Actress charms and scolds Britain’s government over rights for Gurkha veterans

Actress at center of Gurkhas issue in UK

LONDON — An actress best known for playing a selfish, champagne-guzzling fashionista is winning her battle against the British government on a humanitarian issue — securing settlement rights for Gurkha war veterans. She also is embarrassing Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s faltering government in the process.

Joanna Lumley, 63, is famous in Britain for playing Patsy, a chain-smoking magazine editor who slept her way to the top in the TV comedy series “Absolutely Fabulous.” But off screen she has used a ruthless combination of charm and sternness to force the government to review the way it decides which Gurkha veterans from Nepal are allowed to settle in Britain.

Lumley, whose army officer father fought alongside Gurkha soldiers, has used TV to propel her campaign to force the government to allow all of them to live here, appearing at news conferences with elderly war veterans in uniform and wearing medals.

She is so popular that when she bumped into Immigration Minister Phil Woolas at a restaurant in Parliament, she persuaded him to hold an impromptu news conference during which she harangued him publicly over government policy while he shuffled around looking ill at ease. The Daily Mail newspaper wrote Friday that Lumley had treated Woolas live on air “like a miscreant child forced to apologize to the school with the headmistress looking on.”

The fight between the government and the actress and veterans has caught the public imagination.

Lumley is fondly remembered by a generation of British TV viewers as Purdey, a karate-kicking secret agent with a widely copied bob hairstyle, in the 1970s action series “The New Avengers.” She reinvented herself in the ’90s with a flair for physical comedy as Patsy, who tottered through a series of fashion shows and cocktail parties on “Ab Fab.”

Lumley became the public face of the Gurkha campaign last year and has fought the government so ferociously that one newspaper suggested she run for prime minister.

The Gurkhas have a unique British military history. They have fought in the British army for around 200 years and are the only foreign soldiers to have their own regiments within the British army.

“Gurkhas are part of Britain’s historical folklore,” said defense analyst Charles Heyman. “Anyone who remembers any of our wars can always connect them with Gurkhas fighting on our side. In Burma, in World War II, the one thing the Japanese were terrified of were our Gurkha soldiers.”

Gurkhas have for decades earned less than their British colleagues, and were expected to return to Nepal after they left the army with a military pension of around 170 pounds ($256) a month.

The law changed in 2004, and all Gurkha soldiers serving in the British military received the same wages and pensions as regular British soldiers, and those who left the army after 1997 were given the automatic right to settle in Britain. Campaigners argue that the laws are too restrictive and that all Gurkha veterans should have automatic rights to settle here. Other Commonwealth soldiers, who can join the regular regiments of the British army, already receive full settlement rights.

The government tried to appease campaigners and its lawmakers with proposals that loosened but did not eliminate immigration restrictions for the veterans, but the plans were defeated in Parliament last month after Lumley said they did not go far enough.

The government has now promised to review its policies and can only hope Lumley stays off the warpath for a while.