Battle of Danny Boy, in which British troops were wrongly described as murderers and torturers for years.

The Telegraph revealed that Lord Hermer insulted the soldiers in an email to colleagues after key evidence emerged at a public inquiry that fatally undermined his claims.

Lord Hermer said the falsely accused soldiers could never claim to have “made a real difference to people’s lives”, unlike the lawyers who had pursued the case for a decade.

Other emails from Lord Hermer showed him acknowledging that it was “inevitable that some of the Iraqi cases were going to collapse” and dismissing anger from the military as “venting”.

The Telegraph revealed last week that Lord Hermer continued pursuing the Danny Boy case as lead counsel on a no-win, no-fee basis despite repeated warnings that his Iraqi clients were lying.

Allegations were ‘deliberate lies’

The £31m Al-Sweady public inquiry, chaired by Sir Thayne Forbes, later concluded that the allegations were “deliberate lies” driven by “ingrained hostility” towards the British Army.

It exonerated troops, saying the Iraqi men they were accused of torturing were not innocent farmers but insurgents killed or captured during a ferocious firefight.

Phil Shiner, the human rights lawyer who led many of the investigations, was later discredited and disgraced. In 2024, he was sentenced to two years’ in jail, suspended for two years, after pleading guilty to three counts of fraud over the scandal.

Lord Hermer condemned Shiner’s conduct in a statement, saying he was “clear in his condemnation for the reprehensible behaviour of Mr Shiner, that rightly led to him being disqualified and successfully prosecuted”.

However, in an email dated April 20, 2014, Lord Hermer expressed support for a junior solicitor who had failed to recognise the significance of a bombshell document that emerged during the inquiry.

The document fatally undermined the Iraqis’ case by proving they were not innocent farmers, as they claimed, but in fact members of the Mahdi Army, an Iran-backed militia that fought British forces.

Lord Hermer wrote to Anna Crowther, a solicitor at Leigh Day, about the Al-Sweady inquiry.

Sir Neil Garnham, referred to by Lord Hermer in the email, is now a High Court judge. He was lead counsel for the British troops at the Al-Sweady inquiry and “his clients” were the soldiers falsely accused by the Iraqis.

Mr Simm told The Telegraph that money-hungry human rights lawyers chasing vexatious claims against British troops would have turned Second World War heroes such as Lt Col Paddy Mayne, one of the founding members of the SAS, into war criminals.

“I refuse to burst into flames over someone as wretched as Hermer,” the SAS veteran added. “We should encourage people like him to continue saying what they’re saying because the village idiot needs to identify themselves and he has done just that.

“He is massively divorced from reality. His reality is completely different from that shared by the rest of this country.

“Today, Paddy Mayne would be sitting with us, with Hermer treating him like a war criminal or a miscreant… The whole thing is madness.”

‘Lawyers divorced from reality of combat’

Mr Simm added that soldiers were taught to follow the letter of the law during armed conflict and that “wrong ’uns” who breached laws were unacceptable as they degraded the military’s reputation.

“The likes of Hermer and that whole third-rate group of human rights lawyers are trying to codify everything to judge it by standards that are divorced from reality,” said Mr Simm.