Prosecuting Hutchings is a “national disgrace” tweeted Tory MP and former soldier Johnny Mercer. “Dennis Hutchings . . . is an old man,” says the former head of the army Lord Dannatt. “He should be allowed to have his old age.” So outraged by this “unprecedented betrayal of our fighting men” is former Colonel Richard Kemp, who did eight tours of duty of Ulster, “that I am returning the hard-won Commission awarded to me by the Queen that I have prized for 40 years”.

I doubt Messrs Dannatt, Mercer and Kemp will be arguing in favour of giving 66-year-old John Downey his old age. In November the ex-IRA man was charged with the murder of two soldiers in 1972. In 2014, he was also charged with the murder of four members of the Household Cavalry killed by a nail bomb which tore through them and their horses during the Changing of the Guard in 1982. But Downey’s trial collapsed after it emerged that in 2007 he had received one of 200 letters sent to IRA suspects on the run confirming they were not currently wanted even though 95 were linked to some 295 killings. These “comfort” letters followed private assurances to Gerry Adams from Tony Blair, who later explained they were key to ensuring the IRA fully decommissioned their weapons.

Former London car bomber Gerry Kelly, now a prominent Sinn Fein politician, says Downey’s latest arrest is “an act of gross bad faith by the British government”. For most people in Britain, and indeed Ireland, Mr Kelly’s outrage will attract much less sympathy than the outrage by veterans and MPs over the arrest of Dennis Hutchings, because whatever crimes soldiers may have committed, people will struggle to see the remotest moral equivalence between the British Army and the IRA.

Thanks to the Irish “embuggerment” factor, however, when it comes to the legacy minefield it’s just not that simple, at least not if we want Northern Ireland to move on by looking to the future instead of where it is, still stuck fast in the past.

I fear this article may not earn me many friends among Standpoint readers. But let me try to set out some of the realities, however uncomfortable they may be for those who think that, because soldiers were lawfully on the streets with guns, that relatives of those killed by the army should not be afforded the same legacy voice as those killed by the IRA.

A total of 301 people were killed by the British Army, over half of them between 1970 and 1973. The salutary fact is that the army’s biggest single group of victims were not terrorists, but civilians, the vast majority republicans or nationalists. During this period, a little-known Royal Ulster Constabulary force order was in place. The GOC and the Chief Constable had privately agreed that interviews of soldiers involved in killings, disputed or otherwise, would be conducted, not by the CID, but by the Royal Military Police. Many RMP interviews were a “managerial” formality, rather than an investigation, with statements running to just a few lines. This cosy arrangement only ended at the insistence of the Northern Ireland DPP in late 1973. When the Northern Ireland Lord Chief Justice Lord Lowry heard about it, he wasn’t too impressed either: “We deprecate this curtailment of the functions of the police and hope that the practice will not be revived.” It wasn’t — but neither were the 150-plus “investigations” reviewed. Widows, sons and daughters have been in limbo ever since.