Nick Boles MP offered a fatuous and increasingly irascible ‘defence’ of Liam Fox to Kirsty Wark, demonstrating just how thin the ice the Fox is skating on really is. But it also demonstrates the weakness – and the hypocrisy – of the Labour attack on Fox, with Labour snouts still dripping with their insatiable feeding at the trough for 13 years of M.O.D. incompetence accompanied by the enrichment of Labour ministers and their favoured squad of lobbyists, defence contractors, Middle Eastern dictators, et al.
Jim Murphy’s rather leaden attack on Fox in the Commons debate was also fatally flawed because of his party’s acceptance of cash from Cellcrypt, a company at the heart of the charges laid against Fox and Werrity.
There used to be a scatological version of the lyric of The Finger of Suspicion Points at You, a popular song of the 1950s, with the substituted line -
Someone crept into the Crypt, and crapped and crept away
the finger of suspicion points at You!
The defence discussion in the Commons that preceded Fox’s statement consisted of rampant self-interested questions about the distribution of defence spoils around the constituencies – the Defence as Job Creation Scheme concept of the defence of the realm. It was of course prudently interspersed with pious expressions of concern for our brave servicemen and women on the front line, who make all this profitable enterprise so rewarding for those who stay at home while they place their young lives and futures on the line, inadequately equipped, fighting for a cause for which no coherent justification has ever been offered, although many contradictory and self-serving attempts are made at regular intervals.
In between all this inhuman cant, the brutal reality burst through occasionally, of death, injury, brain damage, psychological damage, broken-hearted relatives and ruined lives, in the form of interventions by the tiny number of MPs who really cared about our service personnel and were trying to alleviate their suffering and that of their families.
After this undignified, self-serving spectacle, Liam Fox and his chorus of loyal admirers defended - with straight faces, indeed faces set in a rictus of patriotic indignation – the series of astonishing coincidences, surprise meetings in dining rooms across the globe, family holidays that to everyone’s surprise happened just at the same time and in the same place as pivotal defence discussions, and diaries that miraculously synchronised, in a kind of unique serendipity, with the joint interests and undying friendship of Liam and Adam, a friendship that will surely go down in history along with David and Jonathan and other shining examples.
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