All of Liam Fox's meetings with Adam Werritty need to be properly accounted for and his behaviour fully investigated
It's not a bad political rule of thumb that a day when a prime minister makes a speech about immigration is a day when he wants to distract attention from political bad news elsewhere. That is what happened on Monday when David Cameron tried to draw some of the fire from Liam Fox's ministerial contacts with a speech promising to tighten UK border controls. But the attempt to take the spotlight off Mr Fox made no headway. Mr Fox still dominated the headlines on Monday night. The chances are that he will continue to do so for a long time to come. So he should, because Mr Fox's relationship with Adam Werritty continues to raise far more serious issues about the misconduct of ministerial business than Monday's backbench rally of support for the defence secretary allows.
Monday was almost certainly the worst day in Mr Fox's political career. Throughout the ill-tempered Commons exchanges (from which Mr Cameron's absence was noted) he looked grim. At the end of the day, Mr Fox was still secretary of state for defence. But it would be a mistake to regard Mr Fox as a man who is therefore off the hook. Some media frenzies may occasionally work like that. But the politics of due governmental process is not so easily disposed of. The ministerial code is not optional. Mr Fox has questions to answer about his observance of it. On the basis of Monday's exchanges, the defence secretary is a man whose ministerial career still hangs in the balance. He still has much to account for.
Mr Fox was right to apologise at the weekend for his ill-judged ministerial links with Mr Werritty. He was right, too, to make a statement about it to MPs on Monday. But making the apology and making the statement do not dispose of the serious matters to which they refer. Even Downing Street says he made serious mistakes. If an independent judge had reached the same conclusions about Mr Fox's ministerial conduct to which he himself admitted on Monday, there would be a new defence secretary by now.
Mr Fox's statement raised more questions than it answered. His Labour shadow, Jim Murphy, posed several of them, listing a number of possible breaches of the ministerial code which Mr Fox is bound to uphold and which Mr Cameron is bound to enforce. These must now be investigated properly. But the Labour backbencher Chris Bryant got close to another weakness in Mr Fox's story. It is one thing to meet up with a friend when you are on a foreign ministerial trip, Mr Bryant accepted, but to do it 18 times in a little over 16 months with someone who is presenting himself to the outside world as the defence secretary's adviser? That's quite a coincidence, especially when Mr Werritty held meetings at the same time, like the one in Dubai with the private equity boss Harvey Boulter, which led directly to private meetings with the defence secretary. Who paid for Mr Werritty to be there? Whom did people like Mr Boulter think they were talking to when they met Mr Werritty, with or without Mr Fox? And what did Mr Fox himself think? He has been less than clear. The 40 meetings (Fox also met Werritty 22 times at the MoD) seem to go beyond friendship.
The interim report by the MoD permanent secretary Ursula Brennan contains a number of such puzzles. Even Ms Brennan says her brief probe has revealed a grey area. She is overtly critical of the Dubai meeting and one with the new UK ambassador to Israel. All the other meetings with Mr Werritty also now need to be properly accounted for, and their commercial and financial implications explored. Mr Cameron may have good reasons for not wanting to lose Mr Fox. But both he and the cabinet secretary Sir Gus O'Donnell also have a responsibility to enforce the ministerial code. That's why there is an independent adviser on ministers' interests to provide advice, based in the Cabinet Office. And that is why Mr Cameron should now hand the Fox case to that adviser, Sir Philip Mawer, to investigate more fully.
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