Shropshire Star comment: PM faces backlash if Gavin is the fall guy
After all the resignations, an actual sacking. And she can’t even get the handling of that right.
Gavin Williamson has been one of Theresa May's most resolute supporters.
His reward has been to have been unceremoniously bundled from high office amid humiliating charges, which are enough to ruin his political career and turn him into a brooding figure on the backbenches.
The sacked defence secretary has gone down fighting. It wasn’t him, he says. He’s been the victim of a vendetta and a kangaroo court.
Memorably he says he is prepared to swear on his children’s life that he was not the source of the leak from the National Security Council.
The accusations are wider than the leak itself. Theresa May has accused him of not being as co-operative with the inquiry as others have been.
In her sacking letter she spoke of “compelling evidence” suggesting he was responsible for the leak and said there was no other credible explanation than it was him.
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Given the strength of Mr Williamson’s denials, there is another credible explanation if he is telling the truth. It is that it was not him – it was somebody else. If that’s right it means the guilty remain in the heart of government free to leak again. In this scenario Mr Williamson is the fall guy.
Mr Williamson says he would welcome a police inquiry, as he says it would clear him. The Opposition also wants to see a criminal inquiry into what it sees as a breach of the Official Secrets Act.
How far this would get is anyone’s guess. There is someone not in government who knows who leaked the information, and that is the reporter at the Daily Telegraph who wrote the story based on that information.
'The wrong man'
If they follow the standard journalistic practice of not revealing their source, a visit by the police to Telegraph towers will prove fruitless.
The Telegraph is in the know, and its banner headline for Williamson’s sacking was “You’ve got the wrong man, sacked Williamson tells May.”
You can read into that what you will.
As for Theresa May, she is rewriting the political rulebook, which says that if things are bad, you don’t go out of your way to make them worse. After the initial fuss about the Huawei leak, we seemed to have moved into standard leak inquiry territory of vainly splashing about for weeks and months amid waning public and political interest.
Maybe with the council elections, and the approaching European elections, she wanted to show she was not to be messed with, and that she was ruthless enough to lay down a friend for her political life.
In that case it has backfired. This sacking has not come from a Prime Minister in control and in a position of strength, but from a Prime Minister thrashing about amid a multitude of problems.
Her Cabinet is like a zoo of restive and squabbling beasts, some of whom are chomping at the bit as they wait for the zookeeper to get eaten.
Instead of the country debating the crucial issue of whether it is desirable to have a Chinese company involved in building the nation’s 5G mobile network, we have a major distraction.
And if it transpires that the “compelling evidence” against Mr Williamson is circumstantial evidence reinforced by guesswork, and motivated in part, as he claims, by a clash of personalities with the Cabinet Secretary, then the person damaged most by the affair in the long run will be Mrs May.
She’s made some bad judgment calls, but comes across as being fair. Take that away, and what’s left?
