Liam Fox, that friend of liberty, that most rabid Tory, has done it again. Joe Glenton, on a man who’s only qualification in defence matters is that of a civilian GP on a military base, where he once worked near some servicemen.
Ever since I started to follow his exploits, the War on Terror’s own Captain Mainwaring has left me with questions which burn me. Amongst them: have they just let him out for the day? How is it that of all those tens of millions of sperm, the one that made Fox was quickest?
My first experience of Fox was when he was badmouthing me in a right-wing news-rag. Nothing personal, I’m sure; it was to score a few political points against Bob Ainsworth, outgoing secretary of defence and previous conqueror of Afghanistan.
Fox, who claimed that Ainsworth should’ve restrained me from marching against the festering lie of the Afghan occupation, moralised and foamed about the impact my dissent might have on the desperate, poor youths he continues to despatch there to die for nothing. ‘nothing’ ,he spouted, ‘seems to have been done to stop him…’ . I thank him for this idiot quote, it will be on the cover of my book when it is published. But there my goodwill ends, as do Fox’s credentials as an ethicist.
Liam Fox, a man who’s only qualification in defence matters is, that as a civilian GP on a military base he once worked near some servicemen.
Liam Fox, who was a chief looter in the expenses scandal and who then complained that he had been made to repay what he had stolen from the taxpayer.
Liam Fox who, it’s alleged, leaked information from his department and managed to limit the cuts to Defence from 20% to 8% , whilst EMA was being cancelled and access to university being priced beyond reach of the poor.
Fox, the self-proclaimed ‘hawk on defence’ whose dynamic leadership and rousing oratory is more akin to a budgerigar on Afghan heroin; even as men he doesn’t know are ripped apart by IED’s for nothing much at all.
Fox, whose, not slightly but fully, racist assertion that Afghanistan was a country of primitives beyond help led to the apt moniker ‘13th Century’ Fox, and left me wondering if his values were Victorian or medieval.
Fox, a Tory to the point of almost catatonic stupor, puts himself on the right of the Conservative Party; as if it actually had a left. To borrow loosely what Galloway said of Cameron over Libya; it’s a good job we can’t see his bottom half when he’s facing the camera and talking about war…
Now, for his latest exploit, he has got himself in a spot of bother for, allegedly, allowing his flatmate, one Adam Werrity, to wander in and out of the MoD willy-nilly, produce business cards naming himself as Fox’s “advisor” and, some reports suggest, put it on expenses.
The relationship has much wider implications: the Fox-Werrity special relationship is caught up with the pan-Atlantic one. Werrity was director and only employee of the charity Atlantic Bridge, founded by Fox with a remit to develop relationships between the American and British political right.
Atlantic Bridge is connected to the American Legislative Exchange Council, which aims to ‘further the ideals exemplified by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher’. The council has received nearly three-quarters of a million dollars from group connected to the Tea Party movement, in particular the unfortunately, but not inaccurately, named Koch Foundation. The Koch Foundation is a right-wing lobbying group which not only fights for the interests of tobacco corporations, but attempts to debunk climate change as well as opposing, what it perceives to be, the manifestly Marxist-Leninist healthcare reforms promoted and then dissipated by Obama.
Werrity also attended a lecture given by Fox in Colombo, Sri Lanka during his much publicised and rescheduled trip to the country in which he had worked in the nineties. The trip was marred by a row with Foreign Secretary William Hague and tactically postponed for a short while due to Wikileaks timely revelations about war crimes during the recent conflict with the Tamil Tigers.
Exactly where Fox sits amid all of this is unclear, beyond the sense that the man is a gaping tear in the very fabric of reason; the chaos which follows him reflects that. Cameron is bad enough, but we might be forgiven for feeling slightly relieved that Fox didn’t win the 2005 leadership contest.
Either way, Fox shares much with Cameron. I met David in Afghanistan, that leader of men, when he visited the troops in his mustard coloured cords, with his phalanx of SAS bodyguards, his face shinier than normal in the 56 degrees we common scum spent half a year working, choking, fighting and dying in. I expect he doesn’t remember me.
Cameron gave us the same look that Fox smirks into every camera; the kind of look which for time immemorial has done for ruling classes and started revolutions; I suggest we follow suit, if we need any more motivation than Fox, either the man, his corruption or his deeds, we are unworthy of the title ‘revolutionaries’. I insert one caveat, though it’s open to debate, if it all comes off, Fox’s first hearing is with me.
