There are several good reasons why greater attention (and credibility) than normal should be given to this piece by Matt Cavanagh. I can't tell you all the reasons because, if I did, I'd have to kill you.
Suffice it to say that although Matt is currently an associate director at IPPR, he was an "adviser" on defence to the government between 2005 and 2010. However, he was not an advisor in the Werrity sense.
Rather, he was a fully paid-up SPAD, with top security clearance, working in the highest reaches of Whitehall, first in the Defence Ministry as advisor to Des Browne and then from the Cabinet Office as Gordon Brown's personal defence and security advisor.
Although his name is barely known within the Westminster bubble, this man is a former Oxford don, a rare intellect and no stranger to controversy, with a unique appreciation of defence policy, having seen it from the very highest of levels. Personally, I think Matt has been rather gentle about Fox, but his analysis – worth reading in full from its original, makes a welcome antidote to the fawning sycophancy that we see in Tory and media circles.
What is especially helpful is the insight on the strategic defence and security review (SDSR), conducted by Fox. What must be remembered is that, as shadow defence secretary, Fox had four and a half years shadowing the brief in which to work out his plans.
Yet, throughout that period, it was evident that there was a policy vacuum on the Tory front benches. And, as we explored this further, the more alarming it became. Fox's speeches in the House and elsewhere lacked strategic dimension, to the extent one got the feeling that he was talking the talk but never really understood what his speechwriters were putting in front of him.
Thus, as Matt points out, after Fox became defence secretary in May 2010, it soon became clear that he lacked any real blueprint for what he wanted to do.
As a result, the process degenerated into a fairly superficial spending review, with little focus on strategy. Officials complained that neither he nor the new National Security Council gave them useful guidance.
Most significant of all, though, was Fox's failure to break free of the familiar end game in which the big decisions were left to haggling between the chiefs of the three services.
The most infamous example, the decision to scrap the Harrier, thereby leaving Britain with aircraft carriers with no aircraft to fly from them, makes no sense from either a financial or military point of view – until you realise that it saves face for both the navy chief, who got to keep the carrier, and the RAF chief, who got to keep the Tornado.
Thus writes Cavanagh:
Even viewed in more limited terms as a spending review, the SDSR failed: it did not close the budget gap, let alone create any headroom to allow the MoD to respond to new events and trends. It hid behind over-optimistic assumptions about "efficiencies", which were not underpinned by serious analysis, and soon unravelled.
After a few months the gap reappeared, and programmes which had been on ice since the election remained embarrassingly frozen.
After protracted wrangling between the MoD and the Treasury, Fox was forced into a hasty announcement of further massive cuts to the army, a mere nine months after the SDSR.
Reviewing the rest of the Fox legacy, the brightest hope is the procurement reform programme Fox set up under Lord Levene and Bernard Gray. If that can succeed where the SDSR did not, if Levene and Gray can tackle the systemic failings – the bureaucracy, the inter-service haggling, the tendency to spend money on the wrong things, and the ever-increasing unit cost of fast jets, surface ships and submarines – then some of the sacrifices and reductions in capability which Fox presided over may come to seem justified. If they do not, concludes Cavanagh, history's verdict is likely to remain unkind.
And that is where he is too kind. In fact, while procurement is and has been a significant problem, the far greater problem is one of definition – deciding what you need to buy, and why.
It is here, with his absence of strategic grasp, that Fox has left the MoD almost bereft of guidance, "inspired" by nothing more than the limited vision of as failed politician who, at the outset came to politics as a country doctor and was never able fully to escape this narrow and self-limiting background.
Now that he has gone, Liam Fox's departure will not be mourned by this site. We have made no secret of our dislike for a man who is not only incompetentbut also embodies the very worst of the "greasy pole" tendencies of over-ambitious politicians.
There was a time when we worked very closely with Fox, on an issue of some importance to one of his constituents.
This was the EU directive on slaughterhouses and, for a time, Fox was one of the most effective backbench MPs in the House, with his probing questions then directed at agriculture minister John Gummer.
Working as I was then, in 1992 and early 1993, for the small slaughterhouse association - and with Booker - I kept Fox fully briefed on developments in a fast-moving situation.
To assist the process, he gave me his office number, his constituency number, fax, mobile phone and even his home number. We were constantly in touch.
Then, in June 1993, Fox was appointed Parliamentary Private Secretary to then Home Secretary, Michael Howard. The day after, when I tried to get in touch ... silence.
Phones went unanswered, messages left were not returned. Fox had started up that greasy pole, and now had no time for any of us.
Latterly, as he climbed the political ranks and became shadow defence secretary, it became very clear that he was not master of his brief.
Even worse, he was playing a political game at the expense of the military, pretending to care but in fact milking public support for political advantage. In power, he abandoned those very issues of which he had made such play while in opposition, while proving to be very far from the eurosceptic that he pretended to be.
What has since emerged his how unutterably tacky and seedy his activities in the Ministry of Defence have been.
And it is these that have brought him down. One would have liked to have seen the man fired for incompetence, but that was never going to happen with our media - or with The Boy.
But it is enough that the man has gone. We are well rid of him, as indeed is the MoD. Whether any replacement will be much better, however, is difficult to assess, but if it is Philip Hammond, then we are not in for any great improvement. But he could not be worse than Fox.
No-one could ... er ... of that we can be sure?
Posts
