Forget the culprit, the MoD leak suggests that Fox doesn’t have Cameron’s confidence

Liam Fox is sombre rather than sombrero. A man to reckon with, you’d have thought – determined to fight dangerous cuts to Britain’s over-extended defence budget and an apostle of the Tory right. Which makes yesterday’s leak all the more extraordinary.

The question is not who leaked this incendiary letter, but why Fox wrote it. The night before an important National Security Council meeting, and Fox has an important point to convey. Why not ring the Prime Minister? Go round to No.10 for chat? He is the Secretary of State, but he has to communicate matters of confidence and competence between himself and the PM with such formality, and in such impassioned language. The idea that Fox wrote it to leak it is preposterous. Plainly, he does not have David Cameron’s ear.

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