Friday 14 October 2011

Liam Fox. Badly Misplaced Sympathy.

Called me hard-hearted, but right-wingers are supposed to be reasonably tough-minded and demanding about public servants, yes ?

So what's this Telegraph drivel all about ?

"Tragedy is an over-used word, but ... striking is the sense of genuine loss Dr Fox will feel today: as even his most bitter critic would concede, he truly loved his job at defence. Walking the world stage from Washington to Kabul, talking war and peace and deciding the fate of nations; this was what he came into politics to do, and this he has lost"

"the Tories have lost a talented personality whose warmth, frankness and humour were invaluable assets, even if his judgment left something to be desired"

Hey - we are only interested in his judgement, that and nothing else. Warmth, frankness and humour, FFS? So is my horse, Octavius; and for that / I do appoint him store of provender.

ND

13 comments:

Mark Wadsworth said...

Fox is totally stupid. Had he thrown in the towel a week ago and waited a few years, people might have spoken of him in the same hushed tones as they do of Profumo or Lord Carrington* etc, but he's pissed on his own chips now.

* Who appears to have been a totally decent cove, all things considered.

Budgie said...

Dead right, ND.

"the Tories have lost a talented personality" -give me strength; drivel is the right word.

Bill Quango MP said...

Can't believe some of the Fox supporters on the box.

"He was brought down by a vicious media witch hunt."

Really? It wasn't the witch hunt that took him down. It was the guilt.

The way some fellow MPs are openly weeping you'd have thought he was the only right winger in the cabinet.

Mind you...

Electro-Kevin said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Electro-Kevin said...

I wonder if there hadn't been any aspersions about his sexuality if he would have been treated with such reverance.

Maybe the fact that David Cameron is talking about cutting foreign aid to nations where homosexuals are persecuted (as opposed to Christians, women, anybody else apart from homosexuals) wasn't a clever ruse to abandon promises but because homosexuals are now such a privileged group in the Tory party and the Tory press.

I've nothing against homosexuals being treated fairly because I think that everyone should be treated fairly. This mawkish tripe from the Telegraph isn't just plain wrong - it is grossly unfair too because they wouldn't have spooned the sugar on for anyone else.

Jan said...

Agreed. He only has himself to blame. It's nothing to do with his sexuality only with the conflict of interest and having meetings with foreign governments with the presence of someone from Britain present who had no official role and hence no security clearance.

I reckon Oliver Letwin will be next as I reckon he must have broken the Data Protection Act. If I were one of his constituents who'd written to him I wouldn't be at all happy to have my name and address accesssible to any Tom, Dick or Harry (or criminal) via a waste paper bin in St James' Park. Where's his common sense?

CityUnslicker said...

Letwin is living up to his name as Bumble - he has been known as this for 20 years!

Anonymous said...

" he truly loved his job at defence. "

Yes. And I give a flying f**k, why?

Was he any good at it?

If not his loss is no loss.

Botogol said...

reading the Sundays it seems more and more to me that Fox and Werrity were conducting all sorts of shady lobbying / access / influence deals under the cover provided by a real or suspected gay affair.

It does seem that the affair (or appearance of one) provided a smokescreen or shield that made it difficult for people to ask the right questions.

Meanwhile back at home -- SURELY Letwin should be fired instantly. Again and again high-profile people are held to lower standards than the rest of us. I work for a bank, and I am imagining my my employers reaction if they discovered that i was in the habbit of reading bank documents (any documents, whether they were super-secret or not) on the benches in Cabot Square before dropping them in the waste bins dotted around Canary wharf.

It's quite gob-smackingly stupid.

Certainly I would expect someone doing that to be fired.

I mean -- we arent' even allowed to use wastebins INSIDE the office! Wastebins are for coffee cups and sandwich wrappers ALL printed material has to go in the confidential waste, even if is merely the completely uninteresting weekly status report on the rollout of your unimportant project.

Jan said...

Well said Botogol...totally agree

Bill Quango MP said...

Agree Botogol.
All business have to abide by the super draconian restrictions on waste data.

In many companies the companies own rules between sorting data that must be kept for 1 year, two years or five years, in compliance with government audit rules means everything is kept, uselessly for the maximum term and then sent to the shredders.

Same with data protection. Rather than look up to see if an SAE is considered secure data, its far easier to just assume it is and shred, store as appropriate without comebacks.

Ryan said...

Unfortunately I suspect that Fox was got at primarily because their are way too many people making rather a lot of money out of the MoD that didn't want Fox in the way. That said, he left himself open to exactly the kind of media attack that was bound to bring him down, so shame on him.

If only this meant that someone else will pick up where Fox left off, and start unravelling the trail of corruption at the MoD. Sadly I suspect that particular issue will now be buried. It will be interesting to see if a soft placeman will get Fox's job.

Anonymous said...

Botogol: "I work for a bank, and I am imagining my my employers reaction.. "

I used to work for a bank and they were quite paranoid about such things. No documents to be removed from the premesis at all.