There's nothing like a good Tory scandal with a whiff of innuendo, and a defence secretary too dim to realise his fate
The question is, when al fresco Cabinet Office minister Oliver Letwin dumps government papers in the park bin, does Adam Werritty sidle along later and fish them out? Who knows at this stage, but it has been a week in which it has become possible to begin enjoying certain aspects of this government. When the grimmest financial unknowns are battering at the door, there is great comfort to be had in sitting back to enjoy a classic old-fashioned defence scandal with a side order of innuendo. Sling another chair leg on the fire, and let's hope that some tear in the scandal continuum will see the bin story collapse into the rather more radioactive buddy movie that is Defence Secretaries Like Us.
Convergence is possible. After all, both Letwin and the newly resigned Liam Fox have starred in one of those idiosyncratic Tory burglaries. Letwin once let a young man into his house to use the loo at five in the morning, only for the little tinker to rob him, causing the then shadow home secretary to pursue him clad in only a bathrobe. It now seems a burglary at Fox's flat last year had elements of the obscure, in that Conservative officials apparently felt moved to conceal from journalists that a man (not Werritty) had been staying in Dr Fox's spare room at the time.
It takes one back, really, this sense that the cabinet are a bunch of chaps with a range of eccentricities and appetites upon which they are conducting a doomed struggle to keep a lid. It somehow has a different quality to the Blair years, where the scandals involved dreary things like passports or visa applications or property deals; or horrors such as the death of David Kelly.
To my mind, there were two unexpungeable black marks against Liam Fox. The first was his fondness for Dubai, a place he and Werritty met five times since the election. I'm afraid the world can be divided into people with whom one would care to spend any time, and people who like Dubai. The second and more alarming black mark was the defence secretary's sensational ineptitude as a strategist.
Dr Fox might have viewed each day's survival as a battle won in his war ? as might his allies ? but in fact it was the opposite. David Cameron played this perfectly, allowing the darling of the rightwingers to cling on for the full media evisceration. Had Fox resigned on Monday with some huffy but terse statement about having made mistakes and not wanting to distract from the government's vital work, he would have gone to the backbenches bloodied but unbroken, where he would have remained a low-level threat and might even ? in the meltdown that may occur when those financial unknowns batter down the door ? have seen serious anti-Cameron support coalesce around him. But his insistence on remaining in post allowed the prime minister to watch with a face set to "fair and sympathetic", as an old rival was more irredeemably damaged with each new revelation.
Fox's apparent inability to see that this was what was happening to him was most diverting for the rest of us, though would have been less so had he been defence secretary at the time of the cold war, when rather more first-class game theorists were required. Of course, we had an inkling of the ex-defence secretary's dimness last year, when he felt moved to make a statement saying he was "disgusted and angry" at the "thoroughly un-British" latest edition of the Medal of Honor computer game series, which was set in Afghanistan. According to the MoD, "he wanted to comment on this as it's part of the wider picture of defence". What a mind he is.
I suppose there was a chance the defence secretary might have survived but even if he had, the former GP would have been reduced to the level at which one always sensed the Cameron toffs felt he belonged. To the upper classes, as I wrote in a column about Fox last year, being a GP is almost akin to being a servant. The doctor is certainly not a friend, more someone one has to keep around in case one gets shingles. You give him a middling bottle of whisky at Christmas, and might ask him to make up a bridge four if someone had flu, but you'd have no hesitation in reminding him of his place.
Thus Fox has now been restored to his rightful position in Cameron's model village. It's difficult to decide which was more devastating for him ? the vote of confidence from the PM or his having been disowned by Natalie Imbruglia, the erstwhile popstar once romantically "linked" to him in rumours he battled bravely not to stop. "Please!" sniffed Imbruglia at the opening of some envelope this week. "He's a friend of my manager."
Perhaps all that remains in this imbroglio is to see how far the bonds of Fox's remarkable friendship will stretch. Should he find himself forced to make a high-level visit to the dole office, will Mr Werritty be spotted queueing behind him, before whispering stagily to the benefits adviser that he is there "in a private capacity"?
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/14/liam-fox-innuendo-defence-secretary
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