ORGANISATIONS often have rather offbeat ideas. Blue-sky thinking is one of the buzz phrases given by creative types who sit around shooting out ideas in a scattergun-style, hoping for that spark of genius to justify their excessive salaries.

Coming up with a stupid idea is not necessarily the problem, but committing it to paper usually is.

And so we wonder what the Ministry of Defence’s Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre was ever thinking of, raising the prospect of downplaying the gatherings of mourners for the repatriation of fallen military personnel so as to handle “casualty adverse” public opinion.

Cut through the official nonsense: this idea was nothing but a cynical attempt to deceive the public into thinking no one was dying and our foreign wars were all going spiffingly.

To be fair, the way our injured personnel are slipped back into the country with little fanfare already leaves the public without a true grasp of the casualty rate.

Before you even get to a justifiable sense of outrage that these men and women, who have made the ultimate sacrifice, were viewed by some desk-jockeys within the MoD as chess pieces in the game of winning hearts and minds, it ignores the very real fact these repatriation ceremonies belong to the people.

It was the Royal British Legion and other real individuals who decided to start standing so respectfully in Royal Wootton Bassett, outside Oxford’s John Radcliffe Hospital, in Carterton and many points along the route – not some Whitehall mandarin.

These repatriation ceremonies bring our communities together to mark these deaths and provide solidarity to the grieving relatives.

Surely, it can only ever be the feelings of the mourning families that dictates the future of the repatriation ceremonies, not some cynical spin operation to deceive this nation.