The defence secretary's weasel words cannot hide a gross failure of judgment. Resignation is the only decent course
If the first casualty of war is the truth, then an early victim of scandal is always language. Those in trouble routinely resort to euphemism and obfuscation, and yet Liam Fox's crimes against syntax still stand out as in a class of their own.
Consider the torture he inflicted on the language in his Sunday statement. It began: "I accept that it was a mistake to allow distinctions to be blurred between my professional responsibilities and my personal loyalties to a friend."
Distinctions to be blurred. What a choice phrase that is, its use of the passive voice so deliberate and so telling. Fox did not say: "I blurred the distinction." Instead, by using the passive, he picked up his offence with a pair of sterilised tongs, sealed it in a plastic bag and placed it as far away from himself as he could. That use of the passive turned his sin from one of commission to omission. "You know what distinctions are like," he was saying. "They're always itching to be blurred. My error was not to stop them." I had a flatmate back in my student days who, rather than admit he'd not done the washing-up, would say: "Dishes have been left." The passive is grammar's way of telling you somebody is hiding something.
In the House of Commons, however, the defence secretary surpassed himself. Asked the decisive question in this affair ? did Adam Werritty profit financially from his access to Fox? ? the minister came up with this extraordinary rendition of the language: "When it comes to the pecuniary interests of Mr Werritty in those conferences, I am absolutely confident that he was not dependent on any transactional behaviour to maintain his income."
That formulation was so tortured that Radio 5 Live asked its listeners to volunteer translations. The think-tanker Sunder Katwala floated the interpretation that perhaps Werritty was on a fixed retainer for his services, one that did not vary according to whether Fox did or did not give the clients what they wanted. Whatever the actual meaning, only a person apparently nervous of full transparency and its consequences would use so opaque a sentence.
In other words there is more than linguistic pedantry at stake here. These weasel statements from Fox have come in tandem with his repeated insistence that he has apologised, to the prime minister, parliament and the country. But an apology that is so heavily caveated, convoluted and obscure is no apology at all. It lacks the core elements of genuine apology: full disclosure and a precise admission of culpability.
Perhaps he felt such a statement would have eaten up too much Commons time. For there is much Fox needs to confess and to clarify; indeed, the list gets longer each time he or anyone else involved in this story opens their mouth, the picture rendered even murkier by the latest Guardian discovery of Werritty's Dubai hotel records.
Fox could start by admitting that his initial response to the revelations about his association with Werritty ? which he called "wild" and baseless" ? was far from the truth. The charges were neither wild nor baseless. He could then admit that he did not at first offer a full account of the closeness of his ties. The number of meetings between the two has had to be revised upward, with the current figure at 40 ? though that does not include possible encounters in the UK off the premises of the Ministry of Defence. Given how tight the connection between them, it would be a surprise if they had never seen each other outside the MoD.
Fox's allies are clinging to the line that nothing improper happened at any of these meetings, that no state secrets were discussed and that the minister made no financial gain. But that is to miss the point. The reason why we have rules ensuring civil servants sit in on, and take minutes of, ministerial meetings is so that power is not wielded unchecked. We entrust the money we give in tax ? and, in Fox's case, the lives of our servicemen and women ? to ministers on the assumption that their decisions and conduct are monitored.
It's the same reason people are justifiably outraged at education department officials using private email addresses to get round freedom of information rules. If Werritty was allowed to avoid the usual procedures, including security vetting ? thereby gaining access normally granted only to government officials ? then it is not simply a breach of some stuffy rule. The public expectation that its interests are protected will have been violated.
As the former special adviser John McTernan has argued, cabinet ministers' most precious assets are "their time, their attention and their intelligence", and Fox gave Werritty the unimpeded run of all three. Given the competing demands on a defence secretary involved in two conflicts abroad, to have made a priority of the demands of an old mate is a gross failure of judgment and in itself sufficient grounds, says McTernan, to disqualify Fox for his post.
What if Fox gave the full apology he has so far withheld ? would that be enough? No. Only in politics is the mere act of saying sorry deemed to be sufficient punishment. You don't see rioters walk away from court simply because they had the grace to put their hands up. Nor can they evade a jail sentence by regretting that they had allowed "the distinction between legal and illegal to be blurred". Even Wayne Rooney gets a three-match ban for blurring the distinction between his studs and an opponent's leg.
But somehow politics is placed in a separate, more convenient, category. In politics, a quick mention of the s-word is meant to close the matter, enabling everyone ? including the culprit ? to move on, as if simply saying that you take responsibility is the same as taking it.
It wasn't always this way. When Hugh Dalton blurted out the secrets of his 1947 budget, he did not get away with a passive statement of regret that "disclosures have been made", but paid with his job. Nor did Peter Carrington merely rue that the sovereignty of the Falkland Islands had been allowed to become "blurred" ? as Fox would doubtless describe the Argentinian invasion of 1982 ? but resigned as foreign secretary, even though it was his department rather than he who was at fault. Read John Profumo's resignation statement with its admission that "I misled you and my colleagues and the House", and you will find nary a passive verb in sight.
In recent times the apology has become the pain-free substitute for resignation. There are noble exceptions ? Estelle Morris stepped down, harshly deeming herself out of her depth, while last year David Laws could have clung on but chose not to. Yet most of today's politicians think that a simple sorry will do. It will not ? and David Cameron, always so quick to tell those with less money or power that they must face up to their responsibilities, should prove that he understands that. If Fox hasn't the decency to quit, Cameron should fire him.
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