John McTernan: Whitehall backing crucial for Fox

Were Labour outfoxed on Monday? Many hunting related metaphors were deployed after Defence Secretary Liam Fox was forced to make a statement to the House on his friendship with Adam Werritty. It has been a delicious fortnight for sub-editors fond of cheesy, punning headlines. A cat-flap last week, a fox-hunt this. But there are serious matters at stake. The bitter divisions in the coalition Cabinet on the Human Rights Act will flare up again when the review of the legislation is complete. The Fox scandal, however, is happening now and it has all the appearance of a slow-motion car crash.

Take the handling of the affair. Fox has ignored the central lesson of successful crisis management – get the full information out in the open as soon as possible. This may not, in the end, save your skin. But it prevents you from having information dragged from you piece by piece, which at the very least make you look shifty. Look at last weekend for a good example. Fox first condemned the accusations as “baseless”.

Then he ordered his permanent secretary – the civil service head of his department – to investigate him. And he issued a grudging written apology in which he said he was sorry for the perception of wrongdoing. In other words, he was sorry if the public mistakenly thought he’d made errors of judgment. Oddly insulting, in the manner of an errant spouse who says they are sorry if their partner feels hurt by their affair – it’s not me, it’s you. Finally, on Monday, the Defence Secretary apologised to the House of Commons, conceding eventually that he had made mistakes. But clearing himself at the same time.

Fox was able to survive on Monday not through the quality of his argument or the quantity of backbench support but because of the backing of the Prime Minister. David Cameron had got the Ministry of Defence to speed up their internal enquiry by getting an interim report delivered that morning and ordering a second, more detailed, investigation to be overseen by Sir Gus O’Donnell, his Cabinet Secretary and head of the UK civil service.

Unflappable in the Commons, Fox implied that the report by the MoD permanent secretary cleared him because it established that his close friend Werritty had not been shown classified information, so national security hadn’t been breached. This was a fantastic example of the magician’s trick of distraction. By focusing on what he hadn’t done, the Defence Secretary sought to distract attention from what he had.

The core of the accusation against Fox is simple – he had far too many meetings with a friend who was a defence lobbyist. Suspicions were originally raised when a Freedom of Information request revealed that Werritty had been into the MoD 14 times in 16 months to meet Fox.

This seemed at the time a remarkable number of meetings. No Secretary of State has that much free time to see anyone so frequently. On Monday we discovered that this was a massive underestimate. In fact, Werritty had met Fox some 40 times in the last 16 months – 18 times abroad and 22 times in the MoD.

This is simply astonishing. No-one sees a Secretary of State that often – not the chiefs of staff, not even family members. The only explanation that has been proffered is that Werritty was Fox’s best man and is a very close friend. Not the best of excuses. As one former cabinet minister said to me: “My best man is one of my best friends and I see him every nine months or so. If I saw him forty times in just over a year we’d not be friends for long.” The suspicion, bluntly, is that closeness to Fox aids Werritty in his business interests.

As one defence industry source put it, Werritty is the “go-to” guy. And suspicions can only be heightened by the events abroad Werritty attended – for example, a meal with the commander of the international forces in Afghanistan and a dinner with our ambassador in Israel. It looks like cash for access and the strange phrase used by Fox only heightened concerns. He said Werritty “was not dependent on any transactional behaviour to maintain his income”.

This has certainly got the civil service worried. The interim report by the MoD permanent secretary says that firmer guidance on “propriety” will be given to the Defence Secretary’s private office. This is odd.

His private secretaries – the team that work most closely with him – are all high-flyers. They know the rules. They know right from wrong. So why do they need extra guidance?

Because they have clearly been told, indeed forced, to facilitate impropriety. Instructed by whom? By the Defence Secretary, who among other things told his office that his entire diary was to be shared with Andrew Werritty. This was limply brushed aside by Fox as no sin: anyone can share their diary with friends. But it won’t happen again. There are new rules to stop Fox from doing this in future.

This should all worry Cameron. He made a big deal out of revising the ministerial code, criticising New Labour for slackness – though under Tony Blair anyone doing what Fox has done would have been sacked at the weekend. Indeed, the Prime Minister wrote: “We must be … transparent about what we do and how we do it … above improper interest”.

And the code is really clear: perceptions of a conflict of interest are as bad as actual ones. So, what do No 10 do? They say mistakes were made and move on. Now we know, the point of the code was spin – an announcement last year – not substance, or a tougher take on ministerial behaviour.

Fox is not out of the woods. Any proof that Werritty has benefited financially from this close relationship, and the Defence Secretary will be toast. But his fate is probably in the hands of the middle-ranking military who work in MoD Main Building – the Whitehall defence HQ. If they start to say they have lost confidence in Fox, that he is so distracted by the enquiry into his meetings with Werritty that he cannot focus properly on Afghanistan, or Trident or procurement.

Then it will be all over.