WAR veteran Allan Thipthorpe, 79,has been invited to Buckingham Palace on Sunday, July 10 for the VE and VJ celebrations.

But he is more pleased for his wheelchair-bound wife Stevie, 72, than for himself .

The war veteran said: "I feel honoured because my wife is getting pleasure out of it, but I don't think she's well enough to go."

The invitation is from the Prime Minister as well as the Queen, but Allan, who wears an anti-war badge, has no intention of chatting to Mr Blair.

He said: "I wouldn't waste my time speaking to him.

"The servicemen do the dying, and the politicians do the lying."

He said: "I wasn't 100 per cent sure I would get an invitation because you don't know how many spaces or tickets they have.

"I thought it would be for firemen and people like that."

His family moved to Swindon during the war from Essex, settling in Broad Street.

Allan spent his first year in the Army in England and Wales and then was in Palestine for three years. In 1944 when he joined up he was sent to Colchester for infantry training.

He joined the Royal Army Service Corps and was trained as a driver.

"I spent three weeks learning to drive army lorries, and then three weeks washing up," he added.

He was then posted to Notting Hill Gate, driving officers and also working as a motorbike despatch rider.

The veteran has an amazing memory for detail of events that happened more than 60 years ago.

He remembers the prisoner of war reception camp at Kempton Park racecourse.

During German bomber raids the German prisoners would cheer if a bomb hit a house, and would fall silent if they missed.

Allan said: "I had a morning off and a bomb landed nearby on the Guard's Chapel in Birdcage Walk. It killed about 200 people."

His stint in Palestine was not lacking in danger either.

He said: "When we were creeping around orange groves we never knew who was creeping around nearby with a gun looking for us."

He was also involved in driving and maintaining armoured transport vehicles and field ambulances.

But Allan is at his most animated when criticising British involvement in the current situation in Iraq.

He said: "I'm against our blokes getting killed. I wanted to have a go at the Germans because they had made our life misery, but Saddam would never have come here."

David Andrew